Kiss Kiss (24 page)

      
Claud paused for breath. His eyes were huge and moist and
dreamy as they gazed back into the wonderful world of his
youth.
      
“I don’t quite follow this,” I said. “How did he get the paper
hats over the pheasants’ heads up in the woods?”
      
“You’d never guess it.”
      
“I’m sure I wouldn’t.”
      
“Then here it is. First of all you dig a little hole in the
ground. Then you twist a piece of paper into the shape of a
cone and you fit this into the hole, hollow end upward, like a
cup. Then you smear the paper cup all around the inside with
bird-lime and drop in a few raisins. At the same time you lay
a trail of raisins along the ground leading up to it. Now—the
old pheasant comes pecking along the trail, and when he gets
to the hole he pops his head inside to gobble the raisins and
the next thing he knows he’s got a paper hat stuck over his
eyes and he can’t see a thing. Isn’t it marvellous what some
people think of, Gordon? Don’t you agree?”
      
“Your dad was a genius,” I said.
      
“Then take your pick. Choose whichever one of the three
methods you fancy and we’ll use it tonight.”
      
“You don’t think they’re all just a trifle on the crude side,
do you?”
      
“Crude!” he cried, aghast. “Oh my God! And who’s been
having roasted pheasant in the house nearly every single day
for the last six months and not a penny to pay?”
      
He turned and walked away towards the door of the workshop.
I could see that he was deeply pained by my remark.
      
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t go.”
      
“You want to come or don’t you?”
      
“Yes, but let me ask you something first. I’ve just had a bit
of an idea.”
      
“Keep it,” he said. “You are talking about a subject you don’t
know the first thing about.”
      
“Do you remember that bottle of sleeping-pills the doc gave
me last month when I had a bad back?”
      
“What about them?”
      
“Is there any reason why those wouldn’t work on a
pheasant?”
      
Claud closed his eyes and shook his head pityingly from side
to side.
      
“Wait,” I said.
      
“It’s not worth discussing,” he said. “No pheasant in
the world is going to swallow those lousy red capsules. Don’t you
know any better than that?”
      
“You are forgetting the raisins,” I said. “Now listen to this.
We take a raisin. Then we soak it till it swells. Then we make
a tiny slit in one side of it with a razor-blade. Then we hollow
it out a little. Then we open up one of my red capsules and
pour all the powder into the raisin. Then we get a needle and
cotton and very carefully we sew up the slit. Now . . .”
      
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Claud’s mouth slowly
beginning to open.
      
“Now,” I said. “We have a nice clean-looking raisin with two
and a half grains of seconal inside it, and let me tell
you
something now. That’s enough dope to knock the average
man
unconscious, never mind about
birds
!”
      
I paused for ten seconds to allow the full impact of this to
strike home.
      
“What’s more, with this method we could operate on a
really grand scale. We could prepare
twenty
raisins if we felt
like it, and all we’d have to do is scatter them around the
feeding-grounds at sunset and then walk away. Half an hour later
we’d come back, and the pills would be beginning to work,
and the pheasants would be up in the trees by then, roosting,
and they’d be starting to feel groggy, and they’d be wobbling
and trying to keep their balance, and soon every pheasant that
had eaten
one single raisin
would keel over unconscious and
fall to the ground. My dear boy, they’d be dropping out of
the trees like apples, and all we’d have to do is walk around
picking them up!”
      
Claud was staring at me, rapt.
      
“Oh Christ,” he said softly.
      
“And they’d never catch us either. We’d simply stroll
through the woods dropping a few raisins here and there as
we went, and even if they were
watching
us they wouldn’t
notice anything.”
      
“Gordon,” he said, laying a hand on my knee and gazing at
me with eyes large and bright as two stars. “If this thing works,
it will
revolutionise
poaching.”
      
“I’m glad to hear it.”
      
“How many pills have you got left?” he asked.
      
“Forty-nine. There were fifty in the bottle and I’ve only
used one.”
      
“Forty-nine’s not enough. We want at least two hundred.”
      
“Are you mad!” I cried.
      
He walked slowly away and stood by the door with his
back to me, gazing at the sky.
      
“Two hundred’s the bare minimum,” he said quietly. “There’s
really not much point in doing it unless we have two hundred.”
      
What is it now, I wondered. What the hell’s he trying to do?
      
“This is the last chance we’ll have before the season opens,”
he said.
      
“I couldn’t possibly get any more.”
      
“You wouldn’t want us to come back empty-handed, would
you?”
      
“But why so
many
?”
      
Claud turned his head and looked at me with large innocent
eyes. “Why not?” he said gently. “Do you have any objection?”
      
My God, I thought suddenly. The crazy bastard is out to
wreck Mr Victor Hazel’s opening-day shooting-party.
      
“You get us two hundred of those pills,” he said, “and then
it’ll be worth doing.”
      
“I can’t.”
      
“You could try, couldn’t you?”
      
Mr Hazel’s party took place on the first of October every
year and it was a very famous event. Debilitated gentlemen in
tweed suits, some with titles and some who were merely rich,
motored in from miles around with their gun-bearers and dogs
and wives, and all day long the noise of shooting rolled across
the valley. There were always enough pheasants to go round,
for each summer the woods were methodically restocked with
dozens and dozens of young birds at incredible expense. I had
heard it said that the cost of rearing and keeping each pheasant
up to the time when it was ready to be shot was well over five
pounds (which is approximately the price of two hundred
loaves of bread). But to Mr Hazel it was worth every penny
of it. He became, if only for a few hours, a big cheese in a
little world and even the Lord Lieutenant of the County
slapped him on the back and tried to remember his first name
when he said good-bye.
      
“How would it be if we just reduced the dose?” Claud asked.
“Why couldn’t we divide the contents of one capsule among
four raisins?”
      
“I suppose you could if you wanted to.”
      
“But would a quarter of a capsule be strong enough for each
bird?”
      
One simply had to admire the man’s nerve. It was dangerous
enough to poach a single pheasant up in those woods at this
time of year and here he was planning to knock off the bloody
lot.
      
“A quarter would be plenty,” I said.
      
“You’re sure of that?”
      
“Work it out for yourself. It’s all done by bodyweight.
You’d still be giving about twenty times more than is
necessary.”
      
“Then we’ll quarter the dose,” he said, rubbing his hands.
He paused and calculated for a moment. “We’ll have one
hundred and ninety-six raisins!”
      
“Do you realise what that involves?” I said. “They’ll take
hours to prepare.”
      
“What of it!” he cried. “We’ll go tomorrow instead. We’ll
soak the raisins overnight and then we’ll have all morning and
afternoon to get them ready.”
      
And that was precisely what we did.
      
Now, twenty-four hours later, we were on our way. We
had been walking steadily for about forty minutes and we
were nearing the point where the lane curved round to the
right and ran along the crest of the hill towards the big wood
where the pheasants lived. There was about a mile to go.
      
“I don’t suppose by any chance these keepers might be
carrying guns?” I asked.
      
“All keepers carry guns,” Claud said.
      
I had been afraid of that.
      
“It’s for the vermin mostly.”
      
“Ah.”
      
“Of course there’s no guarantee they won’t take a pot at a
poacher now and again.”
      
“You’re joking.”
      
“Not at all. But they only do it from behind. Only when
you’re running away. They like to pepper you in the legs at
about fifty yards.”
      
“They can’t do that!” I cried. “It’s a criminal offence!”
      
“So is poaching,” Claud said.
      
We walked on awhile in silence. The sun was below the
high hedge on our right now and the lane was in shadow.
      
“You can consider yourself lucky this isn’t thirty years ago,”
he went on. “They used to shoot you on sight in those days.”
      
“Do you believe that?”
      
“I know it,” he said. “Many’s the night when I was a nipper
I’ve gone into the kitchen and seen my old dad lying face
downward on the table and Mum standing over him digging
the grapeshot out of his buttocks with a potato knife.”
      
“Stop,” I said. “It makes me nervous.”
      
“You believe me, don’t you?”
      
“Yes, I believe you.”
      
“Towards the end he was so covered in tiny little white
scars he looked exactly like it was snowing.”
      
“Yes,” I said. “All right.”
      
“Poacher’s arse, they used to call it,” Claud said. “And
there wasn’t a man in the whole village who didn’t have a bit of it
one way or another. But my dad was the champion.”
      
“Good luck to him,” I said.
      
“I wish to hell he was here now,” Claud said, wistful. “He’d
have given anything in the world to be coming with us on this
job tonight.”
      
“He could take my place,” I said. “Gladly.”
      
We had reached the crest of the hill and now we could see
the wood ahead of us, huge and dark with the sun going down
behind the trees and little sparks of gold shining through.
      
“You’d better let me have those raisins,” Claud said.
      
I gave him the bag and he slid it gently into his trouser
pocket.
      
“No talking once we’re inside,” he said. “Just follow me and
try not to go snapping any branches.”
      
Five minutes later we were there. The lane ran right up to
the wood itself and then skirted the edge of it for about three
hundred yards with only a little hedge between. Claud slipped
through the hedge on all fours and I followed.
      
It was cool and dark inside the wood. No sunlight came in
at all.
      
“This is spooky,” I said.
      
“Ssshh!”
      
Claud was very tense. He was walking just ahead of me,
picking his feet up high and putting them down gently on the
moist ground. He kept his head moving all the time, the eyes
sweeping slowly from side to side, searching for danger. I
tried doing the same, but soon I began to see a keeper behind
every tree, so I gave it up.
      
Then a large patch of sky appeared ahead of us in the roof
of the forest and I knew that this must be the clearing. Claud
had told me that the clearing was the place where the young
birds were introduced into the woods in early July, where
they were fed and watered and guarded by the keepers, and
where many of them stayed from force of habit until the
shooting began.
      
“There’s always plenty of pheasants in the clearing,” he had
said.
      
“Keepers too, I suppose.”
      
“Yes, but there’s thick bushes all around and that helps.”
      
We were now advancing in a series of quick crouching
spurts, running from tree to tree and stopping and waiting
and listening and running on again, and then at last we were
kneeling safely behind a big clump of alder right on the edge
of the clearing and Claud was grinning and nudging me in the
ribs and pointing through the branches at the pheasants.
      
The place was absolutely stiff with birds. There must have
been two hundred of them at least strutting around among the
tree-stumps.
      
“You see what I mean?” Claud whispered.
      
It was an astonishing sight, a sort of poacher’s dream come
true. And how close they were! Some of them were not more
than ten paces from where we knelt. The hens were plump
and creamy-brown and they were so fat their breast-feathers
almost brushed the ground as they walked. The cocks were
slim and beautiful, with long tails and brilliant red patches
around the eyes, like scarlet spectacles. I glanced at Claud. His
big ox-like face was transfixed in ecstasy. The mouth was
slightly open and the eyes had a kind of glazy look about them
as they stared at the pheasants.
      
I believe that all poachers react in roughly the same way as
this on sighting game. They are like women who sight large
emeralds in a jeweller’s window, the only difference being that
the women are less dignified in the methods they employ later
on to acquire the loot. Poacher’s arse is nothing to the
punishment that a female is willing to endure.
      
“Ah-ha,” Claud said softly. “You see the keeper?”
      
“Where?”
      
“Over the other side, by that big tree. Look carefully.”
      
“My God!”
      
“It’s all right. He can’t see
us
.”
      
We crouched close to the ground, watching the keeper. He
was a smallish man with a cap on his head and a gun under his
arm. He never moved. He was like a little post standing there.
      
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
      
The keeper’s face was shadowed by the peak of his cap, but
it seemed to me that he was looking directly at us.
      
“I’m not staying here,” I said.
      
“Hush,” Claud said.
      
Slowly, never taking his eyes from the keeper, he reached
into his pocket and brought out a single raisin. He placed it
in the palm of his right hand, and then quickly, with a little
flick of the wrist, he threw the raisin high into the air. I
watched it as it went sailing over the bushes and I saw it land
within a yard or so of two henbirds standing together beside
an old tree-stump. Both birds turned their heads sharply at
the drop of the raisin. Then one of them hopped over and
made a quick peck at the ground and that must have been it.