Pictures of Perfection (21 page)

‘I have been listening to dreadful Insanity.’

‘No,’ said Girlie Guillemard. ‘I’ve no idea where Guy has gone, like I’ve no idea where Franny’s gone. All I know is I’m up to my eyes in work, and everyone I might expect to help me goes bunking off as soon as I turn my back!’

She was clearly on the edge of her nerves, yet Wield sensed it was more than a mere organizational crisis which had brought her here. He got the impression she could have supervised the building of a pyramid without breaking sweat.

He said, ‘I see your statue’s back. The faun.’

‘Oh, is he? Good,’ she said indifferently.

‘Its head’s broken off, but,’ he added. That got her.

‘What? Shit!’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘Useless wanker! George, there you are. Come to help with the furniture, have you?’

Wield turned to see George Creed approaching.

‘What? Oh aye, that’s right,’ said the farmer. ‘’Morning, Sergeant.’

This was a very obliging farmer indeed, thought Wield, ready to drop everything in the middle of
lambing to come up here to do some furniture removal.

He must also be a very strong farmer, added Wield when it became apparent that the furniture in question was the long oak refectory table in the main hallway.

‘Sergeant, I wonder, could you …?’

It was beyond the strength of even two of them and Girlie had to press a couple of Wallop’s reluctant workmen before they could manoeuvre it through the doorway and out on to the lawn. At this point a lorry turned up laden with trestles and folding chairs from the village hall which a quartet of muscular youths started to unload and arrange over the grass. It would have made more sense, thought Wield, to have waited for this lot to appear before attempting to move the big table. He gave a hand for a while till he noticed that Creed seemed to be excused duties after his initial efforts, and Girlie too had abandoned her supervisory position to go into a close confabulation with the farmer round the side of the house. After a while, Creed nodded and turned away and headed towards the woods. Girlie returned to harangue the workmen for an alleged slackening of effort and Wield took the opportunity to slip away.

The farmer was out of sight so Wield pressed on along the gravel track he’d taken through the neglected formal garden, which merged without boundary into a mixed orchard whose buds the warm spring sunshine was exploding into pink
and white blossom. Soon the path greened from gravel to moss and the fruit trees were replaced by beech and oak and ash in which birds piped and chattered their warning of intrusion. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, this too was drowned in the sound of rushing water and he found himself at the edge of a steep gorge looking down at the turbulent Een.

‘Can’t see him,’ said a voice. ‘Must be down at Scarletts Pool.’

He turned to see the Squire with a pair of field glasses in his hand, resting against and blending in with a silver birch.

‘What must?’ asked Wield.

‘Kingfisher, of course. Unbroken record since the Middle Ages. That surprises you, eh? Got him in my ballad. Like to hear?’

Wield nodded, thinking of the bright limp body in Jason Toke’s hand. The Squire cleared his throat, raised his head and began to recite.

‘Kingfisher wears the heavenly blue

Of Mary, Heaven’s Queen,

And bears a heavenly message too

Along the banks of Een.

Though Popes may pine and kings decline

Though thrones and fiefdoms fall,

While I still rule o’er rock and pool,

A Guillemard holds the Hall.’

He finished and regarded Wield complacently.

‘That were grand,’ said Wield.

‘Fellow thinks it was grand,’ said the Squire with mild surprise, looking towards second slip. Then the bright eyes returned to Wield.

‘Tradition, you see. Got to go with it, even if it don’t seem to make sense. You must find this in your line of business. Apply the rules even when they strike you personally as a load of bollocks, right?’

‘Aye, more or less,’ agreed Wield.

‘There you are, then.
Fucata non Perfecta
. Know what it means, Sergeant? I’ll tell you.
Life can be a bastard
. Loose translation, but very apt. Oh yes, apt indeed. Excuse me. Chap I’ve got to see.’

He moved away and Wield saw that it was no euphemistic excuse. George Creed had appeared some distance away and, as he watched, the Squire went to join him. The two men stood regarding each other for a moment, then they moved out of sight into the trees.

Wield was about to start back towards the house when a movement downstream caught his eye. Someone was crouching on the river bank, staring down into the water. He walked along till he was directly above and could see that it was Jason Toke. Wield started to climb down the steep bank, clinging on to bushes and rocks to stop his descent from turning into a fall. He made a lot of noise but the sound of the water must have covered it. Or else the youth, Narcissus-like, was too rapt to admit distraction.

‘’Morning, Jason,’ said Wield.

The youth shot upright and spun round, poised for flight. Curiously, when he saw who it was, he visibly relaxed.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Wield. ‘Looking for another kingfisher to kill?’

‘Didn’t kill him,’ said Toke with a lack of passion which was curiously more convincing than indignation.

‘No. So what are you doing?’

‘Watching.’

‘What?’

‘Water.’

It came out as simple fact rather than studied insolence.

‘Not got your gun?’

‘No. Didn’t want it today. Sometimes it’s better without it.’

‘Why’s that, Jason?’ asked Wield gently.

He raised those disconcerting eyes and said, ‘Sometimes it’s better. If you don’t want to use it.’

‘I see,’ said Wield, hoping he didn’t. ‘So it’s at home, is it? I’d like to take a look at where you keep it, Jason. Shall we go now?’

‘If you like,’ said the boy indifferently.

Wield prepared to scramble back up the side of the gorge but when Toke set off along the bank downstream, he bowed to local knowledge and followed. Eventually they came out of the gorge and after a quarter-mile or so, the youth led him across a field into a lane which brought them behind the Morris and alongside Intake Cottage.
Neither spoke till they were on the narrow path through the ravaged garden.

‘Why’d you cut everything down, Jason?’ asked Wield.

‘Cordon sanitaire,’ said Toke, pronouncing it right. ‘Don’t want cover right up to house.’

‘Cover for what?’

‘Them, when they come.’

‘When who comes?’

‘Makes no matter who,’ said Toke, rapping a rapid five-beat pattern on the door.

Mrs Toke opened it almost immediately, acknowledged Wield’s attempt at explanation with her usual myopic stare, and retired to the living-room. Toke led the way upstairs, ran his fingers lightly over the code panel on his bedroom door and pushed it open.

Wield, half expecting some kind of hi-tech armoury, was rather taken aback to find himself in what looked like any teenager’s bedroom.

It was untidy, with magazines strewn over the floor and posters Blu-tacked to the walls. The most hi-tech thing in sight was a cassette deck and a pair of low-grade speakers.

A closer look was slightly more disconcerting. The magazines were all Combat and Survival journals. And the posters featured portraits of people like Mao and Che and Castro and Guzman. A student trying for radical credibility might have collected such a gallery, but Wield couldn’t see Toke wanting to impress anybody.

He said, ‘Heroes of yours, are they, Jason?’

‘Heroes?’ the boy echoed as if the word meant nothing.

‘Yes. I mean, you admire what they stand for?’

‘Don’t know what they stand for. Just know they could all take care of themselves, live off the land, survive.’

‘Survive? But not for ever, eh?’

‘No one survives forever.’

This was getting philosophical.

Wield said, ‘Do you think there’s someone out there after you?’

‘Don’t you?’ said Toke.

‘Well, yes. Sometimes,’ admitted Wield. ‘But not so that I need protection.’

‘Don’t need what you got. You’re a cop. People shout at you, you don’t go away.’

‘Whereas you do?’

‘Farmer shouts at a fox, old bushy goes away. But he’s got to come back. Got to feed, hasn’t he?’

‘Even if the farmer’s waiting with his gun?’

Toke nodded vigorously as if pleased he’d at last got through.

‘And sometimes farmer don’t wait. He comes after old bushy with his horses and his dogs.’

‘But that’s a fox we’re talking about, Jason,’ said Wield gently. ‘Not a human being.’

‘Humans too,’ said Toke with the certainty of faith. ‘You watch that old telly, you see it every night. All that shooting and chasing. All them folk
sitting around starving ’cos there’s no one looking out for them and they don’t know how to look out for themselves.’

‘But this is England, Jason,’ insisted Wield. ‘Surely you don’t need to put up all these defences here in Enscombe.’

‘Yeah, Enscombe’s all right, mostly. But there’s people come in from outside. There’s always people coming. You’ve got to watch out or they’ll have you afore you know it.’

‘Like the police, you mean? Was Constable Bendish one of the ones you had to watch out for?’ asked Wield.

For a few moments the youth’s face had been animated by what for him was probably a rare desire to communicate. But now the old blankness was back.

‘Don’t know nowt about that one,’ he said.

‘But he came up here to check where you keep your gun, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah. Said it were all right.’

‘I’m sure he did. Now I’d like to see.’

Toke opened the ancient mahogany wardrobe which almost filled one wall. There weren’t many clothes hanging there, which was just as well for a large part of the interior was filled with a steel gun cabinet. Toke produced a set of keys from inside his shirt and opened it. There were two shotguns inside. One was a traditional side by side 12-gauge. The other had a shorter single barrel and a slide action. Wield regarded them both with distaste.
The old truism that it wasn’t the guns that caused trouble but the people who used them cut little ice. Guns were like cars. There was no telling how a man would react to having control of one. He felt the seductive pull of the longer, more elegant double-barrelled weapon now, though he knew the crook out for trouble would opt for the uglier slide-action gun with its superior fire power.

‘Of course you’ve got all the necessary certification?’ he said.

Toke pulled out a wallet that looked as if he’d recently shot it and extracted some creased and stained papers. They all looked in order.

Wield returned them. As Toke relocked the gun cabinet, the Sergeant stooped to take a closer look at magazines on the floor and noticed the corner of a leather-bound book protruding from under the bed. He pulled it out and examined it.

It was
The Warrior: An Illustrated History
. A piece of newspaper acted as a marker. He opened the book and read,
At one end of the scale stands the professional soldier, prepared through conditioning and training to cope with almost any combat situation. He works in a team, accepts his superiors’ orders unquestioningly, and expects the orders he gives to his subordinates to be accepted in the same manner. At the other end stands the berserker, or baresark, the individual warrior par excellence, who, finding himself pushed to the last extremity either by external forces or internal pressures, throws caution to the winds and runs amok among his enemies, heedless alike of the wounds he receives and the
terrible dole he deals. It has often been the case when circumstances shift the soldier from his professional calm to the berserker state, that Victoria Crosses are won
.

‘That’s private,’ said Toke, turning from the cabinet and seeing what Wield was doing. ‘Give it here.’

‘Hold your horses, son,’ said Wield. ‘Interesting book, this. Had it long?’

‘Long enough,’ he said defiantly.

‘And this one?’ said Wield, pulling
Thorburn’s Birds
from under the bed. ‘You had this one long enough too? Where’s the other? Can’t see it here.’

‘What other?’

‘Book of paintings, Mr Digweed said.’

Now the youth looked alarmed.

‘That one’s a present,’ he protested with an almost touching illogicality. ‘Thought she might take heed of me if I gave her that.’

‘Caddy, you mean?’ said Wield gently. ‘You were going to give it yesterday till you saw us there, right? So you gave the kingfisher instead.’

‘Didn’t harm him, but,’ asserted Toke once more. ‘She likes colours and pictures and things. Thought she might like me if I gave her that book with all the paintings in it.’

‘And these?’ said Wield, hefting the two volumes in his hand.

For the first time Toke looked guilty.

‘Them’s for me,’ he admitted. ‘No one wanted them. They was always there!’

‘You could have bought them,’ suggested Wield.

‘What with? Think I’m made of brass?’

‘Must have taken a lot of money to do up this house.’

‘That were needed. And there were nowt left over.’

‘From what?’

‘From Warren’s money.’

Warren … the elder brother, the one killed in Ireland but not thought qualified for the War Memorial.

‘Warren left you some money, did he?’

‘What he saved. And there was some from the Army.’

‘And you spent it making the cottage secure?’ said Wield.

‘Wouldn’t have been needful if Warren had come back!’ cried Toke. ‘Warren knew how to look out for us.’

His face was twisted with remembered grief. Wield, frightened at the emotions he’d tapped, reached out a comforting hand, but the youngster ducked as if from a blow, and pausing only to grab a carrier bag from behind the door, shot through the door and down the stairs. By the time Wield followed, there was no sign of him except the open front door.

He went back upstairs and did a thorough search. There was no sign of any weapons other than those safely locked in the steel cabinet.