The Perils and Dangers of this Night (23 page)

It was all over.

I stood for a minute, for two or three minutes. It made
no difference: the passing of time could make no difference
to what had happened. Once the din of the
explosion had faded and even the ringing in my ears had
gone, I just stared in front of me and my mind was blank.

My breathing was easy. When I felt at my neck, there
was no blood, no wound. The prickling on my hands was
just an itch.

I dropped the gun onto the floor. I heard the faint
sound of a regular, rhythmic clicking, trod to the record
player, picked up the needle from the spinning disc and
put it gently on its cradle. I switched off the turntable and
watched it slow down and stop. Then I closed the lid of
the walnut cabinet.

The world was a still, utterly silent place.

The telephone rang.

It was so loud, so unexpected, that I just blinked
and stared. It was the sound of faraway, of somewhere
beyond the miles and miles of snow-covered forest. I let
it ring for a long time, before I picked up the receiver and
lifted it to my ear.

A woman's voice, bright and blithe. 'Hello, Foxwood
Manor?' A pause, then, 'Dr Kemp? This is Jennifer Scott,
Alan's mother . . .'

I held the receiver away from my ear and examined it
in my hand, as though it were a piece of technology I'd
never dreamed of. The little voice tinkled into thin air. I
said into the mouthpiece, 'Mummy?'

'Oh Alan, you're there! I'm so sorry, darling, I haven't
been able to make it, I'm still in Austria . . .'

Somehow the stream of words was too quick for me.
It was a language which had no meaning for me at that
time, in that place. A warm trickle ran through my hair,
down my forehead and into my eyebrow, from where it
dripped onto the strange black object I was holding. I
stared at the blood, and I studied the odd, crumpled dolls
in the fireplace: the girl-doll was still quite pretty, but the
choirboy-doll had no face at all. Under the piano, a figure
in an old waterproof jacket and boots lay very still.

There was broken glass everywhere. Bullet holes in the
walls and the ceiling.

And blood. It dripped from the mantelpiece, from the
edges of the hearth, from the furniture, and it pooled on
the threadbare carpet. It dripped from my eyebrow onto
the mouthpiece of the telephone.

The voice was quite foreign to me, a breathless prattle:
'– ringing to wish you a Happy Christmas, and of course
your birthday! A teenager, thirteen today, a big man!
Congratulations, my darling!' And then singing, as soft
and sweet as the voice of an angel. '
Happy Birthday to
you, Happy Birthday to you . . .
'

I put the receiver onto the lid of the record player.
There was a gasp from the fireplace, and I saw Sophie's
eyes flick open. I knelt quickly to her, and with the ball
of my thumb I wiped the clotting of ash and blood from
her lips. She coughed, inhaled very deeply, and stared at
me, reaching up to touch my cheek.

'It's all right, Sophie,' I said, 'you'll be all right,' and
very gently I prised her out of the hearth. She stumbled
to her feet, wobbling like a newborn foal. As I helped her
across the hall to the front door, my mother's singing
continued and followed me. I could still hear it very
faintly as we stepped outside, into the gleam of sunlight
and snow – 'are you there, my darling Alan?' – a voice
from hundreds of miles away, oblivious, as though from
another planet.

A beautiful, beautiful morning.

The sky had cleared from grey through silver to an
exquisitely pale blue. And the snow was lovely on the
lawn and in the woodland. The crows had come down
again, a squabble of wings and claws and sharp black
beaks beneath the boughs of the copper beech. Although
they'd risen in panic when the man with the gun had
appeared, they hardly flinched from me and the girl. They
only fidgeted and flapped when we emerged from the
door, before settling again to their Christmas dinner.

I sat Sophie on the front steps of the school. She leaned
back and turned her face to the full light of the sun. I
said, 'You're safe now,' but she couldn't hear me. I could
see from her eyes that she understood.

I skirted the lawn, turned away from the front of the
house and went round to the stable-yard. One more thing
to do.

The car was there, mounded and filled with snow. It
looked as lithe and perfect as new; all of its scars and
wounds had been healed over. I pushed open the door of
the stable, and a stripe of sunlight fell through it and onto
the bird. It was perfect too, from the tips of its blue-black
claws, the shimmer of its plumage, to the blink of its
beady eyes and the gleam of its beak. I whispered as I
crossed the stable, and it shivered with the anticipation of
my touch. 'My little imp – this time it's real.'

The jackdaw consented to having my fingers on its leg.
Indeed, it closed its eyes in a kind of swoon as I untied
the jesses from the perch and the bells tinkled for the last
time. I held the jesses with one hand, and the bird sprang
onto my wrist.

Together we stood in the stable-yard. We smelled the
air, so cold and clean that it burned in our nostrils, and
we narrowed our eyes at the bright sky. I undid the jesses
from the bird's leg and dropped them onto the snow.

The bird gripped my arm, untethered now. It ducked
and shuffled, making a curious mewing sound, cocked an
eye at me and then at the treetops beyond. I said very
softly, 'Go on, go on, you're free . . .' and it beat its wings
so hard that the sunlight dazzled and glittered around my
head.

The jackdaw leaped from my arm, up and up, onto the
stable roof. It scrabbled and hopped and slithered, fell off
– and as I hurried forwards to catch it, it swerved away
from my hands. It climbed into the air. Gaining height, it
flicked from one end of the yard to the other, skimming
the roofs of the stables. Then it banked sharply, up and
away, and was gone.

I waited, in case the bird turned and I'd see it again for
one more second. It did not. I was alone. I breathed
deeply, easily, and the sun felt good as I lifted my face to
the sky.