Three Bags Full (10 page)

Only Maude made a mocking face. “The Devil’s hounds don’t necessarily have to be
big
,” she said. “Not when you stop to think how small human souls are. No higher than a sheep’s knee, I’d say—at the most. Even a very small dog could cope with them.”

The sheep thought about the smallest dog they had ever seen. It was about the size of a large turnip, with a golden coat and a flat nose, and it had yapped at them from a woman tourist’s arms. Was
that
what the Devil’s hounds looked like? Or the wolf’s ghost? They didn’t have to feel afraid of dogs like that.

Miss Maple shook her head impatiently.

“The important part is that human beings
think
they have large souls,” she said. “Beth was right. Humans have to think of the Devil’s hounds as big and terrible. So why weren’t they too frightened to stick that spade into George?”

The sheep considered this question and came to no conclusion.

Maple went on thinking out loud. “We know why no one heard George’s screams. It was because he didn’t scream. He was already dead when someone stuck the spade into him. That’s why there was so little blood on the meadow.”

The sheep were amazed. Now that Miss Maple said it, it was as clear as a pool of clean water in front of them.

Miss Maple flapped her ears to shoo away a few flies. “But that doesn’t explain anything. Why would someone stick a spade in George when he’s already dead?”

An awkward silence. How could a sheep find the answer to such a difficult question? Miss Maple was not discouraged. She trotted briskly back and forth again.

“Of course there are more possibilities now. Perhaps there are two different murderers—one who poisoned George, and another who
thought
he’d kill George with the spade. Or the spade was there to cover up for the real murder. But if you ask me,” said Miss Maple, stopping to nibble a few daisies, “the spade looks like a stupid trick. Like something a couple of lambs might think up together. Perhaps the murderer was brave enough to use the spade because someone else was with him.”

Later, when the other sheep had scattered and were grazing in the meadow, the lamb who as yet had no name stood rooted to the spot where they had conducted this conversation. Snuggling safely into Cloud’s soft fleece, he had heard it all. At first it had been mostly the warmth he was after. But deep in Cloud’s wool, he had begun to tremble. He wished he was brave enough to speak up again in front of all those old, experienced sheep. But would they have believed him? Would they even have listened to him? In the end he didn’t dare.

He had wanted to tell them it was all wrong. He’d wanted to say that Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill and perhaps the whole world, had made a terrible mistake.

Because the wolf’s ghost wasn’t golden. The wolf’s ghost was shaggy and gray. The lamb knew that they mustn’t forget the wolf’s ghost, because it was still out hunting through the wild hills beyond the meadow. In the evening, when the moon had risen but the sky hadn’t yet turned pale, and everything gave off its deepest, truest scent, you could feel it, the way you could feel darkness, even with your eyes closed. The lamb thought how the wolf’s ghost had spread its black wings on the dolmen, and heard its hoarse cry for the second time.

The other sheep grazed peacefully around him.

But anyone looking more closely could see that the peaceful atmosphere of the meadow was deceptive, and that slowly but surely a small group of daring sheep was assembling behind the shepherd’s caravan, where Ritchfield couldn’t see them.

These sheep were thinking of leaving the flock.

It was Miss Maple’s idea.

She was absolutely determined to get into the village that evening and eavesdrop on the conversation between Beth and the red woman. But not alone—she didn’t dare do that again. So she had summoned the bravest sheep in the flock: Zora and Othello, Lane who thought more pragmatically than any other sheep, Cloud because they always grazed together anyway, and Mopple the memory sheep.

So far, her proposal had not met with much enthusiasm.

“No sheep may leave the flock!” bleated Cloud. That said it all, she felt.

“But we’re not leaving the flock,” explained Maple. “If just
one
sheep goes off on its own then it’s leaving the flock. That was wrong of me; I’ll never do it again, no sheep can stand it.” Maple shook herself. “But if several sheep go off, two or three of them, then they can’t be leaving the flock. Because then they’re a little flock of their own!” She looked triumphantly round.

“We could all go,” bleated Cloud. “If we all go I’ll go too!” She made a daring face.

Maple shook her head. “We can’t all go. Beth’s whole garden would be swarming with sheep. She’d suspect something.”

They could all see that.

“It has to be only a very few sheep,” Miss Maple went on. “Few enough to hide under bushes and in the shadow of the trees, and then if anyone does see them he’ll think they’ve lost their way. We’ll just trot off to Beth’s house, listen to what they’re saying, and trot back again. Easy!”

“So where is Beth’s house?” asked Zora. “It could be anywhere.”

“Next to the takeaway, near the church. And it’s blue,” said Miss Maple.

“But how will we find the takeaway? Or the church? We don’t even know what a church is,” said Lane.

The sheep prepared for a long and awkward silence, disappointed but also relieved that no one would have to go on this dangerous expedition now. After a suitable interval they’d go back to grazing.

Then Mopple the Whale, of all sheep, opened his mouth.

“They have chips in the takeaway,” he murmured, lost in thought between two goes of chewing the cud. You could tell he hadn’t really been paying attention. Only when he noticed the silence of the other sheep did he raise his head and look directly at Maple, who was looking back at him with shining eyes.

Mopple was the only sheep in the flock with any experience of fried potatoes. George had once offered him one of those greasy yellow sticks, just to prove that he wouldn’t like it. Ever afterward Mopple had known what chips smelled like, even what they tasted like. And he would remember the smell.

Mopple in search of fodder: he would be their radar sheep. It was a dead cert of a plan.

10

Geraniums for Mopple

There was a small and uninteresting square in the middle of Glennkill, containing four neglected trees, a park bench, a marble column with an inscription on it, and a hedge that would make good cover for a sheep. The hedge cast two shadows: one was a dull shadow shown in golden light, the other was sharp and glaringly outlined.

On one side of the square stood a house with a pointed roof, lit up with gold by the floodlights. On the other shone the cold neon lighting of the takeaway.

Darkness lurked behind the takeaway.

And three sheep were lurking in the darkness.

Maple, Othello, and Mopple the Whale had set off at dusk to listen in on the conversation between Beth and the red woman. Mopple was looking cross. He had been promised chips to induce him to take part in this expedition, but then Maple and Othello had chased him rapidly past the door of the takeaway. Now he was staring through the window with them, obliged to watch Beth, inside, consuming a plateful of raw food—kohlrabi, carrots, radishes, celery—with a big red apple for afters. To see anything at all Mopple had to prop his front hooves on an upside-down bench under the window box and crane his neck. This unusual position was beginning to make his back ache.

Alarming sounds came from the street: the noise of car engines, men laughing, dogs barking. The yard where the sheep stood absorbed these sounds and flung them back and forth between the wall of the house, the other wall, and the blank side of the garage.

After finishing her supper, Beth stood up. She had left a carrot, three radishes, a stick of celery, and half the big red apple uneaten. Mopple felt hopeful again, but Beth carried the plate out of the room and came back empty-handed. She sat down in an armchair and busied herself with a string of wooden beads. She let the beads slip through her fingers, murmuring to herself. Ourfatherwhoartinheaven…

When determined footsteps finally passed the takeaway and came into the yard, Beth was so busy that she didn’t even seem to notice. But the sheep knew at once who was purposefully coming round the corner, casting a clear neon-lit shadow on the ground. She still smelled of earth and sun and good health, even if those delightful aromas were now partly muted by cigarette smoke.

Mopple began squinting uneasily at the backyard for their escape route. But the sheep stayed put; they had rehearsed it in advance. If the red woman went no farther than the door, they were well hidden from sight here behind a bush of broom.

The woman knocked, and Beth jumped in her armchair. She quickly put the string of beads away, traced a sign in front of her breast with her right thumb, and hurried to the door. Then Beth inside the house and the woman outside the house both disappeared from the sheep’s field of vision, and all they could hear was an indistinct murmuring. It was exciting. They had never seen a human house from the inside. Obviously going in and going out were not the same thing.

The door of the room opened and the red woman came through it, not red at all this time but wearing blue trousers and a green shirt, followed by Beth.

“Rebecca,” said the woman as she entered the room. “Please call me Rebecca.”

But Beth said nothing. The two of them looked at each other in silence for a while.

“You’re not here to help the tourist trade,” said Beth at last. “You’re here because of George.”

Rebecca nodded. “I want to find out as much as possible about his life. And his death. If I can give the tourist trade of Glennkill a boost at the same time, then that’s fine by me.” Her smile was ironic, but Beth did not notice.

“Why? Are you from the police? Goodness knows it’s about time they did something at last.”

Rebecca blushed. “No,” she said, “I’m here for…for personal reasons.”

Beth narrowed her eyes. “But you don’t know anything about him,” she said. “That doesn’t leave very many alternatives.”

Rebecca lowered her eyes, and said nothing.

“So you come to me about it!” Beth’s voice was agitated, much as it was when she pressed the tracts into George’s hands. “Me, of all people! I thought you were a respectable woman. I ought to send you away—with a copy of the Gospel, yes, but I ought to send you away. What do you want here?”

Rebecca was still smiling, but it was a much sadder smile now. “You’d probably call it forgiveness,” she said quietly.

Rebecca’s reply did, with the utmost ease, something that none of George’s sharp remarks had ever managed: it left Beth thunderstruck. Rebecca’s slim hands traced curving lines on a chest of drawers, while Beth stood like a weeping willow on a very calm day.

Mopple was getting bored. He reached his neck out, tasted one of the geraniums in the windowbox, and chewed noisily. Othello cast him an irritated glance. Mopple looked back innocently.

On the other side of the glass pane, Beth had turned white as a sheet.

“My God,” she whispered. “My God.” Then a new idea seemed to occur to her. She calmed down slightly.

“Tea?”

Rebecca nodded.

There was a bump outside. Mopple had leaned too far over in his quest for a geranium bud and lost his balance, and was now sitting on his behind.

Othello snorted. “Mopple, if you touch another petal I’m going to chase you all over the meadow tomorrow until you’re as thin as an old nanny goat.” Mopple stopped chewing and clambered to his feet again. Maple looked sternly at both rams. The three of them took up their observation posts in the shadow of the geraniums once more.

But Beth and Rebecca had disappeared. Instead, there was the clink of china.

“You won’t find anything out,” said Beth’s voice. “Not by asking people.”

“As scandalous as that?” asked Rebecca’s voice.

“Unspeakable,” said Beth’s voice. “Unspeakable if only because no one really knows anything. The whole village has rotted away like an apple, if you see what I mean. From the inside out. Like an apple.”

Mopple made a face. It had been a mistake, trotting off to this village. He was about to get down from the window box when Miss Maple discovered what had happened to Beth and Rebecca. They hadn’t disappeared at all. They had just sunk into two low armchairs, and now the geraniums hid them from view.

“Look at that,” said Beth. Something rustled on the tabletop.

“Oh,” said Rebecca.

Beth laughed in a forced kind of way. “It doesn’t get really interesting until I tell you where I found it.”

Maple could stand it no longer.

“Mopple,” she bleated quietly but as firmly as a lead ram, “go ahead, then, eat those geraniums. Eat us a hole through the geraniums. Quick.” Mopple was the fastest eater in all Glennkill; a few geranium plants would be nothing to him. But Mopple didn’t move. He stood between Maple and Othello looking as if he had indigestion.

“Mopple the Whale!” Miss Maple was angrier than she had been in a long time. Mopple looked at her unhappily and turned his head to Othello.

“Eat them,” growled Othello through his teeth.

A short time later there was devastation where the geraniums had recently been growing and thriving. Beyond the devastation the sheep could see Beth and Rebecca sitting at the table. From inside the room, it looked as if Beth had planted three sheep’s heads in her window box, but luckily neither of the two women thought of looking out of the window. They were far too deep in conversation anyway.

“You could call it some silly boy’s trick,” said Beth.

“Hmm,” said Rebecca.

They both looked at the small bundle of straw lying on the table between them. Someone had tied the straw together into the shape of arms, legs, and a head. Someone had stuck a twig right through the straw body.

“Do you know what the children used to call George? ‘Goblin King’! Imagine that—where did they get it from? Such heathens! Only behind his back, of course. Oh yes, they feared him like the Prince of…”

Rebecca nodded. “And so you thought…?”

“A silly boy’s prank. It wouldn’t have been the first time.” Beth sighed. “I found this one morning last week on the steps of George’s caravan. I never gave up hope for him, you know, even though he laughed at me. But he wasn’t at home. He’d been away quite often lately. So I took the thing with me. I thought those kids and their nonsense about the Goblin King weren’t worth bothering about.”

“And now you think…”

“Now I think it was a warning, and it’s my fault he didn’t get it.” Beth smiled sadly. “But never mind. George wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. If there’s one thing I know it’s that George never listened to warnings.”

They fell silent.

“Why was he away so often recently?” asked Rebecca. “What was he doing when he wasn’t there?”

Beth folded her hands. “I wish I knew. He dressed well when he went away, in a suit and white shirt. He looked ten years younger, and a real gentleman. That makes people talk, of course, but I don’t believe a word of it. I think he went up to town, to Dublin, to offices and banks and so on. He wanted to get away from here, you see, away from Glennkill.”

“But someone or other didn’t want him to go away?” asked Rebecca.

Beth nodded.

“Was he having an affair?”

Horrified, Beth shook her head. Rebecca raised her eyebrows. Then she asked, “Do you think it was about money?”

Beth laughed her forced laugh again. “I expect that’s what they’re all wondering here. Money is all they can think of. What heathens! Did George have money anyway? Normally I’d have said no; not the way he lived: a bit of land, a few sheep, a little house, and not much business. Most people here have more. Most of them earn quite well from the tourists, though of course they all complain. But then again, sometimes George did have things. Expensive things, really expensive. A watch—no one in all Glennkill could have afforded a watch like that, not even Baxter, the pub landlord, even though he’s getting fat on the bed-and-breakfast business. Figuratively speaking, I mean. If you ever see him you’ll know why I say figuratively speaking.” Beth giggled like a schoolgirl.

“And George thought nothing of that expensive watch,” she went on. “He wore it when he was sowing radishes.” Beth’s hands played with the straw doll. A furtive trace of something like admiration had crept into her voice.

“So now of course everyone’s waiting for the will to be opened. It’s going to be this coming Sunday, out of doors, a lawyer will come from town. George told the lawyer just what he wanted. Money is what interests these heathens. Believe you me, they’ve never waited for anything more eagerly, not even that feeble-minded sheep competition.”

“The Smartest Sheep in Glennkill contest,” said Rebecca, smiling too. “The ultimate tourist magnet. And now George goes and steals the show.”

“They should save themselves the trouble,” said Beth. “The things they do to animals. It’s ridiculous. But I have to be going now—off to spread the Word.”

One arm of the straw doll had come apart, so it looked as if it were holding a tuft of hay in its hand. Beth’s thin fingers expertly wrapped a single blade of straw around the tuft until the doll was mended.

Maple realized that she was feeling uncomfortable, from her hooves to the ends of her fleece. It was as if her ears were stuffed with wool, as if the glass of the windowpane between them and Beth was clouded over like smoke. She could hear and see, but she felt as if she were standing in fog. It took her a moment to work out where that feeling came from. She couldn’t
smell
Beth and Rebecca on the other side of the pane. There was no scent to let her know if they were telling the truth about what they felt and what they feared. It was a ghostly, incomplete world. It must always be like that for human beings, with their small souls and their sticking-out noses. It meant distrust. Uncertainty.
Anxiety.

“…changeable, capricious,” Beth was just saying. “I don’t believe it. The human heart is a strange thing. It can cling to only one thing in life, and where it clings it stays, for good or bad.”

The sheep were astonished. They had never heard Beth talk about anything but the “gospel” and “doing good works.” She called everything else “idle chat.” And suddenly she was just chatting idly away without pressing a single tract into Rebecca’s hand. In this new and careless mood she was a bit like a lamb, bold and vulnerable at the same time. She must be very worked up indeed.

“Take Ham, for instance,” said Beth.

Rebecca looked at her blankly. “Ham?”

“Abraham Rackham, the butcher,” Beth explained. Her grave face twisted into a smile. “If you want to find out anything here, you have to understand the way the locals think. Abraham is too long a name for them, of course. More than two syllables in your name and it hasn’t a chance.”

She thought for a moment. “There are exceptions, of course. Gabriel. Funny, I never thought of that before. No one here would dare to call him Gabe.”

“But
Ham
?”

“When you see him you’ll see why. ‘Abe’ would probably have been normal, they’re not very inventive around here. But we already have an Abe, and then those two ‘hams’ in the name, and his job. Oh, you should just see him!”

“What about Ham, then?”

“I’d start with him if I were you. He always acts so pious, as if he was the only man in the world who ever read the Bible. But people are afraid of him. And he himself—he’s afraid too. In his butcher’s shop…he has a CCTV camera. He’s had it for ages, even when we only knew about such things from American movies. But why does a butcher’s shop need a camera like that? They don’t even have one at the bank. I think he’s genuinely scared, which means he has something to hide. That’s what I think. I did once tell him so, at the Christmas collection in church.”

“And?”

“He went red. He was angry, embarrassed. And Ham’s not a man to get embarrassed easily. I don’t like to think what might be found in his slaughterhouse. God be with us!”

Mopple’s stomach was making funny noises. Othello looked at him reproachfully.

Rebecca passed her tongue over her lips. “This is a strange place. It’s not the way I imagined it. I thought it would be peaceful here.”