Well, Colonel Meredith, you won’t get old Tom again, he repeated to himself. Too wily for the likes of you, with your fancy house and fancy cars and fancy friends. Nice little pheasant I’ve got here and I’ll get myself another before I leave. It’s still too early for you to be about, I’ve got a good hour before you’re up and around. Three months I’ve laid off, fooled you into thinking you’d frightened me off, but oh no, old Tom don’t give up that easy. Nice price l’ll get for this pheasant and no questions asked.
The poacher crept forward again, still cursing the landowner in his mind, peering into the bushes ahead. He froze. Yes, there was something there and not a man. He kept perfectly still, not wanting to frighten it away, to let it come out in its own time, whatever it was. Another pheasant, I’ll warrant, Tom told himself. Woods were full of them, all under the sanctuary of bloody Colonel Meredith. Well, Tom had patience. Tom would wait for it to show itself. Tom could wait for nearly an hour without so much as twitching a muscle. Come on, my beauty, take your time. Tom can wait.
He crouched there for a full ten minutes before he became aware of the yellowy tentacles of mist creeping around his legs. My Gawd, that’s all I need, he cursed silently. He looked behind him and was surprised to see a solid blanket of fog almost on top of him. Queer, he’d never experienced fog here before. Well, he’d wait a while longer in the hope that whatever was in the bushes would make a move and show itself before the fog grew too dense.
Soon, he was completely enveloped in it and began to curse, realizing if the bird or animal didn’t make a move soon he wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. Still nothing happened and the heavy mist crept forward till eventually he couldn’t even see the bush. Only then did he hear a rustle and the sound of something scampering away. He cursed aloud this time and stood up, kicking at the ground in disgust.
Ah well, one was better than nothing at all. He turned back and walked deeper into the fog. It didn’t bother him, he knew the area so well he could find his way back blindfold.
The Reverend Martin Hurdle prepared himself for his Sunday morning service. As he donned his cassock he smiled at the thought of the panic he’d been in earlier when he’d got lost in the fog. Usually one of the joys of the week, his early morning walk had almost turned into a nightmare. He couldn’t explain the lift he’d felt when he’d emerged again into the sun, the sense of relief, the delight of being released from that sinister cloud. He had a slight headache now but otherwise he’d got over the unpleasant experience and no doubt would chuckle when he recounted the story to his friends.
The church was fairly full today, the pleasantness of the weather helping, but the tragedy of the neighbouring village accounting primarily for the large attendance. The vicar greeted his parishioners at the door of the church as they went in, chatting briefly with some, smiling and nodding at others. When it was time for the service to begin, he entered through a side door into the sacristy, hurried his altar boys along, and walked briskly with them into the church.
The service began as normal, pleasurable to some, boring to others, but today, because of the tragedy, meaningful for most. A few people near the front noticed the vicar occasionally put his hand to his forehead as though he were tired or had a headache, but the service continued smoothly enough.
They sat and looked up at him when he climbed the steps to his pulpit, anxious to be comforted by his words in their time of sadness. He looked down at their upturned, expectant faces, eyes focused on him, eager for him to speak.
Then the Reverend Martin Hurdle, Vicar of St Augustine’s for eighteen years, lifted his cassock, undid his trousers, took out his penis, and urinated over his congregation.
‘Now where have those blessed cows got to?’ George Ross asked himself aloud, a frown wrinkling his already multi-wrinkled, weathered face even more. ‘Bet they’ve got through that gap again.’
The farmer was used to his herd breaking through the fence of bushes and trees that surrounded their meadow and wandering off into the next. He plodded down towards the spot they’d most likely have broken through. ‘As if I haven’t got enough to do without chasing those silly creatures all mornin’. I’ll give ’em what for!’ he cursed angrily.
He reached the gap and pushed his way through. ‘Now where are yer?’ He stood looking around, then his mouth dropped open at the sight of the fog at the other end of his field. ‘Well I’ll be! Never noticed that.’ He scratched his bristly chin, puzzled.
He began to walk towards the murky cloud and grinned as he saw his cows emerging from it. ‘Trust you!’ he shouted at them. ‘Trust you to get yourselves lost in that. Stupid bloody creatures!’
Funny, having a fog down here, he pondered. Too heavy to be a mist. All this bloomin’ p’lution. ‘Come on, me beauties!’ he called out as they trudged towards him. The fog, he noticed, was drifting off into the adjoining field. Strange that he could see the edges of it, like a solid block of smoke moving across the countryside, not at all like the normal widespread blanket of grey.
The cows were up to him now and the leaders passed him.
‘Come on now, up to the sheds!’ he bellowed at them, slapping one hard on the rump as it passed.
It stopped and turned its head towards him. ‘Move yourself,’ the farmer said gruffly, slapping it again. The cow stood silently watching him.
George cursed it more loudly, then turned to see what progress the rest of the herd was making. They had all stopped and were turned towards him, watching.
‘What’s this, then?’ For some inexplicable reason, he had begun to feel nervous. There was a tension about his herd that he couldn’t understand. ‘Move yourselves. Get on ’ome!’ He waved his arms at them, trying to startle them into movement. They watched him.
Then they began to close in on him.
He realized he was surrounded by the cows and the ring was drawing tighter around him. What was happening? He could not understand the menacing air these dumb, gentle animals had taken on. He felt himself jostled from behind. He turned and lashed out at the cow he’d slapped before. ‘Get back!’ he shouted, logic telling him his rising fear was unreasonable.
He heard a pounding of hooves and again felt himself pushed from behind, this time more violently. He fell to the ground.
‘Get away, get away!’ He scrambled about on his hands and knees trying to rise, but every time he raised himself, he was knocked off his feet again. Suddenly, one of the cows turned and kicked out with its hind legs, catching him an agonizing blow in the ribs, sending him flying forward.
He began to scream as he received more kicks. They seemed to be taking it in turns to run forward and lash out at him. One kick caught him full in the face, breaking his nose, blinding him for a few seconds. When he could see once more, it was like opening his eyes to a bad dream.
The cows were racing round him, their eyes bulging almost out of their sockets, froth and slime running from their mouths. They trampled over him. If he rose, they crushed him with their bodies. They used their heads to knock him off his knees. They began to bite him, snapping off his fingers as he raised his arms to protect himself. A scream ended in a gurgling, choking noise as a kick broke his jaw and blood ran down his throat.
When at last he lay sprawled semi-conscious on the muddied grass, they herded together, and crushed the life from his battered body with their hooves.
The poacher gazed at the house from his hiding place in the undergrowth. He’d emerged from the fog, but instead of returning to his ramshackle house on the outskirts of the village he’d walked along the main road towards the gates of the Colonel’s huge country home. He’d skulked up the long, winding drive and hidden in the bushes, waiting and peering through the leaves at the house. After a while his eyes, strangely glazed, looked from left to right. He rose and crept stealthily towards the back of the building. He knew where to go for he’d done casual work for the Colonel’s head gardener years before. That was how he knew the grounds so well, the best places to po
ach, the best places to hide. He walked down towards a wooden hut at the end of the long garden. He pushed open the door, his eyes now developing a fixed stare, no longer worrying about the noise he was making, his movements controlled, steady. He reached for an axe, rusted with time, but the blade still sharp. As he turned to leave the hut, his gaze fell on a box of three-inch nails used for fencing. He scooped up a handful and put them in his pocket.
He walked back up the garden, not bothering to hide, walking in a straight line towards the house. As he reached the back door, the Merediths’ cook was just opening it to let the steam from her kitchen escape. She’d just cooked the Colonel and his wife breakfast and the maid had taken it up to them. Now it was time for her morning tea before she started to make preparations for their lunch. There were lots of guests coming, so there was much to do.
She had no chance to scream before the axe hit her, only a fleeting look into the eyes of a madman, a chance for fear to begin to rise but never to reach its peak, for in the next instant she was dead.
Tom Abbot entered the kitchen and climbed the stairs that led to the hall. He’d never been in the house before and only the sound of voices drew him towards the dining-room. He opened the first door he came to and went in, not stopping till he was in the middle of a large sitting-room, bigger than the whole of the ground floor of his tiny house. He stood there, gazing ahead.
The sound of footsteps passing the open door caused him to turn and retrace his steps. He heard the sound of voices again and walked towards another door.
The maid hummed to herself as she descended the stairs to the kitchen, holding her tray with half-eaten grapefruit and crusts of toast aloft so that she could see the steps beneath her.
‘Put the kettle on, Mrs Peabody,’ she called out as she approached the kitchen door. ‘Let’s have a nice cuppa’ while they’re noshing their bacon and eggs.’
Discovering the kitchen empty, she looked around curiously. The kettle was already steaming away. She put down her tray and walked over to the gas stove to turn the kettle off. The door to the garden was open so she assumed the cook had stepped outside for a breath of fresh air or to empty some food scraps into one of the dustbins. She walked around the large centre table to the door so she could call for her. A scream broke from her lips as she saw the body, lying there just outside the doorway, its skull cleaved open to the bridge of the nose. Before she fainted, she realized it was the cook, recognizable only because of her build and clothes, her face covered in blood, her features in a frozen grimace of terror, bearing no resemblance to the face it had once been. As she collapsed, the maid’s brain just registered the other scream, the scream from upstairs that pierced the still air.
When she regained consciousness, she couldn’t at first recollect what had happened. Then her body stiffened as she remembered. She saw the corpse, her foot almost touching it, and she backed away shuddering, trying to call for help but her vocal cords paralysed with fear. She somehow got to her feet and staggered towards the stairs, clambering up them, falling and sobbing, nothing preventing her from getting away from that kitchen. She gained the hallway and ran down it towards the dining-room, gasping for air, trying to call out.
She stumbled through the open door and stopped short at the sight confronting her.
Her mistress lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood, only a few tendons in her neck holding her head to her body. It lay parallel to her left shoulder, grinning up at her. The Colonel lay spreadeagled on the huge dining table, long nails through the palms of his hands and the flesh of his ankles to pin him there. A man stood over him, an axe dripping with blood in his hands.
As the maid watched, dumb-struck, unable to move with the horror of it, the man raised the axe above his head and brought it down with all his strength. It severed a hand and splintered the wood beneath. The man struggled to free the weapon from the table and raised it again. By the time he’d cut off the other hand, the Colonel was unconscious. By the time he’d hacked off both feet, the Colonel was dead.
The maid finally began to scream when the man with the axe turned his head and looked at her.
4
‘Hello, John.’
John Holman looked at the girl and smiled ‘Hello, Casey.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Okay.’
He was sitting on the steps of the hospital, unwilling to wait inside. He found hospitals depressing.
‘They said you’d need at least another couple of weeks.’ She sat next to him on the steps.
‘No, I’m all right now. Any longer in there and I’d have gone mad again.’
She flinched at the words remembering how he had been the first time she’d visited.
The news of the eruption had stunned the country, spreading alarm, causing dismay among geologists, panic in the neighbouring towns and villages. She hadn’t even known Holman was in that area, for he was very secretive about his job; she wasn’t even sure of his department. All she knew was that he had an ‘assignment’ for the weekend, that no, he couldn’t tell her where he was going, and no, she definitely could not go with him. Had she known he had been in the village that suffered the earthquake, she – she refused to think about it. It had been bad enough when she had rung his office the following day to find out why he hadn’t called her on his return and had learnt of his involvement. The department knew he’d been in the area and as they hadn’t heard from him since, assumed he either couldn’t get back because the roads leading to the disaster were completely blocked by rescue and medical services and the hordes of curious sightseers – the usual ghoulish element that flocked to any disaster – or he had stayed to help. They didn’t reveal to her that they were concerned that perhaps he was being held by the military on their Salisbury Plain base and they were now anxiously expecting the Ministry of Defence to come roaring down their necks. She was asked to ring back later when no doubt they would have some news and was advised not to make the trip down to Wiltshire because of the mounting traffic and the impossibility of finding him anyway.
The rest of the day had been spent in a fear-ridden daze. She rang her employer, an exclusive antique dealer in one of the side streets off Bond Street, and told him she felt too ill to come in. A fussy little man, who considered women necessary only for business purposes, he brusquely hoped she would be well enough to do her job tomorrow. For the rest of the day she wandered listlessly around the house, afraid to go out in case the phone rang. She barely ate and listened to the radio only to find out more news of the earthquake.
Casey had known Holman for nearly a year now and was becoming more and more aware that if he ever left her, she would be lost. Her dependence on him was now stronger even than her dependence on her father had been. When her mother had divorced her father eight years ago, she had turned to him to provide the comfort and guidance every child needs from a mother, and he had coped extraordinarily well. Too well, in fact, for by overcompensating for the lack of his wife, he had tied the daughter almost irrevocably to him. Holman had begun to break the bonds between them, unconsciously at first, but when he realized just how strong the ties were he began to gently, but purposefully, draw Casey away from her father. He did this not so much out of love for her, but because he cared about her as a person. He knew she had a strong mind and a will of her own, but she was too tightly enmeshed in her father’s domineering love. If the relationship developed any further then she would never be free to live her own life. Besides, the closeness between father and daughter made him feel uneasy.
Holman had tried to get Casey – her real name was Christine, but he had invented the nickname for reasons he hadn’t told her of yet – to leave her father’s house and get a flat of her own. This she would have done had he allowed her to live with him, but there he’d drawn the line. After two previous disastrous affairs he had resolved never to become too entangled with one person again. He had been near to it many times and even proposed marriage once, but the girl backed out because
she knew, and realized she had always known, that he didn’t love her. That had been years before, and now he wondered if he were really capable of love. He had gradually lost most of his cynicism on that topic during the months he had known Casey. He still resisted, but guessed he was fighting a losing battle. Maybe he was getting old, resigning himself to the fact he needed a companion, that although he’d never been quite alone, he hadn’t shared for a long, long time.
Casey was breaking down that barrier just as he was breaking down the closeness between her and her father. The process was gradual, but inevitable. Still, each of them offered resistance. She would not leave her father without the assurance of someone taking his place; he refused to be that someone, the move had to come from her before she had the guarantee of someone to run to. Holman was older than Casey, but had no intention of becoming a father-figure. At the moment, it was deadlock.
Now, in her anxiety, as she waited for the phone to ring, Casey knew she would do as he asked. She understood his reasons. It would hurt her father terribly, but it wasn’t as though she would never see him again. And perhaps when he realized she was determined, his iciness towards John would begin to thaw. If it didn’t, then she knew she would have to go through the agony of choosing again, but this time for keeps. And she knew it would be her father who would lose.
She waited till 3.00 p.m., then rang Holman’s office again. This time they had some news. They apologized for not having let her know sooner but all hell had broken loose in their department because of the earthquake. These things just weren’t meant to happen in England! A man identified as John Holman, whose papers showed he worked for the Department of the Environment, had been taken to Salisbury General Hospital, where he was in an extreme state of shock. When Casey pressed them for details, her heart pounding, her thoughts racing, they became evasive, but assured her that John had suffered no physical damage. Again, they advised her to keep clear of the area and promised they would keep her informed of any developments.