The situation was ideal. Mother was rattling round that enormous house on Staffordshire Terrace with bedrooms to spare. Kenneth needed a place to live that wasn’t so expensive that he couldn’t afford to continue to help out his wife and children.
The bond between Kenneth and my mother was already in place. She was one-third mascot, one-third inspiration, and one-third source of inner strength to him. When he shared with her the difficulties surrounding his decision to cease playing for Kent and to join Middlesex, he would also have shared his reluctance to return to his old way of life. To which reluctance she would have responded gravely, “Does Jean know this, Ken?” To which he would have said, “I haven’t told her yet.” To which Mother would have made the cautious recommendation, “Perhaps you need to let your lives unfold gradually. Let nature take its course. What if…This may sound rather impulsive, but what if you moved in with me for a while? While you see what direction your life’s going to take….” Because it was closer to Lord’s, because he wouldn’t yet be making the money that would allow the family to pull up stakes, because because because. “Would that be of help to you, my dear?”
She gave him the words. No doubt he used them. The end was the same no matter how it was effected. He moved in with my mother.
And while she was devoting herself to Kenneth Fleming’s welfare, I was working at the zoo in Regent’s Park.
I remember thinking, You want truth, Chris? I’ll show you truth, after that morning in my bedroom. I thought, He thinks he knows me, the stupid berk. He doesn’t know sod all.
I set about proving how little he knew. I worked at the zoo, first mucking round with the maintenance staff and eventually picking up a job at the animal hospital where I had access to their data bases, which eventually proved invaluable and heightened my standing with the organisation when ARM decided it was time to track where surplus animals were being shipped. I involved myself more devotedly with ARM. If Chris could love animals, I could love them more. I could prove my love more. I could take bigger risks.
I requested assignment to a second assault unit. “We’re too slow,” I said. “We’re not doing enough. We’re not quick enough. If you allow some of us to cross between units, we can double our activities. Perhaps even triple them. Think of the number of animals we can save.” Request denied.
So I began to push our own unit to do more. “We’re sitting back on our arses. We’re getting complacent. Come on. Come on.”
Chris watched me with a wary eye. He’d spent enough time round me to have the right to wonder what my ulterior motives were. He kept waiting for them to emerge.
Had we been involved in something less gut-wrenching, those motives would have emerged within weeks. It’s ironic now that I think of it. I heightened my activities in the organisation with the intent of making Chris see who I really was so that he would have to fall in love with me so that I could screw him and then reject him and walk away filled with jubilation at the fact that I didn’t care. I intended to use the liberation activities cold-bloodedly, with no more concern about the fate of the animals than I would have had for the fate of the men I used to pick up off the street. I ended up with my heart feeling as if someone had cut it into strips with a pair of rusty secateurs.
It wasn’t a process that happened quickly. I felt neither a dent nor a fissure in the armour of my indifference at the dry lick from the tongue of the first beagle pup I rescued from a lab studying stomach ulcers. I just handed him over to the transporter, moved to the next cage, and kept myself focussed on the need for speed and silence.
When I finally cracked, it wasn’t over scientific experimentation at all, but rather over an illegal puppy farm that we raided in Hampshire, not far from the Wallops.
Have you heard of these places? They breed dogs for volume and profit. They’re always in isolated locations, sometimes run out of what otherwise appear to be working farms.
This puppy farm had come to our attention because one of our runners on a visit to Mum and Dad in Hampshire had been poking round a car boot sale, and he’d come upon a woman with puppies. Had two dogs at home, she claimed a touch too earnestly, both whelped at once, crawling in puppies at the moment I am, willing to sell them for next to nothing, pure as pure could be the whole flipping lot of them. Our runner didn’t like the look of the woman or the dispirited look of the puppies. He followed her home, on a winding, dipping, pencil sketch of a road that dwindled down to two ruts with oil-streaked grass growing between them.
“She’s got them in a barn,” he told us. He pressed his palms together and held them like he was praying as he talked. “There’re cages. Stacked on each other. There’s no light. No ventilation.”
“Sounds like a case for the RSPCA,” Chris noted.
“That could take weeks. And even if they moved against her, the thing is…” He directed a solemn look round the group. “Listen. This woman needs to be dealt with permanently.”
Someone raised the problem of logistics. This wasn’t a lab deserted at night. This was where someone lived, a mere fifty yards away from the barn in which the animals were kept. What if the dogs barked, as they undoubtedly would? Wouldn’t the farm owner set up the alarm? phone the police? make after us with a shot gun?
She might do, Chris acknowledged. He decided to recce the location himself.
He went to Hampshire alone. When he returned, all he would say is, “We’ll do it next week.”
I said, “Next week? Chris, that’s not enough time. That puts everyone at risk. That—”
He said, “Next week,” and brought out a plan of the farm. He assigned the sentries to deal with the problem of Mrs. Porter, the owner, remarking that she wouldn’t be likely to phone the police and bring the law down upon herself for running the puppy farm in the first place. But she might do something else. The sentries would need to be prepared to head her off. He told us to bring along surgical masks and right then I should have known how bad it was going to be.
We arrived at one in the morning. The sentries slipped to guard both entrances to the farmhouse, one on the yard and the other facing a perfect front garden and the crater-filled lane. When the flicker of their lights told us the sentries were in position, we liberators prepared for the dash to the barn. For once, Chris would accompany us. No one dared ask why.
We found the first dead animal in a pen just outside the barn. In the circle of light Chris flashed upon him, we could see that he’d once been a spaniel. Now he was bloat, but the bloat seemed to shift in an undulating pattern in the beam from Chris’s torch. These were the maggots. His companion in the pen was a golden retriever matted with mud and faeces. This dog struggled to his feet. He wobbled back into the wire fence.
“Shit,” someone murmured.
The retriever set up the alarm we’d been expecting.
“Go,” Chris said. “Pass over this one.”
We heard the shouting from the farmhouse once we were inside the barn. But it fast became merely an auditory backdrop to what we found within. We all had torches. We switched them on. Excrement was everywhere. Our feet sucked and plopped as we sank into hay that lay over the muck.
Animals whimpered. They were crammed into cages the size of shoe boxes. These were stacked one on top of the other so that dogs beneath lived in the waste of dogs above. Under the cages lay three black rubbish bags. One spilled out its contents into the muck: four dead terrier puppies tossed in among wet hair, faeces, and rotting food.
No one spoke, which was usual. What wasn’t usual was that one of the chaps began to weep. He stumbled against the side of a stall. Chris said urgently, “Patrick, Patrick, don’t fade on me, mate.” And to me, “Give the signal,” as he moved to the cages.
The dogs began to yip. I went back to the barn door and flashed the light to the transporters waiting beneath the hedgerow that lined the property. At the farmhouse, the sentries were struggling with Mrs. Porter. She’d made it as far as her front step where she shouted, “Police! Help! Po
lice!” before one of the sentries whipped her arms behind her and the other gagged her. They dragged her back into the house. The interior lights went black.
The transporters thundered across the farmyard and into the barn. One of them slipped in the muck and fell. The dogs began to howl.
Chris zipped along the line of cages. I ran to join the others working the opposite side of the barn. Even in the limited light of my torch, I could still see, and I felt vertigo sweep over me. There were puppies everywhere but they weren’t the sweet little things one sees on calendars at Christmas. These Yorkies and Shelties, these retrievers and spaniels had ulcerated eyes, open sores. Parasites crawled through hairless patches of their flesh.
One of the older blokes began cursing. Two of the women were crying. I was trying not to breathe and trying to ignore the alternating waves of heat and cold that kept washing over me. A ringing in my ears did much to drown out the sound of the animals. But in the abject terror that the ringing might stop, I began reciting everything I could remember from The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. I’d done the yak, the polar bear, and the whale when I got to the final cage. In it lay a small Lhasa apso. I put my gloved fingers between the bars, muttering as much as I could remember from the rhyme about the Dodo. It began with something about walking around. Something about taking the sun and the air.
I flipped open the cage, concentrating on the rhymes. They had to match around and air. I couldn’t think what they were.
I reached for the dog, but I sought the words. Something something ground? Lah lah la bare? What was it? What was it?
I pulled the dog towards me. Round? Sound? Dodo not there? Somehow I had to put the rhyme together because if I didn’t, I’d start crumbling, and I couldn’t face that. I didn’t know what to do to prevent it except to move on quickly to another rhyme, one more familiar, one whose words I couldn’t forget. Like “Humpty Dumpty.”
I lifted the dog and caught sight of her right back foot. It dangled uselessly from a strip of flesh. In the flesh were the unmistakable punctures and grooves of canines. As if she’d tried to chew her own foot off. As if the dog occupying the cage below had tried to chew it off for her.
My vision narrowed to a pinpoint of light. I cried out but made no sound that could have been either a word or a name. The dog felt lifeless resting against me.
All round me was movement, smudges of black as liberators moved animals and tried not to breathe. I gulped for air but couldn’t find enough.
“Here, let me take it,” someone said at my elbow. “Livie. Livie. Give me the dog.”
I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t move. All I could do was feel myself melting, like a great blaze was burning away my flesh. I began to weep.
“Her foot,” I cried.
After all I’d seen in my time with ARM, it hardly seems sensible that a dog’s foot dangling on a strip of dead flesh would be what broke me. But it did. I felt the rage course through me. I felt helplessness drag me under like quicksand. I said, “Enough.” And I was the one to grab the petrol can from the doorway where Chris had left it.
He said, “Livie, keep away.”
I said, “Get that dog from the pen. Outside. Get it. I said get it, Chris. Get it.” And I began sloshing the petrol around the interior of that hellhole. When the last dog had been taken and the last cage had been tumbled to the floor, I lit the match. The flames burst up like a geyser and never had I seen such a beautiful sight as fire.
Chris pulled me by the arm or I might have stayed inside and gone up with the interior of that wretched barn. Instead I stumbled out, made sure the retriever had been rescued from the pen, and ran for the lane. I kept saying, “Enough.” I kept trying to wipe from my mind the image of that single pathetic dangling little foot.
We stopped at a phone box in Itchen Abbas. Chris rang the emergency number and reported the fire. He came back to the mini-van.
“That’s more than she deserves,” I said.
“We can’t leave her tied up. We don’t want murder on our consciences.”
“Why not? She’s got it on hers.”
“That’s what makes us different.”
I watched the night streak by. The motorway loomed ahead, a gash of grey concrete splitting open the land.
“It isn’t fun any longer,” I said to my reflection in the passenger’s window. I felt Chris looking at me.
“You want out?” he asked.
I closed my eyes. “I just want it to end.”
“It will,” he said.
We shot onto the motorway.
CHAPTER
12
The rustling of the bedclothes awakened him, but Lynley kept his eyes shut for a moment. He listened to her breathing. How odd, he thought, that he should find joy in such an unadorned thing.
He turned on his side to face her, carefully so that he shouldn’t wake her. But she was awake already, lying on her back with one leg drawn up and her eyes studying the acanthus leaves that looped in plaster across the ceiling.
He found her hand beneath the covers and locked her fingers in his. She glanced at him, and he saw that a small vertical line had formed between her eyebrows. With his other hand, he smoothed it away.
“I’ve realised,” she said.
“What?”
“You diverted me last night, so I never had an answer to my question.”
“As I recall, you diverted me. You promised chicken and artichokes, didn’t you? Wasn’t that why we trekked down to the kitchen?”
“And it was in the kitchen that I asked you, wasn’t it? But you never answered.”
“I was occupied. You occupied me.”
A smile feathered her mouth. “Hardly,” she said.
He laughed quietly. He leaned over to kiss her. He traced the curve of her ear where her hair fell away.
“Why do you love me?” she asked.
“What?”
“That was the question I asked you last night. Don’t you remember?”
“Ah. That question.” He rolled onto his back and joined her in looking at the ceiling. He held her hand against his chest and considered the elusive why of loving.
“I can’t match you in either education or experience,” she pointed out. He lifted a doubting eyebrow. She smiled fleetingly. “All right. I can’t match you in education. I have no career. I’m not even gainfully employed. I have no wifely skills and fewer wifely aspirations. I’m very nearly frivolity personified. Our backgrounds are similar, if it comes to that, but what does similarity in background have to do with giving your heart to another?”
“It had everything to do with marriage at one time.”
“We’re not talking about marriage. We’re talking about love. More often than not, those two are mutually exclusive and entirely different subjects. Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII were married and look what happened to them. She had his babies and got to make his shirts. He catted round and used up six wives. So much for similarity in background.”
Lynley yawned. “What else could she expect, marrying a Tudor? Richmond’s own son. She was establishing a genealogical link to primeval slime. Cowardly. Penurious. Murderous. Politically paranoid. And with damned good reason for the latter.”
“Oh dear. We’re not heading towards the line of succession and the Princes in the Tower, are we, darling? That takes us somewhat off the track.”
“Sorry.” Lynley raised her hand and kissed her fingers. “Get me anywhere close to Henry Tudor and I become a bit rabid.”
“It’s a very good way to avoid the question.”
“I wasn’t avoiding. Merely temporising while I thought.”
“And? Why? Why do you love me? Because if you can’t either explain or define love, perhaps it’s better to admit that real love doesn’t exist in the first place.”
“If that’s the case, what do we have, you and I?”
She made a restless movement, akin to a shrug. “Lust. Passion. Body heat. Something pleasant but ephemeral. I don’t
know.”
He raised himself on one elbow and observed her. “Let me make certain I understand. We ought to consider that this is a relationship grounded in lust?”
“Aren’t you willing to admit that’s a possibility? Especially if you consider last night. How we were.”
“How we were,” he repeated.
“In the kitchen. Then the bedroom. I admit that I was the instigator, Tommy, so I don’t mean to suggest that you’re the only one who might be absorbed by the chemistry and blind to the reality.”
“What reality?”
“That there’s nothing beyond chemistry between us in the first place.”
He stared at her long before he moved or spoke. He could feel the muscles of his abdomen tighten. He could sense that his blood was beginning to heat. It wasn’t lust this time that he was starting to feel. But it was a passion all the same. He said calmly, “Helen, what in God’s name is the matter with you?”
“What sort of question is that? I merely want to point out that what you think of as love might be a flash in the pan. Isn’t that a wise possibility to ponder? Because if we were to marry and then discover that what we felt for each other had never been more than—”
He threw back the covers, got out of bed, and struggled into his dressing gown. “Listen to me for once, Helen. Hear this clearly from beginning to end. I love you. You love me. We marry or we don’t. That’s the long and short of it. All right?” He strode across the room and muttered imprecations under his breath. He pulled back the curtains to fill the room with the bright spring sunlight that was blazing down on the back garden of his town house. The window was already partially open, but he threw the sash fully up and took in deep breaths of the morning air.
“Tommy,” she said. “I merely wanted to know—”
“Enough,” he said and thought, Women. Women. The twists of their minds. The questions. The probing. The infernal indecision. God in heaven. Monkhood was better.
A hesitant tap sounded against his bedroom door. Lynley snapped, “What is it?”