Death of a Raven (18 page)

We drank water from a ditch. The water seemed clean so I unwound the strapping from his chest, bathed the wound and dressed it with moss. The bruising and discolouration were still dreadful to behold but there was no sign of infection. I bedded him down on the same bank of moss and covered him, quite unresisting, as warmly as possible with the jacket. He slept and in the morning his temperature had gone down.

We heard a helicopter at around lunch time, if such an event existed in our lives now. I piled ferns and dead leaves over Patrick where he rested in the shade and then hid myself nearby. It skimmed the lake along the banks of which we had been walking and then flew south. A short while later we heard it again but it came nowhere near us this time.

“I should have tried to attract the pilot’s attention,” I said, having made the decision that we would be able to go no further that day.

“Why didn’t you?” 

“I don’t know,” I replied and went away to set the snares so that I could cry alone.

I’m not sure how many hours later it was, maybe it was the next day, when a horrible high-pitched squealing penetrated my dazed state of mind. I tracked the sound and found a young hare caught in one of the snares. When I laid a hand on it it became still; glorious golden brown fur fading to a rich cream beneath its body, beautiful brown eyes surveying me calmly. The snare had caught it just behind the forelegs. I loosened it, understanding neither its tameness nor why I had caught it in broad daylight.

“Sorry, little one,” I said, and then killed it.

With the same knife that had been used to kill the friend of Margaret Howard I cleaned, skinned and jointed the creature. By now I was beyond asking questions, just choked back more tears upon discovering that it had been female and with young. I ate the warm liver and heart right there and then — liver makes Patrick ill. Then I laid the joints in some large leaves and took them over to where he lay.

When you are really hungry it is possible to devour a hare raw, tearing at the flesh, sucking up the blood and gouging out the kidneys with your thumbs. We did all these things then licked our fingers and wiped them on our filthy clothes.

“I hope you offered thanks to your dentist,” Patrick said, trying without much success to remove blood from his new beard.

“Of course,” I replied. He hadn’t been concerned with my good teeth but whether I had thanked God.

I went away for a short distance wondering if God understood whisky and loss of temper in time of trouble but would prefer one to rely on morphine and tears. Neither, came the instant and shockingly alien idea, God preferred prayer.

“Then you’re very unreasonable,” I said out loud, kicking at a rock. I turned to look at Patrick and found that he was looking at me. “Did you feel cheated when you prayed for the relief of pain only to lose the part of your right leg that hurt the most?”

“No.”

“Do you really believe that we’re being looked after even though you’ve killed a man and I’m pregnant and we’re starving and lost, and this is all in the balance with the life of a child called Rachel?”

He didn’t blench. “Yes.”

If this was delirium then my brain was like liquid crystal. “There’s nothing to do with Mother’s Union and bring and buy stalls in that,” I blurted out. “Nothing to do with flower rotas and dog collars. It’s awful — quite awful.”

“Like nailing a man up to a piece of wood and leaving him to die,” Patrick said. “Yes — and look what happened afterwards.”

Even more interesting than this exchange was my disappointment when I woke up and realized that I had dreamt it.

*

Catching and eating the hare however had not been a dream for we both suffered severe stomach pains afterwards. We turned round and retraced our footsteps nearly all the way we had come in the past two days. Whether it took another two days or only one after our meal I do not know, and Patrick is not sure either. He can recollect crossing the stream that fed the lake and then heading over the low hills that I had seen while testing the compass. We came to a logging track that led to a road.

I am told that it was lumberjacks who found us, a team clearing away trees felled the previous winter. Rumour has it that I had to convince Patrick that they were not going to kill us as he had wanted to shoot them all just in case.

They couldn’t believe we were British and had survived on our own for over a week.

Chapter 19

Colonel Daws was standing with his back to the room looking out of the window when we entered his office. Since we had last met he had moved temporarily to a room in Whitehall while the other premises were refurbished. It was a very small room in comparison with the other and there was no space for the cabinet containing military memorabilia and some of the items from his collection of jade. His grandfather clock and the large wall charts depicting famous battles were also missing. Presumably everything was in store.

I was not sufficiently misguided to imagine for one moment that this was the reason for his anger. Perhaps I am slightly fey but he did not have to turn round to face us for me to know that he was consumed by a choking black fury.

Patrick and I sat down, out of necessity. We had not been invited to.

Daws spun round from the window, his expression confirming my worst fears, and spoke directly to Patrick. “Did you write your report or was it the work of your wife?”

“I dictated it, she took it down in shorthand and then typed it on a borrowed typewriter,” Patrick said surprised, too tired, too weak, too downright ill for the warning signals to have reached him.

Daws rested both hands on his desk and leaned on them so that his face was only a matter of a yard from Patrick’s. “I prefer hand-written reports.”

“I know. I’m sorry, sir.”

“I asked because it seems to me that it’s a clever piece of fiction. Clever, Major, in the sense that it attempts to justify your actions. It fails, of course, because in the real world justification has to be based on facts.”

“It’s a report,” Patrick said, “and thus explains why I took certain steps. I can never remember working with less facts to go on. One of the reasons I was recruited into this department was my ability to use intuition. It was all I had in this case.”

The Colonel sat down and opened one of the drawers of his desk. He took out a file that had a photograph fixed to the cover with a paperclip. Even though it was upside down from where I was sitting, I could see that it was of Chris Fraser.

“Fraser hasn’t a daughter called Rachel,” said Daws. “He hasn’t any children at all — legitimate, bastards, wild oats, call them what you will.”

He wasn’t in the habit of using words like bastard when I was present. I took this to mean that although he was ignoring my presence I was included in his displeasure.

This was the last and undoubtedly to be the worst of the carpetings we had endured since meeting the woodmen. First there had been Terry on hearing that I was pregnant concerning the risks thereto, then Hartland when he had discovered that he would have to spirit us out of Canada and back home, then the medical staff at a London teaching hospital where we had been unceremoniously dumped at two in the morning two days previously, and after this Patrick’s parents who had not been mollified when he had threatened never to go home again if they let out that they had heard from us.

Daws warmed to his theme. Margaret Howard’s boyfriend, one Karl Melker, had been the eldest son of an East German family who had fled to the West amidst much publicity in a light plane some four years previously. He had been working at Lancaster University as a lecturer in Maths. 

“He didn’t make us a party to those facts when he came for us in the boondocks armed with a rifle and flick knife,” Patrick pointed out sourly.

“Do people go out into the Canadian backwoods without being armed?” Daws enquired.

Patrick groaned under his breath.

“I should imagine that he was in Canada on holiday to be with her and she asked him to look for you when you failed to return,” Daws continued relentlessly. “And now you tell me he’s in a shallow grave somewhere near the border of a National Park.”

“That’s if it was him,” I said.

“It’s still being checked out,” Daws said without looking at me. “But we’ve already discovered that he’s not at the University. One other thing … who was Fraser’s contact? You haven’t mentioned who gave him his orders.”

“He didn’t say.”

“But I should imagine you made asking him a priority.”

“No. I had to be very careful — I didn’t want him to clam up altogether.”

“But it was all lies!” Daws shouted. And then more quietly, “It was all a pack of lies. No one was threatening him. He had Quade killed because he thought he was going to steal his ideas and take Rogers off to start a company of their own. The entire threat story was to cover up the murder. We must assume that he also murdered the man he hired to kill Quade. He must have laughed like a drain when Rogers ate those poisoned clams and you sat up all night with him at the hospital in case someone finished
him
off. I’ve another complaint from that quarter too — that you threatened hospital staff with loaded gun.”

“How the hell would they know it was loaded?” I cut in furiously.

“Was it?” Daws barked at Patrick.

“Of course,” said Patrick with a look that told me to keep quiet unless I had something intelligent to contribute. 

“Furthermore …” Daws began and then stopped, resting his temples on steepled fingers as if he had a headache. When he resumed speaking I really feared for us, such was his anger. “I will not be laughed at. Fraser has run us around as though we were a bunch of tinkers hawking chicken shit. I’ve been informed from a reliable source that David Hartland is responsible for a question being asked in the House as to our efficiency.”

We were permitted to digest this for a moment.

“But almost worse than this,” Daws went on, “is that you shot and injured a member of the Canadian Security Service. Please don’t tell me that he had been drinking — that gem of intelligence has already been made known to me by his superiors. I’m not quite sure why. But they are understandably angry that you put a bullet in one of their operatives in order to …” Again he broke off. “Major, what in God’s name
did
you shoot him for?”

“At the time,” Patrick said on a sigh, “he was waving a rifle around. He might have decided to stop Fraser from getting away.”

“He might have decided to stop Fraser from getting away,” Daws repeated, and Patrick’s Adam’s apple bobbed jerkily.

“He was there to see it happen,” Patrick explained. “I put it in my report. I wanted someone in an official capacity to witness Fraser apparently doing as he was told.”

“Hurley was threatening me with the rifle,” I said. “He was drunk enough to have shot me accidentally.”

Daws gave me five seconds attention. “Perhaps he thought
you’d
allow Fraser to get away. It doesn’t seem to me that Hurley can be regarded as seriously impaired by alcohol — not when one compares his actions with the subsequent behaviour of those I have to believe were perfectly sober.”

Patrick said, “Fraser and I had come to an understanding. At the time I couldn’t allow anything to risk this child’s life — not Hurley, not friendship between nations, nothing.” 

But Daws was childless. “Would you be prepared to swear on oath that you
were
perfectly sober when these arrangements were being made, and also when you and Fraser carried them out?”

Patrick recoiled as though he’d been slapped across the face. “Yes, sir,” he said after a pause.

“But Fraser lied,” Daws said as though talking to a mental defective. “All right, suppose for a moment that you haven’t made several grave errors of judgement. Where is Fraser? Is he still in Canada and eluding everyone hunting for him or has he succeeded in getting back to this country?”

Patrick said, “The Hartlands’ pick-up was found at Saint John airport. It’s my guess he flew straight home.”

“That wasn’t in your report.”

“I only found out just now. I rang Meadows. Le Blek’s called off the search.”

“Isn’t that a trifle premature? Canada’s a vast country.”

“Le Blek must have been thinking along the same lines as I was.”

“Major,” Daws murmured. “How your enemies must hate you. Do I deduce that the Mounted Police weren’t really looking for Fraser, and that with this Le Blek’s co-operation you’ve had the security people over there going round in circles for over a week?”

“You wouldn’t understand, sir,” Patrick said softly after consideration.

“Then give me a breakdown of your findings from the point of view that Fraser isn’t the guilty party,” Daws replied, dangerously polite.

There is a vivisector in all of us, I reasoned bleakly. Daws wasn’t to be blamed. But Patrick is too old a hand at the game to be reduced to feigning deep thought or jingling the loose change in his pocket. He started talking.

“Up until the moment I pressured him for answers I thought Fraser was heavily involved. But he convinced me that Quade was killed as a warning to him, and that Lanny Gaspereau was murdered by the same source to prevent him talking. Fraser didn’t know where or if Margaret Howard fitted in. Sometimes she’d give him messages which she said had come over the phone — no more than vague threats so he didn’t know if they were genuine or if she’d made them up.”

Daws said, “Why should she do such a thing?”

“Because she’s a bitch,” I retorted before Patrick could answer. “She was engaged at one time to Quade and sleeping with Fraser as well. That nearly broke the company up, too. Paul Rogers gave us the information,” I added, seeing the Colonel’s scorn. “I can’t think of a person less interested in gossip.”

“Is Miss Howard still working out there?”

“No,” Patrick replied. “She handed in her notice and walked out three days ago. No one’s seen her since.”

“Did you get that from Meadows as well?”

“Yes.”

“Did he have anything else to report?”

“No, sir, nothing of interest.”

With an air of finality Daws dropped Fraser’s file back in the drawer and closed it. “It goes without saying that your position will have to be reviewed.”

Patrick was quite ashen by now. Thirty-six hours in hospital had resulted in the cracked ribs being strapped, a small infection drained — this an unpleasant process involving the insertion of hollow needles — and blinding headaches due to a reaction to one of the drugs he had been given. Sleep and a square meal hadn’t quite happened. But he had been recruited to D12 because of his tenacity.

“People don’t lie to me,” he said, and there was none of his usual deference to the Colonel. “Not comprehensively — just a small fib here and there that shows up when the entire story finally comes out. Fraser might not have a daughter called Rachel but there’s someone who means a hell of a lot to him with a gun at their head.”

It was as if he hadn’t spoken. Daws said, “I ordered you to take Quade’s place and use Meadows in whichever gap needed filling in your estimation. You disobeyed those orders — I suggest that you jeopardised the entire operation by doing so. Your place was in the house, not masquerading as an eccentric gardener. What did you discover? That Emma Hartland was a security risk? That’s been known for years. Hartland was sent to Canada for that reason — not much of real importance goes on there.”

I said, “It would have been helpful if we had been briefed on this before we left.”

“But the Major wasn’t here to be briefed. He flew straight out to Port Charles the same day I gave him his orders, despite a request from me to see me before he went.”

“That’s correct,” Patrick said. “Someone failed to give me the message.”

“You left without informing official channels where you were and after a period of leave when I had to persuade my superiors that you weren’t AWOL. No, there’s no need now to explain where you were. I’m no longer interested.” He turned to me. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to leave us for a while.”

I left the room as gracefully as possible in such circumstances, responding to Daws’ secretary’s sardonically raised eyebrow with a shrug and as bright a smile as I was capable of at that moment.

We were in real trouble. I said it again to myself, out loud, standing in the corridor but I was so tired there was no inner reaction at all. I removed myself from the distant sound of the Colonel’s raised voice and went to stand by one of the long windows in the corridor, overlooking Horse Guards Parade. I rested my forehead on the glass, deliciously cool, and wished that I was at home in Devon.

I had been more fortunate in hospital in that I had spent just about the entire stay asleep with a little help from sedatives. Tests that had confirmed pregnancy had been conducted without my knowledge. I had been put on a drip feed to consume all sorts of expensive goodies, in the exact words of a nurse, as I had lost a stone in weight and now weighed considerably less than I should. This had surprised me. What I regarded as my normal weight was, in medical eyes, lath-like. But the real shock had been to be referred to by medical staff in the plural. Baby and I. Two of us.

Looked at dispassionately, the Hartlands had been superb. Emma had driven out to the farm where the foreman of the logging gang had taken us to phone and then rushed us back to Ravenscliff for hot baths, several hot meals and head to toe treatment with an insect bite lotion that had relieved the blotchy swelling covering almost very inch of our bodies. David Hartland had delivered his tirade but nevertheless succeeded in arranging a flight on a Canadian Air Force jet that was leaving in a few hours.