Death of a Raven (9 page)

Chapter 10

Emma’s Morgan mare Queen quivered all over as Patrick lowered himself into the saddle, then snorted and sidled, mouthing the bit. Mark put a hand on the rein.

“It’s all right,” Patrick told him.

“She doesn’t usually take to strangers.”

“I’m OK.”

A two and a half hour drive was behind us, a slow, hot journey because Queen had kicked the sides of the trailer if Mark drove faster than fifty kilometres an hour. She was to be Patrick’s right leg, his own description. The walk was not a long one, perhaps a couple of miles, but along a steep and rough logging track.

Patrick went off down the road for a short trial spin, Queen picking up her small delicate hooves with precision.

“Relax,” I told Mark. “Patrick’s ridden before.”

He watched anxiously. “The mare’s used to Mother riding her Western-style. I wish he’d let me put the Western saddle on her then he could have used the pommel to hang on by when the going gets steep.”

How do you explain without sounding like a know-all that body strength, a good sense of balance and wrists like steel hawsers can control any horse?

Queen tossed her head a couple of times and tried a little humped-back buck. After all, her rider was far heavier than the indulgent Emma who nursed her through various small alarms by crooning to her in French. Then I saw that Patrick held the reins as though they were a single strand of gossamer but his thighs were unmistakably keeping the animal under control. Shortly afterwards he halted her, turned her round and then laughed delightedly as she responded to his touch by breaking into a sedate armchair canter.

I had been prepared for arguments when I asked to be permitted to accompany them — that is from Mark, not Patrick. I am part of Patrick’s back-up team to the last degree, in theory the last one to fire the last bullet if that is how a mission ends. In theory. There had been a couple of exercises along these lines with the SAS as enemy, situations that at the time had seemed twice life-size and twice as bloody. Deliberately made so.

“Ingrid can stay with Queen,” Patrick told Mark before he could protest. “Then she can ride and phone if anything goes wrong.”

At this moment Ingrid was hating the flies, the sudden heat and a nasty little jingle that was going round inside her head in time to Queen’s dancing hoof beats.
Don’t ride Emma, ride Emma’s mare. Don’t ride Emma, ride Emma’s mare.

In fact I hadn’t wanted to be present, merely to keep Patrick in my sight. Even to myself I could not explain why. Something to do with the jingle perhaps, and a pile of magazines and disobeying orders and … No, I didn’t exactly feel differently about him, perhaps it was that time of the month even though the internal processes had gone haywire as they often do when we are on a job.

Paul was still stubbornly clinging to life, slipping in and out of coma. It had not as yet been confirmed whether he was suffering from shellfish poisoning or had had some other form of toxin administered to him. Until such time that this was known Le Blek had mounted a guard over him.

Mark had visited us in our room the previous evening, as we were getting ready for bed. I think Patrick had been expecting him and apologised for not wandering lonely as a cloud in the garden after dinner.

“It was that or crawl up the wastepipe into your shower in the morning,” had said Mark, poker-faced, and with apparently no ill effects from the encounter earlier on. It occurred to me then that his education was still in progress and that he was doing magnificently.

“I’m tired,” Patrick had said quietly and sounding utterly exhausted. “I’m also aware that you did as I asked and gave Le Blek certain information. But grassing on friends isn’t a very pleasant thing to have to do and you’re not the kind of person who would make a habit of it. It’s better, isn’t it, to go after him yourself, even if you take reinforcements, than to bring down the law on him? He’d understand that — your anger that he might be mixed up in the murder of someone who was known to your family.”

Mark had nodded, speechless.

“Is Le Blek likely to be able to find this place easily?”

“It’s an old bus the brothers use as a hunting lodge. I gave the best directions I could but it’s right out in the sticks.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“Three hours — drive and then walk.”

“We’ll leave at six.”

Which was why a trainee architect and the Prime Minister’s part-time body-guard were engaged in a manhunt. I was sure the latter had been planning it ever since Le Blek’s call.

When we had gone a short distance Mark suggested that he precede us by about fifty yards in order to put Lanny at his ease if he was there. Reluctantly, Patrick agreed.

“Would you like a horse?” I asked, walking at Queen’s shoulder.

“If I could have this one.” Patrick was not giving me his full attention but ceaselessly scanning the trees and undergrowth.

“Morgans must be available in UK.”

“At a price.” 

The track became steeper, no more than ruts caused by the wheels of vehicles. Water running off the hill had washed soil from between the stones which had then been split and crumbled by frost. The going got very rough indeed. I hung on to Queen’s mane but she tended to hurry over the worst parts and I had almost to run to retain her support. Soon we were all sweating profusely.

“Why were you so mad with me that day over the stable?” Patrick enquired, without taking his eyes off his surroundings.

“I thought you were hamming everything up dreadfully.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Except perhaps that you seemed to be positively relishing the squalor.”

“You called me a bastard.”

“Like the old days,” I muttered, under my breath, but he heard me.

“At the time I thought you were merely being realistic. Then I realised otherwise. Yes, just like the old days.”

“Let’s just call it diminished responsibility and leave it at that,” I said savagely.

He looked at me. “I simply don’t see how I can be accused of —”

“Me!” I interrupted. “It’s me I’m talking about. Suddenly I can’t face the sight of you looking like Stalky, disobeying Daws’ orders, reading filthy magazines and discussing with Terry whether he should bed Emma. Your mind never used to slant that way.”

There was a long silence. A heron that we surprised staring into a ditch at the side of the track took off and flapped away like an affronted umbrella.

“I do believe you’re right,” said Patrick. “No excuses. Not even about the girlie mags. I found them hidden behind the feed sacks — they must have belonged to Bill.”

“I can understand that,” I said, but heard my grudging tone. 

“No, you can’t,” he replied. “Let’s have all the dirty washing on the line. I thought they’d take my mind off Emma.”

I made myself view this statement dispassionately, even went so far as to pretend for a moment that I was Terry and we were talking on a man to man basis. Not so long ago, and still fighting an agonising battle against his injuries, Patrick had been so terrified of sexual failure he had shunned the company of all women. Then we had met again and, together, solved the problem. And what a woman like Emma could do to ordinary men like Terry and Paul she could also, it seemed, achieve with the more strong-minded.

“Squalid,” said Patrick, looking between his mount’s ears. “That’s a good word for it. She said she’d show me where I was to sleep and as soon as we got there behaved in a fashion that I won’t go into details about. Not even in the army — and I found myself in some pretty awful places after I joined up, you do, it’s part of growing up — had I come across anything like it. She wanted me right there and then, standing up, you name it. I managed to get away. I kept thinking of you but that didn’t stop me wanting to give her everything she was after. I was on a sort of obscene high for days — couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’m sorry.”

I hadn’t really been after an apology and there had been doubt at the back of my mind that I was right to press him. I just wanted an explanation, reasons perhaps. Now, it appeared that I had them but I felt very cheap. I had made him apologise for being human.

“Still love me?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said, no louder.

Neither of us spoke again until Mark halted and waited for us to catch up with him. The trees had closed in over our heads, excluding even a whisper of a breeze. It was stifling.

“Are you armed?” enquired Mark when still some yards away.

“Howitzer and two mortars,” Patrick replied. 

“Engage brain before opening mouth?” Mark queried.

Queen stopped before she trod on Mark’s toes and gave him a friendly shove. Her rider dismounted and handed the reins to me.

“I saw the bus through a gap in the trees back yonder,” Patrick said. “Kindly shed the
Shane
demeanour. I don’t intend to take out the windows of the damn thing, and neither do I want to see so much as a hair of your head when I approach it. Is that understood?”

To my relief it was. We left the track and entered a small glade where the trees had been cut down. From there we could just see the back of the vehicle, an old ex-school bus parked not in the clearing but further up the hill, right in the forest. It had been there for many years judging by the way the trees had it in their embrace. From a distance it looked like a fat yellow beetle caught in an insect eating plant.

“Be ready to mount,” Patrick said to me. “No, on second thoughts, get on now. If you hear me shout your name, or if there’s any shooting the outcome of which you’re not sure about, then ride like hell for the pick-up. Tie the horse to a tree and get to a phone. I’ve put a cross on the map where we parked so you can give Le Blek the reference, and I’ve written his number on the cover.”

I climbed into the saddle. It was a long time since I had done any riding. By the time I had adjusted the stirrups to my shorter legs Patrick and Mark had disappeared. I held my breath and listened for a moment but all I could hear was Queen munching grass and swishing away flies.

From where I was I couldn’t see the bus, which, I reasoned, was just as well for it meant that if anyone was inside it they couldn’t see me. I fervently hoped that Mark would remember his undertaking to keep out of the way.

The flies became a torture, causing Queen to kick at her belly and swish her tail incessantly. She swatted the ones on her chest and front legs with her nose. I prayed that she wouldn’t decide to remove us both back to her trailer. 

Resurrecting the Stalky episode was bringing back other old memories.

When the fuss had died down Patrick had once again merged into the untidy howling mob of boys which made life at school so difficult for every eleven-year-old girl. This was not to say that he joined in with the plait yanking, beret snatching and general ribaldry. He was merely male so as far as I and my friends were concerned, inhabited the same black pit as all his contemporaries, beneath our notice.

Then, when we all began to grow up and take an interest in each other, the three year’s difference in our ages yawned like a chasm. All of a sudden he was eighteen, Head Boy, captain of the cricket eleven, a member of the water polo team and in possession of a maturity that prompted the staff to send miscreants to him rather than worry the overworked Headmaster. Rumour had it that he listened, advised the timid, awarded lines on a sliding scale to occasional offenders and took bullies and real criminals, male, into the gym for a couple of rounds with him in the boxing ring, thoughtfully providing gloves. Troublemaking swiftly went out of fashion.

Fate had decreed that my father be co-opted on to the Parochial Church Council and he had soon found himself Treasurer as no one else admitted to knowing the first thing about accountancy. Dad was a stockbroker, the typical something in the City with bowler and briefcase. In appearance, he was an orchid amongst a field of cabbages: rare, colourful and slightly outrageous. After one of the PCC meetings, and following a conversation between the two men, the Rector had suggested that his son could help me with my physics homework. The Reverend John Gillard had been almost beside himself with gratitude at the time for my father had just announced that he had discovered the existence of a savings account of church funds, long forgotten about, that had accrued several hundred pounds in interest.

The following Thursday Patrick had arrived, eyed my muddle of exercise and text books scattered over the kitchen table, seated himself and simmered. Then, appearing to notice my existence for the first time, asked me heavily what my problem was.

Total confusion, a new sensation for I was a very organised person in those days, had come over me. It was only afterwards that I made the decision that here was the man I wanted, for ever and ever. There was also the realisation that he was unattainable, not a male to be won by thrusting my adolescent bosom under his nose. This knowledge, a kind of instant acquisition of womanhood, materialised in less time than it took to draw a neat line beneath the words “Specific Gravity.”

“Would you like a glass of white wine?” I had enquired, outwardly concentrating on my text book but in reality not seeing one printed word. I had glanced up, schooling my expression to one of polite disinterest. One black eyebrow had quirked and those unholy grey eyes of his had bored into mine. Somehow I had held the look. If I giggled, I was finished.