Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (7 page)

When the programme about music finished it was midnight, and the news came on. I leant out of bed, turned the radio off, listened to my beating heart and closed my eyes. I saw things in the dark and heard things there, but I let them pass. They weren’t going to spook me. I was stronger than imagination, stronger than fright and stronger than the idea that trouble was permanent. It wasn’t. Not even life was permanent. And as the comfort of that thought found a warm place to settle, I began to drift away like a bird on a thermal, and watched myself dip and swoop towards the west.

Sunday. I milked, mucked out, swept the yard and left the farm for the day. I didn’t milk on Sunday evening, Mr Evans got a relief in, so I told him I’d see him in the morning and went to see Mum, Dad and Grace. We always have Sunday lunch together, and as I sat in the kitchen and told them about the hung man and the police they listened with their mouths open and their heads nodding.

“The world’s gone mad,” said Dad.

“I know,” I said.

“And are you all right?”

“Not really. I’m having nightmares.”

“Maybe you should see the doctor.”

“Why?”

“He’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

“I don’t want that. I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”

Grace had learnt a new way to cook a chicken, and after she’d sat and listened for five minutes, she went to fuss in the kitchen and make some gravy. When I’d finished the story, Mum said she wanted to talk to me in the garden, so we walked down to the shed where Dad keeps his tools, stood by the door and she said, “That poor man in the woods; it’s got something to do with whatever Spike’s up to. Hasn’t it?”

“Yes. But I don’t know how.”

“I knew it. Have you seen him?”

“Yes.”

“So tell me. What’s going on? What, exactly, is going on?”

“Mum…”

“You’d better tell me.”

“I can’t. I promised. And I’m afraid that if I tell you, you’ll get caught up in it.”

“I’m already caught up in it. I wake up every morning with the stench of it in my nose and the taste of it in my mouth. Everywhere I go I can smell it, and I can feel it in the wind. And every time I think of you, I see shadows where there shouldn’t be any, and they follow me around until I stop thinking about you.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means danger, Pet. More danger than you can imagine.”

I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? Sometimes I think Mum makes this stuff up to scare me, and that she hasn’t the powers she thinks she has. Sometimes I think Spike is right and it is all mumbo-jumbo, but then I stop because however hard I try to turn away from the things she says, her words won’t let me. They pull me in, suck me in, they make me believe.

“I think,” she said, “that it’s time you started listening to your heart. Really listen to what it says. And recognize the signs.”

“What signs?”

“You know what I mean, Pet. My signs, your signs. Our signs. The old signs. They’re everywhere, and you know it.”

I looked at her face. Lines were appearing where lines hadn’t been before, and her hair was turning white around its grey edges. She was smaller than me, but didn’t feel it. Sometimes I thought she was taller and sometimes when she talked I thought she might be able to stop a train with her voice. Most of the time it was like a moth in flight, a flutter, a touch of powder against a night window, but then it could turn. Now it turned, and her face hardened. “Do what you’re told,” she said. “Because if you don’t, you’ll meet more than trouble.”

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but was saved by Grace, who opened the kitchen window and called us into lunch, but as we walked to the house Mum said, “If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

“Do what?”

“You know,” she said, and there was no doubting it.

When we sat down to eat, Mum said she didn’t want any talk of “bad things”, so Dad told us about a job he’d been doing for a retired army Major in Kittisford. The man had fought in the War, and once captured a German tank armed with only a pistol and a hand grenade. His family had been the biggest landowners in the area, hundreds of acres of the best land, farmhouses, cottages and barns, flocks of sheep, herds of cows and fast horses. Over the years the estate had dwindled, a pocket sold here, another there, and now he lived in a coach house with his library and his war pistol beside his bed. He smoked a pipe that bubbled with spit and moist tobacco, and although he had an appalling back and put up with constant pain, he was a keen trout fisherman. Which is where Dad’s story began.

“He’s got a small lake – more of a pond really. Lots of nice goldfish swimming about, minding their own business. So what does he do? Buys a dozen trout, sticks them in the pond and tells me he’s going to fish them out in a couple of months. Good practice for when he’s fishing properly, he says.”

“Is that the pond you can see from the road?” said Mum.

“Yes. So the trout have been in for a couple of days, and he sends me down there to clear some smoke from the bank. Filthy job, stinking mud, and I’ve been working for a couple of minutes when I see these fat, bloated fish floating on the surface. It’s the trout. I put the tools down and go up to find the Major. He fetches a net and we go down there and started collecting them. Twelve fish, they’re all dead, and when we walk round the pond to look for the goldfish, we only see a couple. It’s a mystery.”

“Lovely chicken…” said Mum.

“So when we get back to the house, the Major goes to the kitchen, pulls out his sharpest knife and starts gutting the trout. And guess what?”

“Tell us, father,” said Mum.

“Every single trout is stuffed full of goldfish. They’ve eaten themselves to death.”

“What a way to go.”

“That’s exactly what I said. And when he’d finished gutting, he put them in a bag and told me to bury them at the bottom of the garden. It was disgusting.”

“Sounds like it,” said Grace.

A typical Sunday lunch at Mum and Dad’s, and as I cleared the plates away and Grace took a trifle from the fridge, I glanced out of the window.

Ashbrittle is a small place. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody’s dogs, cats and cars. If you take a letter to the letter box someone will ask you if you’re going to post a letter, and if you don’t peg out your washing on the day you usually peg out your washing, someone will tell everyone else that you’ve had a heart attack while listening to the news. Every now and again, someone will come and visit the old yew tree, but other than that the place isn’t visited by many strangers. So when a car no one knows appears, it’s an event. It might not be mentioned in the parish magazine, but people will probably talk about it over their tea, and wonder who the people were and what they were doing.

As I was staring out of the window I saw a car I hadn’t seen before driven by a bald man I had seen before. He was sitting there, staring straight ahead, his hands out of sight, still as a corpse. The moment I saw him I felt a wash of ice flow through my blood, and I froze. And as I looked at him, he turned his head very slowly towards me. Deliberate and knowing, and his eyes fixed on mine. His mouth twitched. His teeth were clean and white, and he flicked his tongue. He flicked his tongue again. I tried to look away, but I could not. The car window was open, and his eyes were as pale as clouds reflected on snow, and as cold. He stared on and on, and then he did something inside the car, reached up and his hand dropped a lit match onto the road. He wasn’t smoking, and he looked like the sort of person who had never smoked. He looked like he kept himself very fit. A fanatic. A maniac in the gym with the weights and the heavy bag and the rowing machine. In the corner, pumping and swearing and pumping and swearing and pumping some more, towel around his neck, arms glistening, sweat on his face, dripping down, dripping in pools, blood under his fingernails. A tough man, wiry, sprung and ready. Swift. Planned. Silent even when he screamed. A screech owl. All these things. And then, as slowly as he had turned to look at me, he turned away again, ran his tongue over his lips, started the car and pulled away, and I was left standing with my dirty plate and a black feeling in my stomach that twisted and turned and fed on its own dark bile.

I didn’t feel like eating trifle, and made up an excuse to leave early. Something about a cow ready to drop a calf and Mr Evans wanting me back at the farm. But they knew I was lying. They could tell. They could see it in my face and the way I thanked Grace for the food and told Dad he told a good story. Mum came with me to the door. She put her hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes, but she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, touched the middle of my forehead with her middle finger and let me go. When I got on the bike, I didn’t go back to the farm. I took the road to Spike’s.

I smelt it before I reached it – the dark, acrid smell of burning filled the air around Greenham. For a moment I thought that everything Mum had said was true. I was listening to my heart and recognizing the signs, and I was smelling the fire she smelt. But when I was fifty yards from his place the lane was blocked by a fire engine. Smoke was billowing over the trees, and the sound of cracking and spitting filled the air. I dropped the bike in the hedge and walked past the engine until a fireman stopped me. Hoses were snaking up the road and filthy water was running in the verge.

“Sorry mate. You can’t go up there.”

“What’s happened?”

“House fire.”

“The little bungalow?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he OK?”

“Who?”

“Spike. The bloke who lives there.”

“There was no one home. The neighbours called…”

“OK…”

“When can I get up there?”

The fireman shrugged. “Not sure, mate. It’ll be a while. The state of the place, I reckon they’ll be pulling it down.”

“OK. Thanks,” I said, and stood for a moment and watched as the smoke blew, then went back to my bike, picked it out of the hedge and rode back to the farm.

I rode fast and I rode badly, and all the time my mind was chasing. A voice was yelling in my head “Enough! Stop! Enough! Stop!”, and when I took the junction at Appley Cross I almost came off the bike. It slewed towards the bank and I caught my foot in the hedge, took my hand off the throttle, slipped sideways and stopped. I stopped for half a minute, took deep breaths and started up again.

When I got to the farm I found a note tucked under the caravan door.

EL. I HAVE GONE BECOSE SOMEONE COME TO MINE LAST NIGHT. I WAS OUT AND WHEN I GOT BACK I SAW THEM ROUND THE BACK. I GOT THE WEED SO I’LL CALL YOU WHEN I NO WHERE I AM. SPIKE.

As I was reading the note, Mr Evans came from the farmhouse. “You missed him,” he said. “Came round just after you’d gone for your lunch.”

“Know where he went?”

“No. Looked in a hurry though.”

“Thanks,” I said, and now, in a rush of anger and flame, I thought that this was it. I was tired. Tired of living with stupidity and panic and fear and death, and I wanted to go back to how it was when I first moved into Mr Evan’s caravan and I could watch birds without worrying. I wanted to be able to make a cup of tea and drink it slowly. I wanted to be able to jump on my bike and ride for no reason. I was going to talk to someone, and I was going to talk to them now. Maybe they wouldn’t be there or maybe they would, but what the fuck. You do what you have to do even if you don’t know if it’s the only thing to do.

I rode to the phone box in Appley. I was going to take a risk, the biggest risk I could take without jumping off a bridge with a stone tied around my neck. I’d thought about it, but I didn’t have any choice. I was trapped, and the trap was bolted to the floor of a cave. I could hear things in the cave, scrapes and whispers, and all the things imagination barks in the night.

I dropped the bike in a hedge, stood outside the phone box and listened. The sky was quiet, but the trees tweeked with birds. An owl here, a crow there, a family of blackbirds watching for a cat. Something rustled in the field beyond the hedge, a fox or a badger, and beyond them, sheep. They were standing in quiet groups, staring at each other as if they were having deep conversations. When sheep look like they’re talking you can be sure that something bad is going to happen. I didn’t doubt that, I didn’t doubt it at all. There are people who say that superstition is a blanket the poor use to keep their minds warm with, but don’t believe it. Superstition isn’t a blanket at all. It’s more than that. It’s not even superstition. It’s a bridge we use to cross to the place where meaning is wearing a feathered hat, an embroidered shirt, velvet trousers and big leather boots. And this meaning doesn’t run. It walks and jangles the change in its pocket. I felt in my pocket for some change, jangled it, listened again. Now everything was quiet and still.

The phone box smelt of sick and beer and fags, and the floor was covered in crisp packets and something sticky. I picked up the receiver and called Taunton police station. When someone answered I dropped a coin and said, “Can I speak to DS Pollock?”

“Hang on a minute.”

“Thanks.”

A minute later I heard “Pollock speaking”.

“DS Pollock?”

“Yes.”

“This is Elliot.”

“Who?”

“Elliot Jackson.”

“Elliot Jackson?”

“Yes. I found the man, the man hanging in the woods.”

“Oh yes. Elliot. Hello. How are you?”

“Fucked.”

The man laughed. “So you’ve got something you want to tell me?”

“Maybe.”

“OK.”

“I know it’s Sunday, but can I come and see you?”

“Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – it’s all the same to us.”

“Can I just talk to you please? In a pub or something. Somewhere quiet…”

“Well…”

“Please?”

I could hear him thinking. “Is this important?”

“Very.”

“OK. You know The Black Horse? It’s on Bridge Street.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Meet you there in an hour?”

“OK.”

I was there in three quarters, ordered a half and found a quiet corner table. The place was busy, but I was ignored. People played darts, stared at the juke box and chose their music, men eyed women, and a bored dog lay by the bar hatch and snoozed. Pollock appeared on time, bought a bottle of Coke, sat down opposite me and said, “This isn’t how we like to do things, Elliot…”

“It’s the only way I can,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“You’re scared? Now why would that be?”

“Well…” I said, “it’s difficult.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Can I trust you?” I said, knowing that even if he said that I could I was taking a chance.

“Of course you can trust me, Elliot. I’m a policeman.”

I laughed.

“Why the laugh? And why the question?”

“Can I fucking trust you?”

“Yes,” he said. “You can trust me.”

I looked into his eyes. I watched his mouth. He gave nothing away, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. I had to ignore whoever he was and whatever he knew. I had no choice. “OK,” I said. “I’ll tell you,” and I did.

I started at the beginning, told him about the time Spike came to me and said he’d seen someone in the woods below Heniton Hill, and how we’d found the smoke in the hoop house, and how he’d stolen it. And how the hanging man had been the someone we’d seen, and now Spike’s house had been burned to the ground, and then I said, “We saw someone else with the man who died.”

“You said.”

“But I saw him again.”

“Where?”

“In the car park behind the police station.”

“What?”

“I think he’s a policeman.”

Now Pollock narrowed his eyes, leant towards me and lowered his voice. “You think he’s a policeman? And why would you think that?”

“He was in a suit, but he had a police badge sticking out of his top pocket. And someone called him ‘sir’. And I saw him again. He was sitting in a car outside my mum and dad’s house. And I think he burned my mate’s house down.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Because he dropped a lit match out of the car window.”

“Not a lot of evidence to go on, Elliot.”

“I know. But he has a twitchy mouth. And a look in his eyes.”

“A look in his eyes? Don’t we all?”

“Not like they want to kill you.”

“OK.” He sipped some Coke.

“Now you see why I asked if I could trust you?”

He nodded. “I do.”

“And can I?”

“I told you. Yes. And can I tell you why?”

“Please.”

“Because you’re talking about DI Dickens.”

“DI Dickens?”

“Detective Inspector Dickens, Elliot. We call him Twitchy.”

“Because of his mouth?”

“Exactly. He’s not a man to fuck with. He’s got more decorations than a Christmas tree, and he’s twice as prickly. And he’s as mad as…”

“So you think I’m kidding you?”

“Not at all.” He moved even closer to me. “Far from it. There are people out there who’ve been trying to nail him for years.”

“Why? What else has he done?”

“Lots, Elliot. He’s got his fingers in a lot of pies. He’s a vicious bastard. But there’s nothing anyone can prove. Not yet, anyway.”

“And who are these people?”

He tapped the side of his nose. “Look,” he said, and he fished in his pocket, pulled out a card and put it on the table. “First of all, you’re a lucky bloke. When you decided to call me, you called the right man.”

“You’ve got an honest face.” I sipped my drink. “I think.”

“That’s what my missus says.” He pushed the card towards me and tapped it. “This is my direct line. If you call it and someone else answers, don’t say a word. Just hang up. In the meantime, I’m going to speak to someone I know in Bristol.”

“Who?”

“Don’t worry. But they might be the best friend you ever had.”

“OK.”

“You know where your mate is?”

“No. But I’ve got an idea.”

“OK. Because if I’m thinking right, we might need him.”

“Why?”

“And we’ll need the smoke.”

“I think he’s got it.”

“Good.”

“So go and find him. Try and talk some sense into him.”

“That won’t be easy.”

“The difficult is never easy, Elliot. Maybe you’re beginning to learn that.”

“I think I am,” I said, and I leant back and for a moment I caught a look in Pollock’s face that spun at the edge of deceit. Either he was honest or he was a genius liar. “Fuck…” I said, and he smiled. At least I think it was a smile, though it could have been a grimace or a response to the Coke he was drinking, or the news he was taking back to the police station.