Wasn't he clever, wasn't he brilliant? Wasn't the future opening for them?
He was too tired to enjoy it, but he pretended. She grunted and squealed and kept him inside her long after he was finished.
When would he resign? When would he be shot of the bloody place?
It was as if Vicky had given him a present… His pager bleeped on his belt. His belt was in his trousers, on the floor by the door, where she'd pulled them off him.
He prised open her thighs and fell off her.
All he wanted to do was to sleep, and to forget the one-road village, the prey and the predator, the high church tower that overlooked the marshlands. He crawled to his trousers and read the pager's message. MARK HAM C. IRE JULIET 7FARED HIT GET BACK SOONEST. FEN TON He started to dress. She lay on the bed, limp, her legs apart. He pulled on his underpants, his trousers, shirt, and his socks. The letter still peeped from under her buttocks. He pulled on his shoes and knotted the laces. He went to the bed and tried to kiss her mouth but she turned her head away and his lips brushed her cheek.
"It's the last time you do this to me, the last bloody time. You're not running back to them again, like they're your bloody mother."
Chapter Twelve.
Bill Davies had clung to the pillow in the bed. In his dream mind Meryl had been with him through the night.
The pillow was the principal's wife. He had held her close against him in the doorway of the cupboard under the stairs when her body had shaken with the sobbing, and he had held the pillow against his chest. The pillow had been soft, vulnerable, needing protection.
He had slipped out of the house before Mrs. Fairbrother was downstairs, an hour before his wake-up call. He had driven away from the village, out past the church, to the woodland by the car-park and the picnic site. He had pulled up an oak sapling from the ground, wrenched it up from the sandy soil, and had found a pile of posts for fencing that had been left by the foresters, and taken one. He had thrown the sapling and a post into the boot of the car.
He waved grimly to the men in the unmarked car. They'd be the same shift as had been on last night, and the beggars had played by the rule book and said they weren't permitted to leave their station. He'd have them. Later in the morning he'd burn them when he could get his guvnor on the telephone. It would have been shades of hell for that family, but the unmarked car had followed the rule book, and the family could have died because of it. He shook his head sharply, as if to block the memory, and started up his car.
He pulled on to the road, and had to brake sharply. He'd damn near run into the back of the van. At snail's pace it was going towards the village. He was about to hit the horn, when he realized the implication of the painted words on the back of the van.
"Danny's Removals. Nothing too large or too small. Go anywhere, anytime." And there was a London telephone number.
The removals van was lost and trying to find an address in the village. Why hadn't Blake radioed him, or his guvnor telephoned him? He wondered whether they'd already gone, with their suitcases, and whether the van was just to pick up their furniture and possessions. They could have bloody told him, after everything he'd done for them. He beat his fist in frustration against the steering-wheel. He'd been in charge of the security, and it had so damn near gone wrong. Was he responsible for the family running? Momentarily he shut his eyes, lost sight of the big back doors of the van. He'd thought Perry had the balls to stick it out, even if the wife hadn't. A van meant that Perry was going, or had gone… He felt limp, washed through. He thought that he had failed. He couldn't blame them for going, not after last night. He thought the bastards had won. The bastards were not a man with an assault rifle, but the men in the pub, the neighbour, the people at the school. The bastards, the friends, had won the day.
A man ran out from a hedge ahead, looked like a lunatic on the loose, and waved frantically to the dawdling van. He was wearing a raincoat, under which the hem of a nightshirt showed and bedroom slippers. The brake lights flashed.
Davies saw the for-sale sign on to which the sold board had been nailed. The man was pointing to the narrow driveway of the cottage.
He stopped, and breathed hard. He thought it was his tiredness that had made him react so fast and so stupidly. He waited while the van manoeuvred into the driveway of Rose Cottage, then powered away down the empty road. He realized, then, how much the family meant to him.
In the half-light of the Sunday morning, Bill Davies used the short-handled spade from the boot to hack out the broken tree on the green and the snapped-off post that had held it.
The broken tree, an ornamental cherry, was in bud and would soon have been in flower. Last night, the wheels of Blake's car and its chassis had miraculously cleared the small plaque commemorating the planting of the tree by the parish council as a mark of respect for the dead princess. He dug a deeper pit and planted the oak sapling in the cherry tree's place, then used the back of the spade to hammer down the stolen post. He tossed the broken tree and the snapped stake behind the water-butt at the side of Perry's house.
Where there had been a cherry tree there was now an oak sapling; where there had been a stake there was now a post. He used the point of the spade to scuff up the grass and cover the tracks of Blake's tyres. He folded away the spade.
A teenage boy was working down the far side of the green with a bicycle-load of newspapers.
Two cars went down the road at the side of the green and plumed exhaust fumes behind them.
He shivered in the chill of the morning and wondered if she had slept or had clung to her husband, his principal. And Bill Davies was satisfied… The evidence of the night action was erased. He had told them, in London, in his interim report, of the highly professional defence of his principal and his principal's family. He had written in a stuttering hand, then controlled his voice to hide its quaver as he'd dictated a brisk litany of lies. They might just believe it in London. He looked across the green and the roofs of the houses towards the watery low light growing on the sea's horizon line. He looked at the house and the drawn curtains on the bedroom window, and he wondered how they would be… He was walking to the front door when the neighbour spilled out from the next-door house.
"A word, I want a word with you."
Wroughton, the neighbour, was in a dressing-gown and slippers. His hair wasn't combed and he hadn't yet shaved. Davies saw the wife behind him, half hiding in the hall's shadows.
"How can I be of help?"
"What happened here last night?"
"I'm not aware that anything happened."
"There was a car… "Was there really?"
"And shouting."
"Must have been a television turned up too loud."
"Are you telling me that nothing happened here last night?"
"If there's anything you need to be told, Mr. Wroughton, you'll be told it."
He stared into the neighbour's eyes, challenged him, then watched him back off and go back inside. Bill Davies could be a quality liar and a good-grade bully. He saw the woman's face at the window beside the door, smiled cheerfully at her and waved. A man with a high-velocity assault rifle had been, in the darkness, a few feet from where that woman, her husband and children had lain in their beds and listened to tyre screams and panicked shouts. There were enough complications in Bill Davies's work day without added responsibility for the neighbours. He felt the burden of it, and stamped up the path to ring the bell. The previous week, he would have sworn it couldn't happen, that he would be emotionally involved with his principal's family.
Blake told him that a dog team had arrived three hours earlier, found a trail through the gardens down the green, across rough ground and had lost the trail in the river. Apparently there was no blood on the trail. The dogs had worked the riverbank, Blake said, but had failed to regain the scent. A van had come an hour before and collected the assault rifle.