Carver transferred ten cartridges from his cartridge bag to a pocket of his shooting vest then walked into the butt. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few seconds, trying to clear his mind of everything but the thought processes required to hit a small, fast-moving target. Then he loaded two cartridges into the twin barrels of his gun and raised it to his shoulders.
McGuinness was standing behind him, slightly to one side, holding a control box.
‘Would you like to see a pair, sir?’ he said.
He was offering to release two of the clays before the shooting began so that Carver could see where they came from and at what distance and angle they flew. The obvious response was, ‘Yes please.’ But some perverse refusal to be seen to need outside help prevented Carver from doing the sensible thing. Instead he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’
He concentrated his vision on the air just above the artificial moor, directly in front of him, and said, ‘Pull!’
McGuinness pushed a button on his control box and Carver heard the sound of a spring being released as the trap slung the first clay pigeon into the air. Then came the fluttering whirr of the clay as it cut through the air. It came low and fast from a point about forty yards away, just as a real grouse would do, flying towards him but slanting right-to-left across his line of fire.
Carver fired.
The clay pigeon kept flying, entirely untouched, until gravity pulled it to earth.
He’d missed.
Appalled by his stupidity and incompetence, he barely heard the release of the second clay, was late getting back into position, and missed that one as well.
Carver could not remember the last time he’d felt so humiliated, so exposed. Behind him, the other three stood in stunned, embarrassed silence for several seconds until Klerk called out, ‘Jesus Christ, Carver, you ever fired a gun before in your life?’ It was meant as banter, pulling his leg. But there was nothing funny about Carver’s shooting. It wasn’t just that he had missed. He had done so like a rank amateur.
He ejected the first two cartridges from his gun, resumed his stance and called ‘Pull!’ once again. This time he hit both clays. They broke into a few large fragments – a sure sign that he’d not struck them dead-centre – but they were hits nonetheless. So were the next three pairs. Carver walked away from the butt with a score of eight out of ten. He only cared about the two dropped shots.
Klerk went next. He shot with the metronomic style of a man who has spent a lot of time and money on lessons from an excellent teacher. Technically, he was faultless, but he wasn’t a natural marksman. Even so, he too scored eight, and seemed perfectly happy to have done so.
Now it was Zalika’s turn. She didn’t just hit the first pair of clays, she dusted them, striking them so perfectly that they disintegrated in mid-air, vanishing in what looked like little puffs of smoke.
When she broke open the gun, she caught the cartridges one-handed as they sprang from the barrels before placing them in a little bin that stood inside the butt. The catch was a nice touch, Carver thought, a clever, deceptively casual way of letting him know how at ease she was around guns. He noticed something else as Zalika reloaded: she rotated her cartridges in the barrels so that the writing on the brass base of each shell was the right way up. It was a telling little ritual, designed to prepare her for action, like a tennis player bouncing a ball, or a golfer practising his swing.
It worked. Zalika vaporized the next four pairs as efficiently as she had the first. She walked away with a perfect ten. If it wasn’t obvious before, Carver knew for sure now that he had a fight on his hands – one he could easily lose. If he were going to stand any chance at all he had to shed the look of a loser and regain some sense of authority.
As they walked away to the next stand, he asked McGuinness, ‘Just out of curiosity, what chokes have I got?’
‘Quarter and cylinder,’ the gamekeeper replied.
‘Interesting,’ said Carver.
He hoped he sounded relaxed, even a little blase. But inside he was cursing himself. A quarter-choke was the least restriction available; ‘cylinder’ meant an entirely clear barrel. That gave him a much wider spread of shot. At short range that was an advantage; it might have been the only reason he’d been able to hit any clay at all in that disaster of a first round. But the further the shot went, the more holes opened up in the air between the scattered pellets and the tougher it became to get a kill. If they had to shoot at clays flying high, or any distance away, Carver was going to be in trouble.
36
‘So, we’ve shot grouse, now it’s time for partridge,’ said Klerk as they reached the second stand. It was much simpler than the grouse butt, just a basic square of wooden fencing, hip-high, with a bin for used cartridges attached to the shooter’s side. All the effort had been devoted to creating a classic, mature hedgerow of bushes and trees directly in front of the stand that looked as though it had been a part of the landscape for centuries. Carver marvelled at the effort and cost that must have gone into locating, transporting and replanting the mix of dogwood, spindleberry and hawthorn hedging, as well as the oak and chestnut trees that stood among them.
From behind the hedgerow, Carver heard the noise of a motor starting up followed by a quieter, whirring sound. Somewhere back there at least one mechanized platform was rising into the air, taking with it a trap. So the clays, like the birds they were imitating, would emerge from behind the hedge at a variety of heights.
‘Simultaneous pairs,’ said McGuinness, indicating that both clays would be released at the same time. ‘Mr Klerk to go first.’
Now the strike order had rotated in Carver’s favour. This time he would be the last to shoot.
Klerk took his place behind the fencing and called ‘Pull!’ for the first pair.
The clays emerged from behind the hedgerow, passing over one of the oak trees and rising higher into the air as they flew towards Klerk, angled left-to-right this time. They flew at different heights and on marginally differing courses, adding to the challenge of shooting them both in quick succession.
Klerk tracked the clays as they sped through the sky, swinging his gun round clockwise from twelve o’clock almost to three before he fired. Again his technique was well-schooled and effective. He scored nine out of ten.
Zalika demonstrated once again that she was more gifted than her uncle. She dismissed the first four pairs with her usual accuracy, firing earlier, so that the clays were hit when they had barely passed two o’clock. When the final pair appeared, she destroyed the ninth clay with calm efficiency. But as any serious shot knows, the last bird is often the hardest. It may be a matter of mental fatigue, for even the sternest concentration can slip. Or perhaps complacency is the greater danger, a fractional relaxation brought on by the certainty that the tenth will go down just like the last nine have done. In any event, many a competitor has been undone right at the end of a hitherto perfect sequence. And that was what happened to Zalika Stratten. She looked incredulously at the final clay as it kept flying long after the last echoes of her shot had faded away, then snapped her hand irritably round her cartridges as they sprang from the barrels of her gun.
So the girl was human, after all.
Zalika had given Carver an opening. He had to make sure he took full advantage.
This time there were no distractions. He did not look around. He did not think about anything but the clays. While the others had been shooting he had studied the clays’ flight patterns, noting precisely where they first appeared, relative to the oak tree, taking his mark from one specific branch. He dusted the first four pairs by the time they reached one o’clock.