Each morning George would watch Wayne from his study in the turret of the west wing, from which the expanse of the encircling lawn was fully visible. He saw Wayne pace a full circuit around the house, following the tracks in the grass made by the muntjacs – bare streaks of exposed earth that had long eluded an explanation. ‘Creatures of habit,’ Wayne said. ‘Same pattern every day.’ ‘And at the same time?’ George asked, not really caring. Before long a map had appeared taped to the refrigerator door alongside a note to the family requesting the addition of the times of sightings. Unlike George, who saw no practical outcome to this exercise, Alma was becoming enthused, which may have had more to do with an infatuation – in a very minor way of course – with Wayne. Daily and religiously she entered her data, and on the fourth day stood back astonished. The entries for the point of vantage of the morning room were identical to within minutes. But what was more surprising, those were the only times when she had been present in the room, to rest her feet and peruse the scandal pages of the daily paper. She, like the muntjacs, was a creature of habit. She offered Wayne a coffee and was slightly put out that he for once gave more attention to his results than to her.
The following day Alma made a small detour to pass by George’s study on her way to the morning room. There he was, head down over his accounts, dead to the rest of the world. She could see beyond him into the garden and held her breath. And sure enough the same creature as before, as if on cue, emerged from the undergrowth and sidled across the lawn. It stopped momentarily, as if an intoxicating perfume had wafted for an instant across its nostrils, and then continued on. Alma moved to the morning room. ‘It showed no interest in your husband?’ Wayne asked. ‘No,’ Alma said.
Outside the morning room window the deer was idly nibbling the grass. As Alma gazed out it raised its head and engaged her in a fixed stare. Alma experienced a moment of elation, as if something of great significance had passed between them.
Then the link was broken as Fleance – for that’s what they now called him – resumed cropping the grass.
‘They do that – just stand and stare,’ Wayne said. Then he thought for a moment. ‘What I’d like to do,’ he continued, ‘is measure the stare time. Would give me data for another table, and you can’t have too many of those.’ He gave Alma a stop-watch and over the next five days she recorded the stare times meticulously. On the sixth day Wayne plotted them on a graph. It showed a consistent, if miniscule, increment one day upon the next. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ he said.
The following week George was summoned to the Department of Extra-terrestrial Exploration, where he had been retained as a consultant – and where he and Alma had met while in their thirties. Alma, to some the more gifted of the two, had declined a similar appointment, but in bed every evening they would discuss the affairs of the department. George’s speciality – and what made him an asset – was an overt scepticism to anything that contravened conventional wisdom. So when, years back now, public awareness had been inflamed by reports of alleged extra-terrestrial phenomena – including a few ridiculous accounts of alien landings – George, in his letters to The Times, had scathingly extinguished the issue. But it seemed not quite, and it was surmised that there had been a rash of recent sightings. In all this Alma, the more open-minded of the two, had remained neutral. But, fancying a couple of days in London, she decided to accompany George.
When she returned home ahead of her husband Wayne was waiting at the door. ‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘when you were gone Fleance showed no interest outside the morning room. He just nibbled the grass a bit and continued on. It will be interesting to see what he does now you are back.’ At this suggestion Alma felt a sudden delicious spurt of anticipation. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, then chided herself inwardly for being irrational. But, stop-watch in hand, she resumed her former relationship with Fleance. Strangely, the stare times had increased and after each communication – for that was the word that sprang to mind – she’d felt increasingly queasy and had to lie down.
‘I’ve… er… been asking around,’ Wayne said at dinner. ‘Seems you’re not alone in… well… getting their attention. I’ve had some mates do some recordings. There’s a village in Berkshire, same thing, same results, and another in Sussex. Here’s a list. I’m waiting for others to come in.’ Alma’s ears pricked up. ‘Those names ring a bell. Don’t they with you, George? Aren’t they villages that had… well… sightings?’ ‘Just coincidence,’ George said. ‘Nothing more. Get it out of your heads, both of you.’
But Wayne couldn’t get it out of his head, nor could he sleep. So tempting was the hypothesis that was forming in his brain that he’d managed to persuade his supervisor to allow him to convert his master’s to a PhD. ‘What you’ve got there,’ his supervisor said, ‘is a population ever expanding into the community and increasing their exposure to human behaviour by exploiting conducive habitats and territorial niches.’ And Wayne saw that the very places the muntjacs chose to colonise were precisely those where human intellect – and therefore position in society – was of the highest calibre: big houses in big gardens in affluent areas. Why?
Wayne applied his mind to the problem. He realised there were two contributors to this relationship he was observing. So he took to watching Alma’s response to Fleance’s presence. As the animal appeared in the frame of the window Alma’s eyes glazed over, as if in a trance. Wayne looked from one to the other with increasing rapidity. Something had passed between the two, of that he was sure. And more significant still there was a time-lag – in milliseconds, it is true, but there all the same – between Fleance’s averting his gaze and Alma’s countenance returning to normal. It could mean only one thing: Fleance was in control.
That night, with George still away, Wayne bedded Alma. Her outpourings of affection were peppered with nuggets of pure gold minted from George’s revelations about recent supposed extra-terrestrial happenings. Before even Alma awoke Wayne was at his desk superimposing that map upon another showing the spread of the muntjac population. Surely there was a correlation. He saw in his mind the beaming face of the vice-chancellor as he received his doctorate – and the customers in W H Smith as they flicked through copies of Nature in search of his paper. These were thoughts he had to share; rashly, he shared them with Alma.
George returned to an atmosphere pregnant with expectation. Quietly entering the morning room he observed his wife staring through the window. Wayne was beside her, with an arm around her waist and a stop-watch in his hand. George withdrew silently to his study, removed his shotgun from the wall safe, then had a strong coffee to steady his nerves as he laid his plans.
For many weeks the following Saturday evening had been earmarked for a barbeque in the garden. George’s recent trip to London explained the invitation of a number of professional colleagues not on the original list. ‘Leave the arrangements to me,’ he told a mildly surprised Alma that morning, ‘but you could help by getting a few more things from the supermarket.’ Reluctantly Alma agreed, accepting that for once her relationship with Fleance could withstand a missing session. ‘Take Wayne,’ George said. ‘Strong lad, he can carry the drinks.’