“Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!” she cried. The boy looked up as he climbed naked onto the mossy riverbank. Openmouthed, he gawped at the screaming harpy racing desperately down the hill and calling his name over and over: “Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!”
In a life cursed with many extraordinary sights, this was one of the strangest of them alclass="underline" a wild-faced sexless thing was shouting his name, waving a knife and rushing toward him with a dreadful madness in its eyes. Astonished, he ran for his clothes, fumbled for his sword, dropped it, picked it up again and raised it to strike as she was almost upon him, shouting wildly. Then he heard a sharp buzz, and a hollow thud like the slap of a man’s hand on a horse’s flank. Jennifer gave a sharp cough and went flying head over arse past the terrified Cale and hit the trunk of a sawtooth oak with a wallop.
Cale legged it behind a tree, his heart thumping and fluttering like a just-trapped bird. At once he started looking for an escape. Surrounding the tree there was a rough arc of cover-free ground varying between forty to sixty yards in width. He looked at the body. He could see now it was a woman, and she was lying crumpled against the base of a tree with her backside in the air and to one side. She had what looked like a three-ounce arrow in her back, the tip just emerging from her chest. Her nose was bleeding, a single drop falling to the ground every three or four seconds. It would have been no easy shot, hitting a moving target like that, but neither was it exceptional. She’d been running away from the direction of the arrow, whereas if he went now, immediately, he would be running across the line of fire. From a standing start it would take five or six seconds to reach cover. Enough for one shot, not more, and it would have to be a fine one. But then maybe he was as good as Kleist. Kleist could make a shot like that three times out of four.
“Hey! Sonny Jim!”
About two hundred yards and dead ahead, thought Cale.
“What do you want?”
“How about ‘thank you’?”
“Thank you. Now why don’t you piss off?”
“You ungrateful little shit, I just saved your life.”
Was he moving? It sounded like it.
“Who are you?”
“Your guardian angel, mate, that’s who I am. She was a very bad girl, that one, a very bad girl.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to cut your throat, mate. That’s what she did for a living.”
“Why?”
“No idea, mate. Vipond sent me to keep an eye on you and his ne’er-do-well brother.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“No reason. Don’t care, anyway. I just don’t want you coming after me. I wouldn’t want to have to put one in you, not after all the trouble I’ve taken to keep you alive. So you just stay there for the next fifteen minutes, and during that period of patience I’ll be on my way and no harm done. All right?”
Cale thought about this: make a run for it, follow him, catch him, beat the truth out of him. Or along the way get an arrow in his back. He sounded, this man, as if he knew what he was up to. Anyway, there was an alternative.
“All right. Fifteen minutes.”
“Word of honor?”
“What?”
“Never mind. How about that ‘thank you,’ then?”
And with that both Cadbury and Cale were on the move. Cadbury was yomping it back into the deepest part of the forest, and Cale, using the tree as a screen, had slipped into the river and was carefully swimming along its edge and away.
Three hours later Cale and IdrisPukke were back by the river examining the body of the dead woman under the cover of a cloud of trees. They had spent two hours searching for any sign of Cale’s alleged savior but had found nothing. IdrisPukke frisked the body and quickly discovered three knives, two garrotes, a thumbscrew, a knuckle duster and, in her mouth, alongside the left gum, a flexible inch-long blade wrapped in silk.
“Whatever she was up to,” said IdrisPukke, “she wasn’t trying to sell you clothes pegs.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Your savior? Sounds plausible. I don’t know about whether I believe him, exactly. But let’s face it, if he’d wanted to kill you, he could have done it at any time during the last month. Still-it stinks.”
“You really think Vipond sent him?”
“It’s possible. Lot of trouble to go to on account of someone like you. No offense.”
The reason Cale was not affronted by IdrisPukke’s remark was because he’d been thinking the same thing.
“What about the woman?” he said at last.
“Dump her in the river.”
So that’s what they did and that was the end of Jennifer Plunkett.
That evening the two of them were eating inside the lodge to be on the safe side and discussing what to do about the day’s strange events.
“The thing is,” said IdrisPukke, “what can we do? If whoever killed that young woman wanted to do the same to you, they would already have done it. Or they could do it tomorrow.”
“You said it stinks.”
“It’s entirely possible that Vipond sent someone to keep an eye on us, even if it was for his own reasons. It is also possible that one of the Mond you humiliated so publicly paid someone to encoffin you. They have the money and the bile. It looked like the woman was coming to attack you: she had a knife in her hand. This man stopped her and then cleared off. Those are just facts. They’re obviously not all the facts, and subsequent discoveries may make us come to see those facts that we have in an entirely different light. But until then, speculation is just that. Stay here or go somewhere else-we remain entirely vulnerable to anyone with a good aim and malice or a reward in their heart. We assume what the facts we know tell us because we might just as well do so. Have you any alternative?”
“No.”
“There we are, then.”
Realizing there wasn’t much point in skulking inside, Cale went outside for a smoke. He could see the sense of IdrisPukke’s fatalism, but it wasn’t, after all, his fate that was the one in question. As IdrisPukke was always saying himself, every philosopher can stand the tooth-ache except for the one who has it. Preoccupied, he barely registered there was a sleek pigeon walking up and down the terrace table eating stale bread crumbs.
“Don’t move,” said IdrisPukke softly from just behind him, and holding out a piece of bread he slowly approached the bird and began feeding it, carefully putting his hand around its body and then grasping it tightly. Turning the pigeon over, IdrisPukke began removing a small metal tube attached to one of its legs. Cale looked on, utterly bemused.
“It’s a messenger pigeon,” said IdrisPukke. “Sent by Vipond. Here, hold it.” He handed Cale the bird and unscrewed the tube, removed a piece of rice paper and began reading. As he did so his face became grim.