I walked along the dam towards the landing pier. A couple of pigeons came over the pines, a pheasant called from somewhere back in the beeches and a flight of duck got up from shallows at the far side of the lake. It was a good spot and, from the state of damworks, the boathouse and pier, I guessed that it hadn't long been constructed. It must have cost
O'Dowda a packet. Nice, I thought, when you couldn't get away to Ireland or Scotland, to have your own fishing on the doorstep.
I made my way past the boathouse on to the pier. A fibre-glass hull with an outboard was tied up alongside. At the end of the pier was a vertical wooden post, rather like a small gallows, with a big brass bell hanging from it. I gave the tongue of the bell a whang or two. The noise rolled out across the water and I sat down, legs dangling over the edge of the pier, to wait for the rowing boat to come in.
The men in the boat took no notice of me, though they must have heard the bell. I sat where I was, content to finish my cigarette. They'd heard. They would come when they were ready. One thing you can't do is to hurry a millionaire. If I took the job, I decided, I'd add 5 per cent for being kept waiting. A water-rat swam leisurely out from under the pier and headed for the iris beds up the bank. A swallow dipped near the dam and made a ring like a trout rising. A hundred feet up a heron went over the pines, legs trailing, unhurried, a real dowager of a bird. There was sun and some cloud, a little ripple on the water from a faint breeze, a perfect day. Out on the lake I caught the sudden shine of sun on wet lines as one of the men false-casted. I didn't mind waiting. It suited my mood. I was almost at peace with the world.
The next moment I was almost right out of it.
Two things happened, simultaneously it seemed to me. First the crack of a rifle, and then the thud of a bullet smacking into the bell-post three inches above my head. A chip of wood flipped by me and curved out over the water. Before it hit the surface I was on my feet, running for the shelter of the boat-house.
CHAPTER TWO
'A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in.'
Whoever it was took another shot at me just before I reached the boathouse. The bullet whined overhead, too close for comfort. Angry, frightened and short of breath, I reached the shelter of the side of the boathouse.
I looked back along the pier. The two men were fishing on the lake, not even looking in my direction. There's nothing like a fisherman for being truly absorbed in his sport.
I poked my head round the far side of the boathouse and eyed the near pines. To my surprise a man in jeans and a Windbreaker came out of the cover of the trees and began to run up the side of them. In his hand he carried a rifle.
Sportingly, I gave him fifty yards' start and then went after him, doing a zigzag along the outer row of pines so that I had cover most of the way. The ground sloped gently upwards and where the pines finished was a five-barred gate.
The man with the rifle vaulted it and stooped to pick something out of the grass near the hedge on the other side. It was a motor scooter. He slung the rifle over his back by the sling. Seeing this, I sprinted. I saw the movement of his right leg as he kicked the engine start.
I reached the gate just as he drove away fast down a rough lane. I leaned on the gate and watched him, making a mental note of the number of the scooter. JN4839. Twenty yards from me, he twisted his head back over his shoulder to look at me. I gave him a wave and the bastard briefly waved back. His face was coal-black.
I went slowly back to the pier wondering what I had done to incur the wrath of the coloured races. Nothing as far as I knew, recently. As I reached the end of the pier the boat was just pulling in.
It was being rowed by a little jockey of a man with a face like a shrivelled lemon. Round his neck was a pair of field-glasses. This, I guessed, was Tich, the chauffeur. He was in shirt and trousers and had a big cigar clamped into the corner of his mouth and on his head was an old cloth cap stuck about with trout-flies. Sitting in the stern, on a comfortable chair-arrangement which had been fitted, was Cavan O'Dowda.
While they made the last twenty yards I had time to get a good look at him. Standing, I reckoned he would go about six feet six, and he had more than the girth to go with it. He would have had trouble packing himself into my overnight sleeper. When he'd been made there must have been a lot of spare material lying around which they'd decided to get rid of. I put him at somewhere around sixty. He was wearing a light blue siren-suit and gum-boots. His head was pumpkin-shaped and large enough, if it had been one, to take a prize anywhere. So far as I could see he had no neck and his hair was so close-cropped that it looked like a faint powdering of red-brown dust. He was wearing dark Polaroid glasses and had a cigar clamped into the corner of his mouth. His hands were huge, backed with a faint down of ginger hair — but they were good hands, capable and sensitive, as I saw when he began to fish later.
As the boat steadied at the bottom of the pier steps, O'Dowda said, 'You Mr Carver?'
'Just.'
He gave no sign of being aware of the irony. 'Get in,' he said.
As I went down the steps, he took off his glasses to rub his eyes and I saw that they were light blue, much too small for his face, and embedded in a puffy setting of fat wrinkles. He was not only the most unwholesome-looking millionaire I'd ever seen, he was the biggest as well.
I settled myself in the bow.
'Take her out again, Kermode.'
Tich began to pull away from the pier and I watched O'Dowda over the back of his head.
'Nice of you to come,' said O'Dowda. 'Good of Miggs to recommend you. He must make a couple of thousand every year out of me. Welcome, of course. Real character, Miggs. Thought we heard a shot back there just now.'
'Two,' I said. 'Somebody using your bell-post or me for target practice. I followed him up to the edge of the wood and he rode away on a scooter.'
The big face showed no surprise.
He just said, 'Kermode,' and nodded at a basket at the chauffeur's feet. Tich stopped rowing, dug in the basket and handed a flask over his shoulder to me. I unscrewed and swallowed. It could have been Courvoisier VSOP. I handed the flask back. Tich took it with one hand and held the other out to me with a cigar in it. I lit up as he began rowing.
'Ever fished?' Irish his name might be but I couldn't hear a spot of accent. It was a big, resonant voice. If anything there was a transatlantic touch to it — Canadian, maybe.
'My father, rest his soul,' I said, 'taught me how to tie a turle knot when I was five.'
'And damn right he was. More fish have been lost from a boshed-up half-blood than most people know. Take Kermode's rod.'
The rod was at my side, half over the bows. It was a Hardy job and Tich had got a Bloody Butcher on the point and a couple of Invictas as droppers.
I said, 'What have you got in here?'
O'Dowda, beginning to fish, said, 'Rainbow and brown. And a few gillaroo. Know them?'
'No.'
'Irish. Find 'em in Lough Melvin and Erne. They don't do so well.'
I worked out some line, false-casted once or twice to get the feel of the rod — it was a beauty — and then made a cast of about twenty yards. It wasn't bad, considering I hadn't touched a rod for a year. I knew O'Dowda was watching me. O'Dowda, I reckoned, was a man who watched everything and everybody around him.
Tich held us in the wind-drift and we wet-fly-fished down the length of the lake. Halfway down I saw the quick water-bulge out by my flies and the sharp knock of a take. I struck, the line sang, and the rod-tip bowed. I played him for about five minutes and then he came in, tired, flashing his flanks, and Tich put the net under him. It was a rainbow on one of the Invicta droppers. A nice fish, just over two pounds, I guessed. I unhooked him and tapped his nose with the priest. He lay on the boards, the sunlight bringing up boldly the broad carmine band down his side, the bright colour that fades so soon with death. I looked at the bordering pine woods. The black bastard could easily come back.