Merrily was on her feet, backing away, instinctively looking for Lol, but seeing only Louis Devereaux, a half-silhouette in the grey light, as still, for a moment, as any of the oaks, arms extended, rigid as dead branches, both hands clasped around the pistol.
‘Where’d you buy that, Louis?’ Syd said mildly. ‘Very professional. They say you can get them in Hereford these days. Glock?’
The gun twitched.
‘Move away from my father, Rector.’
‘What for? Which one of us you planning to shoot to prove your old man isn’t in control any more?’
‘And shut up.’
‘Shouldn’t that be shut the fuck up? Got to get the tone right, the correct phraseology.’
‘Shut the—’ Louis’s hands jerking around the pistol. ‘I could kill you now.’
‘Or blow me away, even. Blow all of us away. That’d simplify things a lot. Like that feller in Hungerford in the 1980s. You probably don’t remember that, you’d’ve been just a kid, but he shot himself in the end. Like the bloke at Dunblane. It always ends where they shoot themselves.’
Merrily couldn’t move. Louis was panting with rage and frustration and probably fear. On a hot night, it was the most unstable combination imaginable. And all Syd had was…
‘The other ending is death by Armed Response Unit. Like I’ve already told your father, lots of police marks-men all over the hills. Automatic rifles. Night sights. Make that thing look like a spud gun and you like the crass amateur you undoubtedly are.’
‘You make one more … remark like that and then—’
‘And for a while you get to learn what it was like for all the foxes you used to hunt. Only with not even the faintest possibility of an earth to escape to. No escape at all from those boys. Terrorism-trained, now, and they don’t take any chances. At some stage one of them gets you in the cross-hairs and takes you out. You don’t even see him taking aim. Like a wasp doesn’t see the rolled-up newspaper.’
Syd standing there with his arms by his sides, an unmoving target. Merrily’s heart going, Please God, please God, please God.
‘We can get away,’ Louis said. ‘Any time we want. Just a question of whether—’
‘Nah. It doesn’t happen, son, not at this level.’
‘—Whether we leave you fucking dead when we go.’
‘You don’t understand. You graduated to a new level of achievement tonight, mate,’ Syd said. ‘In the big school now. Where they spend millions hunting you down.’
Preston Devereaux stood up.
‘Can I talk to my son?’
‘Don’t ask me, Preston – he’s got the weapon.’
‘What do I do?’ Louis’s whole body bending backwards like a water-skier, tensed around the swivelling pistol. ‘What do I do?’
‘You probably give the gun to me,’ Preston said.
‘We can still get out of this. He’s got to be lying about armed police. We could—’
Louis turned, the pistol pointing directly at Merrily. She felt a spasm below her heart like a long needle going in.
‘—Take Mrs Watkins with us?’
‘And then what, Louis?’ Syd said. ‘Demand a helicopter? Grow up, son.’
‘Stay fuck—’ Louis spun but not at Syd. ‘Stay fucking there!’
Merrily, heart jumping, heard a cry from Lol.
‘… Tim!’
Tim Loste was lumbering out from the tree. In his stained singlet, he looked like an old-fashioned butcher, arms sleeved in sweat, finger out, pointing at Louis.
‘You were wearing a … a balaclava.’
‘Don’t come any closer,’ Louis said, ‘you wanker.’
‘Recognize your voice. Wearing a balaclava with eyeholes.’
‘Louis,’ Preston Devereaux said, ‘it’s not necessary.’
‘Big knife. You had this big— She was screaming at you to stop, screaming and screaming and … and crying and you just … you bloody bastard—’
Tim tumbled, sobbing, into Louis and Louis shot him twice.
62
Seventeen
‘I went to sleep,’ Tim said. ‘Now I’m refreshed.’
He tried to laugh. A dry, skittering noise came out.
Merrily vaguely recognized the first words sung by the soul, after death, in The Dream of Gerontius.
‘Feel so much lighter,’ he said. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s very good.’ Time seemed to have slowed. The white clouds had diminished and so had the humidity. A small night breeze rattled among the boughs.
Tim said, ‘You’re jolly pretty. I didn’t … didn’t realize you’d be so young. Way Winnie talked, it was as if you were some old…’ He stopped for a breath. It was a terrifying noise, like a small breeze in a mound of dead leaves. ‘Doesn’t matter what Winnie said, does it?’
‘I suppose not.’
She’d rung for an ambulance, said she’d found a man badly injured, didn’t know how. Syd’s advice. What they didn’t need was an Armed Response Unit. She’d given them directions from the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak, her name and her mobile number, telling them they could probably get an ambulance across the common without any difficulty if they took it slowly.
Lol had brought half a bale of straw up from the barn, and they put some of it under Tim, raising his legs. Syd’s advice.
He walked over.
‘Both gone?’ Merrily said.
‘Nothing I could do. Not without more of this. Maybe they’ll get to a vehicle in time. Maybe they have arrangements in hand. Maybe they’ll be on a boat out of Fishguard by morning. Can’t see that he wouldn’t’ve made provision: bolt-holes, foreign bank accounts.’
Syd had phoned West Mercia Police on the general number, someone from Worcester coming back to him. Merrily didn’t know what had been said, but Spicer’d had the impression that they already knew some of what he was telling them and they’d confirmed this by asking if he was the man who’d left a message on Malcolm France’s mobile.
Some explaining, then, for Syd. Later.
She whispered to him, ‘There’s hardly any blood.’
‘Internal, then. Keep him warm. Don’t move him.’ Merrily’s head was filled with a prayer that she couldn’t articulate. She felt as if she was hovering over the entire scene, the wooded arena with its hints of neolithic mounds, its ghost of a processional way and the sacred, magisterial oak stuffed with twinkling symbols of vain hopes and dreams and, at its splayed feet, a man whose plea to be taken away had been answered in a blinding flash.
Tim Loste looked up at her from his bed of straw, his face creamed in sweat.
‘Hannah’s pretty.’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Used to watch out for her when she came past. On her bike. Wished I had a bike. Follow her down. Two of us, whizzing down the hill. Super.’
‘Mmm.’
‘All I ever wanted, really. Thought I might buy a bike, but … Winnie said it would be the wrong kind.’
‘Not like Mr Phoebus.’
‘No.’
‘But you rode Mr Phoebus sometimes. In your … daydreams?’
With Hannah.
Tim’s eyes filled up with tiny pools of moonlight.
‘Know what I don’t want?’
Merrily bent close to him now. His sweat smelled sour.
‘You know what I … really don’t want? Where’s Dan?’
‘I’m here.’
Lol was kneeling on the other side.
‘Dan knows.’
‘Remind me?’ Lol said.
It was possible to speak with normal voices now, but they were whispering because Tim Loste was whispering. Tim smiled under his Edward Elgar yardbrush moustache, through his sweat.