The shadows were spreading out, circling and crouching like a pack of wolves. Five of them at least, murky grey now in the swirling night.
A sudden massive bang on Danny’s side of the tractor.
One of them was there. All black, no face.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! on the panel.
The man was in camouflage kit. Gloves, balaclava. No glint of eyes behind the slit.
Danny got his window up to just a bit of a crack. Looked at Gomer across the grey light in the cab. In the past year, two JCBs had been nicked from this area. All right, not hijacked, just stolen out of their sheds, but there was big money in a brand new tractor and a first time for everything.
‘Don’t wanner make a thing ’bout this, Gomer, but how about we don’t get out till we finds out a bit- No! Gomer!’
‘Balls!’ Gomer was leaning across Danny, mouth up to the crack at the top of the window. ‘ Gomer Parry Plant Hire. You all right, there?’
Oh Jesus… Like these were the magic words, the key to not getting dragged out into the snow and having the shit beaten out of you while the lovely new tractor you’d called Bronwen and had blessed by the vicar got shipped out to Lagos.
Danny was going, ‘Look, pal, we-’
When the voice came out of the snow.
‘Yow know who we are.’
Aye, that kind of voice. Full of clouds and night and a bit of Birmingham, and now Danny could see two solid shadows, either side of the camouflage man. Gomer coughed, a bit hoarse.
‘This a hexercise, pal?’
Silence. Then a short, little laugh.
‘Give the ole man a coconut.’
‘What I figured,’ Gomer said. ‘Only, Sarah back there, see-’
‘… so yow just turn this bus around, yeah, and bugger off.’
All the breath went out of Danny in a steam of relief.
‘I should just do it, Gomer. These guys, they don’t make a habit of flashin’ their ID.’
‘Put your lights out, now,’ the camouflage man said. ‘Then fuck off and forget you seen anything.’
Danny shifted uncomfortably in his seat. You wanted cooperation, you didn’t talk quite like this to Gomer Parry. Five foot four and well past seventy, but you just didn’t. Everybody knew that.
‘And you might find it easier if you put that filthy cigarette out.’
‘Now listen, boy-’
‘Just do what he says, eh, Gomer,’ Danny hissed. ‘You can complain to the Government later.’
Gomer said nothing, just let the windows glide up, putting the tractor into reverse and reaching out for the lights.
Only, the mad ole bugger didn’t switch them off, he threw them on full beam, making a starburst in the snow, and – Jesus! – Danny was jerking back as Bronwen swung round hard, on a slide. In the lights he’d seen what he’d seen – what he thought he’d seen – before the tractor lurched and bucked and went snarling back along the track they’d made earlier.
Danny and Gomer didn’t speak at all till they’d managed to make it up the hill and out the gate and onto the road again. Then Danny sat up and looked hard into Gomer’s thick, misty specs.
‘We really see that?’
‘Hexercise,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘That’s all it is. Kind o’ jobs they get, they gotter be hard, ennit?’
‘Well, yeah, but, Gomer…’
‘ Hexercise,’ Gomer said. ‘That’s what we tells Sarah Protheroe. Her’ll know.’
‘You reckon?’
‘And we don’t say nothin’ else. All right?’
Danny was shivering. He’d go along with that. Anything. But what they’d seen in the white hell… in other circumstances it could have been almost funny, but in a late-February blizzard, in the minutes after midnight, it was enough to scare the shit out of you.
Especially the way the fifth man had been just standing there laughing, bollock naked in the snow.
Part One
MARCH
Empty your septic tank
Take it to the bank
2
The bad stuff started with Jane insisting on getting the drinks. A Lotto thing – she and Merrily had both had ten-quid paybacks on the same number. Jane wanted to buy Lol and Danny Thomas a beer. Which was nice of her. She seemed determined these days, Lol thought, to do more things that were nice, as if she had something to repay.
He watched her at the bar. The tight jeans, the sawn-off white hoodie and the area of soft skin exposed between the two. Merrily had said, If you could just, you know, keep an eye on Jane…?
She’d been thinking about the weather. They all had, since the Christmas flood, a continuing source of unease in Ledwardine. Mid-evening on a Friday, the Black Swan was less than a third full but sounding crowded to Lol because of all the voices raised against the punch of the wind and the fizz of rain on the leaded windows.
Big weather. More big weather.
He’d seen it coming well before dark, the sky over Cole Hill chaotic with ripped-up cloud and flarings of wild violet beyond the church steeple. The last taunt of winter. Or maybe the first sneer of spring. The floods, then the snow, then more snow and now, just as you thought it was over, the gales.
And yet it was an ill-wind because, out of the black night and the white noise of the rain and his anxiety, suddenly the lines happened, like they’d been blown into his head.
The chorus had been hanging around for weeks, begging for an opening trail of memorably bleak images to illustrate the raw emptiness before love walked in. The rhyme was a bit bumpy, but maybe that was OK, maybe even good.
The wind is screaming through the granary
It turns the springtime into January.
This was the granary, where he’d lived for a time, at Prof Levin’s studio over at Knight’s Frome. The perpetual January of a lonely bed. Lol pulled over a beer mat, found a pen in his jacket, saw Danny’s eyes lighting up over the shoe-brush beard.
‘Cookin’, boy?’
Lol reversed the beer mat, steered it across to Danny then drew back as the gale pushed like a big hand – whump – on the leaded pane directly across the room. No let-up. The lines had probably arisen from his failure to prevent Merrily driving out into the storm… or at least letting him drive her. What if there was no Merrily? What if there’d been no Merrily? The void at the core of the song: I can’t define my sense of need.
Danny was gazing at the beermat like it was Mozart’s scorepad. Before Gomer Parry had rescued him, he’d been a struggling Radnorshire farmer with fading dreams. Also, three vintage guitars, a couple of ancient amps, a decibel-dazed wife and a sheepdog called Jimi.
He looked up.
‘I’m hearin’ it, boy, sure t’be.’
The grin reappearing in the beard, though still a little wary, like a poacher’s flashlight in the undergrowth. Not long after Danny had joined Gomer Parry Plant Hire, Lol had been looking for a lead guitarist, someone good but not too expensive. After two sessions in Danny’s barn over at Kinnerton, he’d said, You want a proper contract or will a handshake do? Danny grinning like a little kid, his muddied hand already out.
‘Should be in your barn, recording this,’ Lol said. ‘Under the storm noise, everything shivering.’
‘Storm noise in a barn en’t never as good as you imagines. Ole wind got his own backbeat, see, never plays to yours.’ Danny nodded towards Jane at the bar. ‘Growin’ up?’
‘I suppose.’
Getting the drinks herself was important to Jane. Doing it legally was still a novelty. Barry, the manager, was behind the bar, and everybody in the Swan knew Jane. Some of them even liked her.
The wind came back, a fighter in the ring, leaving you no time for recovery, and Danny picked up on Lol’s anxiety.
‘You’re worried about your lady.’
You had to love the seventies rock-band jargon.