‘Come on, Ruthie, I’d break the door down, if you wanted me to. I’m sure there’s a bag inside.’
I held my breath. Ackland was a heavy fellow, a lot of puppy-fat beneath the beard. Luckily virtue, if such it was, prevailed. ‘No,’ the bossy woman’s voice came again. ‘No, not with you, in or out of any bag. You think I’m any Tom, Dick or Harry, don’t you, for your pleasure? Let’s go back.’
‘No, Ruthie, only trying to help …’
‘Only trying it on, you mean …’
Their voices faded as they walked away. I realised they must have been pretty drunk, the two of them, which was what made me risk stealing the transistor radio I saw on the top of the dashboard of the Renault as I passed it a few minutes later. The cock-teasing woman wouldn’t miss it until next morning, and when she did she probably wouldn’t bother reporting it. It was worth the risk anyway. Leaving the world, I knew I needed to keep in touch with it. I was coming back after all, I thought, as I made off fast across the school playing fields into the deep countryside beyond.
There was no moon, but with few clouds and approaching mid-summer, it was never completely dark that night. There was still some light away to the west, a fan of dying colour, and I knew my way in this direction, too, from school walks and cross-country runs I’d been in charge of with the boys the previous winter. Beyond the beech coppice where the archery range was, at the far side of the playing fields, I took a line north-west moving through open pasture at first along the top of the eastern ridge of the Evenlode valley. Soon there was a farm lane which sank slightly between hedges, making the going easier: part of an old ridgeway, it ran for several miles towards Chipping Norton, with the farm itself half way along, set high on the wolds.
I gave these buildings a wide berth when I came to the first of them, a big dutch barn looming up in the half-light, bearing off to the left down the valley, through sloping pasture, skirting the long dry-stone walls, streaks of crimson right down on the horizon which still just lit my way.
A flock of sheep stirred uneasily somewhere ahead of me. And then I walked right into them, losing my bearings at the same time. The light in the west disappeared completely and I seemed to be in some dell halfway down the valley, enclosed by the land or by trees, I couldn’t see which, as I moved blindly among the sheep, bumping into their great woolly backsides. They started to bleat and then to move; and then they seemed to mass in great phalanxes about me in the dark, going this way and that, as if increasingly hemmed in by something which I couldn’t see. Their own panic was as great as mine now as I thrashed about among them, trying to find the rise in the ground which would take me back up the valley and give me my original vantage-point. Suddenly the animals seemed to rush me in the dark, all together, pushing and butting as they went, and I went with them, thrust along, upwards at last, where the sheep scattered away all round me and I saw the west again, the dying smears of colour on the horizon.
I ran across the great field, keeping north this time, moving away from the dying light, and within minutes I could see the greater lights of Chipping Norton, isolated like a great ship, moored across the valley ahead of me. I was coming to the end of the ridge at last. The parkland I was making for wasn’t far now; I knew that. It lay a few miles to the south-west of Chipping Norton. There was only a small by-road to cross at the bottom of the valley.
I’d seen the great estate many times from this road, some thousands of private acres rising up to a plateau on another hill, run through with great stands of beech and oak, so thickly wooded, indeed, that it was impossible ever to see the house itself which, though on a rise, was shrouded, even in midwinter, by the huge trees.
This Beechwood Manor and the lands had been bought a few years ago, I’d heard, by some American shipping magnate with a great collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, paintings which the public were never allowed to view. I’d not been there. But I’d noticed these thick woods — and remembered, too, the little eighteenth-century bridge, the balustrades decorated with stone pineapples, which the road crossed as it ran along the borders of the estate. One of the most attractive streams in the Cotswolds rose somewhere in the vast privacy beyond. When the tracker dogs came after me, as they would, I could put the beauty of this brook to an entirely practical use, moving up the water so that the dogs would lose my trail.
A dog barked, several sharp yelps somewhere in the night to my left in the distance as I crouched in the ditch near the bridge. The road was strangely white, an almost luminous ribbon in the last of the light. Water gurgled over stones on the other side of the road, the stream coming from somewhere in the great cavern of trees beyond. Otherwise there was silence. The backpack, with the radio which I’d put inside, had been no trouble; nor had the quiver of arrows on my shoulder. But the long recurve bow, which I’d clutched in my fist all the way, was now an awkward weight in my hand.
I thought: what nonsense — a bow and arrow in this day and age. I saw the innocence of my plan then. England was no wild country now, nor was this Sherwood Forest. I felt the pain of a child suddenly, out too late at night, hopelessly astray, whose dare had failed, who could look forward only to punishment, to foolish disgrace, a loss of innocence.
But another sound came then, behind me from the hills, other dogs faintly calling, the noise hurrying down the still night air towards me.
Without thinking I ran across the road and stumbled into the water on the other side beneath the bridge, and then I was splashing madly up the stream through the canopy of dark trees, my shins bruised and cut once more as I fled. At first I thought it was water from the stream wetting my cheeks. But after a minute, when I’d gone some way into the twilit forest, I realised I was crying. They were tears of anger, though: not regret nor uncertainty any more: anger and annoyance, so that even the tall, closely meshed barbed wire fence that crossed the brook, and which I crashed into twenty yards further on into the woods, didn’t deter me. As soon as I realised it wasn’t electrified, I pushed my way under the lowest strand of wire, ducking right down into the water to do so, soaking myself completely, but wriggling through in the end like a fish escaping up-stream. So much the better for this great fence, I thought. It would deter, if not prevent the police from following me — while tracking away from them, keeping in the water all the time, would kill my scent for the pursuing dogs.
Four
Apart from fear and my soaking clothes, it was cold as well by the middle of the night, so that I barely slept at all, wedged in the branches halfway up a big copper beech that had saved me a few hours before, one of its lowest limbs reaching out horizontally over the stream.
The police with their lights and tracker dogs had passed close beneath me some time before midnight and they were likely to return, I thought, when the dogs found no further scent as they went on up into the woods. I didn’t know about the lake then, or the fact that the little brook which fed it rose several miles beyond it to the north. They must have followed this stream right to its source, perhaps thinking that I’d swum across the lake in the night, for they didn’t return until just after sun-up, when I was well awake and could hear them stomping about almost directly beneath my tree.
The dogs whimpered. I thought they must have smelt or sensed me high up in the leaves above them. In the morning light the police would surely see the branch over the water, put two and two together and would be up after me in a moment.
But they were tired or I was lucky, for after a few minutes they left, the sounds dying away as the men went back down the wooded valley to the road. That was where my scent ended, just by the bridge: finding no trace of me in the forest they would think, for the time being at least, that I’d stopped a car and got a lift out of the area the previous night.