He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave—though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.
Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signal ed Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.
Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as wel have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusual y expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.
And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he hadn’t heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at al , he would have made the discovery only gradual y. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?
But Jack has never wondered—at least when sharing his recol ection of events—why his father chose the exact spot and position that he did. Among al the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying—though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm—that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compel ed to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.
That oak, Jack might have added, was reckoned to be over five hundred years old. It had been there before the farmhouse.
MICHAEL HAD PUT ON the same clothes that he might have put on, a little later that morning, to do the tasks that had to be done about the farm: a check shirt, a thick grey jumper, corduroy trousers, long thick socks to go in Wel ington boots—al of this in addition to the long-john underwear which in winter he normal y slept in anyway. The suit he’d briefly worn only hours before (this was later noted) was back in the depths of the wardrobe. Then he’d put on his cap and scarf and his donkey jacket with the torn quilt lining, and the olive-green wool mittens that stopped short at the knuckles. So you might have said that he’d certainly felt the cold, given that he’d dressed so thoroughly for it. But al this was the force of habit. These clothes were like his winter hide, which he merely slipped off overnight. And, of course, he did have a task to complete. He even needed to make sure his fingers wouldn’t go numb and useless on him.
He took the gun from the cabinet and took two number-six cartridges and either loaded them straight away, with the kitchen light on to help him, or loaded them at the last minute, in the dark and the cold. At either point it would have been an action of some finality.
The question would arise, which Jack, since he was asleep himself, could never answer, as to how much, if at al , Michael had slept that night: how, in short, he’d arrived at his course of action and its particular timing. He could hardly have set his alarm clock. Jack discovered no note, though he didn’t tel the investigating policemen that he didn’t find this surprising, and when asked by them if he’d noticed anything strange in his father’s behaviour on the preceding day, he’d said only that they’d gone together to attend the short eleven-o’clock remembrance service beside the memorial in Marleston, as they did every year, because of the Luxtons who were on it. One of the two policemen, the local constable, Bob Ireton, would have been able to corroborate this directly, as he’d attended the ceremony himself, in his uniform, in a sort of semi-official capacity. It wasn’t, therefore, a typical Sunday morning—
they didn’t put on suits every Sunday morning—but there was nothing strange about it, as PC Ireton would have whol y understood. It would have been strange if they hadn’t gone. The only things that were strange about it, Jack had affirmed, were that Tom wasn’t there (though the whole vil age knew why this was) and that they hadn’t gone for the usual drink in the Crown afterwards.
And Jack had left it at that.
There were two other peculiarities about that (already highly peculiar) night that he might have remarked on, setting aside the peculiarity of where the act occurred—
which Jack, in his fashion, suggested wasn’t peculiar at al .
One was that when he’d got up that night, suddenly galvanised into wakefulness and action, having somehow heard the shot and having somehow known what it meant, he’d natural y looked, even before hastily dressing and before (torch in hand) he left the farmhouse, into his father’s bedroom—into what had always been known as the Big Bedroom. And had noticed that the bedclothes, recently pul ed back, had an extra blanket—a tartan one—spread over them. There was nothing special about an extra blanket on a cold night, so in that respect it was unworthy of mention. Only Jack knew that he’d never seen that blanket spread over his father’s bed before. Only Jack knew its history.
And Jack never mentioned either—was it relevant?—that there was a dog buried a little further down that field.
The second peculiarity—which Jack did point out, though the police might soon have discovered it for themselves—
was that when Michael had dressed that night, he’d slipped a medal into the breast pocket of his frayed-at-the-col ar check shirt. It was the same medal, of course, that Jack knew had been earlier that day in the pocket of his suit.
Why, later, the medal was in the pocket of his shirt was anyone’s guess, but it would have meant—though Jack didn’t go into this in his statement—that he must have been conscious of it during the intervening hours, and perhaps never returned it to its silk-lined box. He might have put it, for example, on his bedside table when he went to bed and before he slept, if he did sleep, that night. Perhaps—though this was a thought that would not crystal ise in Jack’s mind til many years later—he might even have clutched it in his hand.
These were considerations that Jack felt the police and, later, the coroner need not be interested in. Any more than they need be interested in the fact that Vera had died (and hers wasn’t a quick death) in that same big bed with a tartan blanket now lying on it. Or that he himself had been born and, in al probability, conceived in it.
But the fact was that Michael had died wearing, so to speak, the DCM.
When the police had asked Jack how he’d discovered this so soon—after al , his father had been wearing two layers of thick clothing over his shirt, and anyway Jack was having to confront much else—Jack had said that he’d slipped his hand inside his father’s jacket to feel if his heart was stil beating. The policemen had looked at Jack. They might have said, if they’d had no regard for his feelings, something like: “He’d just shot his brains out.” Jack had nonetheless insisted, with a certain dazed defiance, that he’d wanted to feel his father’s heart, he’d wanted to put his hand over it. That had been his reaction. He didn’t say that he’d wanted to feel not so much a beating heart—which would have been highly unlikely—but just if there was any last living warmth left on that cold night, beneath the old grey jumper, in his father’s body.