But he said that he’d felt something hard there. Those were his actual words: he’d felt “something hard there.” When Jack said these things the two policemen—Ireton and a Detective Sergeant Hunt—had looked away. Jack was clearly in a state of great distress and shock. God knows what state he would have been in when he actual y came upon the body. Bob Ireton knew Jack Luxton to be a pretty impervious, slow-tempered sort. He was looking now, for Jack, not a little wild-eyed. Bob had been at the same primary and secondary schools as Jack. He’d known, from its beginning, about Jack and El ie Merrick—
but then so did the whole vil age. Save for El ie and his recently absconded brother (and Tom, as Bob would later observe, was not to reappear for the funeral), Jack was pretty much alone now in the world.
Bob Ireton was basical y anxious—he couldn’t speak for his plainclothes superior—to get this whole dreadful mess cleared up as quickly as possible and spare its solitary survivor any further needless torture. Poor man. Poor men.
Both. Bob’s view of the matter—again, he couldn’t speak for his col eague—was as straightforward as it was considerate. Michael Luxton had kil ed himself with a shotgun. His son had discovered the fact and duly reported it to the authorities. In a little while from now, though there’d be a delay for an inquest, poor Jack would have to stand again in that suit he rarely wore, but had worn, as it happened, only the day before the death, beside his father’s grave.
THIS WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME, in fact, that Constable Ireton had been required to attend the scene after the suicide of a farmer. Fol owing the cattle disease, there had been this gradual, much smal er yet even more dismaying epidemic.
One or two hanged themselves from a beam in a barn (sometimes watched by munching cattle), others chose a shotgun. A shotgun was marginal y more upsetting. Bob frankly didn’t attach much weight to the odd circumstantial details that sometimes went with a suicide, the strange things that might precede it, the strange things that might (it was not a good word) trigger it. It was a pretty extreme bit of behaviour anyway. Who could say what you (but that was not a good line of thinking and anyway not professional) might do?
But, sadly, he was not unused to the thing itself, no longer even surprised by it. The underlying causes were fairly obvious—look around. He was both glad and a little guilty to be a policeman, drawing his steady policeman’s pay, while farmers al around him were going under. He should real y have been like some odd man out within the community—though a policeman, a sort of outlaw—a stay-at-home version of Tom Luxton joining the army. Yet now his services were peculiarly cal ed upon. He’d known that the Luxton farm, especial y after Tom had withdrawn his labour, was near the limit. None of it was surprising, and the best thing was to clear it up as tidily as possible.
Had he been told when he became a policeman that he’d one day be officiating over al the wretched consequences of a so-cal ed mad-cow disease, he’d have said that such an idea was itself mad. He hadn’t supposed—though he hadn’t sought a quiet life and there was such a thing as rural crime—that he’d become one day a sort of superintendent of misery. He’d never be (nor would DS
Hunt, he reckoned) any other sort of superintendent.
And al this was years before the foot-and-mouth (by which time he was, at least, a sergeant). More dead cattle
—great crackling heaps of them. And a few more deaths among the “farming fraternity.” Was it Jack Luxton who’d once passed on to him that phrase?
Poor men. Poor beasts. Both.
MICHAEL CROSSED THE YARD and, skirting the Smal Barn where the pick-up and the Land Rover and the spreader were housed, entered Barton Field by the top gate. Barton Field, only six acres and a roughly shaped strip of land, buckling and widening as it descended, was the nearest field to the farmhouse, its upper, narrow end meeting the shelf in the hil side where the farm buildings stood. Its chal enging contours made it the least manageable field at Jebb, but it was the “home” field of the farm and formed its immediate prospect. At the top, at its steepest, it bulged prominently, turning, further down, into a gentler scoop, so that its flat lower end was hidden from even the upper windows of the farmhouse. But this only enhanced the view.
From the house you looked, over the fal of the land, to the woods in the val ey and to the hil s beyond, but principal y took in—perfectly placed between foreground and background—the broad top third or so of the big single oak that stood near the middle of the field where its slope level ed off. The oak’s massive trunk could not be seen, nor the immense, spreading roots which had risen above the surrounding soil. But between these roots, where the grass had given up, were smal hol ows of that reddish earth that Jack would notice on the last stages of a strange, westbound journey. The roots themselves were thick and ridged enough to form little ledges or seats, for a sheep or a man.
The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as wel as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor
—especial y if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day—could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.
None of these thoughts had particularly occurred to Michael or to Jack (or, when he was there, to Tom). They were so used to the tree straddling their view that they could, for most of the time, not real y notice it. Nonetheless, it was straight to this tree that Michael walked on an icy November night, carrying a gun. Or as straight as the steep slope al owed.
Exact evidence of his path was left by the tracks in the frost that Jack, only a little later, picked up by the light of his torch. At one spot it was clear that his father had slipped and slid for a yard or more on his arse. It was very strange for Jack to think of this minor mishap at such a moment—of his father perhaps swearing under his breath at it and suffering its jolting indignity. As it was strange to think that this slip might not have been a simple slip at al , given that his father was carrying at the time a possibly already loaded and closed gun. There might have been a much nastier accident.
Had the frost not begun to melt—unlike the previous morning—even before daybreak, it would have left a very clear record of the activity in Barton Field that night: Michael’s tracks, with that slip, going in one direction, and Jack’s going, separately, in both directions (and, despite the great agitation he was in, without a single slip). But al of them converging on the oak tree.