He heard the crushing of the dead leaves.
He lay in the wood loam. He was using his bivouac as his groundsheet. There was a big wind up high. but where he was the trees shielded him from the cold. There wern't trees heaving, not this night. He hadn't heard the collapse ol a lulling branch.
It wasn't a branch, broken off, that had crushed the leaves.
Rutherford was off to his left, beyond reach IFrom where he was, Rutherford could see the front gate of the Manor House, and could look over the outbuildings of the place, what had once been the pony and trap sheds, right to the front gate. Erlich watched the light on the stair window and he could see the kitchen door.
There was a light on in the empty kitchen
He heard the cracking of a twig.
He heard a soft, dried-breath throat growl
Fast, sudden movement. The weight buckled down onto Erlich. The blow of the weight onto his shoulder, and his back.
The stab of pain at his neck. Groping lot the holsiter. The weight was on his back and heaving down on the fist that scrabbles for the handle of the Smith and Wesson. The throbbing roar in his ears, and the torn hurt in his skin. Hand on the gun, the gun clear, twisting and rolling. The weight and the pain following him as he twisted, rolled. The gun put. The gun pressed against his chest. Foul breath spilling at his lace. The growl roar, and the weight, and the pain.
He fired…
Kept firing…
Erlich kept firing until there was no more noise, until the weight was gone, through the six slugs in the Smith and Wesson chamber, and on round, until there was just the sound of the hammer hitting dead cartridge heads.
Rutherford was above him, and Rutherford's torch played over the tree branches and roots around him, and over the bramble undergrowth. Rutherford asked if he were all right. He heard the concern in Rutherford's voice. Yes, he was O.K. There was pain in the hack of his neck, and the breath had been sucked clean out of his lungs by the weight, and his ears were blasted from the deep throat growl and the hammered gunfire, Bit he was O.K. The torch wavered, came close to him. The torch found it. God, the bastard was huge. Laid out, it's full length stretched, and there was blood at its mouth, blood on its teeth.
He'd only once seen a bigger German Shepherd, half pulling a warden over, at the Federal gaol at Marion, Illinois. There was a head shot and there was a chest shot, and there was a shot that looked to have broken the dog's right rear leg.
They heard the advancing footfall. There was no attempt at concealment. The footfall drove without hesitation through the undergrowth, from the depth of the wood. Goddam fingers shaking. Revolver up, cylinder out, palm of the hand belting the barrel to shake the spent cases clear. The footfall closing on them.
Prising the new cartridges into the chamber.
The torch picked her out. There was her dirt-smeared oil jacket, the jeans and the big boots. There was the rich red flame of her hair. Erlich went to the crouch and to the aim. He could see that she carried no weapon, but he went to the crouch and the aim and his right index finger was crooked level with the trigger. Rutherford held her in the beam of his torch. She never slowed. She seemed to see through the power of the beam that dazzled her. Erlich remembered, too damn well, the beating and the kicking. He remembered his own screams. He remembered the smell of her, when she was a foot from him as he crouched and aimed. She never looked at him.
She picked up the dog. She picked it up like it was a sheep, or a dead deer. It must have weighed 40 kilos. She slung it across her shoulders, and the blood from the dog's mouth dribbled down her jacket.
She looked at him then, and he felt the hate in her.
She walked away, back into the depth of the wood.
He was crouched, he aimed at her all the time that the torch brain held her.
The sounds carried over the fields where the light frost was gathering. He heard all of the shots fired.
He had only slept fitfully since his son had last sat with his wife, held her hand. Not a poacher's shotgun, not a hunting rifle.
He had recognised the full chamber of a revolver discharged.
There were no revolvers in the village, none that he had ever heard of. Revolvers were for soldiers, and for armed policemen.
He lay on his back in the cold and companionless bed.
A man had told him once, a friend of his father, a man who had shot game in Tanganyika between the wars, that the most dangerous animal in the bush was the leopard. The man had said that a leopard was only safe when its head had been sliced off.
He thought that the American at the Reform Club would have thought of his boy as a leopard. And if the bruises on the man's face were anything to go by and the screams in the wood in the night a week ago, then the American was right about the leopard.
And six shots were for killing. Six shots were what he would have fired, nearly 50 years before in France, for killing.
He lay on his back, he stared up at the darkness of the ceiling.
He would be told, they would come to tell him. He listened for the scratch of car wheels on the gravel of the drive.
The shots were heard all around the village.
Every living soul fed from the gossip that Colt had been home, that a car had been stripped of its tyres, that an American had been savaged until he screamed for his life in the high copse behind the Manor House, that Colt was watched for.
Billy and Zap and Charlie and Kev and Dazzer and Zack and Johnny, and the bank manager from Warminster, and the solicitor from Shepton, and the District Nurse, and old Vic in the pub, and the woman above the Post Office, and the tenant of Home Farm, they all heard the shots, and they all thought of Colt.
When Fran reached her home, the cottage on the dirt track past where the church bad once been, old Brennie was in his chair beside the stove. Fran stood in the doorway with the dog, her Rocco, on her shoulders and she saw the anger that he shared with her. They took a spade, and the flash that he used for pinioning rabbits in their fear, and they went to the old tumbled stone wall that marked the edge of the disused cemetery of the church. There had been enough rain to make it easy for deep digging. They took their turns, they dug in silence.
To Erlich it was pointless that they should stay, but he wasn't going to be the first to call a halt. He had picked up the cartridge cases, they had scraped leaves over the dog's blood, they had moved a hundred yards east. It was still just possible to see the kitchen door of the Manor House, and most of the driveway.
At the first grey dawn smear Rutherford broke the long silence between them.
"Where did you get that thing?"
"I got it, and I'm keeping it."
"It's a miracle half the county's police aren't scouring the woods for you. Perhaps they are. They won't make a hundredth of the noise you made."
"What would you have had me do?"
"Bloody good covert surveillance, a real A-team."
"Don't piss on me. I'm not some Rambo kid out of the mountains.. . "
" N o, indeed."
"You'd have had me use a kitchen knife? That monster would have had my throat."
"I was merely observing that we have gone rather public."
Erlich said, "But there's nowhere else."
Rutherford said, "That's the pity of it. It's where we have to stay."
"Every goddam night till he comes…"
She didn't have to look so damned surprised. He had only said that he would take the boys to the school gate, drop them, and then drive to the Establishment. She didn't have to look as though he had suggested running naked round Buckingham Palace.
It was Frederick Bissett's decision to take the boys to school and to arrive 15 minutes later than usual at the Establishment.
He would decide when he should telephone Colt. He would decide whether or not he would accept their offer of employment.