Some of the party claimed to have sighted the Oreales in the far distance, but McAlan wasn’t one of them. He saw a white-backed woodpecker, a nuthatch, and a redstart, which partly made up for the Oreales. The session lasted several hours. His feet were quite tired by the time he got back to the Mini.
Hugh McAlan decided to return along the Haverhill road instead of by the faster A11. He started off down quiet country lanes, musing to himself. He wasn’t giving full attention to the driving, but neither was he really careless. He would have noticed any unexpected road traffic, like a car pulling out of a side road, for instance. What he did not notice, until it was too late, was a pair of birds, flying endlessly round and around each other, a pair that came into the road over the bushes on his near side. There was an unpleasant thud as the car hit the wretched creatures. Only after the impact was McAlan fully aware of what had happened. He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. The birds were lying dead in the road, the road itself covered by an incredibly vast carpet of feathers. He climbed slowly out of the car and sadly walked to the point of the tragedy. Some of the feathers were of a greenish tinge. There were black tailfeathers, too. But most were of a brilliant yellow. Hugh McAlan had “got” his Oreales after all.
A Jury of Five
Arthur Hadley was a hard-driving man, just turned fifty. His only occupations were business and sex. On these topics he lavished his working hours in a ratio of about three to one. His headquarters were in Nottingham, but his activities were by no means confined to the immediate neighborhood. He had a chain of interests spread over the whole of the north of England. He had partners in some of these interests, partners whom he terrified by the risks he ran, like Tony Brown. Sir Anthony Brown was a yellow-bellied twerp, in Hadley’s personal opinion, but his title happened to be useful. The risks were always of the “swallow-all-the-water-in-the-sea” kind. Hadley’s specialty was the take-over bid. Early in life he’d discovered a simple truth, take-overs go most smoothly and profitably if they’re done when times are bad. There was no point in making bids for prosperous firms with long order books, too costly. In the old days, he’d bought when trade was slack. Now things were different, without the old big ups and downs. He bought now when credit was tight, and credit was tight every three or four years, whenever the whole country got itself into another kettle of economic hot water. In the year 1965 he did quite a lot of buying. By the end of 1965 he was pretty replete, overextended, folks called it. For the next year or two it would be necessary to sit down and work away at it all, to chew the cud, to masticate.
Arthur Hadley was good at chewing the cud, because he gave a lot of time and thought to the process. He was good at choosing the right man for a job. He made mistakes sometimes, of course, but once he realized he’d made one, he always put it right quickly. “Cut your losses—fast” was one of his favorite tags. He was thinking now of hoofing out a dull old bugger, who for donkey’s years had run a firm he’d recently bought on the outskirts of Sheffield. Too set in his ways, too stereotyped, too old-fashioned. The only problem was, who to move into the job. Perhaps it would be best to give young Mike Johnson a whirl. It would mean taking him away from the Nottingham factory, which would be a real nuisance just at the moment. But he couldn’t see a better solution. He said so to his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Jennifer, and was surprised when Jenny disagreed. Usually she just listened to his business talk. He used her as a pair of ears, not really because he needed to talk to anybody, for advice or anything like that, but because he was inhibited—like most people—against talking to himself. That was why he was surprised about Mike Johnson. For a brief flash he wondered whether there could be anything between Johnson and his wife. Then he dismissed the thought. Jenny hadn’t much appetite for that sort of game.
Like many promiscuous men, Hadley expected his wife to be one hundred percent “respectable.” Wasn’t that one of the reasons why he’d married her, for Christ’s sake? The daughter of a local manufacturer, Jennifer had been well-educated. She was well-spoken and she knew how to entertain his business associates in the best style. He hadn’t found her very sexy, but that really wasn’t important. There was plenty of sex to be had in other directions, at any rate, there was in the circles in which he moved. Like any woman, Jenny had wanted children, and he’d given her three, in rapid tempo. The arrangement now was that she brought up the kids—his legitimate kids—she made the home attractive and respectable, and in return he gave her anything she wanted—clothes, a car, that sort of thing. He thought it worked very well.
Blanche White was one of the other directions. She was a pretty little thing of nineteen. She worked in one of Hadley’s subsidiaries. Because she didn’t read complex balance sheets, and because nobody told her, Blanche didn’t realize that Hadley was her true boss. But she knew he was an important man, and she was flattered when he asked her to go out with him. She’d been out with him now quite a number of times, usually at intervals of two or three weeks. Hadley had taken her the second time, and he’d made her every time since. And now the silly little bitch had got herself in the family way. How was it possible to be so bloody stupid, he wondered. “Why were you so bloody stupid?” he asked her.
They were in the sitting room of a little place he’d had specially built, about five miles outside Nottingham. “I thought you,…” she began.
Hadley gave a snort and took a sharp snap of whiskey. “Don’t be bloody daft. It’s not up to men these days, not with all the new things they’ve got. Didn’t anybody ever tell you?”
“I didn’t like to go, to that clinic place.”
“Didn’t like to go! You’ll like it a lot less, what’s going to happen to you now!”
“What’s to be done?” the girl sobbed.
“What’s to be done! Stop being bloody daft, for one thing. See a doctor. Go on working as long as you can. Then I’ll see you over it.”
“See me over it!”
“What the hell else d’you expect? There’s a hundred million kids born into the world every year. Don’t think anybody’s going to fall over backwards just because you’re going to have one of ’em.”
“Don’t you care a bit?”
“I care a hell of a lot. D’you think it’s any pleasure to me, this sort of thing? I’m not going to get anything out of it.”
Hadley did get something out of it, much more than he could ever have imagined. He began with a small bonus. He took the little fool back to the bedroom. Tearfully, she let him do it again. He got far more out of it this second time than he expected in the circumstances. She again asked him, now in a whisper, to look after her. Once again, he told her he’d see she was all right. He left her there, thinking this was about as far as he could commit himself for the present. He took another sharp snap before starting back to Nottingham. He’d intended to stay here the night, told Jenny he’d be away the whole night. But he wasn’t staying now, not with this situation to prey on his mind.
There was a stretch of some two miles of twisting country road before the main highway into Nottingham. He thought about Blanche White as he drove his big yellow Jaguar. She wouldn’t give any trouble, too mouselike. He’d see her over it, like he said he would, until the kid was old enough to go to school. Then he’d find her a job. It might be worth his while to go on giving her a bit even after that. She’d only be twenty-three or twenty-four, useful in an emergency, perhaps.
The T-junction onto the highway came up. A vehicle was approaching from the left. It wasn’t too far away, but far enough. Hadley saw no point in letting it get ahead of him. He gunned the big car as fiercely as he could. This was the time when it paid to have a piece of real machinery. The car leaped forward, straight into the track of the oncoming vehicle. Hadley took the turn at a bad angle. There was a blaze of light in his eyes, followed instantly by a blaze inside his head.