She gave an inarticulate cry, and tried to move sideways while simultaneously releasing the rope to avoid being dragged off the cliff. Rock slammed into her right shoulder, and she screamed as she felt herself falling.
Above her, Mike’s flailing arm hit the cliff face and he managed to jam it into a wide crack, stabilising his torso. He scrabbled with both feet, and managed to get a foot onto something solid. He looked down, yelling Gabrielle’s name as he saw her sliding downwards.
Gabrielle was doing her best to keep leaning into the rock face, hoping that friction would slow her fall, and stretched out her right arm to where the rope should be. Her scrabbling fingers found something solid, and she grasped it, but screamed as fingers snapped under her weight. It had done enough, though: she slowed, she slid more to her right, and she felt the rope slap her in the face. Reflexively, she made a grab at it with both hands. Friction stripped skin off both hands, and her broken fingers sent agony spiking up her arm, but she held on.
Mike threw away caution and was coming down the cliff in a series of barely-controlled slips, calling out Gabrielle’s name as he descended. He finally stopped alongside her, in a shower of rock fragments and dust. “Gabby, talk to me,” he said, near hysteria. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
She looked in his direction, her eyes dazed and unfocussed. “Silly bugger,” she said, slurring the words slightly. “Course I’m not all right. It hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“Bloody everything. What happened?”
“The cliff was rotten. A big chunk just fell out. I think it might have hit you on the way down.”
“Feels like I’ve been hit by a cliff,” she confirmed. “Don’t think I can hold on—” Her eyes flickered and closed, Mike grabbed her before she could move, and pinned her to the cliff face with his body. Blood was staring to flow freely down her face from more than one head wound. Mike hammered pitons into the rocks on either side of Gabrielle, and roped her in place. He pulled out a mobile phone, and called Stan’s number to explain the situation. Then he leaned back to await rescue.
Mike and Gabrielle were helped off the cliff three hours later. The fog still clung to the lower cliff, preventing Mike from seeing that he and Gabrielle had come to a stop just a few metres above the transition to the scree slope.
Gabrielle regained consciousness as they were being brought down. She was facing up, where the thinning fog swirled in an eddy in front of the cliff. She briefly glimpsed movement above, near the point where the cliff had given way, but afterwards remembered nothing about it.
Chapter 8
John Willems sipped his tea. He put down the cup, stretched his long legs out and wriggled a little to embed himself properly into the comfortable dents left in his armchair by countless evenings of doing exactly this. Relaxing after a hard day’s work.
He had been working Clifftop Farm all his life bar the three-year gap he had spent in Nottingham earning a degree in animal husbandry. But since the objective of his study had been to take over and revolutionise the family farm, he supposed that counted as working for Clifftop Farm even if he was not working at the farm. His father had been deeply conservative and avoided change, so it was only after his passing that John was able to impose his ideas on the farm. But ironically by the time he was able to act, he had grown disinclined to do so. He had been a little surprised to discover that after thirty years, the extent of his ambition was to breed goats and make cheeses much as his father had. Between his kitchen garden, his hen-house and the modest income from the herd of goats, he was quite self-sufficient and – somewhat to his own surprise – content.
He woke suddenly, roused by the noise from the chicken run behind his cottage. He realised he had dozed off – something that was happening more frequently of late, he reflected, shaking his head in wonder. When had he grown old?
Then the noise of squawking chickens registered with him. What was disturbing them? He collected an electric lantern from the table by the front door as he stepped out to look. He walked quickly across the lawn behind the cottage, holding the lantern above his head to throw light on the chicken run. He could see no chickens – the squawking was coming from inside the hen house. Brown and white feathers were floating across the run and scattered both inside and outside the mesh fence. John reached the fence and stooped to look inside. By the lantern’s light, he could see wet patches darkening the bare earth, and dark stains on the mesh. He stretched out a hand to touch the mesh, but hesitated, afraid for a reason he could not identify. “Don’t be a stupid arse,” he muttered aloud. Rather than touch it, though, he leant in close and sniffed. Blood. He stood back from the fence, and noticed for the first time that there were wet stains – more blood – on the ground outside the fence, as well as tiny pieces of pinkish-grey flesh, a few still with feathers embedded. “What the hell did this?” he asked himself.
There was a sudden rattle and the familiar clap-clap of the top hinged flap that let the hens in and out of their house. John jumped back, his heart thumping. Once he had calmed a little, he quietly stepped forward and held the lantern high to take in the scene. The flap was still swinging to and fro. He saw that a trail of blood ran down the ramp and over to the fence to one side.
“Bastard fox!” he shouted. “C’mere and let me see what ye’re at! Get off out o’ here, you stinkin’ vermin!” He strode round to the side, making no effort to be quiet, expecting to find a hole chewed in the fence and a fox running off. But there was no hole in the fence, and no sign of an animal running across the short grass. “What the hell—”
The noise in the hen house had stopped at some point. John opened the gate into the run, opened the door into the hen house, and held the lantern inside. The hen house had been transformed into a slaughterhouse with blood spattering the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling. Or a charnel house, he thought, pedantically and irrelevantly; some of his birds had been stripped down to the bone. He backed out, turned to one side, and threw up.
John Willems had a visitor, early next morning – old Innes, from the smallholding down slope.
At first light, when his neighbours would have been breaking their fasts, John had started calling round everyone that he knew of who kept poultry, spreading the warning that “foxes or summat” were on the prowl and had already slaughtered his birds. After a few minutes of consideration, he also – reluctantly – called the police station on the mainland. He didn’t expect any action from the police; he was thinking that one of the questions his insurers would ask would be whether the police had been notified.
He had not called old Innes, but old Innes came to see him anyway. When John first knew him, he had been “young Innes”, as his father held the title “old Innes”. Having inherited the family farm, young Innes became simply “Innes”, but only briefly: the sobriquet “old” had apparently been handed down along with the farm. Nobody knew how old old Innes was, but it was a long time since he had sold off most of the farmland and semi-retired to the cottage and remaining few acres. So, it was generally reckoned, old Innes was very old indeed. But he had taken the trouble to trudge up to Clifftop, so as soon as John heard his gravelly, “Hey, Willems,” he stepped out through his front door to greet him.