Live hard and play hard, that's the way to do it, he said to himself.
He glanced at the yellow blur of the oil-seed rape racing by to his left, and the extensive acres of barley off to his right. "All mine," he said out loud, 'soon you'll be all mine," and he laughed again.
He was going far too fast when he reached the bend where the road turned sharply away from the drainage dyke. It would be kind to say that old Roman roads are not expected to make sudden right-angled diversions, but the truth was that Reg Davison was in no fit state to be loose in a motor car. He hit the brakes and swung on the steering wheel. The back of the car skidded out. Instinct took over as Reg corrected the skid, but this took him wide, into the deep gravel round the outside of the bend. For a second he was convinced he'd made it, but then he saw, or thought he saw, the figure on the bicycle. There was a clatter of metal against metal, and Reg glimpsed a black-clad apparition flying towards him, like a geriatric Batman. The figure hit the windscreen with a hollow ker-clump, and then it was gone.
Reg sat there, bathed in cold sweat, knuckles white around the wheel, as sober as a tightrope walker. He reached down to switch off the radio. What had happened to him? He looked around. The road looked the same. The barley was still waving seductively in the breeze and the rape was as cheerful as ever. Nothing had changed. Or had everything changed? He prayed that his imagination had been playing tricks, as he got out and walked round to the front of the car.
There was nothing imaginary about the bicycle, with its bent front wheel and handlebars twisted sideways. Or about Reg's smashed headlight. But where was the cyclist? Reg knew the answer. He reluctantly accepted the reality of the situation as he tentatively looked round the back of the car, to where Father Harcourt lay in a ragged heap.
"Christ!" Reg exclaimed. "He's a vicar. I've killed a vicar." He rested his forehead on the roof of the car, realising that his lucky streak had rolled clean off the table, possibly for ever. He thumped the roof three times with his right fist, saying: "Shit! Shit! Shit!"
Then he repeated the gesture with both fists, sobbing: "Fuck! Fuck!
Fuck!"
His initial reaction was fairly honourable. He ran back to the bend in the road to see if any help was approaching. It wasn't, thank goodness. Although he felt sober he knew that he'd still measure the same on a breathalyser. It wasn't just his job that was at stake, he could go to jail for this. Well, he'd got himself into it, he'd have to get himself out. Dispose of the evidence, that was the priority. He unlocked the boot lid and opened it. The crumpled body was lying face down, with a small, sinister pool of blood forming under the head, bright against the new gravel. Reg hooked the fingers of one hand under Father Harcourt's dog collar and grasped a handful of trouser material with the other. As unceremoniously as if he were loading a fifty-kilogram bag of weaner pellets to help out one of his customers, he heaved the cleric's body into the boot.
Now for the bike. There wasn't room in the car, so it would have to be hidden nearby. The neighbouring field was the obvious choice the oil-seed rape was over a metre tall and wouldn't be harvested for another six or seven weeks. Reg crossed the road and looked over the hedge. At the other side of the field he could see a small, isolated cottage.
"Mmm, better make it the barley," he decided. "It would be just my luck for some old biddy to be watching out of the window."
He wasn't wrong. In Rose Cottage, Miss Felicity Jonas was glancing anxiously down the track that led to her home, awaiting her cue to put on the kettle. Father Harcourt — Tudor, as he had asked her to call him on these informal occasions was never late. She was wearing a new blue dress, and had dabbed on her wrists some of the expensive perfume that her niece had given her two Christmases ago.
The barley would be harvested before the oil-seed rape, but not for at least another month. Reg cast an expert's eye over the crop. It was good, probably destined for making before being transmuted into beer or even whisky. He stooped and squinted across the tops of the waving fronds, looking for the telltale signs of wild oats, standing higher than the rest of the field. He knew that in the next week or two the farmer would walk his lands, roguing out any oats that contaminated the crop. Reg couldn't see any he was safe.
He carried the bike about fifty yards into the field and carefully laid it down, trying not to compress the tall stalks beneath it. He spent a few minutes teasing them through the spokes and stepped back to admire his handiwork. From ten yards away it was invisible, and in a couple of days the barley would straighten itself up again to conceal it even more. He dusted his hands together with a sigh of relief and walked back to the car.
Stay cool, Reg, he told himself. Stay cool and calm and think clearly, then we can get away with it. Remember the old motto: He Who Dares Wins. He'd never been a soldier, but the SAS were his heroes, and the saying appealed to his gambler's instincts. There was just the matter of the broken headlight. He found the scattered glass amongst the gravel and picked up as much as he could. Any bits remaining were so small as to be unidentifiable. After a final look around he climbed into the car and drove off. Two hundred yards up the road he turned round in a gateway and went back the way he'd come he'd had an idea about where he could dispose of the body.
Peddars Dyke was part of the drainage system that had transformed this area from a good-for-nothing bog into the most productive arable land in Britain. The marshes had vanished, taking with them the fen orchid, the bittern and the otter, to be replaced with horizon-stretching vistas of barley, wheat and oil-seed rape. Reg had noticed the ditch running alongside the lane he had so recently travelled. At intervals a culvert would take it beneath a turn-off leading into a field or to a farm. He would shove the body into one of these.
He quickly found a suitable place, and parked in the gateway above the dyke. So far he'd been lucky that no other vehicles had come this way, but something was bound to, before too long. He'd pretend he'd suffered a puncture, and had just finished replacing the wheel. The lifting jack was kept in the engine compartment. He pulled the release lever and the bonnet sprang open.
Reg removed the jack from its resting place and moved round to the back of the car. He wasn't relishing what he had to do, but he acted with the purposeful ness of the desperate. He opened the boot.
The lid rose smoothly on its hydraulic struts, and as it did, so too did Father Harcourt. He sat up in the boot and clutched imploringly at Reg's sleeve. His face was a scarlet mess and his eyes were white orbs, the uncoordinated pupils barely visible, one pointing up and one down.
Reg screamed in terror and tried to shake his arm free from the old man's talons. He wouldn't let go.
"Get off! Get off!" shrieked Reg, but the fingers tightened their grip. Reg was holding the jack in his right hand. His arm rose and fell, and the jack crashed against the parchment skull of the priest.
Again and again the jack came down until the claw-like grip relaxed and Father Harcourt fell back, to keep his appointment with the Lord.
Reg forced himself not to be sick. He sucked in great lungfuls of air through his open mouth and acted like a robot. With one movement he flung the jack into the boot and grabbed the priest under the armpits.
Ten seconds later the body splashed into the shallow water. Reg jumped down after it and, standing astride the ditch and clinging to the bridge, managed to push it with his foot until it was out of sight.
He climbed back up to the road. He'd done it. It was over. Then, and only then, did he renew his acquaintance with the duck a 1'orange.
Traffic was heavy on the A47, but the risk of being pulled over for a driving offence now seemed trivial. Reg knew a car spares shop on the far side of Norwich where he could buy a new headlight. He'd obtained one there a couple of years previously, after a confrontation with a slurry trailer in someone's yard. He shuddered when he remembered the price of it; thank goodness he had his gold card with him. No, that was no good he could be traced through that. He'd have to withdraw a hundred quid from a cash dispenser and use real money. He gave a smile of satisfaction he was thinking well.