Or was it so strange? Wasn’t this hunting fever, more simply, a quite natural extension to her present lifestyle? A form of life in which, identifying with it so completely, she came unconsciously to mime its original foundations, in killing and pain and the survival of the fittest?
Certainly as a result of nearly two months in the woods and this developing urge to track and kill, all Clare’s instincts and senses had become startlingly acute — to the point where I was disturbed by her animalism, seeing in it another and perhaps irrevocable move away from the real world I hoped she would one day occupy again.
And yet it was exactly this animalism, this heightened instinct for survival, which probably saved our lives a week later. I would never have noticed the ominous signs myself.
A footprint, a broken twig, a dead leaf where it shouldn’t be? A shadow moving when it shouldn’t move? Some slight noise at twilight that wasn’t a bird or an animal? What was it that first caught Clare’s attention? I don’t know. What I do know is that one evening, returning from a late swim, Clare stopped suddenly on our path through the undergrowth and quickly drew me aside into the heart of a bush. ‘Here,’ she whispered in my ear, for she could put whole coherent sentences together now. ‘Someone too is here.’ She pointed immediately ahead.
‘Alice?’ I whispered back to her, looking about me in the shadows. But it couldn’t be Alice, I thought. She had only left us a few hours before and she never came down late in the evening in any case.
Clare shook her head. ‘No. It has been here a days,’ she said in her disordered English.
‘But what? What is it? A he or a she?’
‘It,’ she said simply.
I looked around me in the gathering dusk, straining my ears and eyes. But there was no sound, nothing unusual. A bird suddenly twittered in the undergrowth ahead of us — a long trill of mild alarm, a blackbird running over last year’s dead leaves. There was a deep silence again. And then I heard another tread in the woods, not a dozen yards away, on the path we’d been on, coming towards us. It was no louder than the blackbird’s run, but it had quite a different pace, slow, infinitely carefuclass="underline" the paws of some animal, a fox perhaps, nosing through the twilight? But it wasn’t a fox, or a badger or mole, I thought then. The steps were more pronounced, and there were two of them, not four. They were surely human.
Then, in silhouette for a moment, I saw a figure pass between two trees against the flare of dying light on the lake: crouching, thin-shouldered, the skin there with an inky shine in the sunset. It was gone in an instant, flitting soundlessly away into the shadows. I thought it might be Ross again. But Ross wouldn’t crouch like that, I thought, or pass so silently.
Above all, Ross would hardly be moving as the dark shadow had, naked into the night.
Twelve
There was someone else in the valley. They were sleeping rough, I assumed, and must have come from outside the estate, since they obviously weren’t down from the Manor. Was it somebody looking particularly for us? Or just some trespasser, a poacher, a lone camper? The following morning we set about finding out. I explained my plans to Clare, stringing the bow and getting the sharpened arrows together as we sat in the tree house. She didn’t say anything. But she was full of repressed excitement at what she obviously looked upon as a coming hunt.
We left the tree-house and, moving high up along the branches and walkways, made our way down towards the foot of the lake, leaving the trees here by the branch over the stream. My plan was to start at the bottom and work our way up to the head of the valley, carefully looking over the whole area in the half mile between.
It was very early dawn when we started, as I hoped we might surprise whoever it was, sleeping out in a tent or in the old pumping-shed perhaps. There was a ground mist in the valley again, lying in long, wispy streaks over the lake and forming heavier milky pools in the reeds by the shore. We stalked from bush to bush, keeping out of sight as much as possible. I remembered the time, two months before, when Ross and I had sought each other out in just the same circumstances. But now I had Clare and there was no vicious Alsatian. Clare, indeed, was my dog, crawling silently through holes in the undergrowth, places where I couldn’t go, a pointer herself, as I followed behind with the recurve bow and the old army binoculars.
We got above the pumping-shed, looking down on it from the side of the valley. Most of the roof was gone, the planks taken for our tree house, so that I could see inside it. There was no one there. I raised the binoculars, training them out over the lake, looking up to the head of the valley more than a hundred yards away, where the mist was clearing, dissolving, as the sun rose. Suddenly a pair of mallard got up as I watched, just where the stream entered the lake, and the air was briefly filled with their craking squawks.
I saw the burnished blue and green colours of the drake flash past the lenses. And then, right behind where the birds had risen, there was another movement. I would never have seen it, I think, but for the contrast in the colours: the dark face against the remains of the white mist. I focused the glasses more exactly. It was a man, right down on his haunches by the water as if he’d been drinking there, partly hidden by a clump of reeds, a man turning his head quickly now as he followed the startled flight of the birds. He wasn’t naked. He wore a loose green camouflage jacket and tan trousers. Certainly he wasn’t Ross. This man had a cloche of wiry hair above a thin face. And he was dark-skinned, with a long torso and thighs, almost lanky: an African, I thought.
When I looked again at the clump of reeds there was no one there, just the sun beginning to tip over the head of the lake, melting away the mist. An African? Was I dreaming? Or had it been some trick in the early-morning light, the skin of a white or sunburnt man showing up that way, in some strange refraction coming through the mist or off the water?
Then I remembered the old Army camouflage jacket. That detail had been real enough. It worried me suddenly. Someone, recently, had been wearing just the same thing — and it had worried me, yes. But where and why? Then I had it: the man who’d burst into our cottage and shot Laura. How could I have forgotten his dress? And the same man, a few weeks before Laura had been shot, when we’d been out walking behind our cottage with the Bensons after Sunday lunch: the man I’d seen then, in the distance, hurrying away from us along the hedge, the surprising, lone hiker in the middle of the wolds, a tall figure with a pork-pie hat pulled down so that I hadn’t seen his face. He’d been wearing just the same sort of camouflage jacket; one of Ross’s men, sent down from London to scout the land out before he’d come to shoot me a few weeks later.
The thought of this banished any fear I might have had, standing alone in the woods just then with a defenceless child. And suddenly I was filled once more with an overwhelming anger and bitterness — just as I’d been during my first weeks alone in the woods after Laura’s death. It came to me again now, a keen, fresh sense of violence and retribution.
This man was Laura’s killer, and one of Ross’s men: I was sure of that. But had he found us? Did he know we were here, or had we luckily spotted him first?