away.
‚Have you ever been shooting?' Fiona asked.
‚No,' Alex said.
‚I go hunting and shooting,' Fiona said. ‚But of course, you’re a city boy. You wouldn’t understand.'
‚What’s so great about killing animals?' Alex asked.
‚It’s part of the country way of life. It’s tradition.' Fiona looked at him as if he were stupid.
It was how she always looked at him. ‚Anyway, the animals enjoy it.'
The shooting party turned out to be young and—apart from Fiona—entirely male. Five of them were waiting on the edge of a forest that was part of the Haverstock estate. Rufus, the leader, was sixteen and well built with dark, curling hair. He seemed to be Fiona’s boyfriend.
The others—Henry, Max, Bartholomew, and Fred—were about the same age. Alex looked at them with a heavy heart. They had uniform Barbour jackets, tweed trousers, flat caps, and Huntsman leather boots. They spoke with uniform upper-class accents. Each of them carried a shotgun, with the barrel broken over his arm. Two of them were smoking. They gazed at Alex with barely concealed contempt. Fiona must have already told them about him. The city boy.
Quickly, she made the introductions. Rufus stepped forward.
‚Nice to have you with us,' he drawled. He ran his eyes over Alex, not bothering to hide his contempt. ‚Up for a bit of shooting, are you?'
‚I don’t have a gun,' Alex said.
‚Well, I’m afraid I’m not going to lend you mine.' Rufus snapped the barrel back into place and held it up for Alex to see. It was a beautiful gun, with twenty-five inches of gleaming steel stretching out of a dark walnut stock decorated with ornately carved, solid silver sideplates.
‚It’s an over-and-under shotgun with detachable trigger lock, handmade by Abbiatico and Salvinelli,' he said. ‚It cost me thirty grand—or my mother, anyway. It was a birthday present.'
‚It couldn’t have been easy to wrap,' Alex said. ‚Where did she put the ribbon?'
Rufus’s smile faded. ‚You wouldn’t know anything about guns,' he said. He nodded at one of the other teenagers, who handed Alex a much more ordinary weapon. It was old and a little rusty. ‚You can use this one,' he said. ‚And if you’re very good and don’t get in the way, maybe we’ll let you have a bullet.'
They all laughed at that. Then the two smokers put out their cigarettes and everyone set off into the woods.
Thirty minutes later, Alex knew he had made a mistake in coming. The boys blasted away left and right, aiming at anything that moved. A rabbit spun in a glistening red ball. A wood pigeon tumbled out of the branches and flapped around on the leaves below. Whatever the quality of their weapons, the teenagers weren’t good shots. The animals they managed to hit were only wounded, and Alex felt a growing sickness, following this trail of blood.
They reached a clearing and paused to reload. Alex turned to Fiona. ‚I’m going back to the house,' he said.
‚Why? Can’t stand the sight of a little blood?'
Alex glanced at a hare about fifty feet away. It was lying on its side with its back legs kicking helplessly. ‚I’m surprised they let you carry guns,' he said. ‚I thought you had to be seventeen.'
Rufus overheard him. He stepped forward, an ugly look in his eyes. ‚We don’t bother with rules in the countryside,' he muttered.
‚Maybe Alex wants to call a policeman!' Fiona said.
‚The nearest police station is forty miles from here,' Rufus said with a cold smile.
‚Do you want to borrow my cell phone?' one of the other boys asked.
They all laughed again. Alex had had enough. Without saying another word, he turned around and walked off.
It had taken him thirty minutes to reach the clearing, but thirty minutes later he was still stuck in the woods, completely surrounded by trees and wild shrubs. Alex realized he was lost.
He was annoyed with himself. He should have watched where he was going when he was following Fiona and the others. The forest was enormous. Walk in the wrong direction and he might blunder onto the North Yorkshire moors … and it could be days before he was found. At the same time, the spring foliage was so thick that he could barely see ten yards in any direction. How could he possibly find his way? Should he try to retrace his steps or continue forward in the hope of stumbling on the right path?
Alex sensed danger before the first shot was fired. Perhaps it was the snapping of a twig or the click of a metal bolt being slipped into place. He froze—and that was what saved him. There was an explosion—loud, close —and a tree one step ahead of him shattered, splinters of wood dancing in the air.
Alex turned around, searching for whoever had fired the shot. ‚What are you doing?' he shouted. ‚You nearly hit me!'
Almost immediately there was a second shot and, just behind it, a whoop of excited laughter. And then Alex realized what was happening: They hadn’t mistaken him for an animal. They were aiming at him for fun.
He dived forward and began to run. The trunks of the trees seemed to press in on him from all sides, threatening to bar his way. The ground underneath was soft from recent rain and dragged at his feet, trying to glue them into place. There was a third explosion. He ducked, feeling the gunshot spray above his head, shredding the foliage.
Anywhere else in the world, this would have been madness. But this was the middle of the English countryside and these were rich, bored teenagers who were used to having things their own way. Somehow, Alex had insulted them. Perhaps it had been the jibe about the wrapping paper. Perhaps it was his refusal to tell Fiona who he really was. But they had decided to teach him a lesson, and they would worry about the consequences later. Did they mean to kill him?
‚We don’t bother with rules in the countryside,' Rufus had said. If Alex was badly wounded—
or even killed—they would somehow get away with it.
No. That was impossible.
They were trying to scare him—that was all.
Two more shots. A pheasant erupted out of the ground, a ball of spinning feathers, and screamed up into the sky. Alex ran on, his breath rasping in his throat. A thick briar reached out across his chest and tore at his clothes. He still had the gun he had been given, and he used it to beat a way through. A tangle of roots almost sent him sprawling.
‚Alex? Where are you?' The voice belonged to Rufus. It was high-pitched and mocking, coming from the other side of a barrier of leaves. There was another shot, but this one went high over his head. They couldn’t see him. Had he escaped?
No, he hadn’t. Alex came to a stumbling, sweating halt. He had broken out of the woods but he was still hopelessly lost. Worse—he was trapped. He had come to the edge of a wide, filthy lake. The water was a scummy brown and looked almost solid. No ducks or wild birds came anywhere near the surface. The evening sun beat down on it and the smell of decay drifted up.
‚He went that way!'
‚No … through here!'
‚Let’s try the lake.'
Alex heard the voices and knew that he couldn’t let them find him here. He had a sudden image of his body, weighed down with stones, at the bottom of the lake. But that gave him an idea. He had to hide.
He stepped into the water. He would need something to breathe through. He had seen people do this in films. They would lie in the water and breathe through a hollow reed. But there were no reeds here. Apart from grass and thick, slimy algae, nothing was growing at all.
