Once the last shot had rung out, the kennels had been silent for the first time in 163 years. After that his night-time soliloquies brought no comfort or pleasure. There were no braves to listen in the darkness, nor history for them to be part of.
No wife, no children. He had never had the time.
His only legacy now was his own bitter memory of warm bodies piled high, and the undignified wrestle to feed the stiffened carcasses into the flames.
He had destroyed the only things he’d ever cared about.
The pain was overwhelming. He gripped the wire gate and focused.
The child before him looked like John Took. Something about the eyes and the shape of the mouth was very like her father. She held out her empty bucket and moved her father’s lips.
Unconsciously, Bob Coffin touched the warm cotton of his overalls and felt the weight of the cold gun beneath it.
Everything was coming to an end.
Again.
61
REYNOLDS COULDN’T UNDERSTAND a word Teddy said. Or even how he said it.
Every syllable appeared to be agony and took an eternity. His head wagged, his chin jerked, his eyes screwed up and his hands flapped.
And yet Teddy’s mother nodded at Reynolds and Rice throughout each garbled passage and then translated it all into English. It was like watching a medium at work, cocking her ear at knocks and swaying curtains, and deciphering them into a message about Uncle Arthur’s missing will.
Except that the message Mrs Loosemore received was far more interesting than one from a dead uncle.
Reynolds and Rice walked to the car in silence, but the looks they exchanged held a thing called hope that neither of them had experienced for quite some time.
Because he knew less than nothing about hunting, Reynolds called John Took and put him on speakerphone for Rice to hear. He asked him about the white tape.
Took said, ‘Hunt servants use white tape on their whips so they can be identified easily in the field.’
‘Hunt servants?’ said Reynolds.
‘Employees of the hunt.’
‘And do you have any enemies among the ranks of hunt employees?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Took.
Rice mouthed, ‘Shit.’
Reynolds very nearly hung up. Then he remembered the man in the yard below the helicopter. Waving like a cannibal at the iron bird in the sky. Reynolds got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘Mr Took, we flew over the hunt kennels a few weeks back.’
‘Yes,’ said Took. ‘They’re empty now.’
‘But we saw a man there,’ said Reynolds carefully.
‘That’ll be Bob Coffin. Our old huntsman. He still lives in the cottage. For a bit. The place’ll be sold off this winter.’
The feeling in Reynolds’s gut splashed through his body like spilled milk. A sick, excited feeling that he’d never felt before. Never believed he
He tried to deny it. Tried to suppress it. But it defied him.
It was a hunch.
He was having a fucking hunch!
He tried to keep his voice from shaking. ‘There’s an incinerator there, right?’
‘Yes. We’ve got an incinerator up there,’ said John Took.
‘What’s it for?’
‘For burning what’s left of the fallen stock after it’s been slaughtered for the dogs. Hoofs and hides and the like.’
‘But why would the incinerator be in use if the kennels are empty?’
There was a silence on the line that seemed to last for the whole of Reynolds’s life up to that moment.
‘It shouldn’t be,’ said John Took.
The incinerator roared softly to life and the children pricked up their ears like Dobermanns.
Even Jonas felt the dull flames in his stomach as he scrape-scrape-scraped the link on the cement immediately in front of his face.
The knives started to sharpen, and saliva trickled into his mouth. It disgusted him, but he couldn’t help it. It was a relief, in fact. He’d drunk the last of his water yesterday, and his tongue already felt too big, as if it were trying to crowd down his sticky throat.
The children pressed diamonds into their own meagre flesh as they squeezed themselves against the fence, their eyes fixed unwaveringly on the big shed. They waited for the rumble of the trolley piled with meat.
But it never came.
In the big shed Bob Coffin took the coupling chains from the hooks on the wall.
They would give him something to hold them still by.
62
RICE DROVE AS fast as the roads allowed.
At least.
Reynolds kept his right foot pressed hard on the brake he didn’t have and – now and then – slapped a steadying hand on the dashboard.
‘Sorry,’ Rice said, after one particularly close shave with a caravan.
‘Not at all,’ said Reynolds. He assumed Rice had done the Advanced Driver course, but thought that now would be a poor time to double-check.
He leaned forward and tilted his head to the left to peer into the wing mirror. They’d lost the other three cars in the convoy somewhere. They should really wait for them, but Reynolds wasn’t about to slow Rice down. His hunch had segued into a feeling of such imminent disaster – such impending doom – that getting to the hunt kennels as fast as humanly possible was the only thing that mattered. He’d already summoned ambulances from Weston and Minehead, and the police helicopter from Filton. He didn’t care who got there first, as long as they got there fast.
He sat up straight again, and fake-braked through an S-bend.
‘I was getting worried it was Jonas,’ said Rice.
‘Me too.’ He nodded.
‘I’m glad it’s not.’
‘Me too,’ he admitted, and braced himself for a collision with a bank of trees that loomed across the road.
‘Your hair looks good,’ said Rice.
Reynolds was surprised. ‘Thanks.’ He touched his fringe self-consciously.
Rice swung around a hairpin, then stamped on the accelerator and picked up frightening speed on a rare straight.
They passed a group of deer so fast they didn’t even have time to scatter, only to flinch and then stand and quiver post-fright. In his wing mirror, Reynolds saw the buck pointing after them, its dark nose raised and its antlers laid along its back in fury.
He wished he hadn’t looked.
