The Hunger Trace Read online

  Louisa put her finger under Diamond’s tail and reversed him onto cast-iron scales modified with a perch at one end. She could feel Maggie behind her, taking everything in. A mobile phone vibrated, but Maggie made no move to answer it. This was the one sound in the room while both women looked at Diamond. His figure was stark against the white tiles behind. The covert feathers were the grey of wet stone, his breast was striped with black bars, and the top-knot of his hood spiralled up. His feet were the major weapons – his size fifteens, Louisa called them: huge talons grew from gnarled toes and arced back into the wood of the perch. He was an old boy now, and one talon was missing.

  ‘He’s a knockout,’ Maggie whispered.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louisa, writing his weight onto a large whiteboard covered with imperial figures in tiny squares. ‘My number one guy.’

  ‘You know, I met this falconer the other day, at the butchers. Guy called Mick?’

  ‘I know him,’ Louisa said. He was a leering psychobilly who had done time for hitting a neighbour with a sock full of batteries. But he loved his hawks.

  ‘Do you? He’s quite funny, isn’t he?’

  ‘If you like that sort of thing.’

  ‘Bit of a ruffian, you know. He was saying his birds increased his appeal with the ladies.’

  ‘He needs all the help he can get, I imagine,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Ha. Right. What was the phrase he used? Bitch magnet. That’s it. He said the hawks were a bitch magnet.’

  ‘Well. Here you are,’ Louisa said. She watched the smile on Maggie’s face fade as the insult registered. Maggie’s breath curled up from her slightly open mouth.

  ‘You didn’t come here to talk about Mick, I presume,’ Louisa said.

  ‘No. I’ve been having trouble with Christopher. He isn’t doing very well. He misses David, of course.’ Maggie looked down at her boots, their pointed tips darkly discoloured from the wet grass of the bank. ‘But he has his other issues, too.’

  Louisa took Diamond back onto her fist by nudging his legs from behind, and they went back outside. She could not imagine why Maggie would want to talk to her about her family problems, but then she looked around to see no other houses within walking distance.

  ‘I’m running out of ideas. I’ve been trying to get him back into college, but when I ask him what he wants to do he just says, “Formula One”.’ Maggie smiled, but Louisa did not. ‘He used to love me, but nowadays I overhear him talking to the Samaritans and he calls me “The Traitor Maggie Green.”’

  Louisa nodded.

  ‘The other day I saw him standing at the window watching you fly your hawks. You knew his father so well, and for a lot longer than I did,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And you probably know Christopher better, too, having lived here all this time.’

  Louisa did not respond. She remembered when Christopher was born. His mother, Cynthia, at one time the face and body of a TV advert for cereal, had hated the park from the moment she arrived. She had moaned about the smell of the place, and the coarse hairs of the various animals, which clung to her clothes. It had quickly become clear that Christopher was wired differently, and – with a little help from Louisa – Cynthia had left soon after the boy’s third birthday.

  ‘I just thought you might be able to show him the birds,’ Maggie said. Her phone began to vibrate, and again she ignored it.

  Louisa smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t mean teach him falconry or anything. If he really takes to it, I’ll send him on a course.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t even need to handle them. He could just watch,’ Maggie said.

  ‘He could do that from the window.’

  ‘He does.’ Maggie frowned. ‘I thought it might be nice for him to get closer. He seems interested in what you do.’

  ‘Can’t really let him near the birds.’

  ‘But I thought you did falconry days for the public. The birds are manned, aren’t they?’

  Louisa noted the use of terminology. Maggie had clearly been reading up. ‘Obviously my display hawks are fully manned. If he wants to come to one of the demonstrations in the summer, he can stand behind the rope. But I’m very busy, and besides, I can’t have Christopher near the hawks. He’s too unpredictable.’

  Maggie fell silent. Finally, she said, ‘Oh.’

  Louisa saw Philip Cassidy, the head keeper at the Wildlife Park, approaching across the field. ‘It would be irresponsible of me. To the birds and to him. People seem to think you can just—’

  Maggie raised her hand. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

  There was a moment of silence before Philip arrived. Maggie greeted him. When Philip spoke, Diamond turned his hooded head to the sound of the new voice. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone,’ Philip said. ‘But I suppose you’ve been busy.’ He shot a look at Louisa. They had once been colleagues on the park.

  ‘What’s happening? Have you found anything?’ Maggie said.

  ‘It’s bad news, duck. One down on the ibex headcount,’ Philip said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Maggie said.

  ‘And there’s other animals missing. Four fences cut, and they broke into the medical centre.’

  Maggie put one hand to her mouth and the other on Philip’s shoulder. Louisa watched her long fingers extend. ‘Jesus. I’ll come straight back,’ Maggie said. She turned to Louisa. ‘Thank you, again, for today.’

  Louisa nodded. She wanted to say that she was sorry about the missing animals, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  On Christmas morning of the year that Maggie arrived, Louisa had stood at the boundary of her land and watched them. She was obscured from their view by a stand of birches, but could see Maggie and Christopher sprinting up the hill on David’s ‘Go’, towards a trough of frozen water. Maggie let Christopher pass and win the race in his shorts and Wellingtons. He touched the trough and sank to his knees, spitting a greeny that he had to detach with his hand. ‘I’m. Erm. Breathing out of my rump,’ he shouted. Maggie dragged him up, lifting his hand in the air. ‘The winner,’ she cried. Even from that distance, Louisa could see the admiring look the boy gave Maggie.

  Christopher and Maggie turned to the trough and on the count of three kicked through the crust of ice, Christopher squealing at the cold water splashing over his thighs. The miniature zebu came slowly out of the mist for their drink – perfectly proportioned tiny cows, screwing up perspective so you never knew how close they were until you touched them. David roared with laughter.

  They were at the edge of Louisa’s visual range, but starkly delineated against the milky fog. She turned back to her cottage.

  Until then, Louisa had pinned her life to two desires: David Bryant and her hawks. At the age of forty-seven, she could look back and see that almost every decision had been taken with one or both of those concerns in mind. There was profundity in the care of a hawk: the relegation of needs, the pain taken over one ounce of weight, the thrill of watching them hunt. They were like gods to her, especially Diamond. As for David, she had come to realise that it was not so incredible to give a whole life to another person and receive so little in return. It was probably a lot like having a husband.

  Seeing the three of them together on that Christmas day, Louisa had reached a decision. Having outlasted all of the glamorous women whom David had courted, Louisa had been defeated by five minutes of playtime.

  After a few months of financial consolidation, Louisa had walked the hundred yards or so to the big house and quit her job as park falconer. David sat in his ground-floor office, the skin of dust on the threadbare red carpet given sheen by the weak light coming through the bow window behind his head. She squinted as she told him she was going solo; she’d maybe start breeding, or set up in avian clearance.

  ‘You’ll probably make out better than the park,’ he said with a smile. ‘You’ll come back and do the odd show, won’
t you?’

  ‘Not sure,’ she said.

  She slid her staff keys onto his desk. It was a purely symbolic gesture. The keys had made teethmarks in her palm, but she knew that David wouldn’t notice. He studied the bunch. His blond-grey hair was lighter in colour than her own. ‘Louisa, you know I brought you here, to the Drum Hill, because—’

  ‘I brought myself here.’

  ‘I know. But I wanted you here because of your skill. And your friendship. I never felt obligated because of what you did for me.’

  She sighed.

  ‘But I was always grateful.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  She walked home, stemming the tears by force of will, mocked by the stupid moans of his misfit animals. In this way, she did her grieving early. When he dropped down dead on the hill that summer, she thought back to when they last spoke in his office, but could conjure nothing beyond his shape against the light behind his desk.

  The first year after David’s death, Louisa stayed out of the village as much as possible. She did not want to hear about the sorrows of others. She knew they called her a hermit, and when they did, she always thought of Anna Cliff, the reclusive woman from the village where Louisa and David had grown up, with her necklace of scar tissue. Perhaps it was penance that she should end up like Anna Cliff, the woman whose life they had destroyed. Louisa tried to push such thoughts from her mind.

  In the end, there was nowhere else to go, and the only thing worse than the sly glances in her direction was the absence of such glances, so she returned to the White Hart for its sweet punishment. She suspected that everything she felt was sketched on her face, so she downed Guinness until the page was blank.

  Louisa was in the Hart the day after they recaptured the ibex, suddenly greedy for news from the park. But the patrons soon began to irritate her. They talked about the break-in, which provoked polarised debate. Activists, some said. A couple of the regulars said the place was now a liability. Since David died, they said, things had gone slack. What if a young ’un happened upon one of those great big bloody cats?

  Most of them felt sympathy for Maggie. Nobody mentioned Louisa’s part in the rescue of the ibex, and Louisa did not say that she had seen a lone figure on the park the night before.

  Richie Foxton, the butcher, his eyes nigh on the same colour as his pint of Pedigree, spoke up for Maggie. ‘She’s faced many a trial since David passed,’ he said.

  ‘Right enough. It’s a tough ask,’ said Bill Wicks, the landlord, ‘running a place like that on your lonesome.’

  Philip Cassidy smiled into his drink, refusing, as usual, to rise to the bait.

  ‘Aye, she’s a game lass though, in’t she?’

  Richie Foxton glazed over. ‘Yeah, she’s grand. Sommat about her, in’t there? Sommat in her eyes.’

  ‘A bloody dollar sign,’ Louisa said. She’d had enough. Enough being six and a half pints. ‘You don’t know anything about her. What she’s like. So before you start speaking ill of the dead—’

  She slammed her glass down on the bar, knocking over Richie Foxton’s as she did so. The accident broke her chain of thought. ‘Oh shit. Sorry. Are you okay? Can I get you another?’

  Foxton frowned. He looked childish and uncomfortable in his wet trousers. Philip Cassidy stood from his stool and stared at Louisa. She got out fast, feeling idiotic and hungry, but without the energy to contemplate a meal. From the bottom of the hill, the trees were like a mushroom cloud frozen in the second after detonation. She felt consoled by the thought of the nights drawing in.

  TWO

  The walls of the gritstone gorge rose high above Detton village. In the soft light, the cliff-face looked tooth-marked and bruised, like half a discarded apple. Above the face lay a green scalp of land patched with enclosures, the big old house, a diving board, and the woods, through which Maggie carefully picked her way, looking for clues. Autumn’s gravity created movement and noises everywhere. Clouds diffused the sun like lampshades, giving all objects an internal luminescence, their shadows falling at strange angles. Maggie found herself alert to the cascade of dead branches, and startled by the sudden appearance of the fibreglass triceratops, mottled as he was by fallen leaves.

  A week had passed since the animals had been released, and she was alert to news from the village. The issue of the park’s safety had been raised at the Parish Council meeting, and certain villagers were only too pleased to drum up panic. The stories resounded and grew, and by the time they got back to Maggie they were garish: dogs went into gardens to do their business and came back missing an ear; cats, if they came back at all, did so with acute nervous disorders and started pissing on the carpet. The Rileys said they saw something like a wolf in their garden, and Mrs Nettles reported a giant bird in her apple tree, although no birds had escaped.

  It was the newspapers that infuriated Maggie. That week’s Derbyshire Herald had taken the opportunity to resuscitate the perennial story of the big cat, known locally as the Beast of Belton. A farmer in Wirksworth had found one of his sheep ‘torn to pieces’, and his cattle had bolted across the road, smashing through an iron gate, to get away from the mystery predator. The article featured close-up photographs of paw-prints in mud, an archive head shot of a beautiful melanistic jaguar, and a good deal of hearsay and conjecture. The connection with Drum Hill Wildlife Park was explicitly made.

  During her extensive searches in the village, however, Maggie found verifiable sightings rare. She had spoken to the children of Class 5A at the Detton Primary School, who had watched for ten glorious minutes as some kind of horned goat danced proudly across the coloured rings and game lines of the icy playground. Miss McArthur, their teacher, had allowed the pupils to crowd the window and watch. She told Maggie that the animal had slid through an impossible gap in the fence. It had left faeces and a few drops of blood in the playground. The children drew pictures for Maggie. It was the ibex – the yellow felt-tips made the eyes bright.

  Reverend Sipson had killed the arctic fox in his Peugeot. He had the decency to bring the body to Maggie, wrapped in a tartan blanket. It had looked to him, he said, like a discarded bathmat, until it stood, late and alert against the left headlight. When she knelt to open the blanket on the doorstep, the red blood on the white fur – which was almost blue in the dropping light – reminded her of the fairy tales of her childhood. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ Reverend Sipson said. The man who had buried David. She looked up at him.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Reverend. She was blind.’ Maggie rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Shall we pray?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think she was religious,’ Maggie said, pulling the blanket over the dead fox.

  As she emerged out of the trees now, Maggie wondered how she had ever got into this mess. By the woods stood the disused diving board. It was the high, platform type. The house had once belonged to a wealthy Lady with a young Olympian husband, although the pool itself had been filled with concrete many years before David’s arrival. Along with the house on the hill, the diving board had become something of a Detton landmark, and many of the villagers had been grateful to David, who had arrived in 1987 to stop developers turning the place into a red-brick estate, with his odd menagerie of wallabies, ibex, zebu, European lynx, peccaries, otters and ocelots.

  Commercially speaking, David had timed his venture disastrously – zoos were losing public favour, and you couldn’t just buy a leopard anymore. The laws had tightened and visitor numbers had dropped. When Maggie first arrived at the park, David told her how people had boycotted the place for fear of foot-and-mouth, and then bird flu. He had built an assault course and commissioned the triceratops, stegosaurus, and tyrannosaurus in the woods for the infant visitors, stalling his own extinction with a brave smile. He was always better with the children than with the animals.

  This is what Maggie had been left, and she had taken it with fervour, because – along with Christopher – the park was all she had of him
. She looked up at the underside of the diving platform, where snails hung upside down near a hollow house martin’s nest. She climbed the rusty metal steps. She stopped on the top step, and held the handrail. From there she could view the whole village. She could see the river and the brook pinching Detton between them, the traintracks slicing the landscape, and the fuck-you finger of the mill chimney.

  She had met David in Greenwich Park, where she volunteered at weekends in the Secret Wildlife Garden. She took the unpaid work so she could be close to the deer. She had always been drawn to them; their silent ring in the centre of the enclosure was, for her, the steadily pulsing heart of the park. In March of that year, the vets and trained staff brought in two new stags which the Greenwich Park managers hoped would freshen the genetic mix. They had waited until spring, when the males had cast their antlers. It was a major operation. Maggie was not allowed to handle the animals, but she attended to deal with the minor administrative duties of the day, and to watch. She noticed a man viewing from the other side of the enclosure, talking to the managers. Somebody said he was there to observe the process, that he owned a park up north. She noticed the bulk and weight of him, and wondered why he did not help.

  They had celebrated that night in a pub by the river which was furnished like someone’s living room, low-lit with dark red lamps, sofas and a fireplace by which this man, David, stood to tell his stories. She had never seen anyone so closely shaved. In the red light, the sheen of David’s aftershave was visible in a patch stopping halfway down his neck.

  He told a story about a fight he once had with a huge rugby player, represented by two fists pressed thumb to thumb – ‘hands that wide.’ The rugby player had dumped him in an industrial bin. David had been woken early by a member of the local constabulary. ‘Are you a police officer?’ David had said.