The Hunger Trace Read online

  Louisa knew. She had seen them, racing to the trough of frozen water on Christmas Day. Through the big window, she had seen Maggie on his shoulders, changing a light bulb in the dining room.

  Maggie looked at Fred. ‘Did David like the birds?’ she asked.

  Louisa frowned. ‘He liked to look at them. After a certain stage, hunting didn’t interest him anymore. He lost the blood lust.’

  ‘Oh yeah. He was a softie.’

  ‘So he never talked about my hawks to you, then?’ Louisa said.

  ‘No,’ said Maggie, then shook her head. ‘But he talked about you all the time.’

  Louisa laughed immoderately. ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘He did,’ Maggie said. ‘He absolutely loved you.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Louisa said, quieter.

  Maggie began to laugh and then cry. Louisa thought it might only last a few seconds, but it didn’t. She rummaged in the van’s dark interior for something with which Maggie could wipe her eyes, but could find only towels smeared with blood and bird shit. Maggie did not wait; she wiped her nose on her sleeve, and then folded the cuff over, tutting. ‘I haven’t had a good cry in ages,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m a terrible baby,’ Maggie said.

  ‘You are young,’ Louisa said.

  ‘It’s just . . . This isn’t how I saw things working out.’

  Louisa looked around and smiled in a tired way. ‘No. I’ll bet.’

  ‘I would give anything to make Christopher happy again,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Well. What does he want?’ Louisa said.

  ‘What does he want? I don’t know. A family? He talks about having a family a lot. Getting married and stuff. He’s just a kid.’

  Louisa nodded, seeing the many barriers to that goal beyond Christopher’s youth.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much I can do to help him with that,’ Maggie said. ‘Short of getting him a mail-order bride, which, I believe, he has already looked into.’

  Louisa smiled. Maggie put her arms out to the side. ‘I just don’t know what to do,’ she said.

  ‘You could do what I do,’ Louisa said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You take all the feelings, and you screw them into a big ball and bury them in the pit of your stomach.’

  Maggie laughed and put her hands on Louisa’s face, one on each cheek. The left hand was still warm and damp from the glove, the other very cold. Louisa flinched.

  Louisa’s hallucinations continued that night, but they weren’t all malevolent. Waking, she saw a fragment of Maggie picked out by the lamp: her arm, the buttons on her sleeve leading deep into the glove. Then, later, more white flashes of her.

  That screwed up ball of feelings, buried in her stomach, had begun to unravel.

  * * *

  Over the next month their days took on a tentative rhythm. On the mornings when Louisa did not have a clearance job, Maggie helped her to weigh, feed and fly the hawks. Louisa had bought a female peregrine with the future intention of breeding Diamond, and she allowed Maggie to help train her. In homage to the 1980s naming style of Christopher, they called the bird Caroline.

  In the afternoons, Louisa helped Maggie on the park, repairing fences, and feeding the animals. Louisa could see the relentlessness of Maggie’s desire, the need for work and the craving for exhaustion. It was invigorating to watch. Philip Cassidy occupied himself with other jobs in the enclosures, and kept his own company on the afternoons when Louisa helped out, but that was no surprise.

  Out there on the park, the weather drowned the voices of the two women. They had to lean close to talk. They tramped through the long grass, watching the hedgerows tugged back firmly and slowly like pulled hair. Wallabies bounded uphill.

  Sometimes they were afforded an hour of calm in the late afternoon, the brassy light clearing the shade off the hill at the pace of a falling man, the pines casting shadows with a beneficent lean. These were the hours that Maggie would remember later that season, when everything had been lashed to tatters by the floods.

  On 5 November, they went up to the roof of the big house, which was green with moss and bad drainage. There, with old duvets and beers, they sat on ancient garden furniture and watched the fireworks.

  As they clinked bottles, Maggie silently recalled her early exchanges with Louisa. After David died, a consortium of local businessmen and developers had tried to buy the park from Maggie, and she remembered Louisa standing at the back of the Church Hall during the meeting. Maggie had held firm, despite the prising fingers. ‘David did a great job with the park,’ one of the businessmen had said. ‘But I think he’d agree, it’s time for a change.’

  ‘You’re looking at it,’ Maggie had said. Philip Cassidy had escorted Maggie through the throng of disgruntled suits, but Louisa had been the first to leave, banging out through the fire exit.

  Maggie looked at Louisa now, hunched up in her coat and blanket, like one of her preening birds. ‘Lou,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but when David died, were you one of the consortium that tried to buy me out?’

  Louisa held her gaze. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Did you really want them to build flats on Drum Hill? Next to your cottage?’

  ‘I didn’t care. I was going to sell my land and my home – everything that David left me – to the consortium, and just move away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anywhere but this hill. I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘But when the bid fell through, you stayed here.’

  ‘Nobody would’ve bought my place on its own, as it was. Without David’s house and land, mine was worth nothing.’

  ‘If you’d have explained, I would have bought the land from you,’ Maggie said.

  ‘And you were the only person in the world I wouldn’t have sold it to.’

  Maggie sipped from her drink. ‘I’m glad you didn’t sell it,’ she said, not expecting a reply.

  ‘So am I,’ Louisa said.

  That night, finally, Louisa talked. She talked about her father, whose big ears glowed red when he got angry, and her brothers, who sometimes fought each other in the middle of the road. She talked about her dream of starting a breeding business, the dual chambers she would build, and her part in the original peregrine breeding programme – the hand-reared bird who, believing himself to be human, took Louisa for a mate. She had collected his seed in a rubber hat she wore. ‘You’re saying you fucked your falcon?’ Maggie said.

  ‘No. He fucked me. He was the man. That was very clear.’

  Maggie put a hand to her mouth, scandalised and disbelieving; Louisa offered to fetch the hat as proof, and so Maggie conceded. Rockets whistled in the distance.

  Maggie herself spoke of her time back in London, her tight group of friends who had long given up calling. ‘I couldn’t expect them to understand this life,’ she said. ‘Or how I felt about David. How I still feel.’

  She felt the tone of Louisa’s silence change at the further mention of David’s name, and so she desisted, happy enough to quietly recognise David’s part in this new and unexpected friendship.

  When the sparklers had died, when the burger vans had taken their headlights away and the sprays of colour had faded to faint purple scrapes of smoke, they contented themselves with watching the many bonfires down in the valley, the crumpling guys at their centres.

  Walking home, Louisa felt the happiness rising inside her and managed to curb the instinct to strangle that good feeling. It lasted far into the night, and even alone in her bed she recalled snatches of conversation. Lord knows how long it had been since someone had thrown back their head and laughed at anything Louisa had said. There was a moment of panic, when she thought of all the things she had revealed to Maggie, but for once, the panic passed. After all, there were other stories, more deeply buried.

  EIGHT

  On the first leg of the Hunting Challenge, Louisa and David took Jacko out.
It rained heavily, and he would hardly fly. The session lasted an hour and Louisa felt crushed. It was one of the only times a falcon had failed her, and even then it seemed more like her own physical deficiency. David apparently perceived this, and promised to tell his friends that Louisa Smedley couldn’t get it up.

  Much happened in the intervening weeks: the weather cleared, and spring arrived. The smell of cut grass and cold stone spiked the air, and birthing sheep lay prostrate and helpless. The hawking season drew towards its close, and for once, Louisa did not feel like locking herself in the moulting shed for six months.

  The Bryant household was tense in February 1975. The previous year, Leicestershire, along with much of the region, had swung back to Labour. There was talk of change at local level, and Lawrence Bryant, fearing for his job, came down with what he called ‘flu’. Until his early twenties, David believed that the symptoms of influenza were blocked sinuses, moodswings and acute paranoia. David’s father spent the day before the second leg of the challenge in bed.

  Even had Lawrence been well, David saw no sense in asking for permission to use his gun. David had always been told that when he was seventeen he would be old enough to purchase his own shotgun, and therefore old enough to make his own decisions.

  As a child, David had watched his father’s last driven shoot, somewhere near Foston. He remembered the cold, and little else. Lawrence suffered a back injury soon after, which forced him into a bitter retirement from his hobby. So while many of his country friends were being introduced at a very young age to all aspects of field sports, David was permitted only a small air rifle – a .410 – with which he had killed about six rabbits in the extensive family garden. Once, when he was drunk on his mother’s port, he had shot a squirrel from his bedroom window, but the pellet went straight through the torso, and the vermin escaped up the tree trunk with no apparent injury. That was the total of his life’s bag.

  With his father bedridden, and his mother occupied with worry, it proved no great feat for David to enter his father’s shed, which stank of linseed oil and damp, take the old twelve-bore along with a box of cartridges, and put them in his cricket bag. When his family woke to find his bed empty, they assumed he was walking the dogs, as usual.

  Louisa waited for him at the boundary gate of the field on the outskirts of the village. The cold grip of night loosened drip by drip from the fence planks and the roadside lamps. She could hear the canal. David was late. It appeared that he was unaccustomed to rising at dawn, but Louisa had already developed an uncharacteristic patience with David rivalled only by her forbearance when training eyasses.

  She was also aware that letting David triumph in their hunting wager (which he would now surely do) might work in her favour. In her mind, the relationship had progressed quickly, and she had begun to see herself as a stabiliser, a scaffold for him. In this way, he had given her a purpose which she had otherwise failed to find outside of falconry. She admired his extrovert nature and his talent with people; to someone so lacking in these areas, he was like a magician.

  When she saw him slogging up the hill with his cricket bag and a black spaniel, she did not know what she had been expecting; a Labrador and a couple of Land Rovers, perhaps. Or a large group of aristocratic men. The dog got to her first and licked the palm of her hand. ‘Where are we going?’ Louisa said.

  He nodded to the woodland enclosure beyond the first field. Louisa knew it. She also knew the sour old owner of the surrounding arable land, the stubble fields and corn. ‘It’s a bit close to home,’ she said. ‘Is your dad the tenant? I couldn’t get permission to fly my hawks here. Maybe you could have a word—’

  ‘My dad’s not the tenant. I happen to know that the tenant is absent.’

  They climbed the stile and began to walk the bridleway, which was cattle-trod, peaked and frosty in the shade. ‘So we’re poaching,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody’s going to miss a few rabbits.’

  Louisa shook her head. In the early days, she had been just as rash, trespassing on farmland to steal eggs, hunting magpies in the orchards of her neighbours. These days, though, she asked permission.

  ‘I was expecting good quality plonk and high-class people. Isn’t that what happens? The ritual of the kill?’

  ‘Yes, well. I’ve become solitary,’ he said, frowning, and then laughed at his own nonsense.

  In fact, the thought of watching a driven shoot from the sidelines, with all that snooty affectation and the grating subservience of the beaters, had filled Louisa with nervous dread. She liked the idea of David as a rough shooter, even if the signals said he did not want her to meet the family just yet.

  At the outskirts of the woodland, as he sent the dog into the pillow softness of the ferns, she studied the back of his neck. It was strong, the collar flush against the skin, tiny blond hairs dampened by a milky sweat, like sap. When he stopped in front of her, she leaned into him, not without intention.

  Around mid-morning, a rabbit bolted from the grass, and David fired his right barrel, missed. The noise startled a murder of crows and he swung the gun upwards and fired again, into the black. He hit fresh air. ‘You didn’t follow through,’ Louisa said.

  David looked around, listened to the atmosphere settle. Louisa was worried about the possibility of a gamekeeper, but there was no human reaction. ‘Looks like the only person around here who’s going to miss a couple of rabbits is you,’ Louisa said.

  They shared Louisa’s sandwiches, standing up. David was ravenous, his body clearly baffled by the early start.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘My father. He’s afraid of losing his job. And he’s not well, really.’

  ‘He’s a powerful man, though, right? What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He thinks the world is going to end.’

  Louisa looked around. ‘Nice day for it.’

  They finished their food quietly and walked on in the silence that the shoot demanded. Louisa hoped that David felt the same satisfaction she did. Perhaps she was the person with whom he could shed his clown act. She relaxed into that cradled space she inhabited when out with her hawks. Across the stubble fields, through the corn and the bracken, their shadows stretched, David’s crumpled like a garment over the fences. The light was soft, and their breathing slipped in and out of synchronicity. They did not find any release pens; feed hoppers leaked corn for the pheasants but the birds were not to be tempted out of hiding. The only other signs of men were in the angular stands of commercial woodland. The sky ruled, spilling blueness onto the patches of straw-like grass that bordered the fields. Later, they saw a barn owl, the head so human, so still. David’s gun hung empty and open over his arm for much of the walk, but that seemed irrelevant somehow.

  ‘You ready to head back?’ David said.

  Louisa looked at the sun, which was large and low now. ‘Yes, let’s go.’

  As they crossed the final field and approached the canal bridge, Louisa saw a flash of iridescent green in the tangle of overgrown hawthorn acting as a hedgerow. She turned to David; he had seen it too. He loaded cartridges as the dog stalked through the long grass. ‘David,’ Louisa whispered. ‘The dog needs to get behind the hedge, flush towards us.’

  ‘It’s a pheasant,’ said David. ‘It’ll go vertical. We’ll walk it up.’

  Louisa shook her head. They moved to within thirty yards of the hedgerow. The light was poor, but if the bird came up above the height of the first houses of the village, it would be nicely silhouetted against the sun.

  David had little control over his dog, which charged into the cover of its own will, flushing the cock pheasant, which came up briefly and then dipped lower, curling away from the back of the hedge. David fired twice, once as the cock rose, and again when it dropped lower. There was the echo, and the silence. ‘I think I got it,’ David said, marching to the scene.

  ‘Too close to the dog for my liking,’ Louisa said, following ten paces behind.

 
; She would always remember him, opening his weapon, walking towards the sun. She did not even have to squint, because the light was so soft. The noise he made on recoiling from the hedge was strangled and inarticulate. It was a cattle noise, the kind you make when you surface from a bad dream. She was surprised that he should be so upset by a dead bird. But then she saw the pheasant gliding, tar-black, into the distance, and she knew something was wrong. She moved towards the hedge. David walked past her in the opposite direction, coughing and heaving.

  A child lay behind the hawthorn. Louisa had already worked with animals long enough to know death when she saw it. She did not beg the child to wake, or reach through the thorns to shake him. She walked briskly to the gate, went through to the other side, and examined the body.

  The gun had a tight choke. Shot had ruptured the right eye, and smashed the skull like damp wood. There had been no time to scream. Louisa looked with some wonder at the boy’s left ear, which was perfect and intricate, untouched by the damage.

  The disturbance which finally pierced Louisa’s shock was a rapidly growing sense that she recognised the boy. How could this be? He wore scruffy clothes: a ragged little coat, grey shorts, socks pulled up to the knees. She guessed him to be five years old. He was weak and dirty. She lifted his left eyelid and saw the stunning brown eye of Anna Cliff. The breath went out of her. But they had taken the children away from her years ago, hadn’t they? Louisa could not understand. ‘Shouldn’t be here,’ she said. Blood ran from the child’s nose, down the side of his face.

  Louisa went back to the gate to find David walking away, the gun and his cricket bag lying in the grass.

  When she caught up with him, he seemed calm, but he began to cry freely and horribly the moment he looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he said. He spoke violently through his tears, like he was issuing a command, as though, she thought later, he could drive the feeling away. She took him by the shoulders to stop him walking and he dropped to his knees, taking her down with him. He convulsed against her. ‘Maybe he was already dead. Maybe it wasn’t me,’ he said. They both knew better. The blood was fresh. There was no doubt. ‘No, David,’ Louisa said.