Eat, Drink and Be Buried (14 page)

We gathered at the main entrance. The shooters all wore appropriate dress—light tweeds. Ten or so others were there, including Felicity and Angela.

“I'm disappointed,” I told them. “I thought I'd see at least one female gun.”

Angela wrinkled her nose. “Daddy is a Neanderthal when it comes to activities like this. If there were ever a secret ballot on the subject, I'll bet he'd be against women voting and driving cars.”

All three shooters wore slacks and jackets, not quite sporty but outdoorsy. “At least, you don't pursue them on horseback, like a foxhunt,” I commented.

Felicity shook her head. “It isn't a hunt. All they're doing is culling the herd.”

The roar of engines reverberated across the lawn. Four Land Rovers, modified with extra seats, were followed by a one-and-a-half-ton pickup truck. They pulled up near us and we climbed in the Land Rovers. The drive took us out into the estate grounds west of the castle, a parklike area, thick with gorse and frequent stands of oak and beech. We stopped; the drivers conferred, shouting over the engine noise; then we went on across the seemingly boundless acres of the Harlington estate.

The sky was clear but for some fleeting high nimbus. It was an ideal day. After more bumping over the grass, we stopped to park the vehicles by some massive oaks. The park led off to the near horizon in waves of soft green.

“Over there,” said Norman.

The shooters had alighted and were in a tight bunch, rifles on one shoulder and bandoliers over the other. Norman pointed to a cluster of gorse that had grown to a height of ten feet and covered an area half the size of a football field. At first, none of us could see any movement. Then some sharp eye called out, “On the left—look!”

The head of a deer poked out of a bush, looking around speculatively. “Has it smelled us?” I asked. Richard shook his head. He seemed to be in command of the unit. “They might have heard the engines.” He motioned to the others and they fanned out, moving forward.

“Are they trying to flush the deer out of those bushes?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Angela, who appeared to be well informed, perhaps from previous culls. “They don't want to stampede them, though. Shooting them when they're on the run is hunting technique but they might not get a clean kill that way. In a cull, you want to be sure to kill, not just maim.”

Her eyes were bright, almost predatory, and she was clearly enjoying this. “Let's go this way, the view will be better,” she said, “as the ground gets higher.”

Felicity was watching the shooters, now disappearing over a rise. “I think I'll follow the men with the guns,” she said.

“Do as you please,” said Angela with a shrug. She turned to me. “Coming?” Her eyes were inviting.

We walked over the thick grass; the slope was gently but firmly rising. We could see further now and could make out two of the shooters, some distance apart. Felicity was closing up to them. The others had moved out of sight.

“I suppose they have to make sure they don't hit each other,” I commented.

“Oh, they've all done this before,” Angela said. “Each has his own field of fire.”

The slope was getting steeper and the going slower. We could see three figures now, quite distinctly. One of them was Felicity, but then they all moved out of sight.

We went on up the slope, finally approaching a copse of trees where work had evidently been done recently: cut lengths of tree trunk were neatly stacked.

“A good place for a breather,” Angela said. I needed it, for the climb had been steady. She led the way to some stumps that had been sawn at a height making them ideal stools. We had just reached them when—

The crack of the rifle merged into a hollow whine. A bullet smacked into a tree near us and I stood for a second, rooted to the spot. I looked around for some better shelter. The big oaks were of limited use, for if the person with the gun moved to change the angle, we would be exposed. A matted tangle of high bushes caught my eye. I grabbed Angela's hand and dragged her in that direction. I was expecting to hear a further crack of gunfire at any second. We dived into the bushes, less concerned about thorns than bullets, but we encountered neither. I realized that these were ferns, soft and comforting. We scrambled deeper, pushing the ferns aside, then collapsed onto a flattened area.

As we rolled over closely entwined, Angela squeezed against me, breath coming in gulps, the danger of being shot declining in importance. Her large dark eyes searched my face. She squeezed closer. We kissed, then again more passionately.

Then several times more…I was floating in a sensuous world of soft flesh and a faint but indeterminable perfume. Perhaps it was not perfume at all but a natural and delightful personal fragrance. I was swallowed up in that world and sank deeper and deeper into it. Hazy, exciting mental images swam through my brain and I lost track of time as I floated through space…

My vision cleared. I found myself gazing into a pair of eyes. They were large and brown and beautiful. I was prepared to lose myself in them again when I felt a vague stirring of something wrong…

I tried to push the notion aside but it would not go away. Something was amiss. I struggled to think what it could be, then the thought crystallized. Those eyes!

What had happened to Angela's eyes? They were darker but not as large. They were even a different shape.

The eyes examined me with mild curiosity. A pink tongue appeared, the tip moving slowly and provocatively. It was when a small nose, twitching very slightly, appeared below it among the ferns that I came out of my romantic haze.

The face that was inches away belonged to a fawn, a baby deer. It must have been very young and its parents had not yet taught it to beware of those dangerous beings—humans. The shapely head half-turned as another appeared beside it. This one must have been a few months older, for it was larger and looked more suspicious. Another head poked through and studied us. We might have been models for a class of student deer.

I shook Angela. She gasped some words. I didn't catch any of them except for “again,” then she became aware that I was being distracted. She was starting to get critical about my attention span when she realized that parts of our surroundings were displaying movement. Her eyes widened. The ferns had parted to admit one more curious face and then another.

Angela struggled to her feet, making scathing and unladylike criticisms of the dainty creatures around us. It dawned on me that these ferns were their favorite eating and the parents had probably deposited their offspring here as a sort of Nature's day nursery—one with a built-in food supply.

Slowly and carefully, I parted the ferns to see a clearing where a dozen of the tiny, graceful creatures were nibbling away. Food was of more interest to them than two members of a strange subspecies engaged in some bizarre ritual.

I hated to disturb their tea party but neither could I make it clear to them that this was a matter of life and death. It was probably just as well, because it would be too complicated to disassociate ourselves from those other humans out there with guns. Given some means of communication, I could at least have clarified that those men shooting at their parents were shooting at me too.

Deer, I was beginning to appreciate, were not unlike other species of animal life. They varied from one to another; they had different reactions. A couple of them were flicking their tails in an edgy, twitchy sort of way, unhappy at this invasion of their haven. One of them looked downright aggressive, though disqualified, by its size, weight, and lack of horns, from doing anything about it. A couple looked genuinely curious and slightly puzzled. The others just couldn't care less as long the stock of ferns held up.

Angela was fastening buttons, pulling zippers and brushing off her clothes, giving small sighs of exasperation. She blew out her cheeks in one final gasp, then became very matter-of-fact.

“I think the shooting party has moved away,” she said.

“What makes you think that?”

“I haven't heard any gunfire for some time.”

I thought there might be another reason why she had not heard anything for some time, but decided not to infringe on her irritated mood.

We made our cautious way back to the edge of the thicket. There was nothing and no one in sight. The crack of a rifle sounded and it was a long way away. “It's safe,” said Angela authoritatively. “Come on.”

C
ULLING A DEER HERD
was no longer as interesting as it had been. We were first to return to the vehicles and we stood by one of the Land Rovers.

“It was only one shot,” Angela said. She had been making the point that it could have been an accidental discharge of a weapon or a shooter becoming disoriented and not realizing that we were in his line of fire.

“There was only one arrow too,” I reminded her. “At Felicity and me.”

“What's your point?” she asked, turning to face me. She had been argumentative and confrontational since we left the fawns' picnic ground, perhaps in frustration. A frolic in the ferns was probably her intention—or was there more to it than that? I didn't feel like debating the meaning of it, suspecting that it would be a debate I would lose.

“Either one alone could be an accident. Two of them becomes downright suspicious,” I said.

“Aimed at who? You, me, or Felicity?”

Before I could answer, she said, “It's preposterous that anyone would want to kill me.” With a sulky pout, she added, “Or Felicity.”

“I can't really think why anyone would want to kill me,” I said slowly, “but perhaps there's more to my job here than meets the eye, at least someone thinks so.”

“All you're doing is changing some menus,” she said scornfully.

“True,” I said, “but you must admit I'm doing it with a flair.”

“That
is
all you're doing, isn't it? Changing menus?” She was pressing seriously now.

“Of course,” I said, but she was eying me in a judgmental way.

W hen the others returned, she delivered a scathing attack on the unknown marksman. Her eyes flashed and her vocabulary was remarkable in its range—all the way from Anglo-Saxon expletives to current gutter slang. They looked taken aback at the onslaught and all denied having fired in our direction.

“Well, someone shot at us, and it must have been one of you careless idiots! We could have been killed.”

They had a mini-inquest right on the spot, but it was inconclusive. In order to make sure they all had clear fields of fire, they had kept so far apart that they remained out of sight of one another. As a result, not one of them could act as an alibi for any other. There was nothing to suggest who fired the shot.

“Could it have been someone else?” asked Felicity. “Richard, could there be someone else in the grounds?”

“Hardly,” he said.

“One of us would have seen him,” Norman said.

We broke up. Norman and Neville took the pickup truck, which I noticed had a winch mounted behind the cab. They were to retrieve the deer. They had shot eight, they told us, which was the limit set by the Forestry Commission. The rest of us went back in the Land Rovers in uneasy silence.

One of the servants intercepted me as I entered the hall. He lowered his voice to cut down the volume—echoes rolled around the vast dome and came back down.

“Inspector Devlin would like a word with you, sir. She's in the billiard room.”

I hadn't seen that part of the castle, so he told me where it was. The two billiard tables took up only a part of it, and the inspector had moved in two desks; constables sat at each with telephones and laptops. A paperless society might be the aim, but it had clearly not yet been achieved here as each man had stacks of what were presumably reports.

The inspector was sitting on a small, uncomfortable-looking chair at a clear desk. She was on another telephone, but grunted a few words and hung up. She regarded me with a baleful look. “Anything to tell me?” she rasped.

“I have just been watching the culling of the deer herd,” I told her.

She didn't change her expression. I concluded that it was part of her normal repertoire and not aimed specifically at me.

“I was with Angela Harlington; we were by a clump of trees. A bullet hit a tree very near us.”

She rapped out a series of questions: who was there? where was everyone? how far away? what could we see? She had the whole picture in two or three minutes. I was impressed by her ability to gather information rapidly and assemble it.

“What's your opinion? A deliberate attempt, or carelessness?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I assume they are all experienced hunters, so carelessness seems unlikely. If it was deliberate, then who were they shooting at, and why?”

She kept her steady stare directed at me. “Is there something you're keeping back from me?” she asked sharply. “Are you sure you're only here for this business of changing the menus?”

It sounded like a very trivial pursuit, the way she put it. “Changing the menus is one of the missions that make up my job,” I told her. “It may not sound very important to you but—”

She waved a hand dismissively. “But it is to you. Yes, all right. My question is, are you here for any other purpose?”

I could explain that Sir Gerald had asked me to stay on and see what I could find out about the death of Kenny Bryce, but I didn't think she would take kindly to the idea of my acting as the detective after I had assured her I was not. I stuck to the literal truth. “Inspector, I came here for one purpose only—to advise on the menus.”

She cleared her throat. It served as a comment better than words but I didn't mind; it was getting me off the hook, or so I hoped.

“Nobody wants to shoot you, then?”

“I can't believe they do, no. Nor could I think of a reason why.”