Longshot (15 page)

“You could need it in the Lake District,” I said mildly.

“I don’t like walking, period.”

Harry said, “John, Erica wants to know why you’ve ignored mountain climbing in your guides.”

“Never got round to it,” I said, “and there are dozens of mountain climbing books already.”

Erica, the sparkle of victory still in her eyes, asked who was publishing my novel. When I told her she raised her eyebrows thoughtfully and made no disparaging remark.

“Good publishers, are they?” Harry asked, his lips twitching.

“Reputable,” she allowed.

Fiona, getting to her feet, began to say good-byes, chiefly with kisses. Gareth ducked his but she stopped beside me and put her cheek on mine.

“How long are you staying?” she asked.

Tremayne answered for me forthrightly. “Three more weeks. Then we’ll see.”

“We’ll fix a dinner,” Fiona said. “Come along, Nolan. Ready, Erica? Love you, Mackie, take care of yourself.”

When they’d gone Mackie and Perkin floated off home on cloud nine and Tremayne and I went around collecting glasses and stacking them in the dishwasher.

Gareth said, “If we can have beef sandwich pie again, I’ll make it for lunch.”

 

 

AT ABOUT THE time we finally ate the pie, two policemen and the gamekeeper reached the pathetic collection of bones and set nemesis in motion. They tied ropes to trees to ring and isolate the area and radioed for more instructions. Slowly the information percolated upwards until it reached Detective Chief Inspector Doone, Thames Valley Police, who was sleeping off his Yorkshire pudding.

He decided, as daylight would die within the hour, that first thing in the morning he would assemble and take a pathologist for an on-site examination and a photographer for the record. He believed the bones would prove to belong to one of the hundreds of teenagers who had infested his patch with all-night parties the summer before. Three others had died on him from drugs.

 

 

IN TREMAYNE’S HOUSE Gareth and I went up to my bedroom because he wanted to see the survival kit that he knew I’d brought with me.

“Is it just like the ones in the books?” he asked as I brought out a black waterproof pouch that one could wear around one’s waist.

“No, not entirely.” I paused. “I have three survival kits at present. One small one for taking with me all the time. This one here for longer walks and difficult areas. And one that I didn’t bring, which is full camping survival gear for going out into the wilds. That’s a backpack on a frame.”

“I wish I could see it,” Gareth said wistfully.

“Well, one day, you never know.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

“I’ll show you the smallest kit first,” I said, “but you’ll have to run down and get it. It’s in my ski-suit jacket pocket in the cloakroom.”

He went willingly but presently returned doubtfully with a flat tin, smaller than a paperback book, held shut with black insulating tape.

“Is this it?” he said.

I nodded. “Open it carefully.”

He did as I said, laying out the contents on the white counterpane on the bed and reciting them aloud.

“Two matchbooks, a bit of candle, a little coil of thin wire, a piece of jagged wire, some fishhooks, a small pencil and piece of paper, needles and thread, two bandages and a plastic bag folded up small and held by a paper clip.” He looked disappointed. “You couldn’t do much with those.”

“Just light a fire, cut wood, catch food, collect water, make a map and sew up wounds. That jagged wire is a flexible saw.”

His mouth opened.

“Then I always carry two things on my belt.” I unstrapped it and showed it to him. “The belt itself has a zipped pocket all along the inside where you can keep money. What’s in there at the moment is your father’s. I don’t often carry a wallet. Those other things on the belt, one is a knife, one is a multi-purpose survival tool.”

“Can I look?”

“Yes, sure.”

The knife, in a black canvas sheath with a flap fastened by Velcro, was a strong folding knife with a cunningly serrated blade, very sharp indeed, nine inches overall when open, only five when closed. Gareth opened it until it locked with a snap and stood looking at it in surprise.

“That’s some knife,” he said. “Were you wearing it while we were having drinks?”

“All the time. It weighs only four and a half ounces, about one-eighth of a kilo. Weight’s important too, don’t forget. Always travel as light as you can if you have to carry everything.”

He opened the other object slotted onto the belt, a small leather case about three inches by two and a half, which contained a flat metal rectangular object a shade smaller in dimension: total weight altogether, three and a half ounces.

“What’s this?” he asked, taking it out onto his hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“I carry that instead of an ordinary penknife. It has a blade slotted in one side and scissors in the other. That little round thing is a magnifying glass for starting fires if there’s any sun. With those other odd-shaped edges you can make holes in a tin of food, open crown-cork bottles, screw in screws, file your nails and sharpen knives. The sides have inches and centimeters marked like a ruler, and the back of it all is polished like a mirror for signaling.”

“Wow.” He turned it over and looked at his own face. “It’s really cool.”

He began to pack all the small things back into the flat tin and remarked that fishhooks wouldn’t be much good away from rivers.

“You can catch birds on fishhooks. They take bait like fish.”

He stared at me. “Have you eaten birds?”

“Chickens are birds.”

“Well . . . ordinary birds?”

“Pigeons? Four and twenty blackbirds? You eat anything if you’re hungry enough. All our ancestors lived on whatever they could get hold of. It was normal, once.”

Normal for him was a freezer full of pizzas. He had no idea what it was like to be primevally alone with nature, and it was unlikely he would ever find out, for all his present interest.

I’d spent a month once on an island without any kit or anything modern at all, knowing only that there was water and that I would be collected at the end, and even with those certainties and all the craft I’d ever learned, I’d had a hard job lasting out; and it was then that I’d discovered for myself that survival was a matter of mind rather than body.

The travel agency, on my urgent advice, had decided against offering holidays of that sort.

“What about a group?” they said. “Not one alone.”

“A group eats more,” I pointed out. “The tensions are terrible. You’d have a murder.”

“All right. Full camping kit then, with essential stores and radios.”

“And choose the leader before they set out.”

Even so, few of the “marooned” holidays had passed off without trouble, and in the end the agency had abandoned them.

Gareth replaced the coil of fine wire in the tin and said, “I suppose this wire is for all the traps in the books?”

“Only the simplest ones.”

“Some of those traps are really sneaky.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“There you are, a harmless rabbit hopping along about your business and you don’t see the wire hidden in dead leaves and you trip over it and suddenly pow! You’re all tied up in a net or squashed under logs. Have you done all that?”

“Yes, lots of times.”

“I like the idea of the bow and arrows better,” he said.

“Yes, well, I put in the instructions of how to make them effectively because our ancestors had them, but it’s not easy to hit anything if it’s moving. Impossible if it’s small. It’s not the same as using a custom-made bow shooting metal arrows at a nice round stationary target, like in archery competitions. I’ve always preferred traps.”

“Didn’t you ever hit
anything
with a bow and arrow?”

I smiled. “I shot an apple off a tree in our garden once when I was small because I was only allowed to eat wind-falls, and there weren’t any. Bad luck that my mother was looking out of the window.”

“Mothers!”

“Tremayne says you see yours sometimes.”

“Yes, I do.” He glanced up at me quickly and down again. “Did Dad tell you my mother isn’t Perkin’s mother?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I guess we haven’t come to that bit yet.”

“Perkin and Jane’s mother died years ago. Jane’s my sister—well, half sister really. She’s married to a French trainer and they live in Chantilly, which is a sort of French Newmarket. It’s good fun, staying with Jane. I go summers. Couple of weeks.”

“Do you speak French?”

He grinned. “Some. I always seem to come home just when I’m getting the hang of it. What about you?”

“French a bit, but Spanish more, only I’m rusty in both now too.”

He nodded and fiddled for a bit putting the insulating tape back on the tin.

I watched him, and in the end he said, “My mother’s on television quite a lot. That’s where Dad means I see her.”

“Television! Is she an actress?”

“No. She cooks. She does one of those afternoon programs sometimes.”

“A
cook
?” I could hardly believe it. “But your father doesn’t care about food.”

“Yeah, that’s what he says, but he’s been eating what you’ve made, hasn’t he? But I think she used to drive him barmy always inventing weird fancy things he didn’t like. I didn’t care that much except that I never got what I liked either, so when she left us we sort of relapsed into what we did like, and we stayed like that. Only recently I’ve been wishing I could make custard and I tried but I burned the milk and it tasted awful. Did you know you could burn milk? So, anyway, she’s married to someone else now. I don’t like him though. I don’t bother with them much.”

He sounded as if he’d said all he wanted to on the subject and seemed relieved to go back to simple things like staying alive, asking to see inside kit number two, the black pouch.

“You’re not bored?” I said.

“Can’t wait.”

I handed it to him and let him open its three zipped and Velcroed pockets, to lay the contents again on the bed. Although the pouch itself was waterproof, almost every item inside it was further wrapped separately in a small plastic bag, fastened with a twist tie; safe from sand and insects. Gareth undid and emptied some of the bags and frowned over the contents.

“Explain what they are,” he said. “I mean, twenty matchbooks are for lighting fires, right, so what are the cotton-wool balls doing with them?”

“They burn well. They set fire to dry leaves.”

“Oh. The candle is for light, right?”

“And to help light fires. And wax is useful for a lot of things.”

“What’s this?” He pointed to a short fat spool of thin yellow thread.

“That’s Kevlar fiber. It’s a sort of plastic, strong as steel. Six hundred yards of it. You can make nets of it, tie anything, fish with it, twist it into fine unbreakable rope. I didn’t come across it in time to put it in the books.”

“And this? This little jar of whitish liquid packed with the sawn-off paintbrush.”

I smiled. “That’s in the Wilderness book. It’s luminous paint.”

He stared.

“Well,” I said reasonably, “if you have a camp and you want to leave it to go and look for food or firewood, you want to be able to find your way back again, don’t you? Essential. So as you go, you paint a slash of this on a tree trunk or a rock, always making sure you can see one slash from another, and then you can find your way back even in the dark.”

“Cool,” he said.

“That little oblong metal thing with the handle,” I said, “that’s a powerful magnet. Useful but not essential. Good for retrieving fishhooks if you lose them in the water. You tie the magnet on a string and dangle it. Fishhooks are precious.”

He held up a transparent film case, one of about six in the pouch. “More fishhooks in here,” he said. “Isn’t this what film comes in? I thought they were black.”

“Fuji films come in these clear cases. As you can see what’s inside, I use them all the time. They weigh nothing. They’re everything-proof. Perfect. These other cases contain more needles and thread, safety pins, aspirins, water-purifying tablets, things like that.”

“What’s this knobbly-looking object? Oh, it’s a telescope!” He laughed and weighed it in his hand.

“Two ounces,” I said, “but eight by twenty magnification.”

He passed over as mundane a flashlight that was also a ball-point pen, the light in the tip for writing, and wasn’t enthralled by a whistle, a Post-it pad or a thick folded wad of aluminum foil. (“For wrapping food to cook in the embers,” I said.) What really fascinated him was a tiny blow-torch which shot out a fierce blue flame hot enough to melt solder.

“Cool,” he said again. “That’s really
ace
.”

“Infallible for lighting fires,” I said, “as long as the butane lasts.”

“You said in the books that fire comes first.”

I nodded. “A fire makes you feel better. Less alone. And you need fire for boiling river water to make it OK to drink, and for cooking, of course. And signaling where you are, if people are looking for you.”

“And to keep warm.”

“That too.”

Gareth had come to the last thing, a pair of leather gloves, which he thought were sissy.

“They give your hands almost double grip,” I said. “They save you from cuts and scratches. And apart from that they’re invaluable for collecting stinging nettles.”

“I’d hate to collect stinging nettles.”

“No, you wouldn’t. If you boil the leaves they’re not bad to eat, but the best things are the stalks. Incredibly stringy. You can thrash them until they’re supple enough for lashing branches together, for making shelters and also racks to keep things off the ground away from damp and animals.”