Longshot. Part 67

I thanked him and declined. I would probably have liked to replace my boots and ski-jacket, but I still hadn't much personal money. It was easy at Sh.e.l.lerton House to get by without any. Tremayne would doubtless have lent me some of the quarter-advance due at the end of the month but my lack was my own choice, and as long as I could survive as I was, I wouldn't ask. It was all part of the game.

Mackie came through from her side to keep company with Dee-Dee, saying Perkin had gone to Newbury to collect some supplies, and presently the two women went out to lunch together, leaving me alone in the great sprawling house.

I tried again and harder to work and felt restless and uneasy. Stupid, I thought. Being alone never bothered me: in fact, I liked it. That day, I found the size of the silent house oppressive.

I went upstairs, showered and changed out of riding clothes into the more comfortable jeans and shirt I'd worn the day before and pulled on sneakers and the red sweater for warmth. After that I went down to the kitchen and made a cheese sandwich for lunch and wished I'd gone with Tremayne if only for the ride. It was the usual pattern of finding something to do - anything - rather than sit down and face the empty page, except that that day the uneasiness was extra.

I wandered in a desultory fashion into the family room which looked dead without the fire blazing and began to wonder what I could make for dinner. Gareth's 'BACK FOR GRUB' message was still pinned to the corkboard, and it was with a distinct sense of release that I remembered I'd said that I would go back for his camera.

The unease vanished. I found a piece of paper and left my own message: 'I'VE BORROWED THE LAND ROVER TO FETCH GARETH'S CAMERA. BACK FOR COOKING THE GRUB!' I pinned it to the corkboard with a red drawing pin and a light heart, and went upstairs again to change back into jodhpur boots to deal with the terrain and to pick up the map and the compa.s.s in case I couldn't find the trail. Then I skipped downstairs and went out to the wheels, locking the back door behind me.

It was a good day, sunny like the day before but with more wind. With a feeling of having been unexpectedly let out of school, I drove over the hills on the road to Reading and coasted along the unfenced part of the Quillersedge Estate until I thought I'd come more or less to where Gareth had dropped the paint: parked off the road there and searched more closely for the place on foot.

No one had driven the paint away on their tyres. The splash was dusty but still visible and, without much trouble, I found the beginning of the trail about twenty feet straight ahead in the wood and followed it as easily through the tangled trees and undergrowth as on the day before.

Gareth a murderer- I smiled to myself at the absurdity of it. As well suspect Coconut.

The pale paint splashes, the next one ahead visible all the time, weren't all that marked the trail: it showed signs in broken twigs and scuffed ground of our pa.s.sage the day before. By the time I came back with the camera it would be almost a beaten track.

Wind rattled and swayed the trees and filled my ears with the old songs of the land, and the sun shone through the moving boughs in shimmering ever-changing patterns. I wound my slow way through the maze of unpruned growth and felt at one with things there and inexpressibly happy.

The trail strayed round and eventually reached the small clearing. Our improvised seats were frayed by the wind but still identified the place with certainty, and almost at once I spotted Gareth's camera, prominently hanging, as he'd said, from a branch.

I walked across to collect it and something hit me very hard indeed in the back.

Moments of disaster are disorientating. I didn't know what had happened. The world had changed. I was falling. I was lying face down on the ground. There was something wrong with my breathing.

I had heard nothing but the wind, seen nothing but the moving trees but, I thought incredulously, someone had shot me.

From total instinct as much as from injury I lay as dead. There was a zipping noise beside my ear as something sped past it. I shut my eyes. There was another jolting thud in my back.

So this was death, I thought numbly; and I didn't even know who was killing me, and I didn't know why.

Breathing was terrible. My chest was on fire. A wave of clammy perspiration broke out on my skin.

I lay unmoving.

My face was on dead leaves and dried gra.s.s and pieces of twig. I could smell the musty earth. Earth-digested, come to dust.

Someone, I thought dimly, was waiting to see if I moved: and if I moved there would be a third thud and my heart would stop. If I didn't move someone would come and feel for a pulse and, finding one, finish me off. Either way, everything that had been beginning was now ending, ebbing away without hope.

I lay still. Not a twitch.

I couldn't hear anything but the wind in the trees. Could hear no one moving. Hadn't heard even the shots.

Breathing was dreadful. A shaft of pain. Minimum air could go in, trickle out. Too little. In a while- I would go to sleep.

A long time seemed to pa.s.s, and I was still alive.

I had a vision of someone standing not far behind me with a gun, waiting for me to move. He was shadowy and had no face, and his patience was for ever.

Clammy nausea came again, enveloping and ominous. My skin sweated. I felt cold.

I didn't exactly try to imagine what was happening in my body.

Lying still was anyway easier than moving. I would slide unmoving into eternity. The man with the gun could wait for ever, but I would be gone. I would cheat him that way.

That's delirium, I thought.

Nothing happened in the clearing. I lay still. Time drifted.

After countless ages I seemed to come back to a real realization that I was continuing to breathe, even if with difficulty, and didn't seem in immediate danger of stopping. However ghastly I might feel, however feeble, I wasn't drowning in blood. Wasn't coughing it up. Coughing was a bleak thought, the way my chest hurt.

My certainty of the waiting gun had begun to fade. He wouldn't be there after all this time. He wouldn't stand for ever doing nothing. He hadn't felt my pulse. He must have thought it unnecessary.

He believed I was dead.

He had gone. I was alone.

It took me a while to believe those three things utterly and another while to risk acting on the belief.

If I didn't move I would die where I lay.

With dread, but in the end inevitability, I moved my left arm.

Christ, I thought, that hurt.

Hurt it might, but nothing else happened.

I moved my right arm. Just as bad. Even worse.

No more thuds in the back, though. No quick steps, no pounce, no final curtain.

Perhaps I really was alone. I let the thought lie there for comfort. Wouldn't contemplate a cat-and-mouse cruelty.

I put both palms flat on the decaying undergrowth and tried to heave myself up on to my knees.

Practically fainted. Not only could I not do it but the effort was so excruciating that I opened my mouth to scream and couldn't breathe enough for that either. My weight settled back on the earth and I felt nothing but staggering agony and couldn't think connectedly until it abated.

Something was odd, I thought finally. It wasn't only that I couldn't lift myself off the ground but that I was stuck to it in some way.

Cautiously, sweating, with fiery stabs in every inch, I wormed my right hand between my body and the earth and came to what seemed like a rod between the two.

I must have fallen on to a sharp stick, I thought. Perhaps I hadn't been shot. But yes, I had. Hit in the back. Couldn't mistake it.

Slowly, trying to ration the pain into manageable portions, I slid my hand out again, and then after a while, hardly believing it, I bent my arm and felt round my back and came to the rod there also, and faced the grim certainty that someone had shot me not with a bullet but an arrow.

I lay for a while simply wrestling with the enormity of it.