Finders Keepers полностью

The huntsman stared at the children, but instead of being prized possessions, each frail figure now only reflected his own failure.

He’d been here all his life.

This was all his life.

He’d spent forty years rearing the hounds of the Blacklands Hunt. More backbreaking hours than any mother would ever spend on raising her child. More cold, more shit, more sweat, more blood. More mud, more miles, more nipped fingers, more freezing ears.

His life stretched out behind him in one long harsh winter.

Sometimes at night – before the hounds were … disposed of – he would sit in the dark and recite the generations, like an Apache wise man gifting history to his braves. Robbie to Bumper to Rufus to Stanley to Marcus to Major to Patch to Scout. And so on, back through time.

Those nights had brought him comfort. A sense of place and of purpose. A knowledge that everything he’d done and everything he would do was part of a whole. There was old Murton before him, and Townend before that. Beyond that, Coffin barely knew, because it was not important. The pack was the history of his tribe. The pack was his legacy – the proof of his skill and his dedication. Of his love. There were ribbons and trophies in the cottage, and old photos too. The smiling men in bowler hats were strangers who’d once lived in his home, but he would have known the hounds anywhere. He knew Rupert ’71 because Pitcher ’97 had had the same three marks on his ear; Dipper ’85 was one of the family because Daisy ’09 had that same high hock. And there was Fern ’91 – smiling for the camera just the way she’d taught all her pups, and the way they’d taught theirs, all the way to little Frankie.

Once the last shot had rung out, the kennels had been silent for the first time in 163 years. After that his night-time soliloquies brought no comfort or pleasure. There were no braves to listen in the darkness, nor history for them to be part of.

No wife, no children. He had never had the time.

His only legacy now was his own bitter memory of warm bodies piled high, and the undignified wrestle to feed the stiffened carcasses into the flames.

He had destroyed the only things he’d ever cared about.

The pain was overwhelming. He gripped the wire gate and focused.

The child before him looked like John Took. Something about the eyes and the shape of the mouth was very like her father. She held out her empty bucket and moved her father’s lips.

You don’t love them.

Unconsciously, Bob Coffin touched the warm cotton of his overalls and felt the weight of the cold gun beneath it.

Everything was coming to an end.

Again.

61

REYNOLDS COULDN’T UNDERSTAND a word Teddy said. Or even how he said it.

Every syllable appeared to be agony and took an eternity. His head wagged, his chin jerked, his eyes screwed up and his hands flapped.

And yet Teddy’s mother nodded at Reynolds and Rice throughout each garbled passage and then translated it all into English. It was like watching a medium at work, cocking her ear at knocks and swaying curtains, and deciphering them into a message about Uncle Arthur’s missing will.

Except that the message Mrs Loosemore received was far more interesting than one from a dead uncle.

Reynolds and Rice walked to the car in silence, but the looks they exchanged held a thing called hope that neither of them had experienced for quite some time.

Because he knew less than nothing about hunting, Reynolds called John Took and put him on speakerphone for Rice to hear. He asked him about the white tape.

Took said, ‘Hunt servants use white tape on their whips so they can be identified easily in the field.’

‘Hunt servants?’ said Reynolds.

‘Employees of the hunt.’

‘And do you have any enemies among the ranks of hunt employees?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Took.

Rice mouthed, ‘Shit.’

Reynolds very nearly hung up. Then he remembered the man in the yard below the helicopter. Waving like a cannibal at the iron bird in the sky. Reynolds got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘Mr Took, we flew over the hunt kennels a few weeks back.’

‘Yes,’ said Took. ‘They’re empty now.’

‘But we saw a man there,’ said Reynolds carefully.

‘That’ll be Bob Coffin. Our old huntsman. He still lives in the cottage. For a bit. The place’ll be sold off this winter.’

The feeling in Reynolds’s gut splashed through his body like spilled milk. A sick, excited feeling that he’d never felt before. Never believed he would feel.

He tried to deny it. Tried to suppress it. But it defied him.

It was a hunch.

He was having a fucking hunch!

He tried to keep his voice from shaking. ‘There’s an incinerator there, right?’

‘Yes. We’ve got an incinerator up there,’ said John Took.

‘What’s it for?’

‘For burning what’s left of the fallen stock after it’s been slaughtered for the dogs. Hoofs and hides and the like.’

‘But why would the incinerator be in use if the kennels are empty?’

There was a silence on the line that seemed to last for the whole of Reynolds’s life up to that moment.