Or perhaps the river did not end there after all. For beyond the pile of sawdust I now saw the tyre tracks of two single wheels acting in tandem. They were too narrow for car wheels, but they would have been all right for a motorbike, except that there was only one wheel to each track and therefore—my mind had decided to travel slowly now, being mostly occupied with the possible ownership of the pool of blood—and therefore something more in the nature of a farm vehicle.
A trailer? The sort of carriage that pulls a sailing boat down busy roads and holds up bank holiday traffic on its way through Somerset? A gun carriage? A funeral carriage?
The back door was locked, which first frustrated me, then quickly made me angry, although I knew perfectly well that of all the useless emotions I might have given way to—grief, despair, frustration, terror—anger was the least productive and the least adult. I had actually started towards the cars with the intention of taking a methodical look at them, when my anger stopped me in mid-stride and yanked me round and made me attack the locked door. I beat on it with my fists. I shouted, "Open up, damn you!" I shouted, "Larry! Emma!" I hurled myself several times against it, with little effect on the door or, more remarkably, my shoulder. I had the immunity that comes of heedlessness. I shouted, "May! Aitken May! Larry, for Christ's sake! Emma!" I remembered the rusted axe beside the log pile. A more adept spy would have shot the lock out with the .38, but I wasn't feeling adept, and in my distraction I didn't really consider whether the door was locked. I simply hit it, rather as I had lashed out at Larry, but with an axe.
My first blow caused a decent split and sent a squadron of rooks protesting into the cloud: which surprised me because the trees round the house were sparse and mostly dead, except for a row of hideous windburned macracarpa that seemed to have grown and died at the same time. My second blow missed both the door and my left leg by fractions of an inch. But I swung back the axe and struck again. A fourth heave, and the door exploded like paper. I flung the axe through the opening and stepped after it, roaring "Get out!”
“Stand back!" and "Bastards!" in another furious expulsion of air and tension. But perhaps that was just my way of whistling up my courage, because when I looked down at my feet I saw that they were isolated in a lake of blood, in shape very like the first, but larger. And this must have been what my eye had chosen to see before everything else in the raftered farmhouse kitchen: the smashed crockery, the cutlery and pots hurled over the flagstone floor, the splintered chairs and overturned table, and the tree, the unmistakable outline of a tree, drawn or, more accurately, painted on the whitewashed brickwork above the smashed kitchen range. A chestnut perhaps, or a cedar—certainly a tree that spread. And the blood still dripping down from it as it had dried, like so many cones or spikes. The Forest was watching.
But I allowed myself to study these things only after I had seen the blood at my feet. And when I had studied enough of them to draw the necessary conclusions, I pulled the gun from my waistband—more, I suspect, to protect me from the dead than from the living—stepped into the corridor, and sashayed down it, as the trainers say, keeping my left forearm raised across my face and shouting, "Aitken Mustafa May. Come out! Where are you?" because although I knew very well that the names I should be shouting were still "Larry" and "Emma," I dreaded finding them, which was why I had my left hand up to fend off the sight I feared the most.
I was wearing good brown country shoes by Ducker's of Oxford, handmade and rubber-soled but not a lot of bend in them. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a trail of sticky brown imprints on the dusty parquet floor and realised that while the ownership of the blood was an open question, the prints were unquestionably my own. I sashayed past a closed door and another, shouting, "Hullo, hullo, who's in there?" And then, peremptorily, in my six-acre voice: "May!
