The keys to both the Mercedes and the Volkswagen were in my pocket. My legs were leaden, my head was full of images of seven-day-old bodies in car boots. But I was running, because I had to do it quickly or not at all. The Mercedes was locked, and when I turned the key in the passenger door a howl went up and the white cows lifted their heads and stared at me, and a black-faced sheep in the adjoining field baahed long after I had switched the noise off. The interior of the car smelled of newness. A pair of pigskin driving gloves lay hand in hand beside the treasured car phone. A string of worry beads hung from the driver's mirror; a copy of
But no bodies.
I took a deep breath and unlocked the Mercedes boot. It rose automatically, and I helped it the rest of the way. One overnight bag, part of a fitted set. A black hide attaché case, so slim it was no more than a man's vanity case. Key-locked. Examine later. I thought of transferring them to the red Ford but on second thought left them where they were. I moved to the Volkswagen and with a handkerchief wiped the muck from the window. I peered inside. No bodies. I unlocked the boot and raised the lid. A new tow rope, a can of antifreeze, a bottle of windscreen wash, a foot pump, a fire extinguisher, foot mats, a pullout radio. No bodies. I started towards the battered grey Dormobile and stopped dead, for now I saw for the first time what till now it had concealed: an old pony cart with a bridle shaft and rubber tyres half buried in the hay. And winding up the hill, the unmistakable tracks of the same tyres in rough grass. And at the end of the tracks, a granite but with a slate roof and one dead tree beside it, perched on the side of the hill just beneath the line of receding cloud. I was standing about fifteen feet from the pony cart when I saw it, and somehow I covered the distance and pulled away the hay. Blood was smeared over the old coachwork and upholstery. I walked to the back of the Dormobile and seized the door handle and twisted it as if I wanted to break it off, which perhaps I did. The handle gave way suddenly. I pulled back both doors at once, but all I found was sacks and rats' mess and a pile of old erotic magazines.
I started up the hill, half running, half walking. The grass was tufted and knee-high like the grass at Priddy, and after three steps my trousers were soaked through. A stone wall jogged at my side. Lone bare trees, split from their bark by lightning and silvered by the sun and rain, poked their thin fingers at me. Twice I stumbled. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the hut, but it was parted where the tyre tracks passed through it. The but was rectangular, no more than twelve feet by eight, but at some point in its life a crude extension had been added, of which only a wooden skeleton survived. The cloud had vanished. From either side of the valley black peaks glowered down at me, their bracken flanks stirring with the wind.
I was searching for a door or window, but a first tour of the perimeter yielded nothing. I looked again at the tracks and saw that they had stopped on the uphill side of the hut, short of a point in the wall where a door had once been, for the stone lintel and wood frame were still legible, though the opening had been filled with random granite stonework and plaster. And I saw a patch of churned and trampled mud at the foot of the doorway, and footprints leading to and from the tyre tracks: the same male footprints I had seen outside the kitchen door. I saw no blood, but when I took a coin from my pocket and dug into the plaster, it was softer than the plaster in the wall outside the doorframe.
And here I had a second intimation concerning the intruders: that they were not only desecrators and men of the knife, but men of the rough country too, outdoor men, accustomed to the dour life. All this I was telling myself as I prodded inexpertly at the plaster with a bit of old iron. I prodded until I could prise, and having prised, looked in. Then I tore my face away and retched as the stench poured out at me, because by then I had seen by the single shaft of light three bodies with their hands tied above their heads, and their mouths open in the same silent chorus. But such is our egotism in crisis that in the very midst of my revulsion I was still able to offer a wordless Allelujah of relief that neither Emma nor Larry was of the company.
