The grass crunched underfoot, starched with hoar-frost. It was still white where the sun had not reached it. The brown leaves which clung to the beech-trees were etched with random white patterns. The lower twigs of oaks and ashes and thorn-trees formed a white filigree against the darkness of the wood, and the delicate curve of the branches of a larch were touched with white. High, where the sun had struck, frost had turned to water; big silver drops strung the topmost twigs like diamonds. They gathered and fell, nudging the lower beech-leaves as though a flock of tiny birds was busy among them.
The day was windless. After a cold night the sky was clear and blue. The pale sun rose in the south-east and filled the little valley with an illusion of warmth.
It was very quiet. This was a countryside of downland, of big estates, extensive woods, broad hedges, thousand-acre farms. The nearest busy road was five miles away, the nearest railway ten. One or two blackbirds chuckled in the wood. A flock of long-tailed tits scuttled through the highest branches of a hazel, circling and swinging, piping to each other. Robins ticked like mechanical toys and lapwings cried from a nearby meadow.
The valley was a neat, straight groove between slow hills. The hills seemed to show differences of soil, for the one behind, over which the sun had risen, was covered with a scrub of birch and gorse and bracken, while the one in front carried a big and ancient growth of hardwood trees. The valley ended in a little stony cliff, festooned with brambles. The ugly, untidy brambles had been transformed by the frost into a delicate Oriental tracery. A heavy clump of Ponticum rhododendrons grew unexpectedly on top of the little cliff.
At the other end of the valley a five-barred gate stood open on to a lane. The Land-Rovers were parked in the lane. One or two wives of exceptional loyalty waited by the Land-Rovers.
The guns were spaced almost in a straight line the length of the valley. The pheasants would rocket out of the big wood into the eye of the sun. Experience told that they would come highest and fastest and in greatest numbers at the far end, near the little cliff. There, consequently, Lord Candover had stationed the best shots and the most senior guests. The Lord Lieutenant. Admiral Cordle. Old Mrs Pendlebury, the daughter and granddaughter and widow of celebrated shots and herself a formidable slayer of birds.
The beaters could now be heard through the still air, far away on the other side of the wood. One of the dogs began to whimper with excitement. It was a young lemon-yellow labrador. The old keeper who held it had been carved out of a misshapen chunk of cracked and antique oak.
The big dark wood which clad the gently rising ground in front of the guns was full of birds. A few of these were wild. Far more had been reared with anxious love by the keepers, in little chicken-wire houses behind the stables. Until the shooting season began they were quite tame: would stalk complacently through grass and undergrowth, when they heard a keeper, for their handout of mixed corn. The woods were strictly preserved. Picnickers were chased out. A ceaseless war was waged on vermin, and the rides through the wood were dotted with ‘gamekeepers’ larders’ – grisly little gibbets, with the dangling, cautionary corpses of stoats and weasels and carrion crows.
The beaters were getting nearer. Tock-tock-tock, they hit the trees with their walking-sticks and called and whistled. All the birds in the wood were being gradually shepherded to this sudden clean edge, this killing-ground. They would rocket over the nearest treetops, high and fast against the pale bright sky. Stubby wings, giving acceleration and steep climb. Long tails streaming behind. Cocks and hens today – shoot everything. Shoot them in the beak, not the trousers – no one wants roast pheasant full of chunks of lead.
Tock-tock-tock. Mumbles and whistles. Near.
A sudden, electrifying series of explosions as the heavy birds burst out of the dense undergrowth. Their powerful short wings whirred them into their rocketing climb. The guns at the far end of the valley went off in a ragged volley.
Another, totally foreign noise punctuated the big crack of twelve-bore shotguns. A rapid, percussive thudding.
All along the little valley there was unthinkable nightmare.
Bodies lay, still or twitching. Men screamed. A man raised his gun towards the cliff but he spun round and fell backwards before he could fire. The machine-guns were firing in long bursts of ten or a dozen rounds. The bullets lashed into the hard ground. A dog screamed and twitched. A ricochet sang off a stone. One or two men were running from the merciless and unending stream of bullets. They fell.
Five men walked briskly away over the hard ground. The leading pair carried something between them which was awkward and heavy – a long object in a bag of canvas and webbing. The next pair had an identical burden. The fifth man carried two metal boxes which had been heavy and were now light. They walked fast but with no trace of panic. They walked along the dry bed of a stream, between dense hedges of thorn and hazel and bramble. They were inconspicuously dressed, neither smart nor shabby. Four wore caps, the fifth a brown felt hat. All wore gloves.
The last man stopped, turned, and listened. He heard blackbirds and robins and piping tits and the cry of the lapwings in the meadow. There were distant shouts and the hysterical scream of a woman. The man was tall. His face was deeply sun-tanned. He was burly and broad-chested; he might be running a little to fat. His movements were awkward. He looked a man who would stumble going upstairs, who would knock over glasses and break the points of pencils. There was nothing brutal about his face. His mouth curved like that of a pretty girl of an old-fashioned kind. He had an expression of quiet gratification, of goodwill and benevolence.
He turned and trotted after his companions. He trotted clumsily. His coat flapped and his knees hit the metal boxes he was carrying.
They left the stream-bed and crossed a small wood to a cart-track. A Land-Rover was parked off the track. They lifted the guns and ammunition boxes into the back. Three men got into the back. The big man with the hat got in beside the driver. The Land-Rover moved away. It was neither very new nor very old. Its number-plates, front and rear, were encrusted with frozen mud. It went along the track to a lane, and along the lane to a road, and along the road to a bigger road with heavy traffic. It was swallowed up by cars and trucks and towns.
Eight people were killed and six badly wounded. The Lord Lieutenant and the Admiral, nearest the firing-point, were riddled with bullets. One of the Land-Rovers was hit and one of the women was hit in the leg and the shoulder.
Six dogs were killed.
The police investigation started at once and went on for a long time.
Neither the one survivor of the shooting-party, nor the women in the lane, nor the beaters, could provide any information of the slightest value.
The gunners had been in the rhododendrons at the top of the little cliff. They might have been scented by the gun-dogs in the valley: but the dogs were surrounded by men, and were there not to start game but only to retrieve, and were either on leads or obediently sitting until after the drive. No beaters or keepers had been anywhere near the place that day; they had kept well away so as not to disturb the pheasants in the wood.
From their position the gunners had a perfect enfilade of all the valley to the lane. Their empty shell-cases littered the hard black earth under the rhododendrons. They left nothing else behind. They had not smoked. There were no fingerprints on the shell-cases; there was nothing else that could be fingerprinted.
It was reasonably obvious that they had left by way of the stream-bed and the wood. A trace of oil showed where their vehicle had stood. The ground was too hard to show useful footprints or wheel-tracks.
The bullets could have been fired from at least five makes of automatic weapon, both submachine-guns and bipod-mounted medium machine-guns. They could have been stolen from many armies, or bought legally in a number of countries.
Nobody in the area could remember seeing any strangers. Many people had seen many Land-Rovers.
There was no obvious motive for the murder of any of the people in the shooting-party. Still less the keepers. Still less the dogs. The affair received enormous publicity because of its scale, its apparent pointlessness, and the eminence of the dead. There was much speculation about it, public and private. To an immense and unhelpful file the police added a number of crackpot explanations, accusations, and confessions.
A card, two inches by three, lay on the ground by the body of the Lord Lieutenant. It was trodden under a hummock by an hysterical schoolboy who was one of the beaters. It was not found. It would not have been understood. The rain came and pulped it. While it was legible it bore the one word:
ALA
‘I’m sorry about the dogs,’ said a man in a cap.
‘You’re wrong,’ said the plump man with the curved and girlish mouth. ‘Those dogs are bred and trained for that one purpose.’
‘But they can’t help it. They’re not guilty.’
‘You could say the same of the men. You could say they’re so much the product of tradition and environment that they’re not guilty either. But we know they are. Men and dogs both.’
The Master of the Catherwick was finishing his breakfast in the ugly brick house behind the kennels.
He was a middle-aged Irishman, a bachelor, rich. He lived for fox-hunting. He hunted hounds himself. It cost him a lot of money. The Catherwick thought they were lucky to have him, and they were right. The saturnine Colonel who wrote little pieces about the hunt for Horse and Hound had said the previous week: ‘A kill after a seven-mile point over open country ended yet another rattling fine day in the best November’s hunting any of us can remember.’
The Master speared a kidney with a heavily crested silver fork. He munched it and looked out of the window at the weather.
It was perfect.
The wind had swung right round to the south-west during the week. A little rain had come and gone. All the frost had disappeared and the bone was out of the ground. A very slight breeze twitched at the cotoneaster outside the dining-room window. The sun gleamed palely between slow-moving clouds.
Saturday, and the certainty of a big field. A lawn meet on the edge of their best country, where the big pastures of Catherwick Vale undulated towards Warwickshire.
The Master ate his last kidney, spread a piece of toast with Cooper’s Oxford, and gave himself some more coffee.
A groom, half-dressed like the Master in hunting-boots and breeches, came in with the post.
‘The scent’ll be like bloody Dior. They saw a big dogfox in Ramplin’s Wood and Mister Copp, he lost his pedigree bantam hens. Where will you draw first, sir?’
‘We’ll see. We want to get rid of all the cars before we get to Ramplin’s. How’s the mare?’
‘She reckons it’s a great day for hunting.’
The Master’s mail was mostly hunt business. Circulars from feed-merchants and makers of worming-powder and veterinary vitamin pills. British Horse Society, Hunter Improvement Society, the point-to-point, the puppies, the wire fund. A few complaints from farmers. Not many. Not nearly as many as there used to be, before he got some of his field disciplined. Before he and the secretary had taken to giving and drinking great quantities of whisky with farmers all over the county. And before he had paid out of his own pocket more bills for hedges and winter wheat than even the Treasurer knew about.
The last envelope was a little cheap brown one, with a typed address. It looked like a bill from a plumber, or a complaint from a farmer who ran to a once-a-week secretary. Either way it was a bore, especially on a perfect morning.
He said: ‘The hell with it. It can wait.’
Then, because he was conscientious, he slit the envelope open with the point of a fruit-knife. There was a single card inside.
Before he had time to draw it out there was a flurry of hoof-beats on the paved yard outside the window. The mare, in a halter, was popping up and down excitedly. Her ears were pricked and there was no vice in her eye, but she knew she was going hunting and the tiny groom was having a job holding her.
The Master laughed, dropped the envelope, and walked out into the yard.
‘Silly old girl can’t wait,’ panted the groom.
‘Don’t blame her on a day like this. I think we’ll hack her to the meet to take the edge off.’
Two hours later, mounted, he was drinking sloe-gin on the acre of gravel in front of an absurd Victorian castle. The hunt’s host, and his daughters and servants, bustled to and fro among the horses with trays of drinks and plates of sandwiches.
It was a big field. All the regulars were out, from the loyal but critical contingent of old ladies in old top hats, to farmers’ children in tweed coats on undipped Welsh ponies with luxuriant winter wool.
The Master made a point of saying hullo to the children. He or his successor would be settling disputes with these boys.
‘Morning, Master,’ they piped in a variety of accents.
Anyone who thought hunting was snobbish, thought the Master, never went hunting.
Hounds poured like a liver-and-white waterfall out of the back of their trailer. They sniffed and whimpered, and begged shamelessly for sandwiches, and fawned round the legs of the Whipper-in’s horse.
Hundreds of people had come on foot, and cars jammed the nearby lanes. They wouldn’t be around long. Horseboxes were still arriving. Jittery, trace-clipped hunters stepped delicately down their ramps on to the gravel. Tighten the girth, up, have a drink.
Plenty of visitors. The secretary’s cap jingled and rustled.
They moved off a little late, at a quarter to twelve. They drew the bracken enclosure at the edge of the park, then the belt of trees in the valley. They moved up the far side towards Ramplin’s Wood.
Half a dozen people were posted round the wood and hounds went in with glee.
They found immediately.
‘He’ll go down an’ over the road—’
But he ran in an unexpected direction, along the straight side of a twenty-acre field.
‘Did you see him?’
‘Nobody saw him.’
But hounds were sure of their fox. They streamed, shrill with certainty, along the hedge and through a gap at the corner. Then straight across country, across the middle of another huge flat field.
Every hound was on the same line. They were giving tongue like champions and running hard. There was no trace of a check. The scent was breast-high and brand-new.
The second field was almost triangular. It was bounded on the left by a metalled road with an untidy avenue of elms, and on the right by a stream with treacherous banks and a hint of wire.
The pack made straight for the apex, where the top of the triangle had been lopped off. It was thirty yards of neat cut-and-laid thorn fence – a natural hunt jump.
A Land-Rover was parked in the road hard by the fence. They were lucky. By chance – by most unusual chance – they would see a big, beautifully mounted field, in full cry, yards away, taking an excellent jump.
Hounds streamed through and over the fence, like a river demanding passage. They set off baying across plough.
The riders had let their horses out on the long flat run to the fence. This was superb – the essence of hunting – the dog-pack going like bombs over resilient turf.
Six horses rose to the fence at the same moment. The Master was on the right, nearest his hounds.
All six seemed to lose all control as they landed – to check and tip and crash on to their heads, to knuckle over or somersault on to their riders.
Thirty horses were close behind, all at full gallop. None checked. None could have been stopped. They jumped into the invisible trap beyond the fence. They jumped into each other and on to the fallen horses.
Riders farther back managed to rein in. They stared in unbelieving horror. Horses and riders were rolling in a nightmare shambles. Horses kicked. Women screamed.
A third of a ton of thoroughbred landed backwards on top of the Master. The pommel smashed his chest in. Heads and legs and spines of humans and horses were kicked or crushed.
Nobody saw the Land-Rover drive away.
It drove away gently. There were three men in the back, drab but not shabby, in caps. Beside the driver sat a big man, almost portly, in a mackintosh and a brown felt hat. He looked quietly happy. There was a small, proud smile on his cupid’s-bow mouth. When he took off his hat to scratch the top of his head with a gloved forefinger he revealed sparse brown hair. He was not bald but he soon would be. The dome of his head was deeply sunburned, with the large freckles which fair skins get in tropical countries.
The party might have been a farmer and his hands going to a cattle-market, or a contractor and some of his men on their way to a job of haulage or building or demolition, or some friends going to a race-meeting at Warwick or Worcester.
The Land-Rover had been driven through deep, fresh mud. Its number-plates were caked in the mud.
The lane joined a bigger road. The Land-Rover accelerated and crossed into Warwickshire and joined the motorway south of Birmingham.
Hounds came to a dead stop in the plough, where the aniseed drag ended.
It took a long time to sort out the plunging and screaming horror of the pile-up beyond the fence. Two horses were killed outright. Five more had to be destroyed immediately, and a further four by the end of the day when vets had looked at them and shaken their heads.
The Master, an old lady, a local farmer, a girl of twenty-three, and a boy of fourteen were killed outright. The Second Whip and another woman died in hospital. Other injuries included severe concussion, multiple fracture, loss of an eye, cracked skull, broken ribs and pelvis.
When all the casualties, at very long last, had been pulled clear and carted away, it was easy to see the wires at the edge of the plough. There were two. The first horses had landed with their forefeet between them. No worse smash could be devised. The wires were attached at the far end to two pollarded ash-stumps at the corner of the ploughed field. Whatever had held them tight at the road end had gone off in the Land-Rover.
The drag must have been laid in the early morning. Its course did not realistically imitate the running of a fox: but it meant that the field was galloping at exceptional speed when it jumped into the wires.
Nobody saw anybody with the Land-Rover. Nobody noticed its number.
The wire was multi-strand galvanised steel, five-eighths of an inch in diameter, of a type used in thousands of boats and on thousands of building sites.
Nobody was thought to have more than an ordinary grudge against anyone who was hunting. Nobody could in any case predict who was going to be killed.
The anti-hunting organisations joined in the horror and the mourning.
More than one senior officer in Scotland Yard was convinced there was a link with the affair in Hampshire, four days earlier, a hundred miles away. None could be found.
The Hunt Secretary, who only broke a leg, went through the Master’s papers a few days later. He could make nothing of a card in a cheap brown envelope, with a London postmark, on which was written only:
ALA
‘And now horses.’
The man with the girlish mouth said: ‘You know what those horses are called? Hunters. They’re a special type, like a big thoroughbred, and people are subsidised to breed them. Hunters. Bred just for this. Not for getting to a place, or pulling something useful. Just for this. Hunters.
But for them none of it could happen.’
‘You’re ambivalent about animals. You really are.’
‘No. Wild animals, with the dignity of their natural struggle, I live for. You know that. Domestic animals fulfilling useful functions I respect too. Milch-cows, sheep for wool, oxen pulling the plough. But these hybrid instruments of cruelty, these bastard panders . . .’
‘Okay, Tony. But no more for me. No more animals. Maybe your logic’s right but I haven’t got the stomach. Men, yes. But no more animals.’
‘As it happens there won’t be any next time.’
The Igton Agricultural College Beagles were having a depressing day.
The wind had veered to the north-east. The fine weather had turned arctic. The ground was like stone. Flurries of snow, like handfuls of dirty grit, flung petulantly in the gusty wind over the high chalk country. The girls grew miserable and complained with passion about the cold. The boys growled that no one had made them come.
Nothing went right. The new Master’s father had a pack of harriers: he ought to know how to go about killing hares, but he clearly didn’t. He let himself be bossed by the Kennel Huntsman, he was swayed by suggestions, and he was bad at blowing his horn. The hounds behaved shamefully. They split up into little groups, chasing rabbits in different directions. Horns were tootled and whips cracked. Hares were seen, and wearily pursued in great circles over the grim countryside. A kill never looked remotely probable.
Two vehicles waited at a wind-lashed crossroads, where illegible fingerposts pointed at distant villages: the Bedford van which carried hounds and Kennel Huntsman, and the bus which carried the rest. The driver of the bus sat smoking cigarettes and listening to his radio. He was cold and bored.
A Land-Rover drove up to the crossroads. It stopped. A big man in a brown felt hat got out from the passenger’s seat. He climbed out awkwardly, as though it were a thing he had often done before but would never be good at. Two more men climbed out who had been in the back of the Land-Rover: nondescript figures, in caps. One of them immediately relieved himself in the scrubby, frozen hedge behind the Land-Rover.
The man in the hat strolled over to the bus.
‘Waiting for the beagling boys?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’d rather them than me.’
‘Ah.’
‘Guess I’ll be waiting a while too. My pal’s springing his eighth bloody leak in half an hour.’
The man had an accent, not foreign but not English. The bus-driver thought it was Australian.
The bus-driver said: ‘Got a chill on the water-works, has he? So will I have if I sit here much longer.’
‘How long will they be?’
‘Lessee. Two o’clock now. Hours they’ll be.’
‘Pub three miles away.’
‘Don’t I know it. But I can’t get this bugger over the little bridge into the village. The long way round’s thirteen miles. Twenty-six there and back. Not worth it for a couple of pints.’
‘Come with us.’
‘Herm. Well, that’s very handsome.’
‘Not George there with his bladder. No drinks for him.’
So George was left behind with the bus and the bus-driver’s radio.
Hounds were with difficulty collected, in the gathering dusk, from the drains and rabbit-holes they were exploring. They were shoved, yapping, into their van.
The boys and girls swarmed gratefully on to the bus. There were seven girls. Each sat with the boy who was her boy, who was her reason for spending such a horrible day. None of them were hunting girls. They were girls from Igton who worked as secretaries or went to the Teachers’ Training College. One was a dentist’s receptionist and one the daughter of the Methodist minister. The Agricultural College was a godsend to them. It gave dances and jazz concerts. Some of the boys had cars, though they had not brought them today. One (not the Master) was an Honourable; his father was a racing Lord. The girl who was his girl was a solicitor’s secretary. She dreamed of becoming one day a racing lady.
They got warm in the bus. Some of the boys had flasks. Singing started. One of the trainee teachers was shocked, but the Methodist minister’s daughter knew the words.
The driver smoked cigarettes and bumped the long way back to the college. He had been glad of a pint of brown ale and a large whisky. The Australian (if he was Australian) had not come to the pub. They dropped him off outside the village. He wanted to call on a friend about a bit of business. He was a dull man. The others were dull too, but the drinks were all right.
The bus came down from the high bleak chalk to a main road which ran along a river valley. It was a fast road. Much of it was dual-carriageway. There was little traffic on this filthy weekday evening. It was full dark now. Snow gusted against the windows of the bus and the girls snuggled against their boys and the other boys sang the daring rugger-club songs which their fathers had sung in the army.
The driver pushed the bus along. It was a big, powerful, modern vehicle belonging to a charter company in a larger town. Flat out it could get into the eighties and it was doing well over sixty now.
They roared past lit pubs and unlit cottages on the main road. Nearly everyone had become warm. Even the crassest girls relaxed. They had had a traditional, English, bloodsports day. It was more important to try than to succeed. The chase mattered more than the kill. It was something to boast about in office and common room and café.
The bus was going at sixty-four when the steering gave way.
It was on a long, slow bend. The speed was high but safe. There was a narrow footpath on the bus’s side of the road, then a low dry-stone wall, then a steep drop to the black river. The river here was a jungle of alders and willows, a useless and untidy river where nobody tried to catch fish and nobody would have dreamed of swimming.
With useless steering the bus failed to take the bend. It bounced over the footpath and crashed through the wall. It went over the edge of the slope. It landed on its nearside wheels and went over with a crash like the end of the world. It slid very fast down the steep slope, taking with it the dry remnants of nettles and cow-parsley and some stunted bushes. It screamed down the slope and through the spindly untidy trees at the edge of the river and buried its nose, upside down, in the cold mud of the river.
The steering wheel went through the driver’s chest and he was killed. The Methodist minister’s daughter was thrown against the skylight in the roof when the bus went over; she broke it with her head and the broken glass gashed her throat so badly that she died quickly.
None of the others was killed but teeth and noses were smashed and there were many broken limbs. The screaming and sobbing of the injured girls was terrible, and it was pitch-dark and muddy and bitterly cold and there were no houses anywhere near.
Two boys tried to stop a car on the road, to get help. Many cars went by at high speed, their drivers not wishing to stop for muddy hooligans on a wild night. Help was a long time coming. But ambulances and police came quickly after the first telephone call. Some of the boys were able to answer questions. Their guesses at the speed of the bus varied widely. It was established that the bus’s tyres were good and that the driver was experienced and reliable.
A mobile crane arrived the next day and painfully winched the wreck of the bus out of the river and up the bank. It was hoisted on to its wheels and towed cautiously to its garage. It was examined by police and insurance company. Within seconds they saw that the steering-column of the bus had been sawn almost all the way through with a hacksaw. The brilliance of the cut metal showed that the cut was new. It was surprising that the little left unsawn had held up as long as it did.
The police investigation at once assumed a new direction and a far greater scale.
Nobody had seen a third vehicle at the crossroads, but the landlord of the nearest pub remembered three strangers. He described them quite well. One was evidently the bus-driver. The other two wore caps and mackintoshes. He thought they came from London. They were cleanshaven men of medium height with no spectacles, hearing-aids, birthmarks, visible scars, or other distinguishing blemishes. He thought he would recognise them but it was difficult to be sure. They said almost nothing. The bus-driver did the talking. He talked about the cold wind, and he mentioned a man with a chill on the bladder. No names were used.
Several people in the village had seen, near the pub, a Land-Rover not belonging to the village. None remembered its number. One had an idea the number-plates were caked with mud. No one remembered seeing any other stranger.
The investigation came to a dead end. A connection with two other recent disasters was discussed. A certain ferocity was common to all three. Although the methods varied the same mind could be imagined. The same motive could also be hypothesised. The second and third episodes were also tenuously linked by what could, conceivably, be the same dirty Land-Rover. Several Land-Rovers had been reported stolen and hundreds were on hire.
After the bus had been inspected it was cleaned. The man with the hose noticed some letters written on the dirt on the back of the bus. They were partly obscured by mud from the river-bank, and partly scratched out by the salvage operation. They were meaningless anyway: ALA