Just as we always used to at Longcross, we gathered in my room to chew things over.
We all sat on my bed – Henry’s bed.
‘Well,’ said Nel, falsely breezy. ‘Where to start?’
But we all knew where we would start.
‘I suppose that settles it,’ said Shafeen, arm about my shoulders. I could swear there was a tinge of relief in his voice. ‘Henry’s really gone.’
I had to say it out loud. I had to make myself. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He’s dead.’ But I couldn’t say more than that about Henry just now; I needed to get my own head clear, so I threw them off the scent. ‘And how about Rollo taking you for your dad?’ I said to Shafeen. ‘That was so weird.’
‘I guess I must look exactly like him. I mean, I know I do; I’ve seen the photos.’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ I said. ‘He thought you were him for a minute. It was like he’d seen a ghost.’ It was obviously catching. I was glad I wasn’t the only one.
‘Well, he has lost a son,’ said Nel. ‘Maybe if Caro’s cracking up, Rollo is too. Did you buy all that stuff about him being an ace hunter? Your dad, I mean?’
‘I dunno,’ said Shafeen. ‘I mean, he did used to go tiger hunting at home. And he was pretty effective. But no, I don’t really. It’s just another form of racism. They see brown skin and think we are all shamans or some mystical bullshit.’
But still, his tone did not have the sting it had before dinner. I had a sudden jag of memory. ‘He might be a good hunter though. You are.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘You’re a good hunter too. You tracked Chanel when we were at Longcross. You saw her hair extensions caught on the undergrowth, found her cap.’
Nel looked at Shafeen. Of course, she didn’t know this bit. He looked embarrassed and shrugged. ‘That’s just tracking.’
I said nothing but I thought there might be something in it. Not innate or inherent or whatever the right word was, but just experience. If Aadhish had been brought up hunting tigers in Rajasthan, maybe he HAD developed an instinct. A Bruce Willis Sixth Sense; not for seeing dead things but for seeing live ones.
The recollection of that particular drag hunt brought me back to who we were really dealing with here. ‘Whether or not the ability to hunt is inherited, we know that a murderous nature is. We can’t forget that Henry was a murderer, and that only came from one place: Daddy.’ It suited me to think badly of Henry at that point. It helped me bear the fact that he was gone.
‘Well …’ said Shafeen doubtfully.
‘Well, what?’ asked Nel.
‘In the year we went to Longcross, no one died …’
‘Not for want of trying,’ I said.
‘But still. And no one died at Longcross in 1969. My dad was injured. But that’s it.’
‘Leon Morgan died,’ I said doggedly.
‘Not at Rollo’s hand. The dates don’t add up. The good ship Empire Windrush docked in 1948, and Leon Morgan, from what you told me, went to Longcross the next year. Rollo is the same age as my dad, so he wouldn’t even have been born then.’
‘You’re making excuses for him now?’ I was incredulous.
‘No,’ said Shafeen very definitely. ‘What they do at Longcross is abhorrent whether it results in death, or injury, or mental torture. But I think we need to be precise in our language. Neither Rollo nor Henry murdered anyone, as far as we know.’
‘So you’re letting them off the hook,’ concluded Nel.
‘On the contrary,’ protested Shafeen. ‘I want to find out what actually happened that weekend when my dad was there, as well as what they’re planning for the future. Proof is what we need. Proof, proof, proof.’
‘What do you call this?’ I got up and showed him the pad of my thumb, the M brand in his face.
Shafeen drew my thumb to his lips and kissed it very gently. ‘I call that circumstantial evidence. We need to catch them in the act. And we won’t do that by being hostile. And besides …’ he got off the bed and walked to the window. The snowy park was now luminous in the moonlight. ‘I can’t help feeling …’
‘What?’
‘This is going to sound really weird.’
‘Go on,’ prompted Nel gently.
He turned back to us. ‘I feel like … like he loved my father.’
‘That does sound weird,’ I agreed. ‘Speaking of which, what’s all the “Kiss me, Hardy” stuff?’
‘Nelson’s deathbed. Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.’
‘The guy with the column in Trafalgar Square?’
‘The very same – he had this best friend called Captain Hardy. They were devoted to each other, and Hardy was with Nelson when he died. Nelson’s last words were “Kiss me, Hardy”.
‘And did he?’
‘I guess.’
I studied him. ‘What a lot you know.’
‘Come to think of it, my father told me that.’
Nel said, ‘But he never told you he called himself Hardy instead of Aadhish?’
‘No. I guess he didn’t want me to think he isn’t proud to be Indian. He is, you know,’ he said a little defensively.
Nel and I exchanged a look. ‘We believe you,’ I said, meaning it.
‘It’s just camouflage,’ explained Shafeen. ‘Back then, a lot of immigrants anglicised their names.’ He loosened the knot of his tie. ‘I can understand it, coming to a school like STAGS, the only brown kid.’ I didn’t know at that moment whether he was talking about his father or himself. ‘He was being Aidan’s stag, I guess,’ he said sadly, ‘making himself invisible.’
‘That was my whole evening,’ said Nel, lightening the mood. It was a joke, but you could tell she sort of meant it too. ‘The earl targeting you, and the countess targeting Greer. I might as well not have been here. I was just the Uber driver.’
‘It was kind of rude,’ I said. I did think, then, that maybe it had to do with Nel being ‘new money’. I remembered that bit in Emma when Emma (Gwyneth ‘Goop’ Paltrow) is talking about the Martin family and saying that she never has anything to do with the yeomanry, because the middle classes were as much above her notice as below it. I guessed what she meant – Emma, I mean – is that the rich only really take notice of people who are on their level (Shafeen) or properly poor (me). Middle-class folks with oodles of money just weren’t on their radar.
I didn’t say anything to Nel but put my arm around her reassuringly, although at that time I had little comfort to give. She shrugged under the arm. ‘Some people see me,’ she said wistfully. But before I could ask who she meant, she changed the subject entirely. ‘So. We’re going to do this thing tomorrow? Check out the House of Lords?’
‘Hell yes,’ said Shafeen. He seemed keener than all of us. ‘It’s clearly no coincidence that Ty asks about foxes at the very moment that the earl is knee-deep in this foxhunting debate. I want to know what he’s up to.’ But there it was again, that change in his voice. He wasn’t the Shafeen that had come raging up the stairs earlier, talking about unelected representatives. His hatred now seemed blunted – it was more like he was talking about a naughty child than a homicidal maniac.
‘And what about all that House of Lords business?’ I mused. ‘What’s going on there?’
‘Well, he’s obviously a man who doesn’t like to be crossed,’ said Shafeen, ‘and he’s going to try to block the legislation somehow.’
‘But a lot of it was crap,’ said Nel savagely.
‘Do you mean the “fox doesn’t feel pain” bit?’ asked Shafeen, doing a passable Rollo impression.
‘Yes, that, obviously,’ I said, ’but also, are we really buying the story that they are only drag hunting?’
‘No,’ said Nel, who had been tapping away at her phone. ‘It’s totally a cover.’ She held out the Saros.
I took the phone from her hand. She’d found an article in the Independent online. The headline shouted: DON’T BE FOOLED BY BOXING DAY TRAIL HUNTS – THEY’RE JUST AS CRUEL AS ILLEGAL ANIMAL HUNTING. The subheader below read: When ‘lethal’ hunting was banned, trail hunting was invented, which still allows foxes to be slaughtered but claims it’s an accident.
I scanned the article, then passed it to Shafeen. Hunts were gathering legally for a trail hunt, and then the hounds would ‘accidentally’ follow the trail of a real fox instead, and, of course, once their blood was up, they couldn’t be prevented from tearing the fox to pieces.
‘That’s the point of using fox urine for the trail, you see,’ said Nel. ‘It’s the perfect cover. They can’t expect the hounds to differentiate between the fox urine laid for the trail and the scent of a real, living, running fox. They can plead to protesters and the police that they are trail hunting, even if they’re really hunting live foxes all along.’
‘But if the law makes all hunting with hounds illegal, even trail hunting,’ Shafeen finished, ‘then they can’t even gather a certain number of dogs together, and there’s no opportunity to ride around in their fancy pink coats.’
I yawned hugely. ‘OK, well, we’ll learn more tomorrow. Let’s hit the hay.’ It had been a lot, this evening, a lot to process, and I was exhausted.
But when they got up to go I remembered the fox heads. ‘Wait a sec,’ I said, and led Shafeen and Nel over to the fireplace. This time, when I stood on tiptoe, I tried to read the little bronze plaque below the fox mask, but it was too high up. I grabbed my phone from the mantelpiece, zoomed in and took a picture.
We all peered at the phone and I pinched the photo to enlarge the plaque. It said:
Reynard
Michaelmas Justitium
2008
That date meant nothing to me. ‘Funny that they named him,’ I said. ‘Poor Reynard.’
‘That’s a fairly recent kill – 2008,’ said Shafeen.
‘Well after the ban as well. I guess he must have been an “accidental kill”,’ said Nel with heavy irony.
‘OK,’ I said to Shafeen, ‘let’s do yours.’
Shafeen’s room was as neat as ever, with the twin masculine smells of deodorant and aftershave. Above the mantel, in the same position as mine, was Shafeen’s fox head. His was more grizzled and faded, seeming much older, and had a distinctive black snout. I took a pic in the same way and we examined it. This plaque said:
Reynard
Michaelmas Justitium
1969
‘Reynard as well,’ Nel observed.
It wasn’t the name but the date that struck me though. I stared at it until the photo blurred. ‘Justitium 1969,’ I breathed. I let Shafeen say it.
And he did. ‘This fox was caught when my dad was at Longcross.’
‘Do you think your father helped to catch him?’ asked Nel. ‘You know, all that mystical stuff about nothing could hide from him – d’you think he helped run this fox to ground?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Shafeen, sounding troubled.
But I was caught in another memory – Henry on the rooftop, and a midnight vixen frozen in a photo moment on the lawn. We don’t foxhunt at Longcross. But they had done in the past – 1969, 2008. And now the earl was trying to bring back the practice and was being thwarted. And I sensed that Rollo was not a man who liked being thwarted.