Up the path beside the graveyard, skirting puddles which never dried out from one rainstorm to the next, John Jones went with the edgy gait of an old dog, cursing as his ankle turned on a loose stone, and mud spattered over the toe of his boot and up his trouser leg. He looked behind him for the hundredth time, but saw only dripping trees and rank undergrowth, heard only wind in the deep woods, whining through creaking, snapping branches. He prayed it was only the wind, and not the white-faced man come to breathe the dirty stink of death in his frightened old face.
At the top of the path, where the tarmac lane stopped dead by the church gates, he leaned against the wall to get his breath, thinking his life a sorry mess if he was too afraid to stay in his own house and must seek some human company; even his dreary nagging wife better company than the monsters of the imagination. He peered down the lane, past the school with its yard and classrooms empty for the weekend, to the row of low cottages beyond, where his wife was doubtless gossiping with her cronies over cups of tea in Mary Ann’s parlour. Pushing his scrawny body away from the wall, he slid off along the lane, wondering who the man might be, knowing, as night followed day, that such pursuit boded ill for the health of John Jones. The man had been told to follow him, told to worry him like a rogue dog after sheep, told to wait until Chance smirked, then told to pick up a stone or a heavy branch and smash the living daylights out of his head.
He rubbed his scalp, the skull so thin and fragile beneath its pelt of matted dirt-grey hair, knowing how easily he could be destroyed; head crushed and all of himself inside obliterated, along with all the secrets: secrets locked away from the prying noses of his wife and the rest of the world, secrets known only to God. But that was the root of his trouble and terror, because not only God was privy to some of those secrets.
Thumping on Mary Ann’s door with a huge fist at the end of his skinny long arm, still looking behind him, John Jones wondered how much money the man had demanded to do the deed, how much it was worth to have John Jones’s mouth and eyes and ears shut for ever. Was he worth more dead than alive, like a carcase at Clutton’s slaughterhouse? He shivered, waiting for the old woman to creep on her fat rheumaticky legs to open her door, thinking his pursuer might be a gippo from the site down the main road, happy to crunch an old man’s skull to bloody splinters for the price of a packet of baccy, or even for nothing and just for the hell of it. John Jones decided, as he heard Mary Ann fumbling with her lock, it was time to put a stop to it all, to redeem the time the other one planned to steal. Time to take the lid off the can of worms. He snickered to himself, for it was more a can of maggots by now.
‘She’s not here,’ Mary Ann said. ‘She’s doing messages for me.’
‘Where’s she gone then, old woman?’
‘Less of the old woman from you!’ Mary Ann snarled. ‘Whore’s dog!’ She spat at him, and slammed the door in his face, leaving him marooned on her polished doorstep. He deliberately scuffed his dirty boots on the purply slate, scarring the sheen with filth, before trailing off down the lane, away from the church, towards the main road. He looked behind again, then sat on the garden wall of somebody’s house, making a roll-up, cogitating on his plight, and the fear scouring like poison through his bowels.
Sunshine cut the tattered rags of storm cloud, warming his face, making the sweat rise. He lit his cigarette, pungent smoke curling in the air with the stink of his body, remembering what he had seen in those dark woods. The memory stirred him from the wall, gave his feet a life of their own, to pace the square of weedy grass at the roadside, and to kick their owner for his stupidity. He could have rid himself of his job, thrown the pittance of a wage back in the arrogant face of the castle gentry, abandoned the rancid hovel in which he lived, and the poverty suffocating his smallest dream, trampling it into the dirt before it even took shape. And best of all, he could be rid of his wife, the one ugly enough to frighten the Devil from his den.
He sat again on sun-warmed stone, smelling the scents of late-blooming roses in the garden behind him, watching leaves flutter down from the trees to lie in drifts of gold and copper-brown against walls and tree boles, and looked at the manicured acreage lavished with flowering shrubs and succulent roses in pinks and yellows and ivory white. He stared at the cottage within the garden and felt envy enough to break the stoutest heart, recalling the other cottage, its reek of wealth, the rich fat furniture, deeper and more tempting than the breasts and thighs of any wench. He sighed, shaking his head to nudge the memories out of the darkness where he thrust them long months before. It was not too late even now. John Jones ground his jaw, stumps of teeth crunching together, and called himself worse than a fool. He spat on the ground, a phlegmy globule which lay glistening in the sunshine before sliding off the edge of a dead leaf. In his mind’s eye, he saw the man staring at him from the night-dark trees, eyes glittering like black coals, face white as death. He shivered violently, thinking the man might have set a trap in the deepest woods, a gin-trap big enough to snare him, strong enough to hold him until his death throes ceased.
Jumping to his feet, he loped back to the village, sticking up two fingers as he passed Mary Ann’s cottage, and on to the path to his own place, head high, fear quenched by resolve and the prospect of a brighter dawn to come. Time for the other one to have some shocks, he said to himself. A taste of their own bitter medicine might sicken enough to stop the flaunting and the sneering, the swaggering in that fancy car. He licked his lips, tasting revenge. Folk said money stank, and it was time the stench in John Jones’s house and about his person took on another flavour. He started whistling, a shrill rendering of ‘Bread of Heaven’, his ugly wife’s favourite hymn, and scuffed his way back down the path beside the graveyard.