Landed (2 page)

6.1 Accepting the location has remained unaltered, there is no other physical evidence at the location from which to determine the exact series of events as they unfolded.

6.2 Having analysed police records and attended the scene of the accident it is this investigator's assessment that at the moment of impact the Peugeot was indeed stationary and skewed across the carriageway, and the
lorry was travelling at approximately thirty-eight miles per hour.

6.3 Regardless of the question of its admissibility as justification for the accident, the Defendant's claim that he braked to avoid a dog crossing the road is not, in this investigator's assessment, proven. No blood was found on the road or pavement. More pertinently, in particular regard to Mrs H, who was perfectly positioned to have seen such, no witness saw this dog.

6.4 In my opinion a collision between a car and a dog would not account for the car slewing upon such forceful braking. More likely reasons would be an involuntary touch on the steering wheel by the driver or an error in the steering mechanism or wheel balance of the vehicle.

6.5 It is my belief that in all probability there was no dog, and that the canine hair and blood found on the Peugeot bumper resulted from an earlier incident.

The Hill

T
hey walked across the fields up high above the farm, Owen half-trotting to keep up with his grandfather. The old man would periodically stop in his tracks. Owen learned not to walk behind him, for he'd ram straight into his hard back, but to keep off his left shoulder and then his grandfather would put out his left arm to stay the boy, and they'd stand on the hill. Owen would glance up to gauge the direction in which his grandfather was looking, or perhaps listening, ear or eye cocked that way. He might nod for the boy, and Owen peer with his eleven-year-old eyes.

‘Fox,' Grandpa would say. ‘Buzzard.' Never more. Owen then had to find it for himself. ‘Woodcock.' A shadow flitting amongst the trees; a russet blur in the grass, melting into cover.

They walked up towards Lan Fawr then cut right and down the bank behind the ruin. In the pocket of his jacket Owen could feel the animal, entrusted to him for the first time, bumping softly against his hip. Three days earlier he had borrowed needle and thread off his grandmother and sewn two buttons on the pocket, cut eyes in the flap and stitched their edges to stop the fabric tearing further open. The animal, he believed, was excited as he himself was. This morning he thought when he was fussing her that she knew what day of the week it was: Saturday. When Grandpa came in from work Grandma stood out of his way, watched him gobble his lunch.
In the shed he found Owen had laid out equipment: lines, wires, nets, pegs. Grandpa discarded snares and mesh, took up a shovel.

Now he stopped and thrust the shovel into the earth, as if to send tremors underground, fair warning, we're here to have you. Said nothing to the boy, it was clear enough. Grandpa clambered across the bank, taking a small purse net from his pocket, spreading it loose across a hole of the burrow. Satisfied he'd found them all when he'd covered five, he came to Owen, who lifted the ferret from his pocket and held it fast around the neck and chest while his grandfather attached its string muzzle. Then, this time, instead of taking the animal himself, Grandpa stood back.

One hole he'd left uncovered. Owen set the ferret there. She sniffed, then turned away lifting her nose, testing the air as if some distant scent, the rumour of some unheard of exotic prey might see her dash away. Her white albino fur trembled with bloodlust and nerves, she turned back to the hole, then after a moment's further ponder and a shiver of momentary distaste, she slithered into the black earth. Grandpa set a new net across the hole, stood back, then changed his mind, stepped forward, took a handful of loose soil from below the entry and rubbed it into the net, darkening the new string. As he did so the ferret reappeared at the mouth of the hole. While she hesitated, peering around with her bright blind red eyes, confused by the brevity of the game or by her own stupidity, Owen came up and took her and set her back to the hole, into which she once more disappeared.

The old man stood back from the bank; Owen beside him felt his grandfather's big rough hand on his chest, over his heart, as if not just to keep him from moving forward but to
calm him too. Owen cast down his eyes. A labourer's hand, fingers flattened, skin thickened and knotted, hands half as large again as unworked ones. Yellowed nails. Calluses. The knuckles were bony misshapen arthritic protrusions. His grandfather's hands were no longer delicate flesh and blood like Owen's own, they were heavy tools on the end of his arms, they'd accrued inorganic matter like barnacles, or like the horns of a ram. The dark soil with which he'd just dirtied the string on the new net marked his fingers, but even when he'd wash his hands before a meal the lines still showed up, ingrained with oil and mud and creosote, with tar and paint and the shit of the five hundred ewes scattered across these hills.

When he judged the boy was still enough, steady, Grandpa let his hand fall to his own side. They waited. Owen stared at the bank, the focus of his attention shifting from one to another of the half-dozen purse nets, his ears pricked. He became aware of the tiniest movement of grains of soil subsiding, of a blade of grass, flattened by his grandfather's footstep, springing back to an upright position. He became aware of how blue the sky above them was. A crow flew overhead and he could have sworn it was not black but purple. Closer by, a bevy of starlings veered across the sky, metallic plumage flashing in the sun. He heard a liquid sibilant
seep, seep
, and though he looked and saw nothing he recognised a yellowhammer by its flight-note song. He turned to tell his grandfather, but was baulked from doing so: the old man – some way yet from sixty, in truth, but ancient to the boy – stood just as he had many minutes before, focused as a dog on point.

Owen was certain his grandfather had neither seen nor heard any of the things to which his own attention had
strayed. Ashamed, he once again stared at the nets strewn across the bank. Presently his grandfather stirred, stepping quietly, daintily almost, despite his bulk, and reaching the bank he lay with his ear to one of the holes. Owen copied him, tiptoeing forward, bending down and listening at another. He could hear nothing. Perhaps this rabbit warren connected to fissures in the rock, to hidden potholes, deep subterranean tunnels along which the ferret was slithering like an eel in pitch darkness, down, down, after the scent of whatever creatures inhabited the centre of the earth. No. It was his mind, not the animal, that was wandering beneath the ground.

The old man stood up, stepped back. Owen assumed his position beside him. Grandpa had not said a word since before they left the house. Owen wondered what he was thinking as he stood there, patient, alert. The boy understood that his grandfather thought about nothing, that his mind was placid like water, still as the pool in the plantation up by The Bog, dark and oddly ominous, but Owen wondered how he could sustain or even stand it. Had he trained himself, or was this trance a natural state? Did his grandfather not experience tedium? Did his mind not wish to stray, to fill itself with thoughts of other things? Speculation such as this?

Owen was jolted by sounds. Bumps. Coming from the bank, dull thuds, as if furniture were being clumsily shifted inside the burrows, and then a rush and flurry and one of the nets came alive, bursting away from the bank. It rolled over and over, showing brown and white fur inside as it slowed. But even before the rabbit broke Owen had seen his grandfather move towards that particular hole. Owen remembered that between his own splayed hands he held a fresh net at the ready, and he
advanced to cover the hole while his grandfather fell upon the full net: he broke the doe's neck with a chop of the side of his hand.

Now the rabbits came tumbling out of their burrows and the man and boy had to move fast, killing or replacing a net as it fell to either of them to do so. Owen at eleven was not yet sufficiently strong or more likely decisive enough to use his grandfather's method: he had to hold a rabbit's hindquarters and neck and break its spine like a stick over his bent knee. The noise was all human: their footsteps, and rustling clothes, and gasping breath. When he found a big old buck in a net close by he called, ‘Grandpa!' and the old man was over in three strides and took care of it himself.

And then they found themselves standing by, breathing hard in a silence and stillness that had returned more acute than before. Eleven carcasses lay strewn around their feet: the dogs' meat for a week. Owen gathered them up, tied them by their hind legs in two clutches. His grandfather checked the nets for the ferret's emergence then sat on a tussock away from the bank and rolled a thick cigarette.

‘Rarely hear a rabbit squeal,' he said. He lit the cigarette. ‘Hare will always squeal when it's caught, see. Horrible sound.' Owen caught whiffs of the smoke, which wafted in lazy drifts in the still afternoon. ‘Anyhow, be needing a lurcher you want to catch hares, and I've enough to think of with the collies.' He frowned. ‘Not that I've seen a hare hereabouts in a year or two.'

The old man was never as loquacious as after a kill, something about it freed his penned-in personality.

‘Need a gun, too, like,' he said, spitting a strand of loose tobacco onto the grass. A freedom about him, a disdain. There was a gun in a cupboard in the cottage, a twelve-bore shotgun
that was never used but which Owen gazed at and sometimes touched when his grandparents were busy, drawn to an occult power he sensed it had. He didn't know why his grandfather despised guns. It might have been their intrusion upon the silence he preferred.

‘Once had a ferret running the burrows,' he said. ‘Out flies this creature. Rabbit? No. Brown owl. Must have laid its eggs in there. Nicely tangled up in the net. Let it go and up it went.' Tilting his flat palm, he raised his arm. ‘Whoosh.' He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Come on, boy. Better us do something.'

‘Is it blocked?' Owen asked.

‘Maybe. Might have cornered one down a blind alley, see, and can't bear to leave it. If she's slipped her muzzle and killed one, she'll suck its blood dry, gorge herself. Settle down for a good long sleep.' He shook his head. ‘Not minded to dig her out.'

They gathered stones, blocked the entrances to the warren. ‘You can get her tomorrow. She'll come out when she's hungry.' As Owen began to brick up the last hole, his grandfather said, ‘Wait. Got that wailing damn thing on you?'

Owen had been given a Jew's harp by his favourite teacher when he left primary school at the end of that summer term. He took care to play it out of earshot of his grandfather, who claimed to despise all forms of music, but sound carried on the wind. Owen found it now in one of his pockets, beside a penknife and some rubber bands, and produced it.

‘Play it there,' his grandfather said. ‘Nosy beggars, ferrets, like. Might bring her out.'

Owen lay kneeling on the bank, the harp between his teeth, and plucked the harp's tongue. He felt foolish, suspected that his grandfather was having a joke at his expense. As he played, however, he overcame his scepticism, began to believe in the
ploy, that as the notes twanged down into the dark tunnels, reverberating through the burrows, even if his grandfather was laughing behind his back – perhaps ferrets were famously tone-deaf? – that actually this would work. Like a snake charmer, Owen would seduce this ferret to the surface. And thus, for the first time in unrecorded history, as he would tell his grandmother a short while later, on this day in the summer of nineteen seventy two on the side of a hill on the Anglo-Welsh border, a boy lured a ferret out of the earth with the music of his Jew's harp.

 

Before the beginning of these summer holidays Owen had rarely been brought out here, though it was less than ten miles from Welshpool. His father and grandfather, it was understood, did not get on. Some slight or argument had occurred that could not be overlooked by either side. Owen was never told exactly what this had been. It was, he imagined, so fundamental a moral breach that to find out more would provide him with a vital clue to the unblossoming mystery of human relations.

No detail was given, even to his direct questions. ‘What happened?'

‘Old sod's an obstinate bastard,' his father told him.

‘What happened?' Owen asked his mother.

‘Dislike each other, simple as that,' she said. ‘Never could stand to be in the same room.' Not liking your own father had not offered itself, till that moment, as an option, though now Owen saw how it could. Not that he knew his father well enough to love or hate him, his father was invariably just off, just gone, on his way. If they'd had a tent, Owen thought, rather than a house, they could have moved as a little family with his father's moods.

It was his mother who telephoned, and rode with him on the bus. They climbed on, sat down, one of the other passengers came and collected their fare for the driver. His mother told him she needed time alone with his father. ‘To bring him round. Better for us all in the long run. Believe me.'

His grandmother stood at the bus stop in the middle of the village in the valley. ‘Get in the van,' his mother told him, while she spoke with her mother-in-law, before crossing the road to wait for a bus going back the other way. Owen opened the door on the passenger side of the filthy white van. His grandfather sat gazing out of the windscreen, hemmed in, his rough hands resting on the steering wheel. He was too big for this vehicle. Without looking directly at Owen he nodded his head, indicating the area behind the two seats; with his left hand he tilted the passenger seat, it knelt forward to the dashboard. There were two collies in the back. Owen climbed slowly towards them, expecting them to snarl at this invasion of their territory. To his relief they ignored him. His grandfather kept the engine idling, impatient to return home, get back out in the open.