The Hunger Trace (29 page)

She was learning, it seemed, from Louisa, even in her absence.

‘I’ll see if any of the men are on a break,’ the agent said, and stomped outside.

‘Two hundred thousand,’ Christopher said. ‘Jumping Jesus. For this s-house.’

Maggie went out to get the drugs from the Land Rover, and came back inside just as the agent returned with a workman. Maggie knelt by the ibex, sedated him and checked the pulse in his neck. Everyone else watched in respectful silence, even the agent. ‘I’ll be back to clean up,’ Maggie told her.

‘Don’t worry. They’ll just paint over it,’ the agent said gently.

Maggie and the workman carried the ibex out to the Land Rover and laid him on the back seat. When the animal was secure, Maggie took her place in the driver’s seat next to Christopher, and cleaned her hands with wet wipes.

‘Erm. I’m sorry I couldn’t help,’ Christopher said. ‘I think my disc has slipped.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Maggie said.

‘Is he, erm, going to die, at all?’

‘Yes. His leg is broken and badly infected. It’s better that he’s asleep. He must have been very scared.’

‘Erm, I know. Did you see her lipstick?’ said Christopher. Maggie laughed, and then Christopher laughed, realising he had made a joke.

The sky darkened quickly as they travelled home; the clouds were oppressively low. Maggie explained her plans to bring the deer to Drum Hill. Christopher approved. He wouldn’t promise that he’d touch them, but he might.

‘How do you think the goat got into the house?’ Christopher said, looking behind him at the prostrate animal.

‘The ibex? Difficult to say. What I don’t understand is why this one broke from the pack. I mean, how did he end up over
this
side of town?’ Maggie said.

‘Well, he spun round and went through the woods as soon as he saw my torch,’ Christopher said.

‘What?’

Christopher gasped and stiffened in his seat. ‘Erm, erm, erm. I mean. The torch of . . . erm, whoever.’

Maggie blinked slowly and sighed, but she didn’t say anything. Christopher glanced at her, and then looked away.

They drove on for a mile in silence. It began to rain. Maggie rubbed her face. She could not believe she hadn’t thought of it before, but she had been so certain it was activists. She imagined Christopher out there in the enclosures with the bolt-cutters, in the middle of the night. The thought made her long for David. Christopher began to cry. ‘I suppose I’m going to get an absolute rollocking, now?’ he said through his tears.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s okay.’

When they arrived outside the house, she put her hand over his shaking fist on the passenger seat. ‘Did you do all of the releases?’ she said.

‘Leave me alone,’ Christopher said.

Maggie shook her head and just sat there for a while. ‘I’m sorry, Christopher, about—’

‘So you should be,’ he said. He cleared his sinuses, and swallowed. ‘You knew they were daemonic all along.’

‘I mean, I’m sorry for what I said about that man.’

‘Adam?’ Christopher said.

‘Adam. It was wrong of me. He’s probably very nice. I’m sorry. It’s good for you to go out.’

‘Yeah, right. Erm, what if?’

The rain hit the roof of the Land Rover like crackling fat.

‘And Christopher . . .’

‘What?’

‘When I first came here, to Derbyshire, that must have been very difficult for you,’ Maggie said.

‘Looking back, it was abysmal,’ he said quietly. She thought of his kindness back then, and knew from his tone that he did not mean what he said.

‘Well, you were nothing but nice to me. I married your father because—’

‘Because of financial concerns.’

‘No. That’s not why. I married him because we were massively in love. But if you must think in those terms, then you were the Christmas bonus. I knew I’d be happy with your dad, but I never expected to find someone as brilliant as you waiting for me here. I moved away from all the people I knew when I came to Detton. You know what it’s like to be lonely. I couldn’t have managed without you. Whatever has happened since, I want to say thank you for that.’

‘I’m not lonely,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve got friends. More than you.’

‘I know.’

Christopher looked at his feet for a moment. ‘Say it then, if you want to say it,’ he said.

‘What? Oh.’ Maggie smiled. ‘Thank you.’

She kissed him on the cheek and hugged his head. ‘Best bollocking you’ve ever had, eh?’ she said, and he grinned.

Maggie glanced over at the cottage, its lights strong in the thick darkness of the late afternoon.

It seemed obvious to the people of Detton that their village would be dismantled in this way: slowly and irresistibly turned over and picked apart. No panic, no explosions, just the crushing weight of the world. For the first few days of the flood, the village looked still, its people and vehicles and animals sheltered. The only movement came from the straining, tea-coloured ligaments of flood water, and the things it carried.

Louisa had seen the signs before most. Trying to fly Diamond at Ladybower had been pointless in the deluge, and she had observed the abnormal level of the reservoir, and the officials taking decisions down in the basin. She was on the road now, heading back through the diversions.

The problem, as always, was that Detton stood in the delta between two bodies of water. The ancestral barriers held back some of the Derwent’s overflow, but when the River Ecclesthorpe broke its banks for the first time in 112 years, things began to move more swiftly in the lower part of the village. Houses were prised open. In Dewke Street, a patch of cream and maroon wallpaper stripped from a hallway a mile to the north got caught on the windscreen of a Toyota. Terracotta patio tiles, and blue and white bathroom tiles, spun gently into the Bottleneck Brook, where the weeping willows showed high brown stains of their drunkenness. Eventually, bigger debris – a mattress, pallets from the industrial estate – blocked the bridge near the confluence of the Derwent and the Bottleneck, and squeezed the brook like a tube. In the fields, the soil moisture deficit reached zero and the rain had nowhere to go.

On the radio of Louisa’s Transit, an RSPCA rescue worker spoke of being called to help some horses in a waterlogged field, but finding an elderly couple trying to get their granddaughter out of a car as the levels rose, causing the doors to jam. ‘It creeps up on you, water,’ he said. ‘Everything seems fine. It’s so quiet. Then, before you know it, bang. Trouble.’ Louisa thought of her hawks, and began to make plans.

The plate glass window of Young’s Ye Olde Sweetshoppe down by the school gave way under the pressure, and the children who lived nearby awoke on Thursday morning to find jars of bon-bons, bullseyes and Liquorice Allsorts floating past their windows. Some of the children were struck by a sense of wonder, but concealed their excitement when they saw their parents sitting on the dry half of the staircase, watching their homes go to ruin.

Jessop Avenue was the worst hit. The residents waited to be evacuated as discarded clothes, garden furniture, and the bones of shallow-graved pets lodged in the tops of hedges. From his bedroom window, Richie Foxton saw a swan sailing in and out of the windows of the estate agent’s, the red light of the alarm flashing but mute.

And still there was a sense of calm, even when stories came of the accidents, injuries and deaths across the county. A workman in Hilford died behind the Glow-Worm factory when his dumper truck tumbled into the river. A young man was missing after a night out.

At the bottom of the hill Louisa saw Christopher clambering into his brookside den, and was glad to rise out of the valley. The van shunted unsteadily, and Louisa saw rivulets coming together like the handles of divining rods, winding past her, and flushing the detritus into the village. An expert on the radio programme explained the ‘vulnerability variables’ at work in flood-related accidents: clothing, intoxicants, being asleep. Many deaths happen in vehicles, he said. People die in shallow, quick-moving water. ‘Males are almost twice as likely to be injured taking undue risks and attempting rescues.’ There had been a time when such a sentence would have drawn a derisive snort from Louisa, but no more.

The hawks, however, still came first. Despite their favoured location at the summit of the hill, water pooled on the weathering lawn, and had reached within a foot of some of the chambers. The old wooden stables which had served as an aviary in Louisa’s early years at Drum Hill stood on raised ground to the west of her cottage. It had never been an ideal place for falcons, and she had abandoned it years ago, but it was huge, dry and could be warmed for the Harrises by heat lamps run off the outside generator.

Louisa got to work as soon as she got home, but the hawks were reluctant to move in the rain, and it was an exhausting task. She started with the longwings, loading each into a carrier box and taking two at a time round to the stables. With the hood on her coat pulled up, she did not see Maggie until she was a metre away.

‘Hi,’ Maggie said. ‘I saw you moving the hawks, and thought you might need some help.’

Louisa squinted through the downpour. Maggie wasn’t smiling. ‘I’ll be fine,’ Louisa said. ‘You should go back to the house, stay out of this weather.’

Maggie did not move. She held out a hand for one of the carrier boxes, and after a moment, Louisa relinquished it.

They worked together in silence, Louisa erecting fence panel partitions for some of the more temperamental falcons, while Maggie brought Iroquois round from the lawn. The eagle remained calm on her fist.

Louisa put Diamond in last, lifting his tail, with the little transmitter wire she used to track him, over the block perch. She looked at her watch; Adam was due to arrive in an hour. Before they left, Louisa turned on the red porcelain heat lamps, and the place assumed the feel of a Christmas grotto. She padlocked the door.

‘Thank you,’ Louisa said.

‘That’s okay. I wanted to talk to you, actually.’

‘Yeah, me too. Let’s get dry.’

Maggie nodded briefly. They walked over to the cottage and went inside. The warmth and quiet was welcome as they stripped off their outer layers. In the kitchen, Maggie sat at the table beneath the coloured light while Louisa made tea.

‘I wanted to apologise, first off,’ Maggie said. ‘I was flippant, in talking about Adam. I thought . . . Well, maybe you know what I thought. I hadn’t understood the nature of your relationship.’

‘Christopher filled you in, I take it.’

Maggie nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s understandable.’

‘I guess that’s why I haven’t seen you for a while,’ Maggie said.

Louisa brought the tea to the table and sat down, forced herself to smile. ‘Yeah. Been busy.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘It was nothing to do with you, and I’m sorry if it came across like that. You were right in what you said outside the Strutt. I felt strange about it, you know.’

‘And do you feel strange about it now?’ Maggie said.

‘No. You know the truth, and that makes me feel a bit better. The whole thing is a disaster, anyway. It’s a stupid situation and it’s going nowhere,’ Louisa said.

‘Why is it stupid? Is he in love with you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Louisa said, although she did know.

‘And do you love him?’

Louisa did not reply.

‘But because of his job . . .’ Maggie said.

‘Yes.’

‘Would he ever quit?’

Louisa looked away. ‘It was ridiculous from the start, to think that someone like me could get into this kind of thing.’

‘It isn’t ridiculous,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. You’re an attractive woman. You’re a great person to spend time with.’

‘Maybe I was, once. I don’t know. I made certain sacrifices.’

Maggie looked up at Louisa. ‘David told me what happened, you know,’ she said. ‘With the little boy. He told me what you did for him.’

David had spoken to people about it. She knew that already. Louisa, however, had never told anyone, and nobody had said ‘the little boy’ to her, until now. She was struck hard by the boldness of the words, but the sensation gave way in her mind to clear pictures of that day way back in the past, on the borders of Oakley, her life unravelling from the barrels of the shotgun in David’s hands.

‘He let the lie go on too long,’ Maggie said.

Louisa dragged her attention back to the conversation. ‘It wasn’t that simple. I wanted to do it.’

‘You were just kids.’

‘Very briefly,’ Louisa said. ‘And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t. I look back and think, well, it didn’t make any difference, really, taking the blame.’

‘I think it probably did.’

Louisa fell silent.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s good to be back here. Maybe we can just get on with things, now.’