Three Bags Full (26 page)

The bespectacled man who had called Othello “Satan” climbed up onstage again. The sheep fled down the ramp at the back to get away from him. Once there, they regrouped to watch.

“Let’s hear it for Peggy, Polly, Samson, and Black Satan, who have just shown us that even sheep know something about the modern drama,” said the bespectacled man. “Give them a big hand!”

At best the applause was halfhearted, but the sheep had a feeling that it was more for the bespectacled man than them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen the most talented and clever sheep in Glennkill do their turns to win your favor. Now it’s up to you to…”

Right at the back of the hall, something moved. Beth came slowly walking down the central aisle past the audience. In her hands, as tenderly as a mother ewe, she held the rag that Mopple had dropped. Beth had unfolded it, and even through the dirt the sheep could see the pattern of two red signs on a white background.

Beth made straight and undeterred for the stage, as if following a secret scent. She walked so calmly and held herself so upright that it was a pleasure to watch her.

She stopped in front of the stage.

The bespectacled man looked down at Beth.

“Excuse me, please,” said Beth, “but I’d like to say something.”

“Does it have to be now?” the bespectacled man hissed down.

“Yes,” said Beth.

The bespectacled man shrugged his shoulders.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice again, “there will now be a brief intermission for a charity appeal.”

His hand sketched a gesture of invitation, but Beth didn’t join him on the platform. She simply sat down on the edge of the stage and smoothed out her skirt and the piece of cloth she held.

“George,” she said. “I want to tell you something about George.”

From then on it was so quiet in the hall that you could have heard a pin drop. Neither the bespectacled man nor the sheep had really mastered the knack of getting everyone’s attention; Beth did it with the utmost ease. Yet she didn’t do any tricks, she just sat still on the edge of the stage and spoke. Sometimes she swung her legs a little, sometimes her fingers carefully stroked the piece of cloth.

The piece of cloth seemed to be important to her, although it stank. At first she didn’t talk about George at all, but about herself.

“I gave him this,” she said. “Long, long ago. It was so easy. I sat up for a whole night embroidering it. I knew in advance just what it would look like. And in the morning I felt as if I could float in the air, do anything, say anything. It was…” Beth hesitated for a moment, perhaps to recover her voice, which had grown quieter and quieter and was now in danger of fading away entirely. “It was good.”

Some of the people began to murmur.

“And then the moment came, and I didn’t say anything after all, just put the handkerchief in his hand without a word. He looked at me as if he didn’t understand, and I couldn’t say anything or do anything. Ever again. When I saw it again just now, I realized that
that
was the big mistake in my life—not the other thing.”

The sheep could see a shudder run from the nape of Beth’s neck down her spine and into her limbs.

“The Sunday before last, late in the evening, there was a knock on my door. I was still awake, so I opened it, and there was George. I started telling him something about the Gospel, like every time we saw each other. I always talked about the Gospel.”

Beth sadly shook her head.

“But this time it was different. “Beth,” he said, very gently. “Stop that. This is important.” I went weak at the knees because he said it so gently. So I stopped, and he came into the room. It was almost the way I’d imagined it back then. But of course he had something quite different in mind.

“‘I’ve come to say good-bye,’ he said.

“‘Of course,’ I said, and I smiled bravely. At least, it seemed to me it was brave, but now I know it was cowardly. ‘Of course. Europe calls!’

“‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Europe.’

“I understood at once. It was almost good that I understood what he meant so quickly. Then he told me why he’d come to me. I don’t remember exactly what we said after that, except that I begged him again and again not to do it. But he was stubborn. He was always so stubborn.”

Beth’s thin fingers traced the lines on the dirty piece of cloth.

“‘ But you were looking forward to going to Europe so much,’ I said.

“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was. I’d still like to go in a way. But I’m afraid, Beth. I can’t do it. It’s so late now!’”

By this time Beth was trembling so much that her fingers couldn’t follow the lines on the cloth anymore. Now her two hands were clutching each other in search of help, clasping and stroking to calm themselves down.

“I couldn’t give him the courage to go on. And then I even helped him do it the way he wanted. When I thought that otherwise they wouldn’t bury him…”

Beth’s voice had lost its way in a wood and stopped for a moment, trembling.

“I’d have gone with him, but he didn’t want that. ‘In an hour’s time in the meadow,’ he said. ‘I’ll have it over with by then.’ And I went, in the pouring rain. He was dead already. If I can’t do that for him, I told myself—well, what’s it all worth?”

Beth smiled, with tears in her eyes, and the sheep were surprised. But then the smile seeped away like rain in the sand.

“Oh,” she sighed, “it was hell. And the days afterward…everything about it was wrong, such a sin, and yet, and yet…”

“Why?” asked a hoarse voice from the front row, almost a whisper but clear and distinct in the tense silence.

For the first time since she had begun talking, Beth looked up.

“Why…like that?” croaked Ham even more quietly.

Beth looked at him, irritated. “I don’t know why. But it absolutely had to be the spade. ‘That’ll give them something to think about,’ he’d said. I couldn’t persuade him not to do it. It was terrible.”

Ham shook his head. “Not the spade—George.”

“Is that so hard to understand?” said Beth. Suddenly she looked angry in a vulnerable sort of way—like a young mother ewe defending her first lamb. “When I gave him the handkerchief I felt the same. Sometimes your hope is so great that you can hardly bear it. So your fear is even greater. He’d waited for Europe too long. Perhaps…perhaps he simply didn’t have the courage anymore to see if he could really do it.”

“But…”

However, Beth didn’t let him go on. “And is that so surprising? Was I the only person around here to notice how lonely he was, always alone, just him and his sheep? Of course he always laughed at me, but I noticed him moving away from everything, step by step, moving on and on toward something black.”

The sheep glanced uncertainly at Othello. Their lead ram was looking baffled.

Beth sighed.

“It’s been going on so long! Seven years ago, when I came back from Africa, it was really bad. I don’t know what had happened at that time, and I don’t want to know. But since then he didn’t get on with anyone here, or with God either. At first I thought it might be something to do with me, with my absence—but that was vanity.

“I said so much to him! But he wasn’t really listening. And the one thing I always wanted to say I never did. It’s quite easy now.”

It sounded as if Beth and George had been talking about George’s death. But how could George have known he was going to die? And why didn’t he run away if he knew about it?

What Beth was saying made no sense. They understood the words—they were simple words, words like “life” and “hope” and “alone”—but they could make hardly anything of what Beth meant by them.

A point came when the sheep gave up. It was such a strain concentrating on the words when they couldn’t understand their sense. After a while Beth’s voice was just a quiet, sad melody to them.

Baffled, they trotted back into the dark to join the other sheep in their corner.

“So who
did
murder George?” Mopple asked at last.

No one answered.

Then the sheep heard a snort. Fosco was standing behind them. His eyes were shining almost too brightly, and his breath smelled peculiar.

“George,” said Fosco.

None of them reacted to this strange echo.

Then Zora asked, very slowly and carefully, “You mean George murdered George?”

“Exactly,” said Fosco.

“But George is dead,” said Zora. “George was murdered.”

“Right,” said Fosco.

“George murdered
himself
?”

“Right,” said Fosco again, suddenly looking very impressive and gray.

“She’s telling lies,” bleated Mopple, who had carried the smelly rag all the way to the Mad Boar to clear up the murder of his shepherd. “She just doesn’t want to admit that she did it.”

But the sheep could tell by the scent of it that Bible-thumping Beth wasn’t telling lies. Not in the least.

“Is that crazy?” asked Zora.

“No,” said Fosco. “It’s suicide.”

Suicide. A new word. A word that George couldn’t explain to them anymore.

“They sometimes do that—humans, I mean,” said Fosco. “They look at the world and decide they don’t want to live.”

“But,” bleated Mopple, “living and wanting to live are the same thing.”

“No,” said Fosco. “Sometimes it’s different with humans.”

“That’s not specially clever,” said Mopple.

“No?” asked Fosco. There was a glimmer in his eyes like reeling glowworms. “How would you know? I’ve been here several years running. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it’s not easy to say what’s clever and what isn’t.”

No one contradicted him. The sheep were silent again for a while, digesting what they had heard from Fosco. Out in the hall Beth had stopped talking, and the humans were bleating with agitation.

Zora raised her head.

“What about the wolf?” she asked.

“The wolf is on the inside,” said Fosco.

“Is it like an abyss?” asked Zora. “An abyss inside you?”

“Mm, like an abyss,” Fosco agreed.

Zora thought about it. Falling into an abyss—she could understand that. But falling inside yourself?

She shook her head. “This isn’t something sheep can understand,” she said.

“No,” said Fosco. “No, it really isn’t anything sheep can understand.”

Miss Maple had been silent for a long time with her head on one side, thinking. Now she flapped her ears, baffled.

“Well, it got out,” she said at last. “Let’s go home.”

The sheep said good-bye to Fosco, who could understand such dark things and was rightly crowned the smartest sheep in Glennkill year after year. They trotted to the way out at the back that Fosco had shown them. First Othello, then Zora, then Maple, and last of all Mopple the Whale.

Just as Mopple, with a sense of relief, was about to slip out into the open air behind Maple, a meaty hand came down on the door and closed it gently in front of his nose.

Mopple was imprisoned inside the evil-smelling pub. He froze.

Beside him sat the butcher, pale-faced, his eyes narrowed to slits. The wheels of his chair smelled of rubber. Mopple looked in all directions. This time there was no escape.

Mopple sat down on the cold stone floor with the sheer shock of it. He was in a trap.

“You,” said the butcher in a dangerously quiet voice. “You…?”

Mopple the Whale trembled like grass in the wind. All flesh was grass.

Ham’s hand waved clumsily in the air. Mopple flinched back. For a moment he feared the hand might come off the butcher’s arm and leap at him.

But Ham just nodded to him, almost respectfully. “Now I understand,” he said. “Now I know I deserved all this. Should have noticed what a bad way he was in. He didn’t have any other friend—nor me neither.”

Wide-eyed, Mopple stared at the butcher. The butcher’s great paw in front of his nose had now clenched into a fist.

“But I didn’t,” said the butcher. “I just looked away. Ignored him. George took that kind of thing to heart.”

The butcher’s paw shook slightly, and then was carefully withdrawn. Mopple felt dizzy.

Suddenly the door in front of his nose was open again.

The butcher said no more, but he was watching Mopple with bright eyes. His hands lay limp and lifeless on his thighs.

It was some time before Mopple realized what the butcher was waiting for.

Then Mopple the Whale was in the open air again, dazed. Out there dark had fallen. Dense, velvety night air, incredibly sweet and clear, streamed into his nostrils.

Inspector Holmes watched, stunned, as his case solved itself on the stage of the Smartest Sheep in Glennkill contest. Suicide. And the business with the spade had been that gray-haired woman’s doing: he’d never in his life have thought of that, but in retrospect it didn’t seem to him at all implausible. A lonely old man, eccentric, marriage failed, daughter gone—the usual kind of thing. You could never really understand it, though.

A quiet throat-clearing sound nearby brought him out of his thoughts.

A man in dark clothes had appeared next to Holmes. Discreet was the word for him. One of the sort you couldn’t describe accurately five minutes later.

“My border collie’s name is Murph,” said the man.

“Oh Lord,” said Holmes. “I might have known it. What do you want now, then? Don’t I keep quiet enough for you?”

“Silent as a stone, inspector, silent as a stone. We’re really impressed by your masterly inactivity.”

“What do you think of all that?” asked Holmes, jerking his chin in the direction of the stage, where the gray-haired woman had just stopped talking.

The discreet man shrugged. “Nothing to do with us. Nothing much to do with you either, am I right? Look, how would you like a genuinely successful investigation for once? A successfully solved case of your own?”

Suddenly there was a videocassette on the table next to the inspector’s Guinness. His glass was already half empty again.

“Take that away with you,” said the man. “It’ll tell you all about that man McCarthy. Could do your career a bit of good.”

By the time Holmes had finally stowed the unwieldy cassette in his pocket, the man had long since disappeared. So what? He wouldn’t have answered any questions anyway. Holmes stared at the table, where a beer mat promised that Guinness would bring you fame and fortune. There was a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t just to do with the Glenn case.