Wish You Were Here (25 page)

It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.

Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.

Jack, usually a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have
heard
it, he would have wondered, still, what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things—understandably confused—there was always a particular confusion about this point. He
had
heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him—as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had
known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.

He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave—though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.

Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signalled Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.

Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as well have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusually expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.

And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he
hadn’t
heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at all, he would have made the discovery only gradually. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?

But Jack has never wondered—at least when sharing his recollection of events—why his father chose the exact
spot and position that he did. Among all the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying—though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm—that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compelled to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.

That oak, Jack might have added, was reckoned to be over five hundred years old. It had been there before the farmhouse.

Michael had put on the same clothes that he might have put on, a little later that morning, to do the tasks that had to be done about the farm: a check shirt, a thick grey jumper, corduroy trousers, long thick socks to go in Wellington boots—all of this in addition to the long-john underwear which in winter he normally slept in anyway. The suit he’d briefly worn only hours before (this was later noted) was back in the depths of the wardrobe. Then he’d put on his cap and scarf and his donkey jacket with the torn quilt lining, and the olive-green wool mittens that stopped short at the knuckles. So you might have said that he’d certainly felt the cold, given that he’d dressed so thoroughly for it. But all this was the force of habit. These clothes were like his winter hide, which he merely slipped off overnight. And, of course, he
did
have a task to complete. He even needed to make sure his fingers wouldn’t go numb and useless on him.

He took the gun from the cabinet and took two number-six cartridges and either loaded them straight away, with the kitchen light on to help him, or loaded them at the last minute, in the dark and the cold. At either point it would have been an action of some finality.

The question would arise, which Jack, since he was asleep himself, could never answer, as to how much, if at all, Michael had slept that night: how, in short, he’d arrived at his course of action and its particular timing. He could hardly have set his alarm clock. Jack discovered no note, though he didn’t tell the investigating policemen that he didn’t find this surprising, and when asked by them if he’d noticed anything strange in his father’s behaviour on the preceding day, he’d said only that they’d gone together to attend the short eleven-o’clock remembrance service beside the memorial in Marleston, as they did every year, because of the Luxtons who were on it. One of the two policemen, the local constable, Bob Ireton, would have been able to corroborate this directly, as he’d attended the ceremony himself, in his uniform, in a sort of semi-official capacity. It wasn’t, therefore, a typical Sunday morning—they didn’t put on suits every Sunday morning—but there was nothing strange about it, as PC Ireton would have wholly understood. It would have been strange if they hadn’t gone. The only things that were strange about it, Jack had affirmed, were that Tom wasn’t there (though the whole village knew why this was) and that they hadn’t gone for the usual drink in the Crown afterwards.

And Jack had left it at that.

There were two other peculiarities about that (already highly peculiar) night that he might have remarked on,
setting aside the peculiarity of where the act occurred—which Jack, in his fashion, suggested wasn’t peculiar at all. One was that when he’d got up that night, suddenly galvanised into wakefulness and action, having somehow heard the shot and having somehow known what it meant, he’d naturally looked, even before hastily dressing and before (torch in hand) he left the farmhouse, into his father’s bedroom—into what had always been known as the Big Bedroom. And had noticed that the bedclothes, recently pulled back, had an extra blanket—a tartan one—spread over them. There was nothing special about an extra blanket on a cold night, so in that respect it was unworthy of mention. Only Jack knew that he’d never seen that blanket spread over his father’s bed before. Only Jack knew its history.

And Jack never mentioned either—was it relevant?—that there was a dog buried a little further down that field.

The second peculiarity—which Jack did point out, though the police might soon have discovered it for themselves—was that when Michael had dressed that night, he’d slipped a medal into the breast pocket of his frayed-at-the-collar check shirt. It was the same medal, of course, that Jack knew had been earlier that day in the pocket of his suit.

Why, later, the medal was in the pocket of his shirt was anyone’s guess, but it would have meant—though Jack didn’t go into this in his statement—that he must have been conscious of it during the intervening hours, and perhaps never returned it to its silk-lined box. He might have put it, for example, on his bedside table when he went to bed and before he slept, if he did sleep, that night. Perhaps—though this was a thought that would
not crystallise in Jack’s mind till many years later—he might even have clutched it in his hand.

These were considerations that Jack felt the police and, later, the coroner need not be interested in. Any more than they need be interested in the fact that Vera had died (and hers wasn’t a quick death) in that same big bed with a tartan blanket now lying on it. Or that he himself had been born and, in all probability, conceived in it.

But the fact was that Michael had died wearing, so to speak, the DCM.

When the police had asked Jack how he’d discovered this so soon—after all, his father had been wearing two layers of thick clothing over his shirt, and anyway Jack was having to confront much else—Jack had said that he’d slipped his hand inside his father’s jacket to feel if his heart was still beating. The policemen had looked at Jack. They might have said, if they’d had no regard for his feelings, something like: ‘He’d just shot his brains out.’ Jack had nonetheless insisted, with a certain dazed defiance, that he’d wanted to feel his father’s heart, he’d wanted to put his hand over it. That had been his reaction. He didn’t say that he’d wanted to feel not so much a beating heart—which would have been highly unlikely—but just if there was any last living warmth left on that cold night, beneath the old grey jumper, in his father’s body.

But he said that he’d felt something hard there. Those were his actual words: he’d felt ‘something hard there’.

When Jack said these things the two policemen—Ireton and a Detective Sergeant Hunt—had looked away. Jack was clearly in a state of great distress and shock. God
knows what state he would have been in when he actually came upon the body. Bob Ireton knew Jack Luxton to be a pretty impervious, slow-tempered sort. He was looking now, for Jack, not a little wild-eyed. Bob had been at the same primary and secondary schools as Jack. He’d known, from its beginning, about Jack and Ellie Merrick—but then so did the whole village. Save for Ellie and his recently absconded brother (and Tom, as Bob would later observe, was not to reappear for the funeral), Jack was pretty much alone now in the world.

Bob Ireton was basically anxious—he couldn’t speak for his plainclothes superior—to get this whole dreadful mess cleared up as quickly as possible and spare its solitary survivor any further needless torture. Poor man. Poor men. Both. Bob’s view of the matter—again, he couldn’t speak for his colleague—was as straightforward as it was considerate. Michael Luxton had killed himself with a shotgun. His son had discovered the fact and duly reported it to the authorities. In a little while from now, though there’d be a delay for an inquest, poor Jack would have to stand again in that suit he rarely wore, but had worn, as it happened, only the day before the death, beside his father’s grave.

This was not the first time, in fact, that Constable Ireton had been required to attend the scene after the suicide of a farmer. Following the cattle disease, there had been this gradual, much smaller yet even more dismaying epidemic. One or two hanged themselves from a beam in a barn (sometimes watched by munching cattle), others chose a
shotgun. A shotgun was marginally more upsetting. Bob frankly didn’t attach much weight to the odd circumstantial details that sometimes went with a suicide, the strange things that might precede it, the strange things that might (it was not a good word) trigger it. It was a pretty extreme bit of behaviour anyway. Who could say what
you
(but that was not a good line of thinking and anyway not professional) might do?

But, sadly, he was not unused to the thing itself, no longer even surprised by it. The underlying causes were fairly obvious—look around. He was both glad and a little guilty to be a policeman, drawing his steady policeman’s pay, while farmers all around him were going under. He should really have been like some odd man out within the community—though a policeman, a sort of outlaw—a stay-at-home version of Tom Luxton joining the army. Yet now his services were peculiarly called upon. He’d known that the Luxton farm, especially after Tom had withdrawn his labour, was near the limit. None of it was surprising, and the best thing was to clear it up as tidily as possible.

Had he been told when he became a policeman that he’d one day be officiating over all the wretched consequences of a so-called mad-cow disease, he’d have said that such an idea was itself mad. He hadn’t supposed—though he hadn’t sought a quiet life and there was such a thing as rural crime—that he’d become one day a sort of superintendent of misery. He’d never be (nor would DS Hunt, he reckoned) any other sort of superintendent.

And all this was years before the foot-and-mouth (by which time he was, at least, a sergeant). More dead cattle
—great crackling heaps of them. And a few more deaths among the ‘farming fraternity’. Was it Jack Luxton who’d once passed on to him that phrase?

Poor men. Poor beasts. Both.

Michael crossed the yard and, skirting the Small Barn where the pick-up and the Land Rover and the spreader were housed, entered Barton Field by the top gate. Barton Field, only six acres and a roughly shaped strip of land, buckling and widening as it descended, was the nearest field to the farmhouse, its upper, narrow end meeting the shelf in the hillside where the farm buildings stood. Its challenging contours made it the least manageable field at Jebb, but it was the ‘home’ field of the farm and formed its immediate prospect. At the top, at its steepest, it bulged prominently, turning, further down, into a gentler scoop, so that its flat lower end was hidden from even the upper windows of the farmhouse. But this only enhanced the view. From the house you looked, over the fall of the land, to the woods in the valley and to the hills beyond, but principally took in—perfectly placed between foreground and background—the broad top third or so of the big single oak that stood near the middle of the field where its slope levelled off. The oak’s massive trunk could not be seen, nor the immense, spreading roots which had risen above the surrounding soil. But between these roots, where the grass had given up, were small hollows of that reddish earth that Jack would notice on the last stages of a strange, westbound journey. The roots themselves were thick and ridged enough to form little ledges or seats, for a sheep or a man.

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor—especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day—could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.

None of these thoughts had particularly occurred to Michael or to Jack (or, when he was there, to Tom). They were so used to the tree straddling their view that they could, for most of the time, not really notice it. Nonetheless, it was straight to this tree that Michael walked on an icy November night, carrying a gun. Or as straight as the steep slope allowed.