Wish You Were Here (26 page)

Exact evidence of his path was left by the tracks in the frost that Jack, only a little later, picked up by the light of his torch. At one spot it was clear that his father had slipped and slid for a yard or more on his arse. It was very strange for Jack to think of this minor mishap at such a moment—of his father perhaps swearing under his breath at it and suffering its jolting indignity. As it was strange to think that this slip might not have been a simple slip at all, given that his father was carrying at the time a possibly already loaded and closed gun. There might have been a much nastier accident.

Had the frost not begun to melt—unlike the previous
morning—even before daybreak, it would have left a very clear record of the activity in Barton Field that night: Michael’s tracks, with that slip, going in one direction, and Jack’s going, separately, in both directions (and, despite the great agitation he was in, without a single slip). But all of them converging on the oak tree.

In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both followed and avoided them, even carefully skirting round the broad mark where the slip had occurred. He had instinctively not walked through them, not out of forensic considerations, but because, as he failed really to convey clearly but as his listeners may have grasped, they were the last footsteps his father had taken.

Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together. There was certainly only one set of ascending tracks. But all this was neither here nor there, since by dawn and even by the time Jack made his phone call—he’d delayed the call because of the state he was in, but also because he knew not much could practicably be done while it was still dark—a change in the weather occurred. A breeze got up, bringing in cloud cover, and the air warmed appreciably.

By the time the two policemen arrived and descended the field with Jack—who was clearly dreading what he would have to see in daylight—the sharp night had turned into a grey, gusty morning. The top branches of the oak tree made a continual whirring above them, and dislodged leaves spun down. The frost had gone. There was even a touch of drizzle. So the policemen perhaps wondered why
Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there—unless, of course, it was simply because he couldn’t help reliving, and reliving again, every detail. Both officers were not unused to this. It was strange how the silent ones could suddenly become the gushers, while the regular gabblers could lose their voices.

But what both officers had mostly thought was: What must it have been like, to shine a torch on
that
?

The frost was there, anyway, when Jack first walked down, and would have sufficiently reflected the moonlight to make the torch barely necessary. The dark mass of the oak tree, against the ghostly silver of the field and the woods beyond, would have been visible of itself, Jack knew, to his father, who’d carried no torch. Perhaps his father had calculated even this, had waited for the moon to rise and light him. He would have been able to take a final look around. He would have been able, when it came to things closer to hand, to make out the roots under the tree and the gun he was holding: its dull metal glint and his own fingers on it.

Michael sat down at the foot of the oak. There was a sort of bowl in one of the thickest roots, close up to the trunk, which was ideal for this. He took his donkey jacket off first, despite the cold, the better perhaps to manipulate the gun, but also to spread under him before he sat. This precaution was as strange as it was natural: he’d wanted to spare his arse, already damp maybe, from any chilly hardness. It was like that extra blanket on the bed, though Jack didn’t say this. Nor did Jack express to anyone his private view that his father would have removed his jacket
so as to be better able to feel, through his remaining layers, the wrinkled bark and supporting, towering, centuries-old solidity of the tree against his back.

Michael had removed his cap as well, as if out of respect for something. He would have pressed the back of his head, too, against the trunk and its slight inward slope. This might have been mechanically necessary, but Jack had no doubt either, though he didn’t say it (wasn’t it plain—why had Michael gone to this spot at all?), that this was out of the same dominant motive. His father had simply wanted to press his head, his skull and his back hard against that oak tree and feel it pushing back. Spine against spine.

Jack knew—he knew it from climbing up the track in winter to get the school bus—that when you shine a torch at night it lights your way but makes the surrounding darkness several times darker. When he arrived beneath the tree he partly wished he hadn’t brought a torch. It made the scene look like something horribly staged just to be lit up and it made everything else, despite the moonlight, pitch-black. Though Jack was technically prepared for what he would find, this had not made the discovery any less shocking, and how to describe what he’d felt at this moment was beyond him. Though he’d walked downhill—perhaps it was more of a scramble—he was panting for breath and his heart was banging inside him. Perhaps it was because of this that he’d reached out to feel for his father’s heart, as if while one heart was beating so violently another could surely not be lifeless. To touch his father’s breast certainly made more sense, in any case, than to touch any part of what was left of his head.

Thus he’d felt the small, hard object in his father’s
shirt pocket and known exactly what it was. He didn’t dare remove it. Why should he have removed it? He was overcome by conflicting instincts, to touch and not to touch. In its recoil, the gun had jumped from between his father’s lips and from his fingers so that its double barrel lay now aimed at his waist. Even before stooping to feel his father’s chest, Jack had automatically removed the gun, as if Michael was still in danger.

This was all wrong perhaps, he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did. He hadn’t known if his father had loaded—or used—both barrels or if there was still a cartridge in place. He didn’t know if he should have broken open the gun to check. Or indeed if he should have carried the gun back with him to the safety (though that was a strange idea) of the farmhouse. Normal procedure had been suspended. You didn’t ordinarily leave a gun, especially one that might still be loaded, in the middle of a field, even if it was the small hours of the night. You didn’t normally leave your father in a similar position. In any case, he moved the gun from where it had fallen and placed it to one side in a cleft between the roots. Then, after feeling his father’s inert and medalled chest, he just stood—he couldn’t have said for how long—over the body.

He couldn’t have described his feelings at this time, but anger must have been part of them—a very large part of them—since, though this had no place at all in his subsequent relation of events, what he began to say, aloud and more than once in the middle of a dark field to his dead father, was: ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ Even as he shone a torch on his father’s shattered features: ‘You bastard.’ He would never remember how many times he
said it, he wasn’t counting, but he couldn’t stop saying it. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’

It was the wrong word, perhaps, since it’s not a word you use of your father or of any father, it’s a word that works in the other direction, but he kept saying it, and the more he said it, the more it seemed not just an angry word but a useful, even encouraging word in the circumstances—the sort of word you might use to someone who wasn’t dead but just in a precarious situation, to help them pull through it. ‘You bastard.’ It kept coming to his mouth like a chant or some regular convulsion, like the only word he might ever say again.

He was saying it when, after standing for however long it was, he actually sat down beside his father, his own back against the tree—it was easily broad enough—and wondered if he shouldn’t stay there with him, freezing as it was, at least until dawn, or if he should take the donkey jacket from under him and wrap it round him, or—since that would have its problems—if he shouldn’t take off his own jacket and wrap it round him. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ He was saying it when he wondered whether to pick up the gun or leave it where it was. He was saying it, at intervals, when after deciding to leave the gun—it seemed to belong there—he made the climb back up the steepening field to the farmhouse, his breath coming like the strokes of a saw through his chest: ‘You bastard.’ He was saying it as the farmhouse and the lights he’d left on rose monstrously over the hump of the field above him, and as he passed by the Small Barn into the yard. By now it had become like some hoarsely uttered password. ‘You bastard.’

He continued to say it during the period between
regaining the farmhouse and making the call he knew he would have to make, when he had no clear sense of the passage of time and when he continually wavered between the thought of making the call, which would make things final and definite, and the thought that he should go back down to the oak tree, because what had happened perhaps might not really have happened at all. Or because he should just be there with his father. Up here, in the farmhouse, he’d already deserted him. ‘You bastard.’

He said it as he wondered whether he should wash off the muck that had got on his hands or whether he should leave it there for all of time to erase or ingrain. ‘You bastard.’ And he’d got so rhythmically used to saying it, that when he finally made the call and was able to get out that other word, ‘Police’, it’s not inconceivable that he might have said, ‘You bastard,’ too, into the phone.

He didn’t mention his repeated utterance of this phrase to Bob Ireton and his senior companion (or to anyone else), nor did he mention that during the preceding day and evening, following the Remembrance Day gathering, he had also uttered the phrase, if not aloud, but inside himself or perhaps under his breath. But the fact that he’d vented it, one way or the other, so much beforehand somehow enabled Jack to regain a degree of composure—it was his strange way, even, of haranguing himself—and to give the detailed and relatively focussed account of events that he gave. All of which, together with the actual evidence lying there in Barton Field, added up to the overwhelming conclusion, to be endorsed by the inquest, that Michael Luxton had taken his own life.

Neither policeman felt it was his place to comment on the strangenesses, so far as they knew them, of Jack’s
behaviour—who wouldn’t behave strangely?—or on his technically inappropriate actions. He shouldn’t have touched the body or even have moved the gun. But this was his own father lying there. Jack was hardly some meddling third party. The poor man had done what he did and could—when, quite possibly, he might have slept through the whole incident. And he was plainly mortified by the fact that, had he been awake just a little earlier, he might have prevented all of it from happening.

One didn’t have to search far for a motive. Michael Luxton was like others. The peculiar circumstances of Remembrance Day seemed tragically to have precipitated something. Michael had either gone to bed with the not quite complete intention of acting, or he’d woken in the dead of night to form that soon-executed intention.

Detective Sergeant Hunt gave permission for the body to be moved by the ambulance men. It was a laborious and upsetting job transporting it up the steep field. The gun and Michael’s donkey jacket and cap were taken separately as evidence, to be returned later. Likewise everything in Michael’s pockets, including the medal.

Thus it would have been possible for the two policemen, out of curiosity as much as anything, to inspect the medal and see what was written on its reverse. It had been one of Michael’s infrequent, sombre-faced, hard to gauge jokes that the medal had been a good one to give a farmer’s boy, since what it said on the back was ‘For Distinguished Conduct in the Field’.

DS Hunt had thought it right, for safety reasons, to examine the gun straight away. It was unlikely that there was a cartridge still in there (why should Michael have done things by halves?) and it was confirmed that both
barrels had been recently (and it must have been simultaneously) discharged and that the gun was now unloaded. Sergeant Hunt also asked Bob, after the ambulance had departed, if—while he himself remained with Jack at the farmhouse—he couldn’t find a bucket or two of water and (it would be a grim chore, he knew) carry them down to the oak and give things a slooshing down. It would be a decency. This was technically interfering with evidence too, but DS Hunt felt he had seen and noted carefully all the evidence necessary, and it would be a sort of kindness. PC Ireton felt likewise.

It was unfortunate in one sense, but fortunate in another, that Jack couldn’t help overhearing this, and so offered to drive them all down in the pick-up with a jerry can of water, buckets and even a stiff-bristled yard brush. He appeared in need of things to do, no matter how gruesome. Bob had said that no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but it might help if he could borrow the pick-up and be told where the jerry can was.

Jack was also manifestly and increasingly worried about his livestock and about several regular morning tasks not attended to. He seemed, in fact, to have a gathering sense that the farm was about to disintegrate around him—which had only been Michael’s apparently no longer tolerable situation. But all this was duly taken care of. Both Constable Ireton and DS Hunt had the forethought to appreciate that a farm, even in extraordinary circumstances, cannot simply shut down. So there had been some necessary, discreet communications and a prevailing upon a horrified but quickly rallying community spirit. It wouldn’t have been long anyway before word spread around.

It certainly wasn’t long before a battered Land Rover containing Jimmy and Ellie Merrick, dressed as for a hard-working day on their own farm, pulled up in the Jebb yard. This was the first time Jack had seen such a thing. But then he’d seen other things today he’d never seen before. Jimmy and Ellie had come the short way—by the route with which Jack was very familiar—across the fields, through the boundary gate and over Ridge Field, which adjoined Barton Field. The direct route would then have been along the top of Ridge Field, to enter the Jebb yard close to the Big Barn, but Jimmy hadn’t hesitated to drive along the bottom of Ridge Field and then, despite slipping wheels, slowly up by the low hedge alongside Barton Field, so getting a good view down across the dip to the oak tree. The body was still there, though about to be moved, and mostly and perhaps mercifully hidden behind the tree trunk. Jimmy and Ellie could only really make out two very still Wellington boots.