A Whistling Woman (10 page)

Jacqueline cried out. Luk came over and looked at the trembling beast. Jacqueline said they should perhaps take him back to Dun Vale Hall in the car. Luk said he wasn't sure about that. Perhaps they should reconnoitre the battery? Shirley appeared to be urging Jacqueline in that direction, nipping and butting and whining. There was blood also on Shirley's silver-white ruff, but it could have come from Tobias. They decided against going back for Luk's car. They went towards the battery, in the brightening morning, along the sheep-track with the dog and the sheep. Over a rise, beyond a knot of thorns, they saw the large, ugly box, with its galvanised roof and creosoted walls. They went on.

In front of the building Lucy Nighby was picking up eggs. She had obviously dropped a full basket. There were intact eggs rolling around her, and a mess of yolk and albumen and shell, in which she was picking up pieces. She was kneeling on the concrete in front of the building, her hair over her face, picking up eggs. When they came up, they saw that her hair was full of blood and spattered yolk. She looked up blankly, one eye completely closed by a huge, swollen bruise, her nose dripping blood on to her shirt and breeches. Her cheeks were bashed and swollen. Her movements were jerky. She was not distinguishing, as she scrabbled in the mess, between empty shells and slippery, filthy, unbroken eggs.

Jacqueline ran forward, took hold of her, and tried to keep her still.

“What's happened? Lucy, what's happened? Who hurt you?”

A voice from the battery door said

“It's not her as is hurt. Get in here, I'm bleeding to death, the silly cow's done for me.”

Luk went to the door. He could hear the rows of hens making alarmed cluckings and rattling their cages. There was a smell of chickenshit and feathers. It was dark. Gunner Nighby sat inside the door, crouched over his leg, gripping. He was also bloody. His hands and face were smeared, his shirt splashed, his trousers, when Luk touched them, soaked.

“Went for me,” said Gunner to Luk. “Wi' a trowel. My
good
trowel. Stainless steel. Bloody sharp. Gashed my leg. Gashed my rib. I'll get her for this. Get a doctor. Go on, do something, or I'll be dead.”

“What did you do to Lucy?”

“I didn't take a sharp trowel to her, any road.
Do something,
you cunt.”

Luk did something. He took off Gunner's disgusting trousers, ripped off Gunner's shirt and vest, made a pad, and a tight bandage, round his groin, and saw that there was indeed a nasty triangular rent in his left rib-cage. He made him a pillow of sacks, and went back to Jacqueline, pursued by wheezy invective.

Lucy was in a pitiful state. She sobbed steadily, a metronomic, gasping sobbing. She would not be dissuaded from gathering up the eggs. When they questioned her, she made only an almost inaudible keening. When Luk suggested fetching his car and driving both Gunner and Lucy to the doctor, she shook her head violently and pushed him away with dripping fingers. Jacqueline said they should get the car, go to Dun Vale Hall and call the ambulance. Someone should stay with Gunner. She looked at Marcus. Luk was already running down the track to the road. He was fit, he ran fast. Lucy moaned and rocked. Jacqueline said that perhaps Marcus should stay with Gunner, until help came. Keep an eye on the bandage.

Marcus didn't answer. His face was white, his shoulders hunched. He opened his dry mouth and closed it. Lucy picked up an unbroken egg and dropped it. Marcus flinched at the splatting sound. Jacqueline said

“You can't afford to faint. There's only three of us, we're all needed. Gunner won't hurt you.”

“No,” he brought out, with difficulty.

“Maybe you'd better go with Lucy and Luk.”

She couldn't think. She was sure she herself would be more use at the Hall. She knew Marcus was not afraid of Gunner. He was afraid Gunner would worsen, or die, and he wouldn't know what to do. She didn't wholly know what to do herself although she had done various First Aid badges, as a Girl Guide. She had done all the things respectable girls do. Marcus's glasses were full of steam. She put an arm round his shoulder. “You go with Lucy. Take care of Lucy. I'll stay with Gunner.” Luk drove back up the track. Marcus, trying to overcome his own trembling, put out a hand to Lucy.

“Come with us,” he said.

Lucy rocked back on her heels. Marcus hated touching people. He took hold of her bloody, slimy hands. His own were insubstantial. He gripped. Barely perceptibly, she gripped back. He brought her to her feet—she was a slight woman, feather-boned—and half-carried her to the car. The first touch was the worst. He went into her atmosphere of blood and sulphur and mess. He kept hold of her hand. She didn't take hers away, though she flinched. Luk drove them away.

Jacqueline went back to Gunner, who was drowsy and truculent. He said they shouldn't go off without him, he could very well die. He didn't believe that, Jacqueline saw, though she thought he might be right. She put a hand on the tight bandage, to add to the pressure where the blood welled up.

“She ought to be locked up. She hurt my kids.”

“Hurt? How?”

“Beat them up. Battered them. They were trying to help me. They tried to take the rake away. She went for me, wi' the rake. She turned on them. She meant to finish me. She meant to do for me. Wi' th' rake. Should be locked up.”

“What did you do to her, Gunner?”

“Told you. You can see. She went for me. I didn't stab
her
. Not with rake. Not with trowel. You can see who went for who, it's bloody obvious,
bloody
obvious. She hurt th' kids. She's not fit ...”

He muttered. “I was just telling her off ...”

His voice trailed into silence. His chin fell. Jacqueline felt his pulse, which was faint. His blood pumped quietly, in and out of his body.

Luk swung his car into the farmyard of Dun Vale Hall. The yard was enclosed by outbuildings, all in sombre grey stone, like a fortress. The house was seventeenth-century with modern additions, milking-sheds, storerooms, loose-box, and old dairy, slate-roofed. The back door was open. The buildings were quiet. Lucy gave a little moan, and stiffened. Marcus made himself put an arm round her. She gave a whicker of rebuff, and shrank from him.

“Stay there,” said Luk. He had a bad feeling about what was behind that unsnecked door. He got out of the car and went in.

He tripped on the steps, which were worn and hollowed. The back door opened straight into the kitchen, which had small deep windows, heavy beams, and white-washed walls, spattered and smeared with bloodstains. Luk sniffed the scent of violence and listened to the silence. He could feel, in his own ribs, someone somewhere in the house, breathing in pain. The light through the uneven window-panes was grey. He crossed the kitchen, stepping thief-soft, and went through a wicket-gate, and a pair of split doors, like a stable-door. He was now in a long paved stone corridor. On the stones blood-splashes glistened, damp in the centre, skinning over at the edges. These flagstones too were hollowed by generations of bootsteps. Luk stepped lightly through the door which divided the servants' quarters from the Hall, and found himself in a square entrance space, two storeys high, still grey-paved but lit through stained glass windows beside and over the low heavy door, so that pools of violet, amber and green light lay amongst the blood-spots. He listened. He could hear the breathing now. He could feel the presence of bodies.

There was a wide shallow-stepped staircase, going up to a landing with a balcony. At the top Luk found all three children, Carla, Ellis and Annie. They wore interlock pyjamas, printed with white lambs and white daisies on sky blue. All three were blood-smeared, and one, the smallest, Annie, was soaked and dripping. Carla and Ellis sat with their backs to the wall, which was panelled. Carla was eight, Ellis five—both, like Gunner, were white-blond. Annie was lying across their knees, her face invisible under a mask of blood. All the white hair was laced with red, all the small fingernails dark with it. All three were breathing. Carla and Ellis stared at Luk out of shocked, expressionless blue eyes. Carla's small hand gripped Annie's shoulder; her knuckles were pale with force. Luk asked them where a telephone was. They stared, shivered, were mute. He bent and listened to their breathing, ran downstairs and found a kind of office, its chair overturned, its phone off the hook and shrilling. He reconnected it, called 999, and explained where he was, where the children were, where Gunner was. He went back to the children, listened again to their breathing—Annie's was laboured and faint—and found blankets in a nursery bedroom, which he put round their trembling shoulders. He thought of going out to Marcus and Lucy and decided against it. He sat down next to the children; Carla and Ellis, he saw, had scalp-wounds; Annie's looked worse than that.

Luk stared down at the stained glass. The left-hand window showed a man with a sword in a dark valley between pointed peaks. Descending upon him from a dark sky was a leather-winged, sabre-toothed demon, horned, hoofed and clawed. On the right-hand side, under blue sky, a man in a helmet like a magnified snail-shell swam across a blue and purple river towards a golden castle-wall, through slits in which protruded, a little awkwardly, several long golden bronze trumpets. Over the door were four circular lights, arranged like a four-leafed clover, depicting the seasons. A new lamb, skipping in a green field. A striped bee, travelling from a sunflower to a hexagonal honeycomb across cobalt. A spiralling stook of corn on a deep gold ground. A holly-tree in snow, crimson-berried, emerald-leaved, with a fire lit beside it, the scarlet tongues of flame moving up in a spire.

He heard from a distance, the sirens and horns of the approaching police and the ambulance. They came in, they gathered up the children and took them away to be washed, and stitched, and examined, inside and out. They took away the bloody rake from the nursery and the bloody trowel from the battery. They took away Gunner, on a stretcher, scarlet-swathed, and Lucy, dishevelled and tight-lipped. They went over the farmhouse, measuring, recording, bloodstains, breakages. Luk and Jacqueline and Marcus were interviewed, and their shock and efficacy equally became part of an orderly narrative.

Luk thought, closing his vigil away in the dark of his mind, that this was the end now, of loose violence at least. But it was not. It was a halt, only. The real beginning, indeed, was still to come.
The man who was called Josh Lamb was one of the few residents of Cedar Mount who read the local papers put out in the Association Room. He sat in a slippery tan arm-chair and read the
Calverley Post
's account of the events at Dun Vale Hall. A violent attack on the family had taken place, the paper said. Both Mr. Nighby and the three children had received serious injuries. All were in hospital, as was Mrs. Nighby, who was suffering from severe shock. The police were investigating. They were waiting for the children to be well enough to help them with their investigation. They were not at present seeking to interview anyone else about the attack or attacks. There was a photograph of Dun Vale Hall, nestled peacefully in the moorland. There were no photographs of the Nighbys.

The new woman sat on a chair, with her hands folded in her lap. She spoke to no one and looked at nothing. The staff belittled everyone with a kindly use of Christian names, and “dear.” The new woman was Lucy dear. Her face was roundish, her cheeks pink and weathered, her eyes a little sunk. Her hair straggled but Josh thought it probably normally did not. There was blood, clotting in its strands. There was blood running down those soft round cheeks and into her mouth corners. There was blood soaking her blue shirt over her breasts, and dripping into her composed lap. In the old days he had taken the intricate realism of its drip and flow for proof that it was real. Now he knew that it was not there, and that there was nothing he could do about the intricacy, the redundant detail, with which he saw it.

He thought he should speak to Lucy dear, but his hands and his knees were trembling. Old pictures tried to surge up; he knew what they were, and knew that the veil of blood that clouded his retina was drawn across, mercifully, to close them out. But they unnerved him. He was not sure he could stand. He prayed for strength. The blood grew redder and swifter.

The nurse came up to him.

“A cup of tea, Josh? You look a bit off colour.”

She was in a red mist.

“That woman.”

“She's a bit shocked. She's had a bad time.”

“You're right, I'm off colour. The colours are all bad, bloody colours.”

He liked jokes that only he, their maker, could untwist. He liked sounding as though he was swearing, when he was being exact.

The nurse laughed. “Cup of tea cures all ills.”

“I hate tea.”

“So you do. I should remember, shouldn't I? Horlicks, then.”

He loved Horlicks, sweet, white, malty. He had a sweet tooth. He thought of Ezekiel the prophet, eating the inexpressibly sweet rolls of the scriptures, like honey.

He put the Largactil that came with it, into his sock. The right moment to speak to the woman would be opened to him. He need only be patient.

From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

My dear Elvet,

I am growing suspicious about the extent to which I need yr permission to have feelings about my patients. Clinical detachment is a profoundly unnatural state of mind, and all sorts of evil can come of it. It was useful enough in my early days—and nights—in Casualty amongst all that battered flesh and wild and hopeless hangers-on. It was a survival tool. So it gets carried over into psychiatry. We offer our patients what appears to be human contact, human warmth—and we give them a calculated simulacrum of human contact, with no flesh, no blood, no love, no desire. It's not only medical decorum, of course. It's primitive egalitarian justice—all my patients have a
right
to all my attention, potentially, only I'm not equally interested in all of them. And honesty counts for something in squaring up to the world? It must?