The Hunger Trace

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © Edward Hogan 2011

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Edward Hogan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB

Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

HB ISBN: 978-1-84737-124-9
TPB ISBN: 978-0-85720-510-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-232-1

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Typeset by M Rules
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

To Emily

One of the most unusual auction sales Beamish & Fisher have ever held was conducted at Drum Hill Wildlife and Conservation Centre today. For the first time, exotic and dangerous animals came up for sale along with items associated with a wildlife park business.

The animals were viewed in their regular enclosures and the catalogue sale was conducted in the large entrance hall of the main residence. A female wallaby was sold for £510; a pair of Asian otters for £350; an ocelot for £110 and two lynx kittens for £190. The most expensive lots, however, were three life-size fibreglass dinosaurs. A triceratops fetched £800 . . .

Dispersal sale report in
The North

Derbyshire Herald
, 25 March 2010.

Such a thing had never before been witnessed in the village: a small herd of ibex skittering down Drum Hill towards the main road, their thick, ribbed horns blue in the small hours, their yellow eyes catching the streetlight. They turned left at the corner and quickened their pace. The icy pavements and unkempt verges of Derbyshire were not so far removed from their natural terrain. Their reflections shimmered in the Perspex of the bus shelter and the fake stained-glass windows of the White Hart pub.

Out on the road, the elder males bellowed. An HGV driver passing in the opposite direction brought his vehicle to a halt, and in his tired acceptance of all night wonders, reverted to handbrake, neutral. From his high cockpit view, the driver saw them as a brown larval flow, sheathed by their own breath, the young in the middle borne by the power of the current.

The ibex passed the clock tower of the primary school and increased their speed, the raining clatter of their hooves echoing back from the bricks of the semis, bungalows and barn conversions on either side of the road. Scared and hungry, they sought higher ground. They headed for the rocky peaks, and for dawn.

Those villagers who rose early and saw the herd from their windows knew exactly where the animals were from. A mile away on Drum Hill, Maggie took the first of the calls, swaying like a water reed by her bed in the large, bowed room. She pulled on her jeans and boots, and zipped a padded coat straight over her bra. The Land Rover had been playing up lately and she hoped it would start. In the hall she left a note for her stepson:
AN IBEX SITUATION HAS ARISEN
.

Across the way, Louisa Smedley was washing meat for her hawks at the kitchen sink. Pink streaky water ran into the plughole. From the window, she could see Iroquois, the steppe eagle, on her perch on the grass. Iroquois roused herself in the blue dawn, and shook a light dusting of frost from her feathers. She turned her head sharply towards the field separating Louisa’s cottage from Drum Hill Wildlife Park. Louisa followed Iroquois’s gaze but could see nothing other than the silhouette of the big house, a shade darker than the sky. She waited, squinting. Moments later her neighbour came into view, running towards the cottage. Louisa sighed with irritation. She noted the upright gait of Maggie Bryant, the long-legged ease with which she swung over the wire fence, and the way she held back her dark curls with one hand. Louisa dropped the raw meat in the sink, and moved out of view.

On many occasions in the past, Louisa had crept onto the lawn of her neighbours’ house, and stood outside the range of the intruder light, looking in through the large windows at David and his young new wife. Louisa had watched Maggie moving through the warm, yellow-lit rooms, before they had even been introduced. Despite her tendency to watch others – or perhaps because of it – Louisa did not like to be watched herself. She hoped that Maggie might assume the cottage was empty, although she knew this was unlikely.

Maggie knocked loudly on the door, but then entered without waiting for a reply and stepped quickly through the hall and into the kitchen. She smelled of the clean air outdoors, along with a faint cosmetic scent – the first in Louisa’s house for some time.

‘Louisa, thank God. I knew you’d be awake. I need your help,’ Maggie said.

Louisa turned back to the sink. ‘I’m busy. What is it?’

‘We’ve had a breakout over at the park. Some of the ibex – the big goats—’

‘I know what they are.’

‘They got loose somehow, and they’re on the road now.’ Maggie took a long breath. ‘If they get to the dual carriageway, we’ve got serious trouble.’

‘
You’ve
got serious trouble. What am I supposed to do about it?’

‘Well, the Land Rover won’t start.’

Louisa took the keys to her van from her pocket, and threw them to Maggie. ‘Take mine.’

Maggie wiped the watery smears of blood from the keys with her sleeve and looked up with an apologetic smile. ‘I need
you
, as well,’ she said. ‘The trailer’s at my house and we’ll need to hook it up before we go.’

‘Jesus,’ Louisa said under her breath. But she could not refuse. She dried her hands on her jeans and followed.

Louisa had bought the maroon Transit van from a printing firm gone bust. A sticker on the back read
Am I courteous
? and gave an 0800 number. Maggie drove them over to the big house. Louisa, unaccustomed to human company in the van, noticed with some discomfort the state of her vehicle’s interior. A fur of bird lint covered the dashboard, and tiny weeds grew in the footwell, spawned from the cuttings brought in on Louisa’s boots.

When they’d attached the trailer, Maggie put a little wheelspin through the gravel path before they began the long drop down into Detton. ‘Careful,’ Louisa said. As they descended, the mist became water on the ground.

Louisa had watched plenty of women – usually older, and divorced – come and go from David’s park, and had thought Maggie would follow them out. Anyone could see that the park was a money pit, and if the insufficient funds were not prohibitive enough, Christopher – David’s outsized teenage son – was too much for most women. Even the hill road on which they now travelled was unwelcoming. It sloped almost vertically, bordered by knots of rusty grass and moss like body hair. Pines stood below the vehicle at alarming angles.

Louisa did not meet Maggie, in the conventional sense, until a week after she arrived. Of course, the men in the White Hart gossiped about David’s new wife constantly. A lot younger, they said. One of them described her as exotic. Louisa thought them ridiculous. At close range, in daylight, a glance had told Louisa all she needed to know about the new Mrs Bryant: thin as a plant cane, early thirties, dusky skin, long curls, no muscle power or tits to speak of, tight jeans and pretentious cowboy boots with a fucking
heel.
She looked, to Louisa, like a Cherokee squaw. ‘It’s great to have another girl next door,’ Maggie had said. Southern. Her words had the clarity of hail on an iron table.

Louisa had let her handshake do the talking, and felt the cartilage slide while Maggie talked about her intention to help out with the animals. She’d worked at ‘Greenwich Park’, apparently. She’d read some zoology textbooks and some Peter Scott. Louisa did not tell her that her wholesome ideas would soon be buried in lynx shit, or drowned in a bucket of 5 a.m. fish guts. Instead, she let Maggie continue. This one’s talkative, Louisa thought. Perhaps loneliness would drive her off. Either way, Louisa had given her a month.

How many years had it been now? Three? She still wore those cowboy boots, but Louisa saw the scrapes and cuts on Maggie’s long fingers when she changed gear, and the curls were shorter.

Maggie circled the roundabout four or five times. Louisa sighed. ‘What are you doing?’

‘If I was an ibex, where would I be?’ Maggie said, looking east to where Morrison’s supermarket glowed yellow, its huge synthetic awning like a frozen tidal wave. Two small limestone peaks rose up behind. ‘The big rocks,’ Maggie said.

She drove to Morrison’s and pulled up in the car park. Louisa braced herself for a long morning, but Maggie’s instincts proved right. The ibex had crossed the fields, taking the short route towards higher ground, and they emerged in the car park a few minutes after Louisa and Maggie. Louisa had to admit they were impressive animals, for ungulates, and she could see the predicament clearly. To get to the peaks, the herd would have to cross the car park and then the dual carriageway. Grass banks flanked the exit. The traffic on the carriageway was increasing as the sky began to lighten.

Maggie drove slowly, putting the van between the ibex and the car park exit. The van did not fully cover the escape route, and the ibex would have no problem, in any case, scaling the grass banks. ‘What are you going to do?’ Louisa said.

Maggie shrugged.

‘Well, do you have any equipment?’

‘Only what I could pick up as I was leaving the house. Tow-rope, a little feed, a couple of sedative darts.’

Louisa counted twelve animals. ‘You should have brought dogs,’ she said.

They both looked at the flash of cars in the rear-view mirror. ‘If they get to that carriageway, it’s a massacre,’ Maggie said.