The back door was locked, which first frustrated me, then quickly made me angry, although I knew perfectly well that of all the useless emotions I might have given way to—grief, despair, frustration, terror—anger was the least productive and the least adult. I had actually started towards the cars with the intention of taking a methodical look at them, when my anger stopped me in mid-stride and yanked me round and made me attack the locked door. I beat on it with my fists. I shouted, "Open up, damn you!" I shouted, "Larry! Emma!" I hurled myself several times against it, with little effect on the door or, more remarkably, my shoulder. I had the immunity that comes of heedlessness. I shouted, "May! Aitken May! Larry, for Christ's sake! Emma!" I remembered the rusted axe beside the log pile. A more adept spy would have shot the lock out with the .38, but I wasn't feeling adept, and in my distraction I didn't really consider whether the door was locked. I simply hit it, rather as I had lashed out at Larry, but with an axe.
My first blow caused a decent split and sent a squadron of rooks protesting into the cloud: which surprised me because the trees round the house were sparse and mostly dead, except for a row of hideous windburned macracarpa that seemed to have grown and died at the same time. My second blow missed both the door and my left leg by fractions of an inch. But I swung back the axe and struck again. A fourth heave, and the door exploded like paper. I flung the axe through the opening and stepped after it, roaring "Get out!”
“Stand back!" and "Bastards!" in another furious expulsion of air and tension. But perhaps that was just my way of whistling up my courage, because when I looked down at my feet I saw that they were isolated in a lake of blood, in shape very like the first, but larger. And this must have been what my eye had chosen to see before everything else in the raftered farmhouse kitchen: the smashed crockery, the cutlery and pots hurled over the flagstone floor, the splintered chairs and overturned table, and the tree, the unmistakable outline of a tree, drawn or, more accurately, painted on the whitewashed brickwork above the smashed kitchen range. A chestnut perhaps, or a cedar—certainly a tree that spread. And the blood still dripping down from it as it had dried, like so many cones or spikes. The Forest was watching.
Ossetian Ku Klux Klan, I heard Simon Dugdale say. Shadowy mob, fed and watered by the KGB .. .
But I allowed myself to study these things only after I had seen the blood at my feet. And when I had studied enough of them to draw the necessary conclusions, I pulled the gun from my waistband—more, I suspect, to protect me from the dead than from the living—stepped into the corridor, and sashayed down it, as the trainers say, keeping my left forearm raised across my face and shouting, "Aitken Mustafa May.
Come out! Where are you?" because although I knew very well that the names I should be shouting were still "Larry" and "Emma," I dreaded finding them, which was why I had my left hand up to fend off the sight I feared the most.
I was wearing good brown country shoes by Ducker's of Oxford, handmade and rubber-soled but not a lot of bend in them. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a trail of sticky brown imprints on the dusty parquet floor and realised that while the ownership of the blood was an open question, the prints were unquestionably my own. I sashayed past a closed door and another, shouting, "Hullo, hullo, who's in there?" And then, peremptorily, in my six-acre voice: "May! Aitken May!" But the silence that followed these outbursts was more ominous than any answer could have been, and I'm afraid I thought of it as the silence of The Forest.
I passed another window and saw grazing white cattle, marshland, and the bridge, and was grateful to be restored to nature. I passed a third closed door but kept going, determined to launch my reconnaissance from the front entrance rather than by axe through the back door. Also I am right-handed, and if I was going to behave like a middle-aged storm trooper, I preferred to attack doors that were on my left side, holding the gun in my right. That might not be how they do it at training school or in films, but it was what came naturally at my age, and I was damned if I was going to give both hands to the gun.
Age was concerning me a lot just now, the way it used to concern me each time I went to bed with Emma: Am I up to this? Am I too old for my passions? Wouldn't somebody younger do it better? I had reached the entrance hall. Go cold, Cranmer. Walk, don't run.
"Anyone around?" I called in a more conciliatory tone. "It's Cranmer. Tim Cranmer. I'm a friend of Sally and Terry."
Soft chairs. A coffee table, a pile of dog-eared magazines from the fine-rug and antique trades. A counter with a home telephone exchange and answering machine: the still-functioning answering machine. A woman's umbrella, unfurled, drying in the umbrella stand, though it was dry. Was it raining that day? What day? Remember the footprints in the mud outside the back door.
On the wall, Asian embroideries and a poster of jet fighters tearing across the desert at low altitude. On the table, three used teacups and one ashtray in the shape of a miniature car tyre, overflowing with untipped cigarette stubs. The tea dregs thick black, no milk or sugar. Russian tea? It would have been sweet. Asian tea? It would have been weak. Tea from the great barrier between the two, perhaps. And Russian cigarettes like Larry's.
About to address the first door, I paused to listen for a footfall, or a car coming down the track, or a postman's knock on the front door and a cheery call of "Anyone at home?" The country is never silent, as I knew, but I heard nothing to increase my alarm. I turned the handle without testing it and shoved it away from me as hard and fast as I could. I hurled myself after it in the forlorn hope that if anyone was inside, I would surprise them if they weren't dead. But the surprise had happened already, because the room had been systematically devastated. Desk drawers had been turned upside down and stamped on. Fax machines and copiers clubbed out of recognition. The desk chair sliced so viciously that its entrails hung free of its skin. Filing cabinets flung facedown to the floor and beaten head to toe. Curtains shredded with sweeping knife thrusts. The very sex of the room's missing occupant a mystery until my researches slowly revealed the absence of a woman: a fragment of a fake-leather shoulder bag, not Emma's taste at all; a crumpled face tissue stained with nothing worse than a cheap lipstick that Emma would never have worn; the lipstick itself, crushed flat; face powder scattered like human ash; a lady's money purse with coins to fit a parking machine; a Volkswagen key with remote-control locking switch, smashed.
And a pair of shoes. Not mud-caked buckskin or the waif's black lace-up boots that Emma favoured, but decently polished nearly-new women's low-sided brown shoes of a sort to kick off when you've been slogging at your desk all day and are in need of a bit of Christian air round your poor old feet, size five. Emma was size three.
There had once been two doors linking Aitken Mustafa May's secretary to her master. They had been set about ten inches apart and upholstered in a vile green plastic, buttoned. But whatever privacy May had hoped to derive from this arrangement, it had been rudely disturbed, for the first door had been reduced to matchwood and the second flung giddily across his desk, awakening images of some mediaeval torture in which the victim was stretched flat and a board laid on top of him and he was pressed to death by the literal weight of his misdoings: in this case, by heaps of magazines for would-be freebooters and mercenaries and shooters; arms catalogues, inventories, and price lists from potential suppliers; and shiny photographs of tanks, artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, battle helicopters, and torpedo boats.
Stepping fastidiously amid the chaos, I was struck by the deliberation of the intruders. It was as if every idolatrous symbol must be methodically sought out and destroyed—and some symbols that were not, to my knowledge, idolatrous at all, such as the washbasin in the adjoining bathroom, and the glass shelving flung into the bathtub, and the curtains stuffed into the lavatory bowl.
But the greatest defilements had been reserved for the things Aitken Mustafa May loved the most: the photographs of his children, who seemed to be many and by different women; the Mercedes paperweight, property of a proud new owner; the bronze figurines and ancient ceramic pots; or the jacket of his brand-new dark-blue lightweight suit by Aquascutum, parts of which were still draped over the back of his chair; or the illuminated Koran, desecrated by heaves so powerful they had sliced through the table it was lying on; or the picture of Julie, taken, I imagined, by the same photographer who had posed them on the sunlit log, but here she was to be seen in a bathing suit, standing on the deck of what was supposed to be a Caribbean cruiser, leaning into the camera with her smile. And the discreet trophies of his other life, such as the brass shell case cut down to make a flower vase and the silver-plated armoured personnel carrier inscribed to him from a grateful but anonymous buyer, both flattened.
I retraced my footprints down the corridor. The kitchen door was still open, but I passed it without a look. My gaze was fixed straight ahead of me, where a different door, this time of steel, barred my advance. A bunch of keys hung from the keyhole, and as I made to turn the key that was already in the lock, I noticed the keys to Aitken May's Mercedes nestling among them. I dropped the bunch into my pocket, stepped over the steel threshold, and, by the daylight coming through the open doorway behind me, saw that the corridor was now brick-lined and that sandbags filled the boarded windows. I remembered the outside aspect of the house and knew I was in the second freight car. I was still making this discovery when I went blind.
Struggling for sanity, I concluded that the steel door behind me had swung shut, either of its own free will or because somebody had pushed it, and that I would therefore do best to search for a light switch, though I doubted whether any electrical system could have survived so much destruction. But I remembered the answering machine and took heart. And my optimism was rewarded, for, feeling my way along the brickwork, I discovered to my joy the line of an external electrical wire. Returning the gun to my waistband—for what could I shoot in pitch darkness?—I followed the wire's path with my fingertips, and suddenly there before me in glorious Technicolour was a bulbous green light switch, not six inches from my eyes.
I was in an indoor firing range. It ran the distance of the buildings, perhaps a hundred feet. At its end, under stark downlights, stood man-sized targets of unabashed racist implication: grinning Negroid or Asiatic ogres clutching submachine guns across their chests, one knee lifted as they cleared whatever they had just bayonetted, their uniforms dappled green and ochre, their steel helmets tipped saucily awry to suggest a lack of discipline. The place where I stood was the firing area: there were sandbags to stand or kneel behind, and metal forks to rest your firearm, and telescopes if you wished to study the target, and armchairs if you didn't.
And just a few yards beyond the firing area, hauled into the centre of the range and obstructing it for any serious-minded user, stood an armourer's workbench with blood on it. And round the feet of the workbench and on the floor, more blood. Which accounted for the smell I had been noticing but had attributed to gun oil and old cordite fumes. But it wasn't either of these things. It was blood. Slaughterhouse blood. And this tunnel was where the slaughter had taken place, this soundproofed bunker devoted to the profitable entertainments of destruction. This was where the victims had been dragged, one shoeless, one without his jacket, and a third—as I now feared from the sight of the brown cotton overall hanging from a nail above a row of workman's tools—without his storeman's overalls. This was where they had been cut up at leisure, in the seclusion of this artificial silence, before being carried by men in plain shoes or track shoes through the kitchen and across the pile of sawdust to whatever it was that had two wheels and was waiting for them.
Oh, and on the way someone had stopped to paint a tree. Tree as in Forest. Tree as in blood.
The keys to both the Mercedes and the Volkswagen were in my pocket. My legs were leaden, my head was full of images of seven-day-old bodies in car boots. But I was running, because I had to do it quickly or not at all. The Mercedes was locked, and when I turned the key in the passenger door a howl went up and the white cows lifted their heads and stared at me, and a black-faced sheep in the adjoining field baahed long after I had switched the noise off. The interior of the car smelled of newness. A pair of pigskin driving gloves lay hand in hand beside the treasured car phone. A string of worry beads hung from the driver's mirror; a copy of The Economist from eight days ago, unopened, lay on the passenger seat.
But no bodies.
I took a deep breath and unlocked the Mercedes boot. It rose automatically, and I helped it the rest of the way. One overnight bag, part of a fitted set. A black hide attaché case, so slim it was no more than a man's vanity case. Key-locked. Examine later. I thought of transferring them to the red Ford but on second thought left them where they were. I moved to the Volkswagen and with a handkerchief wiped the muck from the window. I peered inside. No bodies. I unlocked the boot and raised the lid. A new tow rope, a can of antifreeze, a bottle of windscreen wash, a foot pump, a fire extinguisher, foot mats, a pullout radio. No bodies. I started towards the battered grey Dormobile and stopped dead, for now I saw for the first time what till now it had concealed: an old pony cart with a bridle shaft and rubber tyres half buried in the hay. And winding up the hill, the unmistakable tracks of the same tyres in rough grass. And at the end of the tracks, a granite but with a slate roof and one dead tree beside it, perched on the side of the hill just beneath the line of receding cloud. I was standing about fifteen feet from the pony cart when I saw it, and somehow I covered the distance and pulled away the hay. Blood was smeared over the old coachwork and upholstery. I walked to the back of the Dormobile and seized the door handle and twisted it as if I wanted to break it off, which perhaps I did. The handle gave way suddenly. I pulled back both doors at once, but all I found was sacks and rats' mess and a pile of old erotic magazines.