The Living and the Dead in Winsford (30 page)

‘Not even a Crunchie?’

‘He’ll get a Crunchie up in his room.’

Mark’s prediction turned out to be correct. When Jeremy had eaten his six fish fingers he stood up and looked at his father. Mark nodded, Jeremy shook my hand again then went back up the stairs to his room.

‘I hope you didn’t . . .’

I paused, but it was too late. Mark raised an eyebrow. I could see that he had expected me to ask the question I wanted to put. So I asked it.

‘I hope you didn’t instruct him to go away and leave us in peace, did you?’

We both had a drop of wine left in our glasses. Sancerre, dry and full-bodied, and a much better accompaniment to the scallops than yellow Fanta would have been. Mark raised his glass and gave me a slightly reproachful look.

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to be clear that I would never do anything like that. He is worth that respect. He’s out of his depth wherever he goes in the world, but not in his own home. This is the only place where he will ever be fully accepted.’

‘Was that why you took him home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘Of course,’ said Mark, with a smile. ‘I have a bit of a hang-up with this. I stress it too much and when it’s not necessary, I know. But now we’re coming to the real fish. Could you see your way clear to continuing with the same wine?’

‘I can most certainly see my way clear to continuing with the same wine. Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘You could stack the plates away in the dishwasher while I see to the halibut. Cheers once again, and thank you for coming. It’s going pretty well, don’t you think?’

‘So far I’ve nothing to complain about,’ I said, and Mark burst out laughing.

That must have been the first time for goodness knows how many years that anything I’d said made anybody burst out laughing.

I don’t know what expectations I’d had for his halibut, but whatever they were there is no doubt that Mark’s dish exceeded them, and he repeated what he’d said at The Royal Oak: ‘It’s the low cooking temperature that does the trick, nothing else. You turn the heat right up for a few seconds so that it doesn’t lose its moisture, then no more than sixty to seventy degrees for an hour.’

You could hear that he really was interested in this kind of thing, and I wondered how pleasant life might have been if I’d been married to a cook rather than a professor of literature. It was presumably as a follow-up to such thoughts – and also the fact that by now we had drunk almost two bottles of wine – that I decided to put my little problem to him.

‘To change the subject, I have a bit of a problem,’ I said. ‘I think I’m being pestered by a stalker.’

‘What?’ said Mark. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A bloke who’s following me around. I think he is, at least . . .’

‘Well, that is what a stalker does,’ said Mark. ‘He follows people around. I’m not surprised, in fact.’

‘Now you’ve lost me.’

‘It’s obvious that a woman like you is going to get a stalker sooner or later . . . No, I’m sorry . . . Are you serious? You don’t mean here and now, do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately I do mean here and now.’

He gave a laugh, and looked confused for a moment. As if he couldn’t make up his mind if I was joking or not. ‘A stalker in Winsford? That sounds like . . . No, surely it can’t be true?’

I recalled what he had said about reading other people’s minds, and wondered if he really could see that I was lying. But emboldened by the wine I went on:

‘If it’s who I think it is, it’s an old story. It’s rather unpleasant, to be honest, and I can’t help feeling that I’m being got at. The fact that I’m not absolutely sure almost makes it feel worse.’

Now I could see that he was taking me seriously. He moved his elbows up onto the table and leaned forward. ‘Huh, you’d better tell me about it. You’re not going to get a dessert until we’ve sorted this out. A stalker? A loony who’s after you . . . ?’

I took a drink of wine, cleared my throat, and started my tale.

‘It’s an old story, as I said. I think I mentioned that I have a past as a television presenter?’

He nodded.

‘Everybody knows it can be a bit risky, always appearing on the box. Lonely loonies sit on their sofas, imagining all kinds of fantasies . . . I suppose it goes with the territory, unfortunately. Anyway, there was a bloke some years ago who started to get all kinds of strange ideas. He managed to get hold of both my address and telephone number, and . . . well, he kept pestering me quite a lot until we managed to put a stop to him.’

‘You put a stop to him? What did he do? Ring up and do some heavy breathing?’

‘That happened, yes.’

‘Were you on your own by then?’

‘Yes. It started about six months after my divorce. At first I actually thought my ex-husband was mixed up in it somehow or other.’

‘But he wasn’t in fact?’

‘Certainly not, no.’

I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember how many children I’d said I had. I hoped he wouldn’t ask – but then, why would I lie about something like that? I decided to say there were two.

But he concentrated on the stalker, thank goodness. ‘What happened? I’ve read about such characters, of course, but this is the first time I’ve met somebody who’s actually been pestered by one.’

I swallowed, and followed the plan I’d worked out. ‘He used to ring, and also to follow me around. Sat in his car, keeping an eye on me. Keeping watch outside my house, and turning up on all kinds of occasions. But he never attacked me, he never came up to me and said anything; he was just there all the time, in the background. To start with, at least.’

‘Did you feel threatened?’

‘Yes. When you don’t know what he’s thinking, it’s threatening.’

‘You said to start with . . .’

I nodded and took another mouthful of wine. ‘It carried on like this for about half a year. I reported it to the police, but they weren’t much help: they just gave me a number to ring if he overstepped the mark. They reckoned they couldn’t do much if he didn’t actually threaten me.’

‘But they identified him, did they?’

‘Yes. They took him in once for questioning. Then they released him because he hadn’t done anything illegal. That’s what they said, in any case.’

‘Silly so-and-sos,’ said Mark.

‘Maybe, but they have a lot to do. And they kept stressing that they were understaffed.’

‘But it, er, escalated, did it?’

‘Yes. I came home one evening and he was lying in my bed.’

‘Lying in your bed?’

‘Yes. He was naked. I still have no idea how he got in. He told the police we’d had a date and I’d given him a key. Luckily they didn’t believe him.’

‘Good God,’ said Mark, slapping the table with the palms of his hands. ‘But what happened when you found him naked in your bed?’

‘I rushed out. Rang the police on my mobile, and they came to fetch him a quarter of an hour later. He was still naked when they dragged him out into the street – I don’t know why they didn’t give him time to put his clothes on, he was carrying them, trying to use them to hide his modesty.’

I noticed that I was beginning to enjoy my tale, and realized that I ought to keep myself in check. It wouldn’t be very clever to give him a mass of facts about all kinds of things that I might then forget about.

‘I don’t need to go into detail. He ended up with a year in jail in any case. But the problem is—’

‘That he didn’t stop there.’ Mark finished off the sentence for me. ‘He carried on pestering you after he came out, did he?’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘He waited for a few months, but before I came here a few things happened that I’m sure he was mixed up in. There was nothing especially remarkable or threatening, so I didn’t contact the police. I was going to leave Sweden anyway, so I didn’t think there was any real danger. But now . . . Well, now it seems that he’s found me again.’

‘Here on Exmoor?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Mark shook his head. ‘How on earth did he manage to do that? But I suppose you’ve had your mail forwarded and so on . . . Perhaps it isn’t all that difficult if you really put your mind to it?’

I shrugged, and wondered if I ought to start going into speculation. I decided it wasn’t necessary. No point in getting bogged down in details, as I’d already thought.

‘I think I’ve seen him in a hire car,’ I said instead. ‘Both here in the village and in a few other places.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Mark. I think that was the first time I’d heard him use a swearword.

‘And there are a few other things he might have done as well,’ I added.

‘Such as?’

‘Somebody has been leaving dead pheasants outside my front door.’

‘Dead what . . . ?’

He paused and sat up straight. Looked at me with a new expression in his eyes that I couldn’t make out. Had he seen through me? But how could he have seen through me? The pheasants were not an invention, nor was the hire car. Or was it just that ability to read other people’s minds that he claimed he had? I decided not to mention the Hawkridge business in any case.

‘Dead pheasants?’ he repeated thoughtfully, scratching at the back of his neck. ‘That sounds really odd. Do you know . . . Well, I suppose you can’t very well know what that means, can you?’

‘Means?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What it
could
mean,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘But it seems pretty far-fetched when I think about it. Anyway, it’s just a matter of an old superstition.’

‘Superstition?’ I repeated, feeling rather silly.

He laughed and held his upturned palms towards the ceiling to indicate that what he was about to say was not something he believed in.

‘In the old days,’ he began, ‘out here on Exmoor in any case, it was seen as a way of warding off death. If somebody was lying ill in their house on the moor, for instance, people would sometimes place a dead animal outside their front door during the night.’

‘Really?’

‘The idea was that when Death came to knock on the door and harvest a life, he would make do with the animal and go away. A sort of primitive sacrifice, you might say, and inevitably there are countless stories to suggest that it really worked. The animal had disappeared by the next morning, which meant that Death had been sent packing and the sick person could recover in peace and quiet. It didn’t have to be pheasants, of course, but there were plenty of them around. You come across them everywhere, and the males especially make very handsome sacrificial offerings – assuming you haven’t run them over with your car, of course.’

‘They were males,’ I said. ‘Both mine. And they seemed to be completely uninjured.’

‘Apart from being dead?’

‘They were most certainly dead. They could have been just the same one, incidentally.’

‘But nobody came to collect them? Or it?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I threw them away.’

Then we sat in silence for quite some time. Mark poured out what remained of wine bottle number two. I thought that if I had still been a smoker this would have been an obvious moment to go out onto the terrace for a ciggie.

But I wasn’t a smoker any longer. Nor was Mark. He really did seem to be sitting there thinking over what I had said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should never have brought this up.’

‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Of course you needed to mention it. What are our fellow human beings there for?’

That sounded a little theatrical, and he noticed that himself.

‘Anyway, I shall obviously do whatever I can to find out who this character is. But I don’t understand that pheasant business. You don’t have customs like that back in your country, do you?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Do you happen to have the registration number of that hire car he drives around in?’

‘I’m afraid not. I’ve boobed there. But it’s a silver-coloured Renault. The rental company is called Sixt, and they have their logo on both sides of the car.’

‘A silver-coloured Renault from Sixt?’

I nodded.

‘Right,’ said Mark, standing up. ‘I’ll do what I can. But now it’s time for afters. Just a simple panna cotta, but you’ll get a full-bodied Sauternes to help it down. What do you say to that?’

I said it might be possible to force it down, and as he stood pottering about by the refrigerator I wondered how on earth he thought I was going to get home.

I certainly wasn’t going to try to walk home with Castor through the dark.

36

‘A boy may only make love to his girlfriend when the gorse is in bloom. That’s an ancient rule here on Exmoor – are you familiar with it?’

‘No. But I’m not exactly a girl.’

‘I won’t pretend that I regard myself as a boy,’ said Mark. ‘But the point is that gorse blooms all the year round. Even now, in December – perhaps you’ve seen it?’

We were lying under the feather duvet in his wide bed. We really had made love. I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t want to deny it either. We were both naked, and it had gone really well. Before we removed our clothes I told him that I was fifty-five years old and hadn’t been in bed with a man for over two years. He responded by saying that the figures were not far off identical for him: fifty-two and two-and-a-half respectively.

A cluster of scented candles was still burning on the window ledge. It was half past one. The door was ajar, and had been all the time. Castor was presumably still curled up in front of the fire in the kitchen downstairs. I assumed that Jeremy was asleep in his room on the next floor up. I thought it felt remarkable, and said as much to Mark.

‘You ought to know that this is among the most unexpected things that have happened to me for a very long time.’

‘For me too,’ said Mark, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. ‘I stopped thinking about this kind of thing ages ago. If you live in a village like Winsford that is the only sensible attitude to take. The number of available women has been rather less than zero for the last sixty years.’

‘I thought lots of tourists come to Exmoor every summer?’

He snorted. ‘If you’re looking for a man you don’t put on Wellington boots and a waterproof jacket and go out on a moor.’