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bottom fields to the quarrying company. That was what his accountant had
advised.
Dunkley was in a bad humour as he left the house that afternoon and set off
across the fields, a rusty twelve-bore hammer-gun beneath his arm. Between the
months of September and January he always went out shooting on Saturday
afternoons. It was a ritual. Not that he shot much, nowadays. The spreading
conurbation which surrounded his small rural island had been responsible for
driving most of the wildlife away. There might be a covey of partridges up on
the top field. There might also be some of those BVF bastards trespassing in
the woods. If so, then his patience was running out. They carried arms.
Shotguns. They were poachers, in effect. He'd heard a couple of barrels being
discharged a few night ago when the moon was full. Only his wife's pleading
had prevented him from going to investigate. The swines must have spotted a
roosting pheasant.
The 'Hanging Wood' still looked the same as it had when he had been a boy, a
horseshoe-shaped covert with giant oak trees and tall Corsican pines which
never seemed to lose their lush greenery even in the dead of winter. The place
was so named because Oliver Cromwell had taken a hundred Royalist prisoners
there, and hanged them from the topmost branches of those tremendous oaks,
leaving their bodies suspended there as a warning to their followers until the
hempen ropes were routed by the elements and one by one the corpses fell to
the ground to become interred beneath a carpet of dying vegetation. Of course,
there had always been rumours that the place was haunted, passers-by claiming
to have heard the creaking of bodies as they swung to and fro on a windy
night.
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The other spinney Jim Dunkley did not care for. Its name, the 'Devil's
Dressing Room' was derived from another legend whereby the devil was supposed
to have stayed there for a short while upon his arrival on earth whilst he
changed into human form. The centre of this copse consisted of a deep quarry
with sheer sides, caused by the removal of the stone which had been used in
the building of nearby Tamworth church sometime during the Middle Ages. The
sides of this deep and gloomy hole were covered with moss and lichen, small
natural caves having formed over the years. Rarely did the sun penetrate
there, and even after four months of continual drought it was still damp and
forbidding.
It had not been Jim Dunkley's intention to go to the 'Devil's Dressing Room'
that afternoon. Even wildlife seemed to avoid it. Yet he had ample time to
spare, and at least it would give him some respite from the heat.
The stile over the barbed-wire fence which was the boundary of the spinney was
as rotten as it had been the first time his father had brought him there when
he was seven. Yet it had survived, and fulfilled everything-that was required
of it.
There was total silence within the small wood. Not even the clatter of a
disturbed woodpigeon could be heard as he forced his way through the foliage.
It was uncanny.
Then came the flies, as suddenly as though they had been forewarned of his
coming and had lain in ambush, allowing him to enter before descending upon
him. They were not the midges which sting all exposed areas of the human flesh
on balmy summer evenings, but swarms of the common black variety, buzzing,
settling. He broke off a stem of bracken and used it as a swat, but it only
seemed to encourage them more. He cursed, propped his gun up against a tree
trunk, and proceeded to fill a short, stubby pipe with dark, long-stranded
tobacco. It took him four or five matches to light it, and only when he was
puffing out clouds of strong brown smoke did the flies retreat.
Jim Dunkley picked up his gun and pushed further into the wood. He had never
known so many flies here before. Surely they would have preferred the warmth
and dryness of the Hanging Wood.
The bracken was chest high, lush green with hardly a tint of brown on its
fronds, defying the drought even as it now attempted to impede his own
progress, entwining around his body as he forced his way through.
There was an area of silver-birch trees leading up to the old quarry, half an
acre of flattened undergrowth with mounds of excavated soil rising up' above "
the trampled bracken. Beneath the surface was a badger-set which had been
there in his youth, the solitary position affording these nocturnal creatures
all the peace and quietness they needed. Yet his experienced eye noted that
the footprints in- the soil, and the scoring of the bark on the surrounding
trees where they had sharpened their claws, were not fresh. The badgers had
moved on elsewhere, a week or more ago at a rough guess, Jim Dunkley decided.
It was strange indeed. Civilisation had not encroached this far. Not yet,
anyway. Perhaps it was the presence of the BVF guards. Those two shots the
other night... He moved forward, an angry expression on his face. Well, they
weren't coming on to his land with guns any more. Nor those damned vigilantes.
It was just an excuse to poach the surrounding countryside. If they tried it
again he'd see how they felt about being on the receiving end of a double
charge of buckshot.
Dunkley was ten yards from the edge of the old quarry when he became aware of
the smell, nauseous, putrifying, penetrating even his own barrier of strong
tobacco smoke. He coughed. It was like decomposing flesh. In his time he had
dug out a number of fox-earths and he was familiar with the stench, the
half-consumed carcasses, rotting and rank. But this was much more powerful. A
dozen foxes would not be capable of making a smell as bad as that. And it was
definitely coming from the pit.
He moved forward, treading warily, knowing that the edge was crumbling and
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that in some places it would not bear the weight of a fully grown man. He
dropped to his hands and knees, crawled the last five yards and peered down
into the depths.
He had to wait whilst his eyesight adjusted to the gloom below. Scrub bushes
grew on the bottom. One or two birch seedlings had even managed a precarious
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