Wild Weekend Read online

  ‘After we’ve done the liberation,’ said Ashok quickly. ‘If we piss off the oppressors, they can get real nasty and call in security to guard the hives and then it gets ugly. Free the slaves first, then we can go down the office and raise hell.’

  ‘Fair enough. That’s why it’s so good to have your expertise, Ashok.’

  ‘But, hang about,’ Video Guy implored. ‘If you just go down the office and do a demo and there’s two men and a dog down there, it doesn’t make a very good film. You need a crowd of some kind. You need to get some conflict organised.’

  ‘We can do that,’ Ashok assured him. ‘Lookey here.’ And he produced, from a roll of papers that had been in his backpack, a dog-eared flyer in Château Saxwold colours. ‘This place has these wine-tasting events. Doesn’t that mean people will be there?’

  ‘By invitation only,’ Video Guy read from the flyer.

  ‘I was thinking we should infiltrate in plain clothes then figure out something to do to get their attention. I brought some visual aids just in case.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Video Guy, finally liking the sound of something.

  ‘Banners and stuff. And we’ve got some bee balloons we can blow up and release. They’re really kind of cute. It’s sort of a playful way of saying that keeping bees is wrong.’

  ‘And legal,’ Carole approved. ‘They can’t pin an assault charge on us if all we’ve got are balloons.’

  ‘So, wait a minute,’ said Video Guy. Ashok rolled his eyes. ‘Is the plan that we go in, turn over the beehives, sneak into this tasting party, blow up a couple of hundred balloons, toss them gaily into the revels, wave a few banners, cause a bit of mayhem, I get it all on the tape, nobody spots us, no cops are called and we are not forcibly ejected but are free to piss off in our own time, handing out leaflets to the grateful peasantry as we go?’

  ‘We’ve got to think about this,’ Carole agreed. ‘Why don’t we just go up there for a bit of a visit and check the place out?’

  ‘Best idea I’ve heard all day,’ said Video Guy.

  ‘But it is only breakfast time,’ said Ashok.

  ‘What shall we do this morning?’ Clare asked Miranda as the waiter removed their plates – plates sullied only by some rejected toast crusts. The full English breakfast option had horrified them both. All the same, the appetising smell of sizzling sausages stole up from the kitchen, since Bel could not restrain herself from frying a few for Oliver’s benefit. Sausages, computed Miranda’s food evaluator: living death.

  They sipped their coffee, finding it agreeably assertive. ‘What do people do in the country?’ Miranda countered.

  ‘You used to like riding,’ said Clare.

  This was undeniable. For quite a few years, Miranda would have walked on hot coals and given up chocolate for life for the sake of an hour with a pony. But that was back in the Old Mum days.

  ‘Haven’t ridden for years,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t forget, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘We used to enjoy going for little rides on holiday.’

  A real Marbella cowgirl, that’s what Dido had said. Miranda had the impression that she’d never done anything that her mother hadn’t been better at.

  Clare said, ‘There might be a riding place near here.’ And she sounded hopeful.

  ‘We can ask, I suppose.’

  Miranda was getting that absent look. She’d developed it, Clare remembered, at about eight years old. It meant that she was feeling invaded, and most of her being had fled to the jungle and would only be coming out to conduct guerrilla raids against the parental aggressor.

  ‘And we could go for a walk,’ Clare went on, thinking that walking when you didn’t have anywhere specific to go would be a complete waste of time.

  ‘Where to?’ asked Miranda, wondering if she was going to spoil another pair of shoes.

  ‘There must be something to see,’ Clare insisted, not really convinced. She cast a glance out of the window. What could there possibly be out there to interest a discriminating urban mind? More of that dreary grass. A misshapen tree, obviously half-dead, it really needed to be cut down. An untidy sort of outcrop that was presumably meant to be a wall or a hedge. A few bedraggled flowers in an insipid yellow colour.

  Miranda also looked out of the window. The old tree in the garden was a marvellous gnarled shape. It was about to burst into blossom, the buds were swelling on the new twigs, and the trunk was covered with lichen. You never saw lichen in the city. Wasn’t it supposed to be something to do with the air quality? And the primroses were out. Maybe she’d find a pencil and do some drawing. Years since she’d enjoyed making little sketches. She had been quite good at it.

  ‘I’ll go and ask,’ she said, finishing her coffee.

  The hall was empty. Following the revolting stench of sausage, she took the stone-flagged corridor to the back of the building and soon found herself in the kitchen, where the owner, tied up in an unflattering apron, was agitating a frying pan on the Aga. The dog, surely a health hazard, was lying at her feet and – aha! – the waiter was taking a break with a mug of coffee. Oliver, his name was Oliver. The sort of stupid name people had in the country.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, in best such-a-nice-girl mode. ‘We were just thinking of going for a walk. Maybe you could tell us a good way to go?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said.

  ‘Tell them the way over the fields to Yattenham,’ the owner suggested, chasing a couple of sausages onto a plate that was already heavy with bacon, eggs, tomatoes and … dear God … fried bread. Fried bread: total human catastrophe. The dog watched her every move.

  ‘Ah – yes,’ he said, as if he couldn’t quite remember the way. ‘Good idea. Let me get you a leaflet.’

  ‘What leaflet?’ the owner demanded, poised with her loaded plate.

  ‘The leaflets we had done for our guests,’ he said. ‘With little maps and directions. You know.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, and giggled, though why this should be funny Miranda could not imagine. The dog tried jumping up for the plate, so she held it high above her head, out of his reach. ‘Get down, Garrick. Bad dog.’

  ‘And we were wondering … is there a riding centre or something near here?’

  ‘Ah …’ Oliver thought immediately of Lucy and her horses. Could he? Would she? It was going to need work.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said, ‘but we can arrange riding for our guests. If you can give me twenty-four hours …’

  ‘No problem,’ said Miranda. Totally inefficient, but what else could you expect? Had she really fancied this bloke? Or just felt weakened by all that red wine? He was actually going to eat those sausages. Maybe she should be thankful that Mum’s all-pervasive public image had saved her from total embarrassment.

  Miranda returned to the dining room with a slip of paper bearing printed directions and a map. ‘They’re going to ask about the riding. And they’ve got a map of walks. We could do this one, over the fields to the next village, taking in some woodland.’

  ‘Very well organised,’ Clare approved. ‘I hope it isn’t going to be muddy, or anything.’

  Suitably protected, in boots, parkas, lip gloss with sunscreen, and warm scarves, the CEO of Agraria and her daughter set forth some twenty minutes later, passing between the two stone dogs and turning right out of the Manor House gates, before climbing with care over the stile in the hedge across the lane and taking the footpath that led along the margin of the field. It was a glorious morning.

  ‘Oliver! Oh my God! Oliver!’

  Never in his entire life had he heard his mother sound so shocked. And distressed. She was almost screaming. Oliver leaped from the table and ran out to see what was happening.

  The path to the kitchen garden was strewn with feathers which stirred in his slipstream as he passed. There, in the middle of the trampled plants, stood the Wendy house, its blue sides spattered with blood. He nearly fell over the first dead chicken, which lay on the
path, a chewed stump of neck sticking from its half-raw shoulders. In the enclosure, an almost complete carcass was jammed head-first under the house, one leg torn away. Another was nothing but a lump of bloody down. The remaining four were surreally unmarked, having dropped dead from fright.

  Such a domestic atrocity. Instead of the nursery-rhyme picture of the chicken house, surrounded by its blamelessly foolish inhabitants, pecking about in the dust, here was a massacre in miniature, with bodies halted by death in bizarre attitudes, wings splayed in the struggle to get off the ground and fly to safety. Evidence of the chickens’last panic was everywhere, in the scattered feathers on the ground and clumps of bloodied down stuck to the netting.

  His mother was almost as pitiful as her dead poultry, standing by a broken-down rosemary bush, dissolved in tears, dabbing at her running mascara. He put his arms around her.

  ‘I did shut them up last night,’ he told her. ‘Something must have got in.’

  ‘What could have done it? It can’t have been Garrick, I know he was in the kitchen all night. Look, it hasn’t even eaten them.

  They’ve all been just killed and left. That one isn’t even touched. It must have had a heart attack. Poor thing.’

  ‘It’s a fox, it must be.’

  ‘But how did it get in? Isn’t the wire netting supposed to be fox-proof?’

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed to the far side of the run, where a half-tunnel of freshly scraped earth showed that the killer had dug his way in.

  ‘I thought we didn’t have foxes round here? Didn’t your friend Jimmy say you never got foxes and badgers together and we had a badger somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what he said. Something’s changed.’

  ‘I’ll never dare have chickens again,’ she wailed. ‘Such a horrible way to die. I’ll never forgive myself.’

  ‘At least we don’t have to worry about dinner tonight.’

  ‘Oliver! How could you!’

  Something had indeed changed, as Oliver found ten minutes later. Driving back to his cottage to fetch his tools, he slowed down to pass Jimmy on the lane. For a very quiet man, Jimmy was animated. He began the conversation, which Oliver had never known him do before, and the words couldn’t wait to get out of his mouth.

  ‘You hear anything last night over your way?’

  ‘I was up late working, I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘’Cause I got a fox in my barns. Or maybe more than one. Terrible thing I saw when I come down. I heard’em immediately but by the time I was down there half of’em was gone, nearly. And the rest won’t be laying. That’s my work for the week gone. For the month, maybe. I’ve got dead ducks all over the show.’

  ‘My mother’s lost all hers too. You know, those silly spotty hens she had.’

  ‘Has she? I reckon it was more than one. Must have been. You didn’t see nothing yesterday? I’m wondering where the animals come from. Not the usual thing, more than one fox. Not on a rampage like that. They’ve killed so many, could have been three or four, even. Something’s not right. You spoken to Colin? I’m going over there now, see what’s happening at his place.’

  Colin had heard nothing, but remembered passing a white van on the road on his way back from the pub, and thinking it strange, since there was nothing down the lane except the farms and the Manor, and even tourists never got lost down there.

  It seemed logical to go to the pub next, and even more so when a white van which could well have been the same vehicle was found in the car park. The landlord supplied the next clue.

  ‘White van? With three people? I got them here,’ he said. ‘Came from London last night, got here so late I’d given up hope.’

  ‘What are they doing here?’ Oliver asked.

  ‘What d’you mean, what are they doing? Same as anybody else, I suppose, having a bit of a break for Easter.’

  ‘They’re sabs or something,’ said the girl from Yattenham who came in to help out on weekends. ‘When I did their rooms this morning they had all kinds of animal rights stuff in there, leaflets and papers all over the place.’

  When it was established that the trio had gone out, Oliver got a torch and shone it through the van’s rear windows. Then he examined the front, where the passenger seat was also littered with documents, and flung himself back to the bar in a rage.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he told them. ‘They’ve only brought a bunch of foxes up from London and let them loose down our lane. The van’s full of cages in the back and there’s some report they’re writing in the front. And a whole pack of those bee leaflets – remember them? Anti Apian Slavery Society. They’re in there too.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said the landlord, seeing an immediate conflict, between his takings for the weekend and his regular customers.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Colin, clenching his fists as if getting ready to beat up the first bee-liberator he saw.

  ‘Bloody fools,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Call the police,’ said Colin to the landlord, who winced and tried to think of a reason not to, but Colin added, ‘No point, is there? Nobody in the station at Yattenham today, won’t be anyone till Tuesday. They’d have to send men from Ipswich, and they’ll have enough to do.’

  ‘Call out the neighbourhood,’ Jimmy advised. ‘Only thing to do now, get a shoot organised.’

  The telephone was in the custody of the landlord, who, in an event of this nature, occupied the position of Switzerland in World War II, useful to everyone and despised by all. He stood looking uncertainly from one face to another, hoping they would all find it expedient to preserve his neutrality.

  ‘Why don’t we call Lucy?’ Oliver suggested.

  The landlord promptly pulled over his telephone book and looked for the vet’s number, but she appeared in the doorway as he was dialling, wearing her riding hat and a stern expression.

  ‘Have you heard anything, about foxes?’ she asked.

  ‘Have we heard.’

  ‘I’ll say we’ve heard.’

  ‘And seen. Why, what have you heard?’

  ‘I just met these …’ Ladylike to the fingertips, Lucy’s vocabulary wasn’t up to the job of describing the kind of person she had met. ‘Saboteurs, or animal rights people or whatever they are. They actually came to the surgery to put up that ridiculous leaflet about bees. And then they told me, the woman told me …’ She struggled for words again.

  ‘About the foxes,’ Oliver added.

  ‘Thirty-eight,’ she said. ‘Thirty-eight. Can you believe it? They rounded up thirty-eight foxes in London and drove them out here and let them loose.’

  ‘On one of my fields,’ Colin said.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell.’ She was blinking hard. For an awkward moment, it seemed that the gallant Lucy was going to cry. ‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath to stop the tears, ‘you’ve seen them, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver, ‘but they got my mother’s chickens. And a lot of Jimmy’s ducks. He got the worst of it. My mother just kept them for amusement but Jimmy’s birds are his living.’

  ‘The price I’d get for them, that’s what we were counting on to cover the feed bill,’ Jimmy was moved to a confidence. ‘I dunno what I can do now. I was counting on getting at least fifty to market next week.’

  ‘Though your mother must be …’

  ‘Pretty distraught,’ Oliver confirmed.

  ‘So,’ Lucy took another deep breath. ‘What to do?’

  ‘Rough shoot,’ Jimmy advised. ‘That’s the best way.’

  ‘I mean, does that stupid woman realise the foxes will just starve? They’ll have no territory of their own, no shelter, they’ll be seen off by the animals we do have, they won’t find food, once we’ve mended our fences as it were, and they’ll just starve to death. Or be killed by the others. Or – you know, she put flea collars on them? Like they were pets. They’ll strangle themselves. It’s just … senseless.’

  ‘Get all the guns together, get everyone out beating …’
As he spoke, Jimmy realised the flaws in his plan. ‘That’s what we used to do, when the foxes were out of control. I remember twenty guns, more than twenty. Down in Yattenham Forest. When I was a kid, that was.’

  ‘You won’t get twenty today,’ Lucy said. ‘There’s Colin, who can’t hit a barn door at ten yards, that brother of Florian’s, who couldn’t bring down a geriatric grouse, you and your dad, that’s about it. We ought to get them as fast as we can, too. Before they do more damage, while we can round them all up, before they get scattered around the whole county. Thirty-eight!’

  ‘My dad’s eyes aren’t what they were,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘What about the hunt?’ Colin asked. ‘They’re still in business, aren’t they? With the license and everything?’

  ‘What hunt?’ asked Oliver, realising that his mettle was to be tested again. He’d never been quite sure how he felt about hunting.

  ‘Our local would be the Haverham Foxhounds. They’re pretty small. And the season’s nearly over. They don’t come this way usually because of the livestock,’ said Lucy. ‘But I suppose we could ask the master to bring some hounds over and work the area. That’d flush the foxes out.’

  ‘Maybe they know some guns could help us out,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘They’re bound to. I’ve met their vet, I could give him a call. Might have to get a special license for land they don’t cover in the normal way. With so many, shooting them’s probably the most humane way. Thirty-eight of them! These people must be mad.’

  ‘It won’t be like a native animal that knows its own territory,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I’ll have a word,’ said Lucy. ‘Leave it to me.’ And since they knew her to be a force in the land, the three men agreed to leave the hunt to her.

  ‘Luce,’ said Oliver, following her out of the pub, ‘I know you’re in a hurry …’

  ‘But,’ she prompted him.

  ‘I need a favour.’

  ‘If it’s anything to do with making life hell for that Agraria woman, I’ll be delighted. Whatever it is. Within reason.’

  ‘You’ve heard.’

  ‘Half the county’s heard. We’re counting on you, Oliver. If she doesn’t go back to London on a stretcher we’ll be deeply disappointed.’