Longshot

A car pulled up behind the Land Rover and disgorged Gareth and then Tremayne who moved like a tank across the earthy verge and rocked to a halt a yard away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said blankly. ‘I didn’t believe Gareth.’ He took charge of things then as a natural duty but also, it seemed, with an effort. ‘Right, I’ll call an ambulance on the car phone. Keep still,’ he said to me unnecessarily. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here.’

I didn’t answer him either. He sped away back to the car and we could hear his urgent voice, though not the words. He returned shortly telling me to hang on, it wouldn’t be for long; and the shock had made him breathless too, I noticed.

‘We’ve looked for you for hours,’ he said, anxious, I thought, to prove I hadn’t been forgotten. ‘We telephoned the police and the hospitals and they had no news of a car crash or anything, so then we came out here...’

‘Because of your message,’ Mackie said, ‘on the cork-board.’

Oh, yes.

Gareth’s camera was swinging from Perkin’s hand. Mackie saw me watching it and said, ‘We found the trail, you know.’

Gareth chimed in, ‘The paint by the road had gone but we looked and looked in the woods. I remembered where we’d been.’ He was earnest. ‘I remembered pretty well where it started. And Perkin found it.’

‘He went all the way along it with a torch,’ Mackie said, stroking her husband’s arm, ‘clever thing — and he came back after absolutely ages with Gareth’s camera and said you weren’t there. We didn’t know what to do next.’

‘I wouldn’t let them go home,’ Gareth said. A mixture of stubbornness and pride in his voice. Thank God for him, I thought.

‘What happened exactly?’ Tremayne asked me bluntly. ‘How did you get like this?’

‘Tell you... later.’ It came out not much above a whisper, lost in the sound of their movements around me.

‘Don’t bother him,’ Mackie said. ‘He can hardly speak.’

They waited beside me making worried encouragements until the ambulance arrived from the direction of Reading. Tremayne and Mackie went to meet the men in uniform, to tell them, I supposed, what to expect. Gareth took a step or two after them and I called him in an explosive croak, ‘Gareth,’ and he stopped and turned immediately and came back, bending down.

‘Yes? What? What can I do?’

‘Stay with me,’ I said.

It surprised him but he said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and stayed a pace away looking troubled.

Perkin said irritably, ‘Oh, go on, Gareth.’

I said, ‘No,’ hoarsely. ‘Stay.’

After a pause Perkin put his back towards Gareth and his face down near mine and asked with perfect calmness, ‘Do you know who shot you?’ It sounded like a natural question in the circumstances, but it wasn’t.

I didn’t reply. I looked for the first time straight into his moonlit eyes, and I saw Perkin the son, the husband, the one who worked with wood. I looked deep, but I couldn’t see his soul. Saw the man who thought he’d killed me... saw the archer.

‘Do you really know?’ he asked again.

He showed no feeling, yet my knowledge held the difference between his safety and destruction.

After a long moment, in which he read the answer for himself, I said, ‘Yes.’

Something within him seemed to collapse but he didn’t outwardly fall to pieces or rant or rave or even try to pull out the arrow again or finish me in any other way. He didn’t explain or show remorse or produce justification. He straightened and looked across to where the men from the ambulance were advancing with his father and his wife. Looked at his brother, a pace away, listening.

He said to me, ‘I love Mackie very much.’

He’d said everything, really.

I spent the night thankfully unaware of the marathon needlework going on in my chest and drifted back late in the morning to a mass of tubes and machines and techniques I’d never heard of. It seemed I was going to live: the doctors were cheerful, not cautious.

‘Constitution like a horse,’ one said. ‘We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.’

A nurse told me a policeman wanted to see me, but visitors had been barred until tomorrow.

By tomorrow, which was Wednesday, I was breathing shallowly but without mechanical help, sitting propped up sideways and drinking soup; talking, attached to drainage tubes and feeling sore. Doing just fine, they said.

The first person who came to see me wasn’t Doone after all but Tremayne. He came in the afternoon and he looked white, fatigued and many years older.

He didn’t ask about my health. He went over to the window of the post-operation side-ward I was occupying alone and stood looking out for a while, then he turned and said, ‘Something awful happened yesterday.’

He was trembling, I saw.

‘What?’ I asked apprehensively.

‘Perkin...’ His throat closed. His distress was overwhelming.

‘Sit down,’ I said.

He fumbled his way into the chair provided for visitors and put a hand over his lips so that I shouldn’t see how close he was to tears.

‘Perkin,’ he said after a while. ‘After all these years you’d think he’d be careful.’

‘What happened?’ I asked, when he stopped.