The Stalking Party Page 2

  Sir Archie shook his head. ‘Precious little feeding value in that stuff. Besides, the deer don’t come down to the river at this time of year. Too many midges. Too many damned people walking along the river path.’

  ‘Are you implying that I shouldn’t have gone there?’ she snapped.

  God! She was quick on the draw, he thought. ‘No, no,’ he said wearily. ‘The deer are on the high tops in this weather. Stick to the paths and you won’t bother them. You’ll be safe enough.’

  Her eyebrows drew together. ‘Safe? Isn’t it safe off the paths?’

  ‘Not really. Not when deer are being culled. A rifle bullet can travel over two miles – if it doesn’t hit something, that is.’

  There was a pause while she digested this, then she said in a combative tone, ‘There’s no law of trespass in Scotland. Ramblers have the right to go where they please.’

  ‘True enough, but all the same they stick to the paths if they know what’s good for them. We put up warning notices during the cull, as a precaution against accidents.’

  ‘Have there been accidents?’

  Under the table, his fingers tapped wood secretly. ‘No shooting accidents, thank God. One can’t be too careful.’

  ‘But other kinds?’

  ‘Oh, nothing serious. Broken legs, people getting lost, fishermen wading in too deep... that kind of thing.’ Again his fingers sought wood. ‘It’s not a dangerous place, exactly, but it is untamed. That’s what I like about it. You have to keep your wits about you and recognise the power of natural forces. Wind, cold, water, precipices. You have to remember that if you get into difficulties, there may not be anyone around to help you.’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘I still think it’s cruel,’ she said.

  Sir Archie sighed. Useless to ask how she would dispose of hundreds of surplus beasts, or feed the ones who survived the long, bitter winter in these remote glens. Useless to speak of blood-stinking abattoirs, or half-stunned turkeys struggling on conveyor-belts. Her mind was closed. She didn’t want to see things as they were, but how she would like them to be.

  He chewed steadily at his meat, reluctant to admit that her accusatory stare was spoiling his pleasure in it. She was good-looking, in a sharp, hawkish way, but her very glance offered a challenge born of...what? Insecurity? Fear? A genuine disgust at the spectacle of the rich at play? If the last, why the hell had Nicky brought her here? He must have known she’d hate it.

  ‘Have you known Nicholas long?’ he asked, carefully neutral.

  ‘Two years, I suppose. A friend brought him to one of our meetings.’

  ‘A political meeting?’

  ‘No.’ She looked down the table to where Nicky was talking animatedly to his solid, grey-chignoned aunt, Marjorie Forbes. ‘I run a charity called Home from Home. You won’t have heard of it.’

  Statement, not question. In her book, bloated capitalists like him knew nothing about charity work. If he mentioned his firm’s vast annual donations, she wouldn’t believe him, and in any case his mental alarm bells were already ringing. Trust Nicky to have got himself mixed up with a dodgy charity.

  ‘Interesting. What exactly do you do?’ he asked, though he could make a fair guess.

  She said glibly, as if she had answered the question a hundred times, ‘We act as a safety net for people who don’t qualify for help from official social services. People with emotional or financial crises, who have no one to turn to.’

  ‘Teenagers on the loose? Battered wives?’

  ‘We try not to categorise. We assess each case on its merits. We offer victims a roof over their heads, counselling, support until they can pull their lives together.’

  ‘It sounds expensive.’ He wished she would talk instead of lecturing.

  ‘We do a great deal of fund-raising. Nicky is our Financial Director.’

  ‘My God!’ he said, startled. ‘I hope someone checks his figures.’

  She frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Two re-sits of GCSE Maths, you know.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a girl to take care of all of that,’ she said dismissively. ‘Nicky just advises us on who to approach.’

  That boy is every kind of fool, thought his father in silent fury. Duns my friends, no doubt. God, what a mess! An explanation for her presence here at Glen Buie struck him with a jolt. No, he thought. I’m damned if I will. Even if I have to sell, she’s not getting her hands on this place and filling it with down-and-outs.

  Duncan was making his rounds, offering second helpings. Sir Archie rubbed his jaw, planning the week ahead. His difficulty nowadays was finding friends who were still fit enough for a week’s intensive exercise. It had been easy enough when they were all in their forties, but desk-bound lawyers and bankers and captains of industry developed aches and creaks in their fifties, and their wives – if they still had them – were mostly struggling against fat or arthritis, menopause or hysterectomy, none of which helped on the hill.

  Over recent years, he had relied more and more on his stepson’s friends to provide youthful stamina and muscle-power, as well as high spirits; but now Alec was dead, and the people his own son hung out with were not interested in stalking deer.

  There was no ducking the fact that it was a tough sport. However carefully he stage-managed, it was impossible to guarantee an easy day. Even on the low ground which he privately termed ‘the Liberian Ambassador’s beat,’ it could take three hours’ walking to come up with a shootable beast, and the irony was that the more inferior stags he culled, the more difficult it became to find one that he didn’t consider too good to shoot.

  He had begun the policy of conserving beasts with outstanding antlers, instead of shooting them for trophies, as Continental sportsmen did. A quarter of a century later, you often had a long climb to find a mature stag with fewer than eight points. That was why Everard Cooper, the sleek-haired paper-manufacturing fat-cat booming away fruitily two places to his left, was so keen to get his hands on Glen Buie. As his expense-account paunch indicated, he spent much of his time and energy buttering up foreign bigwigs, and would jump at the chance of being able to offer them deer-stalking on a famous forest. Merely imagining what he would do to the place made Sir Archie shudder.

  Certainly the solid, spacious, mock-Gothic Victorian lodge would get a new roof, which would be no bad thing, but modern baths and showers would oust the 7-foot cast-iron monsters in which guests loved to soak out the day’s exertions, and very likely bidets would further vulgarise the bathing arrangements. An up-to-date fitted kitchen, full of machines and gadgets, would replace the stone-flagged cavern with its Belfast sinks and huge, scrubbed table at which Mary Grant, the cook, wove her culinary spells.

  That would be for starters. When it came to the sporting side – the side that really mattered – Sir Archie could all too easily predict Everard Cooper’s pattern of behaviour. No true businessman could happily contemplate pouring money indefinitely into a bottomless hole. Once Glen Buie belonged to him, phrases like ‘eating its head off,’ and ‘not earning its keep,’ would crop up in Everard’s conversation. Next would come references to ‘the bottom line,’ ‘breaking even,’ and the dreaded ‘rationalisation.’

  From that point, it was but a short step to the ‘Sporting Lets’ columns, which would unleash the international fraternity of what Sir Archie called the four-letter men – Frogs, Huns, Wops, Yanks, and very probably Nips as well – on to Glen Buie. The sort of trophy-hunters who shot polar bears from helicopters and gazelle from sand-bikes.

  Sir Archie shuddered. The deer-forest which he and his father had cherished would be plundered and despoiled. And then when his enthusiasm waned or his legs packed up, Everard would probably sell out to some giant leisure group. Chalets would mushroom in the glen. Hikers in fluorescent anoraks would drop coke-cans and plastic bags in the heather, and by sheer human pressure drive out the deer. Black rain will fall, and the deer will leave the hills. Four hundred years ago, the Braham Seer had foretold
the destruction of the Highlands, and in the first years of the twenty-first century his prophecy seemed likely to be fulfilled. Black snow was common nowadays, when pollution-laden clouds dropped their acid burden.

  If he sold Glen Buie to Everard Cooper, he would contribute his own mite to the destruction.

  There must be some other way.

  Beverley had turned to her other side. It was time he did his duty and talked to his stepson’s young widow, though too much shooting without ear defenders had damaged his left ear, and he was gloomily certain he wouldn’t catch a quarter of what she said.

  To his relief, he saw that Everard Cooper was giving her a crash-course in Highland social history, to which she was listening with no open signs of boredom. Rapidly the monologue, delivered fortissimo, touched upon crofting, the Clearances, and arrived at the Victorian passion for deer-stalking, which had led to the building of Glen Buie Lodge.

  ‘The original house was at Strathtorran – still is, of course, but in a very delapidated condition,’ boomed Cooper. ‘The McNeils are an old family, but most of them had the sense to keep their noses out of politics, so the earldom of Strathtorran survived, along with most of their land, until very recently. Then the Auld Laird, as they still call him – Torquil Strathtorran’s father – got into deep water in the 1950s, and sold this house and more than half the deer-forest to Archie and your late father-in-law, Hamish Forrester, fifty-fifty. The old house is just across the river. Wonderful view. I walked over to look at it last Sunday.’

  Did you just? thought Sir Archie, pouring cream over his treacle tart in defiance of Gwenny’s censorious eye. Dreaming of adding Strathtorran to your spoils, I shouldn’t wonder.

  ‘Been empty for years,’ Everard went on, ‘but now young Torquil has gone and turned the outbuildings and barn into a hostel. Awful idea, but he needs the money. Unless you can get a job at the fish-farm or with the Forestry Commission, there’s precious little hope of finding work here, despite all the millions we taxpayers pour into the Scottish economy.’ He raised his voice still more. ‘How do you feel about it, Archie? A lot of Outward Bounders on your doorstep, eh?’

  ‘Oh, we rub along,’ said Sir Archie, deliberately neutral. ‘No one can deny that coming here has done Torquil Strathtorran a power of good physically. Remember how seedy he was as a boy?’

  ‘Ah, but has it done you a power of good?’

  Sir Archie shrugged. ‘No harm, anyway. He’s keen to get the place in order – works like a...’ He caught the word ‘black’ and hastily substituted, ‘galley slave, and looks very well on it.’

  ‘What about his brother? Ian – or is it Euan? Roughish diamond, I gather.’

  ‘Oh, well, we all have our crosses. Ghastly tragedy to lose his wife like that. Lovely girl, too. A real cracker.’

  ‘But hardly the sort of work-horse needed up here,’ put in Lady Priscilla Cooper, Everard’s wife, listening from across the table. ‘I never thought Eliza McNeil looked at home in oilskins.’

  ‘Thoroughbred between the shafts,’ Everard agreed, and on Sir Archie’s right Beverley caught Nicky’s eye and gave an impatient little snort.

  Leaning towards Everard, Sir Archie said softly, ‘How did young Benjamin get on today? You were with him, weren’t you? I saw his stag in the larder: a good beast.’ Rather too good, in fact. A handsome ten-pointer, the sort he preferred to see alive on the hill.

  When Everard said nothing, Sir Archie called down the table to Benjamin Forbes, his teenage nephew. ‘How was your stalk, Ben? I see you got a stag.’

  ‘Wasn’t it splendid?’ broke in Marjorie Forbes, before her younger son could open his mouth. ‘Fergus said it was a frightfully difficult crawl, right in the open.’

  ‘Mum!’ Benjamin looked agonised.

  Why is the old bitch yapping so hard? Sir Archie wondered. Something must have gone wrong and she’s trying to cover up. I should have sent the boy with Sandy McNichol. Fergus is too much of a chancer – but then Marje would have insisted on going with them. She can keep up with steady old Sandy. Nothing more likely to upset a boy’s first stalk than having his mother breathing down his neck. I must find out what happened. The shot looked all right – perhaps a trifle too far back...

  Pointedly he addressed himself to his nephew. ‘Was it a long shot, Ben?’

  ‘Not – not really, Uncle Archie. About a hundred yards. Only we were on such a steep slope, looking down. Almost straight down. I’m – I’m awfully sorry I made such a hash of it.’

  ‘My dear boy, I don’t call that a hash. You shot him clean enough; just a fraction too far back.’

  ‘But it was the wrong stag.’ Now Benjamin had got the confession off his chest, words poured out of him, his half-broken voice rising and falling in jerky sentences as he tried to justify his mistake. ‘It was so different from shooting at the target. I hadn’t realised. The light was tricky. The mist kept closing in, then melting away. Half the time I wasn’t even sure the stags were there. There were four of them, but I could only see three. I thought I was looking at the one Fergus meant. He kept saying, “Are you seeing him?” and I said, “Yes”, because I – I –’

  ‘I know just what you mean,’ said his uncle seriously. ‘They move about, and the cloud comes and goes, and it’s damned difficult to tell t’other from which.’

  Ben took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. ‘We scrambled down through the rocks until we were a hundred yards above them on the ridge behind Tulloch Mhor. Where the burn flows in two directions, you know? The cloud was down, and we had to wait until it lifted, and just when we started moving closer, a whole party of hinds came round the shoulder of the hill.’

  Most of the table had fallen silent to listen.

  ‘They stopped and stamped and glared at us, but they hadn’t got our wind. They kept moving on. The stags all jumped up, and Fergus said, “Quick, take him now!” but I wasn’t in a good position. They were looking up, and the one I was aiming at was half hidden. Fergus said, “Go on, shoot, or they’ll be off,” but my stag still wasn’t clear. Then he moved a couple of steps forward and I shot him, and – and Fergus said it was the wrong one.’

  What Fergus had actually said as the ten-pointer crumpled into the peat hag, was ‘God, boy! Ye’ve killed one o’ Sandy’s young feeders. Now the fat will be in the fire,’ and Ben had felt ready to die of shame. It was done, and nothing could undo it. The wrong stag! How could he have made such a mistake?

  All the way home, he had been rehearsing how he could tell his uncle. He was bound to hear of it sooner or later. On the hill, everything had been so different, so difficult. This morning, when he shot at the target and hit that circled spot every time, it had been easy. There was no rush. You wriggled into a firm position flat on your stomach, legs spread, wrist on someone’s rolled coat, and all you had to do was line up the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight, hold your breath, and squeeze the trigger. Easy as falling off a log.

  But on the hill, his heart had been hammering from the scramble through the rocks, and the strap of his binoculars kept getting caught under him. His hands had been stiff with cold, and the sight misted up when he tried to look through it. The stags were not neatly broadside on, as the pockmarked target was; nor was there a nice little circle to tell you where to aim.

  Worst of all, instead of firing from his familiar prone position, Fergus had made him prop his back against a rock and shoot downhill between his own feet. It had felt awful – insecure and wobbly. For one ghastly moment, as the echoes thundered around the rocks, he thought he had missed completely. Perhaps it would have been better if he had.

  Then the stag had given a great bound and stood swaying, looking vaguely round at the empty hill where his companions had vanished. He had put his head back, until the antlers lay along his neck, and crumpled among the rocks.

  His uncle was staring at him. Ben wondered how many of the doubts and fears he had felt there on the hill it would be politic to express, and decided he had sai
d enough.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

  ‘Never mind, old boy, easily done. Can’t be helped.’ I must have a word with Fergus, thought Sir Archie. Tell him to be more careful, particularly with beginners. No sense in making a fuss now and putting the boy off stalking altogether. At least he had kept his nerve and shot accurately, even if he had killed the wrong stag.

  Beverley’s face was stiff with disapproval. ‘It’s disgusting. It shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s obviously a substitute for sex. Initiating boys into the customs of the tribe. Proving you’re a man.’

  Sir Archie considered this charge. There was a grain of truth in it, particularly the initiation aspect. As his own powers declined, nothing gave him more pleasure than seeing a youngster take to stalking with his own enthusiasm. Everard Cooper’s son, Lucas, for instance: now that had been a turn-up for the books. Thickset and heavy-featured, with brutally shaven hair and a gold earring, young Lucas had looked unpromising material. You would have said his natural habitat was a street corner. His own father could hardly bear to be in the same room with him.

  Yet he had taken to stalking like a duck to water. On the one occasion when Sir Archie had gone with him to the hill, he had been astounded by the change in Lucas – his keenness to learn, the way he got on with the stalkers, his instinctive understanding of wind conditions and how they would influence the deer.

  Some of his own friends, who had been coming to stay at Glen Buie for years, had never learned to do more than follow the professional stalker and obey his instructions. Others, like Lucas, could have gone out on their own, once they knew the ground.

  Over their lunchtime piece, looking down on the network of shining lochs and hills blending out towards the Western Isles, Lucas had haltingly confided his longing to be a gamekeeper, and his father’s angry opposition. Sir Archie had promised to put in a word for him, but the last he had heard, Lucas was serving in the Marines.

  Initiation to the tribe? Maybe. But surely stalking was not a substitute for sex? Not for him, at any rate. With guilty pleasure he remembered this very afternoon with luscious little Cynthia Page, trophy-wife of his old friend and one-time brother officer Joss Page, on the sunny bank of the pool known as Miss Hazelrigg’s Catch. Standing behind her, thigh-deep in water, while she played a salmon, he had slipped his hands under her quilted waistcoat and layers of wool and silk until his fingers cupped her full breasts.