Death of a Huntsman Read Free

was actually a touch of pink, the first bloodshot vein or two, in the whites of her eyes.
    â€˜But who
is
she?’
    â€˜Search me.
You
find out. It’s
your
turn——’
    Open-mouthed, she laughed again across the table, the cigarette dangling this time from the lower lip as she mockingly pointed her glass at his face.
    He knew that this gesture of fresh derision meant that she no longer saw him very well. Already the eyes had begun their swimming unfocused dilations.
    â€˜All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to her.’
    â€˜Good,’ she said. ‘That’s the brave Harry. Brave old Harry.’
    As she threw back her head, laughing openly now, letting the cigarette fall into her plate of half-eaten food, revealing relics of her last mouthful smeared across her lips and her tongue, he did not ask himself why he had ever married her. It was too late for asking that kind of question.
    â€˜When does she appear?’ he said.
    â€˜Oh! off and on. Any time. On and off——’
    â€˜I’ll try to catch her on Saturday,’ he said. ‘Or Sunday.’
    Derisively and deliberately she raised her hand, not laughing now, in a sort of mock benediction.
    â€˜Now don’t be rash, Harry dear. Brave old Harry,’ she said. ‘Don’t be rash. She might catch you.’
Chapter 3
    On the following Sunday morning, as he walked up past the cucumber house to where a path led through two wicket gates to the meadows beyond, a light breeze was coming off the little river, bringing with it the scent of a few late swathes of hay. The glass of the cucumber house, with its dark green under-tracery of leaves, flashed white in the sun. The summer had been more stormy than fine, with weeks of August rain, and now, in mid-September, the fields were flush with grasses.
    He stopped to look inside the cucumber house. Underthe glass the temperature had already risen to ninety-five. Thick green vines dripped with steamy moisture. Columns of cucumbers, dark and straight, hung down from dense masses of leaves that shut out the strong morning sun.
    The cucumbers were his wife’s idea. She was very imaginative, he had to admit, about cucumbers. Whereas the average person merely sliced up cucumbers, made them into sandwiches or simply ate them with fresh salmon for lunch in summer, his wife was acquainted with numerous recipes in which cucumbers were cooked, stuffed like aubergines or served with piquant sauces or high flavours such as Provençale. Harry Barnfield did not care much for cucumbers. More often than not, cooked or uncooked, they gave him wind, heart-burn or chronic indigestion. But over the years of his married life he had learned to eat them because he was too good-natured to deny his wife the chance of surprising guests with dishes they had never heard of before. He well understood her cucumbers and her little gastronomic triumphs with them.
    That Sunday morning, as he stood under the steaming shadowy vines, he thought he saw, suddenly, a bright yellow break of sunlight travel the entire length of the glasshouse outside. The leaves of the cucumbers were so thick that it was some moments before he grasped that this was, in fact, a person riding past him on a horse.
    Even then, as he discovered when he rushed out of the cucumber house, he was partly mistaken. The horse wasmerely a pony, blackish brown in colour, with a loose black tail.
    With impatience he started to shout after it: ‘Hi! you there! Where do you think you’re going? Don’t you know—?’ and then stopped, seeing in fact that its rider was nothing more than a young girl in a yellow sweater, jodhpurs, black velvet cap and pig-tails. The pig-tails too were black and they hung long and straight down the yellow shoulders, tied at the ends not with ribbon but with short lengths of crimson cord.
    The girl did not stop. He started to shout again and then, quite without thinking, began to