Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 35

"I haven't had breakfast."

"We've got breakfast." Harvey held up a thermos and a grease-smudged brown paper bag. "Doughnuts. I finally taught Mrs. Frewin how to make them properly." He thought about it. "Well, nearly properly."

"I have a hangover," I told them again. "Go away."

"We're going to stand here, ringing your doorbell every five minutes, until you get dressed and come with us," Harvey said.

"Jesus," I muttered. "All right. Let me put some clothes on." "We'll come in and wait," said Pauline, obviously thinking of visiting my front room.

"No you won't," I told her. "Wait in the car. I won't be long."

I closed the door on them.

There were a lot of stories, some of them going back centuries, concerning the relations.h.i.+p between the Woods and the Dawson-Fairleighs. One story said that a hundred years or so ago a Wood ancestor had managed to wheedle his way into the favour of the then-Earl Seldon, who had given him a loan on which the Wood farm had stood as security. The loan had, of course, never been repaid, but successive Earls had not bothered to foreclose on the farm because it really wasn't worth having. There were also dark rumours that the Woods possessed some information which would terminally embarra.s.s the Dawson-Fairleighs.

Whatever. The Wood farm had pa.s.sed down through generation after generation of pillocks until it fell into the hands of Derek, in whom all the bad Wood genes appeared to have become dominant at once.

The gene for stupidity, for instance, which gossip said dipped in and out of the family from generation to generation. Derek was too stupid to hold his little soirees at a secret location far from home, which was how he got caught, time after time. Doing it at eight o'clock in the morning wasn't going to fool anybody.

Driving through the village, we pa.s.sed half a dozen photographers and a bunch of Azeris who claimed to be their country's Press a.s.sociation. Harvey kept his foot down on the accelerator and almost ran over the little Frenchman who had been the last person to ask to interview Karen.

"Slow down," I said.

"I'm going to hang him up by his b.a.l.l.s this time," Harvey vowed, snarling through the windscreen, but he did lift his foot off the accelerator pedal fractionally.

"Who is this bloke anyway?" Pauline asked from the back seat while she loaded her cameras.

"Derek Wood," I said.

"Beg pardon?"

"Every town's got one," Harvey said. He changed gear and almost took every tooth off the gearbox.

"Geoff?"

"Derek is not a nice man," I told her.

"Three hundred years ago I'd have been able to have him hanged, drawn and quartered and the bits tarred and nailed to the door of St. Luke's, and n.o.body would have been able to stop me," Harvey muttered. We went around a bend quickly enough for me to feel the Range Rover lift fractionally off its nearside tyres.

"Derek runs dog-fights," I explained.

There was a silence from the back seat. "Oh," she said finally.

I thought about last night, wondering at which point precisely Pauline's scepticism about Harvey had disappeared. I couldn't remember going home, or Betty ringing Last Orders, and a lot of things before that were blurred.

"Did you tell me why you paid those students to make the corn circle?" I asked her.

"No."

"Did you tell Harvey?"

She sn.i.g.g.e.red.

"How about Domino?"

"No."

I gave up. "How do you know Derek's having a fight this morning?" I asked Harvey.

"Ned Watkins."

"It's not like Ned to have moral scruples," I said. Ned Watkins was the county's most industrious poacher, the bane of about a dozen landowners.

Harvey shrugged. "Don't ask me what goes on in that guy's head. He just turned up about seven and said a bunch of the local petty criminal cla.s.s were gathering at Derek's farm."

"Did you call Nigel?"

He nodded. "He's on his way with a whole posse of policemen. He wants to slap Derek as much as I do."

"Wow," I said. "I don't think I can handle this much excitement at this time of the morning."

He reached into his pocket and took out a Cafe Creme. "Have a cigar," he said.

"It'd probably make me throw up," I told him. But I took the cigar anyway and put it in my pocket.

The Wood farm sat in a little dip, an untidy cl.u.s.ter of run-down buildings and rusting tractors almost lost in a jungle of weeds. There were a couple of dozen vehicles of varying decrepitude parked in the farmyard when we arrived.

"Right," Harvey said, stopping the Range Rover and undoing his seatbelt.

"Shouldn't we wait for Nigel?" I asked.

He paused with his hand on the door-handle and looked at me. "This guy offends me, Geoffrey. He's one of the stupidest, most amoral human beings I've ever met. He thinks two pit-bulls tearing each other to bits isthe most exciting spectacle since Holiday on Ice and he's a bully to boot. He's one of my tenants and he's my responsibility."

"Don't you think you're taking your responsibilities a little bit too seriously?" I asked, but he was already out of the door and striding across the farmyard towards one of the ramshackle buildings. Pauline hurried after him, festooned with cameras. I watched them go, the Lord of the Manor and his Official Photographer. I shook my head. Then I got out the car and followed them, the Lord of the Manor's Fool.

Harvey reached the building, and at that point everything began to go wrong. Instead of just sneaking in un.o.btrusively, he wrenched open the door and shouted, "Derek Wood! Your worst nightmare is here!" And then he disappeared into a tidal wave of beefy bodies that erupted from the doorway. I started to run.

People jostled me as they tried to get past to their cars. I dashed into the barn and saw more of them milling around, shouting and swearing, illuminated by the flash of Pauline's camera. A deep pit had been dug in the middle of the floor, and I caught a glimpse of two stocky, ma.s.sively-muscled bodies down in the bottom. It was chaos. On the other side of the pit, I saw Harvey for a moment, hand raised above his head, yelling at the top of his voice at someone.

The press of bodies parted and I found myself on the edge of the pit. Whatever Derek had in there, they weren't dogs. For a moment, I had the surreal impression that they were bald chimpanzees. They had the round, short-snouted heads and small ears of bull-terriers, smooth grey-brown hide and short muscular arms that ended in great sharp-clawed hands.

One was obviously dead, lying on the floor of the pit with its throat torn out with such force that it had almost been decapitated. The other one was standing pawing its fallen adversary's body as if confused that it had stopped fighting. Then it looked up and saw me.

All the noise seemed to go away. All of a sudden the creature was in motion. It reached the side and jumped. Its clawed fingers dug into the soil of the pit wall, and it started to haul itself hand over hand up towards me, snarling. Its mouth seemed crammed with tiny razor-sharp brown teeth. Its little yellow eyes were locked on me and it looked completely insane. It was close enough to spray spittle on the toes of my trainers.

Pauline walked unhurriedly up beside me, swung her foot back, and kicked the creature in the face. It tumbled back into the pit and lay in the dirt looking dazed. Pauline got a couple of quick photographs of it.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I looked across the pit. On the other side, Harvey and a big brawny bullet-headed man were yelling at each other. Harvey's nose was bleeding, but Derek looked as if he was going to have a corker of a black eye.

For a fraction of a second, they looked just like the thing Pauline had kicked.

"No," I said, looking at my shaking hands. "No, I'm not all right."

Then Nigel arrived with what appeared to be most of the Wilts.h.i.+re Police Force rugby team, and order, of a sort, was restored.

Our little police action resulted in seven arrests for public order offences, five for offensive weapons, two for actual bodily harm and one for driving a stolen vehicle, Nigel and his boys having checked all the number plates in the farmyard before making their entrance. The live goblin was put in the back of a police dog van and taken away somewhere. The CNN team, who had arrived too late to film the action, were still haggling with Nigel's Inspector for the body of the dead one.

"I call that a good morning's work," said Harvey, dabbing his nose with a fistful of paper tissues.

"Tip your head back," Pauline told him. "It'll never stop bleeding otherwise."

Harvey tipped his head back obediently. "Goblins," he muttered. "Jesus."

"I was talking to Nigel," I said. "He doesn't think he'll be able to make a charge stick."

Harvey looked at me.

"It's not illegal to stage a goblin-fight," I told him.

He raised an eyebrow angrily.

"It's not," I said. "Dogs, yes. c.o.c.kerels, yes. Badgers, yes. Goblins, no. There's no legislation regarding goblins. As far as the law's concerned, you burst in on Derek and his mates doing something extremely unpleasant but perfectly legal." I watched Nigel frogmarching Derek over to a police van. "You'd better pray that Derek's too stupid to charge you with a.s.sault."

Harvey said, "You're a really ungrateful guy, you know?"

"Has something happened today for me to be grateful for?"

"Stop it, you two," Pauline said.

We looked at her. Harvey sighed and tipped his head back.

"Are you staying at the House?" I asked.

Harvey glared at me over his mask of paper tissues.

"Yes," said Pauline.

"I'll ask Karen," I told her. She blinked at me. "Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome," I said, walking back towards the gate.

I walked quite a long way before I heard Harvey call, "Hey! Hey! You want a lift?"

I smiled and kept walking.

"Well, I don't know," said Karen.

"She says she just wants to talk to you for twenty minutes," I said.

"But why me?" she asked. "Why not that old bloke who was with the Duke of Marlborough?"

"General Branch."

"Yes, him. He was on GMTV this morning."

I sipped my drink. Karen was having a bad day; she wasn't much more than a vague smoky presence centred around the armchair in the corner of the living room. If the curtains hadn't been closed I wouldn't have been able to see her at all.

"I haven't even been dead very long, have I?" she asked.

"Thirteen months."

"I can't see that I have anything very interesting to say," she said. "General Branch was banging on about great battles and stuff; what do I have to say? How great it was living in Islington in the early 1990s? How I b.u.mped into Cherie Blair once in Waitrose?"

"She wants to know what it's like to be dead."

"Well it's not that b.l.o.o.d.y interesting. I don't know; what do you think? Am I having a good time?"

"I promised I'd ask you to talk to her."

There was a silence from the other side of the room. "How many other people have asked to talk to me?"

"There have been a few," I admitted.

"You never tried to persuade me to cooperate with them," she said. Another silence. "Is she very pretty?"

I looked into my drink. "Not particularly, no."

"So what's different about her?"

I looked at the febrile impression of motion that was all that remained of my wife. "She saved me from being savaged by a goblin this morning." It occurred to me that Seldon was the only place on Earth where a person could use that sentence and not feel in danger of winding up in a mental hospital.

4.

The doorbell rang at ten o'clock on the dot. She was punctual, I had to give her that. I went and opened the door.

"Are you sure this is all right?" Pauline asked.

"Karen's very keen," I told her.

She had her camera-bag slung over her shoulder and her hair was freshly-washed. She looked about twelve years old.