Toll for the Brave

She frowned. ‘You didn’t lose anything when you were out there did you?’

‘Everything intact and in full working order, ma’am.’ I saluted gravely. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been any good at it. A Chinese psychiatrist once told me it was because my grandfather found me in bed with the Finnish au pair when I was fourteen and beat all hell out of me with a blackthorne he prized rather highly. Carried it all the way through the desert campaign. He was a general, you see, so he naturally found it difficult to forgive me when it broke.’

‘On you?’ she said.

‘Exactly, so I don’t think you’d find me very satisfactory.’

‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ She was suddenly the lass from Doncaster again, the Yorkshire voice flat in the rain. ‘What do you do with yourself – for a living, I mean?’

‘Is that what you call it?’ I shrugged. ‘The last of the dinosaurs. Hunted to extinction. I enjoy what used to be known in society as private means – lots of them. In what little time I have to spare, I also try to write.’

She smiled at that, looking so astonishingly beautiful that things actually stopped moving for a moment. ‘You’re just what I’ve been seeking for my old age.’

‘You’re marvellous,’ I said. ‘Also big, busty, sensuous…’

‘Oh, definitely that,’ she said. ‘I never know when to stop. I’m also a lay-out artist in an advertising agency, divorced and thirty-seven years of age. You’ve only seen me in an artificial light, love.’

I started to slide down the side of the car and she got a shoulder under my arm and went through my clothes.

‘You’ll find the wallet in my left breast pocket,’ I murmured.

She chuckled. ‘You daft ha’p’orth. I’m looking for the car keys. Where do you live?’

‘The Essex coast,’ I told her. ‘Foulness.’

‘Good God,’ she said. ‘That must be all of fifty miles away.’

‘Fifty-eight.’

She took me back to her flat in the King’s Road, just for the night. I stayed a month, which was definitely all I could take of the hub of the universe, the bright lights, the crowds. I needed solitude again, the birds, the marshes, my own little hole to rot in. So she left her job at the agency, moved down to Foulness and set up house with me.

Oscar Wilde once said that life is a bad quarter of an hour made up of exquisite moments. She certainly gave me plenty of those in the months that followed and that morning was no exception. I started off in my usual frenzy and within minutes she had gentled me into making slow, meaningful love and with considerably more expertise than when we had first met. She’d definitely taken care of that department.

Afterwards I felt fine, the fears of the hour before dawn a vague fantasy already forgotten. I kissed her softly under her rigid left nipple, tossed the sheets to one side and went into the bathroom.

A medical friend once assured me that the shock of an ice-cold shower was detrimental to the vascular system and liable to reduce life expectancy by a month. Admittedly he was in his cups at the time but I had always found it an excellent excuse for spending five minutes each morning under a shower that was as hot as I could bear.

When I returned to the bedroom Sheila had gone, but I could smell coffee and realised that I was hungry. I dressed quickly and went into the sitting-room. There was a log fire burning on the stone hearth and she had her easel set up in front of it.

She was standing there now in her old terry towelling robe, the palette back in her left hand, dabbing vigorously at the canvas with a long brush.

‘I’m having coffee,’ she said without turning round. ‘I’ve made tea for you. It’s on the table.’

I poured myself a cup and went and stood behind her. It was good – damn good. A view from the house, the saltings splashed with sea-lavender, the peculiarly luminous light reflected by the slimy mud flats, blurring everything at the edges. Above all, the loneliness.

‘It’s good.’

‘Not yet.’ She worked away busily in one corner without turning her head. ‘But it will be. What do you want for breakfast?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing the muse.’ I kissed her on the nape of the neck. ‘I’ll take Fritz for a walk.’

‘All right, love.’

The brush was moving very quickly now, a frown of concentration on her face. I had ceased to exist so I got my hunting jacket from behind the door and left her to it.

I have been told that in some parts of America, Airedales are kept specifically to hunt bears and they are excellent swimmers, a useful skill in an area like Foulness. But not Fritz who was Sheila’s one true love, a great, shaggy bundle in ginger and black, amiable to a degree in spite of a bark that could be heard half a mile away. He had ceased to frighten even the birds and was terrified of water, objecting to even the mildest wetting of his paws. He romped ahead of me along the rutted grassy track and I followed.

Foulness – Cape of Birds, the Saxons called it and they were here in plenty. I have always had a liking for solitude and no more than fifty-odd miles from London, I rotted gently and in the right place for it. Islands and mist and sea walls to keep out the tide, built by the Dutch centuries ago. Creeks, long grass, stirring to change colour as if brushed by an invisible presence, the gurgle of water everywhere and the sea creeping in like a ghost in the night to take the unwary.

The Romans had known this place, Saxon outlaws hidden here from the Normans, and now Ellis Jackson pretended for the moment that this was all there was.

In the marshes autumn is the saltings purple and mauve with the sea-lavender, the damp smell of rotting vegetation. Birds calling constantly, lifting from beyond the sea wall uneasily, summer dead and winter yet to come. Gales blowing in off the North Sea, the wind moaning endlessly.

Was this all there was – truly? A bottle a day and Sheila Ward to warm the bed? What was I waiting for, here at the world’s end?

Somewhere in the far distance I heard shooting. Heavy stuff from the sound of it. It stirred something deep inside, set the adrenalin surging only I didn’t have an MI6 carbine to hang on to and this wasn’t the Mekong Delta. This was a grazing marsh on the tip of Foulness in quiet Essex and the shooting came from the Ministry of Defence Proof and Experimental Artillery ranges at Shoeburyness.

Fritz was somewhere up ahead exploring and out of sight. He suddenly appeared over a dyke about fifty yards ahead, plunged into a wide stretch of water and swam strongly to the other side, disappearing into the reeds.

A moment later, he started to bark frantically, a strange new sound for him that seemed to have fear in it. There was a single rifle shot and the barking ceased.

Birds lifted out of the marsh in great clouds. The beating of their wings filled the air and when they had passed, they left an uncanny stillness.

I ran into the mist calling his name. I found his body a minute later sprawled across the rutted track. From the look of things he had been shot through the head with a high velocity bullet for most of the skull had disintegrated. I couldn’t really take it in because it didn’t make any kind of sense. This wasn’t a place where one found strangers. The Ministry were tough about that because of the experimental ranges. Even the locals had to produce a pass at certain checkpoints when leaving or returning to the general area. I had one myself.

A small wind touched my cheek coldly, there was a splashing and as I turned something moved in the tall reeds to my right.

North Vietnamese regular troops wear khaki, but the Viet Cong have their own distinctive garb of conical straw hat and black pyjamas. Many of them still use the old Browning Automatic rifle or the MI carbine that got most American troops through the Second World War.

But not the one who stepped out of the reeds some ten or fifteen yards to my right. He held what looked like a brand new AK47 assault rifle across his chest, the best that China could provide. Very probably the finest assault rifle in the world.

He was as small as they usually were, a stocky little peasant out of some rice field or other. He was soaked to the knees, rain dripped from the brim of his straw hat, the black jacket was quilted against the cold.

I took a couple of cautious steps back. He said nothing, made no move at all, just stood there, holding the AK at the high port. I half-turned and found his twin standing ten yards to my rear.

If this was madness, it had been a long time coming. I cracked completely, gave a cry of fear, jumped from the track into the reeds and plunged into the mist, knee-deep in water.

A wild swan lifted in alarm, great wings beating so close to me that I cried out again and got my arms to my face. But I kept on moving, coming up out of the reeds on the far side close to the old grass-covered dyke that kept the sea back in its own place.

I crouched against it, listening for the sounds of pursuit. Somewhere back there in the marsh there was a disturbance, birds rising in alarm. It was enough. I scrambled over the dyke, dropped to the beach below and ran for my life.

Sheila was still at the easel in front of the fire when I burst into the cottage. I made it to a wing-backed chair near the door and fell into it. She was on her knees beside me in an instant.

‘Ellis? Ellis, what is it?’

I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come and there was real fear in her eyes now. She hurried to the sideboard and returned with a glass of whisky.

I spilled more than I got down, my hand shaking as if I was in high fever. I had left the door open behind me and it swung to and fro in the wind. As she got up to close it, there was the patter of feet.