From behind the hedge opposite, came the sound of a second explosion, more muffled than the first – then, and further away, a scream …
Bernard got out of the car, and I shifted across to follow him. One of the girls knelt down beside the fallen boy. As she made to touch him he groaned, and writhed where he lay. The standing boy’s face was anguished. He groaned, too, as if in agony himself. The two girls began to cry.
Then, eerily down the lane, out of the trees that hid The Grange, swept a moan like a magnified echo, and, mingled with it, a threnody of young voices, weeping …
Bernard stopped. I could feel my scalp prickling, and my hair beginning to rise …
The sound came again; and ululation of many voices blended in pain, with the higher note of crying piercing through … Then the sound of feet running down the lane …
Neither of us tried to go on. For myself, I was held for the moment by sheer fright.
We stood there watching while half a dozen boys, all disconcertingly alike, came running to the fallen one, and lifted him between them. Not until they had started to carry him away did I become aware of a quite different sound of sobbing coming from behind the hedge to the left of the lane.
I clambered up the bank, and looked through the hedge there. A few yards away a girl in a summer frock was kneeling on the grass. Her hands were clenched to her face, and her whole body was shaking with her sobs.
Bernard scrambled up beside me, and together we pushed our way through the hedge. Standing up in the field now, I could see a man lying prone at the girl’s knees, with the butt of a gun protruding from beneath his body.
As we stepped closer, she heard us. Her sobs stopped momentarily as she looked up with an expression of terror. Then when she saw us it faded, and she went on weeping, helplessly.
Bernard walked closer to her, and lifted her up. I looked down at the body. It was a very nasty sight indeed. I bent over it and pulled the jacket up, trying to make it hide what was left of the head. Bernard led the girl away, half supporting her.
There was a sound of voices on the road. As we neared the hedge a couple of men there looked up and saw us.
‘Was that you shootin’?’ one of them asked.
We shook our heads.
‘There’s a dead man up here,’ Bernard said.
The girl beside him shivered, and whimpered.
”Oo is it?’ asked the same man.
The girl said hysterically:
‘It’s David. They’ve killed him. They killed Jim; now they’ve killed David, too,’ and choked in a fresh burst of grief.
One of the men scrambled up the bank.
‘Oh, it’s you, Elsa, lass,’ he exclaimed.
‘I tried to stop him, Joe. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen,’ she said through her sobs. ‘I knew they’d kill him, but he wouldn’t listen …’ She became incoherent, and clung to Bernard, shaking violently.
‘We must get her away,’ I said. ‘Do you know where she lives?’
‘Aye,’ said the man, and decisively picked the girl up, as though she were a child. He scrambled down the bank, and carried her, crying and shivering, to the car. Bernard turned to the other man.
‘Will you stand by and keep anyone off till the police come?’
‘Aye – It’ll be young David Pawle?’ the man said, climbing the bank.
‘She said David. A young man,’ Bernard told him.
‘That’ll be him – the bastards.’ The man pushed through the hedge. ‘Better call the coppers at Trayne, guv’nor. They got a car there.’ He glanced towards the body. ‘Murderin’ young bastards!’ he said.
*
They dropped me off at Kyle Manor, and I used Zellaby’s phone to call the police. When I put the receiver down I found him at my elbow with a glass in his hand.
‘You look as if you could do with it,’ he said.
‘I could,’ I agreed. ‘very unexpected. Very messy.’
‘Just how did it occur?’ he inquired.
I gave him an account of our rather narrow angle on the affair. Twenty minutes later Bernard returned, able to tell more of it.
‘The Pawle brothers were apparently very much attached,’ he began. Zellaby nodded agreement. ‘Well, it seems that the younger one, David, found the inquest the last straw, and decided that if nobody else was going to see justice done over his brother, he’d do it himself.
‘This girl Elsa – his girl – called at Dacre Farm just as he was leaving. When she saw him carrying the gun she guessed what was happening, and tried to stop him. He wouldn’t listen, and to get rid of her he locked her in a shed, and then went off.
‘It took her a bit of time to break out, but she judged he would be making for The Grange, and followed across the fields. When she got to the field she thought she’d made a mistake because she didn’t see him at first. Possibly he was lying down to take cover. Anyway, she doesn’t seem to have spotted him until after the first shot. When she did, he was standing up, with the gun still pointed into the lane. Then while she was running towards him he reversed the gun, and put his thumb on the trigger …’
Zellaby remained silently thoughtful for some moments, then he said:
‘It’ll be a clear enough case from the police view. David considers the Children to be responsible for his brother’s death, kills one of them in revenge and then, to escape the penalty, commits suicide. Obviously unbalanced. What else could a “reasonable man” think?’
‘I may have been a bit sceptical before,’ I admitted, ‘but I’m not now. The way that boy looked at us! I believe that for a moment he thought one of us had done it – fired that shot, I mean – just for an instant, until he saw it was impossible. The sensation was indescribable, but it was frightening for the moment it lasted. Did you feel that, too?’ I added, to Bernard.
He nodded. ‘A queer, weak, and watery feeling,’ he agreed. ‘very bleak.’
‘It was just -‘ I broke off, suddenly remembering. ‘My God, I was so taken up with other business I forgot to tell the police anything about the wounded boy. Ought we to call an ambulance for The Grange?’
Zellaby shook his head.
‘They’ve got a doctor of their own on the staff there,’ he told us.
He reflected in silence for fully a minute, then he sighed, and shook his head. ‘I don’t much like this development, Colonel. I don’t like it at all. Am I mistaken, do you think, in seeing here the very pattern of the way a blood feud starts …?’
CHAPTER 17
Midwich Protests
DINNER at Kyle Manor was postponed to allow Bernard and me to make our statements to the police, and by the time that was over I was feeling the need of it. I was grateful, too, for the Zellabys’ offer to put both of us up for the night. The shooting had caused Bernard to change his mind about returning to London; he had decided to be on hand, if not in Midwich itself, then no further away than Trayne, leaving me with the alternative of keeping him company, or making a slow journey by railway. Moreover, I had a feeling that my sceptical attitude towards Zellaby in the afternoon had verged upon the discourteous, and I was not sorry for the chance to make amends.
I sipped my sherry, feeling a little ashamed.
‘You cannot,’ I told myself, ‘you cannot protest or argue these Children and their qualities out of existence. And since they do exist, there must be some explanation of that existence. None of your accepted views explain it. Therefore, that explanation is going to be found, however uncomfortable it may be for you, in views that you do not at present accept. Whatever it is, it is going to arouse your prejudices. Just remember that, and clout your instinctive prejudices with it when they bob up.’
At dinner, however, I had no need to be vigilant for clouting. The Zellabys, feeling no doubt that we had passed through disquietment enough for the present, took pains to keep the conversation on subjects unrelated to Midwich and its troubles. Bernard remained somewhat abstracted, but I appreciated the effort, and ended the meal listening to Zellaby discoursing on the wave-motion of form and style, and the desirability of intermittent periods of social rigidity for the purpose of curbing the subversive energies of a new generation, in a far more equable frame of mind than I had started it.