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blue, but by then it was too late.
Andy and his partner had sold The Gadget Shop chain the previous year; Andy
was still thinking about what he wanted to do next - now he was rich - and was
deep in the desert on a trans-Saharan expedition when Clare died. The funeral
was private, family only; Andy got back just in time. I rang the house a week
later and talked to Mrs Gould, who said Andy was still there. She thought he
would like to see me.
*
A grey day in a cold April, one of those winter's-end days when the land looks
exhausted and worn and it seems like all the colour is gone from the world.
The cloud was thick and low and moving slowly on a damp, chilling wind, a
lidding expanse hiding the sky and the snow on the distant hills. The trees,
bushes and fields were all the same dun shade, as though a thin layer of dirt
had been sprayed everywhere, and wherever you looked there seemed to be mud or
rotting leaves or bare, dead-looking branches. I thought that, if I'd just
come from the Sahara to here, I'd head back as soon as possible, family duties
or not.
I stopped at the house to give my condolences to Mr and Mrs Gould. Mrs Gould
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was covered in flour and smelled faintly of gin. She was a tall, nervous woman
who'd gone grey early; she always wore large bifocals and usually dressed in
tweeds. I'd never seen her without a single string of pearls, which she
fingered constantly. She apologised for the mess, wiping her hands on her
apron and then shaking my hand while I said how sorry I'd been to hear. She
looked around the hall distractedly, as if wondering what to do next, then the
door to the library opened and Mr Gould peeked out.
He was about the same height as his wife but he looked stooped now, and he was
wearing a dressing-
gown; normally he was the epitome of tweedy country-squiredom, an archetypal
laird in three-piece suit, clumpy shoes, checked shirt and cap; he resorted to
a beaten-up, much reproofed Barbour when the weather turned particularly foul.
I'd never seen him in anything as soft-looking, as human as the pair of
scruffy trousers, open-necked shirt and dressing-gown he wore then. His
strong, square face looked drawn and his thinning brown hair hadn't been
combed. He came out of the library when he saw it was me, shook my hand and
said 'Terrible thing, terrible thing' a few times, while Beethoven sounded
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Complicity the opened library door and his wife tutted and tried to smooth his
errant hair. His eyes kept looking away over one of my shoulders or the other,
never meeting my gaze, and I got the impression that like his wife he was
constantly waiting for something important to happen, expecting someone to
arrive at any moment, as though they both couldn't believe what had happened
and it was all a dream or a ghastly joke and they were just waiting for Clare
to come gangling through the front door, kicking off muddy green wellies and
loudly demanding tea.
*
Andy was out shooting. I could hear the shotgun barking as I walked through
the dim, dripping woods from the house, staying off the muddy path as much as
possible and walking on the flattened, exhausted-
looking grass at its side to keep my shoes from clogging up.
The field was surrounded by trees and looked out towards the river upstream
from the loch. The river wasn't visible, but there had been a lot of rain over
that week and one corner of the field had flooded, leaving a shallow temporary
loch reflecting the tarnished dark silver of the clouds; its waters were still
and flat.
There was a stretch of curved gravel, edged with planks, near this end of the
field; six posts stood along the front edge of the gravel stand, and on top of
each post there was a little flat piece of wood like a tray.
Twenty yards in front of the gravel pathway was a low mound where the launcher
mechanism for the clays sat. There were two other mounds about the same
distance away to either side. I could hear the little generator puttering away
inside the central mound as I got closer, clearing the trees and looking
across and down at where Andy stood. I watched for a moment.
Andy wore cords, shirt and jumper and body-warmer; a cap hung from the top of
one of the nearby posts.
He was very tanned. A big box of shells sat opened on top of the post in front
of him; a foot switch at the end of a long, snaking flex operated the catapult
in the pit. He slotted six cartridges into the long-barrelled pump-action gun
and turned to aim.
His foot tapped once, and the clay shot out of the hide, spinning away into
the greyness in a day-glo orange blur. The gun roared and the clay
disintegrated somewhere out over the field. When I looked carefully I could
see lots of orange fragments scattered over the sodden grass and glistening
brown earth of the field.
The generator revved up and down, providing power to the automatic launcher;
it had some sort of randomly set variation built into where it was aiming
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because the clays came out at a different angle and heading each time. Andy
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