Dunbar Read online

  He had been forced to leave Nutting in a hurry because of the two men who had come into the barn last night. He heard them whispering his name and knew that they were there to hunt him down. Luckily he had found a hollow between two bales of hay where he was hidden from the spying beams of their torches. The barn had cattle on one side, warming the atmosphere with their breath and their bodies, and bales of hay on the other. Opposite the entrance was a tractor smelling of oil and earth and wet metal. He had arrived a few hours before the two killers, turning on his own torch in brief, apprehensive bursts, much more aware of its light as a means of drawing unwanted attention to himself than as a means of locating the things he wanted. Eventually his flickering research revealed the pile of empty sacks in the corner next to the tractor, and the convenient hollow where he made his bed. He took off his overcoat, heavy with rain, and covered himself in dry sacking, spreading the overcoat back on top as a blanket, so that its weight and the warmth of its fur lining would help him to sleep, while the outer layer had a chance to dry. Under the circumstances it was a triumph of domesticity, but he was too hungry and too vigilant to fall into a deep sleep, and the moment the barn door opened, briefly amplifying the sound of the storm, he woke up with a pounding heart. He couldn’t hear what they were saying at first, but when the door was closed again and they moved to the middle of the barn, directly under his hiding place, he heard every word through a gap in the bales.

  “Dunbar wouldn’t knock on a stranger’s door in the middle of the night,” said the first man, whose voice Dunbar knew he should recognize. “He likes to be in the driving seat, hates owing favors, and even if he is holed up in one of the houses, the way to handle that one is to come back in the morning, all concerned about an old geezer from our rambling club who got lost in the storm.”

  “My folks have got a barn on our farm in Texas, but it ain’t anything like this,” said the second man.

  “That’s so fucking interesting, J,” said the first man. “Why don’t we sit down while you tell me all about your parents’ barn? I mean, that’s why we came here, right?” He let out a hoot of derisive laughter. “Check out the cab of the tractor, he might have gone in there to sleep.”

  They moved around below him, looking in the tractor and under the tarpaulins that covered the trailers and plows.

  Of course! He had worked it out. The English one was Abigail’s security man: whatshisname—Kevin, that was it, Kevin—the nasty Brit who had been in the Special Forces. All the bodyguards had been in the Special Forces and now they were going to use their special forces to destroy his mind, shattering it like a clay pigeon blasted out of the air. That’s what they were expert at, keeping people physically alive for long enough to experience their own psychological destruction. Well, he wasn’t going to let them take him alive. Maybe he could push one of the bales off the top of the stack and break Kevin’s neck. Dunbar would go down fighting—as long as he could go on being Dunbar.

  “There’s no way that old fat cat could climb up a straw castle like that,” said Kevin, “but why don’t you nip up there all the same and have a look. I’ll check out the beef.”

  “Those are hay bales and the cattle are dairy,” said J, still harping on his rural background.

  “Oh, really?” said Kevin. “What is this, the Royal fucking Agricultural College? You would have thought I knew enough about prize cows, given that I work for one, but I wouldn’t want to pass over the opportunity to learn from a gen-u-ine fucking cowboy.”

  Dunbar’s body was rigid with anxiety, listening to the creaking bales as J climbed toward him. His hiding place was about halfway along the top of the stack, not immediately visible, but easy enough to find.

  Kevin approached the cattle scornfully, catching alarmed and glassy eyes in the powerful beam of his torch. Perhaps sensing his hostile attitude, the cattle grew restless and their restlessness grew contagious; one or two cows bellowed, while others barged against the clanging metal gates of the pen. Moments later a dog started to bark and then another.

  Just as Dunbar heard J hoist himself onto the top of the stack, he also heard Kevin hiss at him from below.

  “Get down here—the whole fucking farmyard is kicking off!”

  J came down in a few easy jumps.

  “Nothing up there anyhow,” he said.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here before Old MacDonald turns up with his shotgun,” said Kevin.

  The two men slipped out of the barn, leaving Dunbar in a state of beatific relief. He couldn’t remember ever being so happy. The cattle had protected him and the dogs had protected him, as they had earlier, after he crossed the pass, when he was stumbling around below the snowline, tormented by sleet on the dark and featureless slope, and he had heard the faint sound of a barking dog, answered by another (just like now) and then a human voice encouraging the dogs to come inside, or to stop barking; the words were inaudible, but the tone was one of coaxing command rather than anger. That series of sounds had drawn him in the right direction until he saw the light that turned out to be shining onto the yard in front of the barn. And now, at another point of crisis, the animals had intervened a second time, making him realize with a rush of joy that nature was supporting him, conspiring with him in shared indignation against the unnatural cruelty of his older daughters.

  He had always had a strong connection with nature, spending the summers of his youth in the holiday house he thought of as his true home, in the Ontario woods next to a lake that he still owned, canoeing, sailing, working on his tree house, hiking, camping, drinking the cool water of the lake as he swam through it, feeling effortlessly connected to the plants and trees and animals around him. Age and money had alienated him from that relationship, but now that he was being tested to the limit, he was also being restored to a deeper instinct, an older identity. How wrong Kevin was to think that he was “an old fat cat” who couldn’t climb the haystack in which he had successfully hidden while his persecutors floundered around the barn. He had always had a prodigious amount of raw physical energy. He needed no more than three hours’ sleep to function perfectly for the rest of the day. That muscle-bound moron had no idea who he was dealing with; he was too fascinated by his own fitness and belligerence to find out what inner strength really was.

  Within a few minutes Dunbar’s elation had peaked and dissipated and disappeared. He started to wonder if Kevin and his murderous apprentice had really left, or were in fact hiding a few yards away, their telescopic lenses focused on the barn door? Was the heavily armed MacDonald on his way to find out what had disturbed his guard dogs and his cattle? He must find a way out before it was too late. Only the front yard was lit up; if the tall sliding door behind the tractor was unlocked and he had the strength to open it, he should be able to leave undetected. He climbed down from the haystack, the tight string on the bales cutting into his fingers as he searched for his next foothold. When he got to the back door he summoned all his strength to push the lever to one side, only to find that the door sprung open and almost dragged him along its smooth rails. He slipped through the opening and closed the door behind him. Although the weather was still foul, it was no longer completely dark and so Dunbar turned up his collar and pulled down his cap and headed immediately in the direction that would take him still farther from his last known location in the King’s Head or, if Peter had blabbed, in the car park.

  And now, after a steady climb, he was crouching behind the drystone wall, only three fields away from the top of the hill, looking back at the hamlet and the barn. It had grown light enough to see his way clearly, but also to be seen clearly by his enemies. There was a black Land Rover parked two hundred yards before the last turning to Nutting. It was facing the opposite direction to his climb, and nobody inside it would have been able to see him except through the back window, but its presence weighed on Dunbar’s mind much more than the houses and the other cars parked around them. As he prevaricated behind the wall, he saw the doors of the Land Rover
open and watched as two men got out, took their rucksacks from the back seats and hoisted them onto their shoulders. They set off at a military pace in the direction of the Merewater footpath. He couldn’t make out their faces, but he was certain that it was Kevin and J, starting out on their hunt.

  He squatted down, his back pressed to the wall, shocked by how close he had come to being caught. Now he would have to wait until they had gone through the pass, otherwise they would turn around at any point and see him on the other side of the valley. His heart was racing from the panic of knowing that had they set off a minute earlier, they could have looked up and seen him climbing over the stile. Whereas his previous reprieve had filled him with a sense of gratitude and destiny and the beneficence of nature, this second piece of good fortune sent him the other way, deepening his underlying sense of horror, feeling like a man being slowly drowned by ferocious surf, occasionally glimpsing the Pacific beach he should never have left, as he is dragged down deeper and longer with each wave. On top of feeling generally disoriented all the time, like someone who has forgotten how to tie his shoelaces or to name the familiar objects around him, he was also being subjected to spasms of much deeper perplexity. Right now, he felt a root confusion, as if he had just witnessed something impossible, a reversal of the laws of nature, like a stone being thrown into the air, which instead of falling downward, continues to accelerate into the sky.

  The ground was hard and wet, but it was only a few feet away; it was his friend. He longed to fall to the ground, if it meant that he didn’t have to fall indefinitely into the sky—with his eyes closed and his mind twisting backward toward the home he had lost. Dunbar lay down at the foot of the wall, and spread himself out so that as much of his body as possible was touching the earth. He didn’t want to be taken away. Searching blindly for extra anchorage, his right hand wrapped itself around a stone protruding from the wall, grazing his fingers against its rough surface, while he gripped a tuft of grass with his other hand. He was reminded of desperately clinging to table legs when he was little to prevent his mother from dragging him away for punishment. One time he was beaten for lighting a fire he had “specifically” been told not to touch. He was haunted by that word long before he knew what it meant. He assumed that it conveyed a dreadful moral weight, referring to something for which “evil” was no longer adequate. When he learnt its real meaning, the neutrality of its precision bewildered him. How could she hope to load so much terror and violence onto such a prim, narrow word?

  “Specifically,” muttered Dunbar.

  He continued to sprawl in the mud, clinging onto the ground by tuft and stone, with his toes dug in and his muscles rigid, not daring to let go. He couldn’t have said how long he stayed there. His sense of time was as warped as everything else, it had the intimate authority of a nightmare: he couldn’t judge how long he was lost in the atmosphere of his mother’s punitive rages: it seemed to be outside time because the experience, although it was over, belonged to a time when he couldn’t imagine it ending. On the other hand, concepts like infinity and space flashed across his mind in a fraction of a second, but left him infused with the hellish promise of eternal punishment.

  When he eventually moved, he rose slowly to his aching knees and then onto his numb feet. He kept his head below the top of the wall in case his pursuers were looking across the valley with powerful binoculars. After a further pause, he glanced furtively over the wall to see how far they had climbed. There was no one there. He traced the line from their car up toward the pass, but could only see bedraggled black sheep lashed by wind-twisted ropes of rain. Perhaps his pursuers had already disappeared into the clouds that obscured the upper slopes. It scarcely seemed possible. How long had he been hiding? Were they already on their way back? Should he go back to Nutting and simply give himself up, ask for the police rather than a taxi, since it was the police they would call anyway? Should he ask to be taken back to Meadowmeade and put back on his meds?

  No, he would not go back down the hill. He would not debase himself; he would not be ruled by his children and insulted by his jailers. Hunger could digest his stomach and frost shatter his blood before he would bow down. He forced himself to start walking again. His pursuers were gone for the moment and he must get as far ahead of them as he could. Like a pack of hounds distracted by a false trail, they were panting their way over the pass to Merewater, but they were moving so fast that when they found nothing on the other side they would be back, yelping and barking and pouring over fences, driving him farther and farther into the hills, like a stag with burning lungs and trembling limbs, splashing through rivers, hoping to put them off the scent, only to get trapped in a thicket or a pond, hounded to exhaustion. He had seen the whole thing in the Loire valley once. They fed the entrails to the dogs as a reward for not dismembering the cornered stag, for having the discipline to leave the Master of the Hunt the pleasure of piercing that wild animal through the heart.

  None of them, it turned out, had been to Manchester before, except Wilson, who explained to Florence that he had been there with her father to buy a television station.

  “What did you do with it?” asked Florence.

  “We shut it down,” said Wilson.

  “Was that the alluring business plan you seduced them with?”

  “Not exactly,” said Wilson, smiling at her. They had been discussing Florence’s misgivings about her father’s empire ever since her embattled adolescence, when she turned into a passionate advocate of workers’ rights, environmental concerns, and high standards of journalistic integrity.

  Florence smiled back; Wilson was part of the family, or rather, to his infinite credit, he was not part of the family, but was someone she had known all her life and loved for his loyalty and good humor.

  “I feel so guilty about renting this private jet,” she said. “I only just finished persuading my kids that it’s an immoral practice because of the carbon footprint.”

  “Well,” said Wilson, “sometimes you have to buy a TV station to destroy the competition, and sometimes you have to rent a jet to catch up with the competition—in this case your sisters.”

  “And then we had a last-minute passenger,” said Florence, rounding her eyes with surprise, but not wanting to say too much.

  “That’s right,” said Wilson, also ruled by tact. “Well, I think we should make use of some of those carbon beds you’ve rented for us, so we arrive in Manchester in reasonable shape. It’s not that long a flight.”

  “I planted seventy thousand trees last year,” said Florence.

  “And now it’s time to give them some airborne fertilizer,” said Wilson, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Goodnight, Flo, I’ll see you in the Northern Powerhouse.”

  “Goodnight,” said Florence, placing her hand briefly on top of his in a gesture of tired farewell.

  She soon retreated to the soundproofed compactness of her own bedroom, kicking off her shoes, peeling off her dress, replacing her bra with a T-shirt, brushing her teeth in a trance of pure routine, and sinking onto the bed. She worked her body under the sheets, put in her earplugs, strapped on her eyeshades, and then lifted them up again to switch off the light.

  The unexpected passenger she had been reluctant to discuss, in case he was in earshot, was Mark. He had called her back while Wilson and Chris were still on their flight from Vancouver and said that he wanted to help find his father-in-law. Florence was not sure what to make of his change of heart, only a few hours after he had chosen his own safety over any other consideration, but she felt intuitively that she was dealing with a kind of brittle sincerity. His hatred of Abigail, although intense, stumbled convincingly under the weight of conflict and guilt. If Wilson was completely opposed to his participation, she could still cancel Mark’s invitation, but in the meantime she thought they might as well all converge on LaGuardia airport.

  “Let your friends wander, but hold your enemies close,” had been Wilson’s cryptic response when she told him about Mark.r />
  “What’s that from, The Godfather or The Art of War?” asked Florence.

  “I don’t know,” said Wilson, “I just made it up.”

  “Wilson! I need some serious advice.”

  “Listen, we don’t really have a plan, so Mark can’t betray us by telling your sisters what our plan is; on the other hand, he might tell us something useful. On balance, I think he should come along.”

  Once they knew that Dunbar was imprisoned somewhere in the northwest of England, Wilson’s team of researchers had come up with three plausible private clinics to investigate, but none of the receptionists would confirm that he was among their patients and there seemed to be no way of knowing whether it was secrecy, ignorance, or absence that made him impossible to find. By the time Wilson arrived at LaGuardia, one of his interns was confident enough to suggest that they could bring the number of clinics down to two, unless the night porter she had spoken to was “about to win an Oscar” for his incredulous response, which she impersonated for Wilson in a hopeless parody of an English accent that made Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep sound like a cockney born and bred.

  “What? The Hen-e-ry Dunbar? The famous Hen-e-ry Dunbar? We ’aven’t got him ’ere, love, or I’d know about it. You couldn’t keep a secret like that in this place.”

  Florence and Wilson were won over by this reported indiscretion, and decided (without telling Mark) to divide into two teams the next morning, each checking out one of the remaining candidates.

  “I’ll go with Chris,” said Florence. “You’ll be better at working out what Mark’s motives are. Anyway,” she added, with one of those sudden collapses into directness that Wilson had always loved her for, “I want to go with Chris.”

  “Sure,” said Wilson, playing along with the practicality of her suggestion, while thinking of the time when he and Dunbar used to discuss whether their children were going to marry each other. “I’d like the chance to see if I can find out why your sisters were quite so pleased to see me leave the Board. Mark may not even know what he knows—there may be some details that will give me a sense of where they’re headed.”