Bear in the Woods

Robin Duval

Description

Set in Britain and America during a Presidential election year in the very near future, Bear in the Woods explores some of the darker and more dangerous connections within our two societies.A group of London friends find themselves at the epicentre of a murderous struggle reaching to the highest seats of power. It starts when one of their number, Bryn, begins to suspect that someone, inexplicably, may be trying to kill him. Two attempts on his life, however, are dismissed by his friends as near-miss accidents. When he goes on a winter trip to the USA to fan the embers of an old flame, a professional assassin pursues him from Chicago to Detroit, to Salt Lake City and across the snow-laden mountains of Utah. He escapes and returns to England, but finds he is no longer the target.Months pass and it seems that the threat - conceivably the result of mistaken identity or a terrible misunderstanding - has passed. But when Bryn travels once again to America, the nightmare starts all over again, this time in New York.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780886299
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEAR IN THE WOODS

Copyright © 2010 Robin Duval
Reprinted August 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978-1780886-299
A Cataloguing-in-Publication (CIP) catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
to The Recorder Group
Contents
One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Three
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Coda
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
ONE
Chapter 1
Lay off, baby. Not now.
He was having real difficulty concentrating on the service. He could not fault the vicar who was bright and evangelical, and very hard-working. She had opened proceedings by announcing that this would be a time for tears and for laughter, which he thought promising. But the family’s choice of hymns so far was from an earnestly modern volume called The Gold Book , and he’d recognized none of the tunes; and neither evidently had most of the congregation. He suspected that most were less familiar with the inside of a church than he was. He looked around. The largest single element was a group of middle-aged men, all wearing tiny round badges in their lapels. Probably members of Guy’s local Rotary Club…
Are you sure?
Damn sure.
As the vicar embarked on her sermon, his thoughts drifted away again to that evening with Zelma and he wondered – not for the first time – where he had gone wrong. Was it a case of female propriety (the first date; the time of the month) or simply that his approaches were unwelcome? Could he have handled it more successfully?
The mortification rose again like dyspepsia and he tried to focus his attention on the Reverend Nicholls. Her faith, after all, was striking. Sometimes at funeral services the minister devoted the sermon to an encomium of the late departed. Not so on this occasion. Taking as her text Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians
For the Lord himself shall descend from
heaven with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel, and with the trump of God:
and the dead in Christ shall rise first
the vicar’s purpose was to persuade those of the congregation present who were not believers that death was a cause for great rejoicing not sorrow. Guy had not been a regular church-goer but was someone who, in the vicar’s delicate phrase, “believed, however imperfectly” in the life hereafter. He was, she explained, even now “tangoing with Jesus”.
Bryn thought he must have misheard. But no, Guy – she insisted – was “alive and kicking in Heaven” while surrounding angels were preparing to bear him back to earth to the sound of trumpets. This would be his old friend Guy then, the rational and pragmatic senior civil servant, descant recorder player and Reform Club and MCC member. That’d be the day…
Surely he could not have mistaken the signs? They had seemed to get on so well. Dinner at Marinello’s in one of those dark private alcoves in the corner. Quite a lot of wine. A blossoming conviction that she really liked him, and no debate at all when he offered to take her back to her hotel in a taxi.
Even so, he had been prepared to believe when he deposited her that – for the moment – that was the end of it. But then:
Hey, how about a nightcap? Help me beat up the minibar?
As they rose alone together in the lift, he embraced her and she did not object. There was a more clumsy moment in the room when he intercepted her with two Courvoisier miniatures in her hands and they subsided onto the bed. She slipped a hand round the back of his head. There was a melting together. But when he started to move from the kisses and entwinement to the foothills of more serious business –
Lay off, baby. Not now...
At last: a hymn he could recognize.
Lord of all Hopefulness, Lord of all Joy…
Your hands swift to welcome,
Your arms to embrace.
If only. The congregation rallied, and for the first time the vicar’s amplified voice no longer dominated proceedings. The soaring cadences of the great old-fashioned tune engaged them like nothing previously and a new spirit of optimism seeped through the building.
Be there at our sleeping and give us we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.
And now it was time for the recorder group. This was, in no fashion, a moment they had looked forward to. But Guy had asked for it a few days before he died. He wanted them to play their signature piece at the end of the service, the one they always did as an encore on the infrequent occasions when they performed to an audience. He had even made them promise to carry on as a quartet after his death.
The group was a central part of all their lives. It had started more than twenty years previously when the two eldest, Guy and Marshall, were singing together in the local Choral Society. They had discovered that both played the recorder and decided to look around for others to make up a larger group. Through the usual social networks, over a period of eighteen months or so, the others joined: Bill, Graeme and finally Bryn. Bryn was younger than the others and had joined the group fresh out of university. His unique appeal was that he was prepared to play the tenor recorder, the one essential instrument missing from their ensemble.
They were not so bad as musicians. For twenty years they had met monthly and practised their small repertoire of pieces, often for an hour or more before the evening disintegrated into gossip, wine and a meal together. Some were better musicians than others. Guy had perfect pitch, could have played clarinet professionally, and enforced such technical discipline as they had. Very occasionally, they put on a performance – in a local church, at a friend’s wedding, or just for their wives and children.
But for the main part, the function of the group was social. A boys’ evening like any other. Driven mostly by force of habit and affection. Over the years, it had become a forum for discussing individual problems, for mutual support and therapy. By contrast to their busy, sometimes high-flying, professional lives, the monthly gathering was as cosily suburban as a book group.
They had always said that, when the first one died, the group would split up. What they had not expected was that a death would happen so soon. Though Guy was the oldest, he had been as fit as any of them, an energetic gardener and a long-distance walker. Then one evening, as they sat and compared their various minor ailments together, he complained of a combination of back-ache and indigestion which he had been unable to shake off.
This hardly compared with the kidney stones that had toppled Bill groaning to the floor one evening ten years ago, still less the triple heart by-pass Marshall had undergone more recently. But within six weeks, Guy was dead from pancreatic cancer. It was a great shock to them all, not least because they had always felt that there were more obvious candidates, like Graeme with his hazardous life-style, or Marshall who everyone agreed still worked too hard.
So there was no question of winding up the group. Its continuation would be a memorial to Guy and a tribute to their enduring friendship. That was why also they had to play out the funeral today.
They formed a half circle of chairs facing the congregation, erected their flimsy metal music stands, and played their signature tune in the arrangement specially made for the five (now four) recorders by a local music teacher. After the formalities of all that had preceded them, it seemed to catch at last the essence of Guy: sociable, full of charm, light of foot, easy-going, affectionate, taking nothing too seriously.
They played it as well as they had ever played it, with the missing second descant recorder successfully covered by the other parts. For once in their lives, now that Guy was not able to make an issue of it, they did not overblow nor stray in pitch. The jaunty marching rhythms of the unforgettable little tune rose and fell. They had worried that members of the congregation who did not know the background might find the choice of music trivial, offensive even. Possibly a few did. But that was not their concern. This was what Guy had wanted. Perhaps the vicar was right after all, and maybe he was up there with the trumpeting angels, singing along with the missing words:
If you go down to the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to the woods today
You’d better go in disguise…
Four black-clad undertaker’s men advanced up the aisle to the coffin and hoisted it on their shoulders. As they processed back down the church, the family followed in twos: Guy’s widow and their son and daughters, various elderly relatives and in-laws and finally, at the back, his grand-daughter – in tears and tenderly supported by her teenage boy-friend.
At the post-funeral reception, the four remaining members of the Ealing Recorder Consort stood together in a corner of Guy’s sitting room, enjoying for the last time his generous hospitality, and modestly accepting the pass