Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Eleven

It had rained in the night. The morning was bright, and a high covering of cloud obscured the sun. I had had a fitful night's sleep, disturbed by several dreams involving being unable to move while great lumbering grizzly bears approached. Despite that, I was surprised at the extent to which I was growing accustomed to lying on bare floorboards.

As usual, Ty was not in his sleeping bag; it was neatly rolled with the drawstring cinched tight.

I fiddled around in my rucksack, finding a towel and shower gel but scattering the rest of the contents across the floor in the process. Outside, the weather was warm, and it was promising to be a fine day if only the cloud were to burn off.

Padding across the damp grass at the edge of the cobbled farmyard in my bare feet felt strangely nice. After the first twenty metres or so, I even stopped looking down in case of turds.

I was a little nervous about my pending ablutionary experience in the cowshed, but I really couldn't begin my day without a shower, so I'd just have to make do. I hung my towel and trunks on a bent nail embedded in the stall wall, and turned the tap on the solar bag that protruded from the oil drum mounted in the roof of the shed. Five jets of water began to flow from holes the rose fitted to the outlet of the bag. I took a deep breath and then jumped under the stream.

"Sweet Jesus!" I exclaimed, vigorously rubbing my quickly numbing body to ward against the torrent of icy water and squeezing out too much gel in my haste. It would be safe to say that it was my personal best time for quick showering.

Having escaped the freezing water, I began to ferociously rub the life back into my bluish skin with the towel. There was a rat-a-tat on the wooden cowshed wall and Ty's voice boomed out.

"Good morning Satchmo, I could use your help in a minute. Enjoy your shower?"

I replied only with a vicious chattering of teeth.

Ty sat cross-legged in the long grass surrounded by an assortment of odds and ends. One of the few that I could positively identify was an old cane rod with a reel that looked like it had last been used to catch a plesiosaur. Edge was whittling something tiny and luminously coloured with a dull-bladed knife. He looked up from his work and sized up my shivering form.

"Get some clothes on Satchmo, we're going fishing," was all he said.

*

"Fishing?"

I had dressed and was feeling a very strange post-shower glow. Perhaps it was the blood venturing back into my extremities.

"M-hmm," Ty's attention was back on the creation of a lure from a luminous walking boot lace. He was fraying strands out of a piece a couple of centimetres in length.

"Haven't we got more important things to be doing?" I asked.

"There are few more important things in life than fishing and setting fire to things. Not always in that order," Ty smiled in response, pointing to a blazing fire he had made in a pit dug into the turf.

"Make yourself useful and chuck those rocks on there," he asked. I was beginning to know better than to question why.

I placed a series of wide round stones into the heart of the flames, deftly avoiding burning myself in the process, then, without prompting, I stacked some split logs that lay next to the pit across the flames.

"Excellent," Ty commended my work. He still did not look up, but instead pointed at a folded metal entrenching tool.

"Your next job is to take up a few square yards of turf over by the barn, I've marked them out with tape. While you're at it, stick some earthworms in this," he said, handing me an aluminium mess tin which I inspected suspiciously, then tucked under my arm.

I sighed deeply. I was sure that manual labour was not in my job description. Then I remembered that as he was paying me cash-in-hand for time spent on the case and if he wanted to pay me top whack to unearth some worms, then so be it.

The 'few square yards' was an area of about ten metres by fifteen. The entrenching tool was a small metal spade with razor sharp edges. A silver sheen of the blade suggested that Ty honed it regularly. The haft was only about two feet long, so I had to bend over at the waist. Thankfully the edge sliced through the turf quite merrily, and after about half an hour I had cut the thick grass into long strips, which I had to drop onto my hands and knees in order to roll up. It was heavy work and the sun had broken out, sweat beaded on my brow and pooled under my armpits and in the small of my back.

Occasionally I came across the pink-grey tube of an earthworm that I would tease from the loam, the creature's shrivelled body receding from my touch. Once free, I would add it to the writhing mass of its brethren in the mess tin. I was so intent on my job that I didn't hear Ty approaching.

"Great work, Satchmo," he said, prodding the aluminium container with the toe of his boot.

I looked up at him and had to squint as the sun shone directly over his shoulder.

"I'm sweating like a nun in a sex-toy factory here!" I exclaimed, though truth be told I felt a certain pride in the dark patch of earth and the neat rolls of turf.

"How much bait have you got in here?" he poked about in the mess tin. "Good stuff, let's go fishing."

Ty strode off across the meadow and I trailed after him, wiping the sweat from my brow on the shoulder of my T-shirt. He stopped to pick up a drinks can, I gathered the cane poll and set off after him.

"There's usually some good action in the pool down by the boat house."

I followed him across the pasture, the thick grass still glistened with dew and wetting the bottom of my trousers. We walked around the base of the elevated mound and came upon the sinuous curve of a river. The water was dark and slow-moving in this section, perhaps ten metres across, and the bank was dense with a tangle of reeds. Off to our right was the weathered wooden bridge where I had sat the day before. A path on the far side led off into the woods, which blanketed the lower slopes of a steep hill.

Ty knelt and scooped a tiny insect from the water close to the bank, held it up and compared it with the home-made fly that dangled from the line wound around his drinks can. He smiled broadly and walked along the river away from the bridge, obviously satisfied at the likeness between the two.

No more than a minute's walk later we came to a broad and still pool through which the water hardly seemed to be moving. Despite this, the water was clear with a greenish tinge and I could clearly see the pebbles on the bottom some two metres down.

Ty dropped to a crouch and scuttled across the rudimentary path. He turned back to me and whispered "Satchmo! Get down! The fish will see you!"

Rolling my eyes somewhat, I copied his stance. Several metres into the scrub was an old wooden shack, the glass in its windows was grey with dust laden cobwebs and the entire front wall consisted of warped and splintered double doors. This was the boathouse that I remembered Ty mentioning.

"What are we fishing for?" I whispered to Ty who was unravelling line from the drinks can around which it was tethered, unsure as to why I was whispering. He pointed to a cluster of large rocks on the far side of the pool.

"There are usually some good sized tench by those stones. If we're lucky we may see a roach or two," he replied earnestly. I felt none-the-wiser.

"All you have to do is put some bait on and land it over there," Ty instructed, pointing to the opposite bank of the river.

I selected a worm that I judged tasty to the eyes of a tench and, after several efforts, managed to fix him to the hook. Flicking the cane pole sent both worm and line arcing across the pool, where they plopped into the water a metre short of the rocks.

"I'm going to try my fly just over the other side," Ty said, studying my form for a moment. "Make the little feller dance a bit," he mimed holding a rod with two clenched fists, acting out a series of small jerks.

I twitched the pole as he had suggested, waited a few minutes, then set about making myself comfortable on the grass and moss at my feet.

It was becoming a fine day. Shafts of sunlight pierced the lush trees which overhung much of the river, playing across the water like disco lights. The pool itself lay in a kind of grotto; the far side was on the edge of a copse, the bank upon which I sat was more sparsely wooded, though there were several gnarled old stumps which suggested some had been felled to make access to the boathouse easier.

I lifted the worm from the water and wound back in some line. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a dark shape shooting across the bottom of the pool. When I tried to focus on it, it had gone and all I saw was pebbles.

The bait flew through the air again and this time landed among the rocks. Pleased with this result, I resumed the macabre little jerky dance on the end of the line.

I glanced over to where Ty fished the bank, perhaps thirty metres downstream. He was whirling the fly to-and-fro above his head before casting it across the water. He repeated this process endlessly, delighting in the immediacy of the act.

I closed my eyes and listened; a gentle wind ruffled the newly formed leaves and there was the occasional drone of an insect drawn from slumber by the sun's warmth. I took several deep lungfuls of air, which was sweet and fresh. Feeling contented, I opened my eyes to find Ty sitting next to me. How I had not sensed his approach was a mystery.

"I'm not having much luck with the fly," he announced, disappointedly and at a potentially fish-frightening volume.

"Perhaps there are no fish about. I haven't had a nibble yet either," I replied, trying to console him. He plainly had high hopes for his new bootlace lure.

"Have you changed your bait?" he asked. I reeled in the worm, which hung limply from the hook. If Ty thought he was having a bad time fishing, he should try being that little guy.

"Stick a fresh one on there and chuck a few others around the area," he suggested, pointing.

I complied, again casting across the pool right on top of the rocks. Almost as soon as the hook had sunk from view, there was a jolt on the rod that nearly wrenched it from my grasp. Line ran from the spool that spun crazily as the cane pole arched. Ty reached across and flipped the little metal loop on the reel. The line stopped paying out and I felt the power of the fish I had hooked pulling all the way from my wrists to my shoulders.

"OK, now just move him around a little, tire him out," he said miming rod movements with his fists again.

I played the fish back and forth across the pool for several minutes. I soon came to the conclusion that it was me that would tire long before the beast on the end of my hook.

"Bring him in a little now," Ty whispered reverently as he slid off the bank and into the river boots first.

I wound in some line, drawing the fish closer to him.

"Shouldn't you have a net?" I panted. I was also worried that the arc bend in the ancient cane rod would snap at any moment.

"No, just bring him a little nearer," Ty replied reassuringly.

I wound in some more and saw the creature for the first time. It looked about thirty centimetres long but was surely distorted by the refraction of the water. I pulled in more line, the fish resisting less and less. In a blur, Ty slipped his hands under its belly and launched it from the water and onto the bank where it flopped desultorily, its mouth gulping.

"Nice tench!" he hauled himself from the pool, water running from his drenched clothes in dark streams.

The fish was thick around the middle, a drab olive-green colour and I didn't think it would be winning any beauty contests. Ty didn't do its chances in that regard any favours by belting the unfortunate tench behind the head with a rock.

*

The tench was gutted, cleaned, and stuffed with some herbs Ty had gathered from the riverbank and several wedges of lemon. The whole fish was then wrapped in leaves and a damp muslin cloth. This parcel was settled onto the hot stones that I had placed in the bottom of the fire pit earlier, the flames having now burned themselves out. Ty put a sturdy stick upright in-between the rocks then buried the entire arrangement, fish and all, with a thick layer of earth. Finally, he removed the stick and poured a canteen full of water into the resulting hole, which produced a loud sizzle and a roiling gout of steam.

I felt content.

There was something satisfying about catching your own lunch, and I felt pride that it was me that had done it and not Edge with his home-made lure. For his part, Ty didn't seem in the least bit bothered. I had no idea of the time, but I guessed it must be mid-afternoon and Edge said that the fish would take half an hour or so to cook. We basked in the sunny meadow and talked; insects buzzing about and the smell of long grass in our nostrils.

"What did you make of Dr. Wimple?" he asked, his tone flat.

"She seemed very young and understandably shaken up by the robbery," I replied.

"The robbery during which nothing was stolen," Ty reminded precisely no one.

"Nothing obvious, anyway," I countered.

"Indeed. Do you think she knows what they were after?" he asked.

"It's hard to say, we need to talk to her again. If there really was any gold buried around here and the Professor had managed to track it down, he could well have mentioned it to his daughter," I mused, sniffing contentedly at the air. A delicious tang of baking fish was wafting about on the early summer breeze.

"Particularly if she has a professional interest. What do you suppose she is a doctor of, exactly?" Ty wondered.

"So, we need to know if she knows whatever it was the old Professor knew, and whether she knows if it has been taken by whoever knew that the Professor knew it," I stated, clear as mud. I had a real way of simplifying even the most complex of issues.

There was a pause as we both gazed off into the distance.

"She is quite beautiful," I said thinking aloud. Ty glanced at me, the flicker of a smile in his eyes, and only his eyes.

"Fish is ready," he laughed.

*

The food was ready and absolutely delicious. The slow cooking had rendered the flesh tender and fragrant with the herbs. We wolfed it down using our fingers to pick out the fine bones. We had finished our meal and were sitting back in the pasture, when Ty suddenly sat up.

"I think I've left my knife down at the pool. I won't be a minute." He stood and made to walk off.

"I'll come along, I can feel myself dozing off here," I replied.

We walked back down to the foot of the meadow where the river meandered. Ty was a few paces ahead of me when he stopped dead in his tracks at the water's edge. He lifted his nose, craning his neck and closed his eyes.

"What's up?" I asked.

He didn't reply and just inhaled through his nostrils, his chest puffing outward. He performed an abrupt about-face and trotted upstream a short distance to an old wooden bridge where he stopped and repeated the process.

"Come on, what are you up to?" I enquired again. He looked at me, his face neutral.

"Can't you smell it?" he asked, studying my face intently.

"Smell what?" I said utterly bemused.

Again, he didn't reply, but set off across the bridge and then at a jog took the path towards the woods at the base of the hill on the border of his land.

"Better wait there, Satchmo," he called over his shoulder.

Bollocks to that! I thought and moved after him at a canter. I caught up with Ty about fifty metres into the treeline, where I found him standing still, his back to me. Breathing intensely to catch my breath, I detected a whiff of faeces and something coppery.

"Smell what, Ty?" I demanded with more urgency in my voice.

He stepped aside and I saw what.

Hanging from a rope tied firmly around his ankles and looped over a broad branch of a tree, was the body of a man.

Flies buzzed around him as if trying to crowd each other out for a taste. The man's throat had been cut so brutally that his head hung back at a grotesque angle, and I distinctly saw the gleaming bone white of vertebrae through the dark gash in the flesh. Thick blood had matted a long white beard into a brownish crust. A spattered Dallas Cowboys baseball hat lay in a pool of congealed gore on the ground beneath as the body spun in the breeze.

As the body revolved, the face turned to me. Though it was crusted with dried blood and crawling insects, the cartoonish black shape of a piratical eye patch was immediately apparent.

"Death," Ty said.

I fell to my knees and vomited, the fish burning up my throat and past my lips like battery acid.