Enter Pale Death(53)
All senses alert, he continued on his way more slowly. A rustling in the undergrowth kept pace with him. A low growl raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Not an animal, he thought. But what human would be making hostile noises at an innocent visitor in broad daylight? He’d try to lure it into view. Joe took his notebook from his pocket and, humming a snatch from The Mikado, went to stand in the shade of a particularly gnarled oak tree and affected to be drawing a sketch of the writhing outline. A very ancient specimen he decided and tentatively reached up and tugged at one of the lower branches, testing its resilience.
He leapt to one side a split second before a log of wood crashed down, grazing his cheek, and thumping to the ground at his feet. He turned and caught a flash of green and brown behind a thick hazel only feet away. With a hideous cackle some being began to crash its way through the undergrowth, running away from him.
Joe set off in pursuit, anger and outrage and a stinging face urging him on. In ten strides he had caught up. He launched his weight at it in a high tackle learned on the rugby pitch, automatically reaching for a human right arm and, to his relief, finding one. He hauled it up behind the creature’s back, shouting a dire caution in a police voice. When he sensed that resistance had stopped, he flipped his victim over onto his back and immediately recoiled in disgust. A stench of sweat and fear wafted up from the leather-clad body of a man. A wiry man, smaller than Joe but well muscled. His face was obliterated by a green mask, his head hidden under a cap of knitted wool woven through with oak and ivy leaves to produce an extravagant mass of greenery. Joe stared in astonishment. The mask was no amateur, papier maché, village-hall-drama-club attempt at stage costume. It was Venetian in quality, dark green silk, a full face mask, with embroidered slanting holes for eyes and a red-lined slit for the mouth. The eyes were dark and venomous, the teeth bared in a growl were grey and rotting.
A Woodwose! He was holding down, but barely holding down, a bloody Woodwose! Joe had seen hundreds of effigies and carvings of the Wild Green Man in wood and stone on bench ends, on architraves, hidden up in the ceiling, keeping sinister watch on the congregation in country churches. No one had any real idea where the image came from but two things were certain: they were ancient and they were malevolent. Joe was disturbed to be faced with a flesh-and-blood relic of this paganism. He resisted the urge to tear off the mask and look into the face of the coughing, winded creature wearing it. Instead he pulled him to his feet, forcing him under his arm in a neck lock, and marched him back to the pathway.
Joe stopped at the spot where his abandoned notebook told him he’d been standing, right by the considerable chunk of oak that had so nearly dropped him in his tracks. With time now to assess the weight of the object, he knew for a certainty that it could have split his skull. If he’d stood still, he calculated he would now be lying bleeding or dead—and from a wound that could have been caused by a falling branch. It would have been very simple, the work of a few moments, to arrange the scene. Remove the killer log, lose it in the undergrowth and replace it with a freshly torn down branch from the ancient tree overhead, ensuring that it bore signs of his blood. “Poor chap!” they’d say. “Killed by the very tree he was sketching! So sad … Still, it was a very old tree, rotten, quite rotten … Mentioned in the Domesday Book I shouldn’t wonder …” There you had it: a death by misadventure. Another death by misadventure on Truelove land.
Keeping his voice steady, “The Green Man of the Woods, I presume?” he said. “How do you do? Or are you calling yourself the Green Knight in such seigneurial surroundings? Before I chuck you in the moat, which I am advised to do, tell me—why did you try to kill me?” He released the man’s head but kept a firm grip on his arm.
“Kill you? Good Lord! Are you barmy? I didn’t! If you hadn’t leapt like a startled hare it would have landed harmlessly at your feet. I always aim to miss!” The voice was accentless and dismissive.
The man was lying but at least he was talking. Joe needed to hear more.
“City gent, clearly—how was I to guess you’d move like a grasshopper?” The shaggy head tilted to one side, assessing him and the voice was slick with suspicion as he asked, “Who the hell are you anyway?”
This was a bit rich, coming from a man in a ludicrous mask, Joe thought, and he fought back a hysterical urge to laugh out loud. He saw the eyes flick, taking in his officer’s trench coat. “The war’s been over a few years now, you know. Didn’t anyone think to inform you, Captain?” The jibe was delivered with a derisory sneer, the use of the lowly rank insulting.