38

The stark metallic structure loomed over the shooting ground like a watchtower at a POW camp. But there were no guards standing at its summit, armed with searchlights and machine guns. Instead, two traps were slowly rising up pulleys attached to the outside of the tower, making Carver more uneasy with every second they kept moving.

‘Think of this as a very steep hillside,’ said Klerk. ‘The beaters are about to flush the pheasants off the top of the hill and they’re going to fly right over us, just begging to be shot.’

‘How high are the traps going?’ Carver asked.

‘One hundred and forty feet.’

At that range, the widely scattered shot from Carver’s gun would be far less effective than the tight, heavily choked patterns Zalika would be punching through the air. Just as the competition reached its climax, she would have a major advantage. It was down to him not to make it a decisive one.

‘That’s some pretty serious shooting,’ he said.

Klerk laughed mischievously. ‘Oh ja, this is the bloody black run all right. And we’ve added a little complication, haven’t we, Donald?’

‘Aye, that we have. I’ve loaded the traps with midi clays. They’re ninety millimetres across instead of the standard one-oh-eight.’

Klerk slapped Carver on the back. ‘No worries for you, eh? I’ve seen you shoot. I’m sure you’ll blow them out of the sky. I know Zalika will, that’s for sure.’

‘Maybe,’ Carver replied, doing his best to sound completely unconcerned. ‘But not before you’ve gone first.’

The clays were released in simultaneous pairs this time, but from two separate traps, meaning that they flew towards Klerk at slightly different heights and angles, forcing him to change his aim between shots. He coped well enough, and his score of seven was more than respectable in the circumstances. But he was really just the warm-up act before the main attractions.

Zalika was second up. She walked up to shoot with her usual air of calm self-control. Her breathing was steady. She lined up the cartridges with her standard ritualistic precision.

Everything seemed fine, yet something wasn’t quite right. She hit the first pair, but only by striking the back edges of the two clays.

Now she faced a real test of character. When a good shot makes a very slight mistake there is always the temptation to over-compensate. It’s very easy, having shot the back of a clay, to aim further ahead of its flight and miss the next one entirely to the front. The best and bravest thing to do is nothing at all. You’re still hitting the clays, so why change anything?

Carver could just imagine the battle going on in Zalika’s head. It was visible in her movements, too: the very slight shake in her hands as she slipped the cartridges into the barrels, the fumbling as she rotated them till they faced the right way.

She was tough: she gutsed it out and hit both the next clays. Now there were just six left for her in the entire competition. She was still a shot up. If she could close out the last three pairs she’d win and Carver could do nothing about it. But the tension was rising, no matter how hard she fought to keep it at bay.

After the fourth shot had been fired, Zalika paused just a second too long, staring at the ground, and she took a long, deliberate breath. When she broke open the barrels she was still lost in her thoughts. She made no attempt to catch the used cartridges but let them fall to the ground. When the new cartridges went in, she did not even look at them, still less line up the writing on their bases before snapping the gun shut again.

Carver knew that she was on a knife-edge. ‘Miss one, miss one,’ he whispered soundlessly to himself.

Zalika did not oblige. She hit the fifth clay all right, but the sixth came out broken, prompting McGuinness to call ‘No bird!’ again.

If anything, this seemed to relax Zalika. She looked far less concerned as she once again discarded the used cartridge, replaced it with a new one and then lined up both cartridges to her satisfaction.

She’d got her routine back again. She’d returned to the zone.

The third pair was replayed. This time Zalika missed the first clay but hit the second. She smiled to herself, blessing her good fortune: when she’d made a mistake, it didn’t matter. Carver could see that she’d remembered McGuinness’s words about the rules of clay pigeon shooting stating that the score for the first bird is counted. On that basis, the first bird was a hit, the hit stood, and she was still one up, just four shots left.

Carver saw the confidence flooding back into Zalika as she dusted the next pair. She was in the final straight now, the finishing line in sight.

The final pair were released. Over they came, the right-hand clay slightly higher than the left, the angle between them widening all the time. Zalika hit the right one first then swung her gun in an arc towards her left shoulder. The swing was smooth, her movements controlled, both her eyes open to give her optimum vision and depth perception.

And yet she missed.

Carver couldn’t believe it. He’d have put any money in the world on Zalika getting the pair. Yet, for the second time, she’d been let down by the final shot in a sequence. Zalika looked equally incredulous, staring at the untouched clay as it continued its gentle arc to the ground as if she could dust it by sheer force of will. She gave a final shake of the head, then snapped the gun open, caught the cartridges with an irritated snap of her fingers and hurled them in the bin before turning and walking back towards the others.

As she walked past Carver, her eyes blazing with defiance, she hissed, ‘Well, you still can’t beat me,’ quietly enough that only he could hear.

Carver said nothing. He had no intention of getting ahead of himself. The end result was just a distraction. He had a job to do first.

He strode towards his firing position not hoping he would shoot well, or even believing that he would. He demanded it.

He banished all thoughts of Zalika, dismissed any worries about the height and size of the clays, or the fact that he’d be firing with unrestricted barrels that would spray his shots across the sky like confetti. He concentrated purely and simply on the element he could control: the quality of his shooting.

The first four clays were obliterated.

When the third pair flew from the traps, Carver hit the first clay smack in the middle, but only caught the leading edge of the second, very nearly missing to the front. Now he was the one who had to fight the temptation to change his technique, the one who had to have faith enough to stick with what he’d been doing.

Carver felt the pounding of his heart against his chest and the itchy stickiness of sweat beneath his armpits. He told himself to get a grip.

‘Pull!’ he called.

The clays were flung from their traps, and at that precise moment the wind, which had blown steadily all day, suddenly flurried. The gust only lasted for a second or two, but it was enough to disturb the flight of the clays. The right-hand one slowed in mid-air and lost height, making the left clay appear to race away from it. Now their courses were radically different, and Carver had to adjust his shot in mid-swing as he locked on to the dropping clay. Somehow he managed to hit it and then jerk his gun left and up, his sights scrabbling across the sky to find the other clay.

Where the hell had it got to?

His spine was arched like a tightly pulled bow and the weight of his head was so far back that he was almost toppling over when he finally found his target. He had no balance, no stillness. He was as ragged as hell.

Carver fired.

The crack of the shot slapped the summer air like a palm to a face, closely followed by a frustrated cry of ‘No!’

Zalika Stratten had not been able to contain her frustration at Carver’s absurd good fortune. The clay had been blown to pieces. Somehow, he’d got everything wrong about the shot except the end result.

After that, the last pair was a formality. Carver came away with a perfect ten.

‘So we tied,’ said Zalika, coldly.

‘You sure?’ Carver replied.

She frowned at him uncertainly. But before she could say anything else there was the sound of a polite cough.

‘I have the scores,’ said McGuinness.

He was holding the score cards in one hand, divided into boxes for each pair of clays. The shots were marked down as ‘kills’ and ‘losses’, a diagonal line across a box indicating that both shots had been kills.

‘Mr Klerk, you came third. I’ve never seen you shoot so well, sir. Good enough to win, I reckon, nine times out of ten. And you, Miss Zalika, well, I cannae imagine how anyone could shoot like you did and not come out on top.’

She gave a weary smile. ‘Thank you, Donald.’

‘But the winner,’ he continued, ‘is Mr Carver by one.’

‘What?’ Now Zalika’s eyes blazed with furious energy. ‘That’s not possible! It was a tie!’

‘I’m afraid not, Miss. You lost two shots in the final five pairs.’

‘I know, but one of them was in the pair that I had to reshoot. It didn’t count. You said so yourself: the score from the first bird is counted. I killed the first bird.’

‘Aye, so you did. And the score is counted … when you are shooting on report. But these pairs were simultaneous. And I’m afraid the rules are very clear, Miss. If a “no bird” is called in a simultaneous pair, the score for the other bird does not count. You start from scratch when the pair is released again. And you lost the first bird of that pair, as well as the very last bird of all. When Mr Carver killed all ten, he overtook you.’

Zalika sighed. ‘I see.’ She switched her attention back to Carver. ‘So you win, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘But only on a technicality.’

‘A win is a win. That’s how it works.’

She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. ‘You knew that rule all along, didn’t you? When I said you couldn’t win, you knew.’

‘Yeah, I knew I had the beating of you. But I still had to get all ten.’

The look in Zalika’s eye was as cold as bare steel on a frosty morning. But as she turned and walked away from him, Carver swore he could see the beginnings of a smile spreading across her face, almost as though she, not he, were the real winner.