Next time I woke, we seemed to be in a town. I caught a glimpse of the white
walls of a pub as we headed down some kind of a small-town main street. Brian
was driving quite slowly, while Lydia was looking anxiously out through the
window.
“What are we doing now?” I asked. “Shh,” replied Lydia.“Looking
for sweet peas,” supplemented Brian.“Sweet peas? In the middle of the
night?” “They smell better in the middle of the night,” Brian told
me, “besides, we’re in Wem.”It made far more sense now he’d explained
it. “You’re mad. Where’s Wem?”“Wem’s in Shropshire,”
replied Lydia, looking irate, “and it’s where the sweet pea was developed.
We had to come down here and see some.”Well, I could see you wouldn’t want
to miss out on that. Eventually we found a garden with sweet peas growing
up the fence. With the exception of Danny, who was dead to the world, we
climbed out and looked at the sweet peas. They were grey. Well, they would be.
Every sweet pea in the twilight’s grey. “That’s actually a Spencer
type,” asserted Lydia. “Not really what you’d come to Wem for. It was
grandifloras that made Wem famous.”Still, we’d seen some sweet peas in
Wem. So rather than hunt around for an appropriate variety, we declared the
hunt a success. We squeezed back into the Metro and set off again. As we were
leaving Wem, something struck me. I checked the road atlas, by the light of
the last few streetlights.“Wem’s not actually on the A41, is it?”“Well,
strictly speaking, no – but we’re going to rejoin it at the same place we
left,” replied Brian.“Why are we visiting places that are totally off the
route?” I asked. Brian looked guilty.“Well, Lydia saw the signpost, and
she likes sweet peas. So I said we’d make the visit. I mean, you and Danny
were asleep.” “Yes, but we’re still sharing the petrol costs.”“I
tell you what,” said Lydia, “what is it? About fifteen extra miles?” She
turned round. “Here’s £1.50. Keep the change.”Well I accepted the
money, because it would have made me look stupid to refuse. Actually, I felt
pretty stupid accepting. Still, I was £1.50 ahead of the game, which was more
than you could say for Danny. The moon was blazing down, again, creating
a world of shadows outside. The front windows were open again, although the
storm had cooled things considerably. Along with the squeaks from the
suspension, occasional other noises could be heard from the outside. “What
was that scream?” Danny asked“Vixen. The sound a female fox makes is so
terrifying, people have been known to call the police saying there’s a
murder going on,” I told him knowledgably. “Yes,” Brian responded,
“When I was a kid living in Somerset, we used to hear them all the time.
Mind you, I hear them quite a lot living on the Finchley Road. We seem to have
hundreds living in our part of London.”“Well, if they get to be a
nuisance,” I suggested, “maybe they could form an urban hunt. People in
red, riding horses through the streets of London?”“More like people on
mountain bikes, armed with baseball bats,” replied Brian.“But that was so
scary,” commented Lydia, ”and it’s so dark now. A real night for a
murder.”“Or at least a ghost?” I suggested. “We had a ghost round
our way, when we lived in Milton Keynes,” Danny butted in. He made us jump
himself, because we’d all thought he was asleep. “A ghost in
Milton Keynes?” I asked. “The newest town in the country? Seems unlikely.”“Well,”
he replied, “many mysterious, man-like creatures have frightened the
unsophisticated and unscientific peoples of the world. The Yeti of the
Himalayas for example, or the Bigfoot of the United States. Few have been as
mysterious, as elusive, and yet lived as close to Civilisation, as the
Duck-man of Furzton.”“Get on with it,” I moaned. “The
first anyone knew was when the Canada Geese started disappearing. “The
thing with Canada Geese is, nobody really cares that much about them. So when
the number of geese started to go down no-one worried about it.““There don’t
seem to be so many geese around the lake these days”, people would say to
each other as they walked round Furzton Lake. Some people thought maybe the
geese were migratory, and they had all flown off somewhere. Canada sprang to
mind. Other people thought that the lake could be getting polluted and maybe
all the geese were being poisoned.. But nobody really cared. Nobody cares
about Canada geese. “Then strange rumours started to spread
among the anglers. You’ve never seen anything like the Milton Keynes
anglers. Every summer evening they’re out by the side of Furzton Lake in
their hundreds. Practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Each has his own little tent
to crawl into when he gets tired. You know my theory? There is actually only
one fish in Furzton Lake, and the fishermen are catching the same one over and
over again. It’s the size of a whale now from all the bait it’s eaten.
Some of them have noticed it’s always the same fish, but since most of them
are only there to get away from their wives, or because their wives want to
get away from them, they don’t mind too much. Anyway, some said it was the
shadows on the lake, and some said it was the mental strain caused by trying
to outwit fish, but the anglers claimed they had seen something in the
trees. “The brook runs through the middle of Furzton. To the south of
the brook lies the original estate. The people in the other half of the estate
sometimes call it Old Furzton because it was built as long ago as the 1980s.
To the north lies the new half of the estate, imaginatively called North
Furzton. The brook itself runs west to east through the park, down into the
lake. Just where it meets the lake there is a small spinney. And that is where
the anglers saw something. The branches moved as something slunk through. A
shadow was cast across the water of the lake. And there was a strange
snuffling noise.“They couldn’t really say what it was. A furtive couple
enjoying some extra-marital activities some said.”“What, were you one of
them?” I asked.“No. Don’t be facetious. A sleepwalker with a heavy cold,
said others. A very, very big badger was another suggestion. But nobody really
worried about it too much.“Until the swans started to go missing.“I mean,
you know how it is. Geese don’t really matter, in the great scheme of
things. What difference was a goose here or there? But when there were no more
geese, the swans started to go. Some people fed the birds on Furzton Lake
every day; old ladies and young mothers with their children. Mary used to walk
Daniel round there when the other two were at school. They didn’t mind the
geese going. The geese were aggressive. If you didn’t give them all your
bread straight away they would mug you for it. I’ve had one chase me round
half the lake once. But it is different when you are down to your last swan.
The one remaining swan became very, very fat. Well it would do, it was wolfing
down the bread of a hundred different schoolchildren every morning. The
mallards and moorhens had never had it so good. “The children started
to talk about a strange character. Daniel told me it was the Duck-man. The
kids said he lived in Cold Harbour Spinney. Nobody believed them. They said he
caught the fish in Furzton Lake with his bare hands. Nobody believed them.
They said he ate ducks. People started to listen. The Neighbourhood Watch
started taking an interest. “One of the local Neighbourhood Watch
committees was very keen. Other Neighbourhood Watches spend their time having
coffee mornings, with a bit of peering through the curtains in the evenings.
But due to a recent outbreak of car thefts, this Neighbourhood Watch had
transformed itself into a Neighbourhood Lynch Mob. Woe betide anyone caught
entering a car in Old Furzton, with or without the key, if they could not
provide documentary evidence that they owned it. Nobody had actually been
hanged from a lamp-post as such, but a few youths had ended up in the lake for
such crimes as hanging around on street corners, or playing football without a
permit during the hours of daylight. I had been a member myself, before they
went all paramilitary, but the day they were all round my house having a
meeting, one of the Watch members had his house burgled. That put me right
off. “The Secretary of the Neighbourhood Watch and his deputy were
making their regular patrol at midnight one night. They marched through the
park and down to Furzton Lake. If it was anything like a normal day for them.
they would have been resplendent in their Neighbourhood Watch hats,
Neighbourhood Watch arm-bands and Neighbourhood Watch steel toe-capped boots.
They had once had Neighbourhood Watch baseball bats, but the Police had
confiscated them after the unfortunate business with the vicar. “Pausing
only to instruct the anglers to take their rubbish home with them, they walked
round to the little wooden footbridge, which crosses where the lake is
narrowest. They would normally have checked out the sports pavilion, where the
kids used to go and smoke dope and have it off. But they saw something moving
in the trees by the edge of the lake, so they went down that way instead. The
Moon threw its light over the scene. On the edge of the lake sat a mallard.
Towards the mallard, creeping through the undergrowth came what appeared to be
a man. He was moving cat-like, creeping through the bushes without the
slightest noise. The Neighbourhood Watch Deputy Secretary rested his hand on
his Neighbourhood Watch flick-knife, which the Police had failed to find the
day that they turned his house over.“Unlike the Duck-man, the Neighbourhood
Watch officials had never learnt to keep in the right direction with respect
to the wind when stalking. The Duck-man stopped for a moment, sniffing the
air. Then he turned round and looked straight at them. The moon shone
strangely in his eyes. He fled through the bushes. The Secretary chased for
fifty yards or so, but the branches knocked his hat off. In any case the
Duck-man was moving too fast. The mallard flew off across the lake, thanking
whatever wet and feathery gods ducks thank in such circumstances.“The next
morning the Deputy Secretary phoned the Police, to tell them about the
Duck-man. The duty officer laughed. The Secretary went round to the Police
Station in person, to tell them what they had seen the previous evening. The
duty officer fell about laughing. The Neighbourhood Watch decided it had to
act alone. Some questioned what right they had to stop someone catching ducks,
which after all were wild animals. Some of the others said that it was
probably out of the Duck Hunting season. Others asked whether the Duck Hunting
season, if it existed, applied only to shooting, and not to sneaking up behind
ducks and catching them with your bare hands. Others said, in any case, he’d
been catching swans as well. and they belonged to the Queen, so it had to be
theft. “Eventually they decided it was their moral obligation to catch
the Duck-man. A few of the more radical Neighbourhood Watchers just wanted to
beat him up and throw him in the lake, but it was generally agreed that they
would catch him red-handed, and record him in the act with photographic
evidence. So began the first Neighbourhood Watch stake-out in Milton Keynes
history.“The best policy, they decided, was to blend in with the background
down by the lake. Some people suggested hiding in holes in the ground, or up
trees. After a moment’s thought the Secretary came up with the best way to
go undetected by Furzton Lake. “That night there were a lot more
anglers than normal sitting round Furzton Lake. The Neighbourhood Watch
blended in perfectly, in their blue or orange cagoules. But in their little
tents they had secreted the tools they needed for their job: cameras,
searchlights and nets. Most importantly they each had a pointy stick.”“A
pointy stick?” Lydia butted in. I felt the need to defend this important
circumstantial evidence that the story was true. “The pointy stick as a
weapon has an important history among the peoples of the South Midlands,” I
told her. “It has two functions - you can hit people over the head with it
while you are catching them, and then you can poke them in the eye with it
when you have caught them. And since you can pretend it is a cricket stump,
the police are very unlikely to confiscate a pointy stick if they catch you in
the park with one. In the village where I live, the pointy stick is almost a
way of life. The locals chase each other around the market square every Friday
night armed with pointy sticks. As Danny pointed out, unlike in Newport, where
they prefer to be unarmed.”“Yes, thanks,” said Danny. “Again it
was a clear night. The moon, one day fuller than the previous night, shed its
silvery light on the scene again. There was silence around Furzton Lake,
broken occasionally by a car roaring down Watling Street or a midnight cyclist
riding into a bollard. And so they sat all night. Nothing happened. There was
no sign of the Duck-man. “The next night they all sat there again. No
sign.“The next night there was a small crime wave as the burglars realised
that the entire Neighbourhood Watch was out sitting round the lake.“Then it
occurred to someone that what they really needed was a decoy. And the decoy
was conveniently close to hand. The one remaining swan had been rescued from
the lake for its own good, and now lived in someone’s back garden. After a
week or so of being the only swan in Furzton, it was now so fat it could not
fly. Every well-wisher for miles around had been coming round to feed it
breadcrumbs, lumps of cake - even the leftovers from a barbecue. The Secretary
of the Neighbourhood Watch commandeered the swan. “That evening, the
scene around Furzton Lake was much the same as the last three nights. The
fishermen sat around, complaining about the Neighbourhood Watch people. The
Neighbourhood Watch people sat around, armed with their pointy sticks and air
pistols. The local press sat around, armed with a huge battery of cameras. But
this time, about four feet from the shore of the lake, bobbed the fattest swan
in the Western Hemisphere. They’d tied him to a stake so he couldn’t get
away. “Around about midnight the Secretary said he would make a patrol
of the lake. He set off anticlockwise from the bridge. From their positions on
the Bowl side of the bridge, the other Neighbourhood Watch people saw him
walking round past the outflow, and along the path parallel to Chaffron Way.
As he walked towards North Furzton he went out of sight. He should have been
back after half an hour, even allowing for a moderate amount of telling people
off for returning from the pubs late, but after an hour there was no sign of
him. “After two hours the Neighbourhood Watch Treasurer went out
to look for the Secretary. It took him twenty minutes to get round the lake,
and he saw no sign of the Secretary.“A little later there was a rustling in
the bushes over by the swan. Seventeen bogus fishermen held their breath. A
dark figure appeared beside the lake. About to make a spring for the swan, the
Duck-man stopped as he noticed the stake to which the swan was tied. He looked
around, and seemed to be sniffing the air. “The Neighbourhood Watch
lost its discipline. People switched on searchlights and blazed away with
cameras. Four or five of them ran across the bridge, waving pointy sticks and
shouting blood-curdling oaths. The Duck-man, for the second time that week,
turned and ran. But in the moment that he had been held in the glare of the
searchlights and the camera flashes, they had seen something awful. He had
been wearing a Neighbourhood Watch Secretary’s hat. “They eventually
found the Secretary. He was hanging by his ankles from the bridge over to
Emerson Valley, naked, with only his Neighbourhood Watch “Macho Man”
studded belt, tied round his ankles and the railings, to stop him from landing
in the middle of the road. When they hauled him up and asked him what had
happened, he could only gibber “The feathers! The feathers!”“The
Duck-man was never seen in Furzton again. Life had clearly become too hot for
him. The swan population gradually recovered, as swans flew in from other
lakes, and before long Canada Geese were mugging schoolchildren and housewives
the same as ever. The Neighbourhood Watch Secretary had to retire due to a
fragile mental state, but otherwise the operation was declared a reasonable
success. When the photographs were developed, the Duck-man bore a striking
resemblance to the ex-leader of a former religious cult, which had believed
that Fishermead was the New Jerusalem and that Armageddon would be fought in
Bradwell Common. The cult had, of course, folded when they discovered that
traditionally Armageddon was meant to be fought on a mountain. And until they
built the indoor ski slope, there weren’t even any hills in MK. “And
that was that. Only two loose ends remained from the whole episode. One was
the tradition in Old Furzton of leaving the leftovers from the turkey outside
on Christmas Night “to keep the Duck-man happy”. The other was, the people
in Woburn Sands and Bow Brickhill started noticing there weren’t as many
rabbits around as there used to be......”“Yes, well thanks for that,”
Brian said. “I always like to hear some hysterical gibberish at 2am.” “Well,
I can swear to its truth,” replied Danny.“Yes, don’t tell me, you were
that naked Neighbourhood Watch man”, I said.“No, but….” Danny seemed
quite embarrassed. “But what?” pestered Brian. Danny didn’t
reply. He was obviously hiding something. “Yes, go on Danny – how do
you know? Were you the Duck-man?”“No. All right, I’ll tell you. I was
one of the fishermen. I watched what was going on. I was there every day.”“One
of the anglers?” asked Brian. “Doesn’t really fit into your image as the
Great Romantic, does it?”“No. But my eldest – Charlie – used to come
with me. He’s really into fishing.”“Thank goodness for that. I thought
maybe you used it as some kind of cover for your extramarital adventures,” I
said, “and the idea of you and some poor unfortunate using one of those
little fisherman’s tents as a love nest was making my mind boggle.”“Your
legs would stick out. And I’m sure they’d fall down while you were
shagging,” replied Danny. But you could see he was running the idea through
his mind. “Out of interest, Danny, how did you make sure you could see
when you had both hands occupied with fishing – like when you made a catch
and had to reel it in, or to bait the hook?”“Oh, we had these special head
torches. They’re a bit like miner’s headlights.”“Oh right. And was
Furzton the only lake in Milton Keynes for fishing?”“No of course not.
Most of the lakes are allowed for fishing.”“Right. What, the Teardrop
lakes?”“Oh yes. Why?”“Nothing, just wondering.” “Anyway,”
Lydia interrupted, “that sounded like quite a scary time for you all. Thanks
for a scary story that happened a long way from my home, so I don’t have to
worry about it.”“But don’t you?” asked Brian. “Don’t you know what
happened to all the Liver birds? Didn’t they disappear suddenly one night?““Yes,
but they made a new series twenty years later,” I said. “Mind you, Lucian
and his mum seemed to have changed from one family to another.”Brian pointed
out that he meant the mythical birds that dwelt on the Mersey, not the 1970s
situation comedy. But to no avail. The discussion descended into a debate
about what was the name of the girl who was Lucian’s sister, the one who
replaced Polly. And which animal it was that Lucian was so fond of. Hampsters,
Danny said. Hamsters, I said. Rabbits, Lydia and Brian said. In which case
maybe the Duckman really did move to Liverpool, I said. We rejoined the
A41, presumably at the point where Brian had left it. Danny had already lapsed
once again into a catatonic state. Up ahead, the lights of the next town were
coming into view. Checking the road map by the interior light, I saw that it
was off the A41, which again was probably in reality a bypass, and that meant
we were finally – after that needless detour - nearing Whitchurch.
To
next chapter