Master of the Moor (11 page)

‘I suppose so.’

‘A man who is apparently a conformist, young and physically very strong, a man who needs routine because any other kind of existence he can’t handle. A man who has a fantasy life, maybe delusions of grandeur, a man with a morbid interest in death. I’m describing a certain type of psychopath. Aren’t I also describing you, Whalby?’

Stephen said nothing. What could he say?

‘So we have a blueprint and here we have a man who fits that blueprint — or so it seems to me. Don’t you think any detached observer would see it like that? Our man knows Vangmoor. He knows it so well he can find his way about it in the dark. He’s so strong and he knows the moor so well he can carry a dead body miles across it by night.’

‘I haven’t a morbid interest in death.’ Stephen tried a dismissive laugh and felt he had succeeded. ‘What was I supposed to do when I found Marianne Price’s body? Not tell you? Go home as if nothing had happened?’

‘We’ll ask the questions, Whalby,’ said Malm.

Stephen had never seen Troth smile or even look pleasant, but now as he sat a little apart from the others, sat with a certain air of deference to the others, his hand moving slightly in the vicinity of that red spot with its yellow blob, there was something in his face that Stephen recognized as amusement. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t even a lifting of those tight, bunched facial muscles, but rather a light in his eyes. Troth was amused, vastly entertained, by the spectacle of a defenceless person being insulted.

True to his word, Malm launched into a spate of questions. This time they were all concerned with
the geography of the moor and Manciple, who knew it better than they, had to be called in to assist. It seemed to Stephen that he had already, dozens of times, described the walks he took and the climbs he did, but they wanted it all again. Then the door opened and a man came in. Stephen didn’t even look up, he was so sure it must be their lunch sandwiches arriving, but there was no tray and no sandwiches, only another one of those whispered messages of the kind, no doubt, that yesterday had made him into a psychopath and a murderer. Malm, Hook and Manciple all left the room. Stephen was left alone with Troth.

Troth behaved exactly as if he wasn’t there. He did something Stephen felt no man would do in the company of another unless he felt that other to be less than the dust. There was no mirror in the room but the street plan was framed and glazed. Troth got up. Achieving a passable reflection of his face in the glass, he squeezed the spot on his chin between his two forefingers. He gave a low grunt of pain and blood spurted, a tiny bead of it plummeting onto the frame.

Stephen sat and waited. Troth made him feel acutely uncomfortable by getting behind him and standing there, presumably to look out of the window. He resolved that whatever happened, if they kept him there for hours, if they kept him there all day, he wouldn’t speak to Troth. He stretched his legs and shifted in the chair. His whole body felt tense. They couldn’t do anything to him, could they? They must be bluffing. They couldn’t actually charge an innocent man.

It seemed like many hours but in fact it was just over twenty minutes before Hook came back. He
came back alone. Troth was sitting at the table again, wiping his chin on a dirty, bloodstained handkerchief.

‘Right, Mr Whalby, you can go. Thank you for your cooperation.’

‘You mean you’ve finished for today?’

Hook looked anything but pleased. He looked dismayed, defeated. ‘I mean we’ve finished.’

‘Why? What’s happened? You mean that’s all you’ve got to say after putting me through the third degree for the best part of two days?’

‘We put you through no third degree.’

‘At least you can tell me why I’m to be let off the hook now.’

Troth laughed. It must have been at Stephen’s unconscious pun. His laugh was like a schoolboy’s crow and when he had uttered it he left the room. Hook muttered something about new evidence but Stephen didn’t bother to listen to him, he felt too angry and indignant. If he had encountered Troth then, out in the corridor, he would have hit him as hard as he could and damn the consequences! Troth, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was Inspector Manciple who came up to Stephen and said he wanted to explain about the ‘small misunderstanding’.

They had just received the result of a complex analysis of the blood taken from Ann Morgan’s fingernails. Stephen was suddenly conscious again of the scratch on his neck. He actually felt it itch and tingle as Manciple spoke. The blood belonged to group B which was Stephen’s own group and to which only 6 per cent of the population belonged. With highly sophisticated forensic techniques, Manciple explained, they could now narrow down blood types much more closely than that, and further analysis had shown
features in the blood found in the fingernails which Stephen’s own didn’t share.

‘Pity that couldn’t have been done before,’ Stephen said. ‘I must say I take rather a dim view of being treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever.’

But it was over, he hadn’t made a fool of himself, and now he was free. There wasn’t even a threat hanging over him that they might start on him again tomorrow, for they knew now that he wasn’t their man, that it couldn’t be he. His relief was immeasurably greater than that he had felt the day before, walking out of here with Harriet Crozier. It was almost as if — though this was ridiculous — he
had
done it,
had
killed those girls, and was sick with joy at having escaped justice.

The sun had come through and the day was going to be hot. Sunlight and mist lay on the distant peaks of the moor and it shimmered in a golden haze. He could go there again, with his freedom the ban was lifted, he could walk there, climb, go whenever he chose.

He went into the hardware shop on the opposite side of the square to the Kelsey Arms and bought rope. It was a self-service store and in the electrical section they had on a display of campers’ flashlights. Stephen chose a big one with a handle like a jug, a tubular element and a battery guaranteed to last for several hours. Because they had large-size jute sacks on cheap offer he bought two with an idea they might come in useful.

The library next for a book on old mine workings. They had one, they said, but it wasn’t in stock. Would he like to order it? Stephen decided against that. It probably wasn’t necessary. He had been successful enough at getting into the Goughdale mine
without a book when he was twelve, so why should he need one now?

Dadda, downstairs at Whalbys’, chain-smoked his little cigarettes. With exquisite delicacy and fastidiousness he was replacing the beading on the doors of a glass-fronted cabinet he had just reglazed. He was currently on an emotional peak, at the zenith of his cheerful or manic phase, and he essayed wit, something he did on an average once a year. He looked at the coil of rope and his face split into a nutcracker grin.

‘Happen they’d done away with hanging in this country.’

Stephen laughed heartily. He laughed the way one does at the jokes of a man who needs to make them but hardly ever can. ‘Good Lord, Dadda, I’m not for the high jump this time, I’m glad to say. They’ve let me go without a stain on my character.’

‘I should bloody think so.’ Dadda dabbed on a flick of glue, pressed in another inch or two of carved rosewood. He looked up at Stephen, ‘That aunt of yours has been round asking for you.’ Dadda had never addressed or referred to his in-laws by their given names. ‘That one, Mrs Pettitt, they call her,’ as if they called her something to which she had no right. ‘She wanted to tell you your grandma’s been taken into Hilderbridge General with a stroke.’ He paused reflectively, wiped a spot of glue from a finger. ‘Old Mother Naulls,’ he said, and savagely, ‘the old bitch, the old bitch!’

That policeman had more or less called him a psychopath. His euphoria past, Stephen smarted when he remembered those insults. He would have liked to take action over that, legal action, and get a public
apology out of the man, but he had an idea that that kind of thing was privileged. In an interrogation, inside a police station, they could say what they liked to you and get away with it. How much more might they have said, though, if they had known he had once made a violent attack on his grandmother!

Her life was nearly over. He supposed they had taken her into hospital to die. How old would she be now? Eighty or thereabouts. She had always seemed old to him, old as the hills even in those days when he had badgered her about his mother.

‘Why won’t you tell me where she is?’

‘Because I won’t, that’s why. She’s got a family of her own, she’s got a boy and a girl, and she don’t want you upsetting them all. Now then!’

‘But she’s married to —’ He had almost said, ‘married to
us
.’

‘No, she’s not. She’s married to Mr Evans and she’s got Barnabas and Barbara.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Don’t you call me a liar, young Stephen.’

He had been ‘young’ Stephen then, small Stephen who didn’t come much more than up to her shoulder. A year later he had grown six inches, and in the following year …

‘He’ll be towering above me soon,’ said Arthur Naulls, ‘towering above me.’

‘You can tell me her address. I could write to her.’

‘You’ll not get it from me, Stephen, it wouldn’t be fair. You’ve got to let bygones be bygones.’

She turned her back on him. He had become in that instant an animal, without the power to reason or reflect, and she — what had she become? He had never quite known and he didn’t know now. The quintessence of woman perhaps. But no, he loved the
women in his life, Lyn, the memory of his mother. The evil inherent in women, then, in some women. He saw only a womanly shape, though, and a bush of soft womanly hair, and then even that was lost in a hot dazzling blur as he leapt on her and seized her by the neck …

Stephen seldom thought about it now. Nothing like that had ever happened since. The police would have made something of it, though, with their cheap, untried psychology. The interrogation must have had some kind of shock effect on him, for even the sensation of relief didn’t last long and for several nights he slept badly and dreamed badly, which was something he hardly ever did. Ann Morgan’s mother came on television and appealed for clues to the identity of the Vangmoor killer. Someone must know him, someone must have noticed a man, friend, lodger, neighbour, behaving oddly. She begged that person, those people, to come forward. Stephen dreamed of her. He dreamed that he and she were in the avenue of the Foinmen and she was refusing to tell the police they had been together in the Kelsey Arms at the time of her daughter’s murder. Stephen made a rush at her, seized her throat and was shaking her when Lyn woke him up and said he had been shouting and thrashing in his sleep.

To go out on the moor would have been the best remedy for this. He had his rope and his powerful torch and a packet of candles, and he had planned to attempt Apsley Sough at the weekend. But the long spell of dry weather broke and on Saturday it rained all day, the driving torrential rain of midsummer. Next day the foins were shrouded in a drizzle that was more than mist and less than rain.

Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Now that
the summer is well and truly with us, several places of interest in the “Foinland” area have been opened to the public. The historic gardens of Jackley Manor may be viewed any Sunday from now until 30 September between 2 and 5 p.m., and in response to popular demand, Mr David Southworth is for the first time opening the gardens and some of the rooms at Chesney Hall on Saturdays, also from 2 till 5. Visitors will be able to see the study in which Tace wrote the famed
Chronicles of Bleakland
and also, I understand, one of the actual pens used …’

‘And why isn’t Cinderella hastening back to her hearth this evening?’ said Nick.

‘Stephen’s gone to see his grandmother. He’ll be late home.’

‘I wish you’d said. We could have gone out somewhere. The way things are, we never do anything but this.’

Lyn sat up in bed. She started to laugh. ‘I don’t claim to know much about these things but I understood that was something men never never said.’

His face was serious. He took one of her hands and held it in both his. ‘I dwell in the suburbs of your good pleasure, don’t I?’

She looked at him inquiringly. ‘It comes in
Julius Caesar
,’ he said. ‘Portia says it to her husband, I think, to Brutus. “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” That’s how you make me feel. I thought I was going to be more than that to you, Lyn, I thought we could be more to each other. Here’s something else you probably thought men never never said. I don’t see much point in casual affairs.’

Her heart was beating hard with fear and wonder.
She was a lifetime away from laughter now. ‘But when your uncle gets better you’ll go away. You’ll go away anyway in August.’

‘And that’s all there is to it? I’ll court more women and you’ll couch with more men?’

It wasn’t at all the answer she had expected. She didn’t know what she had expected. ‘I won’t do that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t before. I don’t see much point in casual affairs either.’

He got up. He pulled on jeans and a shirt and went out into the kitchen where she heard him starting to make coffee. When he came back he sat on the bed beside her and lifted her up in his arms and held her against him. His words surprised her.

‘You’d never go out on the moor alone, would you, Lyn? Promise me you never will.’

‘I promise,’ she said.

Without the knitter and the old man to be stimulus and audience, Stephen didn’t know how to talk to his grandmother. She was in bed for the evening visitors to the Lady Clara Stillwood Ward, and she seemed more limp and structurally collapsed than at Sunningdale. The apoplexy had pulled her face down on one side, giving a quirk to the mouth. Her skin had blanched to the matt, rubbery whiteness of a fungus. She moved one of her hands and made an inarticulate sound when she saw him.

Stephen put the box of jellies down on the white coverlet beside her. One of Mrs Naull’s hands was paralysed. Though he had never loved or even liked her, though he had come to hate and fear her, then feel a deep guilt towards her, it went to Stephen’s heart to see that one sound hand fumbling ineffectually with the cellophane wrapping while the other
lay useless, while his grandmother’s face, or the mobile part of it, contorted with piteous frustration. He unwrapped the box, fed her an orange jelly and then a green one, wiped away the coloured trickle that came out of the corner of her mouth.