Master of the Moor (15 page)

A feeling of sharp alertness took hold of him as he padded along the passage. It wasn’t fear, though there was a breath of fear in it. It was the sensation of adrenalin entering the bloodstream. He was prepared to see a little dim light at the end of the tunnel ahead of him, the light from the two candles. And if he did, would he retreat as quietly as he could, reascend the shaft as quickly as he could? Or would he go on towards the candlelight to meet the man squatting there with his cans of food and drink and his secret hoard? Stephen felt himself tall and strong and physically powerful enough to resist the man in any circumstances. But he didn’t think he would have to resist him, be forced in some way to struggle with him. This wasn’t at all the idea he had of the shadowy relationship which already seemed to exist between them.

However, no light showed at the end of the winze. Stephen shone his torch slowly round the chamber. The bed was as it had been, as far as he could remember. The flak jacket and the two pairs of jeans were still in a heap on the floor, but were they exactly as they had been before? Certain it was that the aran had gone. He looked at the candles and there too there could be no
mistake. He had no need to measure them. The small stub had gone and been replaced by a new candle, the other was burnt down to the length of his thumb.

The man had been back.

He had eaten some of the biscuits out of the packet, drunk one of the cans of beer and brought in half a dozen magazines, all Sunday supplements. Stephen had a sense of satisfaction. He was excited too but mainly he felt satisfaction. Here was proof that the chamber was
used
and wasn’t just an abandoned lair deserted by the creature who had formerly gone to ground in it. He packed the food and the beer cans back into the box just as he had found them. And then a daring idea came to him. Why not show the man he had been here by leaving behind some clear indication of his visit? By substituting for the candles two new ones, for instance, or by placing on the wooden crate table some object from his pocket such as his penknife. He decided against it. The inhabitant of the cavern, however brave and intrepid, would be alarmed, would suspect a trap. His thoughts would turn at once to the police. It would be stupid to make the man think he was betrayed to the police when in fact he, Stephen, had actually gone out of his way to avoid betraying him. For the time being, at any rate, he would be discreet, he would show respect for the man’s privacy.

But instead of leaving the chamber, he sat down on the mattress and gave himself up to enjoyment of the silence and the peace. He ate a biscuit, just one. He switched off the torch and lit his own candle, standing it in the saucer. It was a wonderfully relaxed and comfortable place to be in, and in spite of the possibility of the man’s arriving at any time, a place which felt peculiarly safe and secure. Reclining there with his eyes closed, he asked himself how long it had been since he
had felt as safe and, yes, as happy as this. More than twenty years. And when he had gone back along the winze and climbed the shaft he was surprised to find how long he had been in the mine, for the sun had set and dusk had come, though the sky was still a clear flame-pink, streaked at the horizon with long bars of black cirrus.

Goughdale had a sinister appearance at this hour, more so than the Foinmen about which there was always an air of sanctity. The heaps of stones, the skeleton of the windlass, the coe, black silhouettes in the silvery-grey dale, all seemed apt for concealing shadows and flitting forms. And there was such a stillness, an immobility as profound as the silence in the mine. Nothing moved. Even the sheep had been taken away to pasture elsewhere.

There would be no moon tonight, however clear the sky, no more than a sliver of crescent. Stephen thought he had better go home by the road and he set off to walk across the dale towards the east. The sky was deepening to purple and filling with stars. It was a nuisance Lyn being at home, waiting for him, when if he had been on his own he could have camped out here, night after night until the meeting point came. He was growing out of Lyn, growing beyond her and the domestic ties that kept him in a job and in a valley. He drew in deep breaths of the summer night air. Suppose he were to look back now and see a figure on the hillside, a figure that showed up in the twilight only because of the gleam of its white aran?

He did look back. Nothing stirred on the slope of Big Allen or in the dale. And when he had come among the gorse bushes in the vale and turned round for the last time it had grown too dark to see anything at all.

The headlights
lit up the whole bedroom and made twin rivers of light run down the walls. For a while a diesel engine throbbed, then died away, though the lights remained. Lyn, who had been lying awake, thought at once of the police. She looked at her watch and saw it was a little after five, the dawn coming. The two murders and the fact that Stephen had been questioned made her think it might be the police.

She got up and went to the window. An ambulance was parked outside the Simpsons’ house and as she watched her sister came out. She wasn’t carried out, she walked, holding on to Kevin’s arm, laughing with the driver. Her labour must have begun, Lyn thought, and she laid her hands gently over her own flat stomach in the thin nightdress.

Stephen slept. Lyn watched the ambulance turn
round in the horseshoe at the top of Tace Way, then move off towards the village and Hilderbridge. The sun was coming up now, spreading a flush across the milky blue sky, promising another day of heat. She lay down for another hour beside Stephen, thinking about Joanne, thinking about herself. In February, sometime about the middle of February, and perhaps also at dawn, it would be she the ambulance came for, she who walked out to it on her husband’s arm. That part she couldn’t imagine. When she saw herself holding a man’s arm it was always Nick’s arm she held. After a while she got up, went downstairs to make tea and was immediately very sick.

Stephen took the news about Joanne impassively.

‘Talking of hospitals, darling, I think I’ll just pop in and see my grandmother after work. I’ve got the poor old dear on my conscience.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Lyn asked him.

He never did want her to, she didn’t know why. ‘Lord, no, what a drag for you and in all this heat. She wouldn’t know you anyway, darling. She mixes us all up.’

‘Just as you like.’

He wanted her to be there when
he
wanted her, not otherwise. He was capable of leaving her for hours on end, days, but she must be there waiting when he got back. She had to be his rock, his haven, his mother. These things she had never completely understood about Stephen until she had known Nick.

Perhaps it would change when they had a child in the house. Stephen ought to be a good father, to be good with a child, he was in many ways so much a child himself still. It was as if some part of him, when he was a boy, had stopped growing. But which part? Not his strong tall body. Not his active brain. Unless it
was that curious undefined object that was mentioned in the Bible or you heard old people talk about, the soul.

The dark night had been closing in on Dadda, slowly but inexorably, for some days now. He had come to Tace Way for lunch on Sunday but he had brought no gifts, had eaten little, had folded himself into that chair in the corner, and so deep was his wretchedness that he hadn’t even narrowed his eyes or shaken his head at the sight of Peach sitting with overflowing tail and hind paws on the chestnut leaf table. While the Newmans were there he hadn’t spoken and he had left early.

Depression rarely prevented him from working. Work, if not a cure, if not even an alleviation, was still all he could do, the only possible occupation for him, while the blackest period of the black time lasted. But now he had become almost inactive. An oval walnut table was before him and the wadded lint dipped into the french polish, but his fingers could scarcely form the figures of eight on the prepared surface. Stephen came upon him seated immobile, the lint in his hand, his sombre eyes staring sightlessly, a Samson idle at the mill.

For days he would be like that. Then, suddenly, a fever for work, for making up for lost time, would over-take him, and with it an explosive temper to be vented on Stephen. Afterwards, presents, lavishly bestowed, to take away his guilt. At the moment he was too far gone, Stephen thought, to reproach him for all the days he had taken off lately. He knew better than to speak to him and went on upstairs to his upholstering which had rather mounted up during the past weeks.

It was cool in Whalbys’ works, almost windowless and in a corner of the square where the sun scarcely
penetrated. Dadda took himself off next door in the middle of the afternoon, and Stephen, who hadn’t stopped for lunch, thought he might as well go too. There was visiting at Hilderbridge General from three till five. After that he would go up on the moor and wait in the dale until dark. He would conceal himself as he had been doing for several evenings past in the George Crane Goe and wait, even if he had to wait until midnight, for the denizen of the chamber to appear. The moon was now beyond it first quarter and would offer partial light.

Half Market Square was in shadow, half in sunlight. Passing from the shadow into the light was a daunting experience, so hot and powerful was the sun. It was a screen of hot metal, dropped with a clang, that must be wrenched aside, it was a scorching breath on the skin. Stephen couldn’t remember such hot weather as this, such another August, unless it was when he was a child that first summer after his mother went and Rip came. There had been a heatwave then and another five years later when he was searching for Apsley Sough with Peter Naulls, but neither could have measured up to this one.

His car had been parked in the sun and the steering wheel was too hot to touch. He had to hold it with his handkerchief. He opened all the windows, looked at the very pale blue, white-hot sky. The drought had persisted for twenty days now and there were notices up telling people not to use hoses. Stephen drove along the High Street into North River Street and turned into the hospital car park.

It wasn’t until he was climbing the stairs which led to the geriatric wards that he remembered the jellies. He had forgotten to buy them and the nearest shops were half a mile away. It couldn’t be helped. There was just
a chance one of her other visitors had brought her jellies since last he had, though it seemed unlikely, they never did.

The old women were all up. With lolling heads, with gnarled hands clutching shawls and blankets to them — for the heat was nothing to them, their skins and veins impenetrable — they were bundled into chairs so that movement might be maintained and bed sores prevented. All the windows were wide open, the flowered curtains drawn back, and the heat shimmered in the long room as if the hospital stood on the brink of an open furnace.

Stephen saw from the doorway that his grandmother already had two visitors. His aunt Joan and presumably some friend of his aunt Joan’s. He wasn’t entirely sorry to see them, for alone he never knew what to say, and there was also the matter of the forgotten jellies.

As soon as she saw him Mrs Pettitt jumped to her feet. She and her companion and Helena Naulls were all sitting in chairs on this side of Helena’s bed but Mrs Pettitt alone was facing him. She jumped up and there came over her face a look of shock. It was rather a violent reaction to his unexpected arrival at four in the afternoon, but Stephen wasn’t much interested in Naulls behaviour, or in any human behaviour, come to that. He said, ‘Hello, Auntie Joan,’ and went up to kiss his grandmother.

She wasn’t one of those whose heads were lolling. There was far more life in her than when he had last seen her. She was leaning forward, both hands clasping the arms of the chair, and in her eyes, as he withdrew his face, he saw a gleam of malice so sharp that it made him step backwards. It was a gleam as cruel as any he had seen there in the old days at Chesney Lodge, and it was as if the senility which had brought to her a softening
and a sweetening of the personality had in a flash fallen away.

Before kissing her he had made some sort of apology for forgetting her jellies and now he thought that what he saw in that flat white face and small blue eyes was only simple anger. But from behind him there came a whispered, almost a whimpered, ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ from his aunt Joan, and he turned round. The other woman, a plump woman in her late fifties with hair dyed cornfield gold, was giggling the way schoolgirls do, holding a handkerchief up to her mouth.

Until then Mrs Naulls had remained silent, though eager in her silence, very nearly trembling as she clung to the chair and slipped forward on to the extreme edge of it. She seemed to be trying to speak, to be struggling to get the words out, but now she succeeded and uttered in a high cracked voice, brittle with malevolence, a typical Naulls phrase. For years, all his life, Stephen had known Naullses to telephone — if they had telephones — and ask you if you knew who this was, or to show you letters and ask you to guess who they were from. Now his grandmother said to him, ‘I don’t suppose you know who that is.’

The fat woman stopped laughing and covered her mouth entirely with her hand. The explaining was left to Mrs Pettitt who plunged into the middle of things.

‘You were the last person we expected to walk in at this hour, Stephen. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I mean, I didn’t even know they were coming till I got this cable, and then here she was,
and
Fred
and
Barbara. Well, of course she wanted to come in and see your nan first thing what with them all going off on this five-countries tour Saturday which is why they’re here at all. I mean, I don’t want you to think
you’d have been kept in the dark, it’s just that everything’s been like such a rush …’

He didn’t need her added, ‘… hasn’t it, Brenda?’ to know who it was. She was as fat as Helena had been before the processes of age had pared her down and shrivelled her. Now that she had moved her hand away he saw her face exactly like Helena’s, only a painted Helena, shaded in various beiges and touched up with scarlet and black. She wore a tight shiny jacket and skirt in some fussy, damask, transatlantic material with a frilly braid trimming, and in the armpits were spreading dark stains of sweat.