Master of the Moor (20 page)

His head ached. In spite of that, he didn’t dare stay in after having told his mother-in-law that he and Lyn were going to his uncle Stanley’s. He forced himself to put on a clean shirt and a jacket for the benefit of those watching on the opposite side of Tace Way, though there was no way of showing them Lyn. In the hall, just about to leave, he heard a click and then a faint clatter from the back door and he jumped, almost crying out. It was only Peach, letting himself in through the cat flap, leaving small, dainty, wet footprints across the tiles. Stephen got into the car and drove away, very conscious of being alone and of being seen to be alone.

When he started off he had no idea where to go, but once he was driving through the village he felt an urge that was nearly irresistible to take the road that led past Knamber Foin and over the old pony level. It would be madness to do that. Later, anyone who had driven along that road would be questioned as to what cars they had seen. He felt pulled towards the place, though, teased by a nervous desire to see if the body were still there, to push it deeper into the tunnel, to cover it, even to remove it, take it away and deposit it elsewhere.

He got as far as Thirlton, parking where he had done on the previous night, near the village hall. He
would not go on
. With all his strength he would resist this compulsion. He would sit here in the car for an hour, two hours. Two hours would be enough for this supposed social call, surely. For just that length of time he would stay here, stick it out and wait, and then he would go back and take the phone off the hook and lock the back door and bolt the front door.

With the engine off, it was cold in the car like winter. The rainswept moor rolled away to the right of him, blending without visible demarcation into the rolling grey sky. He thought of running away. He could lock up the house, take the car and go away somewhere. There was money in his bank account, about five hundred pounds. If he made up his mind now he could even take the body with him, retrieve it tonight, drive south …

Anything to escape the questioning and probing of Lyn’s family. He had never thought much about it before, but now he realized how much he hated Lyn’s family, indistinguishable from Naullses, Naullses all. A race of creatures set on this earth to frustrate and torment him. What was he going to say next time they asked him where she was? He couldn’t run away, he could never leave this place. He could no more imagine life without the moor than he could without one of his limbs or his eyes.

The ceaseless rain drove him to despair. It streamed down the windows of the car, having a claustrophobic effect, something he had never felt down in the mine, in Rip’s Cavern. Suppose Lyn’s mother phoned uncle Stanley? She might, she was capable of it. They had known each other all their lives, Lyn’s father and Stanley Naulls had been at school together. What was he
going to say when he got back and Mrs Newman came over and asked where Lyn was?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning. I don’t know where she’s gone. She never came back from Hilderbridge. Stephen turned all these hopeless responses over in his mind, and out of the mělée of them came one that wasn’t hopeless. It came to him gently and clearly and seemed to hang trembling, waiting for him to seize it.

He did so and repeated the words to himself: I don’t know where she is, she’s left me.

Something had stopped him thinking about the events of yesterday morning, something which that idiot Trevor would no doubt have called an emotional block. He had blanked them out of his memory without apparent will or effort. But now he forced himself to remember what Lyn had said to him that had led to his striking her and her breaking the bust of Tace. Not what had led to his killing her, that had been something different, something beyond analysis. He had struck Lyn because she had been unfaithful to him. Therefore there must be some other man.

Stephen hadn’t given this a thought until now. That she had somehow cheated him, that she was going to have a child and bring it into his home, these things had been enough. But now, warily, he turned his mind to that shadowy figure, Lyn’s Lover. He didn’t know much about this sort of thing, it had never interested him. He had supposed it would never concern him. But he had been unable to escape noticing that marriages broke up, men left their homes with other women, women theirs with other men. Why shouldn’t he say that this was what Lyn had done? Why not tell her mother that
Lyn had left him in order to go and live with this other man?

Indeed, if he hadn’t intervened it might have been true. The man must exist. When Lyn’s body was found it would be assumed that she had left Tace Way on Saturday morning to join him in, say, Hilderbridge and, having missed her bus, had accepted a lift …

Stephen started the car and put on the windscreen wipers. The clear arcs they made in the streaming glass showed him the sun setting in red streaks through splits in the cloud. He would go back home, no one would expect him to stay out visiting when his wife had just left him. Reversing, starting back, he began to rehearse the words he would use.

It was a relief to be in the house again. He put on the lights and left the curtains open and awaited the arrival of Mrs Newman. Peach came over to him, hoping perhaps to sit on his lap as he had so often sat on Lyn’s. Stephen pushed him away lightly with his toe. There was a book lying on the chestnut leaf table which made that inaccessible too, so Peach sat in an armchair, looking offended and uneasy. He was waiting for Lyn, Stephen thought, but it hardly mattered, his days were numbered, his hours even.

It was only nine o’clock. He switched on the television and found a channel with some news on it. There was nothing about Vangmoor murders, Lyn’s body hadn’t been found. Stephen began to wonder why Mrs Newman didn’t come. She could see he was back, she must want to see Lyn as much as ever, must even by now be growing anxious about her. He thought of going across the road and volunteering the information about Lyn’s leaving him, but on reflection it seemed an unwise move. It seemed to him not quite in his own character.

Instead he went into his study and tried to finish the article he had been writing for this week’s ‘Voice of Vangmoor’. He had unlocked the back door but even so he left the study door open so that he wouldn’t miss the sound of a knock or ring. After a while he went across the passage and looked across the street from his bedroom window. The Simpsons’ bedroom lights were on and the lights elsewhere in the house had all gone off. The curtains were drawn across the Newmans’ living-room window but through them he could see the light still on and the bluish glow of the television screen.

Back in the study he found it hard to concentrate. Why had they made three or four attempts to get hold of Lyn during the afternoon and then, in the evening, abruptly stopped? Suppose they suspected him of killing her and were keeping quiet over there, lying low, because they had told the police of their suspicions?

That was impossible. Why should they suspect him? It was more likely that they were simply offended. But their silence, their non-appearance, he began to find more disquieting than answering any questions of theirs could have been. At twenty past ten the downstairs lights in the Newmans’ house went out and the landing and bedroom lights came on. Stephen was staring out with the light on behind him, when suddenly Mrs Newman’s face appeared between her parted bedroom curtains. They looked at each other, their eyes meeting. Then Mrs Newman blanked out her window by jerking the curtains together, but Stephen had had a distinct impression, from the brief glimpse he had of her face, that she was very angry and aggrieved and that she had looked at him as at someone particularly blameworthy.

He couldn’t sleep. As he lay down in the dark his body began to jump and there were stars and floaters
before his eyes. He thought how terrible it would be if he were to fall asleep and be awakened by a thundering on the front door, if he were to creep out of bed with pounding heart and see the police car outside, its lights blazing, Manciple and Troth at the gate. He couldn’t sleep but he was uneasy about turning his bedlamp on. Just as he could see Newman and Simpson lights from his side of the road so they could see his from theirs. He wanted to lie lower than they, to lie so low, if only that were possible, as utterly to be swallowed up in the earth and hidden.

But in the small hours he couldn’t stand it any longer. He got up and walked about the house, made himself tea, tried to read, tried even to complete his piece for the
Echo
. ‘After such a deluge as we have seen in these past days, a considerable greening of the moor may be expected to take place …’ The paint on Tace was dry, he looked as good as new. It had stopped raining and as the dawn came the sky was brindled in many shades of grey.

Stephen went back to bed then, but he lay sleepless and at eight he got up again. This was going to be another of those days he took off work. He felt ill and worn. If Mrs Newman didn’t come across the road in the next half-hour he would go to her. Had he ever before done that of his own volition? Probably not, but these were exceptional circumstances. His wife had left him. Have you heard from Lyn? We’ve split up, she’s left me, gone off with some man she says she’s in love with. Did that sound right? A frightening thought came to him. If Lyn really were alive, if she really had left him, wouldn’t she have told her mother? Wouldn’t she have got in touch with her?

The cat made him jump by coming in through the flap with all the bursting suddenness of a circus animal
leaping through a paper hoop. A dog would have made it plain he was looking for Lyn, would have run into corners, poked under furniture, sniffed at doors. Peach walked sedately through the rooms with tail erect, hardly moving his round handsome head, hardly vibrating a whisker. He made a graceful leap on to the window sill to watch for Lyn to come from inside or out. Wouldn’t Mrs Newman wonder that Lyn had gone and not taken Peach with her?

It got to nine and no one had come. Stephen tried to phone Dadda to say he was ill, he had a virus infection, but Dadda didn’t answer. He saw Kevin go off to work, he saw Mr Newman go. At 9.15 Joanne came out of her front door, pushing a high-sprung shining white pram which she put on the front lawn. Stephen put on his walking boots and his zipper jacket. As he came out of his house Mrs Newman came out of hers and hesitated on the step, looking towards him. What happened next made his heart lurch. She shrugged her shoulders, slowly turned her back and went indoors again.

Stephen forced himself to continue down to the gate, to close the gate after him, to walk along Tace Way and into the village. There was a roaring in his head that seemed to get in the way of coherent thought. And his legs felt flaccid, boneless. Once or twice even he found himself stumbling on the smooth dry road. Again, though, difficult as walking was, awkward as that most familiar and satisfying of all his activities had become, he found himself being drawn a great distance, being compelled to that part of the moor where Lyn’s body was. His awkward stumbling walk was leading him in the direction of Bow Dale and Knamber Foin.

After the crossroads he moved in among the birch trees. He refused to lift his eyes to the ridged, boulder-strewn summit of the foin or the grey-green sweep of
the dale beyond it. It was here that he had seen Rip, for the first and only time, seen him dancing to entice him. Stephen felt that Rip would know what to do, if only he were here, if only he would come out into the open and join with him and be his friend. Act normally, Stephen thought, was what Rip would surely say, for that must be what he himself did when he had done his murders and after spending a night in the mine, returned to his blameless and respectable life as a citizen of the Three Towns. Act as if you knew nothing. In your case, act as if your wife had really left you and gone away you don’t know where.

Stephen wandered among the trees whose leaves, no matter how still the day, were always faintly and delicately tremulous. He leaned against one of them, resting himself, supporting his arms on its thready thin branches, for it was too damp to sit down. The pale trembling leaves and his own pale face were reflected in the pools of water which lay everywhere between the tree roots and the hussocks of grass. So far, perhaps, he had acted normally. For someone like him it would
be
normal not to go crying to his wife’s relatives, to lie to them even, to wait until they asked him directly before confessing she had left him for another man. Fear began to trickle off him like sweat. He felt cooler, cleaner, freer. Being on the moor always made him feel better. Last night, hadn’t the atmosphere of the moor at Thirlton positively saved him from losing his mind? He hung against the tree, closing his eyes, resting there, inhaling the clean green scent of the leaves and grass with raindrops on them.

And the rain began again as he came out of the Banks of Knamber and began to walk back. A gentle warm rain it was, dropping out of the thousands upon thousands of tiny white clouds that streamed across the sky
like galaxies. He walked slowly, lifting his face to the rain. No one would suspect him, even though he had been Lyn’s husband, for this murder was so obviously another of Rip’s murders, the victim lying as before within the confines of one of the landmarks of the moor, her death the result of strangling, her long fair hair cut off close. And he couldn’t be Rip, his blood was wrong. Alike though they were, with the same love of the moor, of solitude, of adventure, strong tall men of power and endurance, yet there was this tiny difference of blood between them. Brothers they might be, but not quite twins. Their blood was slightly differently constituted, and that would save him.

Now, he thought, he could sleep. He could eat something and lie down on the bed and sleep peacefully and innocently. Tomorrow when he was rested and fit again he would go back to work. Perhaps Lyn’s body would never be found, perhaps as time went by there would be nothing left of it but the bones and these would gradually crumble and dissolve until they became one with the stony surface of the moor …