Master of the Moor (3 page)

The wind had dropped and a cold whitish mist from the river lingered in patches. Lyn walked across the cobbles and over the Old Town bridge. This morning the water was clear and silvery, chuckling a little as it lapped over the smooth, oval, brown stones. A pair of swans drifted down towards the town centre.

She was early for work as usual because Dadda liked Stephen to be in soon after nine. She whiled away time walking along the Mootwalk, an ancient wooden cloister that faced the Hilder and under which was a row of shops: an optician’s, a hairdresser’s, a wine shop, a jeans and sweater boutique, a newsagent, the pet shop. There was a pale green sweater in the window of Lorraine’s she thought she might buy. That sort of green, a clear, pale jade, was her colour. The newsagent’s Sunday paper placard was still outside: ‘Local Girl in Moors Murder’.

A few cars passed along the cobbles or parked, a few people on foot were on their way to work, not many. The great influx would be north of the river, the other side of town where Cartwright-Cageby’s mill employed 60 per cent of the working population of Hilderbridge. Down here it was always quieter, it was older, it was peaceful. The ramparts of the moor could be seen in the distance, its peaks blurred against a leaden sky, their lower slopes wrapped in mist.

Lights came on in the Mootwalk shops as one by one they began to open. Out of the pet shop window a cat looked at Lyn with champagne-coloured eyes. It was in a wire pen on top of some tortoises and under a pair of lop-eared rabbits. The cat looked at Lyn and opened its mouth in a soundless mew.

Lyn didn’t much like the old man who kept the shop. He ogled her and once he had come out and asked her if she would like a dear little puppy dog to keep her warm in the night. He wasn’t there this morning. Instead, there was a man of about her own age, no older, tidying up the cartons of fish food on a shelf behind the counter. She pushed the door and went in.

‘I’ve been looking at the cat in your window.’

He came out to her. ‘Attractive colour, isn’t it?’

‘I wanted a ginger kitten, but it’s not exactly ginger.’

‘More beige, wouldn’t you say? Or even peach. It’s not a kitten either, it’s more than half-grown. Someone brought it in on Saturday and said she had to go to Africa and would I take it.’

Lyn was indignant. ‘That’s awful, taking it to a pet shop. You wouldn’t know who might buy it. It would be kinder to have it put down.’

‘Oh, come. Not this pet shop. Not under my management.’

Lyn glanced up at him. She had trained herself not to look at men, a restraint that wasn’t difficult to practise in this case. He was rather nondescript, not very tall, thin, mousy-haired, as unlike dark handsome Stephen as could be. But what on earth made her compare them?

‘Are you the manager? What’s happened to Mr Bale?’

‘In hospital, having a hernia operation. I’m his nephew. I’m looking after things for him.’ The cat
mewed, not soundlessly this time. He opened the pen and lifted it out in his arms. ‘He’s a fine healthy cat, a neutered tom. I’d estimate his age at around nine months.’

‘I wanted a kitten,’ Lyn said. ‘Isn’t it strange the way everyone’s got kittens to dispose of when you don’t want them and none when you do?’

‘Have this one and save him from a fate worse than death.’

Lyn held the cat. It felt tense and afraid. Its eyes seemed to her full of tragic puzzlement. She made up her mind quickly, the way she always did. ‘I will have him,’ she said. ‘I can’t take him now, though. I have to go to work, Gillman’s the optician’s. I’ll come back at one when I finish.’

She phoned Stephen.

‘How much does he want for it?’

‘D’you know, I didn’t ask.’

‘Never mind, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘as long as it’s what you want. You’re to have just what you want.’

He went back to the armchairs. Dadda wouldn’t have a phone extension upstairs, preferring to summon him with a shout when it rang. He got his way in most things, had despotically guided Stephen’s life, had chosen Lyn for him, before that had picked him out of this school, pushed him into that, as soon as he could removed him altogether from academic threat. Stephen would have liked further education, though he hadn’t expected Oxford or Cambridge or even, say, Nottingham. He would have settled for Hilderbridge College of Technology. If he had fought Dadda, with the backing of the school and the rumblings there had been about court orders to override parents, if he had struggled, he could have got there. But he never fought Dadda. He had left school willingly, or very nearly,
glad to be pleasing Dadda, rewarded with a secondhand motor bike and next year a car, and had learnt Whalbys’ trade. Or learnt some of it. He would never be able to do what Dadda could, those exquisite inlays, that delicate carving, achieving that mirror polish, and all with hands like a gorilla’s paws. His heart wasn’t in it. He could drive the van and upholster a settee.

He had started on the second chair when Dadda shouted up the stairs.

‘Stephen!’

‘What is it, Dadda?’ The phone again?

‘Some woman says she’s from the paper. You can bloody come down and see to it.’

Stephen felt embarrassed that this woman, a
Three Towns Echo
reporter presumably, should have heard him call Dadda by the shameful name. He went down quickly. Dadda was back at his polishing, making figures of eight on the already brilliantly lustrous surface of a mahogany dining table with french polish on a knob of wadded lint. He had turned his back. The reporter was a young girl in denim dungarees and a bright red knitted coat. She had a red woolly hat pulled down round her ears.

‘Mr Whalby? You’re the Mr Stephen Whalby who writes “Voice of Vangmoor” for us, aren’t you?’

Stephen had thought of describing his discovery of Marianne Price’s body in this week’s column. It was due in tomorrow and he planned to write it tonight. The girl reporter said this wouldn’t really do. What they wanted was a news interview with him. He felt disappointed because writing ‘Voice of Vangmoor’ was the only money-making activity he did that he enjoyed, and this would have been more enjoyable than usual, a piece of real journalism as against the usual pedestrian stuff about the view from the top of Big Allen or hearing
the first cuckoo. But this girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three was going to do it, not he. It was rather indifferently that he described to her his walk, his find, his leading of the police to the spot.

The girl took it down in speedwriting, not proper shorthand. ‘When she didn’t come home on Friday night,’ she said, ‘her parents thought she was staying with her boyfriend and the boyfriend thought she was at home with her parents.’

‘A bit too permissive, those sort of parents,’ said Stephen.

‘Oh, well. He was her fiancé. They were going to get married in June.’

‘Maybe if they’d postponed living together till they
were
married, she’d be alive now.’

‘That’s a bit hard, Mr Whalby. Anyway, you can’t say that, you can’t know. If her parents had reported her missing the night before she’d still have been dead, wouldn’t she?’

The girl was getting belligerent. She probably lived that sort of life herself, Stephen thought. ‘What’s the fiancé called?’ he asked.

‘Ian Stringer. He lives in Byss.’

‘I was at school with an Ian Stringer,’ said Stephen. ‘I wonder if it’s the same one.’

‘He’s about your age.’ The girl put away her notebook. ‘We’d like to send a photographer to take your picture. Will that be okay? Around twelve?’

Stephen said it would, though Dadda’s mood wouldn’t be improved by it. He saw the girl out and put the bar up across the double doors.

‘Bloody keep off the moor in future,’ said Dadda. ‘Keep your feet under your own table.’

* * *

The receptionist who took over from Lyn in the afternoons came into the cloakroom where she was putting her coat on.

‘There’s a man who says his name’s Nick Frazer asking for you. The girl with the beautiful hair, he said.’ She giggled. ‘He’s brought you a cat.’

Lyn reddened at the description of herself. She took off her scarf and tied it round her head, and then thought better of it — why allow herself to be provoked? She put the scarf back round her neck and went through to the shop. Nick Frazer was standing just inside the street door, holding a wicker basket with a barred opening in it.

‘I thought you’d like to have this basket to take him home in.’

Between the bars wary golden eyes stared out.

‘It’s very kind of you.’ She undid the lid of the basket. The cat made no attempt to get out. She stroked the soft, thick fur which felt warm, though the cat was trembling. Like me, I shake like that sometimes, Lyn thought. ‘He’s very afraid,’ she said.

‘He’ll be all right with you. You’ll bring the basket back, won’t you?’

The way he said it, it was as if he was only lending it to her in order to have her bring it back again, but she was forced to agree. ‘How much is he?’

‘I’d like to give him to you. I didn’t pay the Africa lady anything but I ought to make a bit for Uncle Jim. Shall we say two quid?’

Lyn gave him two pounds. She closed the lid of the basket.

‘Do you have a long way to go?’

‘Not really,’ Lyn said, then briskly, ‘Goodbye.’

The Hilderbridge to Jackley bus was three-quarters empty. Lyn took the cat out of the basket and held it
against her. I shall call you Peach, she thought. The trembling had stopped, though the cat didn’t yet purr. It occurred to her that the way she was holding Peach was the way a woman holds a baby and she lowered him gently into her lap.

Taking care not to swing the basket, she got off outside the gate of St Michael-in-the-Moor and walked across the green. Police cars and police vans were parked everywhere. Just inside the gates of Chesney Hall was the lodge where Stephen’s grandmother had lived. Police had taken it over as an emergency headquarters. She could see lights on inside and men moving about, and as she stood there a policeman in uniform came out of the front door. Pinned to the gate, poster-sized, was a blown-up snapshot of a blonde girl not unlike Lyn herself, a girl with a vulnerable face, tender and a little melancholy, a girl who wore her long fair hair like a cloak.

Lyn put her free hand up to touch her own hair. When she realized what she was doing and that those policemen might have seen her, she felt her face grow hot. She turned away and carrying the basket with great care, walked on up the road to Tace Way.

‘
Bumble bees
are appearing in large numbers,’ Stephen wrote, beginning his fourth paragraph, ‘due, most probably, to the exceptional mildness of the past winter. Few, however, will escape the predatory beaks of our Vangmoor songsters, bent upon feeding their young. Let us hope that this year we shall see an increase in the butterfly population, notably that rare member of the family
Lycaenidae
, known as the Foinland Blue.’ That would do. He finished off. ‘Next week I shall be writing about moorland walks and suggesting an itinerary that takes in the ever-attractive Tower Foin.’

In the morning he would drop it into the
Echo
office on his way to the inquest. ‘Ever-attractive’ didn’t sound very good. What he really meant was that Tower Foin exercised a perennial attraction, drawing people by its
beauty and its majesty, but he couldn’t say all that. It would have to stand. Nothing he ever wrote came near to conveying to the reader the way the moor really was or the way he felt about it. The grandeur of the moor, its wildness, its timelessness and peace, seemed to get lost in his prose. He didn’t know why because he took pains and there was no doubt of his writing talent. This particular inheritance was as striking as his physical resemblance to Tace. Perhaps the articles turned out badly because his heart wasn’t really in that kind of parish pump, chatty writing. It would have been a different matter if they had let him write his own account of what he had found at the Foinmen.

He clipped the sheets together and put them into an envelope. Then he put the cover back on the typewriter and tidied up, lining up the pile of sheets of A4 bank paper and his box of carbons with the edges of the desk. Might as well put the butterfly book back in its proper place. He had more than three hundred books on his shelves now; everything that had ever been written about Vangmoor, of course, its history, geology, geography, wild life; all his old school textbooks, all the adventure stories of his boyhood. He didn’t know why he kept them really, except that they helped to make up the number on the shelves. In pride of place were the Bleakland novels,
Quenild Manor
,
The Mountainside
,
Elizabeth Nevil
,
Wrenwood
,
Lady Irene
,
Last Loves
. Stephen had them in the handsome, leather-bound edition of the International Collectors’ Library and also in the paperbacks that had come out to go with the television series. His study, which was in fact the second bedroom, was acquiring an important, even scholarly, appearance. On one wall was a big map of Vangmoor, on another a print of the only painting Constable had ever done of the moor, Loomlade church with Big Allen behind.
His paperweight and doorstop were of ground and polished foinstone. The calendar was the one produced by the
Echo
, ‘Moorland Views’, turned now for April, by the purest coincidence, to a photograph of the Foinmen at sunset.

On a small round table, polished for him by Dadda, was a bust of Tace. The bust looked like bronze if you didn’t examine it too closely. In fact it was papier-mâché on which someone had done a skilful paint job. Stephen still remembered the delight he had felt when, wandering through Jackley market, he had come upon the bust on a junk stall. He could have sworn, though it sounded silly, that Tace’s eyes with their hooded, ironical gaze, had compelled him to approach, and Tace’s mobile lips had adjured him, ‘Buy me!’ Only £1.50, it was almost laughable. Although the room and the whole house was full of really good stuff made or renovated by Dadda, secretly he valued nothing more than this bust. Its features, high, intellectual forehead, straight nose, long upper lip and fine-cut mouth, were so absolutely his own that he wondered others didn’t remark on it.