Master of the Moor (8 page)

He kissed her. He smoothed her hair back and held it
and kissed her, tenderly, then harder, and this time when his mouth opened into hers she didn’t pull away. Her heart had been beating fast and her hands were shaking, but as he kissed her and his body pressed close against hers, the length of his body hard against hers, those signs of fear gradually ceased and she grew weak and curiously fluid in his arms. He put his hands on her breasts and she made a little soft sound.

The sun on the river threw reflections across the bedroom ceiling, down the wall. The ripple reflections moved in a continuous, tiny fluttering. They danced over Lyn’s body as she undressed, over lean, brown Nick, waiting for her. Her arms felt languorous, her flesh soft and relaxed as if she had just awakened from sleep. He felt with his hands the smooth, sleepy flesh and she took his mouth on hers, himself into her.

With pain. She twisted her face away and kept herself from crying out. Her body went as taut as a bowstring, and when she opened her eyes and looked into his face she saw there awestricken astonishment. He lay still inside her. And then, for his sake, she did what she had read should be done: raised her legs and arched her back and held him embraced and reached her mouth to his, and began to enjoy what she did. To enjoy as much as she was going to for this time, she knew that, and she smiled and held him and kissed him when she felt the convulsion and heard his breath released. The quivering net of light from the river seemed now to have set the whole room trembling. Down in the Mootwalk a woman laughed and from the water a swan gave its harsh, grating cry.

Nick, holding her, said quietly, ‘That was the first time for you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve never understood,’ she said, ‘but there it is. Doctors are only of use if a — a person wants to be cured.’ She was very near to crying. She sat up and wrapped her arms round her knees, her hair falling round her like a cloak. He said nothing. She thought that if he said the wrong thing now everything would be over for her and him. And she was so used to the wrong things being said, to her tactless family, a mother and sister who shouted where angels feared to whisper, to Stephen and his inept words. If Nick made the mildest joke about virginity, about his luck, about impotence, about needing to eat after their exertions, she would dress and run away and it would all be over. She turned to him in despair and the tears were running down her face.

He took no notice of them. His eyes were half-closed and he was smiling a little.

‘Go to sleep with me for a while,’ he said, and he took her gently into his arms. He didn’t say he loved her but, ‘I think we’re going to love each other, Lyn.’

From the pulled and sagging pockets of his jacket, his Sunday-go-to-meetings suit, his only suit, Dadda produced a cairngorm and silver ring for Lyn and a pearl-handled Stilton knife for Stephen. Though they might have forgotten that the following day would be the sixth anniversary of their engagement, he with his prodigious memory had not.

‘It was me brought you together,’ he said as they thanked him. ‘But for me I don’t reckon you’d ever have set eyes on each other.’

It was true. He had more or less arranged their marriage, Lyn sometimes thought. Her first job on leaving school had been at Whalbys’. She had been a clerk-receptionist-phone-answerer-tea-maker and she had
got the job through her uncle Bob who was as near to being a friend of Thomas Whalby’s as it was possible to be. He had never employed a girl before or since and now it seemed to Lyn that Dadda had hand-picked her for Stephen without the knowledge of either of them. Young, innocent, they had been malleable in those hands which were so practised in making something valuable out of raw or damaged material.

Dadda, having scrutinized his previous gift, the chestnut leaf table, for white rings, cigarette burns or dust in the carving, shambled about the room examining the legs of furniture. Although he didn’t say so, Lyn knew he was looking for the marks of Peach’s claws. Peach, who often sat on the chestnut leaf table, marking it no more than if he had been a fluffy cushion or a nightdress-case cat, watched gravely from the basket in which he was wise enough to sit when at home on Sundays. Lyn put the ring on and said it was a perfect fit.

‘Ah, I had the size of your pretty fingers by heart,’ said Dadda who was adept at making one feel a heel.

Trevor Simpson came in later and Lyn’s uncle Bob as well as the rest of them. There were hardly enough chairs to go round. Dadda withdrew into a corner, drawing up his spider legs. Uncle Bob said he could remember, from when they were boys, Tom had never been keen on cats.

‘A mild form of ailurophobia,’ said Trevor.

‘Look, lad,’ said Dadda, ‘I don’t have nothing mild. I don’t have nothing bloody
mild
.’

Joanne, vast, out of hospital the day before, sat eating chocolate biscuits.

‘If you go on like that,’ said Kevin, ‘you’ll be back in there before the week’s out.’

‘It’s not food, it’s fluid. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you five thousand times, it’s all fluid.’

‘Chocolate’s poison to horses, did you know that? It’s got some substance in it, theo-something. Racehorses have been known to die of eating chocolate.’

‘You mean me and racehorses have got something in common?’

‘There was a woman lived in Hall cottages when you girls were little,’ said Mrs Newman, ‘used to feed her family on cat food. Out of tins, I mean. She used to give them Pedigree Chum too, but it was mostly cat food. She liked the fishiness.’

‘No thanks, Lyn,’ said her father, ‘I won’t have another sandwich.’

‘And she had this baby and it had a birthmark like a cat’s face on its stomach.’

‘Ours’ll have a Mars bar.’

‘I’ve no doubt it’s true,’ said Trevor. ‘Could be a rare form of imprinting, could even be stigmata.’

Peach jumped up onto Lyn’s lap. He lay there, purring. His pale golden, ringed tail hung down and sometimes the tip of it twitched. Dadda was the first to leave. He hadn’t come in the van. Bob Newman offered him a lift but he wouldn’t accept it, he said he would get the bus. Joanne and her mother lingered, gossiping, by their adjoining gates as if they wouldn’t see each other again for half a year. Lyn washed the dishes. She got out the mower to cut the back lawn.

‘I say, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit, blow the cobwebs away.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’

His eyes became opaque. She could see he didn’t want her. ‘That wouldn’t be much fun for you. You have a rest, put your feet up.’

Was she still trying to retrieve something? Still hoping for something from him? ‘I’m twenty-five,’ she
said, with the edge to her voice that was the nearest she got to temper.

‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you look tired. Why don’t you go out somewhere? Take the car.’

‘Perhaps I will.’ She seemed to hear Nick’s voice saying, We are going to love each other.

‘All right if I’m not back till late, then?’ Stephen said, eager for her approval.

‘Of course it’s all right, of course.’

He set off jauntily, whistling. Golden eyes looked at him from among the leaves of the yellow maple tree where Peach sat cleverly camouflaged. Stephen walked along the Jackley road, past the crossroads and up to the Vale of Allen. It had been a white day, white blank sky, white thin sun, warmish and dull. The sky was white and still, unmarked by cloud or blue.

A car was parked by the roadside, on the left hand side and facing north. Stephen thought it a curious place to leave one’s car, blocking, or partly blocking, the northbound roadway, while taking it a farther ten yards on would have enabled its driver to pull in onto the bridlepath that traversed the Vale as far as the Reeve’s Way. The car was a small yellow Volkswagen. Stephen couldn’t see a sign of its owner. The land here was dotted about with gorse bushes and he half-expected a dog to come bounding out from among them. But apart from the gentle, almost mesmeric, hum of the bees, all was silent and still.

He climbed up on to the Reeve’s Way and followed it northwards into Goughdale. The owner of the car was nowhere to be seen, nowhere in all these wide plains that lay about him, though the car was still there, a bright yellow dot on the distant road. The causeway commanded a view of all this region of the moor, but
once he had jumped down and was in the shallow bowl of Goughdale, he could see nothing except the remains of surface workings and the louring slopes of Big Allen.

It took him nearly two hours to find the hole into the mine. His memory had played him false. He thought he could remember that he and Peter had fastened their rope to a spur or spike of rock and accordingly it was for such a feature that he searched. But the limestone took no such jagged form in the area where he knew the sough must be located, it was smooth and curved. He found instead the only possible protuberance to which they could safely have anchored their rope. This was in the slope of the mountainside above the shelf and below the scree on which Peter had slipped. He crawled along the shelf, peering, feeling with his hands. And there it was — a long way from where he remembered it, quite differently sited, but there beyond a doubt, a cleft into the foot of the mountain under a pendulous lip of stone.

He lay down and looked in. There was nothing more interesting to be seen than if this had been the entrance to a rabbit warren, nothing but a tunnel that led down into darkness. It smelt of earth. He got to his feet again and walked back across Goughdale, pausing at each ruin of a mine building to check if any more entrances to the underground workings remained unblocked. The George Crane Mine, the Duke of Kelsey’s, the Goughdale. He had looked before, of course, he and Peter had looked, and years later he had once more investigated the rough hillocky ground, but then and now he found nothing. The mines were dangerous, the mines were not to be left open as an invitation to any foolhardy visitor. He had found, and rediscovered, what was almost certainly the only inlet remaining accessible to that network of subterranean passages, galleries
and chambers, that other world beneath the moor.

The sun had set and dusk was closing in. Stephen would have preferred to walk back across the Vale of Allen and Foinmen’s Plain but he had no torch and tonight there would only be a thin, new moon. So he made for the Jackley road from which nearly all the traffic had now disappeared.

He was surprised to see the yellow car still there. It had been parked on that spot for at least three hours, probably much longer, for whoever had parked it had very likely done so before the evening traffic build-up. People who wanted to get rid of old cars sometimes dumped them on the moor, the kind of behaviour that maddened Stephen. But this car wasn’t of that sort. From its registration number it was only three years old, and it looked well-kept, the front tyres were new. He looked through the windscreen and then through the driver’s window. A knitted sweater of cream wool hung across the back of the passenger seat and there was a striped silk scarf, cream, red and black, on the dashboard shelf. The driver’s window was partly open. He tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. Once he had opened the door, though, there seemed nothing to do but close it again.

The owner must be somewhere about. It could only be someone who had gone for a marathon walk or a solitary picnicker who had lain down and fallen asleep. But as he passed the crossroads and came to that part of the road that wound down into Chesney he couldn’t help recalling the man he had seen skipping among the trees. He looked long and searchingly at the Banks of Knamber that tonight were as they had been then before the moon rose, grey and pale as a sky dotted with
tiny black clouds. But tonight there was no one among the trees.

In the morning he picked up the van in Hilderbridge and drove to Jackley the long way round through Byss, having a newly upholstered chaise longue to deliver before he made the Jackley collection. His last call would be in Trinity Road, Hilderbridge, so he stopped at a confectioners and bought a box of fruit jellies. It was a day of white sky, ground mist, chilly, an expectant day, waiting for the sun to come through.

The soft, thin mist gave to the foins a mysterious air. Their peaks seemed to float above the ground. Stephen drove south by the main road and as he came through Goughdale it occurred to him that the yellow Volkswagen might still be there. It was. He saw the spot of bright buttercup colour as he rounded the last curve before the crossroads. But the car was no longer the only vehicle parked there. It had gathered to itself, in the still white mist, on the verge of the Vale of Allen, half a dozen more cars and a large van. Stephen slowed down. Two of the cars were police cars, marked Police and with blue lamps. A man in a raincoat was standing by the rear of the Volkswagen while another was squatting down, peering underneath it.

Stephen pulled in on the opposite side of the road. He got down from the cab. He could see now that there was a driver in each of the police cars. He went across the road. Immediately the standing man called out to him, ‘Nothing for you to bother about, sir, thank you very much. This is a police matter.’

It was Detective Sergeant Troth. He appeared to recognize Stephen as quickly as Stephen recognized him, but the dark wedge face registered this only in a tightening of the mouth and a jerk of the chin. It was the
other man, who rose now from his squatting position to be identified as Inspector Manciple, who spoke to him.

‘Good morning. It’s Mr Whalby, isn’t it?’

Stephen nodded. ‘There hasn’t been another — any trouble, has there?’

Troth said gruffly, ‘What d’you mean, trouble?’

‘To be frank with you,’ said Manciple, ‘there’s a young woman missing from Jackley. A married woman. This is her car.’

‘And you think …?’

‘We don’t think anything,’ said Troth in his flat Three Towns accent. His face, Stephen noticed, was badly marked with acne as if he were still in his teens, though he was years older than that. ‘Not yet we don’t,’ he said. ‘We don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘In the normal course of things we’d not treat such a disappearance seriously.’ Manciple sounded as if he were apologizing for the other man’s rudeness. He had a conciliatory air and he looked uneasy when Troth turned his back. ‘Only after what you found back in April, things aren’t normal. There’s a couple of search parties organized. I daresay you can make out one of them up across the Vale there.’