Midnight Sun (20 page)

"Fancy a trip to the moors?"

"Do you mean what I think you mean?"

"I've just had a call from Richmond. Someone who's supposed to have come over here yesterday for a walk and a clamber has been reported missing by his family. He didn't bother to let us know what he was doing," Sally added with a sigh. "Four of us should be enough to be going on with if we start from High Ridge and work our way down either side in twos."

"I'll meet you as soon as I've got my togs on, shall I?"

"Lucy's coming in on her day off. She'll be here in five minutes and then I'll pick you up."

Ellen had pulled on her waterproofs and was lacing up her boots when she heard the Landrover approaching along the track. She zipped up the pocket in which she'd put her compass in case the weather grew opaque, and went to find Ben. He'd opened the blinds and was dawdling over his breakfast, staring out of the kitchen window at the woods, whose burden of snow made the treetrunks look as black as the depths of the forest. "Someone's missing on the moors," she told him. "If I'm not back in time you'll be here to collect the children, won't you?"

"I'll be here."

She kissed him on the forehead. "You'd better be, for me."

Sally was turning the Landrover. Ellen ran through the churned slush and hoisted herself into the passenger seat as Sally set the wipers squealing back and forth on the windscreen before she drove down the track. She was a muscular redhead with a wide face which always looked humorous because of her lopsided mouth. "Did I interrupt anything?" she said. Don t worry.

"You wouldn't tell me if I had, would you? My niece says you're one of the stars of the college. Just you make sure you appreciate yourself."

She swung the vehicle onto the road in a flurry of slush and drove alongside the railway line, all traces of which had been erased by snow. An older Landrover was waiting outside the tourist information centre. Les Barns, who sold climbing equipment in the centre, was behind the wheel, and Frank from the butcher's was next to him. The walkie-talkie on Sally's lap cleared its throat as she drove up. "Men and their toys," she murmured to Ellen as Les said "Testing, testing."

"Head for the heights," Sally told him.

As she drove onto the moor the houses seemed to sink into the snow. She had reached the lowest crags when the green Stargrave bus appeared in the distance. The walkie-talkie spluttered. "Bus coming," Les announced.

"Thank you, Les. We had noticed."

When the meandering road eventually brought the bus and her Landrover face to face, Sally flashed her headlights. The driver slid his window open and leaned out of the cab, a frown supplementing the wrinkles of his weathered forehead. "There's a car abandoned just over the ridge."

"Did you happen to notice the number, Tom?"

"I did." He dug in his breast pocket and produced a tattered notepad no bigger than the palm of his hand. Licking his thumb, he leafed through the pad as though he was dealing cards. "There you are, you little bugger," he muttered at last, and read Sally the registration number. "Any help to you?"

"I'm afraid so. Thanks, Tom."

The phone harrumphed, but Sally ignored it while she made for the ridge and parked where the road was widest. Moors which looked to Ellen more than ever like a picture waiting for its details to be added surrounded the vehicle, sloping back to the crags above Stargrave and ahead more gently towards Richmond. A few hundred yards ahead a white mound stood beside the road, only its shape and the number-plate, which the bus driver must have scraped clear, showing that it was a car. The other Landrover pulled up behind Sally's, and the walkie-talkie said "Is that our man's car?"

Sally stepped onto the road and waited for the men to do so. "It's his all right. We'd better look inside."

"You'd think Tom would have," Frank complained.

"He mustn't have wanted to deny you the pleasure," Sally said, so innocently that Ellen had to suppress a nervous giggle as she followed her along a rut the bus had crushed in the snow. Usually the murmur of the motorway in the distance beyond the horizon would be faintly audible, but now the only sounds were the breathing and the flattened footfalls of the search party. Frank marched up to the car and thumped on the roof to break the crust of snow, then he dragged off one of his gloves and cleared the windscreen, his nails squealing on the glass, his face as morose as it was every weekday at the butcher's. He leaned on the windscreen and squinted through it. "Nothing in here but a mucky old map."

Sally shaded her eyes and surveyed the moor, then used her binoculars. "This isn't going to be easy."

"Do we know what he was wearing?" Ellen said.

"Orange all over."

That made Ellen feel there was something she ought to have noticed on the way to the ridge. "Can I use your binoculars?"

"Have them. Maybe an artist's eye will help."

At first Ellen could see only snow, brought dazzlingly closer. She moved from rut to snowy rut to change her view, and then she halted, one foot skidding. "There."

The lenses planed the crags into shapes like slices of icebergs. Almost at the top of the crag closest to the unseen forest, a patch of snow was tinged faintly but unmistakably orange. She passed the binoculars to Sally, who admitted "It could be. We'll drive down while the men start searching here."

She turned the Landrover, crunching the ribs of snow between the ruts. It seemed to Ellen that the cold intensified as the vehicle headed for Stargrave, but perhaps that was partly her reaction to the patch of orange, whose shape was beginning to suggest the outlines of a body huddled against the rock. Sally parked by the stile above the town and raised the binoculars towards the crag, then she used the walkie-talkie. "I think we've found him where Ellen was looking."

Ellen followed her over the slippery stile in the gritstone wall. The women were trudging up the obscured path when Les Barns' Landrover screeched to a halt alongside the wall. He and Frank vaulted with inventive clumsiness over the stile and ran splashily along the path. "You girls can wait here if you like," Les shouted.

"Don't be daft," Sally said.

Ellen wouldn't have minded dawdling. The air was undoubtedly colder than it had been on the ridge. Perhaps that had something to do with the shadows of the crags, shadows whose blackness on the snow appeared to shine, but she felt threatened by an uncontrollable fit of shivering. She sent herself ahead of the rest of the party, through the shadows to the foot of the crag.

It looked like a massive ancient monument preserved in ice, and the orange blotch made her think uneasily of human sacrifice. She moved into the sunlight, moved again as the shadow of the crag inched towards her while Les and Frank fetched climbing gear from their Landrover. How long had the man been up there, near the top of the winding path which weather and climbers had worn in the limestone? She had to assume that he'd been trapped there by yesterday's premature darkness and had lost his nerve. Surely nothing could have made him scramble up the path after dark.

Les strode up to the crag, brandishing a spade, as Frank toiled up from the stile with the equipment. "Let's see about clearing a way up," Les said.

As soon as he dug the spade into the snow on the limestone path, Ellen began shivering. Each scrape of metal on rock seemed to vibrate her gritted teeth. She was trying to brace herself when Sally cried out and pulled her away. The spade had undermined all the snow which was clinging to that side of the crag.

A jagged diagonal fissure which reminded Ellen of an eggshell cracking streaked up from the stretch of path Les had scraped clear. In a couple of seconds the fissure stretched to the top of the crag, and the snow under the line began to slip. The next moment the snow above it lost its hold on the rock. To Ellen it looked so much like a collapsing wall of marble that its sounds, a soft rush followed by a wide lingering thud, seemed unnaturally muffled. A veil of white spray filled the air between the searchers and the crag. The veil sank to the mound of fallen snow which had engulfed the first yards of the path up the limestone, and the searchers stayed where they were; they all seemed to be waiting for someone else to venture forwards or even to speak. Ellen felt choked by her heartbeat, able to take only short harsh thin breaths. At last Sally spoke in a high panicky voice, as if any words were preferable to the silence. "Oh, bless him," she wailed.

The man high on the side of the crag appeared to have died while trying to shelter. He was huddled into a niche at a bend in the path, pressing his spine against the rock. His arms were outstretched as if to fend something off — the snow, Ellen told herself. It was his face which made her turn away: his lips were drawn back as if he was grinning in terror, his eyes in his whitened face appeared to be the colour of snow. Rigor mortis might have given him that expression, she thought, and perhaps snow had lodged on his closed eyes. She risked one more glance. Rigor mortis must have affected his posture on the crag. He looked as if the cold which had killed him had rearranged his body, posed it against the limestone in an almost perfectly symmetrical shape.

TWENTY-FOUR

For over a week the death was the talk of Stargrave. Children dared one another to sneak up the moorland path to the crag, until Mrs Venable had to warn the school not to do so. Most of the townsfolk seemed to agree with Stan Elgin that the man's death confirmed how unprepared too many city people were when they visited the moors, though anyone who said so to Ellen made it clear that didn't include her. Indeed, as she passed the church hall one morning on her way back from walking Johnny and Margaret to school, Hattie Soulsby called her in to tell her what the town thought of her. "We heard you were a shining example to Sally and her merry men."

"It's news to me."

"Why, Sally says you stood your ground while she was near wetting herself and the rest of the team nearly brought the deader sliding straight down on your heads."

Ellen hadn't considered herself to have behaved particularly admirably. She'd walked arm in arm with Sally to the Land-rover, and they'd fetched two of Elgin's men to help Frank and Les bring the corpse down the rock. Ellen had been grateful to be spared a closer view of it, but now she wished she'd had the courage to examine the face, the better to deny the rumour which the children had brought home from school that not only the man's hair but also his eyes had been white with terror. It had just been snow, she'd told them firmly, but she couldn't help being disturbed by the strangeness of the rumour.

At least now she had the inquest to back her up. Sally had called her last night with the news that the verdict was death by exposure — "as if it could have been anything else." As Ellen watched the playgroup's toddlers stamping their tiny colourful boots and being released from their fat overalls, she found the sight more reassuring than the verdict had been. "Thanks for helping," she told Hattie and Kate, feeling relieved and somewhat guilty because of it. It seemed almost unreasonable of life to return to normal so soon after the death on the crag.

Of course life hadn't done so as far as the children were concerned. The streets leading down to the main road were ski slopes, the schoolyard had become a skating rink. Occasionally the snow began to thaw, but overnight it always froze anew, preserving that day's chaos of footprints and spiking gutters and garden walls with icicles for Johnny and his friends to use for sword-fights. Margaret and Johnny had staked their claim on the stretch of snow between the house and the common, and together with their friends they'd crowded the area with families of snow figures. Every morning Ellen would glance out of the kitchen window to see how the shifts of temperature had reshaped the dozens of figures beyond the garden wall.

As October turned into November, more snow fell. It drifted through the lamplight on Halloween and feathered the children's masks as the family picked their way through the streets to spend the evening with the Wests. Stefan addressed a hanging apple with baboon sounds to make Johnny giggle and then accidentally hit himself on the nose with it to ironic cries of sympathy from his sister and Margaret. Ramona spent minutes trying not to splash her party dress while she ducked for apples in a bowl, then plunged her face into the water with a drowned impatient squeak. Meanwhile the adults talked and drank, though Ben was quieter than usual. On the way home he gazed silently at the light snowfall, a pale dance which grew more massive in the distance where it merged with the restless dark. He was often taciturn while he was working on a book, but rarely as withdrawn as this. Perhaps, Ellen thought, his soul wasn't really in the book he was writing for Alice Carroll, though he was spending a great deal of time at the desk.

On Guy Fawkes Night he refused to be moved from it. "Won't you come down for the fireworks?" Ellen tried to coax him. "The children would like you to."

He crouched over the page of his writing, more than half of which was crossed out. "Tell them I can see from here. Better, though you needn't say that."

Ellen went downstairs cursing Alice Carroll. As Terry West let off the fireworks she saw Ben at the window. Every time a firework blazed, his eyes lit up; he reminded her of a little boy who'd been banished to his room. The explosions of the rockets brought the glazed forest and the snow figures crowding towards the house, and turned the workroom window into bursts of radiance which seemed to emanate from Ben's face. As the last rocket fell back to earth she felt the kiss of snow on her cheeks. Because Ben's was the only lit window in the house, the snow appeared to be homing in on him, whitening the pane and his face.

He hadn't left his desk when Kate and Terry took their children home. Ellen got Margaret and Johnny to bed, and called into the workroom that she was for bed herself. "Not long now," Ben responded distantly, but he hadn't joined her by the time she fell asleep.

When she awoke, feeling isolated by stillness, the sun was up. Ben must surely have come to bed at some point, but now he was in the workroom. It was time she persuaded him not to work so hard, she thought as she saw the children to school. She picked her way home over frozen slush furred with last night's snow, tiptoed upstairs, eased the workroom door open and looked in.