Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

  But when, in the mid-’seventies, he had had to go it alone, it had not taken him long to find contracts hard to renew. He lost his touch for writing songs. His new material was thin and perfunctory. He sank down and out of the charts, was overtaken by new names, some of them sponsored by Dyer.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ Nall said. ‘He’s both Dyer’s labour and his capital. I’ve heard it said that Dyer’s made five million to Larner’s two. Without Dyer he couldn’t find a bloody chord, pick his nose or wipe his arse.’

  ‘You’ve got to give him some due, Sarge. He has brought something original to pop music.’

  ‘Original? Listen: my kid’s just bought his latest single. Dawn broke my heart. They were singing that sort of crap in the nineteen-forties. If there’s anything original in a song like that, my cock’s a kipper.’

  ‘Not characteristic. A one-off sentimental. He does sometimes have to put in a sop to that end of his market.’

  Kershaw did not know why he was taking Larner’s side. Where the hell was Larner now, and where had he taken Joan?

  Wardle grunted, out of humour with everything they chose to talk about. Nall could find nothing more eloquent than another belch, which jarred up from the cavern of his belly as if it had encountered something loose on the way. He glanced over his shoulder to see what public appreciation there was for his talent. A woman with big brassy ear-rings and a half-length fur coat pulled at a black cheroot and shuddered.

  That was the sort of evening that it was. And to make it worse, old Culver did not limit himself to his half-pint but, off the hook for the first time since some unspecified illness of the winter, got in a corner with some of his cronies and wound up serenely and incapably drunk. Kershaw had to manhandle him home, undress him on his bed and hunt round for a receptacle, which he dearly hoped the old man would not need. He also hoped that he would be sufficiently sprightly in the morning for Joan not to have to probe too deeply.

  It was now late—and Joan had not come home. Kershaw sat up to watch the late-night film, but kept nodding and waking until he lost grip of the story. He switched off and went upstairs, was half-undressed when he heard the late private buses from town arrive with their reliefs in convoy. Many of the company were without their own transport, and Furnival was good about the trivia of welfare.

  They slewed round almost under his window. He moved the curtain an inch to look down at the crowd: stage-hands, extras, box-office computer programers: French, Pakistani, Latin American, unidentified Balkan. A man in a long black overcoat and homburg was carrying a banjo-case as if it were his sole possession. One youth was dressed for the American frontier. There were couples who could hardly wait to get each other into bed—shoals of lank hair dangling over damp duffel shoulders. Some were solitary travellers: a middle-aged woman had a psychedelic plastic bag containing her boutique acquisitions of the afternoon. A sallow aesthete, lantern-jawed, was lost in reverie, illusion or void.

  The man with the banjo-case was hanging about as if for some purpose, and Kershaw watched him fall in step with a short, flat-footed tubby girl who might possibly be the writer of the lavender letters. Cantrell had said that her new friend was a monkey of a man. But the disparity in their ages made it seem improbable.

  And hanging about on the edge of the square, round-shouldered, emaciated and hangdog, he caught sight of that odd youth Harpur, the probable Peeping Tom, looking as if he did not belong to anyone. What the hell was he here looking for? Why was he out of his warm bed at this time of night, anyway? Did his ballast-headed parents even know he was out of the house?

  As the empty coaches were pulling away, Kershaw heard another vehicle coming down from the Hall. It drove slowly across the Square, picking a careful way through the crowd: a minibus, its flank painted with crazy lettering—The Deviants. Who the devil were they? Another of Furnival’s fringe groups?

  The rain had stopped now. The puddles in the Square reflected the lights of the coaches. The pavement outside the pub shone with blobs of orange.

  Joan Culver and Wayne Larner were not among those who had returned. But in any case, they wouldn’t be coming by bus, would they?

  Chapter Four

  Kershaw hurled his shirt across a chair. They were old enough to know their own minds. It made him want to fetch up. He still couldn’t think of this as Joan’s scene.

  But who the hell was he to know what was Joan’s scene and what wasn’t? He got into bed, nauseated by the undigested beer that was still swilling about inside him. The room twisted over when he closed his eyes, slightly to the left and backwards.

  So Ricarda Mommsen was Lady Lavender; and tonight she’d told them to keep an eye on Larner and Mary Magdalene. Cantrell had spoken as if he had some sort of surveillance on Larner. Kershaw had made sure he’d got to know Cantrell’s mobsters by sight. They were mostly old soldiers, looking like ex-SAS with the beginnings of middle-age spread: no telling how they would really make out in a rough-house. How subtle would they be at playing gooseberry? How effectively would they have got in Larner’s way? No doubt they were dab hands at not casting their shadows over a spot of innocent philandering. Innocent? It did not seem so innocent when it was somebody you knew. And how long, Kershaw asked himself, was he going to lie here, knowing that he would have to get up and be sick sooner or later? He got up and was sick. He listened for a moment at old man Culver’s door. His breathing was noisy but regular. Kershaw went back to bed and the fumes in his head drew him down into unhealthily heavy sleep. He awoke with a jerk an hour and a half later, listened sharply, knew that a car had pulled up outside. He got up and saw that it was a two-seater Lotus, parked with its headlamps full on, the engine idling—too fast and too noisy.

  They were down there, under his window, Joan and Larner, the pop-star in five or six hundred quid’s worth of leather coat, his voice high-pitched and shallow, a Londoner’s vowels. The beam from the car was assaulting the tower of the parish church with an unnatural brilliance. Larner opened the gate of the tiny front garden and followed Joan up the stone-flagged path to the porch. And there they stood kissing good night, outside Kershaw’s line of vision, but in any case, he had no desire to see. It went on for minutes and filled him with fury. Then he heard Joan come into the house and up the stairs, treading like a hunting cat. She looked first into her father’s bedroom and he heard her groan with disgust.

  In the meanwhile, Larner had driven off with a bravura burst of throttle that must have wakened half the village. Kershaw heard him climb the steep hill past the school in an intermediate gear.

  Then came a violent screech of brakes and tyres, a resonant crash, a tearing of metal and a thundering of falling stone. At once Kershaw had his bedside light on and was pulling on his trousers over his pyjamas. As he came out on the landing, Joan came out of her room.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Larner’s car. I’m going up there. Go down and knock Sergeant Wardle up, get him to call for a squad car and an ambulance. We’re going to need both. It sounded to me as if he’s hit the wall up over Brackdale. It could be nasty.’

  Kershaw was without official transport in Peak Low and his own car was parked in a lane, boxed in, he found, by a van. His only way up the hill had to be on foot, and he ran across the damp Square, the water splashing from the puddles. Past the school the gradient was one in six. His lungs began to burn and he had to drop his pace. The need for action had cleared the vapours from his brain. He made a note that he was physically degenerating: better start jogging next week.

  Beyond the school the road rounded a hairpin bend, on the left a sheer drop of some sixty feet where outcrop limestone cliffs edged a rivulet at the bottom of a minor ravine. Brackdale was one of those short, deep and bleak little gorges in which Derbyshire specializes. And when he rounded the bend, he saw that the crash was as bad as he’d feared. As he advanced on it, shining his powerful torch, something cruelly sharp stabbed into the sole of his foot, hurting him more than he was aware of at the t
ime. He hopped across to the wrecked car and saw that it had been driven into the wall on his left with an impact that must surely have written off the engine. It had also destroyed the wall, and the rubble thrown under the rear wheels was all that had saved it from toppling over the edge. The bonnet, stove in, was overhanging the gap and the vehicle was canted up at an angle with its front wheels three feet off the ground. There was no one in the car. It looked—absurdly—as if Larner had got out as inconsequentially as if he had just pulled up outside some shop. Was it possible that any man could have escaped instant death in such a collision? Larner must have had miraculous luck: the windscreen had ridden up high enough to avoid the impact, and the steering-column had lived up to its specifications and collapsed at the moment of the crash. It had to be a fluke, but one thing was undeniable: Wayne Larner was nowhere in sight.

  But someone else was coming now: a car on the road from the direction of the Hall. No—not a car. A van. A police van. Sergeant Wardle’s van. Wardle must have been out on a call. His van came to a stop, one of its tyres blowing out like a pistol crack as he put on the brakes.

  ‘Blast it! By God—somebody’s in trouble here!’

  ‘Somebody’s walked out of trouble with the luck of the devil.’

  Wardle looked into the car with his torch.

  ‘You mean he wasn’t killed?’

  ‘Seems not. Incidentally, it was Wayne Larner.’

  ‘God help us! I was out at a domestic. How they spend Saturday night in Peak Forest. Chap with his head out of the window, screaming into the street because his wife wouldn’t let him have it.’

  Wardle blew out his cheeks. Kershaw waited. The initiative was out of his hands now. Rank apart, this was uniform work. Then Joan came up the hill, her breathing taxed, her understanding of events confused.

  ‘Mrs Wardle’s doing the phoning.’

  ‘I’ll go down the hill,’ Wardle said, ‘and stop anyone coming up. After that racket, half Peak Low will be up brewing tea, and we don’t want sightseers. You stay here. Guard this evidence like you’ve never guarded anything in your life before. Don’t lay a finger on a panel of that car. And don’t move your feet in the mud more than you have to. Bugger it!’

  He too had stepped on something jaggedly sharp. He pulled out of one of his shoes a vicious iron spike, a sort of three-dimensional letter Z, its shank about three inches long.

  ‘The road’s littered with them. We had these in the war—at least, Jerry had. In Normandy. Chucked them behind their retreat. Whichever way they fall to the ground, one sharp end has to stick up. Mind where you tread, lad.’

  Wardle walked off, exploring the ground with his disc of light before each step. Kershaw heard him snap at some Peak Lowite who was already half way up the hill.

  ‘And I’m telling you, free country or no bloody free country, I’m not having that road trodden any more than it needs to be trodden. One man’s foot could destroy evidence that matters.’

  Left to themselves, Joan was short-tempered with Kershaw.

  ‘Aren’t you going to look for him? Wayne! Wayne!’

  She shouted desperately, but her voice was lost against the backcloth of night and the ravine.

  ‘Are you just going to stand there and do nothing?’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do until help comes. Sergeant Wardle was right. I have to guard this spot.’

  Then he heard something, or thought he did. Was it a human sound, down there, at the bottom of the chasm? He could not be sure. If it had come at all, it did not come again. It had been too faint for him to be really sure that he was not mistaken. But if it had been anything at all, it had been a woman’s cry.

  He went to the edge, tried to shine his beam down, could see no farther than the branches of the trees that fringed this part of the cliff-top. And was that a car he heard, higher up the hill—or wasn’t it? The night was too wild to be sure of anything. In any case there were cars on the move about the Hall half the night. These people never seemed to sleep.

  ‘Larner! Larner! Are you down there?’

  No answer. He had surely been mistaken. How long was it going to take assistance to get here? It depended where the mobiles were, what they had on at this time of night. He shone his torch inside the car and something caught Joan’s eye.

  ‘My bag! I left it behind.’

  It was in the glove compartment on the passenger side: a small brocaded cosmetic bag.

  ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake be careful.’

  Kershaw put his hand to the handle of the car door. And his simple touch was enough to do what gravity had not quite managed unaided. It set the car moving. It dislodged the keystone that was not very securely jammed under the rear wheel.

  He had to jump aside to avoid being pushed over the ravine himself. The car richocheted from one tree-trunk to another. For one hopeful moment it looked as if it might be stopped from going the whole way. But then it found a gap, slithered through it, began to somersault. Nothing could prevent it now from going right to the bottom. And now came what was beyond doubt a woman’s cry—a cry that became a strangled scream—and was then extinguished.

  Chapter Five

  Sunday morning—Kershaw’s third in Peak Low. The first two had been glorious days of unbuttoned leisure: the crime wave that had brought him here in the first instance had not been all that demanding. There had been time to dawdle through the Sunday papers, to exchange righteous indignation with old Culver about the state of the world; time to sit in the kitchen and natter to Joan while she cooked the dinner. Today’s contrast was too sickening to countenance.

  For one thing, he had been up most of the night, most of it writing a report that appalled him when he woke up and remembered it. He had not finally fallen asleep until about five, and then it had been the sort of sleep that came inexorably over creeping flesh, closing heavy lids beyond resistance.

  He woke again about seven, heavy and unrested—and that was because of the noise in the Square. A convoy of police vehicles had formed themselves into a mobile HQ: wireless vans, pick-ups, motorcyclists. Fewter, the DI, was talking to Nall. The pair of them drove together up the hill.

  Kershaw dressed hurriedly and went across in search of information. There was none, other than that they were hoping to get some heavy lifting gear down to the car by some means. And a cross-country search for Larner was being mounted in an outwards-moving circle from the grounds of the Hall.

  Kershaw went back indoors to wash and shave. Old Culver was on the landing, on his way to or from the lavatory.

  ‘By Gad, that was some night out!’

  He was unaware that anything had happened—unaware to the point of sounding stupid.

  ‘Joan won’t be up yet, I suppose. She must have been very late in. Was she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kershaw said. ‘There was an accident. I don’t know yet what’s happened.’

  He did not want to talk until he knew something. When the car had crashed and the woman screamed, he had wanted to be down there, at the bottom of the ravine, doing something. But there was a huge gap in the wall now, and the road was still scattered with the foul spikes. If any more vehicles passed, if any more tyres blew out on this hairpin, then chaos was going to be multiplied. If a police car was immobilized, nobody would be able to get anything done. Yet down there, since the scream, there had been only silence, except for the splashing of the water at the bottom of the gulf. To think of climbing down the cliff-face would be madness. That was a job for professional mountaineers—and by daylight. There were valley-bottom ways into the cleft, both upstream and downstream, but Kershaw was not familiar enough with this tract of countryside to risk looking for them in the dark. And it would be useless for the mobile to arrive while he was a mile away trying to sort out sodden footpaths.

  A dislodged boulder had been hanging precariously since the car had fallen. Now it started to slither again. Kershaw heard it gather speed, strike a tree, then
plunge, bouncing off metal as it landed.

  Dicky Morgan and Bill Chaplin were the first to arrive in their Panda, cool and as yet not fully believing. It was normal to arrive in a place and find that a report amounted to nothing.

  ‘Is there a field we can cross? If we can find a way in, perhaps we can work our way down to the stream.’

  Ten minutes later, Fewter and Nall came, together. Nall was now reasonably sober and suppressing nausea, belching inwardly, sourly, and of necessity. And even at the best of times, it was difficult making verbal reports to Fewter. He had a genius for misunderstanding—for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick at the very beginning, then coming back to his misconceptions at frequent intervals.

  ‘You’re telling me, Kershaw, that you pushed the car over?’

  ‘Not pushed, sir.’

  ‘Have you been drinking, Kershaw?’

  ‘I did have a few during the course of the evening—off duty—but—’

  ‘You’d better get yourself indoors before any member of the general public catches sight of you. A man in your condition can only be a menace on a job like this. Go and tell Sergeant Wardle to put signs out diverting traffic round the village. And don’t let me catch sight of you again tonight. I’ll have a reckoning with you in the morning.’

  Fewter had briefly questioned Joan Culver.

  ‘And what light can you throw on this, young lady?’

  ‘Only that I spent the afternoon and evening with Mr Larner. He brought me back home—and about three minutes after he left my house, we heard the crash.’

  On his way to find Wardle, Kershaw escorted Joan Culver home. The rain had started again—black rain—black, it seemed, from the blackness out of which it was pouring. Joan was shivering from cold and shock. Neither could find anything to say. When he had finished helping Wardle with the road-signs, he went in and stayed downstairs, unable to sleep, straining his ears now and then for any movement in the night outside that might tell him anything. Twice he went and opened the front door, stood and listened. But there was no sound beyond the pouring rain. He turned and went indoors, and on impulse started writing his report.