Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

  What happened between Gleed and the Central Europeans took place behind closed doors and was never made public. There is an inevitable drill when two men are being investigated for the same offence, and it is particularly applicable when they hate each other’s guts. They are kept apart and talked to separately, and hints are dropped to each that the other is betraying him. The more intelligent they are, the less ready are they to believe this, but solitude and fear breed carelessness. First one, then the other, begins to give away vital detail. Patiently, the interrogating officers piece together the puzzle.

  A final picture emerged. Among the hundreds involved in the Passion, none stood to lose as much by failure as Hajek and Szolnok. Neither had ever been associated with a failure and what hung in the balance was their next commitment after this. If the Passion ended up in chaos, both of them were going to drop their fee on their next commission. The Passion was going to fail—and it was going to fail because of Wayne Larner: not on account of his moral aberrations, though they would not help—but because he was aesthetically incompetent for the role he was playing. Hajek and Szolnok had therefore sunk their differences for long enough to agree that Larner had to be edged out of the production while there was still time for him to be replaced.

  They met on the Saturday night to draw up their plans, which at this stage amounted to no more than a concerted démarche in front of Furnival. They had a meal together at a quiet hotel on the Sheffield edge of the Peak, and it was on their way back, at the top of Brackdale Hill, that they caught sight of Ricarda Mommsen. They stopped to offer her a lift, but in spite of the hour and the rain, she declined—not, however, before she had tried to tell them an unintelligible and hysterical story. They gathered that Larner had been embarking on new scandal, and that some sort of attack against him was planned. They did not know whether to believe this. They thought the Mommsen girl was mad: but then half the personnel of the Passion thought that of the other half. They decided not to go to bed yet, to retire to Hajek’s room, whose window commanded a good view of the Hall drive, and whose door was close to Furnival’s.

  So they knew when Furnival, Dyer and Cantrell came back with Larner. They knew how long he was closeted with them, and they knew when he finally came out of the apartment.

  He came in hangdog fashion along the corridor and they did not fall in on either side of him until he was alongside Hajek’s door. He was in a confused condition and his attempts to struggle stood little chance against a waist-lock that Szolnok had learned some time in his troubled Central European youth. If any sound of the brief scuffle carried to any of the adjacent rooms, it brought out no curious eyes. Men—and women—perambulating clumsily at night did not rank as news in the Hall.

  After a few minutes in Hajek’s room, Larner made a bid to escape, whereupon violence simply began to happen. Larner struck wildly about him, and the other two warded blows off with whatever came to hand. A heavy-based table-lamp entered the fray, and so did a wooden stool. Larner’s skull was fractured and Hajek and Szolnok had to prolong their alliance.

  The moment of highest risk was getting the body out of Hajek’s room. But it had to be done, and once they moved, they moved quickly. For seconds they listened for any potential intruder, heard none and transported Larner upright between them, an old hooded anorak of Hajek’s over his head, as if they were manhandling a drunk. There was a complex of stables and outhouses fifty yards from the main building which had been used as a builder’s yard in the early days, and was now a general dumping ground. Among the debris was a collection of crates and tea-chests containing some of the original stage-set models: Furnival had the idea that they might one day be used in a production museum in an annexe to the theatre. Larner went into an empty crate labelled to contain the walls of Jerusalem. It was collected a couple of days later: crates were always coming and going about the site. The arrangements to have Larner shunted about and finally delivered were complex but not unmanageable. And both Hajek and Szolnok were ready to swear on oath that Cantrell—who had always detested Larner—had known perfectly well why he was being asked to alter the patrol schedules—

  In court their counsel denied that their statements had ever been made. He very nearly got them acquitted, suggesting that Larner was almost dead through shock when they found him dazed in the corridor and took him to Hajek’s room for first aid. But he had struggled as a drowning man will fight his rescuer, and had been accidentally killed while they were trying to restrain him for his own sake. Convicted of manslaughter, they were both sent to prison.

  No charge was preferred against Cantrell, the DPP ruling that there was no material case strong enough to stand up. But the most interesting court appearance was that of Alfred Tandy, who had produced so many changes of statement in custody that they hardly seemed to apply to the same set of circumstances. In spite of this, a seemingly unanswerable charge of attempted murder was brought, backed up by a criminal damage offence. No one doubted his guilt, but the jury, after being out for a day and a half, brought in one of those verdicts that are officially described as perverse. ‘These twelve gentlemen, in their wisdom—’ the judge began acidly as he pronounced Alfie a free man. He did not add the common rider that Alfie left the court without stain on his character.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Freddy Kershaw said. ‘It seems to me you were running every risk of making things worse.’

  ‘There was that possibility. Kenworthy warned me of that when he suggested I contacted Julian.’

  They were eating out—at a Good Food Guide recommendation, high on a ridge overlooking a sweep of open landscape. Joan Culver had been explaining why Kenworthy had persuaded her to go out of her way to talk to Julian Harpur. It had been just after he had given her a fright from the wings when they had been rehearsing the dawn visit to the Sepulchre.

  ‘So he had a crush on you from a distance. And the cure for that was to give him the chance to get to know you—I’d think you were simply encouraging him to go on making an even bigger nuisance of himself.’

  ‘Well, it worked the other way—as Kenworthy said it often does. Freddy—a young man’s crush on an older woman is a very sad thing, especially when it’s a young man who’s labouring under all kinds of other difficulties. But sometimes it works to let the sufferer see how normal his idol is. I felt responsible, Freddy. It was because of me that he was doing all that mooning about. It was because I was out with Wayne Larner that he was wandering about up Brackdale—waiting to see Wayne drive home, wondering if I’d still be with him.’

  ‘And two chats with you cured him?’

  ‘Not cured. How can you cure a boy like Julian Harpur? But it settled him down in some way—even his mother admits that. And now, if you don’t mind, can we talk about something nearer home? This place they are moving you to, Freddy—’

  ‘Ilkeston. Gleed says that’s where the action is. A good place, he says, for a young man with his way to make.’

  ‘You’ll get time off, though, won’t you—week-ends and so forth?’

  ‘So that I can have the chance to come and see how normal you are?’

  ‘I am open to investigation.’

  She told herself that she did not know whether she was in love with Freddy Kershaw or not. But she liked him and was going to miss him. She did not want to let herself be influenced by the fact that he would provide a very ready escape from Peak Low. She had an idea, too, that it would be very different with Freddy from the way it had been with the man in Llandudno.

  There were, in fact, any number of things that she was going to allow herself to find out.

  When Jimmy Lindop drove away from Little Longstone, he was almost neurotic about being followed. Twice he slowed down to a crawl to compel headlamps to overtake him. He had an appointment tonight that he did not propose to sacrifice to anyone’s need to tidy up administratively after a mere business of murder.

  Although for several miles he had been heading in the direction of Peak Low, he turned off and dr
ove over exposed country towards Castleton. At The Grey Cat, The Deviants were already setting up shop. Lindop started straight in on testing their microphones.

  ‘If anyone asks for I walked the streets tonight, you can give it them. Furnival and Co. have other things to worry about than copyright.’

  Nall drew air down into his gullet and cracked out a best-ever belch. Old Culver grinned: he had had The Devonshire Arms to himself until the policemen came in.

  ‘Aye,’ Sergeant Wardle said. ‘The buggers have gone. And I finish in September.’

  ‘Are you staying in Peak Low?’

  ‘The house next door’s come on the market and I’ve put a deposit on it. Mind you, it’s going to seem a bit queer at first, seeing things from a different angle.’

  The open-air theatre also came on the market. Several times the estate agent’s ‘Negotiating’ sticker appeared over the billboard—but transactions seemed doomed to fall through. Finally, a builder’s merchant came in as a squatter, and the auditorium was filled with baths, chimneypots and stacks of scaffolding, the seating having been sold off as a job lot by his lordship’s liquidators.

  By the second summer after the one which almost saw the Passion, the broken windows of the box office had been boarded over. Nettles flourished backstage, and the Parish Council were worried about the danger to children playing on the premises, since two winters’ frosts had wrought havoc with the concrete and one corner-stone had already fallen to the ground.

  Copyright

  First published in 1986 by Collins

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-2932-2 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-2931-5 POD

  Copyright © John Buxton Hilton, 1986

  The right of John Buxton Hilton to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

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