The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  He laughed out loud and said, ‘You’re learning. That’s a much better way to ask for a favour. I’ll be delighted.’

  ‘Thanks a million,’ she said, catching Jimmy’s tone and inflexion perfectly. He laughed again, stood up, leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  ‘I’ll go and see if your father’s ready to descend,’ he said.

  As he made for the stairs he noticed that Anya had forgotten to replace the hall telephone on the hook after she had told her father to take the call. As he passed he heard a tinny voice emerging from it. He paused in mid-stride and glanced towards the kitchen. He could hear the sound of dishes being washed. He picked up the telephone, put his hand over the mouthpiece and pressed the receiver to his ear.

  Bryant’s voice said, without enthusiasm, ‘You’ll be in touch then.’

  And the other voice, the one that had attracted Jaysmith’s attention, replied without warmth, ‘You can bank on it, can’t you? Take good care of yourself, Stefan. Goodbye.’

  The line went dead. Gently Jaysmith replaced the instrument on its rest. For a moment in the kitchen he had inhabited a world in which the only peril was that his passionate longing for Anya would trap him into a wrong move, but now he was back in a world much shorter of profit and delight but much more crowded with fatal hazard.

  The voice on the phone had been unmistakably Jacob’s.

  Chapter 18

  Miss Wilson opened the door before he could ring when he arrived at Rigg Cottage. Despite the gentle warmth of the autumn sun she wore a thick tweed coat and a fur hat.

  ‘No use you coming in just to come out again,’ she said, stepping over the threshold and firmly closing the door behind her. A few more days and it would be his front door, thought Jaysmith, not without amazement. He helped her into the car. She made herself comfortable and looked around critically.

  ‘Fancy motor,’ she commented. ‘Foreign, I daresay.’

  ‘So is Anya’s,’ he replied defensively.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it’ll have cost next to nothing compared with this.’

  He took the point. To buy foreign by way of economy was sensible; by way of luxury was unpatriotic.

  ‘I bought it abroad,’ he said. ‘Cheap.’

  ‘Cheap!’ she echoed disbelievingly. He negotiated the hill down into Grasmere. The village was full of visitors lured out by a sunny autumn Saturday. There was no shortage of locals either, and these with their Cumbrian eye for the out-of-the-way, almost to a man and certainly to a woman, spotted Miss Wilson in the BMW and waved their greetings. It was like a royal progress, thought Jaysmith.

  ‘You’ve got your feet under the table then,’ said Miss Wilson out of the blue.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She did not deign to elaborate, forcing him by her silence to admit he understood her meaning perfectly.

  ‘I’m glad to be of help to Anya,’ he said.

  ‘She’s a good girl,’ said the old woman. In what sense ‘good’ was intended was not clear.

  ‘I think so too. A good woman,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘A good woman. ‘She married a bit too early, I sometimes think.’

  He did not reply and this time it was his silence that seemed to force her to carry on.

  ‘Edward wasn’t always an easy man,’ she said. ‘From a boy, he wasn’t easy. I should know. I had the bringing up of him.’

  This was the first hint of criticism of the man who, though dead, he still, absurdly, thought of as his rival, and he felt rising in him a greed to hear more.

  Controlling his voice to conceal his eagerness he asked casually, ‘In what way, not easy?’

  ‘He could be moody,’ she said. Then, family solidarity suddenly making itself felt, she added sharply, ‘But we can all be moody, can’t we? And he was a grand lad in a lot of ways. Not afraid of hard work. A heart like a lion.’

  Like a lion. He thought of that face he had only seen in photographs, with its heavy mane of dark hair and almost sullen gaze. Yes, there had been something leonine about it. Still was; a recumbent form guarding the approaches to the cave.

  Christ! he thought. This is becoming positively Freudian.

  A blare of horns brought him back to awareness of his driving. He had turned north on the main Windermere–Keswick road and was second in a line of cars behind a slow-moving farm-truck piled high with bales of hay. Traffic was heavy in the opposite direction and overtaking was only possible intermittently and one at a time. But a metallic-gold mini, impatient of waiting its turn, had started queue-jumping, nipping into the stopping space between cars to avoid the oncoming traffic and causing much irritation in both directions. He took the final stage from two cars behind the BMW to beyond the hay-truck in a single swoop. Jaysmith saw him as he flashed by, a young man with a shock of ash-blond hair, sun-goggles and a cigarette drooping from his lips. He felt a sudden pang of envy for that youthful impatience, that certainty that there was only one speed possible, and that was headlong. It was life’s irony that by the time you decide that such speed might not be necessary, the advancing years were already making it so.

  ‘He’s in a hurry,’ said Miss Wilson. ‘He’ll be lucky to get there in one piece. Youngsters!’

  The widening of the road as it climbed up Dunmail Raise permitted Jaysmith to overtake the hay-truck without problem, but he found himself opening up the BMW almost as an assertion of his right to be included in the old woman’s condemned grouping. Miss Wilson, however, clearly had no objection to speed when it was combined with comfort and gave every sign of enjoying the experience. Indeed, as they made their way along the winding road through St-John’s-in-the-Vale, she remarked with some satisfaction, ‘There. It didn’t do him much good, did it?’ as they overtook the golden mini which had pulled off the road ahead.

  ‘Aye, and he looks the type for that too,’ said the old woman scornfully.

  ‘For what?’ enquired Jaysmith.

  ‘For spending money on a broken-down barn and doing it up, isn’t that what they call it? Places where there’s been nowt but rats and cow-dung for centuries! They must have more money than sense!’

  Jaysmith realized, glancing in his mirror, that the mini had indeed stopped at the mouth of the track leading to the old barn that was for sale.

  ‘I looked at that,’ he said provocatively.

  Unabashed, Miss Wilson said, ‘Aye, but you’re not a smooth-faced lad, are you? You settled for a real house. And a real bargain, I might add!’

  A few minutes later, they reached the gateway to Naddle Foot and had to wait to let a couple of cars come down the long drive, doubtless fresh from dropping Jimmy’s guests though it was barely two o’clock.

  Anya greeted them with relief.

  ‘There’s quite a lot here already,’ she said. ‘Parents apologetic but some urgent appointment is taking them to the far end of the country, and they know I won’t mind little Fred turning up a mite early, will I?’

  ‘And do you?’ asked Jaysmith.

  ‘Not really,’ she said with a wide smile. ‘Jimmy would have burst if we’d had to wait much longer for his party to begin. They’re all out in the back now, raising hell. Aunt Muriel, come and say hello to pappy before I toss you to the lions.’

  They found Bryant sitting in the lounge looking out of the French window which opened onto the rear garden where Jimmy and three other boys were playing a wild game of football. Such energy, such youth. He glanced at the other occupants of the room. Bryant and Muriel Wilson were greeting each other with a wary courtesy from which Anya obviously derived some wry amusement. She looked so young and fresh. He found himself wondering where exactly she placed him in the gamut of animal youth to prickly age being played before her.

  ‘I’m well enough,’ Bryant was saying in response to a formal enquiry after his health. ‘What of you? All ready for your move? What’s that brother of yours think about it?’

  ‘He can think what he likes,’ Miss Wilson
replied with spirit. ‘It’s me own house. There’s no family entail or owt of that. And if he wanted it to stay in the family he should have come up here to live and run me up and down that hill in his motor car!’

  ‘You have told him you’re moving haven’t you, auntie?’ asked Anya.

  ‘Last Sunday he rang. I told him then. I was able to tell him about your accident too,’ she said to Bryant, reducing his misfortune to a trifle compared with the sale of Rigg Cottage. What were you thinking of, man? Speeding down the Struggle on a night like that?’

  Her effort to redirect the conversation was instantly successful.

  ‘I was not speeding,’ snapped Bryant. ‘Unfortunately some idiot in a Dinky-car was. I was forced off the road!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Miss Wilson, conveying a volume of scepticism. ‘Now where’s that nephew of mine? Doesn’t he want his present?’

  ‘Jimmy!’ called Anya. ‘Aunt Muriel’s here.’

  The boy came running in, flushed from his exertions.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, halting before the old woman.

  ‘Is that all I get?’ she said sternly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and gave her a swift kiss. Jaysmith guessed that his fondness for his great-aunt was laced with just a little fear. She now handed over a box-shaped parcel wrapped in a bright striped paper which looked as if it had been used before.

  ‘Don’t tear it,’ she instructed as Jimmy began the assault which was his normal method of unwrapping gifts. The paper came off to reveal an old cardboard box which bore a legend announcing it contained a dozen cans of baked beans. But there was nothing old or edible about its contents now which turned out to be a radio-controlled police car.

  Jimmy’s delight was unbounded.

  ‘That’s smashing,’ he yelled. ‘Thanks a million!’

  Giving his great-aunt a now uninhibited kiss he rushed out to show off his new treasure to his friends.

  ‘You shouldn’t have, Aunt Muriel,’ protested Anya. ‘It’s far too expensive.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the old woman, gathering up the wrapping paper and smoothing it out. ‘He might as well have it now as when I’m gone. And there’ll be a tidy bit of cash to have, especially when Mr Hutton here gets round to paying his debts.’

  The imputation that he was dragging his feet in closing a deal which had been processed at something like ten times the normal speed made Jaysmith stare. Anya walked past him and nudged him sharply in the side. He saw that she was having difficulty holding back her amusement, and suddenly he was too.

  ‘Come and enjoy the sunshine, auntie,’ said Anya. ‘It’ll get nippy later on.’

  Pulling her coat around her to indicate that perhaps it was nippy already, the old woman followed the young into the garden, where Jimmy was demonstrating the manoeuvrability of his police car to his admiring friends.

  ‘They’ve come a long way since Dinkies,’ said Bryant. ‘With one quarter of the technology they use for making toys now, we’d have won the war in half the time.’

  ‘Dinkies,’ said Jaysmith slowly.

  ‘Yes. Surely you remember Dinky-cars? Not part of my own childhood, of course, but Anya went through a phase of collecting them. She was always tomboyish! Little metal models of real cars, very well made. I think the firm went out of business. The recession, electronics. The usual tale. Tragic.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Tragic. But you mentioned them earlier too. You said when you had your crash, you were overtaken by some idiot in a Dinky-car. Why did you say that?’

  ‘It’s called a figure of speech,’ said Bryant ironically. ‘I thought I was supposed to be the bloody foreigner.’

  ‘You mean it was a small car …’

  ‘It was a mini, bright yellow I think. I’ve never liked them, buzzing around like a fart in a bottle, they seem to do something to their drivers …’

  ‘You mean, you’ve remembered? You never mentioned it to me!’

  ‘Should I have done?’ said Bryant, puzzled. ‘You were out, I think. It was yesterday; it suddenly came back. I rang the police. They didn’t seem very interested. Not half as much as you, certainly!’

  He was regarding Jaysmith with open speculation. The ringing of the front door bell postponed the need for explanation, however. Gratefully he excused himself and went to answer the summons. It was another young guest, the first of a steady stream which kept him occupied for the next twenty minutes, directing them through the house to the rear garden where Anya was organizing a series of energy-sapping games in the hope of rendering them all quiescent by teatime.

  When the last car drew away he went to the BMW and got his field glasses. Running lightly up the stairs, he entered Jimmy’s room which looked out to the south from the side of the house. Careful not to disturb the curtain, he positioned himself so that he could see the winding road and followed it back. The end of the track where the yellow mini had stopped was not within sight, he discovered. He turned his attention to the ruined barn. It stood blank and still in the sunlight. There was no sign of any human presence. But what did he expect to see? he asked himself. A nest of FN MAG 7.62s bristling in the broken walls?

  A sudden cry of pain and anger made him start. But it was only an occupational sound-effect of whatever riot was going on in the back garden. Surely, he thought, even if Bryant did limp out into the open and present a target, surely no one was going to risk a shot when he was surrounded by highly excited, wildly active children?

  He realized he was putting the argument to himself on emotional grounds and checked himself firmly. As a professional, how would he react? He was relieved to find the professional objections were as strong as the emotional ones. The boys by their violent movements might distract the target himself into a sudden movement. Or they might simply run into the line of fire. He would certainly decide they presented an unacceptable level of risk.

  But he was Jaysmith. He wouldn’t be situated anywhere as unsuitable as that barn in the first place. He tried to reassure himself that Jacob would never send a mere apprentice to do such a job, but that effort to run Bryant off the Struggle had not been very professional.

  Probably there was no connection whatever between the golden mini he had seen on the road through the valley and the yellow mini Bryant thought he remembered on the Kirkstone Struggle. But the thought of some nervous newcomer pumping bullets into a garden which contained Anya and Jimmy and Miss Wilson and fourteen happy young boys, as well as Bryant himself, was not one he could live with a moment longer than necessary.

  He went down the stairs, moving swiftly past the lounge door – fearful of being spotted and summoned – out to the BMW once more. The rifle in the concealed compartment was no use to him. Running around with an assembled M21 would rapidly draw attention to himself, and besides, it was hardly a close-quarter weapon. Instead he sought out his only other armament, a broad-bladed, razor-edged Bowie knife in a metal sheath. Slipping it into his waist band, he strolled back to the house. If he was under observation, he didn’t want to alert suspicion.

  He exited via the door from the kitchen into the garage, which was on the north side of the house, and keeping the bulk of the building between himself and the distant barn, he strode out across the neighbouring fields till he hit the curving beck. The banks were too shallow to give the kind of concealment he would have liked, but it was the best cover he could find on the open valley pastures. Anyone working in the fields, or strolling along High Rigg, would be able to see him quite plainly. Perhaps he would look like an eccentric ichthyologist in pursuit of some rare stickleback! In any case, all that mattered was that his approach should go unobserved by any watcher in the barn.

  From time to time, particularly when the course of the beck was in direct line with the barn, he advanced through the shallow water to gain as much depth of concealment as possible. Though St John’s Beck was at this point more than halfway on its winding journey to join the Glenderamackin at Threlkeld Bridge and with it form the Greta which curve
s round Keswick, it still held the chill of the shaded length of Thirlmere whence it sprang. Jaysmith hardly noticed it, however; he had endured greater discomforts in lesser cause. And when the channel reached its nearest point to the barn, he actually dropped down on all fours and half crawled, half floated till he was beyond the ruined building.

  Now he climbed up the bank. If there was a watcher in the barn, his attention would be all on the house. Unless, of course, he’d spotted Jaysmith’s approach, in which case, it didn’t matter. He looked down the track which ran across fields to the road. There was no sign of the mini where it had been parked earlier. He felt the beginnings of relief. Perhaps its presence was innocent and coincidental after all. But thoroughness required that he check out the barn anyway. And after a few seconds of still cautious approach, he felt his relief loose its always tenuous grip on his doubting mind.

  In the stand of trees on the high side of the barn, he could now glimpse the metallic sheen of gold.

  It took him another fifteen minutes to reach the trees, and then he lay there, his chest resting against the rough bark of an alder, simply looking at the car for another ten.

  There was no sign of the driver, either here or in the barn which was some twenty yards away. He had to go forward. There was always the chance of interruption from some local farmer or prospective purchaser, and he needed to know the truth without interruption. There was, of course, also the chance that the mini was quite innocent, the property of some keen bird-watcher, or local historian, or country rambler … he halted the list of possibilities. Looking for innocent explanations was a new weakness. He had survived hitherto on the assumption of guilt.

  He went forward to the car.

  The doors weren’t locked. Ready for a quick getaway. He opened the driver’s door very quietly and peered in. The mini was fitted with every refinement, ergonomic and mechanical. It was the 1275GT version, and from the look of the dashboard, the owner was bent on closing the gap between GT and Grand Prix.

  He tried the glove compartment. It fell open at his touch. He jerked back with a small gasp of shock as tresses of ash-blond hair slithered out over his hand.