Fell of Dark

by Reginald Hill

  Once as we approached a junction with a slightly wider road, she stopped the car and turned off lights and engine. A few moments later the crossroads was filled with light as another car swept across our path. She let it fade out of sight and hearing before starting up again. I had not even been aware of its approach and yet every one of my senses seemed to be super-alert.

  We moved so swiftly and silently that several times we narrowly missed small animals scuttling over the road and once we both ducked instinctively as an owl swept in front of us, almost brushing the windscreen with his wing.

  We came up a slight rise and pulled to a halt once more.

  When I looked at her questioningly, she pointed ahead. In the distance was a line of lights which could only be a main road. Faintly we could see the headlights of cars as they twisted their way along. At roughly the same spot they all seemed to hesitate, slow down, stop. Then they started up again. We watched this happen half a dozen times.

  ‘They’re stopping cars,’ she said. ‘They’ve picked a good spot too.’

  She put the car into reverse and used a gateway to turn round. The dreamlike ride began again, but after a while it became less smooth than before and she seemed to be peering out into the darkness with less confidence. Finally we stopped again at another junction.

  ‘I’m a bit lost,’ she said. ‘It was having to change our route back there. But that looks like a signpost.’

  She seized our mutual friend, the torch, and we got out together and peered up at the worn flaked letters.

  ‘Thurbeck,’ she read. ‘That doesn’t help.’

  It didn’t help her, but it helped me. At least it might. I stood and weighed matters in my mind.

  She was back in the car and I felt her impatience. I got in beside her.

  ‘You’ve been thinking a lot,’ she said with some irritation. ‘You decide which way we go.’

  ‘Go to Thurbeck,’ I said.

  Without another word, she started up and we coasted phantom-like down a long undulating and winding road till the lights of a tiny hamlet came into view. She slowed down, uncertain. I put my hand out to hers on the steering wheel.

  ‘Turn off the road, on the right, just ahead. There. Now pull her round behind the hedge.’

  We came to a halt in an uncultivated field which slanted awkwardly across the diagonal from the corner we now occupied. In the bottommost corner was the dim bulk of a cottage with a thin line of light down the middle of a thickly-curtained window the only sign of habitation.

  ‘Why have we stopped here?’ Annie asked in a steady, clear voice.

  My hand was still on hers. I took it away and pointed to the cottage.

  ‘My father-in-law lives there.’

  I had not spared old Will a thought in months. It had taken the signpost to remind me how close I was to him. Whether he would help or not, I didn’t know. But I felt certain he would not hinder and that his mouth would remain shut.

  ‘Won’t the police know and be watching?’ asked Annie.

  This was a good point. I thought for a moment.

  ‘No. Not if they haven’t interviewed my wife yet. Your father said he thought they hadn’t found her, that she was abroad. Is this what you’ve read?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. We sat in silence a while longer. I was strangely reluctant to leave the car.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Bentink,’ she said, ‘as a matter of interest, not of doubt, how did you persuade my father of your innocence?’

  ‘It was easy,’ I said. ‘He spoke to a passing angel and got the full story.’

  She let out a little hiss of anger. It was easier to leave the car now.

  ‘I’m going down there,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot for the ride. I am truly grateful.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Annie. ‘You can’t just go barging in. You never know who’s there. Why take the risk? We can still get to Carlisle.’

  ‘That’s pretty dangerous, and for you too. This way there’ll just be one of us at risk.’

  How altruistic can you get, I thought. She got out of the car on the other side and came round to me.

  ‘I’ll come down with you then. If it’s no go, you can come back to the car. If it’s all right, I’ll just fade away and go home.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘what’s your interest? Why are you doing this?’

  ‘You’re innocent,’ she said with a touching simplicity. ‘I coshed you once. I owe you for that. And it must be a terrible thing to be falsely accused of such a crime. You need help.’

  I could find nothing to say to that but my hesitation was not prolonged as suddenly the headlights of a car blazed over the rise of the road then levelled down towards us.

  ‘Duck!’ I said and caught her in my arms and crouched down behind the hedge.

  The car drove on by down the hill without slowing. I let out my held breath.

  Annie was pressed tightly to me and I released my grip, but she just pressed herself tighter, her face buried in my shoulder. I pulled her hair gently and her head moved back, then her mouth came up to mine and she kissed me with a violence of passion that took me by surprise. But my Superboy body soon recovered and I applied myself to the activity with great enthusiasm. After a short while her tongue in my mouth and my hands in her car-coat were not enough and I rocked forward to a kneeling position and laid her on the ground before me. She breathed something inaudible, never opened her eyes, but her hands came up and caressed my face and beard.

  Desire failed in me as I felt those eager fingers burying themselves in the shallow tangles of my beard and looked down at that passion-flushed face and close-shut eyes. I knelt there quite still and looked down at her. After a while the hands stopped moving and the eyes opened. She looked up at me without expression, then the hands fell away. She sat up and looked at her slender legs, forking out from flimsy white briefs. She pulled her skirt down and stood up.

  I got up beside her and we set off down the diagonal slope to the cottage. My legs were weak beneath me and I stumbled against her twice. She accepted my weight without any attempt at evasion.

  We covered the last few yards to the cottage with great stealth, partly for fear of disturbing the inmates, and partly because, though fairly isolated, the cottage was on the fringe of the hamlet and there were another couple of houses quite close on the same lane. We, of course, coming across the field, were approaching the back door.

  We crouched down and pressed ourselves close to the wall by the window.

  The crack of light where the curtains did not quite meet was so thin that I could see little or nothing at first. It was not till I had moved my eyes up and down the whole length of it that I found a spot where the width was sufficient to allow me to see in. Even then I could only see a very narrow sliver of the room. Across it moved old Will. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he said, nor see who he was talking to. I hoped it was only his wife. But I had to be certain.

  I sank back down, wondering whether I should get Annie to knock at the door under some pretext. But what? She would have to get right in for it to be any use. Then my doubts were put at rest by a sound made familiar by Jan’s accounts of her childhood, reluctantly told in our early days together when we were still fascinatedly exploring each other’s minds and bodies – the thrusting home of the great metal bolts (three of them) on the back door, a process shortly to be repeated at the front.

  The point was that the nightly locking-up ritual would not take place with visitors in the house. Visitors, I gathered, were such a rarity in any case that I need hardly have feared them.

  I walked boldly to the back door and banged hard against it.

  Nothing happened. Then ‘Who’s there?’ quavered the voice of Mary, Jan’s mother, followed immediately by Will’s deeper ‘Hist, woman,’ and the sound of bolts being withdrawn. The ancient door creaked open and Will stood there, framed in the darkness.

  ‘Come in, lad,’ he said in the same tone he would have used had I come in broad day
light and expected. Then he saw Annie. ‘Wha’s this?’

  ‘A friend. She helped me.’

  ‘Come along in, miss.’

  We crowded into the darkened kitchen. Mary stood looking at us without a word.

  ‘Let’s go through,’ said Will.

  He pushed open the living-room door and the rectangle of light fell into the kitchen. I stepped aside and motioned Annie through first. She moved forward, then came to a dead halt in the doorway. I pressed close against her and had time to register the sensuous pressure of the curve of her buttocks before I saw what had caused her to halt.

  Standing facing us, her face mobile with uncertainty, was Jan.

  I was tired of surprises. I was tired of making sudden readjustments to circumstances and people. I felt a sudden flood of nostalgia not for my old life but for the peace and the darkness of the garden shed I had sat in waiting for Ferguson.

  The sight of Jan filled me illogically with resentment. Something of this must have shown for the uncertainty went out of her face and she said in a perfectly self-possessed tone: ‘Hello, Harry.’

  I pushed by Annie and confronted my wife.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked ungraciously. She did not reply but looked at Annie.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  There was the thinnest edge of a sneer in her tone and Annie reacted to it. Ignoring Jan she turned to me and, in perfect imitation, echoed, ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My wife,’ I answered, then turned it into an introduction. ‘This is Annie Ferguson. She helped me get here.’

  ‘That was kind of you, dear,’ said Jan.

  The stresses and intonation were perfect and Annie went stiff. Then Will, whom we had all forgotten, let out a chuckle behind us.

  ‘Hear that, Mary? Our Jan could always take off people to a turn, eh?’

  This reduction of Jan’s performance to the status of a performance eased the tension for a moment, cooling Annie’s anger and melting the icy façade which Jan had built around herself. I took a step towards her.

  ‘I’m glad to see you, Jan,’ I said.

  She looked at me searchingly.

  ‘Let’s all sit down,’ said Will. ‘You’ll be ready for a drink.’

  ‘So will you,’ I said, and he smiled broadly.

  ‘Ay, you bugger,’ he said, ‘I’m always ready.’

  He poured four great tumblerfuls of whisky. His wife did not drink. She sat still and alert in a corner while the rest of us were grouped around the great open fireplace. There was no fire at this time of year, but a splendid arrangement of green and red ferns in a bowl lit up the grate.

  ‘Who’ll start?’ I asked after taking a long pull at my glass.

  ‘I think you had best,’ said Will. ‘Did you kill those lasses?’

  I looked at him as he sat in the perfect ease of a man in charge of his own house. He wore a collarless shirt with its sleeves cut off a couple of inches above the elbow, and a much-darned and much-holed short-sleeved pullover; his ancient trousers dated back to a period when he measured a great deal less in girth and they were unbuttoned at the top to ease his waist. On his feet were a pair of ex-army boots, with their laces undone and trailing as a concession to domestic use.

  His question to me sounded like (and I felt sure was) merely a request for a necessary piece of information. No condition of assistance was being put forward here.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Can you prove it?’ put in Jan.

  ‘Of course he can’t,’ said Will, ‘or he wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I think she means, can I prove it to you, Will,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘You’re the only one here who can prove it to me, Jan. Could he do it?’

  I looked across at her but she evaded my gaze.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. How can I know?’

  She looked around for assistance. I sympathized with her predicament. How could anyone know anyone else perfectly. The best we could offer was blind faith. But Mary in the corner on whom Jan’s eyes had finally settled, spoke.

  ‘I know what your father could do and could not do, lass. Do you think I’d spend my life with a man if I did not know what he was?’

  This was probably the most complex speech I had ever heard her utter. Even Will looked up with a slight smile on his lips. Jan nodded a couple of times, in thought rather than acquiescence it seemed to me, then she turned to look at me once more. Perhaps it was just my fancy that made me sense she was letting into her mind with long missed clarity all the course of our life together, probing into all the corners where violence might lie hidden and certainly looking at every aspect of our physical relationship. The enthusiasm, the abandon, the readiness, the odd times and strange places, the seductions – and the mock-rapes. But running through it all, if our love had not been one-sided, she must have sensed and remembered the sweetness of it, the recognition of who we were, the refusal ever to become each other’s thing.

  ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘He could not do it. He can do much that is cruel, but not that.’

  This qualification of her verdict cut short any immodest satisfaction I might have felt and I nearly turned on her with the kind of self-controlled sarcasm which was the harbinger of so many of our quarrels. But an awareness of where we were and what we were doing caught me before I spoke. Incredibly I felt glad that I was here with all the attendant circumstances rather than alone with Jan about to file another layer off our marriage.

  ‘Why are you here, Jan?’ I asked. ‘I mean, not that I don’t want you here, don’t misunderstand me.’

  Will shook his head slightly at the thought of a man’s wife having the temerity to misunderstand him, but Jan nodded her comprehension.

  ‘You mean, am I here because of this business. No, not really. Though I might have come when it happened. I came up a week ago. I didn’t know what to do with myself when you and Peter went on holiday. I had no one I wanted to go with.’

  She busied herself with her drink for a moment, while the casually spoken confession sank into my consciousness. Then she resumed.

  ‘So on an impulse I came up here. It happened on the day I arrived. I didn’t know about it till I got here and Mam told me. They’d heard it on the radio and thought it was just a coincidence of names that the escaped man was called Bentink. But I knew.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come forward?’ I asked.

  Will answered. ‘We knew you’d either be caught or come here. It was daft our Jan letting herself be questioned by a lot of policemen when she couldn’t even see you. So I made her put her car in the old barn up hill. She’d arrived too late for folks around here to be up to see her. And she’s stuck close to the house ever since.’

  ‘And you told no one you were coming?’ I said, fearful that the house might be watched.

  ‘Who should I tell?’ she replied.

  I thought of her circle of women friends, the ones who would have been so eager to pass on to the police the rumour of our breaking marriage, and shrugged my shoulders.

  Annie, I noticed, was sitting perfectly still except for her eyes which flicked from speaker to speaker, missing nothing. There was a possible problem here, but whose it was, hers or mine, I had not yet decided. In any case this was not the time and place for problems of any kind except the great problem of my next move. I mentally shifted both Jan and Annie out of the arena of thought and made myself concentrate on the situation before me. Jan settled back in her chair with something like resignation on her face. Annie helped herself to another Scotch despite a disapproving look from Will, who believed that to offer one drink to a woman was generous, but a second was merely frivolous.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘I take it all assembled are for whatever reasons believers in my innocence? Good. Then let’s look at the problem which seems to me to be twofold.’

  I was beginning to get into my board-meeting stride and was a little put out when Will reached forward and tap
ped me on the knee.

  ‘Tell us your story first, lad.’

  I baulked a bit at this, partly I suppose because I’d already been through the thing once today with Ferguson, partly because, as I said to them, there was nothing I could say to them which I hadn’t said to Melton.

  ‘But he was looking for proof of your guilt, not of your innocence.’

  This was from Jan. I looked from her to her father and thought with surprise how alike they looked, not so much in feature as in the relaxed attentiveness of their postures. Suddenly, absurdly, I felt the stirring of a hope that this ill-assorted pair might really be able to help me.

  ‘All right, if you must,’ I said, and began my account of all that happened from our arrival at the Derwent Hotel till the police picked us up at Ravenglass. Here I paused.

  ‘Go on,’ said Will, so I related the course of my interrogation by Melton and all that had come out of it. When I reached the bit about Peter and Marco, I watched Jan covertly, but no other expression showed on her face than the calm attentiveness she had displayed throughout.

  ‘You’re up against it, lad,’ said Will when I finished. ‘A man on bad terms with his woman and a queer out of a loony-bin, that’s a bad enough start. Then there’s the barman who saw you trying to get off with the lasses and there’s half a dozen others who are ready to say you were a bad lot. You sound like a couple of drunks, that’s bad too.’ He shook his head and took a long pull at his glass.

  ‘But that’s not the worst. There’s the fact that you met these lasses, that you lied about it and that you didn’t admit your lie till witnesses were produced. Then there’s the blood from the sheep. And the funny way you behaved later, and the things your friend said to this lass’s father’ – indicating Annie – ‘And if that wasn’t enough, there’s the fact that your friend has confessed, or so they say. That’s a strong case.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ said Jan quietly.

  ‘Aye, and what’s that?’

  ‘The fact that Harry ran away. He could have had the best legal and other expert advice during the past week. He could perhaps have caused some kind of doubt in this man, Melton’s, mind. He doesn’t sound a fool. But the trail’s cold too. And probably all Melton’s been doing for the past seven days is directing the search after you, Harry.’