This is a lie, I thought in amazement. Why is she lying to me?
‘He got hold of my hand. I said very starchily – you know me – that he should tell you, that in fact he could do so any minute as I was expecting you home soon (I wasn’t but I was scared). This didn’t stop him. If anything it seemed to please him, to excite him. I had to literally fight him off. He’s not very strong, is he?’
‘He’s spent a lot of time in bed,’ I said defensively, instinctively and, I realized at once, ridiculously.
She glanced at me with worry.
‘If this is true,’ I found myself saying, ‘why didn’t you tell me that night?’
‘I might have done,’ she said, ‘but you rang up later to say you had some extra work to finish and you’d be going straight to the hospital from the office. I told you to go to hell. Remember?’
I remembered.
‘I would have told you, I think, but by the time you got back, I’d got to like knowing that you didn’t know. It gave me a real grievance to nurse. I don’t think I’d had anything real up to then.’
I recognized then that she was telling the truth.
‘Why are you telling me now?’
‘To get something out of the way between us. Also, I thought, well, is it possible that Peter might have had something to do with the murders, Harry? Were you with him all the time? You said you lied to Melton to defend Peter. You’re not still lying, are you? Did he really need defending?’
‘No, no, I told the truth,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I told the truth to you.’
But I was thinking now of those words of Marco’s quoted to me by Melton. To make a relationship with a woman viable, Peter needed some extraordinary or dangerous circumstance. And he had found this with Jan, for a moment anyway.
‘He never came back?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You went only a few days later. Just think, hardly a fortnight ago. But it’s been worrying me this past week, Harry. I kept on thinking that Peter could do it.’
‘And that was why you had doubts about me?’
‘Till I saw you. Till Mam made me look at you.’
‘Why did you really go home, Jan?’
She never answered the question. Out of a side lane without slowing came a police car and turned left. Jan shoved her foot hard down on the brake and we screamed to a halt. Her face flushed with anger, she blew the Mini’s hysterical little horn and swore vilely. The police-car stopped and the driver got out.
Jan suddenly remembered me and our mission and took her hand off the horn. She reached for the gear lever but I gripped her hand tightly.
‘Don’t be daft,’ I murmured. ‘Be angry but don’t overdo it.’
The constable leaned down till his face was level with the open window.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ snapped Jan. ‘You of all people should look where you’re going.’
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ said the young man equably. ‘Not usually much around here at these times.’
‘Well, no damage done, eh dear?’ I said, smiling toothily and putting on a dreadful comic-officer accent.
‘That’s right, sir,’ said the constable. ‘You’re up and about a bit early yourselves.’
‘Thought we’d beat the traffic.’
‘Good idea, sir. Hope you and your wife have a pleasant trip, Mr er – what did you say your name was, sir?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said with a despairing laugh. He did not laugh back but just stood there with his face filling the tiny window. ‘It’s Ferguson, actually, if you must know.
‘I see. Excuse me troubling you like this, Mr Ferguson, but do you have any proof of your identity. Driving licence, for instance?’
‘Well no,’ I said extemporizing wildly, ‘lost the thing, or rather had it taken off me for a year. That’s why the wife’s driving.’
‘You must have something, sir. Letter, library ticket. You know.’
‘Doubt it,’ I said. ‘I travel light.’ I began fishing in my pockets, avoiding my own wallet in my jacket. My fingers touched on some papers in the inside pocket of the coat. I said a prayer and pulled them out. One was an envelope. It was addressed to Ferguson.
‘There’s this,’ I said.
He took it and turned it over two or three times, then gave it back.
‘Thank you, sir. You didn’t notice anyone on foot as you came along this morning, did you?’
I thought for a moment of describing myself about five miles back, but at once dismissed the idea as stupid.
‘No, we didn’t. Anything up?’
‘Nothing to bother you, sir. Ma’am.’
He touched his cap and went back to the car.
We watched him out of sight.
‘That was quick thinking,’ said Jan.
‘Not a bit of it. It was the only name I could think of apart from my own.’
‘I wonder what little Annie’s up to today,’ said Jan, casually.
I ignored her and put Ferguson’s envelope away and then glanced at the other papers I had pulled out with it. They were the notes and jottings Will had handed me to study that morning. I shivered at how close I’d been to handing them to the policeman and wondered what he would have made of them if I had. I glanced at Jan, but she was now really concentrating on her driving. We couldn’t afford any accidents even if they weren’t with police cars.
I began to study Will’s bits of paper. He’d really done a quite remarkable job though as I glanced down the orderly list before me, I realized that it was really just a systematical presentation of the information and alternatives offered by all the newspaper reports he had read. There were the usual discrepancies from one paper to another, the result of imagination in some cases and indolence in others.
I folded it up and put it in my pocket, then looked at Will’s notes on my own account of the fatal day. Again his orderly mind was very much in evidence. The events of that day again ran through my mind as I read and in the end I shook away the memory and put the paper with the other.
But then something nagged in a corner of my mind. It was like one of those times when you turn the page of a newspaper and suddenly know you’ve caught a glimpse of a certain word on the page you are turning. You may have to search for ages to find it (if such things bother you; they do me) and sometimes you find it wasn’t the word you thought at all, but a couple of words which together form something like it.
I took the papers out again and after much searching, I found it. I looked at my discovery in disappointment. It was like the bit of grit in your eye which, once removed, looks minute. I sat and studied for a while. Insignificant it might be, but it was all there was.
‘Look,’ said Jan, ‘we’re nearly on the A6.’
‘Pull up,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Just pull up.’
The car rolled to a stop and Jan turned off the engine.
‘Well?’
‘You’ve got to go back to Thurbeck and see your father.’
‘What! Are you mad?’
‘No. Take this paper and ask him why he wrote this.’ I underlined an item with my nail.
Jan peered down at the list.
‘What’s the idea? I don’t get you.’
‘Just ask him.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘It’d be silly for me to take the risk of being seen again. I’ll wait.’
She laughed.
‘Just wait? By the roadside? As if for a bus?’
I shook my head and pointed across the field to our left.
‘See those trees. I’ll shin up one of them and watch for you coming back. Then nip back across the field, hop in, and we’re no worse off than before, are we?’
Jan stared at me distrustingly.
‘This isn’t some kind of brush-off, is it, Harry? For chivalrous or other reasons? You’re not just going to take off into the blue the minute I’m out of sight, are you?’
‘Don’t be stupid,
’ I said. ‘Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, wouldn’t I wait till you’d driven me somewhere a bit more civilized than this?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Perhaps you think that that’s just a Machiavellian twist to throw you off the scent,’ I said with heavy sarcasm, getting out of the car.
She seized my hand and hung on to it for a moment. Then, ‘Look after yourself, Superboy,’ she said, and spun the Mini into an exhibitionistic three-point turn.
I watched her out of sight then set off cautiously across the field. Shinning up the tree was harder to do than to say, but somehow I managed it. As I sat in great discomfort in a fork which seemed to be gripping me tighter and tighter like a pair of pincers, I vowed to discard forever the boyhood memories of happy hours spent dreaming green dreams sixty feet up.
It was still very early and there was next to no traffic on this small side-road. A farm tractor went by after about ten minutes, then there was nothing for half an hour, when I saw with some unease a police car drive slowly along. I couldn’t make out if it was the same one that had nearly crashed with us earlier. But it passed out of sight without slowing down and a few minutes later I saw it pass round a curve in the road about a quarter of a mile away and just visible from my perch.
I relaxed again and resumed my vigil for Jan. The powers of patience I had so recently congratulated myself on developing had got lost somewhere and I was as nervous and fidgety as my precarious position would permit. I told myself a hundred times that a single figure could not possibly have any significance at all – for that was all I had underlined with my thumb-nail.
The item had read: ‘2: climb down gully to sheep.’ It was the 2 I was interested in. Was it just Will’s way of tabulating the items? Or was it perhaps a time? If it was a time, I thought … but what if it was? There were a thousand explanations.
There was only one which interested me.
I shifted again and a thrush which had finally plucked up courage to settle in what was obviously his own personal tree rose up again, his speckles heaving with indignation.
In the distance there was a flash. Sun on a windscreen? I was right. The blue Mini came terrier-like along the road.
I nearly broke my leg dropping out of that tree and hobbled across the field, bending low for token concealment.
‘Come on, Quasimodo,’ said Jan. I literally hopped into the car and we set off almost before the door closed.
‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked.
‘It’s pointless hanging about. We’ll just draw attention to ourselves. That police car’s still prowling about.’
‘Yes, I saw it.’
‘So did I. I just hope they didn’t have time to realize this was the same car as before – minus one male passenger.’
We screeched round a corner, if not on two wheels, then at least with the outside pair on tiptoe.
‘For God’s sake!’ I cried.
‘Take it easy,’ she said, ‘you haven’t fastened your seatbelt.’
I did so at once.
‘Well,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘What did Will say?’
‘Hang on.’
We turned another corner and tore along a straight, slowing as we passed a sign saying ‘Halt – major road ahead.’
It was the A6. Right lay Penrith and the south; left was Carlisle.
We seemed to be approaching very quickly if we were going to cut right across the road.
‘Watch it,’ I said warningly.
Jan said nothing, but glanced to her right as we reached the junction, and swung the wheel over hard left.
‘What in the name!’ I expostulated. ‘What are you doing?’
As we were now on a broad straight main road with excellent visibility, Jan slowed down to a steady sedate pace.
‘Dad said he wrote 2 because that was the time Peter went after the sheep. He backtracked a bit and found that he had not got the time from you as he thought when I first asked him, but he’d got it indirectly from one of the newspapers.’
‘Which one? What did it say?’
‘It was the local paper, as it happens. It had an interview with the boys from the Wyrton Boys’ Club, the ones who saw you with the girls. Here’s the paper, I’ve ringed the bit.’
She passed me a cutting headlined, with great verve I thought, ‘Wyrton Boys Help Police.’ Now if it had been the Mirror, there would have been something about the Sun Shining on Murder Mountain.
The paragraph ringed read simply, ‘Alan Hayhurst, 15, the youngest of the group, showed the binoculars through which he had his last glimpse of the murdered girls. “It was about 2 o’clock,” he said, “and we were just getting ready to move on again after having our sandwiches. I looked all around the fells and then I noticed the two girls.”’
They had kept well away from any identification of us in the paper. As it was, I thought they were sailing a bit near the wind in talking to witnesses of this age. But it might be of some help to me so I had no cause to be censorious.
Yet now I had the source of that mysterious 2 in my hands, I could not see how it could really help.
‘The thing is,’ I began to Jan.
‘The thing is, it was well before two when you met the girls and you want to know who it was who was with them at two.’
‘Right. But perhaps it’s just a misprint, or a misunderstanding. Or his watch was wrong. What can I do about it anyway? And why are we heading towards Carlisle. London, in case you’ve forgotten, is south.’
‘And Wyrton, a small but thriving village, is approximately two miles north of Carlisle.’
I threw up my hands in mock admiration.
‘My! Aren’t you and Will the smart ones! What am I supposed to do there anyway! Walk up to whatsisname – Alan Hayhurst’s house and say “Excuse me, Mrs Hayhurst, but can I speak to your son, Alan. My name is Bentink and he mistakenly thinks he saw me with those poor murdered girls at two p.m. on the fatal day.” She’ll let me in, of course.’
‘What’s happened to Superboy?’ asked Jan. ‘You will find a way.’
‘Of course, it would be different if you went and did the talking, dear,’ I said speculatively.
‘I told you you’d find a way,’ she said.
It was too early for the customary traffic jam to have built up in Carlisle and we crossed the city boundary at an illegal fifty.
‘Steady,’ I said, partly because of the speed limit and partly because the car was bumping and bouncing over a series of ridges and potholes.
‘I see now why they like traffic jams here,’ said Jan, slowing to thirty, ‘they stop you noticing the state of the road.’
I laughed, then thought ruefully to myself that we hadn’t laughed together like this for a long time. What would happen to us when the impetus of the now strangely exhilarating circumstances wore off? I wondered if we would slow down to the old grinding speed. I knew our marriage was not a vehicle which could survive bottom gear for long – we were not made for mere tolerance of each other. Of course, the strangely exhilarating circumstances might never end – for me. I felt certain deep inside that we were on a wild goose-chase. The chances of the report of the time being accurate seemed very long, the more I thought about it. The identification of us had been positive. At least, Melton said it had been positive. I sat up straight at the thought and poked my head against the roof. Melton – I had no idea what the boys had really told him. Perhaps it had been much vaguer. Perhaps, the more sinisterly, they had been subtly persuaded into a positive identification. If Copley had talked to them, I could easily believe it. My doubts were resolved. I had to see those boys.
Something of my indecision must have shown for Jan glanced at me and said, ‘Well. What’s the plan?’
We were approaching the centre of the city through a dark industrial canyon. This broadened out eventually into a shopping area which in turn broadened into the station square.
‘Find a hotel,’ I
said.
‘Big, little, scruffy, temperance?’ she asked.
‘Big,’ I said. ‘They’re more easily impressed. We can’t just hang about the place, it attracts too much attention. We’ve got to have a base.’
‘Right,’ she said, and we pulled to a halt in front of a not inelegant building which had a sign in Gothic script advertising that we were arriving at the Carliol.
We were welcomingly received at reception and with surprising lack of fuss for an English hotel so early in the morning (it was still only nine-thirty) were taken to our room immediately. I repeated my patter about starting early to avoid the traffic and was assured that this was a splendid idea. I decided to push my luck even further and enquired diffidently about breakfast.
‘Certainly, sir,’ said the girl from the reception desk, who was herself leading us upstairs.
‘Would you like it in your room or will you come down?’
‘In our room,’ said Jan with a honeymooner’s simper.
‘I’ll send a waiter up,’ the receptionist replied with a smile, opening a bedroom door. ‘Here we are.’
We sat down and laughed together when she had gone. I reached over and took Jan in my arms. There was a sharp knock at the door. We sprang apart like adulterers.
‘Come in,’ I said.
It was the waiter. The sight of him brought Peter to my mind and I knew that here was another problem which I had merely shelved for the moment.
When the waiter had taken our order and gone I said to Jan, ‘By the way, I hope you’ve got some money. With this kind of service the bill must be astronomical.’
‘I’ve got enough,’ said Jan. ‘I haven’t exactly been able to spend much in the last few days.’
‘You’ll spend a bit more in a while,’ I said. ‘They’re looking for me in a brown suit, and I can’t wear Ferguson’s coat all day. It’s going to be warm again as well.’
‘Right. Then what?’
‘This is how I see it. We idle away this morning. Then this afternoon we head out to Wyrton. I drop out at the edge of the village. You go on to this Hayhurst child’s house, say you’re a reporter, writer, sociologist, anything. But get talking to him and check on this time business.’
Fell of Dark Page 15