‘He doesn’t really believe that he killed those girls, you see,’ he explained. ‘He confessed in the first place as a way out, a means of relieving pressure. It’s surprising what even the most well-balanced of us will do or say at moments of stress.’
‘Surprising?’ I asked. ‘No, not so surprising to me, doctor.’
He raised his eyebrows sardonically at me and went on, ‘Also, in Mr Thorne’s case, there is this desire to be linked with you. I suspect the police told him you had confessed, and that his own confession, as well as relieving pressure, also gave him a chance to join you.’
‘What will happen now?’
He smiled confidently.
‘I have no worries. Peter will be fit and well again in a couple of months with your help.’
‘And without it?’
He looked disconcerted. Briefly I explained.
‘Your wife is right to a certain extent. Certainly your visits to Peter will increase his dependency on you. It could hardly be otherwise. Don’t misunderstand me. He’s not so sick that he won’t recover without you. It’ll take longer. All that will happen will be that he’ll find a suitable substitute. Reliable. Solid. Dependable.’ He laughed. ‘Probably me.’
‘At least you’re qualified, doctor.’
‘Yes. I’m qualified.’
The very tonelessness with which he said this struck me as a comment on my attitude, but I left without further discussion.
I had to get back to Carlisle where Jan was still staying and talk things over from the start again.
But when I got back, Janet was gone. She left a note for me.
‘Harry, I’m leaving. Don’t think it’s because of Peter. I’m desperately sorry for him and hope he will be well again soon. But I honestly think he’ll be better without you. I’m rather like him, perhaps that’s why we never got on. I needed you, need you, I don’t know. But there’s something in you which isn’t good for us, for me, for him. A kind of self-regarding. I think that’s probably why you survived out on the fells. I thought for a while there was a change and hope for us. But all that really happened was that I got caught up in your orbit just like all the others. You belong to the moment only, Harry. I need wider horizons.’
It ended there, abruptly, enigmatically.
But not enigmatically enough for my self-esteem.
I spent a feverish week trying to track her down. No one could help. Will and Mary were sympathetic but unsurprised. Melton dismissed me with polite speed when I sought his assistance. Our London friends knew nothing. She had been back to the flat, I knew. One or two personal belongings had gone – a statuette; a picture. I wept dry tears when I saw the gaps they left. But the realization that she meant to go for good did not strike home until the third day after my return to London. Shattock, the man who looks after the garage under our block of flats, approached me as I left one morning. He touched his scant forelock in a gesture more offensive than humble and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Bentink. I wonder if Mrs Bentink would mind moving her car.’
I thought for one heart-turning moment that Jan must have come back. Then he went on.
‘It’s just a bit out of line, you see. Not worth bothering about really, but it’s been like that a week now and if it’s going to be left standing, it might as well be up to the wall so as not to inconvenience the other tenants.’
I hardly heard what he was saying as I strode rapidly down into the garage with Shattock puffing behind me. It was a large underground garage but I had no difficulty in spotting Jan’s Mini. It looked as if it had been parked in a hurry and just left. I should certainly have noticed it if I had been down there since my return, but I rarely drove in London. The keys were still in the ignition, the door was unlocked. I looked at Shattock’s insultingly helpful face. He must have noticed the keys.
‘Why didn’t you move it yourself?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t have done that, sir, not without the lady’s permission and she don’t seem to have been around lately.’
He knew. They must all know, everyone who worked in the building. It was something to enjoy. But I had no desire to reflect upon the petty malice of the human animal at that moment. All I knew, all I could think was that if Jan had left her car, she had gone for good. She was not so stupid as to leave clothes, shoes, anything of that ilk; she needed those: they were hers by right. But the car, her Mini, was her most treasured possession and the most cherished of my gifts. To abandon it was to abandon me.
I climbed in and moved the car right up to the wall, got out, locked the door and walked away, ignoring Shattock’s fulsome thank-yous.
My mind was in a turmoil. In my mail that morning there had been a note from Peter’s doctor asking if I could call to see him, and a short letter, conventionally, almost stiltedly, phrased, from Annie expressing her pleasure at the news which had just reached her.
In addition to this, though I was less pestered by reporters than I had been, a couple of the papers (those, strangely enough, which had previously been most blatant in their assumption of my guilt), still pursued me with ‘generous’ offers for the exclusive rights on the story of my ‘ordeal’. Even if I had felt tempted to accept, my solicitor had advised me to regard every aspect of the affair as sub judice. Not that his warning was needed. I had no desire at all to do business with these or any newspapers. I didn’t need the money, I didn’t want the publicity. But still they persisted.
So when I got to my office that morning, my nerves were stretched taut. The new perspective I thought I had found in the mountains had rapidly wavered and gone out of focus.
Not wholly, but mainly as a result of my prolonged ‘holiday’, a great deal of extremely urgent business had piled up for me, and far from being able to relegate to his proper subservient position that ‘me’ which was a pin-striped business man, ‘he’ had begun to make new and greater demands on my life.
Or perhaps it was just that my life had other more important demands being made on it at the same time. I could do no work that morning and after a couple of hours I dropped everything and went home, determined to look at my problems.
Not that there was much to look at. It is always a pleasant illusion to tell ourselves that it is other people who concern us. But it is an illusion difficult to preserve.
I told myself I was bothered about what happened to Jan. To Peter. To Annie, to a lesser extent, I suppose.
To myself to a greater extent, I should have added.
For in the end, after twenty-four hours’ ‘looking’ at the problem, I did what I had done in Keswick police-station without any looking at all.
I ran.
I stayed long enough to delegate all essential authority in the firm.
I told my friends that I had been medically directed to take a change of air, my colleagues that I hoped to establish new business contacts abroad, wrote an apologetic letter to Peter’s doctor.
And left.
I was sick of it all, of worrying, of working, of effort, of decisions. I wanted a world of acquaintances, of transient relationships, for a while. As my boat crossed the Channel and I peered down at the white scar of our wake on the sea’s grey skin, I even managed to tell myself that I had done my bit for long enough. It was time for others to act.
That was more than six months ago. I think then I half believed that what had happened would heal up as quickly and leave as little trace as that gash of bursting foam. But even then I half disbelieved also. I wandered slowly across the face of Europe. I could afford to. I even turned my imagined business dealings into reality and this helped to satisfy my need for self-justification. But like a chronic disease, it broke out again. And again. Eventually I found myself explaining to acquaintances as casual as I could have desired, and being hurt by their lack of interest.
I had had enough by Christmas, most of which I spent in a Hamburg bar and the rest of which I spent somewhere which involved the spending of every penny I had, though whether it was church or brothel I never knew.
I was incapable of behaving properly in either. I would have gone home then but I had by now mapped out a kind of touring business programme for myself and some stubbornness of will made me go on. I was like a marathon-runner who doesn’t stop because there’s nowhere to stay. But like a runner I found that the first step past endurance is the hardest. The physical image was a very real one for I found that more and more I was beginning to feel as I had done out on the fells those two nights last summer.
Finally with spring I turned and headed back. Not home, not London, but here, once more to the Lakes. The newspapers had pestered me relentlessly but in vain for the right to tell my story. And now I wanted to tell it my way, to make my experiences reliveable, for it is the frightening transience of experience which makes us what we are. Or makes us remain what we are. So I came back to these hills, these waters, these memories.
This morning I wrote a letter to Peter’s doctor offering my help for what it is worth. I know he is out and working again, but I am not sure how he will react to me. I doubt if I have been much of a friend to him. I don’t know if I ever can be now, but I see no escape from trying, for his sake this time, not for mine. I wrote the letter also because I have to make it quite clear here what I have done, what I shall do.
Yesterday I drove into Penrith and went to see Chief-Superintendent Melton. This again was something I felt needed doing. He greeted me, with no surprise, but sat me down and enquired politely after my health and my affairs. I told him a great deal more than I intended but, I felt, even less than he knew. He in his turn told me what I had already read, that Sam had been sentenced to life, whatever that might mean. He was, it seemed, sane within the terms of the law. The other four surviving members of the Wyrton Boys’ Club party had been kept under careful psychiatric observation since the previous summer. Two of the families concerned had moved from the village and the boys had adjusted happily and normally to their new environment. Of the other two, one boy had had to be removed from his parents whose narrow religious views were quite incapable of comprehending events of this nature. They themselves were moved almost to despair by their conviction of their son’s damnation and this not unnaturally had affected the boy’s health. He was now in a local authority home where he seemed to be settling well. Strangely enough, his removal – and that of the first two – seemed to have affected most of all the one lad remaining in the village. His parents, good reasonable people, were growing more and more concerned by his withdrawal into himself and it was thought that he too might have to be removed for treatment.
There seemed little left to say after this and the meeting was breaking up on this sombre note when Melton seemed to come to a decision. Adjusting his spectacles in that characteristic way, he coughed and said, ‘By the way, I hear Mrs Bentink is with us again, staying with her parents for a while. I hope the weather holds out for you both. The rain seems to have retreated, temporarily at least.’
Then he ushered me out into the corridor and shook me by the hand.
‘I’m glad you called. I wondered if you would,’ he said.
As I left, I think I saw Copley driving off outside. He didn’t look round.
Well, that’s it all. My first impulse was to drive right round to Thurbeck and I even set off. But after only a couple of miles I halted and turned back to my hotel in Buttermere.
This was what I had been writing for, after all. To explain myself, partly to myself. But also to you, Jan. So I must not spoil things, or falsify things by appearing suddenly myself. A long time ago, sitting in a wood outside Wyrton we agreed to tell the truth. And agreed that the truth must be written if it is to remain and be effective as truth. You won’t like all you have read. I don’t like much of it myself. But it is my truth. And I shall wait here till you let me know whether, knowing the truth, you want to have me with it. I shall wait.
If you enjoyed Fell of Dark, try reading:
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reginald Hill, who died in 2012, was a native of Cumbria and former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring detectives Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. Their appearances won him numerous awards including a CWA Gold Dagger, the Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. The Dalziel and Pascoe novels have also been adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series.
BY REGINALD HILL
Dalziel and Pascoe novels
A CLUBBABLE WOMAN
AN ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
RULING PASSION
AN APRIL SHROUD
A PINCH OF SNUFF
A KILLING KINDNESS
DEADHEADS
EXIT LINES
CHILD’S PLAY
UNDER WORLD
BONES AND SILENCE
RECALLED TO LIFE
PICTURES OF PERFECTION
THE WOOD BEYOND
ASKING FOR THE MOON: A DALZIEL AND PASCOE COLLECTION
ON BEULAH HEIGHT
ARMS AND THE WOMEN
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD
DEATH’S JEST BOOK
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
THE DEATH OF DALZIEL
A CURE FOR ALL DISEASES
MIDNIGHT FUGUE
Joe Sixsmith novels
BLOOD SYMPATHY
BORN GUILTY
KILLING THE LAWYERS
SINGING THE SADNESS
THE ROAR OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Other
FELL OF DARK
THE LONG KILL
THE COLLABORATORS
DEATH OF A DORMOUSE
DREAM OF DARKNESS
THE ONLY GAME
THE STRANGER HOUSE
THE WOODCUTTER
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
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United Kingdom
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