The unshaded, uncurtained lights of the Grange receded behind him. He was engulfed in the avenue shadows of the drive as if at the whim of a stage electrician’s dimmer. It was a warmer night than any the Kenworthys had had since the dislocated prop-shaft had knocked hell out of its cross-members. It was warm, unrelievedly dark, and damp-feeling still, though it had not actually rained for two days. He came out into the open road by the ruined lodge, relieved to escape from the heavy fungoid smell. Spentlow lay a mile or so below him, its lights, if any were still burning, concealed by the lie of the trees and the hair-pins of the road. On a distant hill-flank a dog was howling, disconsolate and ignored. Nearer at hand he heard the unavailing shriek of some vole taken by an owl. Otherwise there was no sound other than the air among fallen leaves, in itself a kind of silence.
Until, that is, he was within twenty yards of the last bend, which would bring him down over the lip of the village bowl. It was here that he first heard the engine of a vehicle coming up out of Spentlow: a heavy engine, one that had suffered much abuse in its time, the exhaust perforated, the throttle wide open to match its task. And now headlamps were striking up through the trees, spreading a fan of unidentifiable shadows. Kenworthy edged into the wall, thinking that the thing would be rounding the narrow bend and upon him before the driver saw him. But before it reached the corner the vehicle turned. There was a change of engine tone after the unskilful engagement of a lower gear, the struggle of wheels as they sought to grip an inimical surface, the splintering of wood as something was struck. Kenworthy hurried down to the corner, but could not make out what was happening, except that the thing had turned off the road up a field track, and was making heavy weather of a steep gradient and a glutinous surface. From its close-set beams he put it down as a Land-Rover or some such.
He might, then, have let it go at that, had it not become apparent that the driver was getting into more, and unusual, difficulty. The engine stalled, and needed several touches of the starter. There was again the whine of skidding wheels, this time on muddy grass. Kenworthy was now abreast of the field gate into which it had turned, and examined by torchlight the wrecked post whose splintering he had heard. By now the driver was coasting some yards downhill in reverse in order to find himself an easier slope for a fresh take-off. The lights slewed round, playing now laterally across a rough hillside dotted with sparse shrubs and ribbed with sheep-ridges. The vehicle started forward again; but the manoeuvre failed badly. Kenworthy was now near enough to pick up a tractor in his torchbeam, and to see that it was drawing a two-wheeled trailer. It was an ancient tractor, perhaps even an historic model, without hood or any kind of protective superstructure. And, as Kenworthy’s beam found it, it lurched over to its right, lost equilibrium on the uneven terrain, and began to totter sideways, dragging the trailer off its wheels behind it. In the same moment the driver had the presence of mind to throw himself off the seat to his left.
The assemblage did not fall far, but was brought up short by the furrows that it had ploughed. There was the sound of more woodwork breaking, the smell of escaping petrol, and Kenworthy raced uphill towards the man, who had flung himself clear. Already he was pulling himself to his feet, cursing loudly, and then, when he saw the newcomer, berating him as an intruder.
‘Who are you and what are you doing in this field? You know you are trespassing?’
Jesse Allsop: Jesse Allsop with a huge load of drink in him, though it was hard to see how incompetently drunk he was. He was too drunk to drive the ancient tractor that he had not handled for years – yet not too drunk to make some effort at pulling himself together when Kenworthy made himself known. All the same, his first instinct was to get down to the capsized trailer and get some idea as to how extricable the situation was.
‘One thing’s obvious,’ Kenworthy said. ‘You’re not going to be able to retrieve that tonight. Or get breakdown equipment within striking distance until the ground has dried out.’
For the moment, Allsop was more taken up with the state of the trailer than he was in volunteering explanations. The thing had turned full turtle and was obscuring whatever load it had carried.
‘Not a bloody hope,’ Allsop said, more to himself than to Kenworthy. ‘It’s under a curse to the last yard home.’
Kenworthy understood that ‘it’was the Stone.
‘Trying to take it back where it came from, were you?’
‘It should never have been brought down in the first place. And that wasn’t my doing. Two and a half centuries before my time. But somebody has to put things back to rights. Has to bloody well try, anyway.’
An intelligent, commercially competent man, convinced that he could assuage an ancient evil by returning a slab of carboniferous lime to the spot chosen for it four millennia ago? Somehow, on that benighted hillside, with the tractor’s headlights still carving uncouth angles through the long grass, there seemed almost an element of logic behind it. Allsop went to the tractor and tried to get an arm to the dashboard under the smashed steering column.
‘What are you trying to do?’
‘Switch off. The battery will be flat in no time.’
‘If ever you get this back down to the road, you’ll have bigger things to worry about than the battery.’
‘I can’t leave the lamps burning all night.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’ll be seen. Everybody will know.’
‘Does that matter? Won’t they all know, come the dawn? You’d be better off in the warmth and comfort of Dogtooth, making us both a cup of strong, black coffee.’
‘Warmth? Comfort? Dogtooth? You’ve never lived there.’
‘If I did, the place would be what I cared to make of it. I wouldn’t let myself be buggered about by a half-baked legend.’
‘You can talk like that. You’ll be back in London the week after next.’
A flash of impeccable clarity.
‘How about that coffee, Jesse?’
‘They’re thinking now that I killed the girl,’ Allsop said, his brain working in compulsive jerks.
‘Let’s go down to your place and talk about that.’
On their way across the yard it was obvious that the offending doorstep had been rooted out by savage force.
‘Billy Malkin and one or two of them gave me a hand with it. We got it on the trailer with block and tackle. But not one of them would come with me the rest of the way. We could have got it back where it belongs between us.’
Kenworthy said nothing until the coffee was made and Allsop had brought it into the living-room. His load of drink was wearing thin now but he was showing the combined effects of shock, fatigue and overall confusion. He was not wearing his worn, sober suit tonight, but a jumble of working clothes suitable to the job he had been doing. His hair, however, had clearly been sleekly combed when he set out.
‘I don’t understand a hard-headed man like yourself getting into this kind of state over a story.’
‘You haven’t lived with it all these years, Mr Kenworthy. There’d be a curse on the Allsops, that’s what the man said, more than a couple of hundred years ago.’
‘I suppose a man can reach the stage where he isn’t going to take chances on it.’
‘I blame the vicar,’ Allsop said. ‘It’s that Dunderdale who won’t let the thing die, keeping on about history, reminding people of things better forgotten. He still keeps on about a piece of land I wouldn’t sell them just after the war, for children’s swings and see-saws. I bet he’s put it in his silly new fairy-tale book. Why should I sell it to them at their price? They’ve all chosen to stay in dairy herds and what they can get from the Milk Marketing Board. I’ve gone for land and the holiday traffic. It’s my living. Why should I give it away? They don’t give me their cows.’
Gertrude Allsop looked down at them from her portrait; dull eyes, yet uncompromisingly demanding.
‘That’s what I mean, Jesse. You’re a successful man. The most successful man in this village. The only
one who knows what he wants to do with himself, and goes to it in a straight line. And from what I’ve picked up of local history, that went for your father and grandparents before you. That doesn’t sound to me like having a curse on you.’
‘You don’t know, Mr Kenworthy. Now there’s this—’
This meant everything, coming to a climax in the last interview he had had with Gleed. Kenworthy waited, looking closely at Allsop, a miserable man, misery pushed to the last tether of sanity.
‘Why did it have to happen on my doorstep? On that stone?’
‘Perhaps someone’s been trying to get at you.’
‘I don’t know about that. I know I’ve no friends, and I don’t know why that should be. I’ve done tight deals in my time, but never anything that wasn’t fair. Never anything to make me that kind of enemy. I know I may have made mistakes in my time –’
‘Such as what?’
‘When they took me to court, some of them, the preservation people, to try to make me put the stone back. I stuck to my rights – if only because right is right. The judge was on my side. He said that when it all happened the stone belonged to an Allsop. It was his to do what he liked with. I won through. I was right. But I know now that in a way I was wrong. That’s when I ought to have put the stone back.’
‘Maybe. But a court hearing like that doesn’t make people kill young girls and plant them on other people’s doorsteps.’
‘That’s what’s happened, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘I know. And we can rely on Chief Inspector Gleed to find out how and why. It won’t be for the reason you think. It won’t be because of any curse on your family. Because you and I, Jesse Allsop, are hard-boiled men with a sound knowledge of the concrete things about us. You know a cow from a caravan, and I know a hobgoblin from a murderer. But if a man were to believe that he had a curse on him, then things might be different. A curse that exists in the imagination can be every bit as fearsome as the real thing. But there’s only one curse of which I see any evidence in your life.’
Allsop’s eyes now looked as Davina’s dog’s had in the trap. Kenworthy gave him a few seconds in which to fail to think of an answer.
‘It’s a curse you could do something about yourself, if you would. Only it seems to me that you prefer to accept things as they are.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘I’m talking about the curse of loneliness, Jesse.’
The dart struck home. Allsop’s expression was all self-pity.
‘But there was one little period, not very long ago, when you thought you’d found the answer to it, didn’t you? You found that somebody liked you. I want you to tell me about how Davina started coming here.’
‘I’ve told all that to Mr Gleed.’
‘But I’m looking at it from a different angle.’
‘She came here the first time, as I told you when Mr Dunderdale was here. She said there was a mistake in the wages book. I showed her there wasn’t, and she saw that.
But she stayed on to talk afterwards, and she wasn’t like the other kids. A man could talk to her.’
‘About what sort of thing?’
‘About everything. History, and prehistoric burial-grounds, and television. And why people like to come for holidays here.’
‘So you asked her to tea the next day?’
Davina Stott, assuaging Jesse Allsop’s solitude – but only for the sake of the figure she cut in the eyes of those she wanted to impress –
‘I did. And she came often enough in the next few weeks, of her own accord.’
‘And she told you a lot about herself?’
‘A lot.’
‘Such as what?’
‘Such as what she’d been like as a child. How she used to plague her parents.’
‘And I must ask you this – I must have a true answer – was there ever anything between you except talk?’
‘I can only say what I said to Mr Gleed; nothing happened.’
‘And how hard did she try to make something happen?’
‘She didn’t try at all.’
‘No? My impression is that she did so with every other male she encountered. She wasn’t far off trying it on with me.’
‘I’ll swear on my honour that I neither touched her, nor thought of doing so.’
‘But did she touch you?’
‘Anyone can see that you and Gleed come from the same stable. Yes; she touched me. She put her hand on mine and left it there.’
‘And you liked that?’
‘Mr Kenworthy – a girl lays her hand on a man’s knuckles. That doesn’t make him guilty of indecent assault.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about intimate matters?’
Like the prostitute who keeps the pack of obscene photographs for the client who needs rousing; some men can be roused by talking to them about things that they think are taboo.
‘I’m telling you the truth, Mr Kenworthy. There were times when she tried to.’
‘About what kind of thing, Jesse?’
‘About birth control, and sex before marriage, and free love, and that sort of thing.’
‘You discussed all this with her freely?’
‘No, I wouldn’t discuss such things at all. I always headed her off.’
‘Why do that?’
‘Because I am an old-fashioned man, Mr Kenworthy. I understand that the young generation have a freedom about these things quite different from ours, and that is probably a good thing. But it still goes against the grain with me.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
‘What other reason could there be?’
‘Because she disturbed you, Jesse. We are a couple of normal men, you and I, and you know very well what I mean by “disturb you”. Did she disturb you?’
‘No. Because I always scotched it when things started turning that way.’
‘But it is true that you could have been disturbed. Jesse: in my book there are circumstances in which a man isn’t to be blamed if certain things happen.’
‘Nothing did happen, Mr Kenworthy. I was determined it shouldn’t.’
‘So that is why, in the end, you stopped her from coming?’
‘I didn’t stop her from coming. She stopped herself. And even that isn’t the real truth, in my opinion. She was stopped.’
‘Stopped? By whom?’
‘If I could answer that, perhaps you and Gleed could go home.’
Kenworthy seemed to think that there was little more to be wheedled out of Allsop on that score.
‘At any rate,’ he said, as he finally took his leave, ‘maybe things will clear themselves up soon. We’ll see if you have made things any better by getting rid of the Anathema Stone.’
‘I’m not rid of it, Mr Kenworthy. It still lies in one of my fields.’
Chapter Thirteen
The detainees from Spentlow Grange were returned to their quarters before nine o’clock next morning. Bob Foster, the one with the Kaffir mop, and Patricia Cave, known by preference as Triss, had been charged with possession of a small quantity of cannabis resin. No charge had been preferred against John Horrocks. They were driven back to the derelict house in a police car, with whose driver all three of them seemed to have established friendly terms. It was understood that the local authority was setting machinery in motion to secure the eviction of the Beaker Folk.
This news was brought authoritatively to the Kenworthy household by Mrs Scadbolt, whose confident reporting was in no way embarrassed by the speed with which the information seemed to have reached her. Nor was her knowledge supported by such scholarly apparatus as acknowledgement of sources; yet ultimate confirmation proved her to have been reasonably accurate.
Kenworthy was not up early enough to receive the situation report at first hand. Elspeth had left him to sleep off naturally the activities of the night, and it was half past ten before he was up. He was still breakfasting, in negligent rather than merely casual costume, when Chief Inspector
Gleed drew up outside.
Courteous, his head clearly filled with nothing but business, Gleed was nevertheless off-puttingly distant when Kenworthy stressed his readiness to help.
‘Actually, I would greatly prefer it if you would come along with me to headquarters.’
‘The last time I said that to a man, Gleed, it had sinister significance. Well, of course; I don’t mind. You want to play me away from home? You shall.’
During the three-quarter-hour journey from the bleaker hill country down to an arterial road, Gleed apparently saw the need for conversation – a flowing yet shallow conversation about the changing economic structure of the region. The conversation long-circuited itself self-consciously away from Davina Stott and the Beaker Folk. Kenworthy made no effort to plunge them into more pressing matters.
He was left alone for upwards of twenty minutes in an ordinary interview room, perhaps even the same one in which Horrocks and company had been questioned. Gleed disappeared for a while; it might have been a stage in his psychological preparations, it might be that he had come back to his office to find his attention suddenly demanded in all directions. The HQ must suffer chronically from shortage of space and corners for privacy. When Gleed finally returned he was carrying a neat folder that had Kenworthy’s name on it followed by a complex index number.
‘Mr Kenworthy, my colleagues and I have greatly appreciated the care you have taken not to get under our feet. For our part, we have done our best to respect the fact that you are on holiday.’
He said this as if he had learned the speech by heart; a man who did not need to learn his speeches by heart.
‘Your initial’statements and the various memoranda you have submitted are full and clear. They pose virtually no demands for further clarification, except here and there for some detail that is no doubt due to slow perception on our part. All you have told us accords closely with the evidence of other witnesses. All of which, of course, is no more than we would expect from you.’
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