by Gil North
Cluff slumped in a chair, on the other side of a table, his hat tipped over his closed eyes, fists thrust into the pockets of his Burberry, trouser legs steaming slightly under the table. Clive, sedate, walked forward and settled himself on the floor. Barker tip-toed away, easing the door to, missing the flicker of Cluff’s eyelids.
The police car returned. Its driver stamped into the outer office, a gesture from Barker pleading for silence. “Is he going home?” the driver asked.
“Who?”
The driver glanced at Cluff’s door.
“Hasn’t he got his car?”
“Not him!”
“He’s asleep.”
The driver said, “It’s not the night or the time I’d have chosen for a stroll. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he finally turned up with that dog of his. He wouldn’t get away with it anywhere except in Gunnarshaw.”
“Let him rest.”
“She wasn’t half a bobby-dazzler,” the driver commented.
Alone in the office Barker crossed from time to time to Cluff’s door, pausing to listen. He could hear nothing except the ticking of the clock and the wind and the rain. Gunnarshaw slept, its streets empty, the only lamps still lit those at road junctions, the rows of terrace houses climbing the slopes of the moors dark and quiet. Barker found it hard to believe that anyone else was alive in the town. He was a little afraid in case Cluff should be unable to repeat the one important success that stood to his name, solicitous for Cluff, disturbed. Cluff’s heavy, jowled face persisted in his mind, lined, the hint of greying hair peeping from under Cluff’s hat. He looked older to Barker in repose, more careworn, less competent.
Barker jumped, startled by the discordant ringing of the telephone. A woman’s voice, pitched in too loud a tone, demanded peremptorily, “Is he there?”
“I’ll put you through.”
He switched over to Cluff’s extension, prepared for a slight delay before Cluff woke. The Sergeant answered at once. Barker said, “It’s Mrs. Croft.”
“I’m not in.”
“I’ve already told her—” Barker began and Cluff’s phone banged on the rest.
Barker went back to the outside line and excused himself lamely, “I can’t get hold of him.”
“Very likely!”
“A woman’s been killed.”
“Again!”
“They sent for him last night.”
“He’s the only policeman in Gunnarshaw?”
“It’s a job for the C.I.D.”
“He’s got Clive with him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s something. Who are you?”
“Barker.”
“The young one? I want him here by eight.”
“I don’t know—”
The telephone said, “He’s not fit to be let loose on his own,” and died.
“She wants you back, Sergeant,” Barker said, avoiding Cluff’s red-rimmed eyes, Cluff’s grey dewlaps covered with a stubble of grey whisker.
“Is it still raining?”
Barker shook his head.
“Get me Patterson. At his house.”
Cluff’s phone said, “Caleb?”
“It’s me.”
“I expected a call.”
“Did you?”
The Superintendent at County Police Headquarters said, “Sooner or later.”
The seconds ticked away.
“Where are you?” Patterson asked.
“The station.”
“A pity it’s come just now.”
“My God!” Cluff said. “What else do you think I had to do with Wright dead and Jinny Cricklethwaite in prison?”
“I told Mole—”
“Whose job is it?”
“I’ll send you an extra man—”
“What for?”
“You can’t handle this alone.”
“He’ll do more harm than good in a place like Gunnarshaw.”
“Where have you got to?”
“I haven’t started yet.”
The telephone stayed quiet.
“Don’t you trust me?” Cluff said.
“You have your methods.”
“Leave it then.”
“It isn’t me. The Chief Constable—”
“All right. Someone local.”
“We haven’t—”
“There’s a man in the uniformed branch here. Barker.”
“I’ll arrange it with his Superintendent. Mole won’t like it.”
“Never mind Mole.”
“Can we help in the laboratories?”
“I’ll let you know. It was raining last night. Mole searched for a weapon. He didn’t find one.”
“Put something on paper and let me have it,” Patterson was saying when Cluff rang off.
The Sergeant rubbed his eyes. Clive stretched. The dog approached Cluff and put his head on Cluff’s thigh. Cluff looked at his watch. “In a while, boy,” he said.
He reached for the handbag Mole had turned over to him. He fingered apart the metal claws fastening it and up-ended the bag, allowing its contents to drip on to the dirty sheet of blotting-paper that served him, when he wrote, for a writing-pad. The articles came slowly, obstructed by the letter that had revealed the girl’s identity to Mole. They piled in a little heap, a lipstick, a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a powder compact, loose coins. The letter arched at the mouth of the bag, blocking an object too bulky to slip past its edges.
He removed the letter and a folded wallet joined the other debris of her life. The Sergeant dealt with the wallet first, counting out twenty-five pounds in one-pound notes, crisp, straight from a bank.
He took the letter from its envelope and read it. It told him nothing that he hadn’t known, or guessed in the course of the night. What he knew or suspected others in the town must know or suspect equally.
His face set obstinately. He sat staring at the currency notes. At first they worried him but, after a time, he saw them differently. He began to be glad of the notes.
Chapter II
The fingers of the round clock on the office wall crept to the hour. Cluff’s door remained stubbornly shut. The chimes of the clock in the church tower sounded across the roofs.
Barker handed over his duty.
The telephone in the outer office rang. Cluff appeared abruptly, stuffing letter and wallet into the bottom of a pocket, Clive bounding in front of him. He marched smartly to the main door and into the street, calling to Barker. Behind them they left the man on the desk open-mouthed, gaping at the receiver, stunned by the flow of Annie Croft’s invective.
The town, squat in its narrow valley, brooded, shrinking into itself under the threat of the leaning moors, only half awake in the winter dawn. A boy on a motor-scooter, a bag of newspapers slung from one shoulder, chugged by on his morning delivery. A man in overalls, grease-spotted and oil-stained, rode past on a squeaking bicycle, lifting a hand to Cluff on the pavement. Milk-bottles rattled in one of the side-streets. A harsher note from the High Street a few hundred yards away betrayed the arrival of the first buses from villages scattered sparse in the neighbouring dales.
The cold morning, damp from the night’s rain, the keen edge to the wind driving through a gap in the hills that encircled the town, the grim expressions, characteristic of Gunnarshaw, on the faces of the people he saw, brought Cluff back nearer to his normal frame of mind. In the daylight, at least, he knew where he was, everything about him solid and familiar. He flexed his muscles, allowing his big body to go slack and then grow taut again. A vague ache that had pervaded his limbs since his experiences in the blazing barn at Ghyll End lessened. He sniffed the morning, conscious of the first pangs of appetite. A stone lay on the edge of the kerb. Cluff aimed at it with the tip of his stick and sent
it leapfrogging into the carriageway.
“Don’t you lodge over there?” Cluff asked Barker. “Go and change,” the Sergeant added. “Have breakfast with me.”
He went back into the police-station while Barker was away and told the man on the desk, “Send the car for me about ten. The driver can wait at the bottom of the lane. I’ll come down.”
He walked along the pavement, allowing Clive to range in front, the dog like the man in a brighter mood. When Barker, in civilian clothes, overtook them Cluff said, “We’ll walk. What’s the country for?”
A man with a handcart, sweeping the gutter, jerked his head at Cluff and the Sergeant jerked his head in return, an exchange of greetings more economical than words but just as effective.
An entry separated a row of houses from a line of shops extending on to the centre of the town. He turned into it with Barker and they emerged into the forecourt of a garage belonging to a road haulier. They walked to iron-barred gates in a wall and through the gates, going left, leaving a car-park in their rear, passing the side of the Town Hall.
Cluff stopped at the cobbled area behind the public conveniences. The cobbles were wet, blades of grass pushing between them. A cat, scratching to cover its dirt in a corner, flew past them, spitting. Crudely-drawn faces in chalk, the work of children, grinned from the paintless, nailed-shut doors of what had once been the stables of a coaching-inn. A young hand had scrawled in ill-formed capitals, “Jack loves Mary,” and added as an afterthought, “Jack is daft,” underlining the verb heavily.
“You wouldn’t know,” Cluff said.
A caretaker materialized in the doorway of the men’s half of the conveniences. He remarked, “By gum, Caleb, this is a fine how-d’ye-do. They won’t be standing courting round here for a bit.”
“It’s no good asking if you saw anything?”
“You know as well as me how they come and canoodle round the back. I don’t watch them. I’m past that.”
Cluff started to move on.
“You’ll not have to look far,” the caretaker assured him. “They may have cheek but they’ve no gumption. You wouldn’t think they were Gunnarshaw bred, most of them.”
Barker put out a hand, too late, to pull Cluff back as he stepped off the pavement. Cluff continued on his way serenely, glancing neither up nor down the High Street, blind to the traffic. The driver of a car trod violently on his brake and stuck his head out of the side-window, ready with an insult. He recognized Cluff and came fully awake, catching Barker’s eye and winking.
Cluff halted again on the opposite pavement, examining this side of the street, his gaze wandering past the entrance to a public library, its grille still in position, beyond a bank and a service station and shops with their blinds drawn.
“It’s too early,” Barker said.
Cluff hesitated, like a man who didn’t know his own mind.
Barker offered, “I’ll wait.”
“They’ve nowhere to run to,” Cluff replied. “Not in Gunnarshaw.”
The shops and offices gave way to rows of cottages, old, each row marked by a date carved in stone. The town meandered, unplanned. Surprisingly, a farmyard opened off the pavement, with a couple of geese in it and a turkey that gobbled angrily, ruffling its plumage. More houses ended at the top of a long hill and the road levelled for a while, a country road without sidewalks.
In spite of his bulk Cluff moved easily, his pace even. He walked with a long stride, using his stick as a third leg, and Barker grew warm keeping up with him. Muddy ditches, rain-filled, cut furrows in the grass verges. Bare hedges fenced rough pastures mounting to the moors. The moors were dark in colour, the heather dying off. Plantations of fir trees nudged the bases of sheer rock outcrops serrating the skyline. The wind whistled. Sheep in the pastures lifted their heads, wary of the two men and the dog, not trusting in the protection of the hedges. Cluff’s cheeks glowed redder, his eyes washed clean of sleep.
A lane, aiming for the moor-top, avenued for a while by ranks of horse-chestnuts, winter-nude, its surface rough, branched from the minor road. It swung, as if the climb had proved too much, and sought an easier trace along the flank of the moor. Cluff, pushing open a white-painted gate, went up a flagged path through a wind-blown garden to the porch of a stone cottage, stone-slated, four-square and low. White hens grubbed outside an old hut in a field over the garden wall. A bull-nosed Morris stood forlornly outside a shed. Cluff said, “I couldn’t get it to go last night,” more in admiration of the car’s independence than in anger.
Smoke curled from a chimney, escaping from the open triangles of flat stones reared edgewise against each other. Mullioned windows, high under the eaves and small to match the gales, leaded into diamond-shaped panes, guarded a massive, nail-studded door. The door opened before they reached it to reveal Annie Croft, as red-cheeked as Cluff, hair blowing in wisps, arms akimbo, as broad as she was long.
“I’m not surprised,” Annie said, “you didn’t dare face me alone.”
“We’re hungry,” Cluff told her.
“I’m tired of drumming it into you,” Annie went on. “You’d be better off with your brother on the farm at Cluff’s Head. You’re no chicken.”
Clive wriggled past her, making along the passage for his bowl in the kitchen. She let them in and Cluff took Barker into the low-ceilinged living-room, where a round, oak table was laid for breakfast. Barker’s nostrils twitched at the smell of frying bacon and his mouth watered.
The room was warm, dim in the grey morning, a huge fire blazing in the grate, adding its comfort to the comfort of big chintz-covered armchairs and a couch, to the softness of a thick-piled carpet and the cheerful glint of horse-brasses on the walls. Rough-hewn, black-oak beams reached for Barker. An immense cat, long-furred, coiled in a chair on the right of the hearth.
Barker watched the cat, aware of Cluff’s movements in the room above, the boards resting on the beams creaking as Cluff crossed backwards and forwards. He could hear Clive eating in the kitchen. The cat’s unwinking stare fixed him balefully. Annie busied herself at the table, setting a second place.
“It suits him,” Barker said.
“Wonders never cease,” Annie remarked. “He’s not one for company.”
“It’s quiet.”
“We’re used to it.”
“I’m not a countryman.”
Annie said flatly, “He needs looking after. I only come in in the morning.”
“He never married?”
“It’s none of your business.”
The cat jumped down on to the rug. It stretched delicately and moved towards Barker, appraising him more closely. He put out his hand and the cat backed. Cluff, shaved, but still in the same heavy tweeds, came in from the passage. He sat down in the chair the cat had vacated and the cat, disgusted to have lost its cushion, leapt on to his lap. “Her name’s Jenet,” Cluff said.
The lids over Barker’s eyes drooped. He could hardly believe that they had breakfasted. Cluff, the cat still on his knees, sat in the same position across from Barker, one hand resting lightly on the cat’s fur.
Barker relaxed, the room warmer, vaguer, drowsier. If Annie was still in the cottage he couldn’t hear her. Clive lay between his chair and the Sergeant’s, jaw propped on the fender, gazing open-eyed into the fire, dreaming.
The wind howled a little, intensifying the quiet and the peace. Gunnarshaw, Cluff’s duties, his own, seemed a long way off. Somewhere at the back of Barker’s mind, deep-down, a realization stirred, a memory of death.
His eyes closed finally and did not open again. He breathed gently, sliding in his seat. His lips parted and his head lolled against the chair back. He slept.
Cluff let him sleep. An hour went by. The Sergeant lifted Jenet and got up. He lowered her into the chair and she was no more awake than Barker. Clive, moving silently, followed the Sergeant.
; He reached up to the pegs in the wall of the passage for his hat and coat. He sighed. In the brief space of his gesture he lost track of his intention. He found himself in his garden, shivering after the heat in the living-room. The drab garden, the drab fields, the drab moors, did not offend him. He wasn’t a man for summer days, for the brilliance and the long evenings of summer, the small ration of summer dark.
Feet tramped in the lane. The sneck on the garden gate clicked. Cluff said, “I told you to wait in the road.”
“I’ve been waiting,” the driver replied. He held out a folded note: “The Inspector sent this. It’s urgent.”
“To the Inspector everything’s urgent.”
The driver caught sight of Cluff’s old motor-car. “Don’t tell me it’s broken down again,” the driver said.
Annie caught him with his hand on the gate. She shoved his tweed hat and his Burberry at him. “Have you gone crazy,” she asked, “or is it high summer?”
He crammed his hat on to his balding head and struggled into his coat. Annie tossed her head towards the cottage: “What about him?”
“Let him sleep.”
“I thought it was too good to be true.”
“He was up all night.”
“Did you sleep in your bed?”
Cluff shook his head at Clive. The dog flattened, his belly close to the ground, his tail sagging.
“I don’t care where you’re going,” Annie said. “You’re taking that dog with you. I feel easier when you have it by.”
“Mole doesn’t like dogs.”
“You’re your own master. That dog goes with you.”
Chapter III
Mole eyed Clive. He said, “You’ve brought your assistant.”
“I’ve had to borrow Barker,” Cluff told him. “It wasn’t my doing.”
Mole returned, shortly, “They’re in there.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“I thought I was giving you a hand. It seems to be expected.”
“I’d have gone to see them.”
“They’re not crippled.”