by Mike Ripley
‘Haydon Bagley would have been spotted the minute he turned up in Denby Ash,’ said Exley. ‘There’s no secrets in this village.’
‘I’m afraid you’re wrong there, Arthur, judging by what we’ve heard tonight,’ said Campion.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d like,’ said Ramsden with exasperation, ‘and that’s a witness; just one flamin’ witness who actually saw something and who is willing to tell the police.’
As Chief Inspector Ramsden’s outburst faded into the night air, there was an audible thump as something struck the caravan. All three men turned their heads as one and Campion trained the torch he was still holding to sweep the curving roof, where the beam reflected the gleaming white eyes of a crouching cat.
‘Hecate,’ said Campion quietly, ‘I wondered where you’d got to. You wanted a witness to the murder, Chief Inspector? There she is.’
TWENTY-TWO
The High Place
The following morning Mr Campion parked his car in front of Ash Grange School in what resembled a staging area for a major military operation. Cars were arriving, disgorging the troops – boys with their kit bags – who then formed ranks and awaited their embarkation orders before climbing on board one of the three charabancs which would transport them to the battlefield, or rather the rugby field of their arch enemies, Queen Elizabeth’s in Wakefield. Directing operations was their general, Brigham Armitage, his wife clearly having volunteered for the post of quartermaster. There were masters filling non-commissioned roles checking lists of boys and directing them to their allocated coaches, and even Rupert and Perdita had been dragooned as temporary corporals conducting vital equipment checks to make sure that rugby players had the correct number of boots, the right shirt and shorts, and that those boys going along as supporters had a regulation school scarf to wave. This latter duty involving the confiscation of numerous blue-and-white Huddersfield Town scarfs as being non-school regulation and, indeed, the wrong sport entirely.
‘Quite a turnout,’ Campion said as Rupert and Perdita greeted him. ‘Plenty of supporters for the big game, I see.’
‘Last match of the term and a bit of a grudge match against Queen Elizabeth’s,’ said Rupert. ‘There’s no love lost between the two schools, but if you’re a betting man your money might be better put on the home team rather than us. I’m afraid our record against them isn’t good. In fact, it’s pretty pathetic, and without Andrew Ramsden I don’t rate our chances.’
‘Still, you’re taking quite a crowd to cheer you on. Good for morale and all that.’
‘Don’t be fooled,’ said Perdita. ‘Most of the day boys have been sent by their parents so they can go Christmas shopping and quite a few of the staff here will be sneaking off to the shops in Wakefield to do exactly the same.’
‘You’re welcome to come along,’ said Rupert, ‘and watch us be gracious in defeat.’
‘A much undervalued attribute, I always thought,’ said Campion, ‘but I must decline. I have an expedition planned for this morning.’
‘Expedition? Nothing dangerous, I hope.’
‘Not at all, just a walk in the local countryside,’ said Mr Campion, turning his back on the Grange Ash muck stack in order not to unconsciously reveal his intentions.
‘Is that why you’ve gone native?’ Rupert’s eyes flashed to the top of his father’s head on which proudly sat a flat cap, so clean and new that Rupert half expected to see a price tag dangling from the back.
‘Oh, this?’ Campion’s fingers fluttered to the brim of the cap. ‘Well, when in Rome, you know. Bought it this morning, first thing, in Huddersfield indoor market. I believe it’s called a “Garforth” but I can’t quite work out the pattern of the weave. I want to call it a Tattershall check, but there’s a dark red stripe in there. Rather fetching, eh? And we’re not that far from Ilkley Moor and I couldn’t possibly be seen without a hat, could I?’
‘Quite sure that’s all you’re up to?’ Perdita chirped with a coy smile as she linked arms with him. ‘I promised Amanda I would ring her tonight to tell her how Doctor Faustus was going. I could tell her you’d been out taking the air if you’d like me …’
‘That’s exactly what you should report, my dear. No more, and preferably a lot less. However, you could tell my lovely wife that I will be joined, nay guided, on my perambulations by Mr Exley in order to give him a chance to convert me to dialectical materialism, and by this evening I will probably be answering only to the title of “Commissar”, though she of course may call me “Comrade” as a term of endearment.’
Perdita butted her forehead gently against Mr Campion’s shoulder. ‘I will tell her that, word-for-word. It’s so ridiculous she will know you are full of beans.’
Campion patted his stomach. ‘I’m certainly full of a hearty Yorkshire breakfast, hence my need to go for an invigorating walk. Now you get on and marshal your troops and make sure they are in good voice on the touchline. Play up, play up and all that sort of stuff.’
When the last of the parents’ cars had departed and Mr and Mrs Armitage, in a Standard Ensign which still bore its RAF paintwork, had lead off the convoy of charabancs, Mr Campion was left alone outside the front doors of the school. The morning was cold and grey but at least it wasn’t raining and a weak sun was straining through the clouds. For the first time Campion had a good view of the top of the Grange Ash muck stack which suddenly seemed nearer and larger than he had anticipated. From the glove compartment of the Jaguar, he took a pair of Zeiss miniature binoculars and focussed them on the summit. From that angle he could make out an arrangement of ironwork protruding from the point of the peak, which he reasoned must be the buffers of the railway tracks which carried a single truck of waste ‘muck’ on a pulley system to the top of the long incline before tipping, allowing its contents to slide and skitter down the slope. Thus would the black mountain have risen over the years until the pit ceased to be profitable – or ‘economic’, as one was supposed to say these days – but now the pit was closed and the stack would grow no more. This pyramid, thought Campion, was finished and ready for its pharaoh.
Before his fantasy could go any further, Campion’s concentration was broken by the sound of an approaching engine and a light blue Hillman Imp drew up alongside the Jaguar. Arthur Exley levered his bulk out of the car, stretched his shoulders and twisted his upper body as though uncoiling his spine. He was a naturally muscular man and seemed even bulkier by virtue of the thick donkey jacket he was wearing along with, Campion noted with a smile, a flat cap identical to his own. Exley walked around the rear of the Hillman and flipped open the boot.
‘“Morning, Albert,” he said as he reached down into the small luggage space.
‘Hope you don’t mind first-name terms, now there’s nobody around.’
‘Not at all Arthur, I’m rather flattered,’ said Campion, ‘and very grateful that you are allowing me to monopolize your weekend.’
‘I see you got yourself some new boots,’ said Exley, glancing down at Campion’s feet and the shiny black leather army boots which had replaced his brogues. ‘They’ve not got hobnails, have they?’
‘Heaven forbid! I borrowed them from Chief Inspector Ramsden and they’re almost the right size. Police-issue thick rubber soles but no hobnails. Don’t worry, I got the full safety lecture on why you don’t wear hobnails in a colliery. If I were tempted to do my famous soft-shoe shuffle the sparks from my boots could have explosive results.’
‘Then all you need is one of these,’ said Exley, pulling another donkey jacket from the boot of the Hillman. On the back, beneath the leather shoulder patches, in white lettering four inches high was the legend: NCB.
As he removed his Crombie and pulled the donkey jacket on over his sports jacket, Campion chuckled with boyish glee.
‘I’d love to buy one of these. I’d wear it to all the poshest parties in London and tell everyone my name was Nicholas Charles Bonkerstein!’
‘And down in London, they’d believe you,�
�� said Exley. ‘Nice ’at, by the way.’
In deference to Campion’s age, even though he was unsure exactly what it was – pensionable certainly, but physically fit with less fat on him than a butcher’s pencil – Arthur set a leisurely pace as the two of them marched out of the school grounds, across the road and into the fields and rough ground which lay in the shadow of the mountainous muck stack. It was the route a crow would have flown, though a pair of sensible pedestrians would have stuck to the drier roads, but more importantly it was exactly the route he had taken with Bertram Browne, something on which Mr Campion had insisted.
Outwardly cheery and energetic, Mr Campion was secretly daunted by the size and scale of the muck stack as it loomed nearer. Its steep sides, so much steeper close to, appeared to have a sheen of slime so slick that it resembled the skin of snake. Campion dismissed the thought as childish, for snakes were not slimy to the touch, yet there was something about this great black mass of dust and shale and coal which, when wet, did indeed resemble the scales of a reptile. If this mountain of spoil came to life it would be as a dragon, Campion fantasized, though with the rivulets of water pouring down its sides from days of persistent rain, he knew the reality would be that any movement would be more likely to be that of a slowly deflating balloon, spreading thick and unyielding black mud like lava from a volcano. Fortunately the Grange Ash pit stood in splendid isolation away from any habitation and if the stack ever should collapse and slide it would be unlikely to claim human life, except perhaps the lives of any human foolish enough to try and climb it.
Exley guided Campion around the western side of the black pyramid and, after climbing over a single strand of drooping barbed wire, they entered the pit yard. Until that moment they had been tramping through a rural landscape of grass and bracken but suddenly they were in an industrial setting, with concrete underfoot and brick and metal all around.
Whatever function the various buildings had served when the pit was a working entity, they were now no more than forlorn, empty shells. Windows had smashed panes, doors hung off their hinges and coils of telephone or electric cable drooped from insulator brackets in roof corners. The largest of the buildings was a row of three corrugated-iron hangars with curved roofs. Although brown with rust, they seemed sturdy enough and undamaged by weather or vandalism, but the dominant feature was the metal winding rig with its huge wheels and thick cables which would have lowered men down and raised coal up in small wheeled tubs. As they crossed the pit yard, stepping over the railways lines on which the tubs had run, empty cans, broken bottles, large lumps of shiny black coal and unidentifiable pieces of twisted brown metal, Exley explained that only the old colliery office and the winding room were maintained in any sense; the office as a place for the night watchman to have his ‘snap’ and maybe take in a crafty forty winks, and the winding room because the cage which went down the main shaft had to be kept in working order in case the Coal Board geologists needed to inspect things underground.
They followed the grooved railway tracks to the base of the pyramid of spoil where two lines became three as a chain cable ran up the middle providing the mechanism by which full tubs were hauled to the buffers at the top of the slope. Planting his feet either side of the chain, Exley began the ascent with Campion close behind.
‘We can take it easy,’ he advised the older man. ‘It isn’t a race. If you want a breather just say so and don’t be afraid to grab on to me if you slip.’
Campion looked at Exley’s broad back and said, ‘I will be hanging on to your NCB coattails, have no fear.’
If the angle of the slope was not quite that of one of the Great Pyramids, it was steep enough and Campion was grateful when Exley suggested they rest and get their breath back. Though they were still less than halfway to the summit, Campion’s thigh muscles burned and his ankles ached due to the unnatural side-footed gait he had adopted to stop his unforgiving police boots from sliding in the loose grey shale.
They were high enough already to get a view eastwards over Denby Ash and the trees of Denby Wood and back down the slope – which did seem dauntingly steep. The old buildings around the pit yard were already taking on the proportions of a scale model.
‘When was it you brought Mr Browne up here?’ asked Campion when he got his breath back.
‘Be over a month ago now,’ Exley replied.
‘So, after the poltergeist had started visiting, but before Haydon Bagley was released …’
‘Eh? I’m not followin’ you.’
‘Of course you’re not. I barely am myself, old chap. Now let us crack on to the summit. We’re doing this because it’s … well, because it’s here, I suppose. I say, you don’t have a spare oxygen mask about you, do you?’
‘Are you all right?’ asked Exley, sincerely concerned. ‘I don’t want you to conk out on me ’cos I don’t want to have to carry you down.’
‘I’m perfectly fine, just feeling my age, that’s all. But if I do conk out you have my permission to give my lifeless corpse a good kick and let gravity roll it down the hill.’
‘I shan’t need to be asked twice,’ growled Exley, and Campion reassured himself that the gruff Yorkshire sense of humour was indeed an acquired taste.
It took another quarter of an hour for them to reach the summit, Campion conscious that his methodical sideways plodding had slowed Exley to the equivalent of a crawl, but once he had his breathing under control he forgot everything except the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view.
From the peak, where the buffers for the rails jutted out into space, Campion could see the outline of Ash Grange school and its playing fields and then, turning to the east, the haul road which had provided access to the pit, the stone bridge over Oaker Beck by the Sun Inn and then length of the village running down Oaker Hill. Using the working men’s club as a reference point, Campion estimated which of the rooftops belonged to Number Eleven, just as, he guessed, Bertram Browne had checked a compass bearing. With his small Zeiss binoculars he could make out the winding wheels of the Caphouse and Shuttle Eye pits on the far side of the village on the Wakefield road. Below him, back down the slope he had just climbed, the pit yard and buildings looked even more like toy buildings from a model railway set and strangely, looking through his binoculars, negated the feeling of vertigo he feared.
It was as Mr Campion was completing his circular sweep through the Zeiss lenses – his own spectacles pushed up on to his forehead – that he caught a glimpse of movement at the far end of the pit yard. Around the corner of one of the derelict buildings, a figure moved furtively, a figure larger than a dog but smaller than a man, and seemingly walking on three legs.
Campion turned the focus dial and the figure became Roderick Braithwaite, limping across the yard with the aid of a walking stick.
‘How did you know he’d be here, Albert?’ said Exley from somewhere behind him, his voice low and serious.
‘I’m sorry, how did I know what?’ Campion replied absently, the binoculars still at his eye. ‘I didn’t know he’d come here but I suppose I should have expected it, boys being boys and all that.’
‘Not down there, Albert. Here! Look here, over the edge.’
Campion responded to the urgency in Exley’s tone and turned quickly – too quickly for an elderly gentleman on top of a wet and far-from-solid mountain, and he felt Exley grab his arm to steady him.
‘What are you talking about, Arthur?’
‘I’m asking how you knew Haydon Bagley was up here.’
‘What? Where?’
Campion took a nervous step forward towards the very tip of the stack where Exley stood, feet apart, pointing over the edge through the frame of the metal tracks which protruded ominously out into open space.
He felt Exley’s right hand tighten on his left arm and he looked the younger man full in the face. ‘I didn’t know I had vertigo until I came up here,’ he said, his lips suddenly dry. ‘You won’t let go, will you, Arthur? I’m too old to learn how to ski.’
‘Just look over the edge and don’t worry, I’ve got you. Take it easy, there’s no rush. He’s not going anywhere.’
Campion took a deep breath and shuffled forward until the toes of his borrowed police boots – which felt more like the shoes of a circus clown – were level with Exley’s feet and he leaned gently forward, grateful now for his companion’s anchoring grip, and looked out and down into the void.
Except it was not a void – it was almost a mirror image of the slope he had just walked up but the absence of the iron rails removed any sense of perspective and safety. When climbing Campion had had the upward slope under his boots – those boots again! – and the solid mass of the spoil heap in his eye-line. Now he was peering over the edge and staring at a precipice of black rock, scree and mud, a vista of desolation where no plants grew and the rivulets of water run-off resembled bleeding wounds.
‘There,’ said Exley, ‘about forty feet down. All the rain we’ve had these past two weeks has moved the muck.’
What the rain, or gravity or that unnatural state where solids turn unexpectedly to liquids had done was to expose a hand and an arm. The body to which it was attached remained mercifully hidden, its outline a shapeless black lump.
‘My goodness,’ said Campion. ‘How do you know that’s Haydon Bagley?’
‘There’s nobody else missing, is there?’ said Exley with a gruff logic which defied rebuttal.
‘If it is, the question is how did he get there?’
‘Either he walked up here and threw himself off, which I don’t put much credence in, or he was killed down below somewhere, brought up in one of the tubs and tipped over the edge. Chap with a shovel could have climbed down there and covered the body.’
‘Is that likely? I mean, it would take some nerve to slide down there and start digging virtually in mid-air.’