Dead Man Riding

by Gillian Linscott

  ‘No, it would only complicate matters and we don’t want them complicated any more than they are already, do we?’ Then more urgently, when I didn’t answer at once, ‘Well, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m afraid Imogen’s got it into her head that you are trying to complicate things.’

  ‘I know she has. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I thought what we wanted was a verdict that he killed himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed. Then we can all go away and get on with our lives.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has Imogen told you that she and I had an argument over his money?’

  ‘She said you thought you couldn’t take it because it was tainted. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘I’m not even sure. But I have this strong feeling that it would be cheating him. I didn’t do anything to help him and he’s left me a small fortune.’

  ‘You came here. He wanted that. He’d almost certainly decided to kill himself while you were here. I think Imogen’s right about that.’

  ‘I really thought he’d killed the Mawbray fellow. Now we know he didn’t, it’s too late.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be untainting the money if you did something good and useful with it?’

  ‘I’m not sure I trust myself as much as I did.’

  ‘If you turn it down, I suppose it will all go to Dulcie Berryman.’

  ‘Let it. I don’t care.’

  ‘That wasn’t the way you felt the day the will was read. You seemed angry.’

  ‘It caught me off balance, finding out all the things I hadn’t been told. I really don’t mind about Mrs Berryman. All I want is to get away from this nightmare as soon as I can and have a life with Imogen.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s what she wants to.’

  ‘Then we must make sure she gets it. On Tuesday, you stick to the story about the Old Man trying to kill himself on the beach the day before…’

  ‘He really did. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Yes, but the coroner might take some convincing. Still, you can be very persuasive when you want to be.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He missed the sarcasm. ‘And I can tell them how depressed he was about this Mafeking business, probably without bringing young Mawbray into it.’

  ‘I’m not sure depressed is quite the word. Embattled, more like.’

  ‘Nell, this is an inquest, not a viva voce for finals. I don’t think we need to be too critical about the exact word.’

  ‘What a waste, after all that Plato.’

  This time he did notice the edge to my voice. His tone changed and he stretched out his hand to me on the grass, almost touching mine.

  ‘All right, I know you hate the idea of it. So do I. For two pins I’d follow Nathan’s example and do a bunk until it’s all blown over.’

  ‘You think that’s all it is with Nathan?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. He’s a cheerful sort of creature, just not made for unpleasantness. Anyway, we can’t do a bunk, you and I. All we can do is wait for Tuesday morning and put as good a front on it as we can.’

  ‘Only I want to know,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’ll play my part at the inquest if that’s what’s best for everybody. But I want to know what happened.’

  ‘Perhaps there are simply some things we shouldn’t know.’

  ‘That’s a new doctrine for us, isn’t it? Weren’t we all meant to be fearless seekers after truth? Away with lies and hypocrisy and pretending not to see things that don’t suit us.’

  ‘Of course. Nothing that’s happened changes that.’

  I was angry already and the way he said that, humouring me, made it worse.

  ‘So nothing’s changed? In spite of hiding things from each other and lying to each other?’

  ‘Who’s lied?’

  ‘We all have, by implication at any rate. I’m as guilty of it as anybody.’

  ‘I haven’t lied.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because nobody’s asked you the right questions yet. Like what happened with you and Imogen on the night he died.’

  He went red, ‘Nell, you can’t expect me to—’

  ‘I’m not talking about that. There was something you heard or saw, the two of you. I asked Imogen and she was angry with me. Whatever it was, it was serious enough for you to leave her and let her walk back on her own – on that night of all nights.’

  ‘You’ve got no right to ask.’

  ‘Haven’t I? If you’re expecting me to help mislead an inquest, I think I’ve got every right to ask.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with what happened to the Old Man.’

  ‘How do you know? Whatever happened to him happened in those few hours between sunset when Robin saw him with Sid in the paddock and just after sunrise when I was out and about. That’s no more than six or seven hours and for some of that time you two were out here in the fields. Anything you saw or heard matters.’

  He said nothing for a while then sighed. ‘If I tell you, will you promise me that it goes no further?’

  ‘If it’s really got nothing to do with this, yes.’

  ‘It hasn’t, but it is embarrassing. To all three of us.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Imogen and me and Kit. You know that Imogen and I had an arrangement to meet that night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We were sitting on the bank in this field, but further up under that maple there.’

  I looked where he was pointing, to an old hedge maple with a knobbly trunk throwing a fan of shade over the field.

  ‘That’s not very far from where Robin last saw the Old Man, in the paddock just the other side of the track.’

  ‘Nell, I told you, this is nothing to do with the Old Man. We didn’t hear him or see him or even think about him. Do get that clear.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘So Imogen and I were sitting under that maple in the moonlight – it was just a day after full moon – watching a hare in the field. And I remember thinking that I’d never felt as entirely happy as I did then, as if my whole life had been leading up to that moment, sitting there with the woman I loved, watching a hare in the moonlight. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The hare heard something first. She went bounding away and Imogen said maybe she’d smelled a fox and she thought she’d heard something moving in the hedge behind us. So we turned round to look and there was Kit, standing there on the other side of the hedge, quite still. The first thing I saw was his white sling, then his face. I’ve never seen anything so … so concentrated. I think he might have been watching us for a long time.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Jumped up and asked Kit what he thought he was doing. Then I pushed through to his side of the hedge and asked him again. He started talking Greek. Do you know that amazing passage from the Symposium where—’

  ‘People cut in half and looking for their other half?’

  ‘Yes. I kept telling him to go away, but he wouldn’t. He started saying things, really wild things, that I didn’t want Imogen to have to hear. I … I suppose I made a grab for him, just wanting to stop him, and I got his hurt arm by mistake. He drew in his breath and said, “Go on. Do what you like. You can’t hurt me any worse.” Imogen was scared by then, begging us to stop, so I told her to go back to you and Midge and I’d deal with it. She didn’t want to, but her being there only made things worse.’

  ‘What happened after she left?’

  ‘We … we went on arguing. But I was afraid if I stayed I might hurt him again. So I just left him there and went back to the others in the barn.’

  ‘Was Nathan snoring?’

  ‘What?’ He’d been staring out over the hay meadow, as if still seeing the hare in the moonlight.

  ‘When you got back to the barn, was Nathan snoring?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? I suppose so. Nathan was always snoring.’

  ‘When did you get back?’

 
; ‘Some time after one o’clock, probably. I didn’t look at my watch.’

  We were both silent for a while. Alan had relaxed a little now the story was told but there was a feeling of sadness about him that I thought I understood. He and Kit had been friends from schooldays after all.

  ‘Poor Kit,’ I said. ‘It must be awful to feel so jealous of somebody.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ But he said it off-handedly, like a man who’d never needed to feel jealous of anybody.

  ‘He’s obsessed with that passage about the bodies finding each other,’ I said. ‘He quoted it in the letter to Imogen as well.’

  ‘What letter?’ He was suddenly tense again and staring at me. ‘What letter was that?’

  Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that Imogen wouldn’t have told him about her letter from Kit. She’d shown it to me after all. I realised I’d blundered and accidentally betrayed a confidence. Still, I couldn’t see why Alan was looking so thunderstruck. He was the man who’d won. I stammered out something about Kit writing Imogen a letter begging her to think again – but it hadn’t impressed her and to forget I’d said anything.

  ‘A love letter? Kit wrote Imogen a love letter?’

  ‘A plea more than a love letter. I think he already knew he’d lost her. There’s no harm done to you. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’

  But the man who, just a couple of minutes ago, had sounded as if jealousy didn’t exist for him, was looking like Othello presented with the handkerchief. He seemed beyond speech and just went on staring at me.

  ‘I don’t know why that’s so surprising,’ I said. ‘Surely you knew how he felt about her.’

  He just shook his head.

  ‘It was obvious. You only had to look at his face when the two of you were together. You really didn’t notice?’

  Perhaps he and Imogen had been so absorbed in each other that he hadn’t. I hoped he’d let the matter of the letter drop, but he went on worrying away at it.

  ‘Did he give it to her? Post it to her?’

  ‘If it matters, he just left it in her copy of the Republic.’

  For some reason, it did seem to matter to him. ‘What did he call her? Dear Imogen? My dearest? My darling?’

  This was approaching the romantic-morbid. ‘None of those. As far as I remember he just launched straight into it. And please don’t go and quarrel with Imogen. I promise you she wasn’t impressed by it. Horrified, more like.’

  There was nothing else I could think of to put right my mistake, beyond admitting it to Imogen and warning her. It annoyed me, though, to have to add this little worry to the rest of them. Why in the world couldn’t you love somebody and still be rational? Like, for instance … well, like a lot of people. People you could drink tarry tea with on a harbour wall and not think about Gretna Green and eloping Highland chieftains – except in jest of course.

  * * *

  I found Imogen in our loft. She’d folded her mattress in two and was sitting on it like a cushion with her back against the wall, reading.

  ‘I’ve got something to confess,’ I said.

  She looked downright scared at that, so I explained my clumsiness over the letter. Considering that we’d managed to get ourselves on bad terms already, I expected her to be angry with me. She took it better than I expected.

  ‘Should I have told him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seemed to surprise him. Shock him, almost.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why I didn’t tell him. I knew he’d be angry. ‘

  ‘And they’d have had their argument earlier than they did.’

  She let the book fall to the floor. ‘Did Alan tell you about that?’

  ‘Yes. I’d guessed something happened and you wouldn’t tell me, so I asked him.’

  Again I was expecting her to flare up, but she didn’t. She seemed exhausted, the skin on her forehead pale to the point of transparency.

  ‘I didn’t want to talk about it – to you or anyone else. I felt so … so ashamed for Kit, I suppose.’

  ‘For loving you?’

  ‘Guilty too. I know it isn’t my fault, but I still felt guilty.’

  I said I’d leave her to her reading and bent to pick the book up from the floor. Plato’s Republic again. It had splayed open and I looked round for something to mark her place. The margins were crammed with sprawling pencilled notes.

  ‘That’s not your writing, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s Alan’s. I lent my copy to Midge so he gave me his.’

  I went down the stairs, my brain worrying away at what had happened that night. There had been four hours, probably less than that, between the time that Alan got back to the barn and I went out for my early morning swim, and at around one o’clock Nathan was still snoring – or rather, Alan supposed he was. But would Alan have noticed either way? That night he’d become Imogen’s lover and quarrelled with his best friend, more than enough to drive a mundane matter like snoring out of his mind. The same applied to Kit after the quarrel. I supposed I should find him and ask him but that would mean admitting that I knew what had happened between them.

  I walked away from the house, back up the track towards the barn field but kept on the outside of the hedge. Alan had gone from the place under the hawthorn bushes. I went on towards the maple tree and stood under its branches. The argument between Kit and Alan had happened there, after Alan had pushed through the hedge. Alan had actually struck him. ‘Do what you like. You can’t hurt me any worse.’ I didn’t know why I’d needed to come to the place where the words had been said but there was a terrible fascination about them, something humbling and terrifying about that naked need. No wonder Imogen had been horrified that this was happening because of her. The whole sex business simply wasn’t fair. I thought about that, wandering a little way up the track. My feet scuffed dead and dry hazel leaves, unexpected in full summer until I remembered why they were there. There’d been so much else to think about that I’d forgotten finding the Old Man’s carriage whip but it had been stuffed into the hedge, just a few steps up from where Alan and Kit had their argument. I stared at the hedge and the rabbit holes in the bank underneath it, feeling things moving round in my mind like uprooted trees in a hurricane. A letter. A book. Oh my dear, the other and better half of me.

  I said to the hedge, ‘Surely he must have known. He must have known all the time.’

  The rabbit holes and the hedge still looked the same as a few seconds ago but the rest of the world had gone spinning round them and changed beyond recognition.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I LEFT THE HOUSE, KNOWING IT WAS FOR the last time, in the early hours of Monday morning while it was still dark. As I went down the stairs Midge woke up and asked sleepily where I was going. I didn’t answer. I was sure Imogen was awake, but she said nothing. There was no moon but the sky was full of stars. This time there was nobody standing outside the house but I walked fast up the track to the road just in case. At the crossroads I headed away from the town and took the Caldbeck road, walking more slowly now I knew nobody was following me. I had hours of time, eight hours at least before the public houses would be open for hikers and farmworkers with midday thirsts. Or, in Nathan’s case, a midday craving for tobacco. I’d been going over in my mind that evening when he ran away from us and dropped one of his precious tobacco tins. Nathan living as a wild man on the fells without company was almost unthinkable – without the sweet clouds from his pipe unthinkable altogether. In a numb way, I was pleased that my mind was still working well on details like that. In fact, it was working all too well, fitting things together, throwing up scenes from the past few months with the vividness of magic lantern slides on a white wall. The one that kept coming back was the evening of the play, the white moths in the candlelight, the two swans and the men with their eyes on Imogen. That and Meredith in the train corridor, looking out at the fells and wondering how we managed to convince ourselves that being in love was an enviable state.

  When it was li
ght enough I stopped, drank water from a little beck and looked at the map. The area of the fells where we’d seen Nathan was sparsely populated even by Cumberland standards, but I remembered a remote little inn at a crossroads a long way from anywhere else. I walked on, passed only by the occasional farm wagon, and long before midday I had it in sight. It was a white-painted house in a cluster of outbuildings. There were only two or three other houses in sight and it was hard to see where it would get its customers. Perhaps it had been built to serve cattle drovers and shepherds or even travelling tinkers. Today there was nobody, only a sheepdog sleeping in the sun, stretched out across the front door. I turned off the road before I came to the inn, climbed a little way up the hill and found a shady place to sit in the bracken where I could watch for people coming and going. As the sun rose higher the white walls shimmered in the heat haze and the dog got up, stretched itself and limped into the shade of an outhouse wall. A woman in an apron came out and brushed the step, then went in again. When the sun was directly overhead and flies were buzzing round the bracken, drunk with heat, two men who looked like farm labourers appeared on the road from the Caldbeck direction. I watched them from about half a mile off as they closed slowly on the inn, like snails to a lettuce leaf. They went inside. The dog got up, turned round, went back to sleep again. I was beginning to think I’d been wrong about Nathan. There was no point in going to look for him in the lonely fells behind me. It could take days to find him again and I didn’t have days, less than one day now. A small cart drawn by a grey cob with half a dozen barrels on it came slowly along the road from the same direction as the two men and turned into the forecourt of the inn. The driver got down and a plump man who was probably the landlord came out from the porch. Together they started unloading the barrels while the cob stamped and twitched against the flies. I got up, brushed bracken off my skirt and walked down the slope to the inn yard. No question of going inside of course. Respectable women didn’t do that and the landlord, whether I liked it or not, would rate me as respectable. I waited until the last barrel had been rolled into the porch and the driver was back on his seat turning the cart round before introducing myself.