by Gil North
“Hello. Hello,” the Superintendent at Gunnarshaw said, “Cluff? Good work, man. Patterson’s been in touch from H.Q. We’ve got an alarm out.”
“No news?” Cluff asked.
“She can’t get away.”
“Hasn’t she gone through Gunnarshaw?” Cluff asked.
“She can’t have done,” the Superintendent replied. “We couldn’t have missed her. I’ll keep you posted. It’s only a matter of time.”
The Sergeant put the receiver down. A car stopped in the village somewhere. Cluff stood listening. The car started up after a pause. It came towards the inn and braked. Cluff stamped along the passage and opened the inn door.
A patrolman said, “They told us at Symes’s you were here.”
The engine of the police car ticked over quietly, its driver alert at the wheel.
“Didn’t you meet her?” Cluff said.
“Not a trace of her between this place and Gunnarshaw. We’d have been here sooner but we were keeping our eyes open in case she’d gone through a wall or into a field.”
“John,” Cluff called.
His brother came out of the bar.
“There’s no point in waiting longer,” Cluff said. “You’ve a phone at Cluff’s Head.”
John looked relieved, as if he was eager to get back home.
The brothers sat in the back of the car, Clive between them, the driver and the patrolman in front. They got to where the Thorshall road and the road up the next dale, in the direction of Cluff’s Head, joined, combining into one to continue to Gunnarshaw.
“Left,” Cluff instructed.
A school was built a little way past the junction, to serve both dales. The school was unlit and looked deserted. Cluff glanced at his brother, but neither of them spoke.
Headlights gleamed on the road ahead of them, coming their way.
“Stop it,” Cluff said.
The police car swung round to block the road. The driver of a single-decked bus brought his vehicle to a screaming halt and leaned out of his cab, his face angry. Cluff got out into the road and walked over to the bus. His brother followed him.
“That’s enough of that, Tom,” Cluff told the bus driver.
“Sorry,” Tom said. “I didn’t know who it was.”
“Has anything passed you?” Cluff asked. “Either way between here and Daletop?”
Tom considered. “Not so much as a bike,” he decided at last.
“Tom,” John interrupted. “Didn’t Joan get on on your way up?”
“Your wife collected her,” Tom said.
“What?”
“What is this?” the driver demanded, concern in his voice. “I picked up the other kids as usual. Your girl was just getting into a Land Rover. It was your wife driving, wasn’t it?”
“I haven’t got a Land Rover,” John said, in flat tones. “You know my car. You’ve seen it often enough. With the trailer and without it.”
“Here,” Tom exclaimed. “I wasn’t taking much notice. The Land Rover was stopped by the school and it was a woman in it. I thought—”
“Get out of our way,” Cluff said.
The car drove fast up the dale. The lights of Cluff’s Head shone high up on the hillside to their left.
“Straight on,” Cluff told the driver.
“Pull up!” Cluff ordered suddenly.
The driver trod on his brake and looked round, startled. Just behind them, on the opposite side to the farm, a minor road branched off to the moortops.
“Stay here,” Cluff told them.
They could hear the quick beat of Cluff’s feet through the patter of the rain. Clive whined. The sound of feet ceased. The minutes lengthened. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. It spurted on the road in the light of the headlamps, like tiny fountains. The driver shifted in his seat.
“What the devil’s he up to?” the driver inquired.
His companion on the front seat, untalkative, unimaginative, reached inside his coat for a cigarette.
The footsteps began again, rapid, louder, those of a man running.
Cluff emerged from the night.
“Get through on the radio,” Cluff said. “Say she’s got hold of my niece. I want every man they can spare up here as soon as they can make it.”
He turned to his brother.
“I’ve found the Land Rover,” he said.
Chapter XXIV
Once out of the yard at Ghyll End Jinny Cricklethwaite pressed the accelerator to the floorboards. The seat bucked under her. She tore down the lane and swerved, without slackening speed, for the village. The wind roared into the open-sided cab. Her hair streamed from her head. When she came to the Gunnarshaw junction she turned, without hesitation, away from the town, making for the wilds beyond Daletop.
There were children on the road in front of her, children running from the bleak, stone school by the roadside. A thought struck her and she slowed, scanning the faces of a group of girls waiting under a sign planted in the verge.
The Land Rover stopped.
“Joan,” Jinny called. “Joan!”
The voices of the girls stilled. Some of them were pushing one of their number forward, pointing to the Land Rover, saying something to her. The girl came unwillingly.
“Joan Cluff,” Jinny Cricklethwaite said. “Come here, Joan.”
Joan approached her slowly.
“You know me, Joan,” Jinny said. “I’m from Ghyll End.”
The child stared at her.
“Get in,” Jinny invited. “I’m on my way to your father’s. I’ll give you a lift. It’s better than waiting in the rain for the bus.”
“But—” Joan protested, and the bus was already coming along the road, slackening speed to pull up at the stop.
Jinny looked back at the bus. The bus passed the Land Rover and halted. Children climbed in. The bus set off up the dale.
“Come along,” Jinny said. “You’ve missed it anyway.”
Jinny moved the shotgun lying on the front seat beside her into the space behind. They started at a crawl, allowing the bus to get farther and farther ahead of them. The bus disappeared over the brow of a rise, between stone walls.
“Your Uncle Caleb came to see me today,” the woman said. “And then your father arrived.”
She spoke hoarsely and the words stuck in her throat. The child shivered, aware of the woman’s torn skirt and the grey knees, gravel-rashed, protruding through holes in her stockings.
“What are you going to Cluff’s Head for?” the child asked.
“Never mind,” the woman replied. She added, “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.”
Joan leaned forward, peering through the windscreen into the dusk.
“There,” Joan said, breathless. “There!”
She clutched at her companion’s arm. Her voice rose. “You’ve passed it,” she accused. “You’ve passed the turning. Let me out,” Joan pleaded. She fumbled with the catch on the door. The woman took a hand off the wheel. Fingers gripped Joan’s fingers and squeezed painfully.
“Stay still,” the woman said.
“Where are you taking me?” Joan said, in a small voice.
Jinny Cricklethwaite stared anxiously at the offside wall, looking for a break in its line. She found what she wanted and branched off the road. They were going up the hillside with Cluff’s Head away on the opposite slope. This new road was surfaced with macadam, but very narrow, with a soggy ditch on one side. It climbed straight for the moortops, steep, high-walled, making for the roof of the world. The woman had to release the child. She struggled with the gears.
“No,” Joan shouted. “No! I won’t! I won’t!”
She hurled herself on Jinny Cricklethwaite, clawing and striking, fighting back when Jinny tried to thrust her off, returning to the attac
k.
The Land Rover left the carriage-way, leaned, recovered, hit a stone wall, rebounded. It came to a jolting stop, its back wheels bogged in the ditch, down which water flowed, its bonnet pointing upwards, its front wheels spinning free. The engine stalled. Jinny Cricklethwaite rained blows on the child’s head and shoulders. Joan shrank from her, crying. The woman hit harder and harder, full across Joan’s mouth, shouting and cursing. Her hand circled the child’s neck, squeezing.
She flung Joan away. The door flew open and the child toppled out into spongy, muddy grass, hitting the ground with a dull thump. Jinny leapt after her and hauled her to her feet.
“I’d kill you,” Jinny threatened, “if you weren’t going to be useful to me yet. Let them take me if they dare so long as I’ve got you.”
Suddenly, without warning, the woman’s hands fell to her sides. She collapsed on to the grass. She squatted on her hunkers, her hands to her face. Joan stood over her, appalled.
“Look what you’ve done,” Jinny Cricklethwaite said, in low, querulous tones. “How are we going to get over the tops now?”
They were going up and up. The woman had the child’s hand in hers. The rain was fiercer and colder and gale-driven. The wind dashed at them. Joan moaned, her feet like lead. The woman pulled her along and the child tripped and stumbled, at the point of exhaustion. Jinny’s legs dragged. Her strength was going. They were both soaked and battered.
In her free hand Joan clutched a box of cartridges. The gun was icy against Jinny’s breast, clasped to her, burning her flesh with the cold touch of its metal barrels.
The ground levelled. The road, faintly luminous, black-shining, wound in a series of curves on the top of the moor. The rain was turning to sleet and whipped them pitilessly.
The black bulk of a road-mender’s cottage loomed in the night, dark, silent, crumbling. Ivy was a blanket over its gables and crept to engulf its moss-covered slate roof. Long since abandoned, the ivy held up its walls. Its windows and its single doorway were blocked with courses of brickwork to keep out walkers and tramps, for their own safety, in case the cottage fell down on them if they went inside.
They could go no farther. The child was afraid of the woman and afraid, now, in this emptiness, to leave the woman. She felt her hands free but she could hardly have crawled away, let alone have run.
Jinny Cricklethwaite hammered at the brickwork in the doorway with the butt of her gun. The lintel was low. She could reach the top bricks without difficulty and they fitted loosely. She prised and levered. A brick thudded into the room behind the doorway. A second followed it.
The woman called to Joan. They went through the opening Jinny had made. Jinny felt her way round the walls. What was left of the stairs reached into the blackness at the back, no more now than a rotting, inclined ladder, disappearing into a dark cavity in the floor above. Their shoes powdered plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. Broken ends of wooden slats scratched their arms. The ceiling sagged, like the bottom of a bowl jammed between the cottage walls.
The child groaned in a corner. The woman huddled, nursing her breasts in her hands, consumed with self-pity, on the edge of defeat but not quite over it. She dwelt on her past. Her greatest hate was not for her husband, or for Cluff, or for old Ben Crier, but for Wright. Her one consolation was Wright’s death and her part in it. Wright’s futility wrung her heart. Wright was the one who had tossed victory away, fleeing, not from what he had done, but from what he had not done, trying to escape, not from Cluff, but from himself.
Chapter XXV
She lifted her head. The child moved at her movement.
The noises of engines, labouring up the hill, came to them, at first faintly, only an intensification of the wind’s whining, then nearer and nearer, beyond the possibility of mistake.
She crept to the doorway. The night was arrowed with shafts of light.
She piled the loose bricks into the opening she had made a little while ago. The more she forced her frozen fingers to action the less she succeeded in making a barricade. The bricks would not stay one on top of another. She gave up her efforts.
She warned the girl, “If you move, or shout, I’ll shoot you.”
Light flooded through the hole in the blocked doorway. It slid in a moving patch over the rear wall of the cottage, revealing the tottering stairs. It passed and came again, and then a third time and no more.
Jinny Cricklethwaite sighed. Hope made her heart beat faster.
Her heart sank. The cars stopped beyond the cottage. Men were shouting. Engines ground into reverse. The light on the cottage wall reappeared, but steady now, a yellow track across the littered floor.
She lifted the gun, loaded as it had been since she had driven Cluff into the barn with it. She seized the box of cartridges lying beside Joan, wrenching off its lid and stuffing the contents into her blouse. The cartridges piled on the waistband of her skirt.
A man shouted, “Is anyone in there?”
She did not move or reply.
“Give me a torch,” a man’s voice said. “I’ll go in.”
“Not you,” another voice protested. “Me.”
Footsteps approached the door. The woman sidled along the wall, out of the glare of the car headlights. She thrust the muzzle of the gun round the ragged edge of the gap in the brickwork. She pulled one trigger, firing blindly.
Her ears rang with the explosion. The lights went out suddenly. Silence fell.
In the night people were moving again, all round the cottage, unseen. An aeon of time passed.
A voice, very close to the doorway, ordered, “Come out!”
She smiled and pressed her lips tightly together. She felt inside her blouse and loaded the barrel she had fired already.
She fired a second time.
“Now,” she heard. “Her gun’s empty.”
She fired again. Someone drew in his breath so sharply that she heard the sound of it. She reloaded quickly.
“Cluff!” she shouted.
“Turn the lights on again,” a man said.
“I’ll talk to you, Cluff,” she called.
The light came back. She looked round the cottage, at its walled-up windows, at its narrow chimney-opening. She shouted, “There’s no way in except by the door.”
“Here,” she said urgently to Joan.
The child got up and came to her.
“Stand in the light,” Jinny said. “A little back from the door.”
Joan did as she was told.
She heard the sound of a man struggling in the grip of other men.
“Don’t, John,” the Sergeant said. “She’ll kill you.”
“The girl, not her father,” Jinny yelled.
His shadow grew on the rear wall.
“That’s near enough,” Jinny warned.
“What else?” Cluff asked wearily. “This is no fault of Joan’s.”
“You’re her uncle,” Jinny said. “Her father’s your brother. She’s the only child he has. His wife’s too old for more.”
“You’re a devil,” he said.
“I’ve lived with devils,” she told him.
He advanced a step. She thumbed back the hammers with a click.
“I can’t bargain with you,” he said. “I’ve no power to bargain.”
“Don’t move,” she replied.
“If you harm her,” he said, “what good will it do you?”
“No good,” she told him. “But what harm will it do you?”
“You’re not as evil as that,” he said softly.
“For the hurt you’ve done me,” she said, “a hurt in return.”
The girl was bedraggled in the light, dirty, wet. Her face was ghostly. She was small and helpless, lost and pathetic. Her eyes were bewildered. She was caught up in a horror she could not understand.
The
men about the cottage shuffled. The Sergeant’s shadow on the wall did not waver.
Cluff said, “I’m coming in.”
His boots squelched rain-soaked earth. His body knocked bricks from the edges of the opening. He had a torch in his hand. He shone it full on Jinny Cricklethwaite. He told Joan, without looking at her: “Your father’s out there. Go to him.”
His bulk moved, keeping between the woman and the girl.
“Well,” he said, “what’s keeping you from shooting me, Jinny?”
Jinny Cricklethwaite sagged. Her arm was too weak to tolerate the weight of the gun. The gun fell from her nerveless fingers.
“You couldn’t have shot her,” Cluff said.
Emotion had drained out of her. She was empty inside.
“Or me,” Cluff added.
She backed away from him, one hand to her lips. He came on deliberately, watching her.
The side of the stairs stopped her progress. He did not halt.
She whirled and sprang up the stairs. He put his foot on the bottom tread and the whole stairs creaked. They trembled. At the top where they were joined to the floor they eased slightly from their anchorage.
She looked down on him.
She said, “I want to make it quite clear. Wright was with me the night his wife died.”
He waited.
“He never left the farm,” she said. “Whether she killed herself or not, he didn’t kill her.”
Cluff smiled a little, bitterly.
“You were mistaken from the beginning,” she said. “See what you found.”
“It makes no difference,” he said. “He was no less guilty. He wanted her to die. He drove her to it.”
“Yes,” she said, agreeing with him. “The drowning of her dog, the way he treated her, they were all directed to that.”
“Did you love him?” he asked.
She replied, “He was young. I’d lived too long with my husband. My husband had always been old.”
She added, “I wanted him. I thought I wanted him. He was a man. He was handy when the time came.”
She glanced about her. The floor here stretched undivided from wall to wall of the cottage, its partitions removed when the last occupants had gone.