Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I wasn’t even in that part of the moor. I was walking in Goughdale.’

  ‘Where might that be?’

  Manciple knew, Stephen could tell that, but he didn’t say. Stephen explained. Malm asked him about the mines. Did he know the location of the Duke of Kelsey’s mine and the old powder house? Stephen said he knew every feature of the moor, the soughs, the flues, the now-blocked horse levels. Manciple stared at him with blue eyes that made a harsh, ugly contrast to the crimson of his skin, the pale copper hair.

  ‘You knew Mrs Ann Morgan,’ Malm said.

  ‘I’d seen her once, months ago.’

  ‘Not according to Mr Morgan. According to Mr Morgan, you’d been to the house once in February and you went back again when he wasn’t there at the end of March.’

  He made it sound as if Stephen had gone there because he knew the husband would be absent. Stephen didn’t say anything. He shrugged his shoulders. The sun on his back was making him sweat but he didn’t think it would have been better on the other side of the table where Malm and Manciple got the sun in their eyes. Manciple left then and Troth came in with a man carrying a tray with three cups of coffee on it and a plate of biscuits. Troth said something in an undertone to Malm and they both went out, leaving Stephen alone with the coffee. In their absence he took his jacket off, hung it over the back of the chair, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  Troth came back, looked at Stephen’s arms as if he had done something disgusting, exposed himself perhaps, and opened the window. Malm sat down.

  ‘Mrs Morgan had a Volkswagen,’ he said. ‘A small yellow Volkswagen which she left parked on the Jackley road. Did you see that car while you were out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And touched it. Your fingerprints were on the driver’s door.’

  Malm nodded to Troth and Troth pounced on him with a question. How had he got Ann Morgan to stop? Had he waved her down or had she recognized him? Stephen knew they suspected him but he was still shocked to be accused as directly and as insolently as that.

  ‘I didn’t even see her. I didn’t get her to stop.’

  ‘She got out of that car for someone she knew.’

  ‘She stopped and you spoke to her and then you opened the car door for her,’ said Malm.

  ‘The car was empty when I opened the door,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Go around opening car doors, do you, when the fancy takes you?’

  They went over and over that for a long time. The room grew stifling hot, in spite of the open window. Sweat was running down his sides from his armpits. The same man came back with more coffee and cheese and piccalilli sandwiches. Stephen watched a shadow that was creeping across the floor as the sun began to pass overhead and he thought there was no reason why the table and chairs shouldn’t be moved into this shade, but no one suggested doing it.

  After they had eaten the sandwiches Malm said he expected Stephen would like to stretch his legs. Stephen took that to mean he would like to go to the lavatory and it did, but Malm and Troth also took him outside and showed him a car, a Volkswagen of the same model as the yellow one, though this one was green, and got him to demonstrate how he had opened Ann Morgan’s car door and what he had done. He was sure they didn’t believe him and he felt they were humouring him towards something.

  Back in the room with the table and the bentwood chairs Malm started on Marianne Price. It was a coincidence that Stephen had been associated with both girls’ deaths, had found Marianne’s body and then had found Ann Morgan’s car. Stephen said it wasn’t odd when you considered how often he was out walking on the moor.

  ‘Maybe too often,’ Malm said.

  Stephen had never been able to deal with innuendo and he couldn’t now. He sat dumbly under that one while Troth went away and a man he had never seen before came in, a thin, quiet man who stared at him. Malm asked him why he had lost a day’s work to join the search party. What concern was it of his? Had he expected to find Ann Morgan’s body?

  ‘It was because I know the moor,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d be more useful than people who’d never set foot outside Hilderbridge.’ Inside him, deep down, was a small voice that whispered, because it’s mine, because I need to know what goes on there, I need to control it, that’s why.

  ‘Did you often have your lunch at the Market Burger House?’

  ‘I’ve been there once or twice.’

  ‘So you knew Marianne Price worked there?’

  ‘For the Lord’s sake! Everybody knows she worked there.’

  The other man said softly, lightly, ‘What did you do with their hair?’

  Stephen jumped up and pushed his chair back and it fell over with a clatter. ‘If this is going on I want my lawyer!’

  ‘Have you got one?’ Malm said dryly, but even he seemed to think the other man had gone too far, and before any more was said Manciple was back and they were reverting to the car and the time Stephen went out and the time he got back.

  He knew he gave identical accounts each time he retold what he had done on Sunday evening. When he had told them four times they seemed to give up trying to extract a confession from him. Three cups of tea were brought in and a plate of shortcake biscuits. The room was in full shade now but it was still hot and stuffy. For the fifth time Stephen recounted how he had seen the car with its window half-open and seen the scarf and the sweater, and had opened the door and closed it again.

  Manciple asked him how he had come to get a scratch on the side of his neck.

  ‘Brambles when I was out with the search party,’ Stephen said, and he turned his head and pulled down his shirt collar so that they could see.

  ‘Or a woman’s fingernail,’ said Malm.

  Stephen shrugged wearily. It was too ridiculous. They said no more about the scratch but talked about the car again. At five they told him that was enough for today and he could go home, they wouldn’t keep him any longer. If he didn’t mind waiting five minutes they would take him home by car. Stephen said angrily that he did mind, he wouldn’t wait, he would walk home.

  ‘I’d keep off the moor, though, if I were you,’ said Malm. ‘If you insist on walking seven or eight miles when we’re perfectly willing to take you, you stick to the road. And give the moor a wide-berth for a bit, right?’

  Standing by the desk, talking to the duty officer, was the girl from the Three Towns Echo who had interviewed Stephen in April. She looked very different, prettier, in her summer dress and pale blue cardigan. A chiffon scarf, blue, green and white, was tied round her head and knotted at the nape of her neck. She came up to him as he went towards the swing doors.

  ‘Is it you who’ve been all day helping police with their inquiries?’

  Stephen attempted a light laugh. ‘Lord, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘I’ve phoned it over to the PA.’

  ‘What might the PA be in plain language?’

  She looked incredulous. ‘The Press Association. I thought everyone knew that. It’ll be in all the nationals, there’s been a man helping police with their inquiries into the moors murders.’

  ‘Not my name, though?’

  She shook her head. They walked out into the street together. It was warm and sunny, the sky cloudless. ‘They have to be careful of libel,’ she said. ‘You might sue them.’

  ‘I certainly should!’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what they’ve been asking you?’

  It was wonderful to be out in the fresh air again, the sunshine. It had felt like prison in there, or as if he could only be let out of that stuffy room into prison. Remembering jargon he had read somewhere, he said joyfully, ‘I’ll give you an exclusive story!’

  They had walked into Market Square. The Market Burger House was the obvious place to go for a cup of something and a biscuit, but Stephen felt he had had enough cups of something and enough biscuits to last him a lifetime. The Kelsey Arms was just opening. Feeling extremely daring, Stephen held the saloon bar door open for her.

  There w
ere two customers in there already, a man and a woman, no one else. Stephen fetched himself and the girl two halves of lager. She told him her name was Harriet Crozier. It pleased him that she remembered he was an expert on Vangmoor and that she seemed to have forgotten the trade by which he earned his living. She referred to him as a nature writer. On an impulse, a little breathlessly, he told her whose grandson he was.

  ‘Can I use that?’

  ‘Oh Lord, it might be better to say “descendant”.’ He was thinking of Uncle Stanley making a fuss. Uncle Stanley read the Three Towns Echo very thoroughly. There was often something in it about himself. ‘Say “descendant”, and you could say some of his — well, his talent’s been passed on to me, something like that.’ Stephen began telling her about the two occasions on which he had spoken to Ann Morgan, though he left out the bit about covering the settee, how social conscience had led him to join the search party.

  Harriet took it all down in what she called speedwriting but which looked to Stephen like ordinary words with the vowels left out. She had drunk her lager very quickly, and suddenly, announcing that she was terribly hot, she couldn’t stand that thing on her head any longer, she couldn’t stand it whatever the risk, she pulled off her scarf.

  Her hair was as long, as golden and nearly as thick as Lyn’s. It fell down over her shoulders and she pushed it back away from her face. She laughed at his look of consternation. It wasn’t Lyn’s face at all but sharp and knowing, the nose sprinkled with freckles, the eyes a cat’s green.

  ‘I can’t tie my head up for the rest of my life,’ she said.

  She was holding her empty glass. Stephen didn’t want to have to buy her another drink. He had begun to feel uneasy, taking a woman into a pub, buying a drink for her, being seen with her perhaps. It had never happened to him before and he felt it wasn’t quite a fair way to behave to Lyn.

  ‘Time I was on my way.’

  She seemed surprised. ‘Let me buy you one.’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘I’ve a long walk ahead of me.’

  In spite of what he had just said he might have shirked it if the 6.15 bus hadn’t just gone. He set off but it was wearisome to have to stick to the road. What did Malm’s parting shot mean? That he was forbidden the moor? For how long? And what possible right had the police to lay such injunctions on an innocent man? Stephen had the impotent, resentful, revengeful feeling about that which a lover has when warned by more powerful authority off a girl. And he shared that lover’s certainty that if he obeyed his life wouldn’t be worth living. There was no time, since the departure of his mother, when the moor had not been to him a refuge, a domain, and in some curious way, a closer friend than any human being. It brought him a hollow, slightly sick, sensation to think of being estranged from it.

  He must keep to the road. To the left of him now were the Foinmen, to the right the Banks of Knamber, but he must not go among the standing stones nor the birch trees, it was as if an invisible wall had been erected between them and him. And this had been brought about by the murderer of those girls, this man who had usurped Vangmoor and made himself a greater master of it than he.

  It was a beautiful evening, the air soft and hushed, the distant hills floating in a bluish haze. But Stephen kept his eyes on the white road ahead as if he were a blinkered horse or as if there were rows of houses, identical and dull-facaded, on either side of him. At the stop nearest to Knamber Hole he waited and caught the 7.15 bus.

  8

  Next day the CID sent for him again.

  This time it was like a psychotherapy session, or what Stephen imagined such a session would be, only with three psychiatrists and one patient-victim. Manciple wasn’t there. Instead of him there was a chief inspector called Hook. Hook did most of the talking. It was easy to see he had been called in because he was used to this kind of thing, to asking the right kind of cutting-through-to-the-bone questions and perhaps to breaking men. Only you couldn’t break and confess when you had done nothing.

  Hook wanted Stephen’s life described to him. He wanted Stephen to say exactly what he did on one typical day. What was there so special about the moor that he was so attached to it? Was it a fact that he was accustomed to ten- or even twenty-mile walks? How long had he been married? Why had he no children?

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’

  ‘You’re not ashamed to tell us, are you? There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some would say there are too many people in this world without you adding to them.’

  ‘Let’s say that’s the answer, then.’

  Hook said he understood, he had been told, that Stephen was a grandson of Tace the Vangmoor novelist. How had that come about since Tace had apparently been childless? Oh, through an illegitimate child? He was by way of being an illegitimate grandson of Tace’s?

  Coffee and biscuits arrived at ten. It was a misty morning and to Stephen’s relief the sun was sluggish in appearing. The room was cool and smelt of some sort of antiseptic that had been used in the water when the floor was washed. Troth had a pustule on his chin which worried him. He didn’t scratch it but constantly brought his fingers close to it, tenderly palpating the greasy, pitted skin around it. Hook was a tall man who might have been good-looking but for his bulbous, shapeless, pugilist’s nose. He drank in a curious way, holding his coffee cup in both hands. In the middle of a series of questions he broke off and said to Stephen à propos, it seemed, of nothing that had gone before, his eyes fixed and narrowed, his forefinger pointing across the table, ‘We’re looking for a psychopath — would you agree to that? Would you agree that a man who kills the way this one does, for no more motive than that a girl’s young and has got long blonde hair, a man who’s driven by some impulse to kill in this way, he would be a psychopath?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘A man who is apparently a conformist, young and physically very strong, a man who needs routine because any other kind of existence he can’t handle. A man who has a fantasy life, maybe delusions of grandeur, a man with a morbid interest in death. I’m describing a certain type of psychopath. Aren’t I also describing you, Whalby?’

  Stephen said nothing. What could he say?

  ‘So we have a blueprint and here we have a man who fits that blueprint — or so it seems to me. Don’t you think any detached observer would see it like that? Our man knows Vangmoor. He knows it so well he can find his way about it in the dark. He’s so strong and he knows the moor so well he can carry a dead body miles across it by night.’

  ‘I haven’t a morbid interest in death.’ Stephen tried a dismissive laugh and felt he had succeeded. ‘What was I supposed to do when I found Marianne Price’s body? Not tell you? Go home as if nothing had happened?’

  ‘We’ll ask the questions, Whalby,’ said Malm.

  Stephen had never seen Troth smile or even look pleasant, but now as he sat a little apart from the others, sat with a certain air of deference to the others, his hand moving slightly in the vicinity of that red spot with its yellow blob, there was something in his face that Stephen recognized as amusement. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t even a lifting of those tight, bunched facial muscles, but rather a light in his eyes. Troth was amused, vastly entertained, by the spectacle of a defenceless person being insulted.

  True to his word, Malm launched into a spate of questions. This time they were all concerned with the geography of the moor and Manciple, who knew it better than they, had to be called in to assist. It seemed to Stephen that he had already, dozens of times, described the walks he took and the climbs he did, but they wanted it all again. Then the door opened and a man came in. Stephen didn’t even look up, he was so sure it must be their lunch sandwiches arriving, but there was no tray and no sandwiches, only another one of those whispered messages of the kind, no doubt, that yesterday had made him into a psychopath and a murderer. Malm, Hook and Manciple all left the room. Stephen was left alone with Troth.

  Troth behaved exactly as if he wasn
’t there. He did something Stephen felt no man would do in the company of another unless he felt that other to be less than the dust. There was no mirror in the room but the street plan was framed and glazed. Troth got up. Achieving a passable reflection of his face in the glass, he squeezed the spot on his chin between his two forefingers. He gave a low grunt of pain and blood spurted, a tiny bead of it plummeting onto the frame.

  Stephen sat and waited. Troth made him feel acutely uncomfortable by getting behind him and standing there, presumably to look out of the window. He resolved that whatever happened, if they kept him there for hours, if they kept him there all day, he wouldn’t speak to Troth. He stretched his legs and shifted in the chair. His whole body felt tense. They couldn’t do anything to him, could they? They must be bluffing. They couldn’t actually charge an innocent man.

  It seemed like many hours but in fact it was just over twenty minutes before Hook came back. He came back alone. Troth was sitting at the table again, wiping his chin on a dirty, bloodstained handkerchief.

  ‘Right, Mr Whalby, you can go. Thank you for your cooperation.’

  ‘You mean you’ve finished for today?’

  Hook looked anything but pleased. He looked dismayed, defeated. ‘I mean we’ve finished.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened? You mean that’s all you’ve got to say after putting me through the third degree for the best part of two days?’

  ‘We put you through no third degree.’

  ‘At least you can tell me why I’m to be let off the hook now.’

  Troth laughed. It must have been at Stephen’s unconscious pun. His laugh was like a schoolboy’s crow and when he had uttered it he left the room. Hook muttered something about new evidence but Stephen didn’t bother to listen to him, he felt too angry and indignant. If he had encountered Troth then, out in the corridor, he would have hit him as hard as he could and damn the consequences! Troth, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was Inspector Manciple who came up to Stephen and said he wanted to explain about the ‘small misunderstanding’.