by Ruth Rendell
Would the man know someone had been here? Stephen put the box back as nearly as he could remember into the position where it had been before. He switched on his torch and blew out the candles. Perhaps the man would notice a change in the height of the candles but there was nothing Stephen could do about that. In any case, it was unlikely that he came here every day or more than, say, twice a week. He didn’t live here. It was just a camp, Stephen thought rather wistfully, a hidey-hole, an occasional refuge from the world.
He went back along the winze and took the other fork.
In a few moments it brought him to the place where the rope lay along the lower wall of the shaft. He clambered up, putting out the torch when the spot of light appeared ahead. The sun had come through and all the mist been dispersed while he was in the mine. The brilliant light blinded him and for a while he lay on the turf, shading his eyes with his hands until he became used to the sun. A sheep bleated at him as he fetched his rucksack out of the George Crane Coe. It seemed as if he had been half a day in the mine but when he looked at his watch he saw that no more than an hour had passed and it was still only ten. Dadda was coming to lunch as usual on a Sunday. He had better get back.
There wouldn’t be time to go to the police before Dadda came. Once he had been to the police, he would certainly be with them all day, answering their questions, leading them down the shaft, conducting them along the winze to the secret chamber. He repeated those words ‘secret chamber’ under his breath, relishing them. Why hadn’t he thought of making such a hiding place for himself? He envied the man for it. It would have been just the thing for him to have had such a sanctuary on the moor, in the moor. No rain could have kept him from it, no trippers have irritated him. He could have camped there, picnicked there, slept there, gone to ground in his own place like a fox.
It was too late. Someone else had thought of it first. He would go to the police when Dadda and the rest of them had gone, he would tell Malm or Manciple or whoever it was that he had gone down into the mine in the afternoon and then come straight to them. This discovery would probably lead the police quite quickly to the killer of the girls. There must be all kinds of clues among the clothes and food and equipment. It would be almost as good as being taken to the man’s home. Stephen wondered where that home was. It was even possible that he knew the man. He and Lyn knew most people in the Three Towns either to speak to or by sight or had heard of them or knew their relatives. Of course he could be a newcomer, arrived in April just before the first death, but would a newcomer know about the mines? Perhaps, when the man had been arrested and the police had taken everything they wanted out of the mine, he, Stephen, could go quietly back and use the secret chamber for himself.
Whalbys’ van was parked outside the house. Dadda had come early. While he washed and put on a clean shirt Stephen debated within himself whether to tell them about the mine and the secret chamber while they were having lunch. Or should he wait until they had all gone and then tell Lyn? He could hardly go to the police without first telling Lyn why he was going.
They sat down to roast lamb. Lyn always cooked a roast on Sundays. Both he and Dadda expected it. Stephen started to talk about the Vangmoor killer and the two dead girls as a preamble to what he had to tell them, but Dadda threw down his knife and fork and cried, ‘That’s no bloody talk for the dinner table!’
Afterwards he thought of whispering it to Lyn in the kitchen, but she was busy, running in and out. The Newmans came in the back door and then Joanne and Kevin with Trevor. Hesitantly, Stephen brought up the subject of lead mining to test how he would feel about talking of something that for years really, not just half a day, he had nursed secretly to himself.
‘Don’t talk to me about tunnels,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I never could stand tunnels. When we’ve been in London when you girls were little I never would go in the underground, would I, Lyn? My mother was the same. She was staying with your auntie in Finchley and they got in the underground to go down to London, only it wasn’t underground there if you take my meaning, that was the trouble. When they started and your auntie said it’d be underground in a minute, Mother pulled the communication cord.’
‘It’s a handle in tube trains,’ said Joanne.
‘Well, handle or whatever they call it. They stopped the train all right and Mother never did go underground but there was a real carry-on and she got fined. I don’t know the ins and outs but she had to pay this fine. I hate tunnels myself.’
‘Some like them,’ said Trevor, ‘and we all know what that means.’
‘There’s one here as doesn’t, lad,’ said Dadda, frowning grimly.
Trevor floundered then, talking about getting back to the womb and not much liking having to explain what he meant by such expressions as ‘female principle’ and ‘a kind of opposite of the phallic’ in the presence of Dadda and the Newmans. Stephen thought about going to the police and wondered if he should phone first and whether policemen of the rank of Malm or Hook were to be found on duty on a Sunday. And when everyone had gone and it was after seven, he felt it would be too late to go to the police that evening. By the time he had got there and explained to them and they had come back together and gone by car to the nearest point on the road to the mine workings, it would be starting to get dark. He would go tomorrow.
But the next morning it seemed altogether too late, his delay beyond explanation. And then he knew he wouldn’t go at all, had perhaps never intended to go. The idea of telling the police became bizarre. How had he come ever to contemplate such a thing? Had he really intended to betray to men like Hook and Troth the location of the secret chamber?
At the moment, he was sure, only he and the killer of the girls were aware of the chamber’s existence. It began to seem to him a precious secret which it would be something like treachery to betray, though treachery to whom he couldn’t have said. And if he told the police or told anyone, even if he only told Lyn, he wouldn’t be able to go there again. The mine would be closed to him for years, perhaps for ever. He imagined them, in the name of safety, shovelling concrete into the mouth of Apsley Sough, as in the past they had blocked up the openings under the coes and the old pony level down by Knamber Foin. That would be bound to happen if he told.
Stephen felt light and free once he had decided against telling the police. What had they ever done for him that he should help them? Insulted him, called him a psychopath. When he went back to the mine he would go alone.
Lyn went into the bedroom and picked the dead shrew off the counterpane with a handful of tissues. Peach, who had accompanied her upstairs, walking beside her and chattering to her in little chirping mews to announce, perhaps, what awaited her, watched the removal of his tribute with arched back and raised tail.
‘What d’you expect me to do with it?’ Lyn said. ‘Eat it?’ She flushed the tiny velvety corpse down the lavatory. ‘I should have thought a poor little mite like that would have been beneath your dignity.’
Peach stalked into Stephen’s room and jumped up onto the table where the bust of Tace stood. Stephen didn’t like Peach in his study. Lyn went to fetch him out but was distracted by the calendar, the Echo’s ‘Moorland Views’, the Hilder at Loomlade for the month of July. Calendars, dates, the passing of time, she had become obsessed with them. For the third or fourth time that day she counted up the number of days since 24 June. It was easier, but more unrelenting and uncompromising, to do it on a calendar. Ten days. She had made it nine this morning, doing it in her head, but it was ten. Unless, of course, she had made a mistake over 24 June and it really should have been 1 July. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had made that kind of mistake, though in the past it had hardly mattered whether she made a mistake or not.
She picked Peach up. He was very soft and though his body was warm the rosy-gold fur felt cool and sleek to the touch. The rejected shrew forgotten, he began a sonorous purring. Lyn counted the days on the calendar again and made it either ten days or three, but she was sure i
t was ten. Her body felt unchanged, static, stilled in its rhythmic cycle and waiting. She went downstairs slowly, carrying the cat. It was a warm afternoon, the kind of sunny, cloudy, faintly breezy day that sometimes means a heatwave is coming, but Lyn tied her hair up in a scarf. She tucked in the wisps of hair that showed. There was a chicken and rice dish in the oven for Stephen and Lyn set the timer to start it cooking at five. She wouldn’t leave him a note, she never did. Because of what had happened to him in his childhood, he didn’t like notes left.
She walked along Tace Way and up the village street and across the green to wait outside St Michael’s gates for the bus from Jackley. She thought of how it would be, coming back later in the dark, but Nick wouldn’t let her come back in the dark, he would bring her in Bale’s van. Out alone in Chesney she often felt a little afraid, even in broad daylight. She wondered sometimes if the man who had killed those two girls knew which girls had long blonde hair and which did not, if perhaps he had marked them out for a long time, so it made no difference whether you covered your hair or not. She wasn’t quite alone now, though. In the churchyard the American professor in a broad-brimmed felt hat and blue jeans and Dr Scholl sandals was standing in front of the angel on Tace’s grave. He came out into the road and raised his hat very courteously to Lyn and said good afternoon, though he didn’t know her at all.
The bus came and she sat in the front. She was longing to see Nick, though she hadn’t long to wait, had seen him that morning and the evening before. And yet sometimes, when she thought of Stephen, she wished she had never met him. All this was very like the way she felt about those ten days, dreading as if it were the end of the world that she might be going to have Nick’s child, yet hoping it was true.
Next day the hot weather began. Every morning, very early, a mist hung over Vangmoor and then the sun came up into a sky without clouds, without even those shreds of cirrus that over the moorland nearly always flecked the expanse of blue. It was very hot in Goughdale and the Vale of Allen and each day was a little hotter than the last until there was a short break of coolness and cloud but not of rain before the heatwave came back with a renewed fierceness.
Stephen went out on to the moor every evening. Once he was sure he was going to keep the secret of the mine to himself, his feelings for the man who had found and furnished the underground chamber began to undergo a change. It was as if he had done the man a particular favour in not betraying him, and this seemed to bring them closer together. They were joined now in a common bond. Stephen no longer felt fear of the man, he no longer felt abhorrence. He even imagined their meeting and himself being invited into the chamber as a fit associate of its denizen.
When, after a week or so, he went back again he examined everything carefully to see if any changes might indicate a return during his own absence. The candles looked exactly as they had done after he had blown them out on that last visit. This time he had brought a ruler with him and he measured them, in centimetres to achieve greater accuracy. One was 18.5 centimetres long, the other only 6. The bed and bedding seemed unchanged. Nothing had been removed from the boxes or added to their contents and the pile of clothes was just as he had seen it before. The hair lay coiled and as if sleeping in its burial place.
That evening he remained for a long time on the slopes of Big Allen, crouched down among the heather, watching for someone to come. What exactly he would do when the figure appeared, climbed up the ledge and lowered itself into the mouth of the shaft, Stephen didn’t know. And he need not have speculated, for no one came that night or the next, though he remained out on the hillside, waiting, until long after the sun had gone. He had to find his way home in the dark.
Perhaps it was due to the suspense of waiting or perhaps to sunburn, for he had been out in the dale since noon and his face and arms were fiery, that he fell into another of those fevers of his. He woke up in the night in a sweat that soaked his thin pyjamas and crying, ‘The master of the moor! The master of the moor!’
There was no abatement of the heatwave. On a Wednesday afternoon, an early closing day, Lyn and Nick drove up on to Vangmoor for Nick to see it. He wanted to see the Foinmen and the Hilder and Bow Dale. They sat on the turf in the deep dark shade the standing stones made and looked over to Big Allen and down across Foinmen’s Plain to the roofs of Hilderbridge glittering in the sun, and they saw that as far as they could see, as far as they had been able to see in all their drive and climb up here, they were the only people on the moor. A universal fear had brought them solitude.
‘I haven’t been up here for years,’ Lyn said, ‘and I expect it’ll be years before I come again. There’s something chills me about it even on a day like this.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘So is that snake in your shop but I wouldn’t want to live with it.’
‘You don’t like living here?’
‘It’s rather hard to answer that when I’ve never lived anywhere else.’
She turned on her side away from him. She was sure now. It was nearly three weeks. Tomorrow she would take her specimen into St Ebba’s and have the test and then she would know for certain — but she knew for certain anyway. The child would be born in February, by which time Nick would have been gone six months. She hadn’t told him about the baby and she thought it might be better not to tell him, not ever. She had a plan forming in her mind for Stephen and herself and the child.
Nick touched her shoulder and turned her face towards him. He kissed her lips. ‘Your hands don’t shake any more.’
‘No.’
‘I think you’re the gentlest person I’ve ever known,’ he said.
‘I think you mean I’m a weak person.’
‘No, not a bit. Gentle and strong. Lyn, we’re going to change things, aren’t we? We’re not going to go on like this, never talking of your marriage, never talking about what we’re going to do when next month comes. I have to go away next month. Lyn, look at me.’
She got up and began to walk away, holding out her hand to him. Even with Nick there she was afraid of the moor now. The silence and the emptiness seemed only to conceal an unseen watcher, the avenue of monoliths eyes that gazed at her hair. And when Nick caught her up and put his arm round her, she pressed herself close against him.
‘You really do hate it here, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You must never come up on the moor without me.’
‘I live on the moor,’ she said, and as she said that the sun seemed to go in. It was only momentary but it made her shiver. Someone walked over my grave, she thought, but she didn’t say it aloud for fear of upsetting Nick.
Like the lead miners of old, Stephen was becoming used to moving swiftly through the narrow, low-roofed winzes. He was more practical and prudent too than he had been on previous visits, bringing with him a spare torch battery in case his failed. After the heat of the hillside, the intense, glowing heat of early evening, it was cool inside the mine and there was a smell of damp and of far-off stagnant water.
A feeling of sharp alertness took hold of him as he padded along the passage. It wasn’t fear, though there was a breath of fear in it. It was the sensation of adrenalin entering the bloodstream. He was prepared to see a little dim light at the end of the tunnel ahead of him, the light from the two candles. And if he did, would he retreat as quietly as he could, reascend the shaft as quickly as he could? Or would he go on towards the candlelight to meet the man squatting there with his cans of food and drink and his secret hoard? Stephen felt himself tall and strong and physically powerful enough to resist the man in any circumstances. But he didn’t think he would have to resist him, be forced in some way to struggle with him. This wasn’t at all the idea he had of the shadowy relationship which already seemed to exist between them.
However, no light showed at the end of the winze. Stephen shone his torch slowly round the chamber. The bed was as it had been, as far as he could remember. The flak jacket and the two pairs of jeans were still in a heap on the floor, but were they ex
actly as they had been before? Certain it was that the aran had gone. He looked at the candles and there too there could be no mistake. He had no need to measure them. The small stub had gone and been replaced by a new candle, the other was burnt down to the length of his thumb.
The man had been back.
He had eaten some of the biscuits out of the packet, drunk one of the cans of beer and brought in half a dozen magazines, all Sunday supplements. Stephen had a sense of satisfaction. He was excited too but mainly he felt satisfaction. Here was proof that the chamber was used and wasn’t just an abandoned lair deserted by the creature who had formerly gone to ground in it. He packed the food and the beer cans back into the box just as he had found them. And then a daring idea came to him. Why not show the man he had been here by leaving behind some clear indication of his visit? By substituting for the candles two new ones, for instance, or by placing on the wooden crate table some object from his pocket such as his penknife. He decided against it. The inhabitant of the cavern, however brave and intrepid, would be alarmed, would suspect a trap. His thoughts would turn at once to the police. It would be stupid to make the man think he was betrayed to the police when in fact he, Stephen, had actually gone out of his way to avoid betraying him. For the time being, at any rate, he would be discreet, he would show respect for the man’s privacy.