Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  Big Allen was veiled in whitish cloud like a sheet of frayed net that hung part of the way down its slopes. In the dale the stillness was such as to make Stephen feel that the whole bleak landscape with its ruined coes, paved circle and skeletal windlass was waiting with held breath for something to happen, For drama, for tragedy, for some violent act. A gust of wind would have blown away that impression in a moment, but there was no wind and the air hung with suspended moisture.

  By now he thought he could have descended Apsley Sough without the rope but he used it for safety’s sake. It was cold in the shaft and the walls felt clammy. When he reached the bottom he made his way not directly to Rip’s Cavern but along the winze that must lead under the George Crane Coe. It seemed to him that, since the rain of the night before, there was more water underfoot than formerly, so that the feeling he had had of walking on the seashore was heightened. The shale lay in at least an inch of water, and as he came towards the place where the subterranean lake was, water was trickling steadily down the walls of the passage.

  But he didn’t go to look again at the lake. He went into the chamber where egress had been blocked by a fall and there, under the heap of fallen rubble, he buried the sack. He found he was breathing rather shortly and rapidly and when he tried to light one of the candles the pinpoint flame guttered and went out. Something in the atmosphere, something no doubt brought about by the rain, was depleting the oxygen in the mine.

  The air was pure enough back the way he had come. This time the candle flame burned steadily. At the fork he took the right-hand winze and here the only sign that the atmosphere above ground and the weather had changed was a strengthening of the metallic smell, the smell perhaps of vestiges of lead. Stephen paused on the threshold of Rip’s Cavern, moving the candle in a slow surveying circle.

  What he saw made him blow it out and shine his torch. There were new candles in the bottles and a third candle in a brass candlestick. An unopened bottle of cider stood there also and a tankard, and between them was a box of Swan Vestas with a spent match on top of it. But what most excited Stephen, almost making him gasp aloud, was that the sleeping bag on the mattress lay half unzipped and on the pillow in a worn white cotton pillowslip was the impress of where a head had rested. Rip had passed the previous night here.

  Stephen went farther into the chamber. The biscuits and the corned beef had been eaten, all the beer had been drunk. Never before had Stephen been so conscious of the recent presence of Rip in the chamber. It was as if he had left only minutes before he arrived, perhaps even while he was at the other end of the mine, burying the sack, or that they had passed each other, ghostlike, unhearing, unperceiving, one taking the passage out to the sough, the other padding along the winze to the newly vacated chamber. Stephen trembled with excitement. He had to sit on the floor, on the carpet of sacks, and breathe deeply to calm himself.

  After a little while he undid the flaps on the top of the secret box. It occurred to him that he should have brought some small possession of Lyn’s, a hair fastener or a brooch or even that cairngorm ring Dadda had given her, to put with the mementoes of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan. The most important thing, though, he had remembered. Carefully he unwrapped the long smooth skein of hair. In colour it came somewhere between the shades of the other two, being darker than the dazzling white-blonde Stephen liked to think of as Marianne’s and fairer than Ann Morgan’s deep corn gold. He put the hair he had brought beside the others and tried to imagine Rip’s feelings when next he opened the box and saw it for himself. Astonishment, wonder, amusement — it might even make him laugh. Somehow Stephen didn’t think he would feel fear.

  He closed the flaps on top of the box. He considered performing some other act to show Rip he had been there. But what other act was necessary? What disturbance could he make or message could he leave that wouldn’t slightly undo the subtlety of what he had already done?

  Back along the coffin-shaped winze he made his way, along the left-hand fork and into the egress chamber, half-expecting all the time to meet Rip returning. He emerged with a feeling of letdown into the close white air, remembering that first time all those years ago and the stranger boy’s freckled face looking down at him. And this sense of disappointment and growing fear remained with him, darkening his mind. It intensified as he plodded homewards across the spongy, sodden peat. It was as if he had used up all his resources in the strategic placing of Lyn’s body and the depositing in Rip’s Cavern of her hair, and now a kind of reckoning had come. The time had arrived to think instead of act and he began to see that he hadn’t thought well.

  For Rip, of course, there had never been need of thought. He had only to kill, cut off the girl’s hair and hide in the mine until it was safe to resume whatever daily life it was that he led. But Stephen had murdered his own wife. It was his own wife that was missing and, as the successor to Ian Stringer and Roger Morgan, he should have been the first to search for her.

  He tried to imagine himself not her murderer but the husband only of a woman missing on Vangmoor. She would have been missing by now for something like twenty-four hours. He had told her mother on the previous evening he was going to meet her in Hilderbridge. When she wasn’t there, when he hadn’t been able to find her, wouldn’t he naturally have told someone? If not the police at that juncture, wouldn’t he have told her parents?

  None of this had struck Stephen before. He felt a little sick and his skin prickled. It was after one when he got back to Chesney. Surely a man living in a village on Vangmoor, where two girls with long fair hair had been murdered in the past three months, would suspect the same might have happened to his wife, a girl with long fair hair, if she didn’t come home all night? The natural thing would have been to have conferred with her parents last night, to have got in touch with the police last night, to have organized a search party last night. He had been too busy last night to think of any of that. If he went to the police now the first thing they would ask was, hadn’t he been worried when she didn’t come home? Why hadn’t he reported her disappearance on the previous evening? Knowing the danger as he did, he who had found the body of the first victim, he who had been so exhaustively questioned by the police, why had he done nothing until lunchtime the next day?

  As he came along Tace Way he saw ahead of him a crowd of people in the Simpsons’ front garden. It was too late to turn back and wait somewhere until they had gone in. Mrs Newman was waving at him. He went on, the question pounding in his head: what was he going to say when they asked where Lyn was? What was he going to say?

  ‘There you are then, Stephen. Wherever’s Lyn got to?’

  ‘Isn’t she in?’ he said, stammering a little.

  ‘She hasn’t been in all the morning. I said to Joanne, you give her a ring and get her to come over and see Chantal and Joanne did but she didn’t get any reply or anything, did you, Joanne? So I went over, thinking the phone might be on the blink or whatever you call it, but the whole place locked up and not a sign of her.’

  His sister-in-law was sitting in a wicker chair that had evidently been brought out into the garden for that purpose, holding in her arms the small, red-faced child, its face wet and gleaming in patches with saliva or tears or both. It had large dark blue eyes in red wrinkled sockets and a little wispy reddish hair. Kevin was talking to a couple of neighbours and his brother to another pair from the far end of Tace Way, but it seemed to Stephen that as Joanne spoke they all fell silent and turned to look at him.

  ‘I’ve just never known Lyn be out on a Sunday morning. What’s got into her? I mean, it has to be deliberate. I come home with my baby and she’s not even in and then Mum says you’re going out this evening.’

  Stephen didn’t answer. Joanne looked at him and her lip quivered.

  ‘Is it jealousy? Is that what it is? She only came in once to the hospital, and she does work in town, she was there. What does she expect, that I wasn’t to have a baby because she hasn’t got one?’

  ‘Joanne,�
� said her father.

  ‘Now come on, love,’ said Kevin. ‘Lyn’ll come over the minute she gets back, won’t she, Steve?’

  Two of the neighbours discreetly escaped. Joanne burst into noisy tears and this made the baby start crying. She jumped up and rushed into the house.

  ‘Typical post-partum neurosis,’ said Trevor.

  Mrs Newman looked at Stephen with her head on one side. ‘Where is Lyn, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, when she gets back mind you get her to pop across the road. If Joanne’s going to get in a paddy like that it’s bound to upset the milk, it always does. There was a woman lived in one of those houses round the back of the church when my three were little …’

  But what had happened to this woman Stephen never knew, for he turned away abruptly and without a word and crossed the road and entered his own house by the front door. To leave them like that was a stupid thing to do in the circumstances, he knew that, but it might have been worse if he had stood there any longer. He had already begun to tremble and he seemed to have no voice. At the kitchen sink he drank a glass of cold water and did some more deep breathing. When Lyn didn’t appear in the course of the afternoon either Mrs Newman or Joanne would certainly come here. They would want to know where Lyn was. He had no idea what he would say to them.

  Because he and Lyn had seldom drunk alcohol they usually had a plentiful supply in the cupboard Dadda had made them. Stephen found a nearly full bottle of whisky and poured himself a generous measure. Again he hadn’t eaten, he wasn’t used to whisky, and it rushed immediately in a pounding tide to his head. He sat down on the green velvet settee.

  Why hadn’t he gone to the police last night? Obviously he couldn’t go now, yet any time now Lyn’s body would be found. When it had been found and identified the Newmans and the Simpsons and those neighbours would remember how he had stood trembling and tongue-tied when they asked where Lyn was. Mrs Newman would remember how he had said on the previous evening that he was going into Hilderbridge to pick Lyn up at the bus stop. They would remember seeing him carry out to the car something in a sack, something far too large to be the broken bust of Tace.

  He put his head into his hands. But it was panic he was beginning to feel rather than despair. He was convulsed with terror so that he leapt up and began walking feverishly about the house. He drank some more whisky. Every hour that went by made it more strange and suspicious that he hadn’t reported Lyn’s disappearance, and every hour that went by increased the likelihood of her body being found.

  Certainly he had given her parents and her sister the impression that she had spent last night at home in her own bed. If he hadn’t actually told that lie he had acted it. He had allowed them to make the assumption. They would remember that when Malm and Manciple and Troth came asking. Made unsteady by the whisky he had been drinking, Stephen staggered into the study and fell into the chair at his desk. Broken-headed Tace gazed at him with sad irony, with a cynical gleam in his eye that came perhaps from his battered appearance and the way a watery sun gleamed in on his features.

  Last night he had been too busy aping Rip, following in Rip’s footsteps, using Rip as his cover and his guide, to think of that most important step — to announce Lyn as missing. Even if he hadn’t done so till he returned from putting her body in the old pony level, even if he had waited until eleven at night, he would have been safe, would have exonerated himself. And what help would it be to him now that his blood belonged to a different subgroup from that of the murderer of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan? Malm would assume the obvious truth, Hook would see it at once, that he had killed his wife and arranged things to make it look as if the killer of the other girls was responsible.

  Stephen was shivering with fear now. He had always believed himself to be brave and strong but that belief now shook and foundered. In his fear he whimpered out loud that he had no one to turn to, no one who would help him. For twenty years and more Dadda had been useless. He remembered with bitter hatred his dead grandmother and that fat fair woman now jaunting round Europe in a tourist bus.

  It was Lyn on whom for love and comfort he had always cast himself, and Lyn he had murdered. He fell on his knees and buried his head in the seat of the chair as if in her lap.

  15

  In acute fear of what it might tell him, Stephen brought himself to switch the television on for the news at 5.45. He had only to listen to the headlines to know that Lyn’s body hadn’t yet been found. Few people would venture out onto the moor today, he thought, standing at the window and looking out as she had stood and looked out. The rain had begun again, it was very dark for early on an August evening. He heard some more news on another channel at seven. Still nothing.

  There was a chance, of course, a probability even, that if he didn’t report Lyn as missing her body wouldn’t be found for weeks. One would have to go right down into the gully if not into the tunnel itself to see it. However, during those weeks he was going to have to account to her family for her absence. During the afternoon, after he had pulled himself together enough to go downstairs and have some more whisky, he had lain on the bed and fallen intermittently into a drunken doze. The back door he had locked, another departure from normal behaviour. From his bedroom he had heard Mrs Newman rattle the door handle. A few minutes later she or Joanne rang the front doorbell. The phone had rung twice. But he had answered none of these summonses, though knowing that in failing to do so he was only plunging himself deeper and deeper into this morass of his own creating.

  His head ached. In spite of that, he didn’t dare stay in after having told his mother-in-law that he and Lyn were going to his uncle Stanley’s. He forced himself to put on a clean shirt and a jacket for the benefit of those watching on the opposite side of Tace Way, though there was no way of showing them Lyn. In the hall, just about to leave, he heard a click and then a faint clatter from the back door and he jumped, almost crying out. It was only Peach, letting himself in through the cat flap, leaving small, dainty, wet footprints across the tiles. Stephen got into the car and drove away, very conscious of being alone and of being seen to be alone.

  When he started off he had no idea where to go, but once he was driving through the village he felt an urge that was nearly irresistible to take the road that led past Knamber Foin and over the old pony level. It would be madness to do that. Later, anyone who had driven along that road would be questioned as to what cars they had seen. He felt pulled towards the place, though, teased by a nervous desire to see if the body were still there, to push it deeper into the tunnel, to cover it, even to remove it, take it away and deposit it elsewhere.

  He got as far as Thirlton, parking where he had done on the previous night, near the village hall. He would not go on. With all his strength he would resist this compulsion. He would sit here in the car for an hour, two hours. Two hours would be enough for this supposed social call, surely. For just that length of time he would stay here, stick it out and wait, and then he would go back and take the phone off the hook and lock the back door and bolt the front door.

  With the engine off, it was cold in the car like winter. The rainswept moor rolled away to the right of him, blending without visible demarcation into the rolling grey sky. He thought of running away. He could lock up the house, take the car and go away somewhere. There was money in his bank account, about five hundred pounds. If he made up his mind now he could even take the body with him, retrieve it tonight, drive south …

  Anything to escape the questioning and probing of Lyn’s family. He had never thought much about it before, but now he realized how much he hated Lyn’s family, indistinguishable from Naullses, Naullses all. A race of creatures set on this earth to frustrate and torment him. What was he going to say next time they asked him where she was? He couldn’t run away, he could never leave this place. He could no more imagine life without the moor than he could without one of his limbs or his eyes.

  The ceaseless rain drove him to despai
r. It streamed down the windows of the car, having a claustrophobic effect, something he had never felt down in the mine, in Rip’s Cavern. Suppose Lyn’s mother phoned uncle Stanley? She might, she was capable of it. They had known each other all their lives, Lyn’s father and Stanley Naulls had been at school together. What was he going to say when he got back and Mrs Newman came over and asked where Lyn was?

  I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning. I don’t know where she’s gone. She never came back from Hilderbridge. Stephen turned all these hopeless responses over in his mind, and out of the mělée of them came one that wasn’t hopeless. It came to him gently and clearly and seemed to hang trembling, waiting for him to seize it.

  He did so and repeated the words to himself: I don’t know where she is, she’s left me.

  Something had stopped him thinking about the events of yesterday morning, something which that idiot Trevor would no doubt have called an emotional block. He had blanked them out of his memory without apparent will or effort. But now he forced himself to remember what Lyn had said to him that had led to his striking her and her breaking the bust of Tace. Not what had led to his killing her, that had been something different, something beyond analysis. He had struck Lyn because she had been unfaithful to him. Therefore there must be some other man.

  Stephen hadn’t given this a thought until now. That she had somehow cheated him, that she was going to have a child and bring it into his home, these things had been enough. But now, warily, he turned his mind to that shadowy figure, Lyn’s Lover. He didn’t know much about this sort of thing, it had never interested him. He had supposed it would never concern him. But he had been unable to escape noticing that marriages broke up, men left their homes with other women, women theirs with other men. Why shouldn’t he say that this was what Lyn had done? Why not tell her mother that Lyn had left him in order to go and live with this other man?