by Ruth Rendell
Indeed, if he hadn’t intervened it might have been true. The man must exist. When Lyn’s body was found it would be assumed that she had left Tace Way on Saturday morning to join him in, say, Hilderbridge and, having missed her bus, had accepted a lift …
Stephen started the car and put on the windscreen wipers. The clear arcs they made in the streaming glass showed him the sun setting in red streaks through splits in the cloud. He would go back home, no one would expect him to stay out visiting when his wife had just left him. Reversing, starting back, he began to rehearse the words he would use.
It was a relief to be in the house again. He put on the lights and left the curtains open and awaited the arrival of Mrs Newman. Peach came over to him, hoping perhaps to sit on his lap as he had so often sat on Lyn’s. Stephen pushed him away lightly with his toe. There was a book lying on the chestnut leaf table which made that inaccessible too, so Peach sat in an armchair, looking offended and uneasy. He was waiting for Lyn, Stephen thought, but it hardly mattered, his days were numbered, his hours even.
It was only nine o’clock. He switched on the television and found a channel with some news on it. There was nothing about Vangmoor murders, Lyn’s body hadn’t been found. Stephen began to wonder why Mrs Newman didn’t come. She could see he was back, she must want to see Lyn as much as ever, must even by now be growing anxious about her. He thought of going across the road and volunteering the information about Lyn’s leaving him, but on reflection it seemed an unwise move. It seemed to him not quite in his own character.
Instead he went into his study and tried to finish the article he had been writing for this week’s ‘Voice of Vangmoor’. He had unlocked the back door but even so he left the study door open so that he wouldn’t miss the sound of a knock or ring. After a while he went across the passage and looked across the street from his bedroom window. The Simpsons’ bedroom lights were on and the lights elsewhere in the house had all gone off. The curtains were drawn across the Newmans’ living-room window but through them he could see the light still on and the bluish glow of the television screen.
Back in the study he found it hard to concentrate. Why had they made three or four attempts to get hold of Lyn during the afternoon and then, in the evening, abruptly stopped? Suppose they suspected him of killing her and were keeping quiet over there, lying low, because they had told the police of their suspicions?
That was impossible. Why should they suspect him? It was more likely that they were simply offended. But their silence, their non-appearance, he began to find more disquieting than answering any questions of theirs could have been. At twenty past ten the downstairs lights in the Newmans’ house went out and the landing and bedroom lights came on. Stephen was staring out with the light on behind him, when suddenly Mrs Newman’s face appeared between her parted bedroom curtains. They looked at each other, their eyes meeting. Then Mrs Newman blanked out her window by jerking the curtains together, but Stephen had had a distinct impression, from the brief glimpse he had of her face, that she was very angry and aggrieved and that she had looked at him as at someone particularly blameworthy.
He couldn’t sleep. As he lay down in the dark his body began to jump and there were stars and floaters before his eyes. He thought how terrible it would be if he were to fall asleep and be awakened by a thundering on the front door, if he were to creep out of bed with pounding heart and see the police car outside, its lights blazing, Manciple and Troth at the gate. He couldn’t sleep but he was uneasy about turning his bedlamp on. Just as he could see Newman and Simpson lights from his side of the road so they could see his from theirs. He wanted to lie lower than they, to lie so low, if only that were possible, as utterly to be swallowed up in the earth and hidden.
But in the small hours he couldn’t stand it any longer. He got up and walked about the house, made himself tea, tried to read, tried even to complete his piece for the Echo. ‘After such a deluge as we have seen in these past days, a considerable greening of the moor may be expected to take place …’ The paint on Tace was dry, he looked as good as new. It had stopped raining and as the dawn came the sky was brindled in many shades of grey.
Stephen went back to bed then, but he lay sleepless and at eight he got up again. This was going to be another of those days he took off work. He felt ill and worn. If Mrs Newman didn’t come across the road in the next half-hour he would go to her. Had he ever before done that of his own volition? Probably not, but these were exceptional circumstances. His wife had left him. Have you heard from Lyn? We’ve split up, she’s left me, gone off with some man she says she’s in love with. Did that sound right? A frightening thought came to him. If Lyn really were alive, if she really had left him, wouldn’t she have told her mother? Wouldn’t she have got in touch with her?
The cat made him jump by coming in through the flap with all the bursting suddenness of a circus animal leaping through a paper hoop. A dog would have made it plain he was looking for Lyn, would have run into corners, poked under furniture, sniffed at doors. Peach walked sedately through the rooms with tail erect, hardly moving his round handsome head, hardly vibrating a whisker. He made a graceful leap on to the window sill to watch for Lyn to come from inside or out. Wouldn’t Mrs Newman wonder that Lyn had gone and not taken Peach with her?
It got to nine and no one had come. Stephen tried to phone Dadda to say he was ill, he had a virus infection, but Dadda didn’t answer. He saw Kevin go off to work, he saw Mr Newman go. At 9.15 Joanne came out of her front door, pushing a high-sprung shining white pram which she put on the front lawn. Stephen put on his walking boots and his zipper jacket. As he came out of his house Mrs Newman came out of hers and hesitated on the step, looking towards him. What happened next made his heart lurch. She shrugged her shoulders, slowly turned her back and went indoors again.
Stephen forced himself to continue down to the gate, to close the gate after him, to walk along Tace Way and into the village. There was a roaring in his head that seemed to get in the way of coherent thought. And his legs felt flaccid, boneless. Once or twice even he found himself stumbling on the smooth dry road. Again, though, difficult as walking was, awkward as that most familiar and satisfying of all his activities had become, he found himself being drawn a great distance, being compelled to that part of the moor where Lyn’s body was. His awkward stumbling walk was leading him in the direction of Bow Dale and Knamber Foin.
After the crossroads he moved in among the birch trees. He refused to lift his eyes to the ridged, boulder-strewn summit of the foin or the grey-green sweep of the dale beyond it. It was here that he had seen Rip, for the first and only time, seen him dancing to entice him. Stephen felt that Rip would know what to do, if only he were here, if only he would come out into the open and join with him and be his friend. Act normally, Stephen thought, was what Rip would surely say, for that must be what he himself did when he had done his murders and after spending a night in the mine, returned to his blameless and respectable life as a citizen of the Three Towns. Act as if you knew nothing. In your case, act as if your wife had really left you and gone away you don’t know where.
Stephen wandered among the trees whose leaves, no matter how still the day, were always faintly and delicately tremulous. He leaned against one of them, resting himself, supporting his arms on its thready thin branches, for it was too damp to sit down. The pale trembling leaves and his own pale face were reflected in the pools of water which lay everywhere between the tree roots and the hussocks of grass. So far, perhaps, he had acted normally. For someone like him it would be normal not to go crying to his wife’s relatives, to lie to them even, to wait until they asked him directly before confessing she had left him for another man. Fear began to trickle off him like sweat. He felt cooler, cleaner, freer. Being on the moor always made him feel better. Last night, hadn’t the atmosphere of the moor at Thirlton positively saved him from losing his mind? He hung against the tree, closing his eyes, resting there, inhaling the clean green scent of the l
eaves and grass with raindrops on them.
And the rain began again as he came out of the Banks of Knamber and began to walk back. A gentle warm rain it was, dropping out of the thousands upon thousands of tiny white clouds that streamed across the sky like galaxies. He walked slowly, lifting his face to the rain. No one would suspect him, even though he had been Lyn’s husband, for this murder was so obviously another of Rip’s murders, the victim lying as before within the confines of one of the landmarks of the moor, her death the result of strangling, her long fair hair cut off close. And he couldn’t be Rip, his blood was wrong. Alike though they were, with the same love of the moor, of solitude, of adventure, strong tall men of power and endurance, yet there was this tiny difference of blood between them. Brothers they might be, but not quite twins. Their blood was slightly differently constituted, and that would save him.
Now, he thought, he could sleep. He could eat something and lie down on the bed and sleep peacefully and innocently. Tomorrow when he was rested and fit again he would go back to work. Perhaps Lyn’s body would never be found, perhaps as time went by there would be nothing left of it but the bones and these would gradually crumble and dissolve until they became one with the stony surface of the moor …
The pavements of Tace Way were covered with a gleaming skin of rain and water dripped in heavier drops than the rain from neat little front garden trees. Outside Mrs Newman’s house was parked a van with Bale’s Pet Shop on its side. That reminded Stephen about having Peach destroyed, something which would now have to wait until tomorrow, but which would be a very natural act on the part of a deserted husband. Hadn’t he read somewhere, whether as fact or fiction he didn’t know, that Elizabeth Barrett’s father had destroyed, or wanted to have destroyed, her spaniel when she ran away with Robert Browning? Act normally. The normal thing would be to rid oneself of the runaway woman’s pet.
He went into the house and into the kitchen but he felt too exhausted to eat. Mrs Newman would come across the road soon, now she had seen he was back. He locked the back door and took off the phone receiver, took off his boots and jacket and went upstairs. Still wearing his jeans and shirt, he lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over him. For a moment or two he lay there, listening to the gentle patter of the rain, and then he slid into sleep.
A sound from downstairs awoke him, he didn’t know how long afterwards. It was still raining lightly. The sound had been one of the interior doors closing, and now he could hear footsteps. Had he, after all, forgotten to lock the back door?
Surely Mrs Newman wouldn’t come upstairs after him, but these footsteps were mounting the stairs. Stephen sat up as the bedroom door came open. He jumped off the bed and backed against the wall with a cry of terror.
Lyn had come into the room and was looking at him.
16
His nerves must be very bad, she thought. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. She stood about a yard in from the door and spoke to him gently.
‘I’m sorry if I startled you, Stephen. I’ve come back for my things and for Peach.’
He didn’t speak. He stood against the wall, his hands flat against it as if he were only prevented from further retreat by that solid mass.
‘I saw the car, I knew you couldn’t be at work, but I thought you must be out on the moor. I wouldn’t have come in like that if I’d known you were here.’
Still he didn’t answer. She began to feel afraid of him again. For a while she had succeeded in conquering this new fear of Stephen. Because she couldn’t let herself feel afraid of Stephen, poor frightened Stephen, she had stopped Nick coming with her to Tace Way, but now the fear was coming back. She forced herself to take a few steps forward and to speak steadily.
‘It wasn’t right of me to run away like that while you were out on Saturday. It was because I got in a panic.’ She didn’t mention his having hit her but her hand went up involuntarily to her bruised left eye. ‘Being away these two days,’ she said, ‘I think it’s made me understand — you’ll be glad to be rid of me, won’t you, Stephen? You don’t need a — a mother any more.’
He moved away from the wall and she flinched a little. But he wasn’t coming near her. He sat or half fell onto the bed and turned away his face. She was sure then that he wasn’t going to speak to her. The cupboard where her clothes were was on his side of the bed, but she went up to it and slid back the doors. She took out an armful of clothes almost haphazardly, the skin on her back tingling with apprehension. Again she drove herself. She turned and held out her hand to him, though she knew better than to touch him.
‘Won’t you speak to me? We may not see each other again. Stephen?’
He jumped up and climbed away from her over the bed. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so horrible. He scrambled across the bed on all fours, dropped on to the floor, ran across the passage and into his study. She heard the key turn in the lock.
Nick had made her promise not to lift the suitcases herself. She had laughed at him but she had promised. She had survived Stephen’s violence and the baby had survived and she was going with Nick to London. Except that it would have upset Stephen she would have sung out loud as she carried the armfuls of clothes downstairs and packed them in the cases.
Her mother came across the road. ‘I knew something was up when he said you were going to his uncle Stanley’s. I said to your dad, Stanley Naulls wouldn’t have folks round, he might have to give them something to eat and drink.’
Lyn smiled. ‘I kept phoning you but you don’t hear the phone when you’re out in the garden. I knew you’d start wondering, it was a relief when I got hold of you in the afternoon.’
Mrs Newman carried the cases out and put them in the back of the van. ‘I can’t help feeling a bit weepy, Lyn. We’ve never had a divorce in our family. It’s a shame you ever married him, he was never a real husband to you. When you three were little there was a man like him lived in one of those pair of cottages on the Thirlton road …’
‘Mum,’ Lyn said, ‘don’t send Stephen to Coventry, will you? Don’t not speak to him or anything.’
Joanne was in the garden, standing by the baby’s pram. Lyn went up to her and they embraced clumsily because it was the first time for years that they had kissed each other.
‘I’ll miss you. I’ll be so dead bored I’ll die.’
‘I’m not going to Australia,’ said Lyn. ‘I’m not going to the other end of the world.’
‘Might as well be. Oh, I do envy you, you are lucky.’
‘I know,’ said Lyn, ‘I know I am.’
She picked Peach out of the yellow maple tree and gathered him into her arms and put him on the passenger seat of the van. He sat erect, staring out. Lyn turned the van round, waved to her mother and her sister. She saw her mother wave, burst into tears and rush into the house, but she hesitated, slowing only for a moment before driving on and out of Tace Way. And soon the moor unfolded on either side of her, Chesney Fell and Foinmen’s Plain to the right, to the left the quivering copses on the Banks of Knamber. She would never need to see it again except as an occasional visitor. Once when she was first married, walking along the Reeve’s Way with Stephen, she had found lying on the turf a skin shed by an adder. Now it seemed to her that the silvery-grey moor was her own snakeskin that she was sloughing off, peeling it off behind her, as she went on to new ways and new things.
The skin that was the moor wrinkled and shrivelled and rolled away and Lyn drove down into north Hilderbridge, down North River Street, over the bridge to the Moot walk and Nick and the southbound train.
The shock of it prostrated Stephen. He lay face downwards on the floor in his study. He listened to Lyn’s footsteps moving about the house, to her voice and her mother’s, a distant wordless sound like the twittering of birds, to the front door closing. By that time he knew it had been Lyn, was Lyn, not a ghost or some frightful emanation from his own fear or guilt. He knew by then that it was Lyn who had walked into the bedroom and therefore that he
hadn’t killed Lyn on Saturday afternoon.
He got up and went across the passage and into his bedroom and looked out of the window. Bale’s van had gone. The baby’s pram stood on the Simpsons’ lawn but both women had gone in. It had stopped raining and a pale sun was shining through the layers of cloud. He could remember so clearly the events of Saturday afternoon. He had come home and seen Lyn standing at the window, standing there in her blue jeans and white tee-shirt, her hair cloaking her shoulders, and without motive, without even particularly wanting to do it, with nothing but a desire too urgent to resist, he had sprung at her and killed her. Yet just now he had seen her and heard her speak.
Was he going mad? Was it that his mind hadn’t been able to stand the battering it had lately received? The death of Helena, the defection of Lyn, the reappearance of — his mother. Had it all driven him mad so that he believed he had done things he hadn’t done? Perhaps the events were no longer so clearly memorable. He could recall his fingers digging so hard into Lyn’s neck that it seemed he must behead her, but quite lost were the details of his drive to the pony level and the times and sequences of the steps he had taken after the killing. Half an hour ago he would have sworn he had hidden her body but now the remembrance had grown vague, confused, like a dream at morning. He could remember nothing clearly of that killing but the feel of her neck in his hands. Yet even that must be a false memory, a dream …
Hook had told him he had fantasies and therefore must be a psychopath. At any rate now there would be no fresh confrontation with Hook. He hadn’t killed Lyn. He hadn’t cut off her hair, folded it into a sack, buried the sack in the mine. He hadn’t put the hair with that of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan into the box in Rip’s Cavern. Part of the shock of seeing Lyn had been the sight of her veil of pale bright hair.