by Ruth Rendell
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. For a while he had been Rip’s equal. The whole thing, he supposed, had been no more than a sort of wish-fulfilment. He had wanted to be on a level with Rip, so fooled himself he could do, had done, what he did. Stephen gave a dry mirthless laugh. He must recover from it now, take up the reins of life again, never never let his emotions get such a hold over him again.
He went down to the kitchen, made himself scrambled eggs, a mug of coffee, cut off two hunks of bread. Perhaps it was because he had been starving himself that he had had these delusions. When he had eaten he felt so much better, clearer-headed, calmer, that he could look back on his imaginings and laugh at himself. He actually did laugh aloud. There, alone in the house, he laughed so uproariously as he went back up the stairs that he got a stitch in his side.
In the study he tore up the sheet of paper on which he had attempted those first puny sentences of an article the night before. A fresh sheet went into the typewriter. Now Helena was dead he need never see a Naulls again. This would show them, this would be something more pungent than the ending of the drought, than an account of a thunderstorm. It was a chance for him that Tace’s birthday happened to fall this week, a peg to hang his article on.
‘The present writer’s maternal grandfather, Alfred Osborn Tace, would have been ninety-eight years old this week had he lived. His sole descendant will be honouring the great man’s birth date as he always does, as he always did himself, by private celebrations of the beauty of his beloved Vangmoor, in short, by going out on the moor for a picnic on one of our fine August days …’
Stephen said a good deal more about his relationship with Tace and invented two Tace anecdotes as told him by his grandmother when he was a child. He didn’t quite dare say he remembered Tace or even that he had been told of being dandled on his knee, since Tace had died three years before he was born. When the article was finished he thought it the best thing he had ever done. He put it in an envelope, addressed it to the Echo, and went off down to the post box on the green to post it.
From St Michael’s churchyard one obtained the best view in the village of Knamber Foin. Stephen leaned over the lychgate and gazed across the intervening land. Had he truly suffered so much agony and fear sitting in the car at Thirlton, driving down the long bleak road to the ‘bridge’ over the portal, lying sleepless and tortured in his bed, or had that too been a dream? He stared, perplexed, across the moor. The wind was getting up. A breeze blew out of the west, ruffling, then smoothing, the birch foliage in the Banks of Knamber as if an invisible hairbrush had passed over it. Why shouldn’t he take the car and drive to the pony level now? It might be that Saturday wasn’t a dream while this morning was. The dead Lyn might lie over there, the dream Lyn have appeared to him …
He told himself not to be a fool and he chuckled out loud at the very thought of having such ideas. Back at home again, he walked about the house, thinking of changes he would make now Lyn was gone and the place all his. Tomorrow he would have to shop for food, replenish the fridge, cancel half the milk, remember to buy bread. For a while he amused himself tidying the kitchen, rearranging things, putting Peach’s food dish and all the tins of cat food into the dustbin.
The repeat showing of Saturday’s episode of Elizabeth Nevil began at 7.30. Stephen switched on the television as they were playing the by now familiar, even famous, introductory music. The first episode started with Joseph Usher’s finding Apsley Sough while walking his Irish wolfhounds in Goughdale. The joke was that the scriptwriter and the director had no more known where the mineshaft was than Tace had. Stephen laughed aloud at the sight of the actor playing Usher peering down a hole a few feet away from the George Crane Coe. A rabbit warren, that’s all that was. And when they showed the inside of the mine it was obviously something rigged up in the studio and not at all like the real thing. Stephen wondered if Rip was also watching and laughing. After that they didn’t show any more of the moor, but only interiors and the ‘lovely dresses’ Helena’s fellow-inmates of Sunningdale had talked about.
He lost interest because the scriptwriter hadn’t stuck very closely to Tace’s text. He kept thinking of the body in the pony level, the body that wasn’t there, that had never been there. Yet he had only to close his eyes to see it lying there, face downwards and with its shorn head, the light of his small torch playing faintly on it. He had knelt down and cut off the hair and coiled it into a skein and rolled it up in the sack. Then, on the following morning, he had taken it out of the sack and put it in the pocket of his zipper jacket, only to think immediately that this was an unwise move in case any hairs adhered to the lining of the pocket. Surely he had done those things, surely he had done them yesterday morning, had wrapped the skein of hair in clinging film, put it into his rucksack with the rope and the torch while he waited for Kevin to depart and the coast to be clear.
He turned off the television and went to the hall cupboard. His zipper jacket was hanging there. He brought it to the living room window but the daylight wasn’t strong enough to see much by. Under the central light he turned the pocket inside out. A single blonde hair clung to the slightly magnetic nylon lining.
Stephen pulled the hair off and dropped it onto the carpet. He put on the zipper jacket and went out and got into the car. There he sat for a moment or two, breathing deeply, for his heart was racing and his hands were unsteady. He had to concentrate on keeping his hands from trembling as he drove out of Tace Way and down into the village.
The sun had set and the moor lay in a bluish twilight, not yet dark enough for any but the most prudent motorist to have his lights on. There was hardly any traffic. He only passed one car on his way to Thirlton. A wind was blowing, sweeping the grass and heather of Thirlton Plain with that brushing effect, bending the few, already wind-twisted, trees along the roadside. The sky was heavy with bands of grey cloud, between which, all over the west, the remains of the sunset lay in blood-red streaks.
Now that he was approaching the spot he had been yearning to revisit ever since he had left it on Saturday, he had that curious choking feeling of one’s heart in one’s mouth. That hair could have got into his pocket in other ways. From proximity with some garment of Lyn’s in the cupboard, from when Lyn had last washed the jacket. An aversion to going near the pony level seemed to take him by the throat. Yet he couldn’t make himself drive more slowly, his foot on the accelerator refused to obey him. He was compelled steadily on, out of Thirlton village, over the first hump of the moor, out onto the empty road that wound into Bow Dale. And then, as the road curved round the base of Knamber Foin, the point where the dale opened its whole prospect, he slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a juddering stop. He stopped as dead and as shockingly as if something had burst out from among the boulders and had dashed across the road a yard in front of him.
Down at the ‘bridge’ the road was ablaze with car lights. The lights threw a brilliant white radiance, still and constant, up into the dark blue air. It was like seeing the site of some frightful, multiple accident, from afar off on a motorway, for amid the white light blue police car lights rippled on and off, on and off, and yellow lights winked in a slow regular rhythm.
Stephen’s body broke out in a flood of sweat. He could see a crowd of people moving about, black silhouettes in the dusk, illuminated into men when they moved into the encompassment of the lights. He sat still, sweating. The engine had stalled. Down there the blue lights on the roof of a police car rippled, on and off, as pretty, as diverting, as a shop-window display. The yellow lights winked. But Lyn was alive, he had heard her speak, seen her in the living flesh and the living golden hair!
To drive down there and find out …? It was impossible. He doubted if he were physically capable of it. He drew in a deep breath and at the second attempt managed to start the car. The steering wheel was wet with sweat from his hands. Once he had turned round and had his back to the brightness and the activity down there in the valley, he put his own li
ghts on. Then he drove back slowly, tensing his body, hunched over the wheel. A police car with its lamp flashing passed him in Thirlton village.
There was news on the television at ten. He had half an hour to wait and he paced up and down. Suppose there was nothing on the news, nothing tonight, tomorrow, ever? Suppose he had hallucinated what he had seen in Bow Dale just as he had hallucinated killing Lyn? He got on to his knees on the carpet and crawled about, looking for the hair he had dropped. Instead of the hair he found a handbag of Lyn’s, a brown leather one, fallen out of a chair between the back and the seat. But at last, after a long time, he did find the hair. He held it between his fingers, drawing it out like a bowstring. It was Lyn’s hair and it was real. Or he thought it was real. If he went to Rip’s Cavern now would he find Lyn’s hair lying in the box with Marianne Price’s and Ann Morgan’s, or had the placing of it there also been a dream and an illusion?
If there was nothing on the news at ten he would go up to Goughdale and into the mine and look for the sack and the hair. Even if it were pitch dark, moonless midnight, he would go. The girl announcer’s face swam on to the screen as he pressed the switch. His watch must be slow, he had missed the headlines.
He crouched on the settee, watching the President of the United States shaking hands with an African prime minister, union leaders talking about a projected rail strike, the search for survivors of an air crash in Turkey. There was going to be nothing, nothing, and he was mad. He shivered, clenching his fists.
The announcer came back. She moved a paper on the desk in front of her, said in that indifferent silky voice: ‘The body of a third victim of the Vangmoor murderer was found this afternoon at the entrance to former lead mine workings near the village of Thirlton. The body has been identified as that of a journalist on a local newspaper, Harriet Jane Crozier, aged twenty-four …’
Stephen jumped to his feet and let out a crow of laughter.
17
It had been there since Saturday, its presence had prevented the cat from jumping onto his favourite place, but it was only now that Stephen really saw the book that was lying on the chestnut leaf table. Muse of Fire, A Life of Alfred Osborn Tace, by Irving J. Schuyler. Harriet Crozier had brought it to lend it to him as she had promised. He understood now. Lyn had gone and had left the back door unlocked for him and later, much later, Harriet had come with the book. There had been no one at home but by that time the storm had begun. The back door was not only unlocked but a little ajar and she had come in to shelter from the rain. There he had found her, dressed as Lyn often dressed, as a thousand girls did in summertime, in jeans and a tee-shirt, waiting for him, watching the storm.
And that brown leather bag he had found wasn’t Lyn’s, it was Harriet’s. He took it from the chair seat where he had left it and looked inside. The blue, green and white scarf was there, folded up, her reporter’s notebook, a purse, a credit card and a cheque book, a jumble of pens and pencils, make-up and loose coins. Stephen couldn’t help laughing again. It was so enormously funny. As far as his safety was concerned, nothing could have worked out better for him. He picked up the book. There was no inscription in it, nothing to show it had been the property of Harriet or the Echo. Filled with an exquisite relief, he took the book upstairs to bed with him and fell asleep over it, waking in the morning to find it still lying on the covers and still open halfway through chapter one, so deeply had he slept and without stirring.
It was late, after nine. There seemed something absurd in the idea of going to work. He made himself a large breakfast, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, fried bread, and he opened a can of sausages. It was the first proper meal he had eaten for days and when he looked in the glass he fancied he had lost weight. His face looked drawn and there were hollows under his cheekbones.
After breakfast — and after washing up, for though alone, he wasn’t going to sink into squalor — he went up to his study, and because he was calm now and relaxed, knowing himself to be a sane rational man, he was able to mend the crack in Tace’s head without difficulty. While the glue was drying he took out all his books and dusted and rearranged them. It continued to pour with rain and he had to have the light on.
Odds and ends of paint were kept in a cupboard under the sink. He found a tin of black undercoat, half-full. The paint itself was a very dark grey, not quite black. He spread old copies of the Echo out on the floor and set the bust of Tace on them and began carefully painting it with the undercoat, paying special attention to the mended head. While he was painting he noticed Harriet Crozier’s name above an article about Three Towns girls cutting off and dyeing their hair and he started laughing again. To have made such a mistake! But of course it had been as dark as it would be now without the light on and he had never, either down there in the living room or in the old pony level, looked at his victim’s face.
The painting done, he got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned all the carpets and upholstery in the house. He dusted the rooms. At 1.30 he cooked himself the rest of the sausages with cheese on toast and then he took the car and drove through the rain down into Hilderbridge to shop for more food. The town was full of police, there were policemen and police cars everywhere, and when he came back into Chesney he saw that there were lights on in the gatehouse lodge and police cars parked outside.
The clean and tidy appearance of the house pleased him. From five o’clock onwards he watched television, later fetching himself a meal of cold chicken and precooked chips and packaged salad. For most of the evening he went on eating, chocolate bars, packets of crisps and nuts. He watched every news programme, switching from channel to channel to get all of them. There was an interview with the assistant chief constable of the county who had been censured by someone or other for his refusal to call in the help of Scotland Yard. There was an interview with a man called Martin Smith who said that he had been out with Harriet Crozier a couple of times. He would never forgive himself if he lived to be a hundred for not taking her out on Saturday afternoon instead of going by himself to the first football match of the season which was anyway cancelled due to the storm. Stephen didn’t go to bed till midnight.
The following day passed in much the same way, pleasantly, peacefully, though without the painting or the shopping. The rain was sporadic and gave up altogether in the late afternoon. Stephen walked as far as Ringer’s Foin and back and for the rest of the evening he watched television, eating pork pie and tomatoes and crisps and chocolate bars. It was years, not since he was a child, that he had eaten so much. Chief Superintendent Malm came on the BBC news at nine to say he was confident they would catch the Vangmoor killer this time. They were optimistic. A few more days or even hours would see the end of it.
Next day, having eaten heartily at breakfast, Stephen went back to work.
Dadda wasn’t so far sunk in misery as to spare Stephen. He looked up with sunken eyes from the inlay he was working on.
‘You’ve come back then. You’ve bloody condescended to come back. Had another one of your bloody viruses, have you?’
‘Afraid I have, Dadda. Sorry about that. I always turn up like a bad penny, though, don’t I?’
‘Aye. Have you ever thought about your bloody future if Whalbys’ goes bust? Noticed all the small businesses going bloody bust in the Three Towns this year, have you? Or d’you reckon I can do the lot on me own, a man with a sick mind like me?’
‘Good Lord, Dadda, you haven’t got a sick mind.’
Dadda turned and spat into the sawdust. ‘You’ve got a wife, you want to remember that, you’ll maybe have kids. What are you going to live on when Whalbys’ goes down the bloody drain?’
‘Actually,’ said Stephen, ‘I haven’t got a wife. Not any more.’ He gave a bright, strained smile. ‘She’s left me, we’ve split up. She walked out on me on Saturday.’
The table creaked as Dadda leant on it to heave himself up. He stood staring at Stephen with great arms hanging. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You heard me, Dadda. Lyn’s
left me.’
‘I’ll not believe it!’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to. Good Lord, Dadda, we’re not the first couple to split up. We’ll get over, by or through it.’
Dadda said in a deep, dark, bitter voice, ‘There’s history repeating itself, there’s the sins of the fathers visited on the children.’
It had happened almost before Stephen knew it. One moment he was standing next to Dadda, trying to avoid his eye, the next he found himself clutched in a bear hug, held in a crushing embrace, while Dadda murmured over him just as he had done all those years ago when Brenda first went away.
‘Like father, like son,’ crooned Dadda. ‘We’ll be all in all to each other now, all in all to each other.’
Stephen was more frightened by this now than he had been then. Then it had at any rate seemed natural, natural even to the child. Now there was something horrible about being embraced by this gorilla-like man who on his own admission was halfway to madness. As a child he hadn’t wanted to hurt Dadda’s feelings by protesting, later on he had given way to Dadda in everything for the sake of peace and not to offend. He had always believed he loved Dadda. Suddenly he understood how much he hated him. With this surge of hatred he pulled himself violently away, digging his elbows into Dadda’s chest, bracing his back and jerking himself free, so that Dadda’s arms flew wide and he staggered — huge, powerful Dadda actually staggered. He gave a low cry. Stephen ran upstairs and got behind the ranks of chaises longues and three-piece suites. He stood against the wall, listening, but there were no more sounds from downstairs.
After a while he crept to the top of the stairs and looked down. Dadda was sitting on a Hepplewhite chair with the whole of the upper part of his body prone on the table top, his head on the table between his outstretched arms. Stephen tip-toed away and went back to the Victorian love seat he had been working on in oyster-coloured velvet and to which he hadn’t given a moment since the previous Thursday. At lunchtime Dadda was gone, though Stephen hadn’t heard him leave. He went out himself and was crossing the square to the Market Burger House when someone touched his sleeve.