Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  It was Troth.

  ‘Oh, not again,’ Stephen said. He felt enough confidence to say that, though if it had been Lyn who was dead he might not have. ‘You don’t want to talk to me again?’

  ‘You don’t know what we want,’ said Troth in that tone of cunning triumph a stupid man uses when he thinks he has got the better of an adversary. ‘I never said. I might be merely warning you about parking your car on a yellow line.’ A fresh outcrop of acne made the near approach of his face offensive. Stephen slightly retreated. ‘It could be just that,’ Troth said. ‘That’s what an innocent man would presume.’

  ‘Good Lord, I can read, you know, I can watch TV. Any bloke in my position would jolly well know you want to talk to me about this last murder. What are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it, let’s get going.’

  Troth didn’t say any more. They were only about a hundred yards from the police station. Stephen wasn’t taken into an interview room this time but into an office with a desk and chairs and filing cabinets and a view of Hilderbridge roofs. Manciple, in a lightweight grey suit, his face burned to an even darker brick red by the previous week’s sun, was sitting behind the desk and Malm was standing at the window against the light. Malm looked tired. The past weeks had aged him and whatever he might have said on television, he looked neither confident nor optimistic.

  Manciple apologized to Stephen for bringing him there.

  ‘We’ll try not to keep you longer than is strictly necessary, Mr Whalby. We have to do our job, you’ll appreciate that.’

  Stephen shrugged. Manciple was looking at him in a way he didn’t like, as if he saw into his mind. It was perhaps the most intelligent look any of these policemen had ever worn in all his encounters with them. It was a look of enlightenment. Stephen moved his eyes away.

  Malm spoke. ‘Your car was seen twice in Thirlton during the weekend, Mr Whalby, once on Saturday night and once on Sunday evening, both times parked outside the village hall. Would you like to tell us what you were doing there?’

  Stephen blustered a bit at first. He said it was no business of theirs. But everything, of course, was their business in a murder case. He couldn’t simply refuse to explain. After a while he admitted he had been to Thirlton and said he had been inside the village hall. It was a piece of luck for him, the merest chance, that when they asked him what had been going on there and he replied that it was a concert, he had guessed right.

  Then Manciple wanted to know how well he had known Harriet Crozier.

  ‘I’d met her three times.’

  ‘Three times is ample to start a relationship,’ said Malm, adding, ‘at any rate, these days.’

  Stephen wanted to laugh at that, it was so remote from any of the ideals or aims of his life, and he did feel a smile twitch his mouth.

  ‘Something amusing you?’ Malm asked.

  ‘I don’t have “relationships” with women. I’ve always been faithful to my wife.’

  He felt that the dignity of this reply silenced them for a moment. Then Malm began talking of the nearness of Thirlton to the old pony level and Manciple, taking over from him, proceeded to give Stephen a straightforward and lucid account of how Harriet’s body had been brought and left there. He described with perfect accuracy what Stephen had in fact done, from his placing the body in the tunnel, having first ascertained that no car was visible on the road in either direction as far as the eye could see, to his parking the car in Thirlton and returning on foot to cut off the hair. Stephen was alarmed. He had to keep telling himself about the difference in the blood subgrouping and that he was safe.

  Manciple said in his diffident apologetic way, ‘I don’t suppose you can remember what music was played at the concert.’

  Stephen knew nothing of music. Manciple’s statement — for it had been a statement, though it required an answer — silenced him and blanked out his mind. But he must make some sort of reply. After a moment or two he said, for surely the work of these giants among composers must have been included, ‘Oh, Beethoven, Bach, classical stuff.’

  Their faces told him nothing. There was no derision at the wildness of his response and no surprise at its accuracy, and immediately after that they let him go. Without a word about the future, without reassurance, without threat.

  He came out into the street, telling himself he was safe, his blood made him safe. His blood was a clinging scarlet cloak, a magic cloak, that protected him. For two hours he had been with the police and for the first time no one had brought in coffee or biscuits or sandwiches. But Stephen had no appetite left. For a while he sat in his car as he had sat in it on Sunday evening, but the streets were filled with policemen, men in uniform and men who, though not in uniform, who wore as far as they themselves knew the clothes of the ordinary citizen, were nevertheless unmistakably policemen too. Stephen felt that they were taking particular note of this solitary figure in a parked car.

  Dadda had gone. Stephen climbed the stairs, even less inclined for work than usual. On the horsehair padding of a chaise longue beside the love seat on which he had been working were two decanters in etched glass. Written on the sheet of paper on which they stood were two words: From Dadda.

  Stephen felt anger well up and burn his throat. Dadda’s gifts had always brought him more embarrassment than pleasure. He would have liked to smash the decanters and leave the broken glass for Dadda to find when he came back from wherever he had gone. Two things stopped him, a contemptuous impatient pity for Dadda that still survived and a regard for beautiful objects his upbringing had instilled into him.

  But the presence of the decanters and the note bolstered, he didn’t know why, a decision that had been taking shape as he sat in the car, crossed the square, climbed the stairs. He was going to stop working for Whalbys’. He hated it, had always hated it, though never so much as he did now. Surely there was something else he could find to do, something more closely connected with the moor. If they gave him the chance to do anything else, if they left him at liberty …

  He picked up the decanters, wrapped them roughly in newspaper and, holding them in his arms, went down into the street. The big double doors he closed almost ceremoniously and locked them, and then he turned his face towards the moor. There was scarcely a point in Hilderbridge from which it couldn’t be seen, and now as he crossed the square towards his car a segment of it appeared between the overhanging fronts of the shops in Market Hill, the bluish peak of Hilder Foin.

  Stephen hadn’t been to church since he was a child, but there are two psalms the opening lines of which everyone still knows. He repeated tremulously under his breath, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help …’

  Freedom from marriage, freedom from work, should have lightened him, but he felt as heavy as lead. Every moment he expected the police to arrive again and begin their questioning or take him away for more questioning. The phone rang at about seven but it was a wrong number. That made him take another decision in his aim for total freedom. He sat down and wrote a letter to Post Office Telecommunications, asking them to disconnect the phone. What did he want a phone for? Who was there for him to call? He addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it and walked up to the green to post it, though it wouldn’t go out until the morning.

  Once more the gatehouse lodge of Chesney Hall was heavily manned by police. Stephen felt a pang of real dread for Rip. With so many after him, surely he must be caught, there could be no final escape for him. It was like when he was a child, there in the lodge with his grandmother, and the Vangmoor hounds met on Chesney Green. He had pitied the fox then, pursued unfairly by so many.

  And next morning, out on the moor, walking across the Vale of Allen towards the Reeve’s Way, he met men in jeans and sweatshirts who told him they were police officers and asked his business. He recognized none of them but when, reluctantly, he gave them his name, he sensed that they knew it, that it was familiar to them in some unpleasant way. He couldn’t guess why they were there or w
hat they could possibly be looking for. They advised him to go home and Stephen agreed to this, it seemed simplest, but when they were out of sight he made for Pertsey and Tower Foin. He needed the moor, they weren’t going to be allowed to take it away from him again.

  Tace had been born ninety-eight years ago that day. Stephen thought about Tace and wondered if what the people who believed in reincarnation said was true, and if the novelist’s spirit had entered into himself. He stayed out all day, walking, lying on the sun-dried, tilted, flat boulders of the foin, and when the sun grew hot, retreating into the shade of the powder house to sleep there in the cool dark. It was early evening before he got home.

  A police car was parked outside his house and inside it were Manciple and Troth.

  18

  Manciple sat on the settee. Troth wouldn’t sit down but walked about the room, looking at things in what Stephen thought a very insolent way. He picked up Dadda’s silver Stilton knife and examined the assay mark and then he lifted up one of the decanters out of its newspaper wrapping and tapped the glass to make it ring. Stephen was glad he had taken Harriet Crozier’s handbag upstairs.

  He didn’t know why they had come. Not to arrest him, certainly, not even to take him to the police station. Up to a point they were behaving as if making a mere social call, yet they had refused his offer of a drink or of coffee or tea. Manciple was doing nearly all the talking. He sat with his legs crossed and one arm stretched out along the back of the settee, giving Stephen a slow detailed account of how Harriet had been missed at work on Monday morning and how, because she had told Martin Smith she was going for a bus ride on the moor on Saturday, a search party had been assembled and the body found at four on Monday afternoon. What she hadn’t told Martin Smith but had told a girl friend was that there was a man she liked who was living on the moor, only he was married.

  Manciple talked, not in an accusing or hectoring way, but as if perhaps Stephen were a criminologist who might be expected to be interested in such things. Troth walked about, examining ornaments like a valuer. After a while Manciple asked him to go out and wait in the car. Stephen thought Troth was going to refuse outright. He set down the chestnut leaf table which he had actually lifted up to scrutinize by the light at the window, turned and looked at Manciple with one eyebrow cocked up. Then he shrugged.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Let yourself out,’ Manciple said as Stephen moved towards the door. The front door closed, almost with a slam. Stephen stood where Troth had been, his back to the light. ‘Stand if you’d rather,’ said Manciple in his understanding, conciliatory voice. ‘I won’t keep you five minutes.’

  Stephen sat down on the arm of a chair.

  The social note was back in Manciple’s voice. ‘You know the introductory music to that Bleakland series on TV?’ He hummed and pom-pommed a couple of bars. Reading from a scrap of paper he took from his pocket, he said, ‘Vivaldi, part of the Four Seasons.’

  ‘Of course I know it. Of course it’s Vivaldi.’ Stephen was always huffy when anyone questioned his intellectual pretensions, and huffiness prevented him seeing the trap.

  ‘Funny you didn’t remember that was one of the pieces they played at the Thirlton concert on Saturday night.’

  Stephen felt himself flush and the sweat start on his body.

  ‘Strange when you’re a descendant of Tace’s and an admirer of his books and when you’ve got a TV set … It’d be a fair assumption you went to the concert just because they were playing that music. Only you didn’t go, did you, Whalby? You went to the old Pony Level to cut the hair off a dead woman’s head.’ He took no notice of Stephen’s gasp. ‘We should like,’ he said, ‘to search this house first thing tomorrow. Okay with you?’

  ‘Why should I help you?’

  ‘Don’t, if that’s the way you feel. I can get a search warrant but I’m sure you’ll let us in without. And don’t run off, will you? That only pays when you’re very rich and you’ve got friends in distant places.’

  Stephen shook his head, saying nothing more. He closed the front door after Manciple. He had been shocked, he had been briefly frightened, but that was all. They had no evidence, they wouldn’t be able to prove anything, it was all typical police bluff. No doubt they would come in the morning, though, and it would be unsafe to keep that book in the house.

  The sun was shining, lying in golden bars and rectangles across the walls, the carpet. It was turning out rather a nice evening, the sky clearing over Big Allen. The idea of his running away made him laugh, to himself at first, then out loud. He? Run away? Where could he bear to go to? Where else could he live? What rotten psychologists the police were!

  He put on his zipper jacket, slipping Muse of Fire by Irving J. Schuyler inside it, against his chest. At least he could get it out of the house and after that he could think how to dispose of it. A man followed him down into the village, or at any rate walked behind him down into the village. The man was young, he was alone, unknown to Stephen, and he might well have been a policeman. Or he might not. And when Stephen crossed the green and came to the gate into the churchyard the man also walked onto the green, got into a parked car there and drove off.

  There was a police car with three men in it parked on the path that ran alongside the churchyard wall. He couldn’t tell whether they were there to watch him or not. Two uniformed policemen stood outside the gatehouse lodge. But Stephen didn’t feel at all afraid. Fear had begun to leave him that afternoon, had now entirely departed, and he felt, without knowing why, that it wouldn’t return. He had said goodbye to fear, he felt invincible, full of power. It was like being in one of those dreams in which you have committed crimes that you know you cannot be punished for, no matter what you do now you cannot be caught and they can never reach you.

  The book was cumbersome, a rigid block against his body, and he knew he must get rid of it without knowing how to do this, but it didn’t worry him, he would find a way. The mine, of course, would be the place. But if it was true the police were watching him he didn’t want to lead them to the mine. He owed it to Rip not to do that. The police car started, turned round, moved slowly off down the hill towards Hilderbridge. Stephen walked back across the green, pausing at the pillar box and pretending to post a letter. The evening was sultry and humid, the air quite still, all the trees that grew in the churchyard, that surrounded the vicarage, that concealed the Hall, hung down canopies of thick, dark, tired foliage. It was respite weather, in a hiatus between rain and rain.

  The two policemen were back in the lodge. Stephen began heading in the direction of the path that led up on to Chesney Fell and Foinmen’s Plain. Up there somewhere he would find a hole, a rabbit warren, a small cavern lipped by a stone, wherein to bury the book. He was approaching the Hall gates when a car came slowly down the drive. It stopped just inside the gates, the driver’s door came open and Professor Schuyler got out and hurried back to the house.

  Plainly he had gone back for something he had forgotten. On the back seat and floor of the car were a tumble of books, folders, two battered briefcases, a mass of manuscript held together with a clip. Stephen looked round quickly to make sure he was unobserved and then he pulled Muse of Fire out from the breast of his jacket and tossed it lightly among them. It made him chuckle. There was even another of the professor’s own works among the books, a glossy jacketed memoir of Ford Madox Ford.

  After that Stephen climbed the crinkle-crankle path with a light step, almost joyously. No one followed him. They wouldn’t have the stamina, the lung power, to follow him up here or anywhere over the steep crests of the moor. He laughed as he climbed, throwing out his arms as if to embrace with wide heavens, the foins, the green fells. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …

  There was no evidence of any kind against him. All they knew was that he had been twice to Thirlton by car during the weekend. They would look stupid when they had wasted time and manpower searching his house only to fin
d nothing. Perhaps he should get himself a lawyer, though. Why? Why spend money on that, money down the drain, when there was no evidence against him? When he got home he would check on the car. There might be a hair or two in the car that by some scientific process they could tell wasn’t Lyn’s.

  When they had finished with it, perhaps he would sell the car. What was the use of a car to him now he wasn’t going to work any more? He wouldn’t want to go anywhere but up here on the moor. The car was a useless encumbrance that would be as expensive to keep as a horse that never got ridden.

  He came over the crest at the top of the path and stood looking across the plain to where the standing stones, the curious converging procession of them, stood out dark against a sky that was peach-pink and flecked all over with feathers of gold and blue. It was almost too gorgeous, too photogenic, too much of nature copying art, and art in this case the Echo calendar. A flock of birds passed overhead, flying very high, a hundred tiny black commas in formation. Stephen came slowly across the turf towards the gate in the railing. He thought he saw something move behind the Giant, but when he looked again there was nothing.

  As he opened the gate he thought he smelt tobacco smoke. The air was heavy and humid. If someone had been up here smoking during the afternoon perhaps the smell would linger on that air for many hours. The two great comb-shaped shadows lay spread, between the stones and out beyond. Stephen walked along the shadow and caught it again, the whiff of smoke. The feeling of being alone up here had left him and now he turned back sharply to see who was following him.

  The plain was deserted. Stephen blinked and closed his eyes against the dazzlement of the sinking sun. He turned away again and looked with screwed-up eyes towards the far end of the avenue and as he did so a figure moved out from behind the broad protection of the Giant and stood against the sky, the sun’s rays gleaming on it with a brassy sheen. It was the figure of a very tall man with a bush of dark hair, a bearded man who wore dark trousers and a white or very pale sweater that the sun had dyed a fiery gold.