Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  He went upstairs. It wasn’t possible to go out because Peter was going to phone. The sun was setting, staining a sky that was the wispy grey of wood smoke. Earlier and earlier it set, the autumn would soon be here. He saw the Newmans’ front door open and his mother-in-law come out, cross the road. The doorbell rang. Probably she wanted to pack up Lyn’s things. He ignored the bell and went into his study where he began typing a letter to Hilderbridge Rural District Council, informing them that as from the end of the month he wished to terminate his tenancy of 23 Tace Way, Chesney Moorside …

  The doorbell rang again. He went down to answer it, knowing he would have to let her in some time. His caller wasn’t Mrs Newman but Trevor Simpson. What was wrong with the car that Stephen was selling it so cheaply?

  Once Stephen would have been indignant at that remark but tonight he didn’t care. He shrugged. There was nothing wrong with the car, it had never given him a day’s trouble.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m getting out,’ he said. ‘I’m off to fresh woods and pastures new, making a clean sweep. There’s nothing to keep me here. I’m giving up the house and I shan’t need a car. You interested?’

  Trevor was. He lifted up the bonnet, then sat in the driver’s seat. Stephen made no objection when he said he would like to take it out on a test run but he wouldn’t go with him. He had to wait in for Peter to phone. The letter was finished, signed and inside an envelope by the time Trevor came back, satisfied with his bargain. He would give Stephen a cheque for five hundred pounds and bring the balance on Monday.

  ‘Good Lord, there’s no hurry,’ Stephen said expansively. ‘The car’s yours. I shan’t let it go to anyone else, I shan’t gazump you.’

  Trevor gave him a knowing look and as he was leaving said, ‘You can’t run away from your own id, you know, Steve.’

  It was dusk now, nearly dark. Peter wouldn’t phone tonight, he would wait until tomorrow. From his study Stephen fetched the bust of Tace and from the living room, where the professor had left it, Harriet Crozier’s copy of Muse of Fire.

  He stepped out into the twilit garden. The sky was a deep violet colour. He had read somewhere why it is that the stars give no light but he couldn’t remember why. The heavens were thick with stars and it was true enough they gave no light but appeared only as puncture holes in a dark velvet bag. He opened the cupboard by the back door where Lyn had kept the garden tools and got out a spade.

  There were probably flowers growing in the border here. He saw them as a grey mass, a fuzzy fungoid growth, and he stabbed the spade in among them haphazardly. His fancy was playing tricks with him, for when he looked up he thought for a moment a face had looked back at him out of the gloom behind the kitchen window. He turned away and continued to dig. When he had dug a pit some three feet long and two feet deep, he laid the book inside it and then the bust of Tace.

  For a long while he paused, leaning on his spade and staring down into the little pit, and then, slowly, he thrust his hand into his pockets, drew out all Harriet Crozier’s small possessions and dropped them item by item into the grave with Tace and the book. The topsoil and the plants went back like earth falling on a coffin.

  Stephen cleaned off the spade, restored it to the cupboard and went back into the house. He could have sworn he hadn’t left lights on upstairs and in the hall. It took him a moment or two to realize what had happened while he was in the garden but he did realize when he walked into his bedroom. The wardrobe doors stood open and all Lyn’s remaining clothes were gone. Mrs Newman had been in to fetch them.

  Harriet Crozier’s handbag was gone with them. Stephen began to laugh when he thought of Harriet Crozier’s bag being sent off to Lyn. He lay down on the bed and laughed but when he put his fingers up to his face because the skin itched, he found it wet with tears.

  20

  In the past days he had occasionally felt as if a cord were tightly stretched inside his brain, stretched from one side of his cranium to the other, from the eyes to the occiput. At some time during the evening or the night that cord had snapped and the freedom he desired had come with it. He walked about the house, wondering how he should dispose of his furniture. Dadda could have it and sell it. Or it might go to Lyn. He bore Lyn no ill will any more. He wrote a note to Dadda and a note for Lyn and left them on the chestnut leaf table. The sight of the notes there made him giggle, for it looked as if he were about to commit suicide instead of embarking on a new life.

  There had been no sign from Peter. Of course there would be, sometime during the day, but Stephen felt impatient, he didn’t want to wait. Perhaps he should go to Loomlade and find Peter himself. The objection to that was that the girl might be there and Peter might not want the girl to know too much. He tried to reconstruct the conversation between Peter and himself in an effort to recall what Peter had said about the girl. And as he went over it there came back to him two things of profound significance Peter had said, though they hadn’t registered with him at the time, though they had been lost in the generality of their talk.

  ‘I’ve got a place to stay’ and ‘You know where to find me’. What a fool he was! What a fool he had been not to see what that meant. Of course he had a place to stay and of course Stephen knew where that place was. Peter had meant, I shall be in the mine, come up and meet me in the mine. He was going back to London on Sunday, so today he would be in Rip’s Cavern, waiting …

  Stephen felt almost unbearably excited. He was breathless and laughing with excitement. For a moment only his happiness was checked when it occurred to him that Peter might have been waiting in the mine all day yesterday, waiting in vain. But no. Yesterday had been Friday and he would have supposed Stephen to have been at work. Saturday was the day, all the pointers indicated it. Peter was probably making his way up there now, across the Vale of Allen.

  Stephen’s laughter became rather shocked and awed when he walked about the house, looking at things and realizing he might never come back there. He wouldn’t waste time going into the village to post the letter to the council. Might as well leave it with the notes for Lyn and Dadda. What should he take with him? A change of clothes, of course, and a blanket for the night. There was food enough in the cavern. Later on, say on Monday after Peter had gone back, it would be his turn to stock up with food and drink. A sleeping bag would have to be bought and a mattress for himself. He would make the cavern welcoming and homelike for Peter’s return …

  The last he saw of Tace Way was the pram on the bright green square of the Simpsons’ lawn and the last he heard was the urgent crying of Joanne’s baby. I am shaking the dust of this place off my feet, he said to himself, shaking it off my feet. The expression pleased him and for a while he walked in a prancing way, shaking his feet as he lifted them, repeating what he had said, and then, as he crossed the Jackley road, lifting up his eyes to the hills.

  His rucksack, containing the rope, the big torch, candles, clothes, was on his back. Under his right arm he carried a blanket, rolled up and tied with string. He had decided to grow a beard like Peter’s; he had shaved for the last time. There was no one following him, he was as alone as he had ever been when out on the moor. Behind him a car passed along the road, going towards Jackley, then after a moment or two another heading for Hilderbridge, but Vangmoor itself where there were no roads was stripped of people. It was empty and silent and now at the end of summer no birds sang.

  In the Vale of Allen there was here and there a golden flower on the gorse. It was a curious thing about gorse that although the season of its flowering was springtime, there was always blossom on it even in the depths of winter, even if it were just one solitary bloom. He should have written about that for the Echo but it was too late now. He didn’t think he would ever again write the ‘Voice of Vangmoor’. Someone else would have to take over, for he, though not far away, would nevertheless be removed from such activities. Pleased with the idea, he understood he was making himself into an outlaw, a modern Robin Hood. He and Rip together would be
a kind of robber band, though it was not robbery they would come out of the hills to commit.

  The mist which enclosed the moor, which almost since sunrise had been shot with gold, should have lifted by now, but instead it seemed to be closing in, growing colder, whiter and more autumnal. He could see the foin only as a vague blurred shape, rising out of the flat land ahead. The coe and the windlass were invisible, and when they did appear it was to loom up like men advancing.

  He fastened the rope to the lip of rock and clambered down Apsley Sough. The sides of the shaft were moist and slippery but not running with water and there was no water lying in the chamber at its foot. Stephen felt relief. There had been times in the past days when he feared a flooding of the mine.

  All the rain seemed to have done was intensify the sour chemical smell. He made his way along the winze, wondering if Rip were here already and if the sound of his footfalls might be audible to him through the rock walls. The atmosphere felt colder than usual, laying a thick chilly breath on his skin. His throat tightened with excitement but he walked slowly, he walked with measured tread, to give Rip a chance to know that he approached.

  The end of the winze, where it opened out into the doorway to the chamber, he saw as he rounded the slight bend in the passage, was in darkness. If Rip had come he was there no longer. Unless he sat waiting in the dark. Stephen remembered that Rip didn’t know he was called Rip, that was only his own secret name for him, and he called in a loud clear voice, ‘Peter! Peter, it’s Stephen!’

  There was no answer. He hadn’t come yet. Stephen had a sudden feeling that Rip might have been alarmed by the discovery of the third girl’s hair and have emptied the cavern for safety’s sake. He didn’t know, couldn’t then have known, the identity of Harriet Crozier’s killer. Stephen raised the torch. The light leapt across the rocky walls and showed him everything as it had been before, the boxes, the bottle of cider, the clothes, the bedding, the candles in the bottles and the candle in the candlestick.

  Being in the cavern, the cavern as he had always known it, made him feel happy again. He sat down on the mattress, unrolled his blanket and lit all the candles. Like someone who, though long intimate with a friend’s house, has always been a visitor, he had now taken a room there himself or moved in to share and might take liberties that were previously forbidden. He lit the calor gas burner. The kettle, he found, had been filled with water. It would take a long time to boil but eventually he would get himself a cup of tea. Into the box where the tins were and the biscuits Rip had put two packets of cigarettes, and Stephen seemed to smell again the scent of tobacco that had come to him as he opened the gate on Foinmen’s Plain.

  The gas burner gave a little welcome warmth. Stephen ate biscuits while the kettle boiled. There was only dried milk for the tea but he didn’t mind. Doing without, making do, added to the fun of picnics. He saw before him a vista of future picnics with Rip, hard-won tea, the sweeter because it took so long to brew, biscuits softened with keeping, meat dug out of a tin. He had slept badly the night before, after he had buried Tace. He lay down on the mattress and covered himself with the blanket and fell asleep.

  When he awoke his watch told him it was the middle of the afternoon. In the mine all times and all seasons were the same and the silence was the same. He sat up, feeling stiff and rather cold and listened to the silence. The candles had burnt down a long way but there was still a new one in the candlestick and he had brought four spares with him. He lit the new candle and that made him look at the candlestick and fancy he recognized it. In his own home surely when he was a small child? Or in the gatehouse lodge — yes, that was more likely. It must have been Helena’s, passed on to Leonard, then to Peter. It gleamed like gold in the dimness of the chamber.

  It was after four. Surely Rip would come before dark, surely he wouldn’t wait till nightfall? To pass the time he undid the flaps on top of the secret box. He was almost certain the three hanks of hair lay exactly as he had left them. Did that mean Rip hadn’t looked in the box since then, that he didn’t know the third girl’s hair was in there? What times he and Rip would have together! Sharing this place, hidden here, descending sometimes from their mountain fastness like wolves on the fold. He closed his eyes and saw them as wolves, grey, shaggy, powerful and fleet of foot, a victim held between white and red jaws. The first victim perhaps should be Stella Crane who could easily be lured from her sanctuary in Loomlade.

  He laughed at the thought, though by now his teeth were chattering. His watch showed five and he got up and walked about, rubbing his hands and stamping his feet. It seemed to be growing colder all the time but he didn’t want to light the burner again and use up all the gas in the canister. They would need it for tea in the morning. He decided to go for a walk, take some exercise. That was another thought to make him laugh, the notion of taking exercise down here in the bowels of the earth. He walked back along the winze and when he came to the fork continued a little way along to where the bad air began. And there he saw he had been wrong about the unlikelihood of flooding in the mine. Here the floor of the passage which had always been wet was lying under water. The level of water in the lake called the Bottomless Pit had risen up the walls of the cavern it filled and the water was spreading out to cut off the passage. Stephen shone his torch up ahead and whistled at what he saw. It was impossible to tell exactly how deep the water was but it had come so high as to leave a gap of only a foot or so between its ruffled black surface and the coffin-curved roof of the winze.

  Ruffled, not still. It was rising as he watched. Was it raining again outside? Had it perhaps been raining all the time he had been asleep and before and since? For the first time Stephen realized how steeply after the fork the two branches ascended, the one to Rip’s Cavern, the other to the egress chamber. It would take a long time for the water to get up there, perhaps it never would, perhaps whenever there was heavy rain the mine flooded like this and then afterwards the water gradually seeped away again to be sucked up by the moor.

  An awareness that he might be in some danger struck him with a chill. He felt less fear than irritation at this threat to his and Rip’s happiness. Was that why Rip hadn’t come? Because it was raining once more as it had rained on the day of the storm? Stephen thought he would go up and see. He would go up the shaft and see if it was raining.

  It was at this point that his torch battery failed. Of course he hadn’t been so imprudent as to come without a spare and he went back to Rip’s Cavern to fetch it from his rucksack. Should he take the rucksack and the blanket up with him? Not yet. It might not be necessary at all. Rip would come. So great was his faith that he would come back and Rip would come that he left the candle burning in the brass candlestick.

  Back to the fork he went and along the winze to the egress chamber. Water was running in thin trickling rivulets across the floor out from the mouth of the shaft. But it wasn’t these runnels of water that made Stephen stare and then dash forward across the wet shale.

  The rope had gone.

  He moved the torch beam aside to give the effect of closing his eyes. Then he shone it again on to the shaft opening. The rope wasn’t there. He went to the shaft and stood in it, looking up. A big drop of water splashed on to his forehead. He imagined it raining hard up there, the water draining off the hillside, over the stones and into the sough. Could the rain have been heavy enough to have washed the rope from its anchorage? If that had happened it wouldn’t have disappeared altogether, it would have dropped down the shaft. Someone had unfastened it.

  After his first couple of visits to the mine he had found himself so agile at climbing the shaft that he could have done without the rope. Now was the time to prove that. Should he go back for his rucksack? Of course not. He didn’t mean to stay above ground, he intended to come back into the mine. The torch, however, he would take with him. He hooked it over his arm.

  The first steps he took were encouraging. Down here there were prominent ledges of rock for footholds and the stre
aming water made little difference to the purchase obtained. But after the first five or six feet the walls grew smoother and the shaft became a slippery gullet. When he had calculated that he could do without the rope he hadn’t reckoned with the results of heavy rain. He lay against the wall of the shaft about six feet up, unable to find a secure hold for his hands, and until he could do so, scarcely daring to move his right foot. But he did move it, his hands grasping shale and nearly liquid mud. Both feet slipped and he slid back down all the way he had come, grazing chest and arms and hands on the sticky gravelly surface.

  He tried again. He tried twice more and had to give up when he twisted his left ankle. His clothes were covered in mud, his hands were bleeding and he had cracked the glass in the torch. It was stupid to struggle like that and get in a state over it, stupid to risk injuring himself, for there was no chance of his being trapped in the mine. Rip was coming. Rip would bring his own rope with him.

  Holding the torch, which still gave a powerful light in spite of its cracked glass, Stephen limped slowly back along the winze. At the highest point he had reached in the shaft before sliding down again he had fancied he could hear rain, a roaring overhead like the sound of the sea. But down here was the same eternal deep silence. He could hear his own footsteps and that was all.

  He stopped dead. He froze, he was utterly still, and yet he could still hear footsteps. Very faintly, ahead of him, reaching the fork perhaps from the other direction and pattering along the passage that led to Rip’s Cavern.

  Rip had come at last. Stephen couldn’t tell how he had come, by what means he could have entered the mine, but he had come and must now be in the cavern where the candle still burned. Stephen would have run on then in his anxiety to reach him but for his ankle. It was starting to hurt to put it to the ground. He limped as fast as he could up to the fork and turned down the other winze. Before he reached the bend and saw the light from the candle he smelt the sweet aromatic cigarette smoke. He called out, ‘Rip, I’m coming,’ and stumbled up to the entrance to the chamber.