There are however more rainbows here than anywhere else in the country. The villagers were told that as a trade-off for the disruption of the reservoir: you’ll get good rainbows round here.
RUTTER GOES OUT back. He digs into a sack and throws the dogs some kibble then says halt your whining.
He walks past the pig shed. He walks past the barns and looks down the slopes to the glorified turning area they call the Square.
A dozen houses cling close to the Square and behind it there is another row of houses accessed by ginnells at either end then a dozen or so more each with bigger gardens. Beyond the hamlet are larger farmsteads.
He scans to the right past the last of the houses in the hamlet and along to Muncy’s place. Squat and lavish. Gaudy. The bricks not fitting in with the landscape like his. Typical Muncy that.
Because Muncy’s a money man Muncy’s a big-mouth Muncy’s a big shot. He buys a new four-wheel-drive every two years and thinks he’s gentry. He has bought up half the top end of the dale over the years. He’s got the farm and he’s got grazing fields and woodlands and that part of the moor-top that doesn’t belong to the water board that’s mainly boglands.
The Coast-to-Coast path runs through Muncy’s farm and when her nerves hold his sour-faced wife serves sandwiches and flapjacks out of a hatch and in the summer they open up the meadow out back that rolls down to the top set of falls. It’s nothing but a sloping field covered in cow scat but come May it’ll be dotted with the coloured canvas of walkers and cyclists passing through.
Muncy has put in a toilet block. There is talk of picnic tables and a bunkhouse. Madness thinks Rutter.
And now Muncy has a Merc in the garage too and quad bikes and twice a year he gets cover for the farm and takes foreign holidays. Comes back all smug and leathery.
You should expand your horizon get some sunshine sunshine he’d said once and Rutter could have lamped him right there and then. Just put his front teeth down the back of his throat.
But he doesn’t need to do that. Because he knows things about Muncy that no one else knows. He can lord it all he likes over him and he can sit on all the boards and be in all the secret clubs and wax his cars every bloody Sunday but there are things that Rutter knows. There is a shared history. And while Muncy has the house and the car and the holidays and the tan what he doesn’t have any more is a daughter and though it wasn’t planned that way – thinks Rutter as he walks – it’s just the way it is.
And then he is thinking back again. Back to the past that he has been frequently inhabiting and those endless nights in the X amongst the exhibitionists. Those that liked to put on a bit of a show for the men. Men like him.
When that happened – when they took seats together somewhere in the centre – the men would circulate like vultures. Sighing and moaning and tugging in the half light. In these moments everyone was equal. The darkness was the leveller. The taxi drivers and the sissies and the Muslims and the mackintosh men: all were hungry for the same things. Release and escape.
He considered the silence and the atmosphere as churchlike. Almost holy. Hallowed. After a week on the fells he liked to sit there indoors with the colours from the screen lighting his face and those of the other men who watched in mute rapt wonder.
Because aside from the two screening rooms there were also two private lounges in the X. One was billed as the Couples’ Room. In both they showed films on a loop and there were sofas and tissues and bins.
The films were the old kind from years earlier. The seventies and eighties mainly. Sixties even. Real old stuff. Vintage classics. None of the new glossy Californian crap that Rutter found noisy and vulgar and lacking edge.
He liked the stuff from Germany. He liked the stuff from Sweden.
Britain too.
The Danes made some good ones.
Because the X only screened hardcore. Hairy fannies. Muck arcing across the screen.
The normal stuff – a bit of tit a bit of arse – you could see in the mags in any newsagent. The mags were boring the mags were soft.
The mags got used up and chucked out down country lanes where they belonged. The American stuff Rutter didn’t like. Too many tans and fake tits.
No. The women up on the screens at the Odeon X – they were his girls. Each and every of them. In time he knew all their names he knew their works he knew every inch of their bodies and back home up at the farm they occupied his thoughts. They rode with him on the tractor or helped him muck out. They fixed fences with him; they slept with him ate with him. They colluded against his mother with him.
Each Saturday afternoon for months he sat under the cover of darkness as day became night and he slipped into a trancelike state in the manmade state of permanent gloaming.
Marilyn Caramel. Gloria Scoops. Bambi Bigheart.
Boarding School. Bottoms Up! Door-to-Door Salesman.
He knew every inch of them.
Mitzi Brown. Cathy Dee. Diane Drinkwater.
French Lessons. Girl-Guide Temptation. Jolly Hockey-Sticks.
Every title.
Non-Stop Spunker. Private Agent. A Taste of Cunny.
He loved the blueys. He loved his girls unreservedly and without discrimination. Age colour shape; it didn’t matter. He prided himself on not harbouring favourites.
Sometimes in the X he unhooked his overalls and lazily masturbated. He slowly spread it out over a whole afternoon. Sometimes he sat back and let others do it for him.
He learned things there in the soft light of the Odeon X. Because he was only just twenty and had no one to guide him. He had no brothers no friends no father. All he knew was learned from his mother’s parties and from farm animals in the farmyard doing what it is that beasts do to one another.
He loved them then and loves them now as distant memories; faded faces from those early days before things got so involved and life became this big dark cloak that hung upon his shoulders.
HE’S UP EARLY. Christmas Eve and his head is throbbing. He used to be able to sleep through hangovers but not any more. Back when he was a student and in those early days in London Roddy Mace could roll out of a stranger’s bed after two or three hours sleep and still be at his desk on time. Coffee and a croissant and cigarettes all day long. Now the hangovers wake him up at dawn and slowly destroy his day. Kill all hope. Cripple his good intentions.
He’s closer to thirty than twenty but already hangovers feel like punishment. Like the best days of consequence-free drinking are behind him. It’s something to do with the beer up here. That’s his theory. It’s stronger stuff. Locally brewed for iron-bellied farmers. It slips down and stays there and in the morning it feels like trepanning.
Mace showers and then rings round for updates on the girl. Calls the local police station. Calls the press office at the North Yorkshire head branch. Calls a pal who works on production at the BBC. Look North. He puts an egg on to boil and makes coffee and then drinks it looking at the softly falling snow.
It’s too quiet. In an upstairs flat down a side street that’s just off the main square in a small market town the silence is unnerving after years living amongst the screaming sirens and hissing bus doors and helicopter blades and street screams of south London.
After the city he had wanted to live on a houseboat. Had the notion but there were no canals round here. The industrial age of cotton mills and coalfields hadn’t reached up to the Dales – the landscape was too uneven and it was miles from any city. Sheep and slate-mining was all it had been good for. He turns the radio on. Slade’s Christmas song. Sod off.
He hits shuffle on his iPod. Iggy.
Sweet sixteen in leather boots.
Better but this is night-time music. Drug music. Something for the city.
Pretty faces beautiful faces. Body and soul I give to you.
He scrolls through for some folk music. He hated folk until he moved north. Despised it. But then an oil painter that he knew did him a mix CD and now he is hooked on the old dark weird stuff. Comu
s. Pentangle. Mr Fox. Young Tradition. Bands who made music preoccupied with brutal death and rural misery. It reminded him of the metal bands he had liked when he was a teenage skateboarder only these artists sung about crimes and hunting and bloodshed and cruelty and adultery often without even using instruments. Here in the Dales this type of music made sense. In the context of the open moors and the remote farms it chimed with the landscape. What his friends in the bars and clubs of London would make of it he does not know. Doesn’t care. He is here they are there. And life rolls on pay-cheque to pay-cheque. Drink to drink.
He finishes his breakfast and then he checks in with his editor Grogan. He shares what scant information he’s managed to scrape together: no sign of the girl. The chances of a runaway are unlikely. Slim. General prospects grim. There is talk of an accident. Talk of an abduction. Just talk though. Speculation. They say a dog is missing too says Grogan. Muncy is trying to call the shots with the cops he says. There has been heavy snow in the night and there’s not a single footprint to be found up top.
You’re still going up there? asks his boss.
I am says Mace. In a minute.
Get some quotes. Get anything. Something is unravelling here. I can feel it.
Yes says Mace. Me too.
They hang up.
He heaves his suitcase down from the wardrobe. He scoops up t-shirts and trousers and underwear and throws them in. He remembers the bottle of whisky that Grogan gave him and is surprised to find it is down a third since yesterday. He puts that in the case too. He’ll need it to get through a family Christmas. He cannot face hearing about how he gave up a perfectly good job and a perfectly good flat and a perfectly good fictional girlfriend in London; he cannot face this because he cannot explain it.
The flat is a mess. Papers everywhere. Old copies of the Mercury and his manuscript scattered and crumpled. Coffee cups. Washing in the sink. The accoutrements of a bachelor’s existence. He checks the time. It’ll have to wait.
He puts on layers and turns off the boiling egg – no time – and pours the rest of his coffee into a travel cup and then leaves the flat. Takes his iPod with him and plugs it into the car stereo. Gets the heaters blowing. It takes Mace ten minutes to scrape the ice off the windscreen and ten more to get out of his parking bay and round the market square where the road is a slick sheet of black ice.
Out of town it is slow going. Fresh snow crumps and creaks beneath his tyres as the road winds and climbs. There are no edges to be seen; everything is rounded. The cornices of houses and the tops of stone walls – the snow has softened the landscape. Opiated almost thinks Mace. He sips his coffee and feels it chip away at his hangover. The phone lines sag under the weight of all that white and he enjoys the muffled silence.
He passes hamlets of houses that cling close to the road with holly wreaths hanging from their front doors. He sees flashes of other people’s lives.
Mace checks the time and decides to make this a fleeting visit. A five-minute sniff-around then send the notes and quotes to Grogan. Then – the train station. Christmas. Family. Annual obligations.
He turns the heater up. Turns the music up.
NOT LONG AFTER his mother took ill Muncy had cornered Rutter outside of the Laidlaws’ post office and tried to talk to him about the farm. Suggested he could be doing more with the family land. A place like that he said. All that space. All that potential. You’ve got how many acres up there?
Rutter had shrugged and grunted and not made eye contact. Muncy’s aftershave stung his sinuses.
Prime grazing. You could make a tidy packet Steve. You rattling around in all that space. There’s barn conversions to consider. Holiday homes. Think about it. Or if you’re not interested I could make you an offer myself.
I’m not bothered about that Rutter had said.
Then Muncy went on about market gardens and crop rotation; blethered about the price of British lamb and government subsidies; blethered on about grants for fixing up the roof and the outbuildings. Rutter couldn’t wait to get away so told Muncy he wasn’t interested in no government interfering. Told him right out he couldn’t give too hoots for walkers and cyclists because they’re mad the lot of them out there in the rain like that.
He told Muncy the Rutter place would stay just as it was; told him to mind his own beeswax. He never mentioned the clause though. The clause that bound him to the place until he was fifty even if he wanted to sell it. It was his mother’s doing. She had got it written into the deeds in the event of ill health or incapacitation or her passing. It was her last laugh. A cruel curse bestowed upon him. Her idea of a joke. Payback for his existence. Black Tits’ revenge.
In her prime Aggie Rutter was feared Aggie Rutter was unpredictable Aggie Rutter had a tongue on her. She was known to lash out. They made sure she never heard the jokes about her making cheese under those dirty dugs and the half-dozen teeth in her head. And still the dalesmen came and when they put the reservoir in she had a few of that lot too.
Sometimes she had made him watch. The barefoot boy. Her Steven. Some of the men liked it that way. They asked her special. Liked an audience. Two thrills for the price of one up at the Rutter place.
Watch and learn lad she said. Aint no different from cows in the field and you’ll need to know your way around a woman soon enough.
Young Rutter didn’t want to watch but she’d beat him if he didn’t. If he flinched or turned away. Said she’d slap his mouth right off his face.
And so he had watched them with their trousers round their ankles and their knees creaking in the autumn chill. Tugging away at themselves and pawing at Aggie Rutter and twisting themselves into strange contortions and awkward configurations. Grunting huffing and puffing some of them even crying as they hunched over his mother’s big white rear that was raised high like a hog at a trough.
Her wrinkled socks gathered round swollen ankles.
All those men. One on a hay bale or two in the quarry. One at each end and another one watching. In the woods in the moors in the cabin of a bright yellow digger.
The old man’s long gone they said. Just her and the lad and hogs running wild.
It’s nowt to look at but it can suck a golf ball through a hosepipe and it’ll never run out of puff. It can go all day they said.
Just follow the smell of the pig shit they said.
Yours for a pike or a wool-knot pullover they said. Yours for a bundle of kindling.
FOLK CRIMES. STORIES in the soil. Skeletons.
This is what James Brindle thinks about as he winds his way up the valley: the things they put beneath the sod. Secrets of dark deeds and bloodspill. Folk crimes and the crimes of folk bound into mute mythologies. The history of the land.
He counts the bars on gates as he drives past them then counts the number of cottages and farm houses that he can see up the hillsides. He seeks order in the numbers and in that order he hopes to find silence and sometimes he briefly finds it. But it is never enough.
The tales these hills and moors could tell he thinks. Every dale a crime scene. Every squat stone home or ancient disused quarry now overgrown. Maybe not today or last year or the year before that but sometime.
You read about Richmond and Ripon. Grassington and Skipton. You read about them in the magazines and saw them on Countryfile. You heard about Appleby and Leyburn and Hawes but what about the gaps between – the forgotten hinterlands up the hills and down the dells.
Christmas coming. Brindle asks himself again whether it is because he is the best or if it is for this reason. Is the festive season the reason why they have sent him in? Because they know he has no wife to disappoint. No kids to upset. Because Brindle is the only one pathetic enough to have no one miss him when everyone else is tucking into their turkey. And because they – they – know he is ambitious enough not to say no.
And they know that he knows how this will look if he cracks it and cracks it quick.
He’s a DS now. Detective Sergeant.
DS.
In Cold Storage they joke it stands for dark shit.
Deceitful suspects. Dead stories. Drowned – what?
He doesn’t remember and he doesn’t care because he won’t stay DS for long.
The road carves a path and the countryside makes him feel uneasy. He tries to count falling snowflakes but it makes him feel dizzy.
He looks at the mileometer he looks at the speedometer he looks at the petrol gauge.
He looks at the mileometer again and calculates how many miles he has driven – sixty-three and most of that on back roads – then he takes the six and three and does calculations with them. Adds them. Multiplies them. Plays around. Seeks patterns. Imposes order.
Facts. Facts are Jim Brindle’s religion. Facts are what he worships. Facts and science and numbers. Evidence and motives. Statements and sentences. Order.
And in that order he seeks peace and silence and resolution though it is rarely there. There are things that he has witnessed that can never be unseen. Sounds he has heard. Scents he has smelled.
He remains a stone-turner though. They know it – those upstairs who sent him out here. They know he’s cold-blooded and hard-faced and pragmatic despite the traumas of past cases.
He counts the cat’s eyes as his headlights pick them out. The sides of the roads are thick with drifts now. The dry-stone walls are disappearing. When he hits upon a number that feels right he plays around with it for a while. Doubles it triples multiplies it by itself then breaks it down to its components.
Other men – other detectives – they get irrational about cases. They unlearn their schooling and put themselves in the position of the victim or the victim’s family when it’s the mind of those who’ve done the crimes where you need to be. Never forget the victims: sure. But become the killer. Ask how and when and where and who. The why rarely matters. Only the end results. He’s a DS now but not for long. DS. It stands for: derelict spaces. Daughters screaming. Deafening silences.
Turning Blue Page 6
