The Stranger House

by Reginald Hill

  “Please, have another. Or two, if you like.”

  “I’ll take one for the road,” she said, standing up and putting her hat back on. “Thanks again. Like I say, I need a long think before I make this official. I started it and it feels like I ought to see it through myself.”

  “Your decision,” he said. “But tread carefully, my dear, before you start throwing accusations around. Get it right, someone could turn nasty. Getting it wrong can be nasty too. Remember what happened here in Candle Cottage. I still feel that poor devil’s pain some dark nights when I’m sitting here alone. Good job I don’t believe in ghosts!”

  “Me neither,” said Sam.

  On the other hand, she thought, Mig Madero probably didn’t believe in Hilbert space. And his spooks had got him as far along the path of revelation as her calculus.

  At the front door, they stood together on the threshold and enjoyed the touch of the sun on their faces.

  “Another couple of months and I’ll be in permanent shadow,” said Melton.

  He saw the expression on her face and laughed.

  “No, my dear, I’m not being morbid. I just mean that once we get into November, the sun never gets high enough to touch this end of the valley. It might bother some people, but I don’t mind. Unless you lose it for a space, you can never feel the delight I feel when quite suddenly early in March I look out to see the first finger of sunlight touching my garden.”

  “That’s lovely,” exclaimed Sam. Impulsively she leaned forward and kissed the old man’s dry cheek.

  “Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to shock the vicar.”

  “What he doesn’t see won’t harm him.”

  “God sees everything and the vicar has a direct line to God.”

  “You don’t like him?” asked Sam, detecting satire.

  “On the contrary, I think he’s a very decent man. Compared with his father, whose main concern was what was going to happen to us miserable sinners after death, Rev. Pete concentrates on taking care of the living. He’ll be missed when he’s gone. And no more Swinebanks to follow. We’ll probably get some menopausal matron — no offense.”

  “None taken,” said Sam. “You said we. Like you feel you’re one of them.”

  “After all my years here, how else should I feel?” he said, smiling.

  “Yeah.” She found herself thinking indignantly, it’s not right he’s never been told. Everyone’s got a right to know the truth about what most concerns them. Someone ought to have told him long ago. Ought to tell him now.

  His bright little eyes were fixed on her face as though seeing her thoughts.

  As she opened her mouth — not yet knowing exactly what was going to come out, a not uncommon situation when the indignant fit was upon her — he put one finger up almost to her lips and said, “Yes, my dear, I shall live out the rest of my days here quite happily, an itch on the Illthwaite bottom which they might from time to time feel like scratching but which they will hardly use surgery to remove. After all, if I weren’t here, keeping an eye on things, what reason would I have to get up in the morning? And where would I go? Retire to a villa in Spain perhaps to shrivel up in permanent sunshine?”

  A villa in Spain!

  He knows! How can he know? He can’t know!

  The thoughts tumbled across Sam’s mind like leaves in a west wind. Again she opened her mouth, again not knowing what she would say, and again he was there first.

  “Goodbye, my dear. And good luck. And use your ears. Fingerprints, DNA, these are fine, but frequently all the forensic us hardworking detectives get is words. What people say, what they don’t say, what they say other people say. Look for inconsistencies. These too are tracks. The muddier we try to make them, the easier they are to follow.”

  Was he warning her off? She didn’t know, couldn’t ask. And in any case his advice, and his comments about the vicar, had brought something else to mind.

  An inconsistency.

  She said, “Just one thing more. About Sam Flood, the curate. Young Pete’s statement said he was in his room and the curate shouted up to him that the Bible class was canceled. That was all the conversation they had, right?”

  “Yes, I think so. In fact I’m sure so.”

  “And he didn’t mention anyone else coming to the house after lunch?”

  “No, definitely not. Why do you ask?”

  “Just getting things straight in my mind. No big deal.”

  Which was probably true. If God was the last prime number, human beings were the first irrational. No, worse than that. The square root of two was an irrational number, but at least you knew that if you squared it, you got back to two. And if you wanted to actually see it, all you had to do was draw a pair of one-inch lines at a right angle. Human behavior, however, subscribed to no such laws. An inconsistency in a mathematical proof was fatal. But inconsistency in human evidence could mean nothing at all.

  Or, as in the case of Gracie and the year of sailing, everything.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Melton. Take care,” she said.

  “You too, my dear. I mean that. Take real care. You’re exploring dangerous territory. The door to the past opens north. The devil lives there.”

  She went down the short garden path, out of the little wicker gate, and crossed the road. On the other side she paused and looked back.

  He was still on his threshold. With his head cocked on one side and his lurid waistcoat, he resembled a robin scanning its territory for insects or intruders.

  She gave him a wave. He didn’t wave back but turned and went into the cottage. It was like losing sight of a friend as you embarked on a long and perilous voyage.

  12

  The devil’s door

  AS SAM APPROACHED THE GREAT IRON gate of St. Ylf’s she saw it stood open and there was a vehicle parked outside. She’d only seen it once before but she was sure it was the Gowder twins’ old pickup.

  At the gateway, she hesitated. Though still without concrete evidence that one of the twins was responsible for her fall beneath the tower, she didn’t relish the prospect of running into them again without witnesses. But she needed to talk to Rev. Pete. If he wasn’t in the church, she’d do a quick turnaround and head back out, she promised herself.

  She set out up the path. There was no sign of Gowders in the graveyard. When she reached the church door, she made sure its gothic groan came out at full pitch, and called as she pushed, “Hi there. Rev. Pete. It’s me, Sam Flood.”

  No reply came, but there was something in the silence which gave notice of a listener as much as any words.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside.

  The gloom wasn’t anywhere near as deep as she’d expected. The reason lay straight before her.

  The Devil’s Door stood open.

  Through it she could see the Wolf-Head Cross. Before it crouched a man.

  Or perhaps, because she saw at once it was the vicar, and because it was the sacred symbol of his religion that towered above him, perhaps what she meant was knelt a man.

  But what she thought was crouched.

  She moved toward him, again saying, “Hi” as she passed through the Devil’s Door.

  He reacted to her voice, half glancing round, and by the time she got close to him he was pretty definitely kneeling.

  She heard the sound of a rackety engine starting up and, looking back through the two open doors to the churchyard gate, she saw the Gowder pickup moving away.

  Swinebank struggled to his feet. Sam noticed his knees were stained with grass, the price you expected to pay for outdoor praying. But to get your left shoulder and thigh in the same state required a devotional contortion not usually undertaken by Protestants.

  “Miss Flood,” he said, rather tremulously.

  “Sorry to disturb your praying, Vicar, if that’s what you were doing…?”

  She let the question hang.

  He tried a smile and said, “You must think me eccentric, but it is a cross, after all…�
��

  She looked up at the towering artifact and the wolf grinned back down at her.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Though to me it looks the kind of thing you’re more likely to slit a goat’s throat in front of than do a Christopher Robin. You OK?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. Is there something I can help you with?” he said in a peremptory tone which sounded more affected than real.

  She shrugged. If his sermons were so bad his parishioners beat up on him, it was none of her business.

  She said, “I wanted to ask you something about what happened a long time ago. More than forty years. The day my namesake, Sam Flood the curate, topped himself.”

  She admitted she might have phrased it better, but his reaction seemed over the top. There was anger on his face, and loathing. It took her a moment to realize they weren’t directed at herself.

  She said, “I’m sorry if I’m bringing back bad memories. I know all about them, how they can hurt. There’s just something I need to clear up… about Mr. Flood…”

  “I killed him, you know,” he said abruptly.

  Jesus! she thought. Not another one taking on responsibility for Saint Sam’s death!

  “I don’t think so,” she said gently. “He was on the edge and he went over, no one’s fault, certainly not yours.”

  “What do you know about it?” he demanded.

  “Not much, but at least I’m trying to bring stuff to light,” she retorted.

  He stood stock-still for a moment then said, “You’re quite right. Light, it’s time for light. Keeping things hidden never does any good. Like Sam’s memorial. All that grows up as cover is filthy weeds!”

  He went to the wall behind the cross and started dragging out the briars and nettles. Soon his hands were red and bloody, but he didn’t stop till the inscription was clear.

  “There,” he said, standing back. “It’s been too long. I’m glad you came back, Miss Flood. When I heard you’d gone away, I felt relieved. But I knew it was only a respite. Like a calm patch in the middle of a storm. You take a deep breath and you think, well, that wasn’t so bad. But you know inside that the storm’s only taking a breather too and will be back at you before you know it. Shall we go into the church and sit down and talk?”

  His voice was calm, the calm of acceptance, of submission even. But Sam recalled Melton’s warning not to take risks.

  “Out here and standing suits me fine,” she said.

  While she was pretty certain most of Swinebank’s anger was directed at himself, you never knew precisely where you were with these religious guys. Except maybe Mig. OK, perhaps she was silly to make an exception just because she liked the guy and had slept with him, but somehow she was pretty sure he wouldn’t hear the voice of God telling him, It’s sacrifice time, and if you don’t have a goat, a redheaded girl will do!

  Rev. Pete she wasn’t so sure about. Pretty sure, but not enough to want to go into that dark scary church with him. Out here she reckoned she could leave a guy in skirts for dead from a standing start.

  “Very well. Before our Wolf-Head Cross. That may be fitting.”

  She followed his gaze.

  There it stood, packed full of messages from the past, maybe messages for the future. She thought on the whole most religions were crap, but religion wasn’t the same as belief. They called this a Viking cross. She didn’t know a lot about Vikings but she had a picture of them as large bold-faced men, doers not dreamers, undaunted by ferocious storms and mountainous seas, always ready for a scrap. What they believed in must have derived from what they were, and when they settled here they’d decided this cross would make a necessary statement of that belief. So there it was, paying lip service to the rules and repressions of this new intangible god who’d crept up from the south with the insidious inevitability of global warming, but at bottom making a plain statement of things as they were, an assertion of their own individuality, as true and uncompromising as a mathematical proof.

  Her heart jolted in her breast at the feeling that finally the time of truth was close.

  But her voice was calm as she said, “Pete, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Couple of questions first to get you going. Why didn’t you tell the police that Edie Appledore had been visiting Sam the day he died? And what was it you went to his room to talk about?”

  He turned to look at her almost with exasperation, as if she were interfering in some well-ordered, perfectly thought-out scheme.

  “Oh no,” he said. “The day Sam died wasn’t the beginning. The beginning was when little Pam Galley, your grandmother, was orphaned and came to live with the Gowders. Or maybe it was when Madge Gowder was diagnosed with cancer. Or maybe it was the day she gave birth to the twins.”

  “They were here when I arrived, weren’t they?” said Sam. “What were they doing? Threatening you?”

  Some certainties just arrive, and then you spend days at the blackboard working out where they came from.

  “Yes, they were here,” said Swinebank dismissively. “It’s not important.”

  He had, she realized, a story to tell, a story which had been bursting to come out for decades. At last its time was close and he was impatient for the moment of release.

  “OK,” said Sam. “Shoot.”

  He closed his eyes. Was he saying a prayer? And if he were, what for?

  His eyes opened and fixed themselves on her face and he began speaking.

  13

  Pete Swinebank

  LET’S START WITH PAM GALLEY coming over to Skaddale from Eskdale. That was in the autumn of 1960, not long after Sam Flood started here as curate. She came to the village school with the twins. She fitted in all right, didn’t talk a lot. We watched the way the twins treated her. That was the touchstone of survival for us lads. So long as you didn’t cross the Gowders, you’d be all right. They weren’t cruel to her or anything. They just treated her like she was some kind of animated doll. She did more or less exactly what they told her. Sometimes they’d play silly tricks on her, like telling her to stand out in the rain during playtime while the rest of us were sheltering. But it was too easy to be fun for long. Generally they just ignored her.

  Not long after she came to Illthwaite, she started menstruating. The twins knew, living in the same house, and they told us. They were our sexual mentors. Living in the country, you pick up on the animal basics pretty early, but when it came to translating the facts of life from the byre to the bedroom, it was the Gowders who spelled things out. Sometimes their spelling was pretty terrible. If you did it standing up, the girl couldn’t get pregnant, and if you did it in the churchyard, your willy would fall off, that sort of thing. But no one ever argued.

  They stated pretty authoritatively that once a girl started bleeding, she was ready for tupping. Their word. Not that little Pam offered any incentive to tupping compared with some of the other more developed girls. And not that any of us boys had much real notion of the mechanics of human tupping, apart from some very confused and overheated fantasies. This was 1960. In rural Cumberland, it might as well have been 1930.

  The Gowders I should say have never seemed very personally involved with sex, either as adolescents or grown men. Maybe it’s because they’ve always formed a sort of self-contained unit. They were only interested in sex because they saw how much most of the rest of us were fascinated by it, so being the acknowledged experts gave them yet another form of dominance.

  Midway through December Madge Gowder, the twins’ mother, who’d been poorly for a long time, took really ill. It was cancer. They said reassuring things to the kids, of course, but all the adults must have known she was dying. It was a bright hard spell, lots of sun but very cold. We used to go up on Mecklin Moor to play. It’s a wild place, there’s lots of old stone circles up there, and lots of wild legends about what went on in them. And of course there’s the Moss, where on a dark and misty night they say the ghosts of every creature that’s drowned there come out to taste the air again.

  No
t far above the Foulgate track before you reach the Moss itself there’s a place where two rock slabs have rolled together to form a sort of cave, and this was the spot us lads thought of as our den.

  That day in January 1961 — it must have been the first week, we still weren’t back at school — there were five of us up there. Me, the Gowders, Pam Galley, and Gerry Woollass.

  Here in Illthwaite the squire’s children had always gone to the village school till they were eleven or twelve and then moved on to boarding school. There was no distinction made in lessons, but in the playground, maybe because I was the vicar’s son, Gerry and I often kept pretty close together. The twins could easily have persecuted us for being different. Instead, maybe because it demonstrated their supremacy even more, they made us subordinates in their gang. It was an invitation you didn’t refuse. In fact I felt quite excited and privileged as I swore a rather bloodthirsty oath of fealty and secrecy about all the gang’s activities.

  We brought some bits of wood for a fire, knowing we’d not find much up on the moor, and soon we had a decent blaze going. We pooled what scraps of food we had to make a picnic — some biscuits, a bit of cheese, a bar of chocolate — and the twins had brought a bottle of beer and a bottle of cider and some cigarettes. With Foulgate being a house of sickness, they’d been able to raid their father’s drink store without being noticed. They’d also got a magazine which I presume belonged to him too. By contemporary standards, it was pretty innocuous, but the photos it contained of nude women posing with beach balls, that sort of thing, set our young minds swooning.

  Then one of the Gowders asked if we’d ever seen the real thing. We had to admit we hadn’t. And he said, would we like a look? Not knowing quite what he meant, me and Gerry said, yes, we wouldn’t mind. And the twin turned his head and called to Pam.

  We’d almost forgotten she was there. I think she’d been given some squares of chocolate and she just sat a little way behind us, dead quiet, waiting till the twins would take her home.