The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  Nevertheless the idea of taking time to adjust, of letting things ripen at their own speed, was not without its appeal. But where to let the ripening process take place? Not London, that was certain. Whatever residual pressures might remain from his old life were centred on London.

  The answer was absurdly obvious but he did not reach it by any kind of open-cast logic. Instead, after a couple of soporific brandies in the bar, he heard himself saying to Parker, ‘I’ve been thinking. There’s really no desperate need for me to be off in the morning. In fact, if that old lady’s not going to make up her mind for a few days, I can easily hang on into next week, if my room’s going to be vacant, that is.’

  Parker smiled with triumphant delight.

  ‘We’ll be glad to have you,’ he said fulsomely.

  Jaysmith did not return the smile. Faintly surprised, he was still trying to work out whose voice he had just heard speaking. It wasn’t Jaysmith’s, certainly. And it hadn’t even sounded like William Hutton’s.

  No, it had been both more familiar and more distant, like the voice of a dead loved one conjured up by a medium at a seance. And then it came to him that in some odd, ghostly fashion, the voice he had heard belonged to that naively hopeful, irretrievably remote young man who had once played the foolish ostler in Dr Faustus.

  Chapter 3

  Summer was dying like a lady this year. Leaves flushed gently from olive to ochre with no savage assault of gale to rip them down; bracken singed at the edges and heather burned purple with no landscape-blackening downpour to dampen the glow. The locals assured Jaysmith, not without nostalgic pride, that it was not always thus.

  Jaysmith took their word for it. Though he had presented William Hutton as a long-time lover of the Lake District, his only real previous acquaintance had been as a small boy on a day trip to Windermere with his mother and stepfather, who had stared indifferently at the mountains and lake, explored the souvenir shops, eaten ice cream and fish and chips, and left him in the coach with a packet of crisps at each of the many pub-stops on the sixty-mile journey back to Blackburn in Lancashire.

  His mother had died when he was fifteen. His stepfather, to do him credit, had supported him through the loss and the next couple of years at school till he got the exam results needed to take him to university. But first had come National Service. After basic training he had been posted to Hong Kong. He went home on embarkation leave, and the night before his departure his stepfather had told him apologetically but firmly that his stepbrother, four years his senior, was getting married and coming to live in the family home. His wife-to-be was pregnant. The strains this would put on the limited accommodation made it sensible for him to think from now on of making arrangements to look after himself.

  He had never been back to Blackburn since that day.

  His first taste of the East had brought balm to his pain. From the very moment its first rich warm exotic scents came drifting over the sea, he was fascinated. He had been planning to read French and German at university, but within a couple of months of reaching Hong Kong, he was writing to ask if he could transfer courses to the School of Oriental Languages. The facility with which he learned Chinese made him a highly valued member of his unit, but it was another talent which the Army spotted and nurtured that won him all those privileges and comforts a regiment bestows on those that bring it honour. He turned out to be a natural marksman capable of winning trophies at the highest level, and thus rapidly promoted to sergeant, well out of the way of any parades, fatigues or guard duties which might dull his eye.

  For his part, he enjoyed his unsuspected excellence, and even let his enjoyment spill over into civilian life, becoming a prominent member of his university shooting team. But he never dreamt that this was a talent with any commercial value. It had taken fate at its most unpredictably tragic to nudge him onto that path.

  And now it had taken a fractional weakening of the right eye to nudge him off it.

  For the next three days he put past and future out of his mind and set out to turn his pretended intimacy with the fells into fact. A need to be fit and the demands of his job had taken him into some of the roughest terrain in the world. He was expert both practically and with maps. But hitherto his expertise had been focused on one thing only – the job in hand. Landscape to him was considered solely in terms of best approach, best hide, best line of fire, best escape. Here in the Lake District for the first time in two decades he went exploring simply in search of delight. He did not have far to seek. Eschewing guide books in his desire for personal discovery, he spent the days in long high walks, armed only with map and compass. Any feeling of condescension for this somewhat narrow area of rather lowly mountains soon disappeared. The physical demands were great; he never had to look far for the exhilaration of danger; and whether he was standing windblown on the bald head of Gable with the stark wildness of Wasdale stretching below, or descending from the gentle swell of Silver Howe in the gathering dusk towards the sun-gilt shield of Grasmere which at the end of a long day felt very like home, he was ravished by the sheer beauty of it all.

  Small the Lake District might be, but three days’ exploration was scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its great variety and when Parker greeted him on Sunday evening with the excited news, ‘She’s made up her mind! Miss Wilson. She’s definitely going. I can arrange for you to see Rigg Cottage tomorrow!’ Jaysmith felt surprisingly put out.

  He had what looked like a perfectly splendid walk mapped out for Monday and it was most irritating to be forced to postpone it for what was now an unnecessary piece of role-playing.

  Doris Parker who was standing alongside her husband sensed his hesitation. She was a pleasant, calm, down-to-earth woman who was used to coping with her husband’s enthusiasms.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of Philip’s hard sell, Mr Hutton,’ she said. ‘There’s not need to look at Rigg Cottage unless and until you want to. I only heard at church tonight that Miss Wilson is definitely selling.’

  ‘But the whole point is for Mr Hutton to get in quick before it comes on the open market,’ protested Parker.

  ‘It might be worthwhile,’ conceded his wife. ‘She’ll certainly not be happy about paying an agent’s commission. But it’s up to Mr Hutton if he wants to see it, dear.’

  Her broad-set grey eyes fixed speculatively on Jaysmith and he smiled at her and said, ‘Of course I’d like to, if you can arrange it. I’m really very grateful.’

  Triumphantly Parker went to the telephone and returned a few minutes later with the news that eleven o’clock the following morning would suit Miss Wilson very well.

  Jaysmith nodded his agreement. He’d have preferred to get the tedious business out of the way even sooner, but at least he would have the whole afternoon for the mountains. In any case, he could stay as long as he liked. The mountains weren’t going anywhere without him!

  The next morning he used his unexpected post-breakfast period of non-activity to read the newspapers in detail. There was no reference to any violent death in St-John’s-in-the-Vale and there had been nothing on the local TV and radio news either. Presumably Jacob had not been able to make new arrangements before the deadline elapsed. That would not please him.

  He put the thought out of his mind and drove up the winding road out of the village to keep his appointment.

  Miss Wilson was curiously almost exactly as he had pictured her. Anything between seventy and ninety, she had snow-white hair and clear blue eyes in a cider-apple face. But any impression of gentle cosiness was soon dissipated. She carried her five feet three inches as straight as a guardsman, albeit with some help from a stick, and when she spoke it was in a clipped, brusque, no-nonsense tone.

  ‘I’d not be moving from here if it wasn’t for this leg,’ she informed him sternly, as if he had hinted suspicion of some less creditable motive. ‘Now the place is getting too big for me, the garden’s taking over, and the hill’s too steep. Not that I can’t climb it, but it takes me twice as
long as it once did, and me mind’s back here already doing me jobs while me body’s still halfway up the bank, and there’s nowt so ageing as always letting your mind race on ahead of itself.’

  Politely Jaysmith agreed, which seemed to surprise her, not because she anticipated disagreement but because she could see no need for a mere man to affirm that she spoke plain truth.

  She proved remarkably unsentimental about Rigg Cottage and talked about it as if it were already settled that he would buy.

  ‘The sitting room fire smokes in an east wind,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to get it fixed these thirty years. That’ll be your job now.’

  She sounded almost gleeful.

  It occurred to Jaysmith that this was a house whose faults could be freely pointed out because its more than compensatory attractions advertised themselves. Built of grey-green Lakeland slate, it stood foursquare to the east, as simple and appealing as a child’s drawing. The sloping garden which overlooked the lake was full of shrubs, mainly rhododendrons and azaleas whose blossom in June, Miss Wilson proudly and poetically assured him, burned like a bonfire. Now, however, the colours of autumn were beginning to glow, with Michaelmas daisies challenging the turning leaves to match their rich orange, while mountain ash and pyracantha were pearled with red berries which the blackbirds would soon devour.

  It also occurred to him that if he really were looking for a house in the Lake District, this might very well be the kind of house he was looking for.

  A thought stirred in his mind.

  Why not?

  He dismissed it instantly. It was once again the voice of that forgotten young man who played the ostler twenty-odd years ago. Jaysmith, however, knew the dangers of sentiment and impulse. It was one thing to decide on the spur of the moment to treat himself to an extra week in the Lake District, quite another to invest a large sum of money and, by implication, a large piece of his life here.

  William Hutton, holiday-maker and property-seeker, would have to speak soon. Miss Wilson had shown him the outside first, as if reluctant to miss any moment of this glorious autumn morning. Now they moved indoors, and all was exactly as it should be, the right old furniture in rooms of the right dimensions, with just enough of light coming through the leaded windows and just enough of heat coming from the small fire in the huge grate.

  ‘Old bones need a fire almost all the year round,’ she said, seeing his glance. ‘That’s what we started with, that’s what we end with.’

  Curiously he had no difficulty in understanding this enigmatic statement. Man’s move away from the beast was emblematized by a group crouching around a fire. And Jaysmith had felt the need of that fire in many a long cold hour spent in patient, motionless waiting.

  The door bell rang. Miss Wilson left him and returned a moment later with another woman whom, with that tendency to instant mini-biography he had already noted in denizens of the area, she introduced as her niece, Annie Wilson, a widow, who lived out Keswick way, just back from her holidays and come for lunch.

  Jaysmith was presented in similar terms with all of William Hutton’s known and assumed background and purposes spelt out. He guessed that Parker had been rigorously cross-examined.

  The newcomer shook his hand. He put her age as early to mid-thirties. She had a long, narrow, not unpleasantly vulpine face, with a sallow complexion, watchful brown eyes and thin nose, slightly upturned, giving the impression that her nostrils were flared to catch the scent of danger. She was dressed in gloomy autumn colours, dark brown slacks and a russet shirt, with her long brown hair pulled back severely from her brow and held back with a casually knotted red ribbon. Her body was lean and rangy and she moved with athletic ease.

  Jaysmith felt she regarded him with considerable suspicion. Its cause soon emerged.

  ‘You’re selling Rigg Cottage!’ she exclaimed to her aunt.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve talked about it often enough.’

  ‘I know, but it’s so sudden. Didn’t you discuss it with anyone? With pappy or Granddad Wilson?’

  ‘No I didn’t,’ said Miss Wilson tartly. ‘As you well know, else your father would have told you when you got back and James would have told you when you were staying with him. I’ve always made up me own mind and always will, so there’s an end to it. Now tell me about you and young Jimmy. When’s he coming to see me? I thought he might come with you today.’

  Annie Wilson laughed and suddenly a decade was wiped off her face. Jaysmith watched, fascinated by the transformation.

  ‘He started back at school today, auntie. He’ll be round next Sunday as usual, I promise you.’

  ‘Just see he is,’ grumbled the old lady. ‘He could have been here yesterday if you’d got back earlier. It’s not right leaving it till the day before school starts. Too much of a rush.’

  ‘Granddad Wilson wanted us to stay as long as possible,’ said the young woman. ‘He doesn’t see much of Jimmy.’

  ‘Then he should get himself up here more often,’ retorted Miss Wilson. ‘The wedding, the christening and the funeral, that’s been about the strength of it these past few years.’

  Annie Wilson’s face lost its animation and the ten years came back with whatever was causing the pain visible in the depths of her eyes.

  ‘Jimmy bought you a present in London,’ she said abruptly. ‘He asked me to give it to you.’

  She handed over a packet in gaily coloured wrapping paper.

  Miss Wilson said, ‘I’ll look at it later. I’ve got to show Mr Hutton upstairs yet.’

  ‘I’ll show him,’ offered the younger woman. ‘You sit down and open your present.’

  For a second the old woman looked doubtful, then she agreed. Jaysmith guessed that despite her independence, she might value her niece’s opinion of him as a prospective buyer, and he guessed also that Annie Wilson wanted a chance to check him out for herself.

  He played William Hutton to the best of his ability as she showed him round the bedrooms, enthusing over the view from the main bedroom window. It looked out over the valley, across the lake to Town End with the great swell of Seat Sandal looming behind.

  ‘Yes it’s hard to beat anywhere in the world,’ she said. ‘Have you set your heart on Grasmere, Mr Hutton, or will anywhere in the Lakes do?’

  He almost admitted that his knowledge of the area was limited to what he’d been able to garner in the past three days, but this would have sounded very strange from William Hutton, prospective resident and eager house-hunter.

  ‘I love it all,’ he said expansively. ‘But Grasmere best of all.’

  ‘And you walk, of course?’

  He gestured towards the eastern heights.

  ‘It’s the only way to get up there, isn’t it?’

  She nodded, and suddenly thirsty for more of her approval, he went on, ‘I wouldn’t like to count the happy hours and the glorious miles I’ve passed on the tops.’

  Which was quite true, he told himself ironically. The reward for his boast was to make her laugh and shed those years once more.

  ‘You’re as keen as that, are you?’ she said, gently mocking his grandiloquence. ‘You’ll be telling me you’re Wainwright next.’

  He didn’t know if he succeeded in not registering his shock. Wainwright was a cover name he’d used on the Austrian job. How the hell did this woman know …? Then it came to him that, of course, she didn’t. The name had some significance he didn’t grasp, that was all.

  He smiled and said lightly, ‘Just plain William Hutton. Is this the last bedroom?’

  She nodded, her face losing its rejuvenating lines of laughter and settling to the stillness of a mountain tarn, momentarily disturbed by a breeze. He wondered if she’d noticed something odd in his reaction after all. But when she opened the bedroom door and motioned him in, something about her stillness focused his attention on the room itself. It was small with a single bed and a south-facing casement window with a copper beech almost rubbing against the glass. On the walls hung several
photographs of what he saw were early climbing groups, young men, often moustachioed and bearded, garlanded with ropes and wearing broad-rimmed hats and long laced-up boots, standing with the rigid insouciance required by early cameramen. The background hills were unmistakable. Even his limited acquaintance enabled him to recognize the neanderthal brow of Scafell and the broad, nippled swell of Scafell Pike. The pictures apart, there was no sense of the personality of the occupier of this room, or indeed any signs of recent occupation. But twenty years of nervous living had honed his sensitivity to atmosphere and suddenly he heard himself saying, ‘Your aunt brought up your husband, didn’t she?’

  She looked at him in amazement and said, ‘Why? What has she said?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he assured her. ‘She said nothing. I just got the feeling that once this had been his room, that’s all.’

  Now there was anger alongside the surprise and all her initial distrust was back in her eyes.

  ‘What are you, Mr Hutton?’ she demanded. ‘Some kind of policeman keeping his hand in on holiday?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be offensive. I just …’

  But she was walking away.

  ‘That’s all up here, Mr Hutton,’ she said coldly. ‘We’d better get back downstairs to my aunt. She’ll be wanting to get lunch ready. I hope you’re as quick with decisions as deductions.’

  He was very angry with himself. The remark had just slipped out and Jaysmith was not accustomed to anything but complete self-control.

  Miss Wilson was holding a small pot replica of Big Ben in her lap.

  ‘Tell Jimmy it’s very nice, dear,’ she said. ‘Now, Mr Hutton, what do you think?’

  He hesitated. When he’d arrived, he’d had it all worked out. A delightful house, but not quite what I was looking for. But now this formula would cut him off from Miss Wilson and her niece for ever. That was something he discovered he didn’t want to do, at least not without a chance for further thought.