“I realise it seems—”
“There has to be something else, something more substantial …,” Jane interrupted, then paused in thought. “Does Mrs. Gaunt know what her husband used to strangle Oliver—if he strangled Oliver.”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
“That would be an uncomfortable question, in any case. But if—”
“You mean,” Tom said, picking up on her thought, “if Gaunt admitted to his wife that he had used a school tie—”
“Then Gaunt would be a certain candidate. After all, only we—you and I and Jamie, and Hector and the kids, of course—know about the tie hidden in the tunnel.”
“And one other person, of course—Gaunt. If it’s Gaunt. He could, I suppose, have pocketed the tie Max left in the drawing room Saturday evening.”
“But then”—Jane looked hard at him, as she spurred her horse forward—“why are there two identical ties?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The somber green tunnel ended at an old wooden wicket gate half hidden in the yew hedge demarcating the northern boundary of Eggescombe Park and the margin of Devon’s fertile mosaic of fields. Beyond, bleak Dartmoor curved upward like a ragged, greying brow towards a sky now dark and brooding. Tom shivered, whether from simple, sudden chill or from some unnamed fear he couldn’t be certain. The moor without the blessed sun to soften its coarse carpet of bracken and gorse and warm the great outcroppings of cold granite could hold a malevolent power over an imagination—his imagination—stoked by a sickening dread at the violent deaths of two men and new fears for the fate of another. He fought to empty his mind from sinister thoughts—the moor as staging place of blazing-eyed, dripping-jawed hounds and wicked ritual murders—but he sensed himself not alone in his disquiet. Jane, beside him, cast him a troubled glance. Jamie was silent and grim. The horses, too, seemed to stir doubtfully, whickering and tossing their heads as if their finer senses detected something noxious in the atmosphere.
“Interesting the gate being unlatched,” Jane remarked, twisting back in her saddle to remove a waterproof from its bundle. “Someone’s left it open.”
“It could be some intruder, though.” Jamie pushed his arm into his jacket as Tom released his from the constraining strap by his saddle. “Hector’s private security men may not be up to the job. After all, Anna eluded them. And so have we.”
But like Jane, Tom took this negligence as a hopeful sign that Gaunt had come this way, even if this formally courteous man’s failure to observe country courtesies suggested something more troubling.
Beyond the gate, a narrow grassy track appeared to twist its way up through a thin stand of stunted oak and scrubby fir trees towards a jagged crest. The air was beginning to feel weighted, thick.
“He can’t have got far.” Jamie gestured northward, giving his horse headway with a light kick. “I know there’s a bridleway to the west, but this will take us to a designated footpath. Someone along it must have seen him.”
Tugging their reins to hurry their horses, they cantered briskly up the stone-strewn, hummocky slope through the few trees reaching the wooden footpath sign in a few moments. But a glance up and down the path—north towards the higher reaches, south towards the distant verdant coombes—brought home to Tom with renewed force how swiftly with all the hikers and trippers vanished the moor regained its solemn emptiness. There was nothing to do but to press northwards, along the summer-hardened mud, through granite-flecked, desiccated grasses, rising higher into the sky, looking left and right for a solitary, eccentric figure. In such a barren landscape only the tors and beacons, weathered crowns of stone, thrust from the thin soil, should be higher than a man, but in the gloom of this darkling early evening the shadows of men and rock might easily blend into blackness.
The path dipped in a crease in the rise where they startled a bony man of middle years in a thin T-shirt, his arm elbow-deep in a backpack, his face downward in furious concentration. He started at the sight of them, the moaning wind of the moor now a cover to the beat of horses’ hooves. He gestured vaguely north when asked if he had passed a man in a business suit. “Strange berk,” he snapped, pulling a blazing yellow waterproof from his bundle.
Reassuring as was the man’s sighting, no sign of such clothed figure on the footpath presented itself when they crested the next rise. Jamie shouted Gaunt’s name, as if the man might burst from behind the single gnarled and nipped oak tree, but each call was sucked into the whipping wind. Flummoxed, disbelieving the possibility that someone could come so far on foot and vanish from the path, they separated, each taking a different direction into the wild heart of the moor. Tom, feeling the horse surge beneath him as he tugged at the reins, rode northeast, towards a castellated mass of stone, thrust like a giant’s cloven toes through the moor’s earthen coverlet. He bent his head, squinting against the first splatters of rain to see a spectral transformation cast upon the looming tor, Hryre Tor—he knew it from an earlier visit to the moor, the one Gaunt’s finger had crossed on the OS map. He glanced over his shoulder to catch streaks of brightness straggling through fissures in the clouds in the west sweep across the plain, silvering for a moment stone and stunted tree. He fancied he caught a movement, yes! and his heart surged, to be dashed by the dismaying sight of a beefy Dartmoor pony trotting like a thing possessed across the field of his vision—sensing with animal prescience before Tom’s poorer powers could the explosion in the heavens, the violent tearing of the sky with the first jagged flash of lightning, the imminent barrage of thunder. Tom looked higher to see illuminated in the few bars of western sun a silver curtain of rain advancing swiftly from the northeast upon the tor and waited, pulling the hood over his head, for the drenching to come. But in that moment, as feeble sun and violent lightning once again conspired to blaze the great crown of stone before him, a narrow chevron of blinding white near the bottom of the tor, unnatural in its symmetry, met his eyes. He knew what it was in an instant and spurred the horse forward into the veil of rain.
“Gaunt!” he shouted, a hopeless noise against the drumming of rain, straining to keep the figure of a man, black against grey, in focus. But a vivid flash of lightning, bursting against the black clouds like a tree aflame, once more favoured him. Gaunt’s white shirtfront flared. The man was seated, rigid, on one of the collapsed blocks of stone tumbled at the tor’s rock-strewn hem, seemingly oblivious to the drenching pressing his hair to his head and his clothes into soggy tissue.
“Gaunt!” Tom shouted again, squeezing his fingers around the reins to halt his horse. “Gaunt,” he called a third time, unnecessarily, but gratefully, flinching with a burst of pain as he removed his right foot from its stirrup. Struggling, he leaned forward, lifted his right leg and swung it over the horse’s hindquarters, letting his good foot fall first to the ground, his weaker one nearly collapsing beneath him. Holding on to the reins, he hobbled forwards, the spooked horse straining against him. He said Gaunt’s name gently now as he approached, conscious of the peculiarity of the man’s posture in the circumstance, like that of a daydreaming parishioner in a pew. Above the pungent aroma of wet earth, he could smell wet wool, as Gaunt’s suit, still buttoned like a City banker’s, sagged in the growing weight of water. He called his name again, but this time Gaunt met his eyes, telegraphed a sort of mild curiosity, as if Tom were a vaguely familiar figure passed in the street, and rose from his stony seat. Tom lurched painfully to grab the man’s arm, but Gaunt turned and stepped up to the next rock.
“Please don’t,” Tom called after him. He could tether the horse to a stunted tree to go after Gaunt, but his leg wouldn’t steady him to climb. Hryre Tor was eminently climbable—he had done so one afternoon in the spring with his St. Nicholas’s Men’s Group—but now it was awash in rain splashing off the hard surfaces, cascading into the formation’s hollows. Helplessly, Tom watched through the scrim of rain as Gaunt tread down paths beaten along the walls of the tor, climbing from rock to rock in his dress Oxfords with an almos
t robotic confidence, oblivious to the water-slicked surface. With fear for Gaunt’s safety mounting, he jerked himself around on his good foot to survey the moor curving below to the valley that held Eggescombe, peering through the greyed air for one of the others, waving his arms in the vain hoping he could be seen as a moving object on an immutable landscape. In the middle distance, he could detect the silhouette of a figure on horseback—whom, he couldn’t tell—and he flagged at it madly. In a minute Jamie thundered to a stop, dismounting in a swift, fluid motion. He was soaked below the hem of his waterproof and grim-faced.
“My ankle’s buggered.” Tom added the reins of Jamie’s horse to his own, and gestured to the climbing figure, now moving quickly towards the top. “He’s gone insensible,” he added as Jamie clambered wordlessly past him onto the first rock and shouted after him, through the roar of the rainfall, “Be careful. He may have no idea where he is or what he’s doing.”
Tom watched with growing anxiety as Jamie followed a well-worn route among the stones towards the top of the tor, but taking each step with less assurance than the older man. When Jamie nearly slipped executing a turn, Tom pushed his hand into his pocket groping for his mobile. This is folly. He should have insisted to Ellen that the police be brought in at once. If only Jamie could catch Gaunt this minute, talk to him, and guide him back down the slopes of the tor, but he feared for Gaunt’s precarious mental state. The man might lash out, jump down, react in some unpredictable ways, and take Lord Kirkbride with him. So riveted was he by the drama unfolding before his eyes, his ears failed to heed Jane’s approach until her horse sounded a thump on the ground behind him and she executed a swift and precise dismount, a blur of fantastic orange rain slicker in the corner of his eyes.
“Oh, God, what are they doing!” Jane’s voice penetrated the clatter of rain, now sheeting in fast cold drops, as she darted forward to the base of the tor, craning her neck to the figures silhouetted against the sky in another burst of lightning. With her hood over her head, springing slightly with anxiety, she looked from the back like a maddened bird set for flight. And then she did, flitting quickly onto the first rise in the stony path.
“Jane!” Tom called, straining to tether the whickering horses to the withered tree. “There’s nothing you can do!
“Jane! Stop!” Tom shouted now over the drumbeat of thunder with the full force of his voice, this time scrambling forward, pain darting at his leg. He stepped onto the first stone with his good foot, gingerly pulling the other after him. “Jane, for heaven’s sake!” He lunged forward, trying to snatch at any part of her wet, slippery jacket, but failing as she skipped to another stone, then onto the rough, ascending path. He followed, stepping one pace behind, then two, frustrated at her progress, his eyes rising higher to Gaunt, now pushing towards the summit. The tor gleamed darkly with a slick skin of rain; Jamie appeared to slip and lose his footing along its side, sending Tom’s heart leaping to his mouth and freezing Jane in a lockstep, long enough for him to lurch to within a hand’s grasp, but Jamie recovered his footing swiftly at that moment, setting Jane lunging forwards and upwards again. But Tom in one last painful burst of speed grabbed her along the slick plastic of her arm and held on.
“You can’t do anything, Jane!” he shouted while she struggled against him.
“Ridiculous man!” Her dark eyes flashed from under her hood. “I mean my husband, not you.”
“He’ll be all right,” Tom said with an assurance he didn’t feel.
“Gaunt or Jamie?”
“Jamie.”
“What can Gaunt possibly think he’s going to do when he gets up there?”
“I don’t think Gaunt really knows what he’s doing.”
Lightning again flared the sky. Their eyes flew to Hryre Tor’s broad crown where the two figures were now illuminated like combatants on some dark battlement, Gaunt motionless, seemingly vigilant, gazing over the expanse of the moor, as if on watch for advancing troops, Jamie caught in an urgent forwards motion as if carrying to him the message that spelled their doom, before they disappeared into shadow and thunder sounded another bullet crack.
And then, as the sky blazed with another violent flash, they saw outlined the two men—Jamie and Gaunt—locked in a peculiar embrace, the taller, leaner man—Jamie—gripping the shoulders of the shorter, stockier man, pulling him, stumbling backwards into his chest. It was all too horrifyingly evident: Gaunt, whether by chance or by choice, had moved to step off the tor, to plummet most certainly to his death, dashed against the tor’s unforgiving surface to the scattered rocks below. Jamie alone had saved him. Tom closed his eyes against the drilling rain and sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving. Thank God, he heard Jane murmur, feeling her relax against his side.
In a moment, against the brilliance of a further burst of lightning, the two men were illuminated retracing their movements down the winding tracks worn into the tor’s collapsed stones, Jamie half a step behind the other man, arms in a football stance to catch Gaunt should he lose his footing. Gaunt moved with a strange giddy pliancy, yet with the same assurance of his ascent, as if he were untroubled by the rain greasing the granite surface and pooling in the path. Jamie moved with greater caution. Jane stepped up along the path worn along a hollow of the tor, a gesture of impatience and helplessness. Tom remained behind, martyred to his bloody ankle, keeping his eyes peeled on the two figures as they emerged from the shadows of the great stones, twisted around a bend to blend back into the blackness before reemerging, more recognisable now, Gaunt a drowned creature, Jamie his patient minder. His fears tempered by relief at their proximity to safety, Tom turned to retrace his steps. Later, he wasn’t certain what his consciousness registered first—the stony stare on the face of a man who had vanished from his life more than a year earlier, or the short sharp cry of terror behind him—but when he jerked his head to see, what tore past his appalled eyes was a shape, dark and scrabbling, in sharp descent, glancing against a stone outcropping and hitting the saturated, sloppy earth with a sickening thud.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Gaunt’s face was ghastly pale under a fringe of black hair, but he was breathing, the passage of air rasping, audible even against the drumming of the still-falling rain. A low moan emerged from his throat, and Tom noted as he placed his rolled-up waterproof under Gaunt’s head the heavy lids of his eyes flutter weakly, a welcome and merciful sign of the brain’s struggle for consciousness. Tom raised his hand to push back his own dripping hair and stared at his fingers black and wet with blood with a kind of disbelieving horror, a frisson of cradling his own murdered and bloodied wife almost four years ago. He must have gone rigid, for Jane laid a hand on his shoulder and murmured something about head wounds often appearing worse than they really were, which stilled his crashing heart as he watched her spread Jamie’s waterproof around the fallen man. It was uncertain if luck appeared to have favoured Gaunt. He had fallen more than a storey, and though Jane could find no further evidence of external bleeding, internal bleeding—along with broken bones—was the greater worry, and time was critical.
Tom’s eyes jerked past Jane’s shoulder to peer through the curtain of rain to the middle distance, seeking out the figure he’d glimpsed moments before, but forgotten in the horrible immediacy of Gaunt’s trauma. Yes, there he was, a way back, hand stroking the still-restive horses, the hood of his waterproof monk’s cowl over the familiar face. Why is he here? Now? And so near to Gaunt? The conjunction of events didn’t bear thinking about. And why is he tarrying down there? Tom peeled his eyes back to Jane and Jamie. The pair faced away from the slope down to the horses, concentrated on Gaunt. In the pandemonium, they had been oblivious to anything but the twisted body of the man. Yet Tom couldn’t let the figure vanish—again—not with Jane and Jamie so near. Not with the possibility he could shed some light on the tragedies of the weekend. He opened his lips to voice his news, but Gaunt’s eyes flickered again, struggled to focus, then closed.
“Gaunt!�
� Jamie shouted as if to penetrate his consciousness. “Gaunt!”
The man’s eyes fluttered open, this time with an uncertain stare; opaque, they held a dawning light of understanding. He moaned deeply, twitched; a yelp of pain followed.
“Help is coming.” Jane took Gaunt’s hand.
Tom studied the man’s face for signs of awareness. “Do you know where you are, Gaunt? Don’t speak if it’s painful.”
“Mr. Christmas?” Gaunt’s voice came as a wondering croak, his glittering eyes struggling to take in the figures around him. “Your Ladyship … my lord …?” He moved his head but groaned in the attempt. Instead, his eyes moved, roving the sky and its grey massings. Rain continued to fall, but with less intensity, the ominous black clouds massing now towards the west, where chance glimmers of sunlight splashed the horizon.
“The moor …,” Gaunt moaned. “I’m in the moor. But how—?”
“Mrs. Gaunt asked me to speak with you.” Tom regarded Gaunt with an intensity he hoped telegraphed the information with which Ellen had entrusted him. “Do you remember? Your wife asked you to stay at the Gatehouse until she had fetched me. She’s very, very worried about you.”
Gaunt stared at him, seemed to absorb his intent, his eyes swinging wildly to the others. With evident effort, he struggled to restore his features to servantly impassivity, but somewhere pain shot along his broken body and shattered the mask.
“What did Mrs. Gaunt say, sir?” he groaned, his eyes sinking back.
“You needn’t speak,” Tom said, frightened at the extent of Gaunt’s injuries, impatient for the arrival of the air ambulance. He flicked a glance to the sky as Jane performed a secondary survey of Gaunt’s potential damage. The storm had put them in an invidious position. The cloud ceiling was so low, the theatre of the storm so vast, Devon Air Ambulance at Exeter had passed the task to the police, who were alert to Eggescombe’s sudden notoriety. It was a police helicopter they were expecting.
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 34
