Fell of Dark

by Reginald Hill

  ‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not an intrusion into the place. Not like all those bloody motor-cars you find parked all over the place. You could run up Helvellyn in something like this and even Wordsworth wouldn’t object.’

  The exhilaration of feeling the rush of air on your face, of being able literally to lean out and pick flowers as you pass is almost indescribable. Perhaps the sense of inhabiting in reality for a while the imaginative world of childhood has something to do with it. Certainly the (so it seemed) inevitable sun, the royal blue sky, the smell of things growing, to which the occasional whiff of steam or smoke seemed a natural addition, all these contributed to the enchantment of the moment. Peter looked like a child on a perfect birthday.

  ‘Thalatta, thalatta,’ he murmured softly to himself, eyes straining ahead to take everything in. ‘Soon we will see the sea.’

  I nodded happily, acquiescingly. Soon we would see the sea.

  Beckfoot came and went. Then Eskdale Green, Irton Road and the descent down the flank of a wooded fell to Muncaster. All too soon it seemed our journey was over and the sturdy little engine pulled us round an easy bend into the Ravenglass terminus.

  I sat back for a few seconds, reluctant to move. But Peter was already on his feet.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘All right.’ I took my knapsack and we walked slowly up to the small booking-kiosk and the exit.

  There were two men standing by the gate. They were dressed in rather shabby grey suits cut in a style that was archaic by London standards and must have been a bit behind the times even for Ravenglass.

  One was reading a newspaper. The other, a smaller, altogether less restful-looking man, registered our approach and touched his companion on the arm. I was reminded of the Fergusons when we came into dinner the previous night.

  The larger man glanced up, folded his newspaper into a squat little packet and thrust it into his jacket pocket. The anxious little man was already heading towards us. The big man strolled in his wake.

  ‘Not more waiters, I hope,’ I said to Peter.

  He laughed. ‘Not mine if they are.’

  It was obvious that the men were heading for us. There hadn’t been many people on the train and most of those had already disappeared.

  ‘I think they are policemen,’ said Peter.

  I felt a sudden panic. To intercept us on holiday like this meant something pretty urgent. Something at the office? Hardly. A fire at home? Something happened to Jan?

  ‘Mr Bentink? Mr Thorne? We are police officers, I am Detective-Constable Armstrong and this is Detective-Constable Lazonby.’

  Peter and I nodded inanely. For a moment, overlaying worry, came the thought of how amusing it would be if we all shook hands and then went our separate ways. But only for a moment.

  ‘We wonder if you would mind helping us in some enquiries we are making.’

  ‘Certainly, if I can,’ said I, my relief that none of my personal fears seemed to be realized making me more enthusiastic than I normally am in my dealings with the police.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said little Armstrong. ‘Then if you’d come this way. We have a car.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Can’t we chat here just as easily as in a car?’

  Armstrong stood on his toes in his anxiety.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of talking in the car, Mr Bentink.’

  ‘No,’ said Lazonby in a much less conciliatory tone. ‘We’d like you to come to the station.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but what followed I liked even less.

  ‘In Keswick,’ added Armstrong with reluctant honesty.

  ‘Keswick!’ Peter screeched.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Armstrong. I found to my surprise we were moving quite rapidly towards the car-park.

  ‘Detective-Superintendent Melton would like you to assist him with an enquiry he is in charge of.’

  Superintendent. I knew enough to know this meant it wasn’t trivial.

  ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘Just what is this case, and how can we help?’

  Armstrong looked at Lazonby with dog-like appeal.

  ‘Detective-Superintendent Melton is in charge of the investigation into the deaths of Miss Olga Lindstrom and Miss Sarah Herbert. He thinks you may be able to help him with his enquiries,’ recited Lazonby.

  ‘Which girls? Oh, not those girls – the Swedish pen friend and – but how did they die? An accident on the fells?’

  ‘Accident?’ said Lazonby. ‘If you can strangle somebody by accident, and rape them by accident, then it might be a bloody accident. Come on.’

  Stunned, we followed. A few minutes later we were in a police car on the road to Keswick.

  Some time later as the car began to labour up into the fells we thought we had turned our backs on, it began to rain.

  FIVE

  We had been driving for more than half an hour before I summoned up courage to speak. I prefaced it with an offer of cigarettes. Lazonby accepted.

  With an effort to sound casual (an effort all the harder because of my sense of how stupid it was that I should have to try at all) I asked, ‘What exactly happened to the girls?’

  Lazonby took so long in replying that I thought he was just going to ignore the question. But finally he said, ‘Exactly, we don’t know. But we will know, eventually. At the moment all we know is that some time last night they were raped. Then strangled. Then thrown in a gully. Probably in that order. That’s all we know.’

  He looked me full in the face.

  ‘But it’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think, Mr Bentink?’

  I nodded foolishly and decided to try to turn the conversation yet again.

  ‘What kind of man is Mr Melton?’ I asked.

  Lazonby thought a long time about this too.

  ‘He’s a good policeman. Oh yes. He’s a good policeman,’ was all that he said in the end.

  But now we were fast approaching Keswick. The rain was still beating down on the windscreen almost too hard for the wipers to clean a space, but Armstrong kept his foot down on the accelerator. This seemed rather out of character for so nervous a man, but I caught him glancing at his watch, and guessed that some kind of deadline was involved. I was recovered sufficiently to be able to smile wryly at the thought of deadlines in a murder case.

  My new complacency was shattered, however, as we pulled into the small courtyard of the Keswick police station. Despite the rain, a small crowd had gathered there and as I got out of the car, I was horrified to hear from two or three throats a low baying noise, half growl, half boo, which rose in volume as Lazonby seized me by the arm and hustled me into the building.

  I wrenched my arm away from him and asked in some anger, ‘What do you think you’re doing? And what was all that din about?’

  Lazonby looked apologetic, or at least as apologetic as his solid impassive face permitted.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bentink, but you always get a funny type of person hanging around the station on cases like this. They want a glimpse of the murderer. I had to rush you in. There was a photographer there, and I’m sure you didn’t want your picture in the papers, did you?’

  ‘Why no,’ I said, still feeling uneasy about the whole incident. I looked around.

  We were standing in a kind of foyer about twelve feet square. There was a counter running the length of it, topped by frosted glass with a couple of compartments in it, like the windows of a railway booking office. One of these was open and through it two uniformed policemen eyed us with undisguised interest. The door which led through this partition into the office behind it opened and a sergeant came out. Armstrong stepped forward and spoke to him. He nodded and disappeared again.

  ‘Won’t keep you a moment,’ said Armstrong brightly, obviously pleased at the prospect of getting rid of us.

  I turned to Peter. He had slumped down on to the bench which ran along the wall opposite the partition. He looked, I thought
with horror, the picture of guilt overtaken by conscience. But before I could think what to do to rearrange this allegorical picture, a door opened at the far end of the room and through it came Marco.

  He stopped dead when he saw Peter. I might not have been there. Then he set off for the exit door and I thought he was going to rush through it without a word. But he stopped with his hand on the knob, turned and looked down at Peter who stared back with no discernible emotion on his face, then cried:

  ‘Pardon me, Peter. I was so angry.’ This was followed by a few sentences in very rapid and emotional Italian, then he flung open the door and rushed out.

  Peter, with one of those rapid transitions of mood which I realized I had noticed previously but which only now began to cause me some unease, looked up at me and winked. I glanced round quickly to see if anyone had noticed. The two constables behind the counter were chatting away to each other with great verve, Lazonby was staring thoughtfully at the door which was just swinging slowly shut on its spring. Armstrong was looking to the other end of the room where in the open doorway through which Marco had appeared stood a new figure. He was looking straight at Peter.

  Something told me immediately this was Melton. Yet he looked nothing like my mental picture of the man. Perhaps I had been conditioned by television, but I had expected a large man, solid, impassive and like Lazonby except larger and cleverer. But this man was nothing like that. Short, thin, wearing an ill-fitting blue suit and, most unsuitably in every sense of the word, a green and orange checked waist-coat, he had a triangular face swelling from a narrow chin to broad expanse of forehead, accentuated by a far-receded hairline. He wore spectacles, round, cheap-framed, with bi-focal lenses.

  He stepped into the room.

  ‘Emotional creatures, these foreigners, aren’t they? Mr Bentink? Mr Thorne? Thought I had you spotted. Yes, emotional. Easily upset. Show it all. Not like you and me, Mr Thorne, eh?’

  His voice was high-pitched, but perfectly controlled, lacking entirely the over-rapid pace and near squeakiness of the normal high male tone.

  ‘It’s good of you to come. I’m Detective-Superintendent Melton. We’ll try not to keep you any longer than is necessary. Though on a day like this you might as well be here as anywhere, eh?’

  ‘It was sunny in Ravenglass,’ said Peter in a childishly sullen kind of voice.

  ‘Yes, yes. I dare say it was. Come along now.’

  He turned and walked back through the door. We followed him into a long corridor with several doors leading off. One of these was open and sitting behind a desk there was a figure cast much more in the mould I had expected. He was a big solid man, about sixteen stones of him I reckoned; he made Lazonby seem a puny youth.

  ‘Ah, Inspector Copley. Just the man. I wonder if you would have a chat with Mr Thorne here and take his statement. In you go, Mr Thorne.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming too, Harry?’ asked Peter appealingly. I could see signs of strain on his face like those which had seemed permanently etched there during the first weeks after his breakdown.

  ‘Mr Bentink will come with me,’ said Melton politely but firmly. ‘We’ll get things done much more quickly that way. We don’t want to keep you hanging about, do we?’

  He turned away, but Peter still stood in the doorway, his hand tightening on the jamb till his knuckles whitened.

  ‘I don’t see how we can help anyway,’ he said in a high, strained voice, looking straight at me. ‘We only saw the girls once, in the hotel bar. We never saw them again.’

  His gaze fixed on me for a few moments longer, then he turned into the room and the door closed behind him.

  I stood in bewilderment. What Peter meant by his last comment seemed clear enough to me. He wanted me to enter into conspiracy with him to conceal our second meeting with the girls. But why should he want this? Why?

  ‘Come along, please, Mr Bentink,’ said Melton. ‘Let’s see if we can find somewhere to stow ourselves.’

  He led the way further down the corridor and stopped at the last door.

  ‘Here we are. This will do, I think.’

  He opened the door and waved me in. I stepped forward, then stopped dead. Sitting there reading a large type-written sheet was Ferguson. He looked up.

  ‘Hello, Bentink,’ he said.

  ‘How on earth did you get here?’ I asked.

  He grinned.

  ‘Our policemen are wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Melton. ‘Come along, Mr Bentink. We must obviously look further afield.’

  We turned the corner at the end of the corridor and went up a flight of stairs. Up here we were obviously on a different plane of existence. There was a carpet on the floor, not luxurious but sufficient, and the room he finally took me into was very different from the bare functional boxes I had had a glimpse of below. Again, it was not luxurious, but it was reasonably spacious and the emulsioned walls looked bright and fresh. The furniture just consisted of a large desk and three or four chairs, but even these looked solid and reasonably expensive compared with the flimsy hardboard affairs below. And the room’s biggest advantage was that it had a real window. I went to it and peered out. The rain was slackening off a bit it seemed and visibility had improved, but it was hard to believe in the brilliant sunshine of the previous day.

  Melton had come to stand beside me and he seemed to catch the tail-end of my thought and take it further.

  ‘If it had been like this yesterday, those girls might still be alive.’

  We stood in silence after that looking out on the rain-washed landscape.

  The police station was a fairly new building situated on the outskirts of the town and it backed on to some open fields which stretched away to the near fell-slopes. As I looked up at the dimly discernible heights, I felt I could imagine all kinds of sinister and dreadful happenings taking place there, but not what had happened the day before. That seemed somehow too urban, native to those stretches of heath or parkland which pass for the countryside near large towns rather than this wilderness whose terrors were not made by man.

  ‘Shall we proceed now, Mr Bentink?’

  I shook off my mood of abstraction and took the proffered chair. Melton smiled at me, placed the fingertips of his hands carefully against one another and stared down at the resulting pinnacle.

  ‘Now, Mr Bentink,’ he said. ‘What can you tell me about the deaths of Miss Olga Lindstrom and Miss Sarah Herbert?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said.

  There was a long pause. I began to feel rather embarrassed for Melton, who was waggling his fingers around now as if rather uncertain how to go on.

  Finally he took a deep breath and spoke.

  ‘Obviously I did not get you to come all this way, at considerable expense to the taxpayer, just so that you could tell me absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I agreed.

  ‘Then why did I fetch you?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You tell me. You did come, after all. Voluntarily. Why did you come?’

  ‘Why, to help you with your enquiries.’ I cursed myself for mouthing the well-worn phrase. He smiled.

  ‘And did you feel you could help?’

  ‘No,’ I began, but was quickly interrupted.

  ‘Then I am indeed grateful that you’ve come all this way despite your conviction that your journey was useless. That was very good of you.’

  I began to grow angry.

  ‘Look, Superintendent, if you want to translate cooperation with the police as a confession of guilt, that’s your business.’

  Again he interrupted me.

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Bentink. I was just interested to know if there was anything relevant to the case which you felt you yourself would like to mention. That’s all. We don’t encourage amateur detectives but the ideas of intelligent men, especially those who have been on the spot at important times, are never ignored by us. I’m sorry you feel suspicious
of my motives. All I want is information. All the information. All the little bits you might have stored away, quite unknown to your conscious mind. I set no traps. I just want to help you remember.’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘If I knew that, I would not need to trouble you any further. Perhaps a little confirmation to start with. You are Henry Aldgate Bentink of Flat 67, Montagu House, W.C.I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Splendid. It’s not often that people are so precise or legible in their entries in hotel registers.’

  ‘A mark in my favour?’

  ‘It depends where in your scale of values you put precision and legibility, Mr Bentink. You are at present on a walking holiday with Peter Charles Thorne, you arrived at the Derwent Hotel last Monday evening and stayed there till Wednesday, that is yesterday morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did you stay there till yesterday morning, rather than, say, this morning? Or tomorrow morning?’

  I did not understand his motives for this line of questioning and this worried me. What on earth could the length of our stay at the Derwent have to do with the case? I decided to be as unforthcoming as I could till he had revealed his hand.

  ‘No reason in particular.’

  Melton stood up and took a turn round the room.

  ‘Mr Bentink, I take it you are an intelligent man, probably a University man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One of the penalties of intelligence is the difficulty of simulating unintelligence. It is so incongruous. Why will you not attempt to be frank with me? Either it was part of your overall holiday plan or it was an improvisation, a whim, a decision taken at the hotel. Whatever it was, there was a reason. No one suggests it was a sinister reason. Ninety-nine per cent of the people I talk to look for sinister reasons for all my questions when there are usually none. I know what it feels like. But let me repeat, I set no traps.’