Fell of Dark

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Writing-pads and envelopes, you mean.’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Where is Mrs Bentink?’

  ‘At home, I suppose.’

  ‘Suppose?’

  ‘Well, she might be away.’

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But no firm plans?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not like you.’

  I was growing more and more exasperated and it was only my conviction that the meek and nervous Mr Melton was deliberately aiming at this that made me keep my temper.

  ‘Mrs Bentink is making her own plans this year. I have made my own plans. I would be carrying them out were it not for this business. Couldn’t we hurry it up, Superintendent? It’s getting near lunch time and this mountain air gives me a splendid appetite.’

  He shifted his spectacles on his nose. He used them rather like a trombone player uses his slide, to get different tones. He now looked apologetic.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Bentink. It is getting on, isn’t it? You mustn’t miss your lunch. We have quite a good canteen here. I’ll ring down and ask them to bring something up.’

  I was genuinely surprised.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to lunch here, thank you very much.’

  ‘You mean, you want to leave.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I’m not finished yet, Mr Bentink. There’s a great deal more. Of course, I can’t stop you leaving. You must do as you think best. But I would much appreciate an opportunity of continuing our talk later on.’

  I was nonplussed. The trouble with the police, I thought rather bitterly, is that they are right and we are wrong. Melton pressed his advantage.

  ‘I feel I should warn you that there’s quite a considerable crowd outside the station. Reporters, photographers, workers with nothing better to do in their lunch-break.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So anyone coming out of this building is going to be subjected to a lot of questions and photographing. These reporters are persistent. At least a couple would follow you to wherever you went for lunch.’

  ‘Isn’t there a back way?’

  ‘Oh yes. But that’s reserved for people we’ve finished with.’

  He smiled.

  Always be a bad loser, my father had taught me, but let your badness be concealed.

  I smiled back.

  ‘All right. You win. But if your canteen cooks like it makes coffee, I can do without it.’

  He sat down, content it seemed to go on with the interrogation right away. But I had other plans.

  ‘I’ve got a packed lunch from the Boot Inn. It looked rather nice. I’ll settle for that, I think. It is in my knapsack.’

  We had removed our knapsacks on entry into Armstrong’s car, and I had noticed Lazonby had carried them into the station with him.

  ‘I’ll have it sent up,’ said Melton, reaching for the phone.

  ‘Don’t bother. I feel like stretching my legs. I’ll go down.’

  I got up and left the room before he could reply. I clattered down the stairs and turned into the narrow corridor. A few steps brought me opposite the door through which Peter had gone. I gave a perfunctory knock and shoved it open.

  Inspector Copley was sitting on the edge of the desk, one leg dangling, looking down expressionlessly at Peter, who sat on a very uncomfortable-looking chair, his head thrown back and a handkerchief clutched to his face. It was covered in blood.

  My first thought was of third-degree methods, police brutality, and all the other horrors which grow up in parallel with the myth of the helpful fatherly copper. But Copley did not seem at all put out by my entrance. He obviously read the accusation in my eyes, however.

  ‘It’s his nose,’ he said laconically.

  Peter rolled his eyes round to the door, and saw me.

  ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘it’s my nose again. It just started.’

  Nose-bleeds had been one of the physical manifestations of Peter’s nervous disturbance while he was in hospital, indeed to such an extent that he had been in need of blood transfusions at one point.

  I rushed over to him. He was pale and drawn.

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ I snapped at Copley, ‘can’t you see he’s ill?’

  ‘It’s just a bleeding nose,’ said Copley evenly. ‘I put a key down his back.’

  ‘Yes, Harry,’ said Peter. ‘It’s just my nose. Really it is, I’m all right.’

  He looked up at me pleadingly.

  ‘Inspector Copley says we won’t be long now. Then we can go.’

  I interpreted his glance easily. He felt the end was in sight and could hold up till then. I felt he would be better off seeing a doctor, perhaps spending a night in hospital, but I also knew that he would regard this as a defeat and instantly cease the desperate struggle he was making to remain on the surface of reality.

  ‘All right, Peter,’ I said. ‘See you soon.’

  As I went out of the door I bumped into Melton. He carried my knapsack.

  ‘I got there before you after all. Here we are. I’ve had some tea sent up to the room we are using so you’ll have something to wet your throat. I’ll let you chew in peace and join you later, shall I? Do you hear that, Inspector Copley? Mr Bentink’s having his lunch here; sandwiches. He doesn’t trust our cooking. Perhaps Mr Thorne would like to do the same. See that he’s comfortable, won’t you? Come along now, Mr Bentink.’

  I let myself be ushered back upstairs. Melton poured me a cup of tea and left. I unfastened my knapsack and pulled out the grease-proof paper packet of sandwiches. Then stopped with it half way out.

  Below it lay my hat, neatly spread out with the crown acting as a kind of sack or support for the sandwiches.

  The thing was, however, that my hat, made out of some phenomenally efficient crush- and crease-proof material, had been rolled up into a cylinder and thrust down the side when I had packed that morning.

  My belongings had been unpacked and replaced since I arrived at the station.

  I went through things carefully then. Nothing was missing, but now my suspicions had been aroused, I noticed many small items which were out of place. The knapsack had undoubtedly been searched.

  I sat for a long time wondering why. I suddenly began to feel that matters were leaving my control. But once again, the certainty of my innocence made me laugh mockingly at myself and my overdramatization of events. Then I ripped open the sandwich packet and began eating in case Melton should return and find me sitting there, just staring into space.

  I need not have hurried, however, for it was after 2 p.m. when Melton reappeared, full of apologies.

  ‘There’s so much to do. So much. So many little things. I’m sure you find this in business too. Now, where were we?’

  ‘I haven’t known where we were for the past four hours, Superintendent.’

  ‘Haven’t you? Perhaps that explains why you have been lying to me.’

  My face settled instantly into the unemotional mask I reserve for crises, but my stomach began to bubble and pop like a panful of curry. I said nothing. I wanted to know what particular lie I was being accused of before I started defending myself.

  ‘Mr Thorne spent the three months up to a week last Tuesday in the Sister Moss Nursing Home near Epping in Essex. This holiday you are on is intended as a kind of buffer state between the world of the Home and the world of reality. Am I right?’

  ‘I’ll have that doctor struck off.’

  ‘I doubt it. Mrs Bentink is unobtainable at the moment, it seems. But we have it on reasonable authority that you and she parted on the worst of terms, that your friendship with Mr Thorne had long been a source of friction between you, that in fact your marriage was near breaking-point.’

  I thought of a dozen worthies of both sexes and all levels who would have delighted in offering these tid-bits. It was little consolation to know that the eleven who did not get in first would be equally willing to let me know the ide
ntity of the one who did.

  ‘It also seems that Mr Thorne is sexually abnormal.’

  I smiled.

  ‘You find it amusing, Mr Bentink?’

  ‘I find your way of expressing things amusing. Yes, Mr Thorne is a homosexual. But so are so many people that one wonders what is normal and what is abnormal.’

  ‘You are not homosexual yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you do not regard Mr Thorne’s activities as in any way deplorable?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s very liberal of you, Mr Bentink.’

  ‘I am a very liberal person.’

  ‘So I see. You must know, of course, that Mr Thorne made certain advances to a young waiter at the Derwent Hotel. The boy was eighteen years old. He was a first-year university student. Clever, yes, but not necessarily very mature. How liberal are you about that, Mr Bentink?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘It came to nothing.’

  ‘No. The boy was mature. There was another student earlier on, wasn’t there? How liberal were you about that?’

  I did not reply.

  ‘Then last night. Another youth. Twenty years old. Italian. Again a waiter. Did you notice anything there, Mr Bentink?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But perhaps you were not privy to the fact that last night they slept together, they indulged in what passes for sexual intercourse between such people. Your mature, intellectual friend, convalescing from a mental breakdown, and a twenty-year-old foreigner stuck in the strangest part of a strange country. How liberal are you about that, Mr Bentink? How liberal can you get!’

  He cracked his hand sharply on the desk.

  I viewed him warily. I felt it was important to discover exactly how much this was a genuine display of indignation, how much a carefully controlled performance to lead me – where? My main feeling in any case was one of relief. This particular lie was not too difficult to account for. In fact, its discovery seemed to offer a new line of defence, though I did not take kindly to having to recognize I was now on the defensive.

  ‘Look, Superintendent, as far as I could see – in fact, can see – Mr Thorne’s illness has got no possible bearing on the case. I wished to save him embarrassment, that’s all. As it is, now you have found out, I take it that you have instructed Copley to stop badgering him?’

  ‘Badgering? No one is badgering. Inspector Copley is questioning a member of the public who has come voluntarily to the station to assist us. That is all.’

  His recent emotion had gone and he was once again the rather dry, nervous, bird-like figure I had first acknowledged. But I knew him better now. I’m not very good on first impressions and people often exist in my mind as their own caricatures long after I first meet them. But I was quickly beginning to recognise the quality of this man.

  ‘Fair enough, Superintendent. As for Mr Thorne’s sex life, I did not know things had gone as far as you say with Marco. But if anything, surely this indicates the impossibility of his being connected in any way with a rape? You can’t have it both ways.’

  Melton smiled at my phrase. Encouraged, I pressed on.

  ‘There’s nothing illegal about Mr Thorne fancying a young man. Nor anything morally reprehensible, no more so than if you or I should cast a lecherous glance at a couple of …’

  I let the sentence fade away, but Melton finished it for me ‘… Teenage girls. No, you’re right. As long as it ends there. But your theory of sexual exclusiveness interests me. Your friend had the misfortune to fall out with young Marco. He was still very angry when we got him here and he was very ready to talk. Among other interesting things, he reported to us a rather curious remark passed by Mr Thorne as they talked, or rather as Mr Thorne indulged in a kind of meditative monologue which Marco only half heard and half understood. Mr Thorne commented that he found it a terrible physical strain to have a relationship with a woman. To make it at all viable, he needed some extraordinary or dangerous circumstance. What do you make of that?’

  Frankly, I had not got the faintest idea what I should make of it. It referred to no part of Peter’s experience with which I was at all concerned. I smiled in as superior a fashion as I could assume.

  ‘Come now, Superintendent, surely a reported remark half-heard, as you yourself put it, by a fellow who doesn’t speak the language so well in any case, can hardly be very important?’

  ‘It is part of a statement taken from a voluntary witness and must carry some weight. But by itself, I admit, it is nothing.’

  By itself. I did not like the sound of that. I tried to look relaxed. Christ! I thought, I should be relaxed. What have I got to fear?

  ‘Just what is all this leading to?’ I asked. ‘Surely, let me get this straight, there is no question of Mr Thorne and myself being suspected of this crime any more than everyone else on the mountains that day is, in the most general sense, suspect?’

  He did not answer me directly.

  ‘One of the first jobs of a detective is to look for what is odd, what is not quite in the normal run of things. Detection is often merely the sum of oddities. Your names, yours and Mr Thorne’s, kept cropping up in different statements. Quite innocently, I am sure. But we must look closer as you will appreciate.’

  ‘Whose statements, for God’s sake?’

  He looked through his papers again.

  ‘Mr Stirling, the manager of the Derwent Hotel …’

  ‘That time-server! Hasn’t anyone ever been drunk in his hotel before?’

  ‘I suppose so. Mr John Carboy, the head waiter, remarked that he did like the way Mr Thorne interfered with the efficiency of his dining-room service by talking with apparent intimacy to Clive Broad, a waiter.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ I said hotly. ‘We only had a couple of meals in the hotel and I was with Mr Thorne most of the time.’

  ‘Possibly. Possibly. The boy himself seems to have been very impressed with your friend, flattered by his attentions, but fortunately kept him at arm’s length. He states that Mr Thorne seemed very keen to meet him yesterday morning, which was his morning off after breakfast. They had made a tentative arrangement to meet, but evidently he talked to you, realized that you knew nothing about any such arrangement, and deliberately avoided you both when you set out as he did not wish to be an embarrassment. You did talk to him?’

  ‘Yes.’ Silly weak Peter!

  ‘He filled a flask with iced lager for you?’

  ‘Yes.’ That didn’t sound too good either.

  ‘Did you take a lot to drink with you on the fells that day?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I just thought that the lager would be pleasant in view of that heat.’

  ‘No spirits?’

  ‘I’ve told you. No!’

  ‘Right. Let’s carry on. The barman at the Derwent in his statement says he got the impression that you attempted to pick up the murdered girls last night.’

  There was a pause, not so much because I was considering what he had just said, but because with every successive use of phrases like ‘last night’, ‘yesterday morning’ and so on, I had to make a progressively greater effort to assure myself that yesterday had been yesterday, the day we climbed Esk Hause and lay roasting, carefree in the sun. The rain still spattered the window-panes. Yesterday seemed as distant as London, as the office. As Jan.

  I shuddered to think what Jan would make of all this. To say our marriage was at breaking-point was the hyperbole of malice; but it was stretched taut. I was not quite sure whether I wanted the tension eased by relaxation or severance, but I knew I did not want this kind of business to play any part. I hoped fervently that the reason they could not find Jan was that she had gone abroad for a holiday. Suddenly something struck me which I had noticed earlier but which my constant concern with Peter had relegated in my mind’s priorities. Why should they want to speak to Jan anyway? And with this thought came a most unpleasant awareness of the vast machinery of the law shaking and sifting my life and all it contained
.

  ‘Do you not dispute the barman’s statement, then?’

  ‘What? That! Of course I do. It’s utter nonsense. I explained to you exactly what happened. Surely you can see that these people are just interested in expanding their own importance? Why, the bar was so crowded that night that the barman can hardly have noticed us!’

  Melton sighed, took off his glasses and fixed me with a firm but, I felt certain, unfocused stare.

  ‘Do not try to tell me how I should look at things, Mr Bentink. Your function is to give me something to look at. All I have so far is far from easy to understand.’

  ‘You mean being drunk? Is that all?’

  ‘For an invalid it’s a lot. But let’s move on to Mr Ferguson then. He tells us that he observed you and Mr Thorne bathing naked in a stream some miles above Boot. He says he saw you wrestling together in the water. He stressed that in his opinion you were wrestling, not as was suggested to him, embracing. What do you think of that?’

  What I really felt was anger. I felt a sense of betrayal, as if Ferguson should have been on our side, but had for some reason gone over. I shrugged.

  ‘It is true. We did have a bathe. There was a bit of horseplay. What of it?’

  ‘Nothing of it. He also reports a conversation he had later with Mr Thorne in the bar of the Boot Inn. In it, let me see, ah yes, in it he says that Mr Thorne talked very freely about you and stated as the motive of your trip to the Lakes that you were recuperating from some illness. He hinted that the activities of that day had done you the world of good. Miss Ferguson who was present confirms this. I take it this is a flight of fancy?’

  ‘Of course. Mr Thorne has an odd sense of humour.’

  ‘Mr Ferguson also reports that he intervened in a quarrel which arose between Marco, the waiter, and Mr Thorne at breakfast. Marco said, in Italian which Mr Ferguson speaks fluently, that your friend was a cruel, sadistic, egotistical monster, that he had promised him friendship the night before, but now scorned him; that he had promised him money but now refused him; that he, Marco, had been led into sin against his family, his race and his religion, and all for nothing. He had started a pretty comprehensive string of threats when Mr Ferguson intervened.’