Fell of Dark

by Reginald Hill

  Suddenly to the purr of the engine was added a flapping, bumping noise. I sat up in alarm. Annie brought the car to a halt.

  ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘It’s a tyre gone. What a nuisance.’

  For her it was just an inconvenience, for me the delay could be fatal. I pointed to a comparatively flat space on the other side of the road at the entrance to a Forestry Commission track.

  ‘Pull over there,’ I said. ‘It will be safer.’

  She did as I suggested.

  ‘Where’s your jack?’ I asked.

  ‘In the boot. I’ll get it.’

  She reached for the door. I put my hand on her arm.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll get it. It’s silly you getting wet as well. I’m soaking already.’

  I could feel her arm muscles tensed like steel beneath her sleeve.

  I took the car keys out of the ignition switch and got out of the car. The rain had slackened off a bit but it was still very damp. I went round to the boot and opened it.

  Despite the luxurious design of the car, despite the silent engine, the polished woodwork, the grained leather, the thick-piled carpets, the overdrive, the power-assisted steering, despite all these the jack was still tucked away in a position which involved the removal of nearly all items of luggage before it became accessible. The suitcases divided themselves easily into two lots – the smart, modern, expensive ones in keeping with the car, which I took to be Annie’s, and the old, battered, much be-labelled ones whose ostentatious modesty was, I thought viciously, more in keeping with Ferguson. Then I reproved myself, realizing I knew as little about the man as Annie could know about me.

  Finally I got to the jack and went round to the offending rear off-side wheel.

  Annie made as if to get out, opening her door as I fitted the jack.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘It’s pointless getting yourself wet.’

  ‘But the weight,’ she said.

  I ran my eyes over her slender body.

  ‘There’s not enough of you there to make any appreciable difference.’

  She did not reply, but resumed her seat, closed the door firmly – not a slam, those doors were not built for slamming – and switched on the radio. A stream of pop music began to fall with the rain.

  I returned to my work. I’m not very expert at this kind of thing and my consciousness of the importance of time made me clumsy in my eagerness. The car rocked dangerously the first time I got it lifted and I had to let it down again, readjust the jack and go round wedging rocks under the other wheels. The flatness of the road here was only relative.

  I was very worried in case another car should come along and stop to offer help. The fewer risks of recognition I had to take, the better. Finally I got the jack perfectly positioned. I prised the hub cap off, seriously scratching the gleaming chrome in the process, removed the wheel trim and began to unscrew the holding nuts. Or at least tried to begin unscrewing them. They must have been fitted with a power-driven spanner and turned several twists past human strength. In the end I had to use my feet, bringing as much of my bodyweight as I could manage on to the protruding handle of my spanner. I could well have done with some assistance here, but even my sense of urgency could not overcome my absurd pride and make me ask Annie to help.

  Finally the wheel was off, the spare removed from its equally tightly screwed bracket, the spare fitted, the nuts tightened the wrong way round, then the right way, the hub cap replaced without the wheel-trim, removed, and replaced properly; then I wearily put the removed wheel in the spare’s place, let down the car on to the road, put the jack back in the boot, after removing again all the luggage which I had replaced so that it would not get wet, replaced the luggage for the second time, closed and locked the boot.

  I straightened up with a groan. It had taken me more than half an hour. I was now even wetter than before and I realized as I looked down at the oil and grease which had joined the mud on my hands, much dirtier.

  As I opened the passenger door, the music from the radio stopped and one of those informal, brief, hourly news-reports came on. The announcer’s first words stopped me dead.

  ‘The Lakeland Murders. A man has been arrested and charged with complicity in the murder of Miss Sarah Herbert and Miss Olga Lindstrom. Another man who was helping the police in their enquiries into the murder of the two girl walkers in Borrowdale yesterday has fled from Keswick police station after assaulting a constable. The man is Henry Bentink …’ Here followed a description which I was pleased to hear sounded too general to be of much use; then – ‘A massive search involving police from two counties, army units, and dogs, is being organized on the fells where it is suspected he is hiding.’

  I reached in and snapped the radio off. Annie stared at me white-faced.

  ‘Why don’t you like me?’ I asked.

  ‘I knew that peculiar friend of yours and you were perverted,’ she spat, ‘but I didn’t know how far it went.’

  Her expressive features showed all the scorn and dislike only her passivity had revealed before.

  ‘Afraid we’d seduce Daddy?’ I asked with unnecessary crudity.

  She reached for the ignition. I dangled the keys in front of her eyes, and wondered what the hell to do. My old mental hero would not have been in two minds. He would have taken control of the car, probably by tying the girl up and hiding her in the boot, and driven away feverishly smashing through any number of road-blocks before reaching safety. Or, as he got into his teens, the girl would have known instinctively he was innocent and, after a brief but passionate amorous interlude, they would have driven off together. It had been the introduction of the amorous interlude which had finally caused the death of Superboy for, with regrettable speed, these brief moments grew longer and longer till finally the adventure element disappeared altogether from my fantasies.

  There was no hope of appealing to Annie Ferguson’s instinctive awareness of my innocence I could tell from her face. Nor, even if I felt the inclination, did I feel strong enough to wrestle with that potentially violent little body and thrust it into the boot. I reached down and picked up my knapsack which I’d left on the floor. As I straightened up, I felt a violent blow on the back of my head. Stunned, I staggered back and sat down by the roadside feeling sick. Through water eyes I peered up and saw Annie leaning out of the window looking down at me. In her hand she clutched one of those large rubber-padded torches. She got out of the car and came and stood over me. Everything was very unsettled, like the horizon in a heat wave. I clasped my hands over the back of my head to fend off another blow.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked anxiously.

  I looked up, surprise seeping through pain. I could see a conflict of thoughts on her face. Obviously she found the actuality of violence as little to her liking as I had done when I hit the policeman. I nodded, and was instantly sorry. She bent down and took the keys from my nerveless fingers. Then she climbed back into the car and started it up. Just before she drove off, she looked down at me again, then flung something out of the window on to the knapsack I had let fall on the road.

  It was her father’s flask, still half-full of whisky.

  I sat nursing my pain and watched the car accelerate away. And just before it disappeared from view, I had the small satisfaction of seeing the incompetently replaced hubcap fall off and go bounding along the road like a great silver coin till it too disappeared into the ditch.

  EIGHT

  It took nearly the remainder of Ferguson’s whisky to get me fit to move again. I had no idea where I was going to move to, but I knew that it couldn’t be long before Annie got to a telephone. The gesture of leaving me the flask had not led me to hope that she might let me have a ‘fair start’ or any other sporting nonsense. It was merely a conscience-easer for the pain she had caused me. Now, however, she would be thinking of the pain she believed I had caused those girls. Or at least, one of them. The other had been Peter’s. I wondered gloomily whether the charge involved them b
oth or allotted us one each. Presumably with the evidence of the sheep’s blood, Sarah Herbert would be marked down to Peter, the Swedish girl to me.

  I was now firmly convinced that Melton had not been bluffing when he said that Peter had confessed. One of the reasons for his breakdown had been his readiness to cave in under pressure of guilt-feelings. Melton and Copley would be experts at pressure.

  Later I discovered I was right. He had confessed, but not at the time Melton told me he had, though he was very much broken down by then. It had been the assault by Mrs Herbert followed immediately by the news, cleverly dramatized by Melton, that I had run away which had finished him off. He was by then ready to agree to anything. In fact, he was ready to believe anything.

  I surmised some of this, but then brought my fractured thoughts to bear on the immediate problem, which was putting as much distance as possible between myself and this stretch of road before the police arrived. I had to get off the road. The choice was simple, North or South. Looking back later I saw that most things pointed me North. Reason did; it was the route to easier terrain once over the Whitlatter fells; it was also the direction which would take me towards my chosen goal of Carlisle. Superstition also; the last time I had chosen between South and North had led me into that fateful climb over into Eskdale.

  But neither reason nor superstition were very strong forces in my mind at that moment. I was sitting on the north side of the road, but when I stood up, I staggered across to the other side. The ground here did not ascend immediately so steeply as it did to the north.

  So naturally I went south.

  This was not an area I was closely acquainted with and the driving rain, and closely-grown firs prevented me from getting any satisfactory picture of what lay ahead. At the same time I was not altogether displeased with the weather as, looking back after only fifty yards or so, I saw the road was almost invisible through the trees. A couple of minutes later and it had disappeared completely.

  Soon I found I was climbing just as steeply as I would have been if I had chosen North. Eventually the fir plantation came to an end, and I lost the small protection of the trees afforded me against wind and rain. I kept on doggedly though I was very aware of the dangers of so doing in this visibility. But when after another thirty minutes I found myself up against what seemed a sheer cliff face, I knew better than to try to get up it. I shuffled slowly round to the left. When the ground beneath me turned into a narrow ledge below which was a drop almost as steep as the hill above, I went into reverse and shuffled round to my right. So careful was I this time to keep an eye on what lay below that I never saw the indentation in the rock against which I was pressed till I fell into it. I suppose you might call it a cave, but this would really be an exaggeration. It was, as I say, an indentation about two and a half feet deep and the same in width. But to me it was like a room at the Ritz. Squeezed in there, I was right out of the blast of the wind and the rain.

  The heat of the previous week had not been entirely dissipated and the temperature of the rain was not unduly low. But I was beginning to feel the damp strike deep into my body and knew that the drop of temperature that would come with night could easily tip me into the Nirvana of death from exposure. Even now I knew I needed to take action before I started feeling comfortable. Quickly I removed my knapsack and opened it. I put my hand in and for a moment wondered what the hell I had got hold of. It was a large onion. It was, I thought, dinner. But what I really wanted to know was whether the waterproof guarantee I got with the knapsack was trustworthy. It was.

  I sighed with relief and began stripping off my clothes. The upper part of my body wasn’t bad. There had been some seepage round the neck and wrists, but the plastic raincoat was ludicrously inadequate as far as the lower half was concerned. I rather suspected I had brought Jan’s by mistake. Above the knees I was soaked, below them I was liquid. I pulled a towel out and began rubbing myself violently. My enthusiasm reminded me of the scratch on my leg, but it was almost pleasant to feel the tingle of pain again. Satisfied finally, that I was as dry as I was going to get, I dug into the knapsack again and pulled out a dry pair of underpants and my ‘best’ trousers, the ones I wore at dinner, and put them on. My others I wrung out as best I could and hung them up by jamming one of the legs into a crack in the rock.

  Then I crouched down, made myself as comfortable as possible and ate an onion, washed down with the remainder of Ferguson’s whisky. I thought of Annie Ferguson and the gesture, angry with herself perhaps, with which she had chucked the flask out of the car. I gingerly felt the back of my head; there was a large painful bump and a slight tackiness. I shook the last few drops of spirit on my handkerchief and gently patted the spot. It stung for a moment, but there really wasn’t much whisky.

  Still hungry, I nibbled at a carrot and watched the rain. The wind had died away now and the rain fell like a bead curtain at the entrance to my refuge.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. One way and another it had been a long and tiring day even though it was only about six o’clock.

  When I opened them again, the rain had stopped, it was night and a nearly full moon was flooding the rock-face with light.

  I was almost set fast in the position in which I had fallen asleep. Flashes of cramp shot up and down the whole length of my body as I straightened up. It took another ten minutes of rubbing and pinching to make me mobile. Then I stepped out of the ‘cave’ with some care. I did not really think that they would still be searching for me in the dark but this particular dark was a lot lighter than the rest of the day had been. For all I knew, of course, they might have been up here and past me hours earlier while I slept. But there was no sign of life anywhere now. I looked at my watch. It had stopped. It could have been any time at all. I glanced expertly at the moon but found the sky as enigmatic timewise as always. But the moon did offer some help with its brightness. I had no doubt that at first light, the beaters would be out again and Whinlatter would be a good point to start. So the obvious thing to do was for me to take advantage of the light and put as much ground as possible between myself and my present situation.

  I folded my damp clothes and wrapped my raincoat round them. Then I concealed as best I could all traces of my presence in the ‘cave.’ After a last look around, I was ready to start.

  The ‘cliff’ in the hollow of which I had been sheltering did not look half so formidable now I could see it clearly. Or perhaps I had arrived at it at the steepest section round somewhere to my left. I trekked a little further to the right, then scrambled up with no difficulty at all. My mind was clearer now than it had been earlier when I had left the road and I began to be aware where I was.

  Despite the rain earlier, I had climbed a considerable way, inspired no doubt by my fear. I was quite near in fact to the summit of Grisedale Pike. I moved steadily forward, mapping out a route in my mind. I had no map with me – that was in Peter’s knapsack – but I knew if I got to the top of Grisedale while the moon was shining, I would have no need of a map. Theoretically, of course, I should have been heading due south, but I knew – or rather didn’t know – how many changes of direction I had made as I blundered about in the rain. At the moment all I was doing was heading uphill. I suppose I could have found north by tracking down the Pole Star. I could do this with consummate ease when pointing it out to anyone else. It had always been a good romantic ploy. But I had never been really sure that the star I was pointing at was in fact the Pole Star, and not some mere anonymous twinkler.

  Surprisingly I was feeling remarkably sprightly. The night was fairly mild, my brisk pace sent the blood coursing round my veins and my recent stiffness was fading away. And I had a sense of purpose. In fact, I felt more like my superboy hero than I had done since the start of this business. Striding alone among the moonlit boulders I felt the master of all I surveyed, fully in control of my environment. But all I surveyed was the few feet in front of me over which I picked my path with considerable care. I couldn’t afford to twist
an ankle and the moonlight was bright, but deceptive. So I was hardly prepared for what I saw when I scrambled up the last steep section to the summit, halted, and extended my horizon.

  I must in fact have more or less kept my direction for I recognized that I was facing south. Before me pale in the moonlight heaved a wild sea of hills, like a petrified stampede of vast, unknown animals. Away in the distance I could pick out the lofty outline of Scafell Pike.

  It was a wild and terrible sight.

  Turning eastward, aware of but not daring to look into the abrupt drop down to Coledale, I looked out over Derwentwater to Helvellyn and Fairfield. And to the north as I continued my circle, I could see the mass of the Whinlatter fells and beyond in the distance a long scarf of whiteness which it took me several minutes to identify as the Solway Firth.

  At last I was seeing the sea.

  Westward I could not see so far. The near mountains blocked the view, but their very nearness was view enough. Superboy was not equipped to deal with such static violence as this.

  I sat down on a boulder and forced myself back to my old limited horizons. The prospect of going further was now frightening to me, but I knew I had to do it. If I was Melton, I thought, what I would have done would have been to take a map and a pair of compasses, stick the point in at Whinlatter Pass and draw a circle showing the maximum distance I could have travelled in the time it took him to marshal his forces to this particular spot. Then I would dispose my men along the roads which came nearest to bounding the area, and sit and wait till I came down off the mountains. The best way of avoiding him would be to refuse to come down and force him to come looking for me. In this kind of hide-and-seek, the hider had all kinds of advantages. What he did not have was food, drink, warmth, shelter. I could not survive indefinitely on runner beans, onions, and carrots. So I had to go down to break through Melton’s line and tonight was the best time to do it.