The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  The runner came nearer. He was going to pass the house. But a second before he put his hand on the gate fastening, Kenworthy knew that this was where the man was coming. Kenworthy moved silently into the hallway, put up his hand to the latch and had the door open while the man was still in the act of knocking. It was the vicar, the vicar hatless, his cloak askew about his shoulders. And the vicar was in distress, the distress of a man who has been mobbed or ambushed, the breathlessness of a man carrying too much weight for sporadic athletics.

  ‘Come inside. What on earth – Are you hurt?’

  Dunderdale was in a filthy condition, daubed with mud and muck, his clothes soaked, as if he had struggled through a weed-choked autumn ditch. Already a light was on upstairs. Elspeth came down, hair dishevelled, in her pink dressing-gown.

  ‘Why, Vicar – what on earth?’

  ‘Come with me, Kenworthy.’

  ‘Just put me in the picture.’

  ‘I’ll make a hot drink,’ Elspeth said.

  ‘There’s not time.’

  ‘Just get out of those things.’

  ‘Later – Kenworthy, come with me.’

  ‘I’ll get dressed.’

  Two and a quarter minutes, it took him, shoes patiently tied. Dunderdale was now sitting on one of the hall chairs, on to which Elspeth had coaxed him. He shot up again at the sound of Kenworthy’s feet on the stairs.

  The vicar wanted to run again, but Kenworthy held him to his own fast walk.

  ‘Just give me the essentials.’

  ‘You’ll see for yourself, not two minutes from here.’

  ‘This is no time for play-acting, Vicar.’

  ‘We’re not play-acting. By God, we’re not.’

  Down an entry between walls, boggy patches, ankle deep; press on – through a gate held by a loop of leather, into a typical Spentlow yard, with its stinks, its filth, its creatures fractiously startled from sleep Dogtooth: Jesse Allsop’s.

  ‘It was Allsop who came to fetch me,’ Dunderdale said. ‘Pity he didn’t think of fetching you, too. He had to get up in the night. That’s how he saw –’

  There were lights on all over the farmhouse, the door widely ajar, the man who must be Jesse Allsop coming out to meet them. A Tilley lamp, hissing, unnaturally bright, had been placed out on the cobbles in the yard; not too close, as if with a suggestion of respect for what lay across the doorstep: the Anathema Stone. It wouldn’t have been a man’s first reaction that the form had ever sparkled with life. But Kenworthy recognized the costume of someone in whose company he had been acting a scene something like seven hours ago. The appalling corpse had been Davina Stott.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Jesse Allsop was short, stocky, but lacking the physical strength that is kept in trim only by application. He had not done that kind of work for twenty years. Dark-eyed, dark-visaged, like his half-savage ancestor, he had little to say, not out of sullenness, but out of a lifetime of distrusting speech. Yet he had also an ingrained preference for the unobtrusively conventional. At some hour of the night he had changed into a sombre, anciently worn but evidently respected working suit, and his hair, lacking any hint of grey even at the temples, was sleeked down, suggesting a throw-back to the nineteen-thirties.

  There was polish in the house, and no dust. At half past eight each morning, a woman came over from the village to do for him, by which time he had cooked, eaten and cleared his own breakfast. The room in which he received Dunderdale and Kenworthy was proud in the affluence of a departed era: heavy furniture, too much of it. On the wall was a large, late-century photograph of a not-very-intelligent matriarch, but one with a mind of her own, however limited; eyes not open to interpretation, but committed to their own memories; Reuben Allsop, relenting on his death-bed, had bequeathed to Gertrude his considerable capital gains, and she had come down to Dogtooth with the son she had had by her cousin.

  Jesse Allsop had given up farming, except that he still lived in this house and probably could not tolerate living anywhere else. The work in the yard, which stopped strictly at his door, was done by a neighbouring relative, to whom the land was leased. The room, for all its period pieces, was dominated by a television set with a twenty-six-inch screen. A desk calculator was lying casually on a side table, and the telephone was a prestige model.

  Jesse Allsop had seen, a crucial few years before most of the others, that the returns from hill-farming were not worth the grind. The slopes were too scraggy here for the profitable herds that were feeding the Stilton factory at the head of the dale. It was natural beauty that the discontented Midlanders and Northerners were prepared to pay money for, happy to find temporary footing on High Peak soil. Jesse Allsop owned eighty caravans on the edge of this and other villages dotted about the flanks of Dove and Manifold. He had thirty letting cottages, all nominally furnished. He smiled wryly when men told him that word of mouth was the best advertisement; he did not care what went from mouth to mouth. It did not matter to him if the same family never came twice to his roof-trees. There were tens of thousands more where the first few hundreds had come from.

  ‘At what time did you call the police?’

  And Allsop looked at Kenworthy as if he thought him demented.

  ‘What do you mean? You are the police.’

  Kenworthy reached for the telephone.

  ‘My name is Kenworthy,’ – no rank, no explanations – ‘I am speaking from Dogtooth Farm, Spentlow, the residence of Mr Jesse Allsop. There has been a violent death on the premises. I shall remain here until someone arrives.’

  In an armchair the vicar was leaning back inelegantly; filthy, dog-tired, tormented by revulsion now that the spring of instant activity was uncoiled. It was an act of moral cruelty not to let him go home, get stripped, bathed and to bed, but Kenworthy had put himself in charge.

  ‘I have no standing at all in the activity that’s going to buzz about here in an hour’s time. It would be wrong of me to interfere, would confuse the issue. I shall merely assume the minimal functions of scene-of-crime officer until the real man arrives.’

  They had come indoors and sat waiting, no one attempting to make conversation, least of all Jesse Allsop. At ten minutes to seven they heard someone handling the fastening of the yard gate. Kenworthy hurried out. A grey shadow of a man was letting himself in; the tenant farmer. There was an anticipatory stir in a cowshed, and an animal lowed.

  ‘Don’t come any further, please.’

  ‘Who are you? And who do you think you are ordering about?’

  ‘I am a police officer. There has been trouble. I’m allowing no one to enter until my colleagues arrive.’

  ‘I’ve got to see to the cows.’

  ‘Come back in an hour.’

  Then the man caught sight of what was lying across the stone. He would be the first to set up rumours in Spentlow. It hardly mattered. There was little point in delaying them.

  The grey day was lightening now. Dunderdale came out of the house.

  ‘No point, you think, in getting down to work while the trail is still hot?’

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s hot, or was ever hot, or cold, or will ever be anything but cold. It’s important for me to do nothing.’

  ‘In that case, please let me go home. When they want me, I’ll not be five minutes’walk away.’

  ‘I need you here. You’re a man of standing. I shall need you to swear to my actions – or, rather, inertia – since I arrived on the scene.’

  ‘Why should that be necessary?’

  ‘Because it complicates a case when a man like me is a primary suspect.’

  ‘You, a suspect?’

  ‘I must be. Statistics show, our procedures acknowledge, that in the majority of cases a murderer turns out to be one of two people: the one who found the victim dead, or the last one to see him alive.’

  ‘Statistics –’

  ‘I am determined to stick to the manual.’

  They were joined now by Allsop,
who came gloomily out of his door, his arms swinging loosely in front of him. The Tilley lamp was still hissing, its light now superfluous. Allsop took a step towards it.

  ‘Leave it. Let it burn itself out.’

  ‘Oil costs money.’

  ‘Weigh that against how many years that girl might have had in front of her.’

  ‘I put it there. I’ve trodden the ground already.’

  ‘And the man with his head full of footprints is going to say you were one too many.’

  Now Allsop did begin to sulk. And beyond the lamp the dove-grey costume looked pathetically cheap.

  Davina Stott was lying full length, her limbs at inhuman angles. The side of her face was against the barrow stone and a tress of her hair was still stirring silkily. Her right arm was doubled unnaturally beneath her.

  ‘Did you touch her?’ he asked Dunderdale.

  ‘I tried to turn her over as well as I could with my torch battery running out. How was I to know that she was beyond help?’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  Kenworthy suddenly became gentle, consoling. He looked round the yard, the first time he had taken it all in by daylight: the paraphernalia of subsistence farming, a broken root-cutter, the windlass of an abandoned well, a pump in a corner – the one they had been at such pains to represent in their stage set. When it came to scenes of crime, the manual teetered on the brink of self-conscious poetry. The scene of a crime was a place that had been visited, however fleetingly, by the man who had committed that crime. And wherever a man goes he leaves some trace of his passage, however slight, however invisible to the untrained eye.

  ‘Ought we not go and tell Mrs Stott?’

  ‘Do you think she’s awake yet? Do you think she’s still waiting up for the girl? Do you think it’s the first time she’s been out all night?’

  And Kenworthy turned to Allsop.

  ‘I’d like you to run your eyes over the yard – no, from where you’re standing. Tell me if anything’s been moved since yesterday.’

  Allsop did as he was asked, perfunctorily.

  ‘Do you think I know all that’s in the bloody yard? Every time I cross it, I try not to look at it.’

  ‘Did you know this girl, Mr Allsop?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘How vaguely?’

  ‘She did some work for me the summer before this. Holiday work – several of the kids do: cleaning up the vans on a Saturday, when the new trippers arrive. She came up here.’

  ‘What for?’

  He did not look the sort of employer who kept open house to his work-force. ‘She said she’d been paid two pounds short over the season. I didn’t argue.’

  ‘Just peeled them out of your wallet?’

  ‘No: told her to bobby off. That’s what I call not arguing.’

  ‘That’s not the whole truth, Jesse.’ Dunderdale had come to life, but not with much energy. It was a mechanical rebuke, like a mother correcting the narrative of a child.

  ‘You know very well she was up here two or three times a week at that time.’

  ‘Trying it on. She got no two quid out of me.’

  ‘Mr Kenworthy – Jesse is by no means the curmudgeon he would have you believe. He has himself to thank for his public image.’

  ‘A man could make his own image, if some people would let history die.’

  ‘History can never die, Jesse – “unto the third and fourth generation”.’

  ‘That is the old law, Vicar. Don’t you preach that it has been fulfilled?’

  ‘That depends on which law men choose to live by.’

  ‘If you hadn’t chosen to put on your damned Gabbitas Week, a lot of things were on their way to being forgotten.’

  ‘And only injustices remembered? Gabbitas Week will wipe out a tangle of misunderstandings.’

  ‘And I say you’re wrong, Vicar. You’re doing the village a disservice. Spentlow’s becoming a new place. Let the process work itself out.’

  ‘Will Spentlow ever change while it’s full of Allsops and Brightmores? Did you know that Barton Brightmore has helped himself to your cloak-tree?’

  ‘You think I care? You think it matters to me who has it?’

  ‘It matters to Barton Brightmore and his following. But I’ve everything lined up for him. He’ll get the shock of his life, come Gabbitas Week.’

  ‘Gabbitas Week? You’re still thinking of having a Gabbitas Week – after this?’

  Then they heard a car engine coming up the Spentlow street; the change into low gear as it scouted past farm entries; the reverse turn; the jolting along ruts. The scene-of-crime car arrived first, a beefy and beery young inspector with one detective-constable, both of whom clearly knew what they were about. A brief look at the corpse – the inspector might have been a batsman at the wicket, surveying the field as of habit. Then the marker tape was being laid out, laying down the no-go area. Within minutes a bigger car was parking behind the first, three men this time, their obvious master a man in his early forties, with clipped fair hair that still had enough spirit of independence to react in the slight breeze. It gave him a misleadingly boyish look. Chief Inspector Michael Gleed; Kenworthy neither knew him nor of him. At least he made some kind of noise in his throat, as he viewed the body. Then he listened to Kenworthy as an overworked doctor might hear the first recital of symptoms from a new patient.

  Then factual statements: Allsop’s first, because he had been the first to see the body. He had got up to urinate, had seen what he had seen, had gone close enough to the corpse to know that it was a corpse, had not touched it. He had gone in and dressed, then went for the vicar, lighting the Tilley lamp when he came back. Why the vicar? Because the vicar knew the girl. Because the vicar was the natural intermediary with the Scotland Yard man who was staying in the village.

  Why had he not rung direct to the police? Well, they’d got the police here, hadn’t they? He did not add that the indirect approach helped to soften reality. Calling in Kenworthy had about it a touch of keeping things in the family.

  Next, Dunderdale: he had been in bed when Allsop came to his door. It was about half past four, but he was still reading. The evening’s rehearsal had left him excited and tense; he was often awake half the night. He had hurried with Allsop to Dogtooth. He had to admit that he had disturbed the body; it was a reasonable thing to do, wasn’t it, to see if there was anything left to resuscitate? Then he had gone for Kenworthy – obviously, with such eminence on tap. He knew that Kenworthy had no status in the area, but Kenworthy would know what to do, wouldn’t he? Besides –

  Gleed was not the man to miss an inflection, particularly the hint that here was a line that a man was already wishing he had not broached.

  ‘Mr Kenworthy already knew something of the girl’s background.’

  Kenworthy did not intervene. His turn came. He was Detective-Superintendent Simon Kenworthy. He was holidaying in Spentlow: well, trying to. He’d agreed to help out with amateur dramatics, and in that sphere he had on two or three occasions met the girl whose body lay out there. He had, in fact, walked her home after rehearsal. He had seen her as far as her gate, had watched her go through it, had heard her footsteps go up to her front door as he himself was returning up the lane. Time? It was twenty past eleven when he arrived back at his cottage. It had been a long rehearsal, had it? Well, it had gone on until half past ten. They must have found plenty to talk about afterwards, Gleed said, suppressing innuendo. Well, the girl was mixed up; there’d be more to say about that later. It was undoubtedly better not to clutter up an initial statement with secondary stuff. Kenworthy was at Gleed’s absolute disposal, wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t doing anything – except, as an immediate priority, sleeping.

  Gleed clicked the retractable tip of his ballpoint – a silver Parker – slipped it back into his pocket, looked down for a fraction of a second to see that the clip had gone home: a man methodical in detail.

  ‘One more question at this stage.’ Gleed was a qui
et man, no drama, cold emphasis in his clarity.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned notifying the girl’s parents.’

  ‘Professionally indefensible. I’d have had the lights out of a subordinate who had tripped up on that one. But there’s only the mother, she’s divorced. There’d have been no point at all. Wakes about ten, I imagine – and can’t do much with her hands till she’s had her first noggin.’

  Gleed said nothing.

  ‘I restricted myself to keeping Dunderdale and Allsop where I could see them, and ensuring that nothing was touched in the yard.’

  Gleed did not react at all. The inspector outside was already labelling finds in little plastic bags. Gleed was paying as much attention to him at a distance as he was to Kenworthy close at hand.

  Fatigue was invading Kenworthy in a wave that began with a prickling somewhere in the lumbar region, and that crept up his spine until he had to halt in his steps and take in deep breaths of the sharp air. It was still early morning. Spentlow was still coming out of its night. Bedroom curtains were being snatched open: they didn’t know yet. They couldn’t. Or had Spentlow its own herd perception, that would not need telling?

  Elspeth saw the fatigue in his face and refrained from asking questions. She cooked him the sort of breakfast he had written home about from country pubs in his journeyman days. Fatigue left it half-finished. Elspeth put him to bed; and then the tensions of fatigue drove sleep away, so that he got up again and came down for a notebook, determined not to be found unready when the time came.

  Chapter Nine

  Kenworthy slept, an unfightable sleep that mastered him while he was still labouring over his notes; then he woke and scribbled a word or two more; and finally a deeper sleep won, and he dropped his notebook, and his pen rolled away amongst the cloughs and dales of the eiderdown. It was a quarter to midday when Elspeth woke him, with a steaming black coffee on a tray.

  They’re here, Simon. Your Derbyshire colleagues. Or at least, one of them is.’