Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

by Gil North

  “Give me a stick,” she said.

  Tremors flowed like waves under the horse’s skin. Flecks of white foam scattered from its mouth. The woman swore as she struck, in a level voice, using words as foul as any Wright knew.

  They wound up the track to the moor. She walked by the horse’s head. Wright had his hand on the side of the sledge. The extinguished lantern rattled, nudging Ben’s body.

  She did not hesitate. Wind from the moortops whipped round them, tugging at their clothing. The horse, subdued, strained, pulling its heart out. The sledge lurched and skidded.

  Wright lost all notion of time. They turned from the track over the bracken. The wind moaned like a banshee. Shapes and shadows materialized and vanished without rhyme or reason.

  She pulled the horse to a halt. She lifted Ben from the sledge by herself, with no assistance from Wright.

  “Bring the lantern,” she said.

  He followed her, frightened of losing her. They ploughed through the moor growth. They walked on softer ground. Wright’s shoes sank in it and this, too, soon ended. He stumbled on hard, smooth rock, inclining upwards.

  She stopped so abruptly that he collided with her. She backed against him, her voice tense with warning. Ben’s dangling head butted him in the chest. He peered beyond Ben and the rock was cut off sharply. Emptiness stared him in the face. He could not see what was below the sheer face of the rock or how far away it was.

  She shrugged Ben from her shoulder into her arms. She drew herself erect. Wright cringed at the intake of her breath as she put forth every ounce of her strength. For a long time there was nothing.

  A bump, the heavy thud of something not soft and yet not unyielding. A series of bumps, each less than the one before. He went on hearing them long after they had ceased.

  “Light the lantern,” she said.

  He struck match after match, in the shelter of a boulder, trying to protect the flames from the wind. His hands were too unsteady. She did it for him.

  “Take care,” she said. “There’s a way down, but it’s steep.”

  Her voice was kinder, caressing.

  They scrambled down where the crag merged with the moor. The lantern bobbed and dipped.

  “I’ll stay here,” Wright protested at the bottom.

  She did not object. The lantern was a pinpoint in the dark, receding. He could see no more of her than her broad side and the bulge of her huge breast, the curve of her hip, a fat thigh moulded under her coat.

  He cocked his ears. Her shoes scraped in the loose shale. The light of the lantern steadied.

  “You couldn’t tell,” she said, when she returned, “but that he’d fallen over the crag by accident.”

  She came closer. The lantern dropped from her hand and went out. Her arms circled round him. Her mouth was groping for his. She moved against him. He was being enfolded in her flabbiness, drowned in her.

  Words whispered into his ear.

  “In the morning,” she murmured, “we’ll report him missing. How did we know he hadn’t come down from the moor and gone to his cottage in the village without coming in to see us?”

  Chapter XX

  John Cluff, surprised, asked, “You’re not for the moor again, Caleb?”

  “Why not?” Cluff asked.

  “The wind’s shifting west. It’ll rain.”

  “I’ll not melt,” Cluff replied.

  His brother held a match to his pipe. He sucked and expelled smoke from his mouth. He watched the smoke disintegrate.

  “What’s wrong, Caleb?” John Cluff asked.

  “Nothing I can lay my finger on,” Cluff answered slowly. “I have to do the best I can with what there is.”

  “You’d be better off with me here,” John said. “I could get Moor Bottom next door. That place joined to this, we’d be something like. There’s a good house and some decent meadows.”

  “You’ll have me married next,” Cluff told him.

  “It’s about time,” John said.

  “Past time,” said Cluff. “Too long past.”

  “I could find a job on the moor,” John offered.

  “I’ll not be back before dark,” Cluff said.

  “Suit yourself,” his brother replied. “When you’re ready you’ll tell me about it.”

  “Maybe.”

  John stood at the back door watching Cluff and Clive getting smaller in the distance. He turned into the house. His wife was busy with breakfast dishes at the sink.

  “What’s up with him, Alice?” John asked.

  “Leave him alone,” Alice told her husband. “He’s not here for his health.”

  A girl of about ten came into the room from upstairs. She had long fair hair and very blue eyes.

  Her mother said, “Your father and your uncle have had their breakfasts.”

  “Where’s Uncle Caleb?” the girl asked.

  Her father said, “Gone up the moor, Joan.”

  Joan pouted. “I hoped he’d take me to the bus,” she said.

  “I will,” her father told her.

  “I wanted the others to see him,” Joan explained. “It isn’t everyone who’s got a detective for an uncle.”

  “No,” John said. “It isn’t.”

  Alice said, “It’s a job like anything else. Worse than some. Better than others.” She rattled the dishes. “I’d not like the responsibility on me of deciding what’s right and what isn’t.”

  Mist was gathering on the moor. Low cloud wrapped the higher peaks, breaking into a fine drizzle below. Cluff followed the track he had taken on the previous day. He avoided the more sizable ridges but did not descend into the boggy hollows.

  Sheepwalks crisscrossed the moor, wide enough for only one animal at a time. He turned from one into another, his sense of direction inbred. He settled down above Ghyll End.

  He could not see anyone moving below him. After a while he took a handkerchief from his pocket. It was large and white and he tied it to his walking-stick by two of its corners. He stuck the stick in the ground. The wind took hold of the cloth, holding it stiff and flat.

  He sat there, confident that he would be seen sooner or later. He had his hands in the pockets of his coat, his coat collar lifted about his ears. Clive leaned against his leg. The dog’s hair shone with a film of wet.

  A crowd of men approached Ghyll End up the lane. They congregated at the moor gate. Some of them went into the farm and came out again. They began to climb the moor and Cluff could see them pointing.

  He stayed where he was. They came straight towards him, attracted by his makeshift marker. A constable led them. He wore his helmet and a uniform coat, but his trousers were tucked into gumboots. Cluff uprooted his stick. He untied his handkerchief and put it back into his pocket.

  “It’s you, Symes,” Cluff said, as the constable walked to him.

  “I heard you’d been in the village,” Symes said.

  “I’m at Cluff’s Head,” Cluff told him. “I’m not on duty.”

  The village policeman hesitated. Cluff did not add to the information he had given.

  “Ben Crier’s missing,” Symes said. “Cricklethwaite’s widow came in from Ghyll End this morning to say he’d not turned up for work.”

  “He was all right the day before yesterday,” Cluff said.

  “He wasn’t in his cottage. It didn’t look as if he’d been there all night.”

  “What makes you think he’s up here?”

  Symes said, “He was supposed to be gathering sheep yesterday. He didn’t bring any down.”

  “They must have known that at Ghyll End before this morning.”

  “They?” the constable said. “She didn’t look out last night.”

  “There was no one on the moor yesterday but me,” Cluff said.

  “It’s a big place.”
>
  “I’d have seen the dog if I missed the man. I’d have heard something.”

  “There’s nowhere else he can be,” Symes said.

  “Ghyll End?”

  “He’s not there.”

  Symes spoke to his men. They were farmers and labourers, augmented by the village grocer and the postman and the mechanic from what had been the smithy before it became a garage.

  “Spread out,” Symes told them. “Keep in line.”

  “I’ll come too,” Cluff said.

  The men worked forward, a hundred yards or so between each, poking with sticks.

  Symes said, “He was getting on. It’s easy to twist an ankle on the moor, or break a leg.”

  “Clive,” Cluff said. “Seek, lad. Seek! Clive!”

  A rock face, flat and high, grew out of the heather. Its base was strewn with loose boulders.

  “Call your men in,” Cluff said to Symes. “The dog’s found something.”

  Ben was broken over a rock, backwards, his spine shattered. He’d hit the crag face coming down and his head wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “Where’s that stretcher?” Symes shouted.

  The man carrying the stretcher ran up and began to unroll it.

  “I’ll take a look from the top,” Symes said.

  Cluff wandered about the rocks. They were lifting Ben. He heard someone say, “There wasn’t much blood in him. He must have shrivelled up with age.”

  Symes slid down to them.

  “He came over the edge,” Symes said. “That much is certain.”

  “The weather was clear yesterday,” Cluff said.

  “He was an old man.”

  “He knew the moor.”

  “A fit of dizziness perhaps,” Symes suggested. “A seizure of some sort.”

  “So conveniently? Just where he’d fall over?”

  Ben was strapped to the stretcher.

  Cluff said, “Never mind Doctor Henry. Get a proper pathologist to have a look at him.”

  “Eh?” Symes exclaimed. “And make an idiot of myself? I’d never live it down. We don’t need your clever detective tricks in these parts, Caleb.”

  The bearers lifted the stretcher. Their companions were beginning to straggle away, grateful that the search was so soon over.

  Symes pushed back his helmet and scratched his head.

  “He couldn’t have lasted much longer,” Symes remarked. “He’d had his innings, Ben had.”

  Chapter XXI

  They’d gone.

  Cluff watched them until they were out of sight. He climbed the course Symes had taken to the top of the crag. He walked over the solid rock slabs and on to the peaty, bare soil beyond. Little depressions in the ground had not sprung back to disappear from view. Cluff knelt and peered at the marks. He visualized the size of Ben Crier and compared his size with the boots he would wear. The disturbances in the peat looked more than one man would make unless he had been wandering round aimlessly in the same narrow compass. Some of them were large enough to fit Ben Crier but there were others, smaller, more sharply defined at the heel.

  The Sergeant continued to where the bracken and the heather began. The bracken and heather were too tough and resilient to give much indication of people passing through them. He went in increasing circles, his eyes on the ground. He found a spot where something heavier than a human body had been restless. The bracken was crushed and broken. When he stood back and looked into the distance he could follow a faint double trail across the moor.

  “They couldn’t get away with it,” Cluff thought. “Once they began they couldn’t stop. They couldn’t walk unseen for ever.”

  He approached the farm at Ghyll End.

  He told himself, “Amy’s death wasn’t wasted. They were too subtle.”

  He saw the sledge in the lean-to against the barn. He looked inside it and examined the joins of the boards from which it was constructed. He heard the horse stamping in the loose-box. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  “Wait for me, Clive,” Cluff said and went in.

  He ran his hand over the horse, which stood quietly at his touch. He felt the cloth-covered padding on the inside of the horse-collar on the wall. He let the links of the chain harness slip through his fingers and picked out from them fragments of vegetation.

  “Not you!” a voice whined.

  Cluff turned round. Wright was a statue in the other doorway, the one that led through the remaining loose-boxes to the interior of the barn.

  The Sergeant moved forward. Wright, petrified, did not budge. Cluff got hold of Wright by the arm, firmly. He marched Wright into the barn, along by the feed-bins to the big barn door. He was pulling a leaf of the door open when he heard the clatter of buckets.

  Cluff dragged Wright between the haymows. He peered down the steps that tunnelled under the flagged platform on which the hay to his left rested. At the bottom a corridor was dusty with hay-seed. The sides of the corridor were worm-eaten planking, chest-high, between upright posts supporting the roof at intervals. The heads of cows poked over the planking, two rows of them facing each other across the corridor. A round, flat bucket, containing cattle cake, was placed under each head. Jinny Cricklethwaite, at the far end of the shippon, began to lift the buckets one by one over the partitions. The cows lowered their heads and ate.

  The Sergeant released Wright. He had to bend down at the top of the steps in order to see her properly. So long as he remained erect only his trousers’ legs were visible to her.

  “They’ve found Ben,” Cluff called loudly.

  She dropped the bucket she had in her hands. Its rattle on the floor echoed in the closed shippon. The cows backed, jerking their chains.

  Her face looked up at him. From his position above her he could see the deep cleft between her breasts.

  Cluff said, “I’ve seen the sledge and the horse. You don’t think they won’t be able to tell whether he was dead before he fell?”

  “You’re clever,” she said.

  “No,” Cluff replied. “There’s nothing clever about it.”

  “What else do you know?” she asked.

  “What Ben Crier knew, perhaps. How did Cricklethwaite die?”

  Wrinkles appeared about the corners of her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

  “You should have left Amy alone,” Cluff said.

  She began to laugh. Her laugh had a note of hysteria in it. She laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes.

  “Do I have to come down to get to you?” Cluff demanded.

  She stopped laughing.

  “Alf!” she cried. “Alf!”

  Cluff’s body was inclined forward. A violent push in the back toppled him headfirst down the steps. The stonework on either side of the steps was smooth and his clutching hands found no grip. He bounced awkwardly, half-stunning himself. He lay in a crumpled heap, trying to get up. He lifted his arms to ward off the bucket that was descending on his head. His arms were beaten down. Wright landed on him squarely from above, knocking out of him what breath he had left. Wright pummelled and struck him, but Wright’s blows were weak and he scarcely felt them.

  Cluff bumped unevenly. Hands under his armpits dragged him along, careless of obstructions. Voices murmured indistinctly. A wind was cool on his face and then it faded. He jolted and scraped. His wrists and his ankles burnt and his hands and feet were numb. He got colder. The chill struck at his whole body. His head was splitting. The lids pressed too heavily over his eyes for him to force them open.

  He could see again. He could feel. A little window above him admitted a sharp, icy draught. After a while he realized that he was lying against a wall on a stone shelf some distance from a stone floor. His brain began to work. He remembered the pantry he had seen on his first visit to the farm.

  He wanted to move, but he could not, no
t without rolling off the shelf. His arms and legs were lashed together with coarse, strong ropes. The ropes bit at his flesh. He struggled and blood ran warm on his hands. Apart from increasing his pain to a fiery torment he accomplished nothing.

  His bonds grew tighter, not looser. His arms and legs were swelling to bursting point. He had to stop and lie still.

  He tried to remember more. Little by little the events of the morning came back to him. He remembered the moor. He remembered coming down the moor. He remembered going into the loose-box to the horse.

  “Clive,” Cluff whispered.

  “Clive!” he shouted, more loudly.

  He remembered leaving the dog outside the barn in order not to disturb the horse.

  “Clive! Clive!” he repeated, afraid for Clive, wondering what they had done to Clive. He pursed his lips and tried to whistle but his mouth was too dry and no sound came.

  He could hear nothing. The closed door was thick and solid. His thoughts went round and round in his head.

  “Help!” he called. “Help! Help! Help!”

  His voice was hoarse and his throat sore. The door opened. She was there, derision on her face. He was ashamed of himself for his weakness.

  “What a noise!” the woman said, using the manner she might have adopted to a tiresome child. “I could hear you in the barn, on top of the mow.”

  He did not answer.

  “I’m not Wright,” she went on. “You don’t scare me just by looking at me.”

  She came closer. Her face was very near to his.

  She said, “What do you expect?”

  “Nothing,” Cluff replied. “Not after Cricklethwaite. Not after Amy. Not after Ben Crier.”

  “You can leave Amy out of it,” she said. “But the other two are enough.

  “You!” she said fiercely. “And Wright! Both of you coming to take from me everything I’ve planned for.”

  “It’s no use,” he said. “You can’t get things that way.”

  She smiled.

  “I can only hang once,” she told him.

  He was alone. He lay quiet.