Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  In the morning he picked up the van in Hilderbridge and drove to Jackley the long way round through Byss, having a newly upholstered chaise longue to deliver before he made the Jackley collection. His last call would be in Trinity Road, Hilderbridge, so he stopped at a confectioners and bought a box of fruit jellies. It was a day of white sky, ground mist, chilly, an expectant day, waiting for the sun to come through.

  The soft, thin mist gave to the foins a mysterious air. Their peaks seemed to float above the ground. Stephen drove south by the main road and as he came through Goughdale it occurred to him that the yellow Volkswagen might still be there. It was. He saw the spot of bright buttercup colour as he rounded the last curve before the crossroads. But the car was no longer the only vehicle parked there. It had gathered to itself, in the still white mist, on the verge of the Vale of Allen, half a dozen more cars and a large van. Stephen slowed down. Two of the cars were police cars, marked Police and with blue lamps. A man in a raincoat was standing by the rear of the Volkswagen while another was squatting down, peering underneath it.

  Stephen pulled in on the opposite side of the road. He got down from the cab. He could see now that there was a driver in each of the police cars. He went across the road. Immediately the standing man called out to him, ‘Nothing for you to bother about, sir, thank you very much. This is a police matter.’

  It was Detective Sergeant Troth. He appeared to recognize Stephen as quickly as Stephen recognized him, but the dark wedge face registered this only in a tightening of the mouth and a jerk of the chin. It was the other man, who rose now from his squatting position to be identified as Inspector Manciple, who spoke to him.

  ‘Good morning. It’s Mr Whalby, isn’t it?’

  Stephen nodded. ‘There hasn’t been another — any trouble, has there?’

  Troth said gruffly, ‘What d’you mean, trouble?’

  ‘To be frank with you,’ said Manciple, ‘there’s a young woman missing from Jackley. A married woman. This is her car.’

  ‘And you think …?’

  ‘We don’t think anything,’ said Troth in his flat Three Towns accent. His face, Stephen noticed, was badly marked with acne as if he were still in his teens, though he was years older than that. ‘Not yet we don’t,’ he said. ‘We don’t jump to conclusions.’

  ‘In the normal course of things we’d not treat such a disappearance seriously.’ Manciple sounded as if he were apologizing for the other man’s rudeness. He had a conciliatory air and he looked uneasy when Troth turned his back. ‘Only after what you found back in April, things aren’t normal. There’s a couple of search parties organized. I daresay you can make out one of them up across the Vale there.’

  Stephen got back into the van and drove down into Hilderbridge. At Sunningdale the same collection of old people, arranged in much the same order, was watching television in the day room. On the screen a woman with bright blonde hair and red-rimmed glasses was teaching her audience how to make profiteroles. One of the old men was reading the Daily Mirror, the knitter was knitting, Helena Naulls was asleep, her mouth open and her dentures slipped out of alignment. She was wearing a pink cotton dress which evidently belonged, not to her, but to the fattest resident, a mountain of a woman who was also asleep, whom Stephen had never seen other than asleep in all his visits.

  Mrs Naulls awoke as easily as she slept. The knitter pushed her shoulder and she sat up and opened her eyes. Stephen kissed her.

  ‘How’s tricks then, Grandmother?’

  ‘Just the same,’ said Mrs Naulls. ‘Have you brought me my jellies?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He put the box on her lap. ‘Whoa there, go easy!’ She grunted as her fingers scrabbled with the cellophane wrapping. ‘I reckon I’ll have one myself, I’m feeling a bit peckish, and what about this lady?’

  ‘Go on,’ said the knitter, ‘it’s a shame to tease her.’

  ‘Leonard was always a tease,’ said Mrs Naulls, putting a purple jelly into her mouth. ‘His dad tried to knock it out of him but it never made no difference.’

  ‘Knock one devil out and another in, I always say,’ said the knitter.

  ‘How’s Midge getting on, Peter?’

  ‘If you mean Lyn, she’s okay, and I’m Stephen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It looks as if there’s been another murder on the moor.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Mrs Naulls, her mouth full.

  ‘We’re most of us a bit hard of hearing in here, dear,’ said the knitter.

  ‘Another murder on the moor,’ Stephen repeated more loudly.

  The old man put his paper down. The fat woman opened her eyes and closed them again. Helena Naulls hesitated between a red jelly and a yellow one and finally chose the yellow.

  Round-eyed, the knitter said, ‘It turns you cold all over to think of it. Was it another young girl, dear?’

  ‘It looks like it.’ Stephen jumped up. ‘Actually, I’m off to join the search party. They’re looking for the body now.’ In that moment he had made up his mind. It was what, half-consciously, he had been longing to do since he had got out of the van and talked to Manciple. He’d go back and explain to Dadda. Anyway, Dadda owed him a day off for working the Spring Holiday Monday to get those Chippendale chair seats done. ‘They’ll need someone like me, someone who knows the moor inside out.’

  ‘Mr Tace,’ said Mrs Naulls, smiling reminiscently, ‘he was a one for the moor. He did love it. He was a lovely man, one in a million. Bye-bye, Stephen. Mind you give my love to Lyn.’

  The sun had appeared as a brighter white puddle in the white sky and the mist had begun to move. There was no sign of the search party. Stephen always kept an anorak and a pair of walking boots in the car. He parked in Loomlade and took the path that ran between Loomlade Foin and Big Allen, the direction in which Manciple had surely indicated the party was veering. It was near here that he had found the little white orchid. He came up to the Hilder at the point where the aqueduct pillars crossed it.

  He could see the river winding away from its source in the springs of Pierce Foin. The land was marshy here, tussocky with reeds, the black peat showing through the heather. Distant Goughdale seemed deserted. He crossed the river by the stepping stones, wondering if they had yet searched the mine ruins. Mottle Foin, the only foin on which trees grew, little stunted pines making a black dappling on its surface, was the highest hill on the moor after Big Allen and now its rocky hump hid the Hilder’s northerly curves, Pierce Foin and all of Lustley Dale. Stephen had another couple of miles to walk before the view was open to him again and he saw the men in the distance, deployed out across the ground on the river’s right bank.

  There must have been forty or fifty of them. One man had done that, one man had had the power to call them all out here on to the moor, away from their homes, their jobs. He had killed one girl and now, because another was missing, they had come as if he had called them, as if they were his slaves. Stephen went back across the river again, clambering over the boulders. Two or three of the men looked round, no one waved. A burly figure, tall and heavy, came towards him. It was Ian Stringer.

  ‘No luck yet?’ called Stephen.

  ‘Luck, d’you call it?’

  ‘Oh Lord, you know what I mean. I just thought I’d come up and lend a hand. I’m by way of being a bit of an expert on the moor, you know.’

  Stringer shrugged. His blue shirt, open at the neck and showing a mat of black hair, was wet with sweat in the armpits and down the back. ‘You see that chap in the green? The little dark chap? That’s her husband, that’s Roger Morgan. We’re hoping, there’s just a chance, she left her car to pick wild flowers. She was fond of wild flowers, he says, and — well, she could have got lost or passed out or something.’

  ‘In that case she wouldn’t be all the way over here, would she?’

  ‘There’s a couple of policemen with us.’ Stringer pointed them out. ‘They’re sort of directing operations.’

  Stephen had rather expected he would do that. But he j
oined the party as they tramped off towards Lustley Dale.

  ‘What was she dressed in?’ he asked the husband.

  ‘I can’t be absolutely sure.’ He had a middle-class, educated voice. ‘A red shirt, I think. Jeans.’ His face was grey with fatigue.

  ‘We’ve been out looking for her since five,’ said another man.

  ‘She’d gone to see her parents in Hilderbridge and I was with mine in Jackley.’ Morgan managed a wry grin. ‘We didn’t get on with our in-laws.’

  Stringer said, low-voiced, as Morgan moved out of earshot, ‘We started at the Foinmen.’

  ‘Of course you would. Good Lord, yes.’

  ‘We’ve been at it — ’ He looked at the watch on his sinewy wrist with its furring of black hair ‘— like nine hours. There’s two other parties, one doing the southeast and one the Pertsey side.’

  By mid-afternoon they were on the lower slopes of Lustley Foin. Stephen wasn’t hungry. He felt invigorated, exhilarated by the search. It wasn’t often that he had a whole day out on the moor. As he clambered over the rocks, parting the scrub and the brambles to peer into crevices, he heard a droning throb overhead and looked up to see a helicopter. It was circling slowly and very low down, almost touching, it seemed at one point, the summit of Big Allen.

  Stringer cocked a thumb in Morgan’s direction. ‘That copter belongs to some mate of his father-in-law. Useful if she’s out in the open.’

  A bramble whipped and clawed Stephen across the neck. He put his hand up to it and saw the blood streaked on his fingers. There was no point in climbing the foin, she wouldn’t be up there. They spread across the opening to the valley that was called Jackley Plain, and there Roger Morgan could go no further. He didn’t quite collapse. He sat down on a stone and put his head in his hands. Of all the members of the party he was the one from whom the most endurance was called, but of all the members of the party he was perhaps the only one unused to sustained walking or manual labour, and he was also the smallest. Stephen felt a flicker of contempt for him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Morgan said gruffly. ‘I’m dead beat. I’ve had no sleep since the night before last.’ He looked at Stephen with recognition. ‘You’re one of the Whalbys, aren’t you? You and your father came to our place to cover a settee.’

  Stephen didn’t much like to be reminded of this in public. ‘Oh, yes. Jackley. St Edmund’s Avenue.’

  Morgan nodded. ‘Better get on, I suppose.’

  ‘I should sit there a bit longer,’ one of the policemen said. ‘Then we’ll get you down to the road. We’ve got our vehicles at quarter mile intervals all the way from Hilderbridge to Jackley.’

  Stephen started off again and the others began to follow him. He wasn’t going to be left behind, nursing Morgan. Overhead the helicopter circled once more, making a black locust-shaped shadow on the sunlit turf of the plain.

  They stood admiring each other.

  ‘You’re lovely,’ said Nick.

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘I did make you happy, didn’t I?’

  ‘You know you did. Couldn’t you tell?’ She reddened, for she wasn’t yet used to this kind of talk. ‘I never knew it would be like that.’

  ‘I get a strange feeling when you talk that way. It’s a strange situation, isn’t it? It makes you more mine than if there’d been others or if your marriage had been real.’

  She nodded. ‘And you more mine.’

  ‘Stay with me, Lyn. I don’t mean all night, I know you can’t, but stay with me for the evening.’

  ‘No.’ She began to put her clothes on, blue denim jeans, white tee-shirt, shoulders thin and straight with bones like white shell. ‘It’s seven now. I ought to have been home two hours ago.’

  Nick said, but very gently to take the sting out of the words, ‘You’re not his mother.’

  ‘I’ll never be anyone else’s.’ She hunted in the bed for the ribbon that had come off her hair while they were making love.

  Nick combed her hair and tied the ribbon himself, badly, too loosely. She had to do it again. He dressed and went downstairs with her. Where Peach’s pen had been in the window was a cage with a snake in it, curled up on straw. In the shop, in the dimness, she threw herself into Nick’s arms and kissed him. The snake’s skin trembled at the movement in the air.

  She got the 7.15 bus, feeling as anxious as a mother who isn’t home in time for when her little boy comes back from school. People on the bus were talking about the number of police cars on the road and someone said another girl was missing.

  When she rushed into the house in Tace Way Stephen wasn’t even there. It looked as if no one had been there since she left in the afternoon to go to Nick. Peach alone was in the house, having let himself in through the cat flap Stephen had fixed into the lower panel of the back door. He was sitting on one of the kitchen counters, paws folded, tail tucked up, gazing with stately patience at the larder door. Lyn fed him. She made herself a cup of tea, cut bread for toast, beat up eggs with grated cheese in a pan. At nine she put the television on for the news.

  The first item was the discovery of Ann Morgan’s body. She had been found at two that afternoon by a party searching the Pertsey and north-west region of Vangmoor. The body was in a stone hut, formerly the powder magazine of the long-disused Duke of Kelsey’s mine. She had been strangled and her long fair hair shorn off at the scalp. Lyn switched off the set as Stephen came in at the back door.

  7

  Fingerprints were taken of all the men over sixteen and under sixty in the Three Towns. Then a man in a white coat took blood samples from their thumbs. Troth was ticking off names on a list. He gave Stephen the same pinched stare as that which he levelled at Lyn’s father and Trevor Simpson, as if he had never seen him before.

  Stephen hadn’t been in the gatehouse lodge for years. As a child he had lived there half the time, for after his mother had left the obvious person to look after him had been Mrs Naulls, however much, and by then however much more, Dadda loathed all the Naulls family. He had been at school a year but they took him away and sent him to Chesney Primary so that Helena could fetch him and take him home with her until Dadda came at six to pick him up in the van.

  It had been Naulls policy to close up on him whenever he spoke of his mother. Helena didn’t quite close up. She teased. If Uncle Leonard was a tease, you could tell where he got it from.

  ‘She’s on the moon, there!’ Helena would say in answer to his question, or, ‘Maybe she’s at the North Pole with the polar bears.’

  While Helena went down to the shop and Arthur Naulls dozed in the old shiny armchair that smelt unaccountably of wet dog, Stephen hunted for letters, a photograph, an address. He found nothing, he never did find anything. Helena showed him what she thought it was good for him to see, pictures of Brenda as a young girl, a lock of her fair wavy hair, twisted into a circle and tied with a piece of thin red ribbon.

  ‘Where is she, Nanna?’

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ said Helena.

  Stephen had his fingerprints done and a sample taken of his blood. It was all very impersonal, a routine test for all the men. There were green baize notice boards and maps studded with pins hung up where the nasturtium paper had been, though faintly Stephen thought he could smell the old smell, that mixture of boiled greens and beeswax and unwashed woollen cloth. He came out into the sunshine and the scent of new-mown grass.

  Lyn had gone to work an hour before on the bus, Stephen having escorted her to the stop and waited with her. No woman wanted to be alone on the moor or in the moorland villages, even in broad daylight. He saw the police car waiting outside his house a hundred yards before he got there himself. Manciple was sitting inside it with another, younger, man and the driver. He got out as Stephen approached.

  The faintly hangdog, embarrassed air was stronger than ever this morning. Always red-faced, Manciple looked as if he was blushing for shame. He said in his awkward, apologetic way, ‘We’d like you to come down to the station, Mr Whalby.
Have a chat.’

  ‘A chat about what?’

  ‘About the situation up here. Miss Price. Mrs Morgan. Just routine inquiries on an informal basis, Mr Whalby.’

  He had no choice but to get into the car and go with them. He sat in the back with the other man. Manciple, in the passenger seat, remarked that it was a fine day, going to be warm. Apart from that, no one said a word all the way down to Hilderbridge.

  They showed him into a different room this time, small, bare, on the ground floor. There was a metal table in it and three bentwood chairs, two benches, a calendar on one wall and on the opposite one a street plan in a frame. He waited in there alone for half an hour. Once, towards the end of the half-hour, he opened the door and looked out for a sign of anyone. It gave him a strange feeling to see a uniformed policeman sitting just outside the door like a warder in a film about prison.

  Chief Superintendent Malm came in briskly and full of apologies like a conscientious chairman late for a board meeting. Apologies, not explanations. He had just sat down opposite Stephen on the other side of the table when Manciple came in and took the third of the bentwood chairs. The room was already growing very warm, for the large, metal-framed window, its panes still grimed with winter and spring dirt, received the full force of the sun. Malm had a grey suit on, Manciple a cheap-looking, thin sports jacket.

  Stephen hadn’t really believed that stuff about an informal chat, but Malm started lightly enough, asking him at what time he had gone out on the moor on Sunday, why he had gone and when he had got home. His tone was polite and pleasant, but it held a note of wonder as if Stephen’s excursions were a highly unusual leisure-time activity. It was only then that Stephen understood they suspected him. They hadn’t got him here to inquire about someone else, but because they suspected him. When Marianne Price had been killed he had told the family gathering jokingly that he was the police’s number one suspect. Now it was true.