Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Kev said better safe than sorry.’

  When she understood Harriet Crozier let out a nervous shriek of laughter. ‘Maybe you should have it dyed black as well. D’you mind if I write a story about it? I mean about Three Towns girls cutting off their hair and dyeing it. I’m a reporter. It’d make a great story.’

  Joanne was huffy at first but presently relented. They all went back to Tace Way. Lyn made tea while Harriet interviewed Joanne and got what she called ‘quotes’ from Mrs Newman.

  ‘What about you?’ she said to Lyn. ‘Are you going to defy him and keep your hair long?’

  Lyn said quietly, ‘Are you?’

  ‘I cover mine up. I don’t go about looking like Alice in Wonderland.’

  Although it was hours yet before it would be dark, although the sun was still high in the sky, Stephen walked with Harriet as far as the bus stop. The last of the visitors to the Hall had gone and the professor could be seen walking back towards the house from the road.

  ‘He’s just had a biography of your grandfather published. I expect you know all about that, though. Muse of Fire, A Life of Alfred Osborn Tace by Irving J. Schuyler.’

  Stephen hadn’t heard of it but he wasn’t going to say so. ‘I haven’t read it yet.’

  ‘They sent us a copy at the Echo.’ Harriet gave another of her shrill nervous laughs. ‘I don’t know who they thought was going to review that. D’you want to read it? I’ll drop it in to you sometime when we’ve done with it.’

  For a moment he had thought she was going to ask him to review the book. She didn’t and he was affronted.

  He said distantly, ‘I expect I shall get a copy sent to me.’

  Was it his imagination that she seemed disappointed? It occurred to him that she liked him, liked him in a way he had never really ‘liked’ a member of the opposite sex. As Kevin or perhaps Ian Stringer might have put it, she ‘fancied’ him. He recoiled from her with a feeling that was part distaste and part fear.

  The bus came before they had waited five minutes. He saw it bear her away with relief. It had been an unpleasant day, fraught with humiliation, with intensely irritating, troubled moments. But when he looked back over the past weeks it seemed to him that all his life recently had been like that, the even tenor of his way disturbed, even his marriage, once so smooth and serene, in some indefinable way changed. He could put a date to it, he could fix the point at which this change had begun. It was on the day in April that he had found the body of Marianne Price.

  A white gauze of mist, that might have been heat haze or might later turn to rain, hung over Vangmoor next morning. Stephen had got up and come out very early before Lyn was awake. He wore a sweater, an anorak and carried his rucksack in which were the rope, the big new torch, two candles, a saucer and a box of matches. He had also brought with him two bread rolls filled with sliced Gouda cheese. Taking provisions with him onto the moor was something he liked to do, something he and Peter had done daily when they had been searching for Apsley Sough. Stephen sat down and ate his breakfast. He leaned against one of the upright stones, shaped rather like gravestones, of which there were several in the dale and which had once denoted the ownership of or title to a vein of lead ore. This one was engraved with a K for the Duke of Kelsey.

  Between where he was and the shelf of rock that skirted Big Allen, a flat circle of stone paving like the rim of a round pond was embedded in the turf, was now indeed partly overgrown by the turf and heather, and in its grassy centre the dark-wooled sheep were grazing. Peter and he had often wondered what this circle was, had thought it ancient, as old perhaps as the Foinmen themselves. Stephen now knew that it was centuries younger than that, a crushing circle on the rim of which a horse had walked round and round, pulling the heavy stones that crushed the lead ore out of the lighter rock. He began to walk towards the foin, not exactly reluctantly, but feeling pinpricks of trepidation now that the time had come to enter the mine again.

  Two derelict coes, mine buildings erected over climbing shafts and in which the miner had kept his tools, lay to the right of him. One of these was a ruin, no more than a heap of stones, but the other, though nearly roofless, still stood. Stephen had been inside the coes before to check how thoroughly the old shafts had been filled in and blocked. He dropped his rucksack on the ground inside the stone hut that was known as the George Crane Coe, and set off with the rope slung over one shoulder, the candles in his pockets, and carrying the torch.

  This time he found the entrance to Apsley Sough without difficulty. He anchored the rope to the protruding lip of rock just as he and Peter had done seventeen years before. But this time he found himself to be less single-minded than he had been then. As far as he could remember, in those days he and Peter had thought of nothing but of getting into the mine, of nothing but the adventure ahead. Now he was hesitating, feeling the warmth of the sun on his face as it permeated the mist, even gazing across the dale to what he had sometimes written of as the finest view on Vangmoor, the prospect of Blathe Foin with Tower Foin rising stark behind it, gazing as if he might never see it again, as if the earth he proposed to enter might swallow him up for ever.

  With the rope and his supply of light, though, he was quite safe. He knew that. It even seemed rather silly to have hidden his rucksack, for there was no one anywhere on the moor. He hadn’t seen a soul since leaving Chesney, and then only the milkman and the boy who delivered the papers. The moor had been deserted since the second murder. Apart from man’s vestiges, the remains of surface workings, it was as it must have been before man or the animals came, peaceful, bare and in the morning mist, mysteriously veiled.

  He parted the bushes at the opening to the shaft and peered down. Dark, a stony, earthy smell, nothing to be seen. He took the rope in his hands and lowered himself down until his feet found a purchase in the footholes that had been cut haphazardly out of the rock wall. The shaft was about two feet six in diameter, a narrow slanting tube in the roots of the mountain.

  He had gone down quite a distance before he switched the torch on. The gleam of light at the mouth became a remote spot, a point only, then, as the shaft bent slightly, disappeared altogether and Stephen was left in the dark. The torch supplied a splendid broad light, a clear radiance, though perhaps rather chill and sinister. He was surprised to find that now he was in the mine he wasn’t at all afraid. He felt as excited as he had done when a child.

  But one of the differences was that he was much taller, and the chamber into which the shaft led, which he remembered as eight feet high, he now saw was a good deal less than this, not much more than six, for he could only just stand upright in it. He held the torch aloft and surveyed the cavern, the ‘rake’ from which the vein had been stripped, leaving the bare, rough, dark limestone. Out of the chamber led the coffin level tunnel which he and Peter had followed until they met the bad air. Since then he had learnt that this kind of cutting was called ‘coffin level profile’ because the tunnel was tapered at the roof and sole so as just to admit the human form. The miners hadn’t been as tall as he. In making his way along it, he had slightly to stoop.

  After a while, though he had forgotten this, the tunnel or winze in which he was met another at an acute angle to it. He had come along one of the prongs of a fork and now continued, holding his torch up in front of him, along the winze that was that fork’s handle. Inside the mine it was utterly silent. No doubt it had been so that other time, but the presence of Peter must have made it seem less so. Now he was aware of the most profound silence he had ever known. Outside on the moor, in the heart of the moor, it was quiet enough, but that silence was nothing to this. Out there the wind sighed or whistled, birds called, there was a constant, softly humming insect life, aircraft passed over. In here was the silence of the subterranean, that which is called the silence of the grave. It was not so much an absence of noise as a presence of total quiet. It was as if he had become stone deaf. He stood still for a moment, listening to the silence, living in a deafness where he
could hear the thoughts turning and proceeding inside his head.

  Down a passage to the left of him had been that wide gallery whose farther end was blocked by a fall. He walked a little way into the passage. It was just the same, nothing had changed in those seventeen years, not even a particle of stone, a fragment of shale, or so it seemed to him, had been added to or had fallen from that barrier of rubble. So it would still be, all of it, in a thousand years. Though the civilized world might be destroyed and the surface of the earth distorted, though the moor became a desert, this labyrinth would remain unchanged, neither added to nor depleted, scarcely a grain of dust moved, a maze of silence.

  It was not far from here that their candles had gone out. Stephen lit a candle and switched off the torch, He made his way along, holding the candle on the saucer. There was a tunnel here, a low-roofed winze, he and Peter hadn’t been into. It fell away from the main artery at a slight but steady downward gradient, and after a while Stephen noticed that the pieces of shale which formed the floor were damp, were moist, were now lying in half an inch of water like pebbles over which an incoming tide creeps.

  He held up the candle and looked ahead of him into a huge cavern. It was a hall in the mountain that surely must have occurred naturally, so lofty was its roof and so wide its walls. It had no floor. Or, rather, what floor it had was submerged under the lake of water, unruffled, motionless, black as pitch, that filled the cavern. Stephen switched on his torch again, and in the brighter light looked with awe at the still sheet of black water and the great vault above it. He couldn’t remember that he had ever before seen standing water in which no vegetation of any kind grew. But here there was not even a wisp of green scum, not a shred of moss or thin, drifting leaf, only the gleaming water, black as flint. He must be looking, he thought, at that part of the workings he had sometimes heard referred to as the Bottomless Pit.

  That meant he was in the George Crane Mine, a long way from Big Allen. Returning along the sloping passage, he relit his candle and turned left along the coffin level, but only for a few yards. The flame shrank, dwindled to a little jumping point of light, and went out. As a child he hadn’t noticed the bad air. He did now. There was a curious smell, like mingled coal gas and sulphur. Perhaps the water, not for a hundred years now pumped out of the levels, was combining with some chemical to produce a gas.

  He turned back the way he had come, putting the candle in his pocket and relying once more on the torch. Once again he stopped to listen to the silence, a silence which his footfalls disturbed, and as he stood he was aware suddenly that he was happy. The depression of the day before, the feeling that nothing had been right for him since the day he found Marianne Price’s body, had faded away to be replaced by this deep, blissful contentment. He would have found it hard to say, even at the moment he began his descent, why he had wanted to go into the mines. For adventure? Just to see if it was the same? The answer should have been because he would be happy there, to find happiness. In the timeless, motionless subterranean silence he savoured his happiness. There came to him a curious idea that if somehow he could always stay down here he would never be unhappy or suffer or be humiliated again. The sigh he gave sounded as a roar in the silence.

  He set off again, past the cavern where the rock had fallen, to where the tunnel forked. When he reached this point Stephen realized that he had no memory of which branch he had come up, the left one or the right. They looked exactly the same, winzes made in coffin level profile, narrow, with arched roofs and the sweeping marks of picks on their walls. One would lead him back to Apsley Sough and the dangling rope, the other into God knew what depths of Big Allen. And if he took the wrong one, would he realize in time to find his way back again?

  At school he remembered being told the story of the labyrinth at Knossos and the Minotaur. Theseus in those passages had brought a ball of string and paid it out behind him. Stephen wished he had had the forethought to do the same, for, although there was no risk of his encountering a monster, half-man, half-bull, he had no idea which tunnel to take in order to find his way back.

  Were he to lose himself and be unable to find the place where the rope was, no one would ever look for him here. He hadn’t even left his rucksack by the sough which might have indicated where he was and where it was, but had deliberately hidden it under the George Crane Coe, a good quarter of a mile away. He was happy down here under the ground but he didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want to roam the maze of levels until he grew exhausted, his candles burnt down, his torch battery spent, and lie down here to die in the dark …

  Moving the torch beam searchingly over the entrances to the two winzes and the tooling marks on their walls, he deliberated over which one to take, the left or the right. If he had had a coin he would have tossed it. He thought, if the matches are in my right-hand pocket I’ll go to the right. His left hand, the free one, went into the pocket on that side and found there only the candle and the saucer. Stephen hesitated no longer but began to make his way down the tunnel on the right-hand side.

  * * *

  For a long way there was nothing to show him if he was going in the direction of Apsley Sough. The walls of the winze, because of the way they had been tooled three centuries before, had a corrugated appearance. So had the walls of the tunnel he had come along, so had all the coffin levels. He couldn’t remember if the passage he had come along curved as much as this one seemed to, but that was the point, he couldn’t remember. However, he could go back. Very soon the tunnel, if it was the right tunnel, should enter the wider, though scarcely higher, chamber through which he had come into the mine. And here it was now. Powerful as his torch was, it couldn’t illuminate the passage for very far ahead, but now he could clearly see an ending of the tunnel and at the end a broader darkness.

  Stephen had never felt very afraid. With so much means of light at his disposal, with a good sense of direction — though it had seemed to let him down a few moments before — it was absurd really to suppose he could get lost or be trapped in the mine. He came to the end of the tunnel, swung his torch up to eye level for a sight of the suspended rope, and saw that though he had come into a chamber it was the wrong chamber. This wasn’t the cavern at the foot of Apsley Sough.

  But it wasn’t only this that fetched from him a gasp of astonishment. He had thought of the mine as bare, empty, unchanged, but this wasn’t so. Someone had been there before him, had made of this smallish, vaulted room in the rock a — what? Bedroom? Hiding place? Sanctuary? Wonderingly he played the torch beam across the walls, the floor, into the room’s furthest recesses. It was quite dry up here, without smell, the air fresh. At the far end of the chamber had been a fall, perhaps blocking exits. Between this and a great spur of limestone that jutted out from the wall, placed on the floor on a groundsheet, was an inflatable mattress, inflated, and on it a dark blue sleeping bag, zipped up and rolled. There were some clothes in a pile, a camouflage-pattern padded jacket, an aran sweater very much like one he had once owned himself, a pair of brown cord trousers and a pair in worn and dirty grey tweed. Set on an upturned wooden box were two candles, one hardly used, one a half-burnt stump, stuck in the necks of milk bottles.

  These things were by no means all the chamber contained. Stephen, who had stood for some moments at the end of the passage simply staring in, now stepped across the sacks which provided a rough carpet and lit both the candles. They made an eerie flare, sending up enormous shadows of themselves on to the walls. He looked round him slowly and with wonder. Whoever lived here, camped here, had provided himself with food and drink. In a cardboard box that had once contained two dozen cans of loganberries were a packet of biscuits, two tins of corned beef, a jar of pickled onions and four cans of beer still linked together in their plastic sling. Stephen squatted down to examine it all. In another box he found a small kettle and a can opener, in a plastic carrier dried milk and teabags and pieces of cutlery.

  There was one more item of furnishing in the chamber, on the
farther side of the spur of rock and half concealed by it. This was another cardboard grocer’s box, its lid of four flaps closed by folding the four separate pieces under and over each other. Stephen wondered if it contained pans for cooking or possibly more clothes. It intrigued him that the top of this box should have been so carefully closed while the others were left open. He lifted it but it felt very light.

  There must have been strong currents of air in the chamber, for the candles constantly guttered and flared. Sometimes the light jumped and ran up to the roof. Stephen undid the flaps on the cardboard box. Inside, in a loose nest of pink tissue paper, was a mass of small, essentially feminine objects, a hairslide, an eyebrow pencil, a black and white plastic bracelet, a perfume phial, a crumpled handkerchief initialled A, a tissue with lipstick on it, a tasselled pencil. There came from these things a cashew-like, powdery scent, very strange down here under the earth.

  Beneath the objects were more layers of pink paper, and under the paper lay two smooth hanks of shining hair, each a headful of hair cut off close to the scalp. One was a gleaming white-gold, the other of a darker corn colour, and each was carefully coiled in its bed like a sleeping snake.

  10

  So there was a Minotaur here, after all, a monster, half-man, half-animal, who inhabited this maze. The images of the candle flames and the arcs of light from them shuddered. It was as if someone had come into the chamber to move the air and the shadows. Stephen jumped, his heart racing, but there was no one there, there was nothing but the bed and the tins of food and the things in the box.

  He looked at the two coils of hair. Cautiously he put out his hand and lightly touched them. Then he lifted out the paler blonde hair and held it in his hands. Was this Marianne Price’s or Ann Morgan’s? He had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing which items in the pink tissue paper belonged to which girl except for the handkerchief with A on it. When, almost reluctantly, he had put the hair back and had closed the lid of the box again, he looked around the chamber for the knife or scissors which the man must have used, but he found nothing. It was going to be something to tell the police, all this, a gift of evidence as would rarely come their way. Stephen thought of Malm’s face when he coolly informed him of what he had found and of the respect even Troth would have to accord him now.