Master of the Moor

by Ruth Rendell

  She began a choking cry his hands immediately stifled. She fell forward, first into a kind of dreadful curtsey, then to her knees, then prone, face downwards to the floor. He was pulled with her, his hands anchored to the thin stalk of her neck, until he lay upon her body as he had never done in life. He lay and held on. It seemed to him, so locked were his hands and so enduring the clutch, that when he took them away her head must come away with them. And when at last he did release his grip, his fingers were swollen and his palms marked with weals as hands are that have carried heavy baggage.

  Stephen, huddled in his sodden clothes, rolled over on to his face and fell at once into a deep sleep.

  13

  The storm was over and rain was falling silently. The cat awakened Stephen. He awoke when Peach rubbed himself against his outflung hand. His sleep, he saw from his watch, had lasted an hour and a half and had restored him to a thinking aware being without deluding him as to what he had done. Tentatively, not looking, he reached out one finger and touched one of Lyn’s fingers. It was cold.

  Peach sat on the carpet between the living and the dead, washing his face. Stephen got up and went into the kitchen. The back door had been open all the time, had now blown wider open. Anyone could have come in. That made him understand what the future might hold. He filled a glass with water and drank it. He locked the back door. Then he went upstairs and took off his cold, damp and wrinkled clothes, put on a clean pair of jeans and a clean shirt, went into his study and fetched one of the cheap-offer sacks he had bought when he bought the rope and the torch. The glue on Tace’s head hadn’t held, and he sat there on the desk, contemplating the moor, with a hole in his skull like a shrapnel wound.

  He took the sack downstairs. From the top of the bookcase Peach watched him with placid, light-filled, yellow eyes, his pendent tail swaying gently. Stephen couldn’t stand that. He shut the cat in the kitchen and, keeping his eyes averted — for this time he wasn’t attracted by the sight of the dead as he had been by Marianne Price — he bundled the body into the sack and fastened the top with the hemp strings attached to it.

  It was five o’clock but much less dark. Lights no longer showed in any of the houses on the other side of the street. As he watched, Kevin’s car came splashing down Tace Way and turned into the driveway opposite. Kevin got out from the driver’s side, Mrs Newman from the other, and with coats pulled up over their heads they plunged to their front doors. Joanne and the baby hadn’t yet been brought home, Stephen noted. If they had it would have been difficult, almost impossible, for him to have explained Lyn’s absence.

  He lifted the sack in his arms and laid it between the settee and the wall, pushing the settee back against it so that it was entirely concealed. There, for a while, it could stay while he thought what to do. The attack, the murder, had broken nothing in the room but Lyn herself, had left no signs of what had happened but an overturned stool and a displaced cushion. He picked up the stool and put the cushion back, repeating the word ‘murder’ to himself. Although he could scarcely quite believe it yet, he had done murder, he had done what Rip had done and they were equal. He reached behind the settee and felt through the sacking the shape and firmness of the body in order to convince himself. It was true, he must believe, he had done murder.

  And having done what Rip did, why shouldn’t he dispose of his victim as Rip did of his, by laying the body on some chosen spot on the moor? Why shouldn’t it be the third in the slowly progressive series of murdered girls, long-haired, blonde and young?

  Even though this time it was his own wife who was dead, there could be no question of the police suspecting him. This time there would be no interrogation in a little stuffy room. Hadn’t Manciple told him he was exonerated from suspicion because his blood subgrouping wasn’t that of the killer of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan?

  Stephen sat down on the green velvet cushions under which Lyn’s body lay and began to think what he would do. His car was on the driveway with its bonnet pointing towards the road. Before putting the sack in under the hatchback it would probably be safer to wait until dark. Marianne Price had lain among the Foinmen, Ann Morgan in the powder house of the Duke of Kelsey’s Mine. This time should it be the George Crane Coe perhaps or Knamber Hole? It might be risky to attempt to carry a body across the broad and exposed Goughdale, and on a dark, wet, moonless night impossible.

  A sudden knocking on the back door made him jump. He looked quickly round the room to check that all was well. The cat slipped past him as he went into the kitchen. Through the frosted glass he could make out the shape of Mrs Newman. Suppose he hadn’t locked that door and the body had still lain where he left it while he slept!

  His mother-in-law came in, untying a plastic rainhat, tipping her umbrella into the sink.

  ‘I don’t know when I’ve seen rain like it. And all that lightning! My auntie was a one for storms, she used to cover up all the mirrors. In the war they had one of those Morrison shelters, Morrison or Anderson, whatever they call them, and after the war was over my auntie said to her husband they’d keep it so as she could get in it in a storm. Where’s Lyn?’

  ‘Well, actually, she went charging off into Hilderbridge before it all started and I expect she thought it was too jolly wet to try and get back.’

  ‘Why ever didn’t she take the car?’ Mrs Newman asked, but she didn’t pursue it. ‘I just popped over to say we won’t come in tomorrow, Stephen. Joanne’s being fetched home in the morning with Chantal, but Kevin says you and Lyn come over in the evening and I’m to say they’d love to see you. You haven’t seen my little grandbaby yet, have you?’

  Stephen said eagerly but without preparatory thought, ‘Good Lord, I’m terribly sorry but we’re going out tomorrow night.’

  Well might Mrs Newman look astonished. When had they ever gone out together on a Sunday night or on any other night, come to that? He said hastily, ‘To be perfectly honest with you, my uncle Stanley asked us after the funeral yesterday and in the circumstances I couldn’t say no.’

  He didn’t much like the way she still looked mystified but there was nothing he could do about it. A fresh and very useful idea came to him. He waited impatiently while she said that some other time would have to do and began listing, actually ticking off on her fingers, all the possible times in the forthcoming week that he and the infant Chantal might be introduced to each other.

  ‘I think I’ll take the car,’ he said when she paused for breath. ‘I’ll go down into town and see if I can’t pick Lyn up. Unless I’m very much mistaken she’ll be sitting in the bus shelter in North River Street, waiting for the six fifteen.’ It was wonderful the way inspiration came to him when most he needed it. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, ‘and at the same time I’ll take a piece of sculpture that got broken round to my father’s.’ Mrs Newman wasn’t surprised by anyone’s listing his future, petty intentions, it was the way she talked herself. ‘If anyone can repair it my father can,’ said Stephen.

  The rain continued to fall but it was no longer torrential. When Mrs Newman had gone he locked the back door after her, rolled out the settee and pulled the sack out from behind it. He found he could carry the sack quite easily. Lyn had weighed a few pounds less than a hundredweight.

  A light came on in the Newmans’ living room. They would watch him get into the car. He carried the sack out, holding it upright, the head upwards. Once, outside Byss Town Hall, he had seen a statue carried out, wrapped in sacking like that, to a waiting van. He lifted up the hatchback and laid the sack gently on the floor of the car. When he had locked the hatchback he went back into the house for the kitchen scissors and his small torch.

  The rain and the heavy clouds were maintaining a permanent twilight, but it would be a long time before it was dark enough to carry a body out on to the moor without being seen. As he drove away Stephen realized he would have to stay out and stay with the car for at least four hours. He drove north out of Chesney in the direction of Jackley. The car was going to be a
liability, he would have been better without the car, yet without it how could he ever have got the body out of the house?

  It was a little after six now and something like nine hours since he had had anything to eat. He hadn’t felt hungry but now he did. Only it was impossible to use up some of the time by eating a meal because it was unthinkable to leave the car. He went into the last garage on the road outside Jaekley and bought five pounds’ worth of petrol and then he turned back and drove towards Pertsey, parking the car in the shadow of Tower Foin.

  Time passed very slowly. He hadn’t even brought anything to read. The rain enclosed him in a dome of reeded glass. Sometimes other cars passed along the road, splashing through the pools of water, their lights gleaming palely like dull reptilian eyes. At seven he moved off again, not because he had an idea of where to go but because the water was rising up the car’s wheels. With his particular cargo, it felt safer to be on the move. There was no water lying in the newly paved Jaekley municipal car park, so he sat there for a further half-hour. Gradually the rain was slackening. It had become a misty drizzle, hanging in swathes of grey over the moor. Stephen drove down the Hilderbridge road, concentrating now on where to put the body when dark came.

  It was a question of how to avoid the car being seen while he positioned the body the way Rip would have done and in the sort of place Rip would have chosen. If he took the car into the bridlepath in the Vale of Allen it would be seen by anyone passing along this main road. Besides, the path would have become a quagmire. He might hide the car in one of the lanes around Loomlade, but how to carry the body away from there without risking being seen? There seemed nothing for it but to attempt the Banks of Knamber with its cover of birch trees. At the crossroads he turned left into the Thirlton road, but without even leaving the car he could see that this plan was impossible. The banks themselves, a thousand little round hillocks they said had once been burial mounds, were dry enough but the valleys between them lay under water — a thousand little hills with a thousand little lakes between.

  Wherever he left the car tonight it was going to have to be on a metalled road. He drove through Thirlton and took the moorland road that ran through Bow Dale and under the lea of Knamber Foin. The road wasn’t much frequented but it was in use and it would be too much to hope that no other vehicles would pass along it that evening. But Stephen had remembered a possible place to hide the car which would be safer than any bridlepath or copse.

  Apart from the workings in Goughdale, the only other mine on Vangmoor, Stoney Bow Mine, had been here in Bow Dale to the east of the foin. No surface evidence remained except for the portal of the incline level which had been used to allow the access of horses and was known to local people as the ‘old pony level’. The road passed over the top of it, its pediment of three stone blocks, engraved with the date 1819, forming a short length of low wall along the roadside.

  Stephen got out of the car, which he had parked on the ‘bridge’ over the portal, and clambered down the slope. It was so high up here that most of the water had flowed away, not into the level, which was blocked some ten feet inside the tunnel by a concrete barrier, but down the drainage sough that fell away into the dale. The ground was wet but not waterlogged. He saw at once, though, that he couldn’t bring the car down here without leaving the grossest evidence of tyre marks imprinted in the mud.

  No other cars had passed. He had kept one eye on the road all the time he had been down there. Now as he climbed out again he surveyed the whole length of empty road winding away on either side of the ‘bridge’, the thin twisty white road like a piece of string that contorts itself as it falls. There were no cars in sight and not a figure. It would be a long while yet before dark, but what difference would darkness make if there was no one to see? He couldn’t put the car into the old pony level but what was to stop him putting the body there?

  Only the risk of a car passing and the driver seeing his car there and later on remembering. The portal under the road was exactly the sort of place Rip himself would have selected if he instead of Stephen had committed this third murder. The Foinmen, the powder house, the old pony level, they seemed a logical, a balanced, sequence. But if a car came by? He could do it in a moment. He could see so far from where he stood, he could see if a car was coming five minutes off. There was nothing in either direction, only the low-hanging cloud, the drawn-out dusk in which the white string of road, curling and twisting more on the left than on the right, glimmered with a greater clarity than in sunshine. He could see if a car was coming five minutes off but he could do the deed in less time than that.

  He was nervous, though, lifting up the hatch and lugging out the sack. The road was still empty. He walked on the grass, on the bent-over tussocks of long grass, to avoid leaving footprints, but he plunged down the slope for all that, taking long strides, holding the body in the sack slung over his shoulder, and when he was a few feet out from the stone-coped arch, he threw it with all his strength into the tunnel opening. There was no time now to take it out of the sack or perform that other task which must be done. He scrambled up the bank, expecting all the time to see the car he had missed, the car that had been hiding round a bend in the white road, the car that had been one minute and not more than five off, hurtle over the ‘bridge’ ahead of him.

  But there was nothing. The road was still empty and the gleam on it was fading as the dusk deepened. He encountered his first car ten minutes later as he was driving into Thirlton, and the owner of it who was talking to the person in the passenger seat hadn’t particularly noticed him, he was sure of that. There was some sort of meeting or social event going on in Thirlton village hall. Its car park was crowded with cars and so was the road outside it. Stephen left his among them and set off to walk the four or five miles back to the old pony level, keeping to the moorland paths and avoiding the road.

  It was the region of Vangmoor least familiar to him. But he took the long, low, rubble-crowned crest of Knamber Foin as his landmark. There was no moon, but no matter how dense the sky and how dark it grew, the irregular, tumbled shape of the foin never quite became invisible, but was always a deeper blackness against the dark. And as deep a silence prevailed. For all that distance he saw only two cars, saw them by their lights that threw up arcs into the indigo air.

  When he reached the portal to the pony level, coming up to it from below out of Bow Dale, he put on his torch. It gave a poor thin light. He had grown used to the other one and had forgotten how inadequate the small one was. But he didn’t need much light, not really. The scissors were in his other pocket.

  He knelt down on the shale splinters, the small flat stones, that formed the floor of the tunnel, untied the mouth of the sack and pulled the sack down off the body. It lay face-downwards, the hair which cloaked it colourless and dully lustrous in the weak little beam of light.

  A car passed over the ‘bridge’. Stephen froze. He switched off the torch and knelt there in the pitch darkness. But the car wasn’t going to stop or even slacken speed. When Stephen thought about the geography of the place, the way the road passed right over where he was as a road might over a railway tunnel, he knew he or his little spot of light couldn’t possibly have been seen. For all that, it was unnerving.

  After a little while he put on the torch again. He took the scissors out of his pocket and clipped off all the hair close to the scalp. Another car passed along the road above his head and he felt the roof of the tunnel rumble. He twisted the single thick hank of hair into a skein, laid it in the bottom of the sack and rolled the sack up around it.

  14

  The morning was dull and grey, the air still. Before leaving the house Stephen phoned Dadda, intending to tell him not to come for lunch as Lyn wasn’t well. But Dadda himself had entered that phase of his depression which was a kind of dark night of the soul. He picked up the phone but he didn’t speak. Stephen only knew the phone had been answered because the ringing stopped. Then he heard breathing and catches of breath.


  ‘Dadda? Stephen.’

  The voice when it came sounded infinitely remote and small. ‘You needn’t expect me, I shan’t be coming.’

  ‘Right. Well, you know best, Dadda.’

  ‘Aye. I know I’d be bloody better off dead.’

  Peach was sitting on the kitchen counter, staring at the fridge. Stephen remembered he hadn’t fed him the night before. He opened a can of cat food and Peach, though never quite abandoning a calm stateliness, fell upon it. The cat would have to go, Stephen thought. The kindest thing would be to have it destroyed, better than finding it yet another home. He’d see about it tomorrow.

  He took the hair out of the sack and put it into the pocket of his zipper jacket. Then it occurred to him that if by some mischance the house and his clothes were to be searched, it would look bad for him to have a stray blonde hair found inside his jacket pocket, He wrapped the hair in a length of plastic clinging film and put it in his rucksack with the sack, the rope and the torch. Kevin was getting his car out to go down to St Ebba’s and fetch Joanne and the baby home. Stephen waited until he had gone and then he too left Tace Way.

  The moor, as if its thirst had been quenched, lay calm and sleepy under the low, still mass of cloud. The roads were dry now and the surface of the moor appeared so, except that sometimes where Stephen trod a puddle of water would well up around his boot. He met a fisherman coming away from the Hilder with his tackle and an umbrella. Along the Reeve’s Way two boys were walking with an Alsatian. People were easing their way back onto Vangmoor, but today or tomorrow when Lyn’s body was found it would be cleared again and this time surely for good. That would be the final scouring that must make it over exclusively to Rip and himself.