The Body in the Beck

by Joanna Cannan

  ‘But that is not possible. A murderer has always some veakness in his character. A strong character has no need to kill. He vill find some other way to arrange his difficulties.’

  ‘There’s a lot in that, Gerda, especially as the murdered man was a blackmailer — ein Erpresser. That’s not public property yet, but the detective told Meade and Meade told Worthington and Worthington told me this morning at breakfast. It’s highly probable that Worthington, like most of us, has something he would prefer to keep hidden. He’s unmarried and certainly not a ‘queer’ — I’d bet my boots it’s someone’s wife he’s involved with. At once he becomes blackmailable. But I can’t see him allowing himself to be pushed around by anyone. ‘Publish and be damned’ would be his line. He’s got a lot he can’t lose in this world; like most of these mountaineers, he’s a bit of a mystic — ein Mystiker; in a hopeless mess, he’d go off to Tibet and live in a monastery.’

  Gerda said, ‘A blackmailer makes more than one enemy. Some person not known to us may have followed him here to kill him.’

  ‘That raises the question: what was he doing here? I suppose blackmailers take nice holidays like other people, but I wouldn’t expect them to choose the Lake District — I’d look for them in luxury hotels at Blackpool or Brighton. If he was brought here, it was by someone who knows the place. That brings us back to Worthington. Even the pool — he knows it better than anyone.’

  Gerda sighed, ‘Yes, it is strange about the pool. Vy vas the body carried all up that so steep hill when it could with less exertion have been dropped into the lake?’

  ‘The answer to that is that this lake is extremely shallow — look, Gerda, it’s obvious from the reeds. It’s no more than a mere, and I’ve no doubt that in fine weather it dries up with remarkable speed. No, the odd thing is that the body wasn’t dumped in the big pool below the ghyll. The kids from the Youth Hostel use it — there’s nothing deep enough in the High Beck — but that again is local knowledge.’

  ‘There are men at the farms; there are — nicht wahr? — people living at the house among the trees. There is our landlord.’

  ‘One supposes that the detective has questioned them and they’ve got alibis. I don’t know the farmers, but I should imagine that from a blackmailer’s point of view they’re scarcely worth while. Hardwick was saying that the woman at the Hall is quite elderly, with an invalid son, but she’s got a strong pair of foreign servants. I suppose they’ve got alibis.’

  ‘If it is Vorthington, I shall veep,’ said Gerda. ‘Look, there he is, so kindly teaching that Carey. See the rope and Carey on the slab — he looks like a fly.’

  ‘More like a spider,’ said Doctor Ormonde. ‘This must be where we leave the road, Gerda. Here’s the track, look, and there on that rock is a grandstand just made for us . . .’

  *

  III

  ‘I’m stuck,’ shouted Sebastian. ‘Pull, Francis, pull.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Francis, looking down from a grassy platform above the slabs. ‘There’s a perfectly good knee-hold on your left. Let go of that moss you’re clutching, push yourself out from the rock and get your left knee up. Come on now.’

  ‘A knee-hold,’ gasped Sebastian, ‘is like patriotism. It’s not enough.’

  ‘If I tell you it’s enough, it is enough,’ said Francis. ‘But you can’t get your knee up while you’re pressing yourself against the rock. You’ve got a perfectly good toe-hold with your right foot. For Christ’s sake let go of that moss.’

  Gingerly Sebastian abandoned the crevice which he imagined was his last link with life.

  ‘Now pull your knee up and shift your weight,’ instructed Francis. ‘Christ Almighty, man, don’t snatch like that.’

  ‘No handhold,’ yelled Sebastian.

  ‘You and your handholds! There’s a foot-hold now on your left. Got it? Now call to mind that you’re a biped, Mr Carey, and stand upright.’

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘Yes, there. That’s right. Now you can look around and consider your situation.’

  ‘It looks dam’ hopeless to me.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s most enviable. You have two choices. Turning slightly sideways and grasping that whitish knob of rock with your left hand, you can traverse out to your right and look for a crack under the overhang . . .’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘. . . or you can come straight up to me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘My dear fellow, there’s a plethora of holds. It’s a veritable staircase. You could walk up if you had the necessary confidence. Your trouble is that you hang on so hard that you lose all rhythm. Now come on, right up to me without stopping.’

  ‘I’ve got to start first,’ said Sebastian. ‘I can see some handholds further up, but there’s nothing I can reach. Perhaps I’d better try the traverse.’

  ‘You’ll find that much worse,’ said Francis. ‘Look, I’ll come down to you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’m not at all secure and if you come down you can’t hold me. If you’d give a little pull . . .’

  ‘I won’t do anything of the sort — a most improper suggestion. Look, under your left elbow the rock bulges: put your palm on it, fingers down, and shove yourself up till you can reach one of those nice handholds.’

  Sebastian said, ‘I don’t feel at all firm. Have you got me?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got you.’

  A few moments later Sebastian scrambled on the wide ledge of grass and sat down panting. ‘Sorry to be such a drip. I suppose that Brown chap would have walked up,’ he said jealously.

  ‘He’s a better gymnast than you are,’ replied Francis, coiling the rope. ‘He’s not too good on ice; that’s his trouble.’

  ‘Would I be any good on ice?’ enquired Sebastian.

  ‘You’d better join me in the Alps and see what you’re like in the Long Vacation.’

  ‘Oh, could I? That would be simply marvellous. Isn’t Brown going?’

  ‘He only gets a fortnight, and I shall be there for six weeks. You’ll have to come at different times unless I can get hold of Melchoir. With the Swiss franc as it is — Look, there are the ladies.’

  ‘Blast them,’ said Sebastian, who preferred to be alone with his idol.

  ‘No, bless them. I like them very much. And tea will be most pleasant,’ said Francis.

  He slung the rope over his shoulder and led the way along the ledge to the knoll where Dr Ormonde and Gerda were unpacking a knapsack. Dr Ormonde said, ‘That was a very entertaining show you put on for us. We heard every word too. What wind there was was in the right direction.’

  ‘I’m afraid I made a muck of it,’ said Sebastian sulkily.

  Gerda said, ‘You climbed vell. It looked very difficult.’

  Dr Ormonde quoted, ‘And we’ll charitably hope t’was assistance only moral you were getting from the rope.’

  Sebastian bridled.

  Francis said, ‘Oh yes. It was entirely his own work.’ And ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the bakelite beaker of tea and the egg sandwich which Gerda offered him, sitting down among the blowing grasses and wondering why he had had to fall in love with a woman who didn’t care for mountains. It would have been too much to expect from life that she should have been a climber, but in the grand old Victorian days, when the Alps had practically belonged to the universities, dons’ wives had accompanied the annual exodus, and those who didn’t actually climb had enjoyed the scenery, the mountainy inns and the high level walking. Or hadn’t they? Was it significant that nowadays everyone rushed off in cars to the South of France, a woman’s country? Well, that needn’t worry him. Harriet and he were washed up, anyhow. Never for him the loved one and dawn on Monte Rosa, noon on the long, hot Dauphiné valleys, silent night and moonlight on the Meige. ‘What?’ he said, realizing that Dr Ormonde had spoken to him.

  She said, ‘Sorry to intrude, as our Price would say. I only remarked on the odd taste of the people living
in the house down there smothered with trees. Think of the view they’re missing.’

  ‘Someone said it was an elderly woman and her invalid son,’ said Sebastian. ‘Invalid is often a euphuism for imbecile. I expect the trees are there to conceal the moping and mowing from the public eye.’

  ‘Brighter surroundings might do him goot,’ said Gerda. ‘Look, see the figures! There, beyond the trees. He is not so imbecile. He valks to the road with his mamma.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think that was him,’ said Sebastian. ‘I imagine him tall and shambling. That’s a stocky, middle-aged man.’

  ‘The servants probably,’ said Dr Ormonde. ‘It’s their evening out and they’re rushing to catch the bus at Holwith.’

  ‘They’ll have to rush, then,’ said Francis, looking at his watch.

  ‘And now,’ said Sebastian, ‘night falls on the silent house. Save for the mopings and mowings of the imbecile, all is quiet and still.’

  ‘Redundant,’ said Francis.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sebastian. ‘Now she is alone with her thoughts, the long, long thoughts of a woman duped and betrayed. As a young and innocent girl . . .’

  Dr Ormonde said, ‘There aren’t any any more.’

  ‘And how novelists must miss them,’ said Francis. ‘Really, with no innocence to be seduced and no finger of scorn to be pointed, writing novels must be damn difficult today.’

  ‘I vill try,’ said Gerda. ‘I vill write a novel, but none of you vill read it, for in Cherman it must be.’

  ‘Make it a roman policier,’ said Sebastian. ‘It’ll save you a lot of bother — you’ve got your plot and your characters here all cut and dried. You needn’t wait for the finish either — it’s sure to be dull. And you must have some love interest or the book won’t sell. Suppose you had Francis and he was in love with Gloria . . .’

  ‘But that would not be in character. Mr Vorthington, I think, would lof visely and not too veil.’

  ‘Well, of course you’d have to make him younger than he is,’ said Sebastian. ‘What do you think, Dr Ormonde? Would it be out of character?’

  ‘Badly. But not for Gerda’s reason. What about yourself, Sebastian?’

  ‘I’ve never been in love,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘Never in lof?’ cried Gerda. ‘Oh, you poor man! How hard you vill fall one day!’

  ‘I’m getting cold,’ said Dr Ormonde. ‘I tink I go ’ome. Shall we go down by the quarry and look at the Elizabethan architecture on the way?’

  ‘Oh, do let’s,’ said Sebastian. ‘It does look so mouldering and I do so love decay.’

  ‘And corpses and gibbets and Housman. Nice, isn’t it, Ormonde, to find someone really being their age? I’m cold too,’ said Francis, rising and handing Gerda’s knapsack to Sebastian.

  In single file they slithered down the sheep track which skirted the quarry. It was Francis who remarked on the queer tooth of rock rising from the hillside above the first of the larches. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘In all the years I’ve been coming to Berrinsdale I’ve never noticed that, yet last summer I spent a by-day climbing things just like it at Arolla. I’m going up.’

  ‘Alvays he must go up,’ complained Gerda.

  ‘He seeks the stars,’ said Dr Ormonde.

  ‘I shall get a better view than you of the Elizabethan architecture,’ said Francis. ‘I’ll take the rope, shall I? And then any of you who likes can come up — assuming it ‘goes’.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Dr Ormonde. ‘A nice, sensible chimney is one thing, but a tooth sticking out of a wood is another.’

  Sebastian said, ‘I couldn’t agree more. It looks positively eldritch,’ and, watching Francis, ‘I see what he means about rhythm. He just flows up. My progress is a series of grabs and snatches.’

  The ‘tooth’ of rock, some sixty feet in height, was bare except for a crack, starting at the base and petering out under an overhang, in which ferns were growing and moss and a twisty stunted oak tree. The summit, an area of roughly twenty square feet, was clothed with bilberry plants and two small wind-tormented birches. Francis had chosen what he afterwards described as the north-east arrête: he started along a flake of rock, surmounted a ‘nose,’ hand-traversed out on the face to avoid an overhang, ascended a ladder of footholds provided by the weathered edges of a perpendicular crack, returned by small footholds across a slab to the ridge, where good holds in sloping rock now led him easily to the top. He shouted to the others, ‘Coming up?’ but they called back, ‘Not on your life’ and ‘No bloody fear’ and ‘Danke schön,’ and Dr Ormonde and Gerda began to stroll slowly towards the Old Road. Sebastian lay down with his head comfortably pillowed on Gerda’s knapsack.

  Francis looked about him. With the upward slope to the Howe and the sixty feet of his eyrie, he was level with the fantastic chimneys of the Hall. The property was ringed by a drystone wall, fallen in places; inside the wall an unkempt lawn, on which a once-magnificent cedar had fallen, stretched to a flagged terrace under the mullioned windows of the east façade. To the south of the house lay the kitchen garden with unpruned espaliers, shattered glasshouses and rotting sheds. Across the orchard on the north was the stable block: the clock in the tower was stopped, the dovecot in ruins; an old well in the centre of the yard had lost its hat. Francis thought that if ever the property came up for sale it would be amusing to buy and restore it: he would cut down the wood at the west of the house and replace it with paddocks — half the kitchen garden could go that way too, then, as far as the grounds went, once they were cleared it wouldn’t be an expensive place to keep up . . . you’d need a full-time man and a motor mower. The house itself was probably riddled with dry rot, and no doubt the most habitable of the rooms and get the most habitable of the rooms and get the repairs done gradually . . . minor repairs and the interior decorating you could do yourself and the people you asked to stay would be glad to help on bye-days and in hopeless weather . . . David fancied himself as a handyman . . . you would have to restrain Sebastian from painting murals. It was a fine idea, but when, if ever, would the place come up for sale? . . . How old was this elderly woman? . . .

  Francis stared at the windows, ghoulishly hoping to see a fragile, failing figure, but there seemed no sign of life about the beautiful, melancholy building, and thinking, I sha’n’t be able to provide it with children, but at least I’ll have a couple of dogs of some stately breed, and I’ll have Herdwicks in my paddocks, he turned to go, but stopped, hearing the sound of a heavy door opened and catching sight of a figure emerging from the north side of the house and hurrying across the stable yard. It wasn’t the old lady whom Francis had desired to see; it was evidently the son, and he wasn’t the imbecile that Sebastian had suggested: he was a hefty-looking young man and didn’t shamble at all and would inherit the property and hang on to it.

  Wait . . . The chap might be sane enough, but it was queer what he was doing. Under his arm he carried some long narrow object with a sack draped carelessly over it. As he walked, he looked suspiciously about him, and Francis, scarcely knowing why, but getting a general impression of furtiveness, dropped into the bilberries on his stomach. Arrived at the well, the man stopped, looked and listened; Francis now expected to witness some act of cruelty — drowning kittens or an old dog . . . the boards — if boards they were — might be used to keep the hapless animal below water . . . but the sack looked remarkably empty. Now the man — or youth, since his yellow hair was shining in the sun, which would be gone in a moment behind Russet Crag’s long shoulder — grasped the cover of the well, whisked it aside and, quickly shaking off the sack, cast the object it had concealed into the well and in a fraction of a second had replaced the cover. He looked round him again; then ran for the house as fast as his long legs would carry him.

  Francis lay still. He had seen a queer thing and, though it was none of his business, it intrigued him. That the son of this dark and decaying house was an imbecile was no more than a flight of Sebastian’s fancy, but it wasn’t the action
of a sane man to take the number plates of a car and throw them into a well and make off as though the devil himself were after him. Was the fellow a car thief? Was he covering up after an accident? ‘God!’ said Francis aloud, recalling that, according to Hardwick, the detective had asked about a car, meaning the car in which the murdered man had come, or been brought, into Berrinsdale. The arm of coincidence was a long one; people continually rid themselves of junk; but it would be a whale of a coincidence if at the very time a car was sought by the police — an unusual event in remote and innocent Berrinsdale — an inhabitant of the dale should toss a pair of number plates down a well, in itself an unusual action.

  Francis wriggled across the bilberries and, though he had planned a descent on the south side of the rock, went down by the same route by which he had ascended. Sebastian was asleep. Francis prodded him in the ribs with the toe of his climbing boot and he wakened, saying, ‘What’s the matter?’ Francis quoted, ‘Nothing wrong at present, you child of an anxious generation. Come on; we’re going back to dinner,’ and Sebastian said, ‘Oh hell! I wanted to see you come down. Which way did you come? I wish you’d hollered.’

  ‘I lost interest and came down the same way. Come on,’ said Francis and walked off rapidly in preference to hushing Sebastian. The evening air was calm and still and though — as Francis knew all too well — Sebastian’s habitual mutter was hard to hear unless you were walking beside him, Francis’s own voice carried far, and if he whispered he could scarcely fail to arouse Sebastian’s always lively curiosity. When they were well away from the Hall, walking beside the reedy margin of the mere, the dale now in shadow, but sunlight falling still on the shoulder of Stone Fell, and Sebastian did so wish he could improve his rock work, Francis delivered a short lecture on balance and fell silent again, asking himself whether it was his business to bring chaps to the gallows, wondering if it were the ulterior motive of self-preservation which was urging him to telephone Price in London, and his dislike of Price which told him to say nothing. With Francis, mountaineering had superimposed on a dreamy nature the habit of decision; it humiliated him to find himself dithering, searching this way and that, like Sebastian hunting for handholds . . .’