Master of the Moor Read online

  Lyn didn’t laugh. She had heard it all before but he always seemed to forget he had told her. His voice went up in pitch.

  ‘Good grief, when I think of some creature coming onto the moor and doing a vile thing like this! It makes my blood boil, it’s sacrilege!’

  But Lyn said quietly, ‘I wish it hadn’t had to be you who found her.’

  2

  There were Sundays when Dadda didn’t come to lunch, when depression kept him from stirring out of doors. His depressions were an illness, not merely a feeling of lowness or irritability. They dragged him down into horrors he said no one could imagine. But between bouts, in a precarious euphoria that to others seemed like dourness, he drove up from Hilderbridge in Whalbys’ van.

  The depression of last week had lifted like a fever passing when the patient sleeps or asks for food. Dadda looked shattered by it, though, bruised under the eyes. He wore his one good suit, grey with a white chalk stripe, and he had brought with him Lyn’s birthday present in an unwieldy brown paper parcel. He didn’t kiss Lyn, he never touched women, or men either for that matter, but he seemed to make a principle of shrinking from the touch of women.

  Lyn unwrapped a small round table, high-polished, with curved legs and a top carved in a design of a chestnut leaf and cluster of spiny fruits.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Dadda. You are good to us.’

  ‘Don’t go ruining it with hot cups.’

  ‘What a lovely piece of work!’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Early Victorian, isn’t it?’

  ‘Late,’ said Dadda. ‘You ought to be able to see that with half an eye. You’re supposed to be in bloody trade.’

  Lyn’s parents and Joanne and Kevin always came over on Sunday afternoons. Mr Newman was a small quiet man, half the size of Dadda, probably literally half his weight. He ran a finger along the carving.

  ‘We shan’t be able to compete with that.’

  ‘It’s not a question of competing,’ said his wife. ‘Lyn knows she’s getting a cardigan, anyway. Have to wait till Wednesday.’ She had brought two Sunday papers with her. Everyone had a paper except Dadda who never read anything. Mrs Newman’s face was round and healthy and high-coloured like Joanne’s. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘but in a place like this, a sort of open space, forest, moors, anywhere that’s National Trust, you always get killings. It’s a wonder we haven’t had them before.’

  Joanne said, ‘What d’you mean “them”, Mum? There’s been one young girl killed so far as I know.’

  ‘So far. You get one now and another in a couple of weeks and folks are scared to go out or we women are. It’ll be one of those pathologicals.’

  ‘Psychopaths.’

  ‘Whatever they call them. Maniacs, we used to say.’

  ‘A proper ghoul, isn’t she, Tom?’ said Mr Newman.

  Dadda didn’t answer but gave his awkward humourless grin. He sat with his huge shoulders hunched up. He was used to company but hopeless in it, he never improved. Many men are as tall as or taller than their fathers and Stephen was six feet, but Dadda still towered above him. He filled his armchair, all long, gaunt, bent limbs, that somehow suggested a cornered spider. All but he wanted to know how Stephen had got on with the police.

  ‘I’m their number one suspect. No, it’s a fact.’

  ‘He’s exaggerating,’ Lyn said.

  Dadda spoke. ‘Beats me why he had to stick his neck out.’

  ‘Once I’d seen her,’ Stephen said, ‘I had to report it.’

  ‘I’d have shut me eyes and carried straight on. It all comes of this traipsing about the moor.’

  ‘Good grief, you sound just like the police! Can’t anyone understand a man can love the countryside? It’s a simple enough pleasure in all conscience, harmless enough, I’d have thought.’

  Kevin winked. ‘I tell folks Lyn’s not a grass widow, she’s a moor widow.’

  A grim smile moved Dadda’s mouth.

  Mrs Newman said, ‘I should think this’d put you off anyway, Stephen. You won’t want to be up there with this maniac about. I don’t like that word widow, Kevin, that’s not very nice.’

  Joanne and Kevin held hands on the sofa. ‘I knew that girl, that Marianne Price, Mum, did I tell you? Well, you must have known her, Stephen. She was at the cash desk in the Golden Chicken.’

  ‘The Market Burger House they call it now, Joanne.’

  ‘Whatever they call it. Don’t you get your lunch there, Mr Whalby?’

  ‘Me? I keep me feet under me own table. Stephen goes out for his dinner, he’s young.’

  ‘There you are, Stephen, like I said, you must have known her, you must have seen her hundreds of times.’

  ‘Good Lord, Joanne, how would I know? She’d have looked a bit different, I can tell, from what she was like lying up there with her hair all cut off.’

  Joanne gave a little scream and put her hands up to her own abundant blonde hair.

  ‘She won’t be there tomorrow,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if they were to close tomorrow out of respect. I remember when you and your brother were little, Lyn, Joanne wasn’t born, old Mr Crane over at Loomlade got killed in his car and they closed the electric shop two days out of respect and the branch in Byss.’

  But next day the Market Burger House was open for business as usual. Stephen took particular note of it after he had taken Lyn to the Mootwalk and parked the car in the market square. The restaurant was the only one in Hilderbridge, in the Three Towns probably, that served breakfast. People were breakfasting, some were just having coffee. An Indian girl in a blue sari was at the cash desk in Marianne Price’s place. Stephen went across the square to Whalbys.

  Dadda lived alone in the three-storey house in King Street, a narrow foinstone house, one room deep and heated with oilstoves. The workshop was the coachhouse next door and the room above it. Over the double doors, painted dark brown, was a sign in gilt lettering that said: Whalby and Son. Restorers of fine furniture. The sign was peeling and you couldn’t read it from the other side of the square but the Three Towns knew who Whalbys’ were without that. A Whalby and his son had been there for as long as anyone could remember and Dadda used sometimes to boast on his good days that Alfred Osborn Tace had himself been a customer and that Whalbys had recovered the seats of the Hepplewhite chairs at Chesney Hall.

  Stephen said hallo to Dadda before going upstairs to start work on the three-piece suite they had brought in on Friday. Dadda was smoking. Between his nutcracker lips was one of the thin twisted little cigarettes he made himself. The frames of the furniture were sound, a lot better than the kind of stuff they manufactured nowadays. He began tearing off the old, almost ragged, tapestry and prising out tacks. The scent of tobacco was wafted up the stairs. Dadda only smoked when he was contented and then he would get through forty or fifty a day, bringing on a cough and staining his fingers yellow-brown. Dadda might have been a lot different, Stephen thought, if his wife hadn’t deserted him. Or was it because he was the way he was that she had walked out one day when Dadda was at work and he at school, leaving a note on the kitchen table and the remains of the week’s housekeeping money? He had been too young to read the note but he could still remember how that table had looked when he came in, its top at the time the height of his own shoulder. He could still remember the piece of folded exercise book paper, the three pound notes and the pile of coins at eye level.

  Dadda never spoke of her directly. When, a long time ago now, Stephen had tried to call him Dad or Father and drop the babyish name, he had shouted that Stephen was all he had in the world and couldn’t he have a little bit of kindness and call him by the one name that meant something? And sometimes he had clasped Stephen to him, almost crushing the breath out of his body, muttering his tortured affection. It was only in such oblique ways that he referred to his state of deserted, now divorced, husband. There were no photographs of her in the house in King Street, and the photographs Stephen had seen he had wrested out of old Mrs Naulls. He gu
essed she had been named after Lady Irene Nevil’s daughter in Wrenwood. She had Tace’s colouring. She was slender and very fair with long golden hair and as unlike as possible any Naulls that had ever been.

  The wind had dropped and a cold whitish mist from the river lingered in patches. Lyn walked across the cobbles and over the Old Town bridge. This morning the water was clear and silvery, chuckling a little as it lapped over the smooth, oval, brown stones. A pair of swans drifted down towards the town centre.

  She was early for work as usual because Dadda liked Stephen to be in soon after nine. She whiled away time walking along the Mootwalk, an ancient wooden cloister that faced the Hilder and under which was a row of shops: an optician’s, a hairdresser’s, a wine shop, a jeans and sweater boutique, a newsagent, the pet shop. There was a pale green sweater in the window of Lorraine’s she thought she might buy. That sort of green, a clear, pale jade, was her colour. The newsagent’s Sunday paper placard was still outside: ‘Local Girl in Moors Murder’.

  A few cars passed along the cobbles or parked, a few people on foot were on their way to work, not many. The great influx would be north of the river, the other side of town where Cartwright-Cageby’s mill employed 60 per cent of the working population of Hilderbridge. Down here it was always quieter, it was older, it was peaceful. The ramparts of the moor could be seen in the distance, its peaks blurred against a leaden sky, their lower slopes wrapped in mist.

  Lights came on in the Mootwalk shops as one by one they began to open. Out of the pet shop window a cat looked at Lyn with champagne-coloured eyes. It was in a wire pen on top of some tortoises and under a pair of lop-eared rabbits. The cat looked at Lyn and opened its mouth in a soundless mew.

  Lyn didn’t much like the old man who kept the shop. He ogled her and once he had come out and asked her if she would like a dear little puppy dog to keep her warm in the night. He wasn’t there this morning. Instead, there was a man of about her own age, no older, tidying up the cartons of fish food on a shelf behind the counter. She pushed the door and went in.

  ‘I’ve been looking at the cat in your window.’

  He came out to her. ‘Attractive colour, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wanted a ginger kitten, but it’s not exactly ginger.’

  ‘More beige, wouldn’t you say? Or even peach. It’s not a kitten either, it’s more than half-grown. Someone brought it in on Saturday and said she had to go to Africa and would I take it.’

  Lyn was indignant. ‘That’s awful, taking it to a pet shop. You wouldn’t know who might buy it. It would be kinder to have it put down.’

  ‘Oh, come. Not this pet shop. Not under my management.’

  Lyn glanced up at him. She had trained herself not to look at men, a restraint that wasn’t difficult to practise in this case. He was rather nondescript, not very tall, thin, mousy-haired, as unlike dark handsome Stephen as could be. But what on earth made her compare them?

  ‘Are you the manager? What’s happened to Mr Bale?’

  ‘In hospital, having a hernia operation. I’m his nephew. I’m looking after things for him.’ The cat mewed, not soundlessly this time. He opened the pen and lifted it out in his arms. ‘He’s a fine healthy cat, a neutered tom. I’d estimate his age at around nine months.’

  ‘I wanted a kitten,’ Lyn said. ‘Isn’t it strange the way everyone’s got kittens to dispose of when you don’t want them and none when you do?’

  ‘Have this one and save him from a fate worse than death.’

  Lyn held the cat. It felt tense and afraid. Its eyes seemed to her full of tragic puzzlement. She made up her mind quickly, the way she always did. ‘I will have him,’ she said. ‘I can’t take him now, though. I have to go to work, Gillman’s the optician’s. I’ll come back at one when I finish.’

  She phoned Stephen.

  ‘How much does he want for it?’

  ‘D’you know, I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Never mind, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘as long as it’s what you want. You’re to have just what you want.’

  He went back to the armchairs. Dadda wouldn’t have a phone extension upstairs, preferring to summon him with a shout when it rang. He got his way in most things, had despotically guided Stephen’s life, had chosen Lyn for him, before that had picked him out of this school, pushed him into that, as soon as he could removed him altogether from academic threat. Stephen would have liked further education, though he hadn’t expected Oxford or Cambridge or even, say, Nottingham. He would have settled for Hilderbridge College of Technology. If he had fought Dadda, with the backing of the school and the rumblings there had been about court orders to override parents, if he had struggled, he could have got there. But he never fought Dadda. He had left school willingly, or very nearly, glad to be pleasing Dadda, rewarded with a secondhand motor bike and next year a car, and had learnt Whalbys’ trade. Or learnt some of it. He would never be able to do what Dadda could, those exquisite inlays, that delicate carving, achieving that mirror polish, and all with hands like a gorilla’s paws. His heart wasn’t in it. He could drive the van and upholster a settee.

  He had started on the second chair when Dadda shouted up the stairs.

  ‘Stephen!’

  ‘What is it, Dadda?’ The phone again?

  ‘Some woman says she’s from the paper. You can bloody come down and see to it.’

  Stephen felt embarrassed that this woman, a Three Towns Echo reporter presumably, should have heard him call Dadda by the shameful name. He went down quickly. Dadda was back at his polishing, making figures of eight on the already brilliantly lustrous surface of a mahogany dining table with french polish on a knob of wadded lint. He had turned his back. The reporter was a young girl in denim dungarees and a bright red knitted coat. She had a red woolly hat pulled down round her ears.

  ‘Mr Whalby? You’re the Mr Stephen Whalby who writes “Voice of Vangmoor” for us, aren’t you?’

  Stephen had thought of describing his discovery of Marianne Price’s body in this week’s column. It was due in tomorrow and he planned to write it tonight. The girl reporter said this wouldn’t really do. What they wanted was a news interview with him. He felt disappointed because writing ‘Voice of Vangmoor’ was the only money-making activity he did that he enjoyed, and this would have been more enjoyable than usual, a piece of real journalism as against the usual pedestrian stuff about the view from the top of Big Allen or hearing the first cuckoo. But this girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three was going to do it, not he. It was rather indifferently that he described to her his walk, his find, his leading of the police to the spot.

  The girl took it down in speedwriting, not proper shorthand. ‘When she didn’t come home on Friday night,’ she said, ‘her parents thought she was staying with her boyfriend and the boyfriend thought she was at home with her parents.’

  ‘A bit too permissive, those sort of parents,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Oh, well. He was her fiancé. They were going to get married in June.’

  ‘Maybe if they’d postponed living together till they were married, she’d be alive now.’

  ‘That’s a bit hard, Mr Whalby. Anyway, you can’t say that, you can’t know. If her parents had reported her missing the night before she’d still have been dead, wouldn’t she?’

  The girl was getting belligerent. She probably lived that sort of life herself, Stephen thought. ‘What’s the fiancé called?’ he asked.

  ‘Ian Stringer. He lives in Byss.’

  ‘I was at school with an Ian Stringer,’ said Stephen. ‘I wonder if it’s the same one.’

  ‘He’s about your age.’ The girl put away her notebook. ‘We’d like to send a photographer to take your picture. Will that be okay? Around twelve?’

  Stephen said it would, though Dadda’s mood wouldn’t be improved by it. He saw the girl out and put the bar up across the double doors.

  ‘Bloody keep off the moor in future,’ said Dadda. ‘Keep your feet under your own table.’r />
  * * *

  The receptionist who took over from Lyn in the afternoons came into the cloakroom where she was putting her coat on.

  ‘There’s a man who says his name’s Nick Frazer asking for you. The girl with the beautiful hair, he said.’ She giggled. ‘He’s brought you a cat.’

  Lyn reddened at the description of herself. She took off her scarf and tied it round her head, and then thought better of it — why allow herself to be provoked? She put the scarf back round her neck and went through to the shop. Nick Frazer was standing just inside the street door, holding a wicker basket with a barred opening in it.

  ‘I thought you’d like to have this basket to take him home in.’

  Between the bars wary golden eyes stared out.

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’ She undid the lid of the basket. The cat made no attempt to get out. She stroked the soft, thick fur which felt warm, though the cat was trembling. Like me, I shake like that sometimes, Lyn thought. ‘He’s very afraid,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll be all right with you. You’ll bring the basket back, won’t you?’

  The way he said it, it was as if he was only lending it to her in order to have her bring it back again, but she was forced to agree. ‘How much is he?’

  ‘I’d like to give him to you. I didn’t pay the Africa lady anything but I ought to make a bit for Uncle Jim. Shall we say two quid?’

  Lyn gave him two pounds. She closed the lid of the basket.

  ‘Do you have a long way to go?’

  ‘Not really,’ Lyn said, then briskly, ‘Goodbye.’

  The Hilderbridge to Jackley bus was three-quarters empty. Lyn took the cat out of the basket and held it against her. I shall call you Peach, she thought. The trembling had stopped, though the cat didn’t yet purr. It occurred to her that the way she was holding Peach was the way a woman holds a baby and she lowered him gently into her lap.