Kitabı oku: «The Long Kill»
REGINALD HILL
THE LONG KILL
Copyright
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Methuen 1986 under the author’s pseudonym Patrick Ruell
Copyright © Patrick Ruell 1986
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007334841
EBook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007389186
Version: 2015-09-17
Epigraph
I was a fell destroyer …
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Keep Reading
About the Author
By Reginald Hill
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Jaysmith was a firm advocate of the cerebral approach.
He always shot at the head.
The head he was shooting at this bright autumn morning was a noble one even when viewed through an Adjustable Ranging Telescope at 1,250 metres. An aureole of near-white hair surrounded a tanned leathery face in which the crinkles of humour seemed at least to equal the furrows of care. It was the head of an ageing man, seventy at a guess, who must surely now be reckoning that he was going to be allowed to slip naturally from life in the fullness of his years. Another minute would teach him the error of such confidence, and also the error of whatever lust for power, pleasure, or political change, had put him at the end of Jaysmith’s rifle.
Still, there were worse ways to die than suddenly, in your garden, looking across the peaceful fields of St-John’s-in-the-Vale to the swell of the eastern fells, drinking a cup of coffee and feeling the warmth of a September sun on your November skin.
The old man lit another Caporal. He was practically a chain smoker. This, thought Jaysmith, was the last link in his chain. He began to make his final checks.
He had worked out five possible lines of fire on the OS 1:25,000 sheet before leaving London. Two of them he had discarded on his first slow drive along the valley the previous Sunday. Two more had failed his strict on-the-ground examination. The last was the longest, but that didn’t bother him. He preferred the long kill, the longer the better. And with his equipment, his meticulous preparation and, above all, his accuracy, distance had never posed any difficulty. That was why he was the best.
He had till Sunday morning to make the target. It was only Thursday now, but there was no reason to delay. In fact, with the weather so perfect there was every reason to go ahead. He stretched his muscles systematically and began to quarter the ground below him with his Zeiss binoculars.
He was squatting on a lichened rock in a steep gill cutting down a rocky outcrop which his map told him was called Wanthwaite Crags. Eight hundred feet above him was the fell summit called Clough Head. Fears that the fine weather would crowd it with walkers had proved unfounded. It was clearly not a fashionable top. He had checked all possible approaches from the east, south and north before descending. The only signs of life had been the nodding head of a grazing sheep and the slow flap of a raven’s wings. Now he looked westward. A car moved slowly along the valley road. A tractor buzzed purposefully across a stubble field half a mile away. Nothing else. In any case, even in this stillness the Sionics Noise Suppressor on his M21 would scatter the sound of his shot untraceably.
He drew in a long deep breath and let it out slowly. St John’s Beck winding through the valley below was a ribbon of glass. The trees in the garden of the house called Naddle Foot were still as a painting. The moment was perfect.
He squeezed the trigger.
The bullet missed. It passed close enough to the old man’s ear for him to flap his Caporal at a buzzing fly. Then it buried itself deep in the rich earth of the upper level of the tiered garden.
Jaysmith sat utterly still. There were many possible explanations. A gust of wind along the channel of the beck; a slight change of atmospheric pressure; an imperfection in the bullet; at this range any one of these could translate itself into several inches at journey’s end.
Yes, there were many possible explanations. But only one cause.
Gently he massaged his temples and blinked his right eye rapidly a couple of times. It focused perfectly on the M21 as he began to dismantle it with practised ease. But perfect focusing for a job he could have done in pitch blackness was not enough. There was a weakness there. He had suspected it two targets ago when he had shot the Austrian. And last time out he had been almost certain. It had been a perfect shot in the eyes of the world. Only Jaysmith knew that as he squeezed the trigger, the Chinaman had raised his teacup and bowed his head into the path of the bullet.
Two weeks ago he had paid a Harley Street optician an exorbitant fee to put a clinical label on it. It was not a condition which could be in the least detrimental to any normal activity, the man had assured him. He should have retired then, at once, without thought. But this target had already come up, unusually soon after the Chinaman, and marked ultra-urgent. Something had made him reluctant to refuse it. Loyalty to Jacob, perhaps. Or professional pride. Professional pride! Amateurish stupidity was what Jacob would call it.
He packed the sections of the dismantled rifle in the internal pouches of his specially constructed rucksack. Now he was just a fellwalker again. With athletic ease he climbed up the steep gully to the top of the crags. Here he paused and glanced back across the valley. Without the A.R.T. the house was just a dark red monopoly token set on green baize. The reprieved man in the garden was completely invisible. He didn’t even know his name. Jacob never provided more than was necessary for a target. In this case it had been a head-and-shoulders photograph of the man, the OS sheet NY 32 with the house called Naddle Foot ringed in red, and a deadline.
Plus of course an order for twenty-five thousand pounds paid into his Zurich account.
That would have to be returned. A pity; but there was plenty left for his retirement.
Retirement! At forty-three. Statistically he had just become another unit in the unemployment figures.
The thought amused him and he let out a snort of spontaneous laughter that would have surprised the few people who knew him at the middle distance which was as close as he ever permitted. But there was no one here to take notice except the grazing sheep and the indifferent raven.
His long economical stride took him swiftly across the sun-blanched grass of the shallow saddle between Clough Head and Calfhow Pike. Now he followed the tumbling path of a long beck, a strange exhilaration making him take the descent faster than was really safe, and by the time he reached the old coach road which runs from St-John’s-in-the-Vale across to the next valley of Matterdale, he was panting as much from this inexplicable excitement as the exertion. Slowing to a more sedate but still deceptively fast pace, he moved eastwards along the old coach road to where he’d left his BMW parked outside the village of Dockray.
Even at his rapid pace, and mostly downhill, it was still over an hour since he had aborted the target. Normally he preferred more rapid access to his car, but in this case his best protection after the event had been to blend into the landscape as an ordinary walker. Now there was no event to be after. For all that it was still with some relief that he dropped the rucksack into the hidden compartment beneath a false panel in the BMW’S boot. An identical rucksack containing conventional walking gear lay in the boot. These isolated country areas were full of sharp eyes. And ears too.
He had a phone call to make and he decided to make it from the nearby village instead of waiting till he got back to his hotel. Security apart, he felt eager to get it over with. It was the first admission of failure he had ever made. The best that could be said for him was that he had made his error with time to spare and he had not alerted the target. But it was not just his sense of responsibility which urged him to haste. He was suddenly afraid that if he waited till he got back to the hotel, he might put off the moment even further. And that after a bottle of wine and a good meal, he might persuade himself it had been a trick of the wind after all.
He went into the public phone box and dialled a London number. A woman’s voice answered, bright and breezy.
‘Hello there! Enid here. Jacob and I are out just now but we’ll be back soon. Leave your message after the tone and we’ll be in touch as soon as ever we can. ’Bye!’
He waited then said, ‘Jaysmith. Tell Jacob I can’t make the deal. There’ll be a refund, of course.’
He contemplated adding, ‘Less expenses,’ but dismissed the idea as a small, unnecessary meanness. Let the parting be complete and painless.
Gently he replaced the receiver and stepped out into the golden September air. He drew in a long deep breath and let it out slowly. It tasted marvellous. For the first time in twenty years he felt totally relaxed and free.
Chapter 2
The dangers of Jaysmith’s new sense of relaxation became apparent when he entered the hotel bar for a pre-dinner drink that evening.
‘Evening, Mr Hutton. Any luck today?’ called Philip Parker, the Crag Hotel’s owner-manager, and it took Jaysmith a moment that could have been significant to a practised observer to react to the name.
Pseudonyms and cover stories might now be totally irrelevant but they could not just be shed at will. At the Crag he was William Hutton, businessman; and in conversation with Parker he had let it slip that, as well as the fellwalking, he was on the lookout for a house or cottage to purchase. It was those sharp country eyes again; he wanted an excuse to be seen anywhere, walking or driving, during his stay.
‘No,’ he said, slipping onto a bar stool and accepting the dry sherry which Parker poured him. ‘No luck at all. But I enjoyed my walk.’
‘Oh good. The weather’s marvellous, isn’t it? Excuse me.’
Parker went off to the side hatch of the bar where one of the girls from the dining room was waiting with a drinks order. Parker’s quietly efficient wife, Doris, looked after the kitchen and dining room, while he exuded bonhomie in the bar and at reception. He was a rotund, breezy man in his early fifties, a redundant sales executive who’d sunk his severance money into the small hotel five years earlier and, as he was willing to explain to anyone willing to listen, had not yet seen any cause to regret it. In fact his enthusiasm for the Lake District was so evangelical that Jaysmith had soon regretted the intended subtlety of his cover story. From the start, Parker had taken an embarrassingly close interest in his alleged house-hunting and now, the dining room order dealt with, he returned to the topic.
‘So no luck then,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Jaysmith. ‘The market seems pretty dead. In fact, with the weekend coming up, I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities, so I’ll check out tomorrow.’
Parker looked so taken aback that Jaysmith felt constrained to add, ‘I’ll pay for tomorrow night, of course.’
He had booked in till Saturday. If he’d made his target he’d have stayed the full week in order not to excite comment, but now there was no point.
‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ said Parker, slightly indignant. ‘It’s just that I heard today that there’s likely to be just the house you’re looking for coming on the market in the next couple of days. It’s called Rigg Cottage and it’s just outside the village, up the bank on the road towards Loughrigg. It belongs to an old lady called Miss Wilson who’s finding the long haul up the hill more and more difficult. Also it’s really too big for her with the garden and all. So she’s thinking of moving down into the village. There’s an old cottage become vacant. Semi-detached and her best friend occupies the next-door cottage. Actually the vacant one belonged to Miss Craik, another old friend, who died a couple of weeks back and the family had always promised to give Miss Wilson first refusal.’
He paused for breath and Jaysmith regarded him quizzically.
‘Your channels of information must be first-rate, Mr Parker,’ he said with hint of mockery.
Parker grinned and glanced conspiratorially towards the dining room. Lowering his voice he said, ‘To tell the truth, it’s Doris who told me all this. She’s quite chummy with Mrs Blacklock, the old lady in the other semi, and she passed it on, in strict confidence, of course. Like I’m doing to you.’
‘Of course,’ said Jaysmith.
‘Which is why there’s nothing to be done till Miss Wilson makes up her mind. But when she does, if I know her, she’ll want everything settled in five minutes which is why it’s a pity you’ll not be on the spot.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jaysmith, exuding regret as he moved fully into his William Hutton role. ‘A real pity.’
At dinner, he ordered a full bottle of Chablis instead of his usual half and settled to a mellow contemplation of the limitless joys of retirement.
O what a world of profit and delight … the words drifted into his mind and he sought their source. It wasn’t altogether apt. They were from Marlow’s Dr Faustus whose world of profit and delight had been purchased by selling his soul. Or perhaps the words were too apt. He pushed that thought away and concentrated on working out why he should know the quotation. Oriental Languages had been his subject, not English literature, but now he recalled that he’d once acted in the play at university; or rather not himself, but that incredibly, hazily distant young man whose name was now as vague as all those he had since inscribed on hotel registers in his career as Jaysmith. And he hadn’t been Faustus either. An ostler, that’s what he’d been. A grasping gull made a fool of by magic.
Shaking the memory away, he returned to the future. He could go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow, back to his London flat. Next, the Continent. Italy to start with; a villa in Tuscany till autumn died. Then on to the Med, Greece, North Africa, always south, keeping abreast of the retreating sun.
The prospect filled him with surprisingly little enthusiasm. It was odd, like looking at a beautiful, naked and available woman without feeling excited.
‘Everything all right, Mr Hutton?’ said Parker, doing his end-of-dinner mine-host round.
‘Fine,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Sit down and have a drop of Chablis.’
‘That’s kind.’
He filled a glass for the hotel owner and emptied the remaining drops into his own. He realized with amused interest another effect of his new relaxed state. A couple of sherries and the best part of a bottle of wine had left him feeling slightly drunk.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When you were made redundant, did you know at once what you wanted to do?’
‘Far from it, old boy,’ replied Parker, delighted to be invited to explore a favourite topic. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me, I see it now. But at the time, I was simply shattered.’
‘And you’d never thought of living up here and running a hotel?’
‘Never.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I more or less sat with my head in my hands for three or four weeks, then one morning I got up and knew what I was going to do.’
‘You knew that you were going to buy a hotel in the Lake District?’
‘Not exactly. But I knew I was never going to work for anyone but myself again. I was absolutely certain about that!’
Jaysmith felt let down. Hoping for some sort of dramatic revelation, instead he was hearing about a conventional revolt against the boss–servant relationship.
Nevertheless the idea of taking time to adjust, of letting things ripen at their own speed, was not without its appeal. But where to let the ripening process take place? Not London, that was certain. Whatever residual pressures might remain from his old life were centred on London.
The answer was absurdly obvious but he did not reach it by any kind of open-cast logic. Instead, after a couple of soporific brandies in the bar, he heard himself saying to Parker, ‘I’ve been thinking. There’s really no desperate need for me to be off in the morning. In fact, if that old lady’s not going to make up her mind for a few days, I can easily hang on into next week, if my room’s going to be vacant, that is.’
Parker smiled with triumphant delight.
‘We’ll be glad to have you,’ he said fulsomely.
Jaysmith did not return the smile. Faintly surprised, he was still trying to work out whose voice he had just heard speaking. It wasn’t Jaysmith’s, certainly. And it hadn’t even sounded like William Hutton’s.
No, it had been both more familiar and more distant, like the voice of a dead loved one conjured up by a medium at a seance. And then it came to him that in some odd, ghostly fashion, the voice he had heard belonged to that naively hopeful, irretrievably remote young man who had once played the foolish ostler in Dr Faustus.
Chapter 3
Summer was dying like a lady this year. Leaves flushed gently from olive to ochre with no savage assault of gale to rip them down; bracken singed at the edges and heather burned purple with no landscape-blackening downpour to dampen the glow. The locals assured Jaysmith, not without nostalgic pride, that it was not always thus.
Jaysmith took their word for it. Though he had presented William Hutton as a long-time lover of the Lake District, his only real previous acquaintance had been as a small boy on a day trip to Windermere with his mother and stepfather, who had stared indifferently at the mountains and lake, explored the souvenir shops, eaten ice cream and fish and chips, and left him in the coach with a packet of crisps at each of the many pub-stops on the sixty-mile journey back to Blackburn in Lancashire.
His mother had died when he was fifteen. His stepfather, to do him credit, had supported him through the loss and the next couple of years at school till he got the exam results needed to take him to university. But first had come National Service. After basic training he had been posted to Hong Kong. He went home on embarkation leave, and the night before his departure his stepfather had told him apologetically but firmly that his stepbrother, four years his senior, was getting married and coming to live in the family home. His wife-to-be was pregnant. The strains this would put on the limited accommodation made it sensible for him to think from now on of making arrangements to look after himself.
He had never been back to Blackburn since that day.
His first taste of the East had brought balm to his pain. From the very moment its first rich warm exotic scents came drifting over the sea, he was fascinated. He had been planning to read French and German at university, but within a couple of months of reaching Hong Kong, he was writing to ask if he could transfer courses to the School of Oriental Languages. The facility with which he learned Chinese made him a highly valued member of his unit, but it was another talent which the Army spotted and nurtured that won him all those privileges and comforts a regiment bestows on those that bring it honour. He turned out to be a natural marksman capable of winning trophies at the highest level, and thus rapidly promoted to sergeant, well out of the way of any parades, fatigues or guard duties which might dull his eye.
For his part, he enjoyed his unsuspected excellence, and even let his enjoyment spill over into civilian life, becoming a prominent member of his university shooting team. But he never dreamt that this was a talent with any commercial value. It had taken fate at its most unpredictably tragic to nudge him onto that path.
And now it had taken a fractional weakening of the right eye to nudge him off it.
For the next three days he put past and future out of his mind and set out to turn his pretended intimacy with the fells into fact. A need to be fit and the demands of his job had taken him into some of the roughest terrain in the world. He was expert both practically and with maps. But hitherto his expertise had been focused on one thing only – the job in hand. Landscape to him was considered solely in terms of best approach, best hide, best line of fire, best escape. Here in the Lake District for the first time in two decades he went exploring simply in search of delight. He did not have far to seek. Eschewing guide books in his desire for personal discovery, he spent the days in long high walks, armed only with map and compass. Any feeling of condescension for this somewhat narrow area of rather lowly mountains soon disappeared. The physical demands were great; he never had to look far for the exhilaration of danger; and whether he was standing windblown on the bald head of Gable with the stark wildness of Wasdale stretching below, or descending from the gentle swell of Silver Howe in the gathering dusk towards the sun-gilt shield of Grasmere which at the end of a long day felt very like home, he was ravished by the sheer beauty of it all.
Small the Lake District might be, but three days’ exploration was scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its great variety and when Parker greeted him on Sunday evening with the excited news, ‘She’s made up her mind! Miss Wilson. She’s definitely going. I can arrange for you to see Rigg Cottage tomorrow!’ Jaysmith felt surprisingly put out.
He had what looked like a perfectly splendid walk mapped out for Monday and it was most irritating to be forced to postpone it for what was now an unnecessary piece of role-playing.
Doris Parker who was standing alongside her husband sensed his hesitation. She was a pleasant, calm, down-to-earth woman who was used to coping with her husband’s enthusiasms.
‘Don’t take any notice of Philip’s hard sell, Mr Hutton,’ she said. ‘There’s not need to look at Rigg Cottage unless and until you want to. I only heard at church tonight that Miss Wilson is definitely selling.’
‘But the whole point is for Mr Hutton to get in quick before it comes on the open market,’ protested Parker.
‘It might be worthwhile,’ conceded his wife. ‘She’ll certainly not be happy about paying an agent’s commission. But it’s up to Mr Hutton if he wants to see it, dear.’
Her broad-set grey eyes fixed speculatively on Jaysmith and he smiled at her and said, ‘Of course I’d like to, if you can arrange it. I’m really very grateful.’
Triumphantly Parker went to the telephone and returned a few minutes later with the news that eleven o’clock the following morning would suit Miss Wilson very well.
Jaysmith nodded his agreement. He’d have preferred to get the tedious business out of the way even sooner, but at least he would have the whole afternoon for the mountains. In any case, he could stay as long as he liked. The mountains weren’t going anywhere without him!
The next morning he used his unexpected post-breakfast period of non-activity to read the newspapers in detail. There was no reference to any violent death in St-John’s-in-the-Vale and there had been nothing on the local TV and radio news either. Presumably Jacob had not been able to make new arrangements before the deadline elapsed. That would not please him.
He put the thought out of his mind and drove up the winding road out of the village to keep his appointment.
Miss Wilson was curiously almost exactly as he had pictured her. Anything between seventy and ninety, she had snow-white hair and clear blue eyes in a cider-apple face. But any impression of gentle cosiness was soon dissipated. She carried her five feet three inches as straight as a guardsman, albeit with some help from a stick, and when she spoke it was in a clipped, brusque, no-nonsense tone.
‘I’d not be moving from here if it wasn’t for this leg,’ she informed him sternly, as if he had hinted suspicion of some less creditable motive. ‘Now the place is getting too big for me, the garden’s taking over, and the hill’s too steep. Not that I can’t climb it, but it takes me twice as long as it once did, and me mind’s back here already doing me jobs while me body’s still halfway up the bank, and there’s nowt so ageing as always letting your mind race on ahead of itself.’
Politely Jaysmith agreed, which seemed to surprise her, not because she anticipated disagreement but because she could see no need for a mere man to affirm that she spoke plain truth.
She proved remarkably unsentimental about Rigg Cottage and talked about it as if it were already settled that he would buy.
‘The sitting room fire smokes in an east wind,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to get it fixed these thirty years. That’ll be your job now.’
She sounded almost gleeful.
It occurred to Jaysmith that this was a house whose faults could be freely pointed out because its more than compensatory attractions advertised themselves. Built of grey-green Lakeland slate, it stood foursquare to the east, as simple and appealing as a child’s drawing. The sloping garden which overlooked the lake was full of shrubs, mainly rhododendrons and azaleas whose blossom in June, Miss Wilson proudly and poetically assured him, burned like a bonfire. Now, however, the colours of autumn were beginning to glow, with Michaelmas daisies challenging the turning leaves to match their rich orange, while mountain ash and pyracantha were pearled with red berries which the blackbirds would soon devour.
It also occurred to him that if he really were looking for a house in the Lake District, this might very well be the kind of house he was looking for.
A thought stirred in his mind.
Why not?
He dismissed it instantly. It was once again the voice of that forgotten young man who played the ostler twenty-odd years ago. Jaysmith, however, knew the dangers of sentiment and impulse. It was one thing to decide on the spur of the moment to treat himself to an extra week in the Lake District, quite another to invest a large sum of money and, by implication, a large piece of his life here.
William Hutton, holiday-maker and property-seeker, would have to speak soon. Miss Wilson had shown him the outside first, as if reluctant to miss any moment of this glorious autumn morning. Now they moved indoors, and all was exactly as it should be, the right old furniture in rooms of the right dimensions, with just enough of light coming through the leaded windows and just enough of heat coming from the small fire in the huge grate.
‘Old bones need a fire almost all the year round,’ she said, seeing his glance. ‘That’s what we started with, that’s what we end with.’
Curiously he had no difficulty in understanding this enigmatic statement. Man’s move away from the beast was emblematized by a group crouching around a fire. And Jaysmith had felt the need of that fire in many a long cold hour spent in patient, motionless waiting.
The door bell rang. Miss Wilson left him and returned a moment later with another woman whom, with that tendency to instant mini-biography he had already noted in denizens of the area, she introduced as her niece, Annie Wilson, a widow, who lived out Keswick way, just back from her holidays and come for lunch.
Jaysmith was presented in similar terms with all of William Hutton’s known and assumed background and purposes spelt out. He guessed that Parker had been rigorously cross-examined.
The newcomer shook his hand. He put her age as early to mid-thirties. She had a long, narrow, not unpleasantly vulpine face, with a sallow complexion, watchful brown eyes and thin nose, slightly upturned, giving the impression that her nostrils were flared to catch the scent of danger. She was dressed in gloomy autumn colours, dark brown slacks and a russet shirt, with her long brown hair pulled back severely from her brow and held back with a casually knotted red ribbon. Her body was lean and rangy and she moved with athletic ease.
Jaysmith felt she regarded him with considerable suspicion. Its cause soon emerged.
‘You’re selling Rigg Cottage!’ she exclaimed to her aunt.
‘That’s right. I’ve talked about it often enough.’
‘I know, but it’s so sudden. Didn’t you discuss it with anyone? With pappy or Granddad Wilson?’
‘No I didn’t,’ said Miss Wilson tartly. ‘As you well know, else your father would have told you when you got back and James would have told you when you were staying with him. I’ve always made up me own mind and always will, so there’s an end to it. Now tell me about you and young Jimmy. When’s he coming to see me? I thought he might come with you today.’
Annie Wilson laughed and suddenly a decade was wiped off her face. Jaysmith watched, fascinated by the transformation.
‘He started back at school today, auntie. He’ll be round next Sunday as usual, I promise you.’
‘Just see he is,’ grumbled the old lady. ‘He could have been here yesterday if you’d got back earlier. It’s not right leaving it till the day before school starts. Too much of a rush.’
‘Granddad Wilson wanted us to stay as long as possible,’ said the young woman. ‘He doesn’t see much of Jimmy.’
‘Then he should get himself up here more often,’ retorted Miss Wilson. ‘The wedding, the christening and the funeral, that’s been about the strength of it these past few years.’
Annie Wilson’s face lost its animation and the ten years came back with whatever was causing the pain visible in the depths of her eyes.
‘Jimmy bought you a present in London,’ she said abruptly. ‘He asked me to give it to you.’
She handed over a packet in gaily coloured wrapping paper.
Miss Wilson said, ‘I’ll look at it later. I’ve got to show Mr Hutton upstairs yet.’
‘I’ll show him,’ offered the younger woman. ‘You sit down and open your present.’
For a second the old woman looked doubtful, then she agreed. Jaysmith guessed that despite her independence, she might value her niece’s opinion of him as a prospective buyer, and he guessed also that Annie Wilson wanted a chance to check him out for herself.
He played William Hutton to the best of his ability as she showed him round the bedrooms, enthusing over the view from the main bedroom window. It looked out over the valley, across the lake to Town End with the great swell of Seat Sandal looming behind.
‘Yes it’s hard to beat anywhere in the world,’ she said. ‘Have you set your heart on Grasmere, Mr Hutton, or will anywhere in the Lakes do?’
He almost admitted that his knowledge of the area was limited to what he’d been able to garner in the past three days, but this would have sounded very strange from William Hutton, prospective resident and eager house-hunter.
‘I love it all,’ he said expansively. ‘But Grasmere best of all.’
‘And you walk, of course?’
He gestured towards the eastern heights.
‘It’s the only way to get up there, isn’t it?’
She nodded, and suddenly thirsty for more of her approval, he went on, ‘I wouldn’t like to count the happy hours and the glorious miles I’ve passed on the tops.’
Which was quite true, he told himself ironically. The reward for his boast was to make her laugh and shed those years once more.
‘You’re as keen as that, are you?’ she said, gently mocking his grandiloquence. ‘You’ll be telling me you’re Wainwright next.’
He didn’t know if he succeeded in not registering his shock. Wainwright was a cover name he’d used on the Austrian job. How the hell did this woman know …? Then it came to him that, of course, she didn’t. The name had some significance he didn’t grasp, that was all.
He smiled and said lightly, ‘Just plain William Hutton. Is this the last bedroom?’
She nodded, her face losing its rejuvenating lines of laughter and settling to the stillness of a mountain tarn, momentarily disturbed by a breeze. He wondered if she’d noticed something odd in his reaction after all. But when she opened the bedroom door and motioned him in, something about her stillness focused his attention on the room itself. It was small with a single bed and a south-facing casement window with a copper beech almost rubbing against the glass. On the walls hung several photographs of what he saw were early climbing groups, young men, often moustachioed and bearded, garlanded with ropes and wearing broad-rimmed hats and long laced-up boots, standing with the rigid insouciance required by early cameramen. The background hills were unmistakable. Even his limited acquaintance enabled him to recognize the neanderthal brow of Scafell and the broad, nippled swell of Scafell Pike. The pictures apart, there was no sense of the personality of the occupier of this room, or indeed any signs of recent occupation. But twenty years of nervous living had honed his sensitivity to atmosphere and suddenly he heard himself saying, ‘Your aunt brought up your husband, didn’t she?’
She looked at him in amazement and said, ‘Why? What has she said?’
‘Nothing,’ he assured her. ‘She said nothing. I just got the feeling that once this had been his room, that’s all.’
Now there was anger alongside the surprise and all her initial distrust was back in her eyes.
‘What are you, Mr Hutton?’ she demanded. ‘Some kind of policeman keeping his hand in on holiday?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be offensive. I just …’
But she was walking away.
‘That’s all up here, Mr Hutton,’ she said coldly. ‘We’d better get back downstairs to my aunt. She’ll be wanting to get lunch ready. I hope you’re as quick with decisions as deductions.’
He was very angry with himself. The remark had just slipped out and Jaysmith was not accustomed to anything but complete self-control.
Miss Wilson was holding a small pot replica of Big Ben in her lap.
‘Tell Jimmy it’s very nice, dear,’ she said. ‘Now, Mr Hutton, what do you think?’
He hesitated. When he’d arrived, he’d had it all worked out. A delightful house, but not quite what I was looking for. But now this formula would cut him off from Miss Wilson and her niece for ever. That was something he discovered he didn’t want to do, at least not without a chance for further thought.
He said, ‘Would it be possible to come back this afternoon? It’s hard to take everything in at a single viewing. You can often get mistaken impressions at a single encounter, can’t you?’
He glanced at Annie Wilson as he spoke, but got nothing in return.
Miss Wilson regarded him thoughtfully, then turned to her niece.
‘Well, I daresay we can put up with you trampling round again, can’t we, Annie? But give us time to enjoy our lunch. Three o’clock, let’s say.’
‘Fine,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Three o’clock.’
The old lady showed him out, Annie Wilson having disappeared with a perfunctory farewell into the kitchen.
‘One thing,’ said Miss Wilson on the doorstep. ‘You’ve not asked me price, young man. It may be too high for you.’
He rather liked her directness. It also occurred to him that he would rather like her good opinion.
He said, ‘If you really think of me as a young man, Miss Wilson, then I’ll be happy to accept any estimate of the house’s value based on the same principle.’
A sunbeam of amusement warmed the old face. Then she closed the door. There was a little red Fiat in the drive, presumably belonging to Annie Wilson. Carefully he backed the BMW past it and drove down the hill to the Crag Hotel.
Chapter 4
Jaysmith ate a snack lunch in the hotel bar and told the openly curious Parker that he had liked Rigg Cottage, but needed a second look.
‘Quite right, old boy,’ said Parker. ‘Never rush into these things. On the other hand, don’t hang about either. There is a tide and all that.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Jaysmith, finishing his beer. ‘By the way, who is Wainwright?’
‘Wainwright? You mean the walking chappie?’
‘Probably.’
Parker was regarding him with considerable surprise.
‘How odd,’ he said.
‘Odd?’
‘That someone as keen on the Lakes as you hasn’t heard of Wainwright! He’s the author of probably the best-known series of walkers’ guides ever written. You must be pulling my leg, Mr Hutton. Every second person you meet on the fells is clutching the relevant volume of Wainwright!’
‘Of course, I know the books you mean,’ lied Jaysmith. ‘Me, I’ve always managed very well with the OS maps.’
He left the hotel a few minutes later and strolled through the sun-hazed village to a bookshop he had noticed on a corner. There he found shelves packed full of the Wainwright guide books. He bought Book Three, entitled The Central Fells, which included much of the terrain around Grasmere. A glance through it explained its popularity: detailed routes, pleasing illustrations, lively text; there was possibly something here even for the man who lived by map and compass.
It was after two-thirty. Slipping the book into his pocket, he set out to walk up the hill to Rigg Cottage. It was a good distance and a steepish incline and he found himself admiring the old lady for having stayed on so long.
At the house he was relieved to see the little Fiat still in place, but there was no sign of Annie Wilson as Miss Wilson showed him round the ground floor once again.
‘Has your niece gone?’ he asked casually.
‘No, she’s out in the garden.’
‘You mentioned a boy, Jimmy. Are there any other children?’
‘You’ve got sharp ears and a long nose, young man,’ said Miss Wilson reprovingly.
‘If I’m going to become an inhabitant, I need to adapt to local customs,’ smiled Jaysmith.
His impudence paid off.
‘No, just the one,’ said the old lady abruptly. ‘They’d been married barely seven years when Edward died. It was just before Christmas last year.’
Nine months and still grieving. Grief could last forever unless life wrenched you out of its course. And even then you could not be certain if you were really living or just escaping.
‘You look around upstairs by yourself,’ instructed Miss Wilson. ‘I don’t bother with the stairs unless I have to.’
He spotted the younger woman from the window of the room with the mountaineering pictures. She was reclining in a deck chair at the bottom of the garden with her feet up on an ornamental wall, her eyes closed against the slanting sun. He stood for a while, watching, till she shifted slightly. Suddenly fearful she might glance up and see him at this particular window, he turned away and went downstairs.
‘Well?’ said Miss Wilson. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘We haven’t talked about a price,’ delayed Jaysmith.
‘I thought you said you’d leave that to me,’ she replied, her lips crinkling. ‘Well here’s what the agent reckoned he’d advertise it for if I put it with him, which I’m going to do tomorrow if it’s not sold today.’
She mentioned a figure. It was hefty, but, from the little bit of expertise Jaysmith had had to gather to keep up his end in conversations with Phil Parker, it seemed reasonable.
Miss Wilson added, ‘But for the pleasure of not paying an agent’s fee and not having hordes of strangers and more than a few nosey local devils tramping around the place, I’d knock a thousand off that, Mr Hutton.’
He scratched his chin and whistled softly.
‘That’s very generous of you,’ he said. ‘Very generous.’
He hoped that Annie Wilson would materialize at some point to show a protective interest in her aunt. But he saw now that the old lady would not take kindly to being protected and that the niece would remain determinedly absent till negotiations were concluded.
And if the conclusion were no sale, he would be politely shown the door and his chance would have been missed.
His chance for what? He wasn’t quite sure, but Parker’s words rang in his ears … there is a tide in the affairs of men …
He said, ‘On the other hand, I rather feel that for a cash sale, no property chain to worry about, no pressure to complete, or delay when you are ready either, all this guaranteed, you might come down a little lower.’
‘How much lower did you have in mind, Mr Hutton?’
‘Oh, another couple of thousand, I’d have thought.’
She looked outraged but he also saw behind the outrage what he had already guessed at – the haggler’s spirit burning bright.
They went at it hard for another fifteen minutes.
‘I’ll need to go out and talk to Annie,’ she said at one point.
She was gone a couple of minutes only. Shortly after she returned they settled for a reduction of the agent’s price by fifteen hundred pounds.
She offered her hand. He took it. Her grip was firm and warm.
‘That’s settled then. You’ll have a drink. Come into the garden.’
He followed her out. Another deck chair had appeared alongside Annie’s.
‘It’ll be whisky to seal a bargain,’ said Miss Wilson, returning to the house. ‘Sit down.’
She went back inside. Annie opened her eyes.
‘You’ve bought it then,’ she said neutrally.
‘It is irresistible,’ he said.
‘Did you knock her down?’
‘Only as far as she had decided to go. Probably not as far as that,’ he said ruefully. ‘I think she was very gentle with me. If she’d really tried her hardest, I suspect I’d have been raising her price. She’s rather formidable, isn’t she?’
He had struck the right note. She smiled at him now and nodded.
‘When she came out to see you just now, what did she say?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘She just came out, got that deck chair you’re sitting on from the shed and set it up, then she went back inside. Why?’
‘She told me she was coming to consult with you,’ he said.
Slowly she began to laugh and he laughed with her. It felt like a long time since there had been such a moment of shared pleasure in his life.
‘You two sound very jolly, I must say,’ said Miss Wilson, returning with a tray on which stood a decanter and three glasses.
Jaysmith struggled to his feet to offer her the deck chair but she said, ‘No, I find them things too awkward for me nowadays. I’ll sit on the wall here if you’ll shift your feet.’
Obediently Annie removed her feet from the ornamental wall and her aunt sat down.
‘Take your jacket off, man, and enjoy the sun,’ exhorted the old lady.
Obedient in his turn, Jaysmith removed his jacket. As he draped it over the back of the deck chair, the Wainwright guide fell out of his pocket. Quickly he picked it up and replaced it, wondering if Annie Wilson’s expression of amusement only existed in his mind.
He stayed for half an hour, deftly fielding questions about his background. At the end of this time the younger woman said, ‘I really must be off now, Aunt Muriel. I promised I’d pick Jimmy up from school.’
‘You’ll spoil him.’
‘First day back. After this, it’s the bus and a nice healthy walk. I’ll bring him round this weekend.’
‘Make sure you do.’
Jaysmith rose too.
‘You can get in touch with me at the hotel when your solicitor’s ready,’ he told Miss Wilson.
‘You’re staying on then?’
‘A few more days.’
He was wondering how to keep contact with Annie Wilson when she said, ‘Like a lift down into the village, Mr Hutton? I can’t see your car.’
‘No. I walked up this afternoon.’
‘Spoken like a real enthusiast. Of course, if you want to walk back …’
‘No. Uphill was enough. Downhill’s often much harder.’
‘There speaks an expert.’
He folded himself into the tiny car, leaving the two women to take their farewells. A moment of panic hit him as he waited.
What am I doing? he asked himself. I’ve promised to buy a house just so that I can talk a little longer with a woman I’ve only just met who may turn out to be dull as ditchwater, or reckon that I’m even duller!
But the panic vanished like morning mist when she climbed into the driver’s seat.
They hardly spoke on the short descent into Grasmere. She dropped him at his hotel. To invite her in for tea or a drink was manifestly absurd when he knew she was going to pick up her son.
He held the car door open and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘A pleasure,’ she said, putting the car into gear.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’d like to see you again.’
‘If you’re coming to live up here, I daresay we’ll bump into each other,’ she said with a smile.
‘No. I mean sooner. What about tomorrow? Lunch, say.’
She stopped smiling and studied him closely.
‘I don’t often eat lunch,’ she said. ‘Except when I go to auntie’s. Otherwise I just grab a snack.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘So why don’t we eat our snacks together?’
She thought for a moment then nodded gravely.
‘All right. Why not? Half past twelve suit you?’
‘Fine. But where? What’s the best place round here? You’re the local. You name it.’
‘Best place?’ she echoed, letting in the clutch and beginning to move gently away. ‘Well, one of my favourites is the Lion and the Lamb. Let’s meet there, shall we? Twelve-thirty prompt. ‘Bye!’
She smiled at him, her face suddenly alive with humour and mischief, and then she was gone.
That night before dinner Jaysmith studied the Cumbrian telephone directory in the bar. There were only two Lion and Lambs listed. One was in Gosforth which a glance at his map told him was about fifteen miles to the west as the crow flew but a long drive along high, narrow winding roads as the car went. The other was in Wigton, thirty odd miles north and almost at Carlisle. Neither was what he would call local.
‘Can I help?’ enquired Parker who’d been observing his search from the bar.
‘It’s nothing really,’ said Jaysmith. ‘I just made a casual arrangement to meet a friend in a pub locally and I can’t remember its name. I thought it was the Lion and the Lamb, but I see there’s nothing nearer than Gosforth.’
‘I don’t know a pub of that name round here,’ said Parker. ‘What about you, dear?’
His wife had just come into the bar to get some drinks. She shook her head when the problem was explained and said, ‘No, there’s only one Lion and Lamb round here that I know of.’
After she’d gone, Jaysmith said casually, ‘What did she mean?’
Parker gave him the same look of surprise he’d shown at his ignorance of Wainwright.
‘Up there, of course,’ he said.
He pointed at the window. Evening was well advanced but there was still light enough in the sky to provide a foil for the massive outlines of the nearer fells. One in particular seemed to loom over the hotel.
‘Helm Crag,’ said Parker. ‘Home of Grasmere’s tutelary deities.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry, my mind was too much on pubs,’ smiled Jaysmith, not having the faintest idea what was being said to him.
Later in his bedroom he made sense of it by looking up Helm Crag in his newly purchased guide book. He found it described as possibly the best-known hill in the country because of the rock formation on the summit whose silhouette was said to resemble a lion couchant and a lamb. The Lion and the Lamb!
He cursed himself mildly. Such ignorance displayed a week ago when he was still planning the kill would have been a real error of security. It would have been too large a task for the police to interrogate every hotelier and guest house proprietor in the Lakes, but there would certainly have been media exhortations for them to report any oddities in their recent guests. Parker was just the man to volunteer his services.
But now it didn’t matter. He enjoyed the feeling of perfect relaxation once more. It didn’t matter!
Except, of course, for the fact that Annie Wilson might have been testing him.
He examined the proposition and quickly dismissed it. As a test it was pointless. He must have been the only person within fifty miles who didn’t know what the Lion and the Lamb was. Such ignorance was scarcely credible and all too easily remediable.
So, no test. Just an invitation to a picnic.
He switched off the light and his thoughts simultaneously. It was a trick of mental discipline he had developed over twenty years. Usually he could fall to sleep within a minute. Tonight for some reason it took just a little longer but the sleep when it came was as dark and undisturbed as ever.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
