Master of the Moor (26 page)

His rucksack, containing the rope, the big torch, candles, clothes, was on his back. Under his right arm he carried a blanket, rolled up and tied with string. He had decided to grow a beard like Peter’s; he had shaved for the last time. There was no one following him, he was as alone as he had ever been when out on the moor. Behind him a car passed along the road, going towards Jackley, then after a moment or two another heading for Hilderbridge, but Vangmoor itself where there were no roads was stripped of people. It was empty and silent and now at the end of summer no birds sang.

In the Vale of Allen there was here and there a golden flower on the gorse. It was a curious thing about gorse that although the season of its flowering was springtime, there was always blossom on it even in the depths of winter, even if it were just one solitary bloom. He should have written about that for the
Echo
but it was too late now. He didn’t think he would ever again write the ‘Voice of Vangmoor’. Someone else would have to take over, for he, though not far away, would nevertheless be removed from such activities.
Pleased with the idea, he understood he was making himself into an outlaw, a modern Robin Hood. He and Rip together would be a kind of robber band, though it was not robbery they would come out of the hills to commit.

The mist which enclosed the moor, which almost since sunrise had been shot with gold, should have lifted by now, but instead it seemed to be closing in, growing colder, whiter and more autumnal. He could see the foin only as a vague blurred shape, rising out of the flat land ahead. The coe and the windlass were invisible, and when they did appear it was to loom up like men advancing.

He fastened the rope to the lip of rock and clambered down Apsley Sough. The sides of the shaft were moist and slippery but not running with water and there was no water lying in the chamber at its foot. Stephen felt relief. There had been times in the past days when he feared a flooding of the mine.

All the rain seemed to have done was intensify the sour chemical smell. He made his way along the winze, wondering if Rip were here already and if the sound of his footfalls might be audible to him through the rock walls. The atmosphere felt colder than usual, laying a thick chilly breath on his skin. His throat tightened with excitement but he walked slowly, he walked with measured tread, to give Rip a chance to know that he approached.

The end of the winze, where it opened out into the doorway to the chamber, he saw as he rounded the slight bend in the passage, was in darkness. If Rip had come he was there no longer. Unless he sat waiting in the dark. Stephen remembered that Rip didn’t know he was called Rip, that was only his own secret name for
him, and he called in a loud clear voice, ‘Peter! Peter, it’s Stephen!’

There was no answer. He hadn’t come yet. Stephen had a sudden feeling that Rip might have been alarmed by the discovery of the third girl’s hair and have emptied the cavern for safety’s sake.
He
didn’t know, couldn’t then have known, the identity of Harriet Crozier’s killer. Stephen raised the torch. The light leapt across the rocky walls and showed him everything as it had been before, the boxes, the bottle of cider, the clothes, the bedding, the candles in the bottles and the candle in the candlestick.

Being in the cavern, the cavern as he had always known it, made him feel happy again. He sat down on the mattress, unrolled his blanket and lit all the candles. Like someone who, though long intimate with a friend’s house, has always been a visitor, he had now taken a room there himself or moved in to share and might take liberties that were previously forbidden. He lit the calor gas burner. The kettle, he found, had been filled with water. It would take a long time to boil but eventually he would get himself a cup of tea. Into the box where the tins were and the biscuits Rip had put two packets of cigarettes, and Stephen seemed to smell again the scent of tobacco that had come to him as he opened the gate on Foinmen’s Plain.

The gas burner gave a little welcome warmth. Stephen ate biscuits while the kettle boiled. There was only dried milk for the tea but he didn’t mind. Doing without, making do, added to the fun of picnics. He saw before him a vista of future picnics with Rip, hard-won tea, the sweeter because it took so long to brew, biscuits softened with keeping, meat dug out of a tin. He had slept badly the night before, after he had
buried Tace. He lay down on the mattress and covered himself with the blanket and fell asleep.

When he awoke his watch told him it was the middle of the afternoon. In the mine all times and all seasons were the same and the silence was the same. He sat up, feeling stiff and rather cold and listened to the silence. The candles had burnt down a long way but there was still a new one in the candlestick and he had brought four spares with him. He lit the new candle and that made him look at the candlestick and fancy he recognized it. In his own home surely when he was a small child? Or in the gatehouse lodge — yes, that was more likely. It must have been Helena’s, passed on to Leonard, then to Peter. It gleamed like gold in the dimness of the chamber.

It was after four. Surely Rip would come before dark, surely he wouldn’t wait till nightfall? To pass the time he undid the flaps on top of the secret box. He was almost certain the three hanks of hair lay exactly as he had left them. Did that mean Rip hadn’t looked in the box since then, that he didn’t know the third girl’s hair was in there? What times he and Rip would have together! Sharing this place, hidden here, descending sometimes from their mountain fastness like wolves on the fold. He closed his eyes and saw them as wolves, grey, shaggy, powerful and fleet of foot, a victim held between white and red jaws. The first victim perhaps should be Stella Crane who could easily be lured from her sanctuary in Loomlade.

He laughed at the thought, though by now his teeth were chattering. His watch showed five and he got up and walked about, rubbing his hands and stamping his feet. It seemed to be growing colder all the time but he didn’t want to light the burner again and use up all the gas in the canister. They would need it for tea in the
morning. He decided to go for a walk, take some exercise. That was another thought to make him laugh, the notion of taking exercise down here in the bowels of the earth. He walked back along the winze and when he came to the fork continued a little way along to where the bad air began. And there he saw he had been wrong about the unlikelihood of flooding in the mine. Here the floor of the passage which had always been wet was lying under water. The level of water in the lake called the Bottomless Pit had risen up the walls of the cavern it filled and the water was spreading out to cut off the passage. Stephen shone his torch up ahead and whistled at what he saw. It was impossible to tell exactly how deep the water was but it had come so high as to leave a gap of only a foot or so between its ruffled black surface and the coffin-curved roof of the winze.

Ruffled, not still. It was rising as he watched. Was it raining again outside? Had it perhaps been raining all the time he had been asleep and before and since? For the first time Stephen realized how steeply after the fork the two branches ascended, the one to Rip’s Cavern, the other to the egress chamber. It would take a long time for the water to get up there, perhaps it never would, perhaps whenever there was heavy rain the mine flooded like this and then afterwards the water gradually seeped away again to be sucked up by the moor.

An awareness that he might be in some danger struck him with a chill. He felt less fear than irritation at this threat to his and Rip’s happiness. Was that why Rip hadn’t come? Because it was raining once more as it had rained on the day of the storm? Stephen thought he would go up and see. He would go up the shaft and see if it was raining.

It was at this point that his torch battery failed. Of
course he hadn’t been so imprudent as to come without a spare and he went back to Rip’s Cavern to fetch it from his rucksack. Should he take the rucksack and the blanket up with him? Not yet. It might not be necessary at all. Rip would come. So great was his faith that he would come back and Rip would come that he left the candle burning in the brass candlestick.

Back to the fork he went and along the winze to the egress chamber. Water was running in thin trickling rivulets across the floor out from the mouth of the shaft. But it wasn’t these runnels of water that made Stephen stare and then dash forward across the wet shale.

The rope had gone.

He moved the torch beam aside to give the effect of closing his eyes. Then he shone it again on to the shaft opening. The rope wasn’t there. He went to the shaft and stood in it, looking up. A big drop of water splashed on to his forehead. He imagined it raining hard up there, the water draining off the hillside, over the stones and into the sough. Could the rain have been heavy enough to have washed the rope from its anchorage? If that had happened it wouldn’t have disappeared altogether, it would have dropped down the shaft. Someone had unfastened it.

After his first couple of visits to the mine he had found himself so agile at climbing the shaft that he could have done without the rope. Now was the time to prove that. Should he go back for his rucksack? Of course not. He didn’t mean to stay above ground, he intended to come back into the mine. The torch, however, he would take with him. He hooked it over his arm.

The first steps he took were encouraging. Down here
there were prominent ledges of rock for footholds and the streaming water made little difference to the purchase obtained. But after the first five or six feet the walls grew smoother and the shaft became a slippery gullet. When he had calculated that he could do without the rope he hadn’t reckoned with the results of heavy rain. He lay against the wall of the shaft about six feet up, unable to find a secure hold for his hands, and until he could do so, scarcely daring to move his right foot. But he did move it, his hands grasping shale and nearly liquid mud. Both feet slipped and he slid back down all the way he had come, grazing chest and arms and hands on the sticky gravelly surface.

He tried again. He tried twice more and had to give up when he twisted his left ankle. His clothes were covered in mud, his hands were bleeding and he had cracked the glass in the torch. It was stupid to struggle like that and get in a state over it, stupid to risk injuring himself, for there was no chance of his being trapped in the mine. Rip was coming. Rip would bring his own rope with him.

Holding the torch, which still gave a powerful light in spite of its cracked glass, Stephen limped slowly back along the winze. At the highest point he had reached in the shaft before sliding down again he had fancied he could hear rain, a roaring overhead like the sound of the sea. But down here was the same eternal deep silence. He could hear his own footsteps and that was all.

He stopped dead. He froze, he was utterly still, and yet he could still hear footsteps. Very faintly, ahead of him, reaching the fork perhaps from the other direction and pattering along the passage that led to Rip’s Cavern.

Rip had come at last. Stephen couldn’t tell how he had come, by what means he could have entered the
mine, but he had come and must now be in the cavern where the candle still burned. Stephen would have run on then in his anxiety to reach him but for his ankle. It was starting to hurt to put it to the ground. He limped as fast as he could up to the fork and turned down the other winze. Before he reached the bend and saw the light from the candle he smelt the sweet aromatic cigarette smoke. He called out, ‘Rip, I’m coming,’ and stumbled up to the entrance to the chamber.

The figure which had its back to him, which was bending over the box that contained the hair, cast on the wall a grotesque and monstrous shadow. It remained bent there as if paralysed and then it turned slowly round to face him. Stephen let the torch fall, it smashed and went out.

The man in Rip’s Cavern was Dadda.

There was
everything to say and nothing. They said nothing for a long time. Stephen staggered over to the mattress and half sat, half lay on it. He saw it was his own aran Dadda was wearing, an old one he had left in the house in King Street when he got married. He remembered the candlestick too. It came from Whalbys’ stock of antiques.

Dadda had been looking in the box where the hair was. He was holding Harriet Crozier’s hair in his hands and now he looked long and hard at Stephen. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out on the floor. It had always been his way to smoke only when he was happy.

Stephen forced himself to speak. ‘Did you take away my rope?’

‘Aye. Didn’t know it was yours, did I? Didn’t know it was you.’

Stephen shivered. ‘Then how did you get into the mine?’

‘Same bloody way I always do. Down Apsley Sough.’

‘But that’s Apsley Sough, where my rope was.’

Dadda lifted his great shoulders. ‘Years ago you came home and said you’d found a way into the mine. Apsley Sough, you said. When I — needed a place I looked for a hole and I found a hole, that’s all.’

There
were
two ways in then — and two ways out. Stephen got to his feet. Pains shot up his left leg from his ankle but he hardly felt them. For the first time he noticed how wet Dadda was, up to the waist he was wet as if he had been immersed in water.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘If you’ll tell me the way you came I’ll go. This is your place, I won’t come again.’

He felt, though, that he had come to an end, the end of his life perhaps. If he tried to climb out of it, as he had tried to climb out of the mine, he would only slide back and break himself in pieces. Dadda threw the hair from him. It fell in gleaming coils, bright as the candlestick.

‘We’ll both go,’ Dadda said, and he added in a low wondering voice, ‘Like father, like son …’

He handed Stephen the candle and switched on his own lantern. Stephen left the rucksack and the blanket behind. Dadda didn’t speak again until they were at the fork, Stephen limping along behind him. Then he pointed ahead.

‘It’s up there we go and it’ll be wet, I’m warning you. When I came in I was wading up to my belly in it.’