He didn’t much like the way she still looked mystified but there was nothing he could do about it. A fresh and very useful idea came to him. He waited impatiently while she said that some other time would have to do and began listing, actually ticking off on her fingers, all the possible times in the forthcoming week that he and the infant Chantal might be introduced to each other.
‘I think I’ll take the car,’ he said when she paused for breath. ‘I’ll go down into town and see if I can’t pick Lyn up. Unless I’m very much mistaken she’ll be sitting in the bus shelter in North River Street, waiting for the six fifteen.’ It was wonderful the way inspiration came to him when most he needed it. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, ‘and at the same time I’ll take a piece of sculpture that got broken round to my father’s.’ Mrs Newman wasn’t surprised by anyone’s listing his future, petty intentions, it was the way she talked herself. ‘If anyone can repair it my father can,’ said Stephen.
The rain continued to fall but it was no longer torrential. When Mrs Newman had gone he locked the back door after her, rolled out the settee and pulled the sack out from behind it. He found he could carry the sack quite easily. Lyn had weighed a few pounds less than a hundredweight.
A light came on in the Newmans’ living room. They would watch him get into the car. He carried the sack out, holding it upright, the head upwards. Once, outside Byss Town Hall, he had seen a statue carried out, wrapped in sacking like that, to a waiting van. He lifted up the hatchback and laid the sack gently on the floor of the car. When he had locked the hatchback he went back into the house for the kitchen scissors and his small torch.
The rain and the heavy clouds were maintaining a permanent twilight, but it would be a long time before it was dark enough to carry a body out on to the moor without being seen. As he drove away Stephen realized he would have to stay out and stay with the car for at least four hours. He drove north out of Chesney in the direction of Jackley. The car was going to be a liability, he would have been better without the car, yet without it how could he ever have got the body out of the house?
It was a little after six now and something like nine hours since he had had anything to eat. He hadn’t felt hungry but now he did. Only it was impossible to use up some of the time by eating a meal because it was unthinkable to leave the car. He went into the last garage on the road outside Jaekley and bought five pounds’ worth of petrol and then he turned back and drove towards Pertsey, parking the car in the shadow of Tower Foin.
Time passed very slowly. He hadn’t even brought anything to read. The rain enclosed him in a dome of reeded glass. Sometimes other cars passed along the road, splashing through the pools of water, their lights gleaming palely like dull reptilian eyes. At seven he moved off again, not because he had an idea of where to go but because the water was rising up the car’s wheels. With his particular cargo, it felt safer to be on the move. There was no water lying in the newly paved Jaekley municipal car park, so he sat there for a further half-hour. Gradually the rain was slackening. It had become a misty drizzle, hanging in swathes of grey over the moor. Stephen drove down the Hilderbridge road, concentrating now on where to put the body when dark came.
It was a question of how to avoid the car being seen while he positioned the body the way Rip would have done and in the sort of place Rip would have chosen. If he took the car into the bridlepath in the Vale of Allen it would be seen by anyone passing along this main road. Besides, the path would have become a quagmire. He might hide the car in one of the lanes around Loomlade, but how to carry the body away from there without risking being seen? There seemed nothing for it but to attempt the Banks of Knamber with its cover of birch trees. At the crossroads he turned left into the Thirlton road, but without even leaving the car he could see that this plan was impossible. The banks themselves, a thousand little round hillocks they said had once been burial mounds, were dry enough but the valleys between them lay under water — a thousand little hills with a thousand little lakes between.
Wherever he left the car tonight it was going to have to be on a metalled road. He drove through Thirlton and took the moorland road that ran through Bow Dale and under the lea of Knamber Foin. The road wasn’t much frequented but it was in use and it would be too much to hope that no other vehicles would pass along it that evening. But Stephen had remembered a possible place to hide the car which would be safer than any bridlepath or copse.
Apart from the workings in Goughdale, the only other mine on Vangmoor, Stoney Bow Mine, had been here in Bow Dale to the east of the foin. No surface evidence remained except for the portal of the incline level which had been used to allow the access of horses and was known to local people as the ‘old pony level’. The road passed over the top of it, its pediment of three stone blocks, engraved with the date 1819, forming a short length of low wall along the roadside.
Stephen got out of the car, which he had parked on the ‘bridge’ over the portal, and clambered down the slope. It was so high up here that most of the water had flowed away, not into the level, which was blocked some ten feet inside the tunnel by a concrete barrier, but down the drainage sough that fell away into the dale. The ground was wet but not waterlogged. He saw at once, though, that he couldn’t bring the car down here without leaving the grossest evidence of tyre marks imprinted in the mud.
No other cars had passed. He had kept one eye on the road all the time he had been down there. Now as he climbed out again he surveyed the whole length of empty road winding away on either side of the ‘bridge’, the thin twisty white road like a piece of string that contorts itself as it falls. There were no cars in sight and not a figure. It would be a long while yet before dark, but what difference would darkness make if there was no one to see? He couldn’t put the car into the old pony level but what was to stop him putting the body there?
Only the risk of a car passing and the driver seeing his car there and later on remembering. The portal under the road was exactly the sort of place Rip himself would have selected if he instead of Stephen had committed this third murder. The Foinmen, the powder house, the old pony level, they seemed a logical, a balanced, sequence. But if a car came by? He could do it in a moment. He could see so far from where he stood, he could see if a car was coming five minutes off. There was nothing in either direction, only the low-hanging cloud, the drawn-out dusk in which the white string of road, curling and twisting more on the left than on the right, glimmered with a greater clarity than in sunshine. He could see if a car was coming five minutes off but he could do the deed in less time than that.
He was nervous, though, lifting up the hatch and lugging out the sack. The road was still empty. He walked on the grass, on the bent-over tussocks of long grass, to avoid leaving footprints, but he plunged down the slope for all that, taking long strides, holding the body in the sack slung over his shoulder, and when he was a few feet out from the stone-coped arch, he threw it with all his strength into the tunnel opening. There was no time now to take it out of the sack or perform that other task which must be done. He scrambled up the bank, expecting all the time to see the car he had missed, the car that had been hiding round a bend in the white road, the car that had been one minute and not more than five off, hurtle over the ‘bridge’ ahead of him.
But there was nothing. The road was still empty and the gleam on it was fading as the dusk deepened. He encountered his first car ten minutes later as he was driving into Thirlton, and the owner of it who was talking to the person in the passenger seat hadn’t particularly noticed him, he was sure of that. There was some sort of meeting or social event going on in Thirlton village hall. Its car park was crowded with cars and so was the road outside it. Stephen left his among them and set off to walk the four or five miles back to the old pony level, keeping to the moorland paths and avoiding the road.