Stephen was shivering with fear now. He had always believed himself to be brave and strong but that belief now shook and foundered. In his fear he whimpered out loud that he had no one to turn to, no one who would help him. For twenty years and more Dadda had been useless. He remembered with bitter hatred his dead grandmother and that fat fair woman now jaunting round Europe in a tourist bus.
It was Lyn on whom for love and comfort he had always cast himself, and Lyn he had murdered. He fell on his knees and buried his head in the seat of the chair as if in her lap.
15
In acute fear of what it might tell him, Stephen brought himself to switch the television on for the news at 5.45. He had only to listen to the headlines to know that Lyn’s body hadn’t yet been found. Few people would venture out onto the moor today, he thought, standing at the window and looking out as she had stood and looked out. The rain had begun again, it was very dark for early on an August evening. He heard some more news on another channel at seven. Still nothing.
There was a chance, of course, a probability even, that if he didn’t report Lyn as missing her body wouldn’t be found for weeks. One would have to go right down into the gully if not into the tunnel itself to see it. However, during those weeks he was going to have to account to her family for her absence. During the afternoon, after he had pulled himself together enough to go downstairs and have some more whisky, he had lain on the bed and fallen intermittently into a drunken doze. The back door he had locked, another departure from normal behaviour. From his bedroom he had heard Mrs Newman rattle the door handle. A few minutes later she or Joanne rang the front doorbell. The phone had rung twice. But he had answered none of these summonses, though knowing that in failing to do so he was only plunging himself deeper and deeper into this morass of his own creating.
His head ached. In spite of that, he didn’t dare stay in after having told his mother-in-law that he and Lyn were going to his uncle Stanley’s. He forced himself to put on a clean shirt and a jacket for the benefit of those watching on the opposite side of Tace Way, though there was no way of showing them Lyn. In the hall, just about to leave, he heard a click and then a faint clatter from the back door and he jumped, almost crying out. It was only Peach, letting himself in through the cat flap, leaving small, dainty, wet footprints across the tiles. Stephen got into the car and drove away, very conscious of being alone and of being seen to be alone.
When he started off he had no idea where to go, but once he was driving through the village he felt an urge that was nearly irresistible to take the road that led past Knamber Foin and over the old pony level. It would be madness to do that. Later, anyone who had driven along that road would be questioned as to what cars they had seen. He felt pulled towards the place, though, teased by a nervous desire to see if the body were still there, to push it deeper into the tunnel, to cover it, even to remove it, take it away and deposit it elsewhere.
He got as far as Thirlton, parking where he had done on the previous night, near the village hall. He would not go on. With all his strength he would resist this compulsion. He would sit here in the car for an hour, two hours. Two hours would be enough for this supposed social call, surely. For just that length of time he would stay here, stick it out and wait, and then he would go back and take the phone off the hook and lock the back door and bolt the front door.
With the engine off, it was cold in the car like winter. The rainswept moor rolled away to the right of him, blending without visible demarcation into the rolling grey sky. He thought of running away. He could lock up the house, take the car and go away somewhere. There was money in his bank account, about five hundred pounds. If he made up his mind now he could even take the body with him, retrieve it tonight, drive south …
Anything to escape the questioning and probing of Lyn’s family. He had never thought much about it before, but now he realized how much he hated Lyn’s family, indistinguishable from Naullses, Naullses all. A race of creatures set on this earth to frustrate and torment him. What was he going to say next time they asked him where she was? He couldn’t run away, he could never leave this place. He could no more imagine life without the moor than he could without one of his limbs or his eyes.
The ceaseless rain drove him to despair. It streamed down the windows of the car, having a claustrophobic effect, something he had never felt down in the mine, in Rip’s Cavern. Suppose Lyn’s mother phoned uncle Stanley? She might, she was capable of it. They had known each other all their lives, Lyn’s father and Stanley Naulls had been at school together. What was he going to say when he got back and Mrs Newman came over and asked where Lyn was?
I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning. I don’t know where she’s gone. She never came back from Hilderbridge. Stephen turned all these hopeless responses over in his mind, and out of the mělée of them came one that wasn’t hopeless. It came to him gently and clearly and seemed to hang trembling, waiting for him to seize it.
He did so and repeated the words to himself: I don’t know where she is, she’s left me.
Something had stopped him thinking about the events of yesterday morning, something which that idiot Trevor would no doubt have called an emotional block. He had blanked them out of his memory without apparent will or effort. But now he forced himself to remember what Lyn had said to him that had led to his striking her and her breaking the bust of Tace. Not what had led to his killing her, that had been something different, something beyond analysis. He had struck Lyn because she had been unfaithful to him. Therefore there must be some other man.
Stephen hadn’t given this a thought until now. That she had somehow cheated him, that she was going to have a child and bring it into his home, these things had been enough. But now, warily, he turned his mind to that shadowy figure, Lyn’s Lover. He didn’t know much about this sort of thing, it had never interested him. He had supposed it would never concern him. But he had been unable to escape noticing that marriages broke up, men left their homes with other women, women theirs with other men. Why shouldn’t he say that this was what Lyn had done? Why not tell her mother that Lyn had left him in order to go and live with this other man?
Indeed, if he hadn’t intervened it might have been true. The man must exist. When Lyn’s body was found it would be assumed that she had left Tace Way on Saturday morning to join him in, say, Hilderbridge and, having missed her bus, had accepted a lift …
Stephen started the car and put on the windscreen wipers. The clear arcs they made in the streaming glass showed him the sun setting in red streaks through splits in the cloud. He would go back home, no one would expect him to stay out visiting when his wife had just left him. Reversing, starting back, he began to rehearse the words he would use.
It was a relief to be in the house again. He put on the lights and left the curtains open and awaited the arrival of Mrs Newman. Peach came over to him, hoping perhaps to sit on his lap as he had so often sat on Lyn’s. Stephen pushed him away lightly with his toe. There was a book lying on the chestnut leaf table which made that inaccessible too, so Peach sat in an armchair, looking offended and uneasy. He was waiting for Lyn, Stephen thought, but it hardly mattered, his days were numbered, his hours even.
It was only nine o’clock. He switched on the television and found a channel with some news on it. There was nothing about Vangmoor murders, Lyn’s body hadn’t been found. Stephen began to wonder why Mrs Newman didn’t come. She could see he was back, she must want to see Lyn as much as ever, must even by now be growing anxious about her. He thought of going across the road and volunteering the information about Lyn’s leaving him, but on reflection it seemed an unwise move. It seemed to him not quite in his own character.