Stephen knew nothing of music. Manciple’s statement — for it had been a statement, though it required an answer — silenced him and blanked out his mind. But he must make some sort of reply. After a moment or two he said, for surely the work of these giants among composers must have been included, ‘Oh, Beethoven, Bach, classical stuff.’
Their faces told him nothing. There was no derision at the wildness of his response and no surprise at its accuracy, and immediately after that they let him go. Without a word about the future, without reassurance, without threat.
He came out into the street, telling himself he was safe, his blood made him safe. His blood was a clinging scarlet cloak, a magic cloak, that protected him. For two hours he had been with the police and for the first time no one had brought in coffee or biscuits or sandwiches. But Stephen had no appetite left. For a while he sat in his car as he had sat in it on Sunday evening, but the streets were filled with policemen, men in uniform and men who, though not in uniform, who wore as far as they themselves knew the clothes of the ordinary citizen, were nevertheless unmistakably policemen too. Stephen felt that they were taking particular note of this solitary figure in a parked car.
Dadda had gone. Stephen climbed the stairs, even less inclined for work than usual. On the horsehair padding of a chaise longue beside the love seat on which he had been working were two decanters in etched glass. Written on the sheet of paper on which they stood were two words: From Dadda.
Stephen felt anger well up and burn his throat. Dadda’s gifts had always brought him more embarrassment than pleasure. He would have liked to smash the decanters and leave the broken glass for Dadda to find when he came back from wherever he had gone. Two things stopped him, a contemptuous impatient pity for Dadda that still survived and a regard for beautiful objects his upbringing had instilled into him.
But the presence of the decanters and the note bolstered, he didn’t know why, a decision that had been taking shape as he sat in the car, crossed the square, climbed the stairs. He was going to stop working for Whalbys’. He hated it, had always hated it, though never so much as he did now. Surely there was something else he could find to do, something more closely connected with the moor. If they gave him the chance to do anything else, if they left him at liberty …
He picked up the decanters, wrapped them roughly in newspaper and, holding them in his arms, went down into the street. The big double doors he closed almost ceremoniously and locked them, and then he turned his face towards the moor. There was scarcely a point in Hilderbridge from which it couldn’t be seen, and now as he crossed the square towards his car a segment of it appeared between the overhanging fronts of the shops in Market Hill, the bluish peak of Hilder Foin.
Stephen hadn’t been to church since he was a child, but there are two psalms the opening lines of which everyone still knows. He repeated tremulously under his breath, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help …’
Freedom from marriage, freedom from work, should have lightened him, but he felt as heavy as lead. Every moment he expected the police to arrive again and begin their questioning or take him away for more questioning. The phone rang at about seven but it was a wrong number. That made him take another decision in his aim for total freedom. He sat down and wrote a letter to Post Office Telecommunications, asking them to disconnect the phone. What did he want a phone for? Who was there for him to call? He addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it and walked up to the green to post it, though it wouldn’t go out until the morning.
Once more the gatehouse lodge of Chesney Hall was heavily manned by police. Stephen felt a pang of real dread for Rip. With so many after him, surely he must be caught, there could be no final escape for him. It was like when he was a child, there in the lodge with his grandmother, and the Vangmoor hounds met on Chesney Green. He had pitied the fox then, pursued unfairly by so many.
And next morning, out on the moor, walking across the Vale of Allen towards the Reeve’s Way, he met men in jeans and sweatshirts who told him they were police officers and asked his business. He recognized none of them but when, reluctantly, he gave them his name, he sensed that they knew it, that it was familiar to them in some unpleasant way. He couldn’t guess why they were there or what they could possibly be looking for. They advised him to go home and Stephen agreed to this, it seemed simplest, but when they were out of sight he made for Pertsey and Tower Foin. He needed the moor, they weren’t going to be allowed to take it away from him again.
Tace had been born ninety-eight years ago that day. Stephen thought about Tace and wondered if what the people who believed in reincarnation said was true, and if the novelist’s spirit had entered into himself. He stayed out all day, walking, lying on the sun-dried, tilted, flat boulders of the foin, and when the sun grew hot, retreating into the shade of the powder house to sleep there in the cool dark. It was early evening before he got home.
A police car was parked outside his house and inside it were Manciple and Troth.
18
Manciple sat on the settee. Troth wouldn’t sit down but walked about the room, looking at things in what Stephen thought a very insolent way. He picked up Dadda’s silver Stilton knife and examined the assay mark and then he lifted up one of the decanters out of its newspaper wrapping and tapped the glass to make it ring. Stephen was glad he had taken Harriet Crozier’s handbag upstairs.
He didn’t know why they had come. Not to arrest him, certainly, not even to take him to the police station. Up to a point they were behaving as if making a mere social call, yet they had refused his offer of a drink or of coffee or tea. Manciple was doing nearly all the talking. He sat with his legs crossed and one arm stretched out along the back of the settee, giving Stephen a slow detailed account of how Harriet had been missed at work on Monday morning and how, because she had told Martin Smith she was going for a bus ride on the moor on Saturday, a search party had been assembled and the body found at four on Monday afternoon. What she hadn’t told Martin Smith but had told a girl friend was that there was a man she liked who was living on the moor, only he was married.
Manciple talked, not in an accusing or hectoring way, but as if perhaps Stephen were a criminologist who might be expected to be interested in such things. Troth walked about, examining ornaments like a valuer. After a while Manciple asked him to go out and wait in the car. Stephen thought Troth was going to refuse outright. He set down the chestnut leaf table which he had actually lifted up to scrutinize by the light at the window, turned and looked at Manciple with one eyebrow cocked up. Then he shrugged.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’
‘Let yourself out,’ Manciple said as Stephen moved towards the door. The front door closed, almost with a slam. Stephen stood where Troth had been, his back to the light. ‘Stand if you’d rather,’ said Manciple in his understanding, conciliatory voice. ‘I won’t keep you five minutes.’
Stephen sat down on the arm of a chair.
The social note was back in Manciple’s voice. ‘You know the introductory music to that Bleakland series on TV?’ He hummed and pom-pommed a couple of bars. Reading from a scrap of paper he took from his pocket, he said, ‘Vivaldi, part of the Four Seasons.’
‘Of course I know it. Of course it’s Vivaldi.’ Stephen was always huffy when anyone questioned his intellectual pretensions, and huffiness prevented him seeing the trap.