Читать книгу Fell of Dark - Reginald Hill - Страница 10

We stopped twice more on our descent into Eskdale, the first time to eat the stringy ham sandwiches Stirling had probably picked personally to go into our packed lunch. To wash them down I had a super-sized flask which I had filled with iced lager by courtesy of Peter’s waiter. I mentioned this.

‘Clive?’ he said. ‘That was nice of him especially when we were in such disgrace.’

We laughed once more at the memory. Peter seemed to have recovered completely from the episode with the sheep.

Our second halt was in the valley. We had diverted slightly to have a look at Cam Spout as it poured down from Mickledore and had followed the stream down to Esk Falls where it mingled with another which came trickling down from Bowfell. Here the track levelled out and we were able to take our ease after the exertions of the steep descent. Eventually we reached a spot where the waters broadened into a pool about a dozen feet across. Peter decided he wanted to bathe. There was no one around, but I don’t think it would have mattered if there had been. Quite unselfconsciously he took off his clothes and stepped in.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘The water’s lovely.’

Prudence, or prudery, made me hesitate a moment. Then my clothes were off and I leapt in beside him.

Peter flung a handful of water at me with a laugh and next minute we were engaged in a splashing match which soon degenerated into a wrestling match. Eventually, half drowned, we relaxed again and let the sun warm all that was uncovered by the water. My eyes were closed, but suddenly I sensed a shadow on my skin and looking up I saw a man standing on the bank. He was dressed for walking and looked an imposing figure as he tood there, my angle of view making him seem taller than he was. His broad sunburnt face and thick grey-red beard added to the general impression of forcefulness and power. I was sure I had seen him before.

‘Good day to you,’ he said with a slight Scottish accent. ‘If I wasn’t so modest, I’d join you.’

‘Please do,’ I replied.

‘No, no.’ He grinned. ‘I’m getting old. I couldn’t stand the comparison. Good day.’

So saying, he touched his stick to the floppy hat he wore and strode away down the track.

Shortly after this, we clambered out and dressed ourselves. I noticed Peter did not put back on the shirt with the blood-stained sleeve, but replaced it by another.

It was only a few miles now to the village of Boot. There was a fairly large inn nearby with hotel pretensions in the summer. We were both now feeling very tired.

‘If,’ I said, ‘if they can fit us in, I suggest we leave the seaside till tomorrow. It won’t go away.’

By luck, there was a double room available, a cancellation, almost a miracle at this time of year, the manager assured us. An expensive miracle, it appeared when we enquired the cost. But I hadn’t got the will-power to go any further now.

We were shown upstairs to our room and I collapsed on the nearest bed and closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. Or so I thought.

When I woke Peter was standing over me dressed in his ‘respectable’ kit.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘or we’ll miss dinner. I’ve been down already and it smells gorgeous.’

‘Borrowdale seems a million years ago,’ I commented as I sipped a well-diluted scotch in the bar.

‘Yes, doesn’t it? I bet it’s raining in Seathwaite.’

An anxious little waiter stuck his head round the bar door and waved at Peter.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘do you always make friends with the most unimportant members of the domestic staff?’

‘That,’ he said, ‘is Marco. He is Italian. He is here for the season. He is telling me that if we really want our dinner, we’d better get a move on or else the chef, a man with a vicious tongue and I suspect a gangrene on his shin will run amuck. I have ordered for you.’

We went in. Nearly everybody else was at the pudding stage. Over in a corner with a rather pretty young girl was the bearded man who had passed us as we bathed. His semi-formal attire made him look even more distinguished but older too. He must have been well over fifty at least.

He had his back to us but to my surprise the girl on seeing us enter reached over and touched his arm and he turned to look.

With the attractive smile I had remarked earlier, he waved genially, then returned to his food. The girl watched us to our seats, though not blatantly.

The mystery was explained when we sat down.

‘That,’ said Peter, with a flicker of his left cheek muscle in the direction of the bearded man, ‘is Richard Ferguson, the bird-man. With him is Annie Ferguson, the bird.’

‘His wife?’

‘His daughter, you fool. It’s no use looking for reassurance that your advancing years have not put you on the shelf. They’re v. devoted, almost incestuously so. His wife, I believe, is an invalid. Might even be dead.’

I had heard of Richard Ferguson, had even listened to a radio talk of his on one occasion when I had been too comfortable to reach out of my bath to change the station on my transistor. He was much sought after, so I gathered, as a broadcasting pundit. Some accident of chance had led the BBC to adopt him as one of their panel game and quiz team ‘characters’. It seemed almost incidental now that he was also one of the country’s leading ornithologists.

‘How did you meet him?’ I asked.

‘Introduced myself in the bar. When a man’s seen you naked, you’ve taken the first step to friendship after all.’

‘From the way his daughter’s looking at us, he’s obviously described the scene to her too.’

‘Well, it’s too good a tale not to be retold.’

Our soup arrived in the slim brown hands of Marco. I ate with gusto.

Peter’s suggestion that we had a couple of drinks in the bar after dinner I firmly refused. I left him there and watched the telly for a while, struck up a conversation with a couple from London, read half a page of the Daily Telegraph, then went to bed.

It had been a splendid day. I had a self-congratulatory sense of physical achievement. I was well fed, pleasantly sleepy and lay in a comfortable bed. To cap it all, a large yellow moon shone right outside my window. I saluted it and fell asleep.

I don’t know what time Peter came up but when the knock came at our door in the morning he was already up and dressed. He looked pale and told me as we went down to breakfast that he was suffering from sunburn as a result of our bathing party the day before.

‘I can’t walk today,’ he said. ‘I doubt if I’ll ever walk again.’

Marco’s smiling greetings had gone almost unacknowledged and the little Italian did not look at all happy when he brought us our bacon and eggs.

‘Not to worry,’ I grinned. ‘Today we go by train.’

Marco slammed Peter’s plate down in front of him. His thumb was in the fringe of the egg. As he removed his hand the egg came with it, then sliding free, it fell towards Peter’s lap. Peter with the casual rightness so hated by Jan lifted the edge of the tablecloth and caught the greasy object. He looked expressionlessly at Marco, then spoke.

‘Marco, can’t you organize something that makes sense out of this chaos?’

Marco’s underlip suddenly shot out and he began to gabble in Italian, lowly at first, but soon swelling in volume till everyone in the room was looking at us. Ferguson and his daughter, I noticed, had just come in and were standing by the door openly observing the scene with great interest.

Marco reached some kind of climax and halted. I thought of applauding, but a look at his face made me think again. He was very angry. Peter still sat there holding the tablecloth like a bridal train.

Ferguson moved over to us and spoke sharply in Italian. Marco caught the remnants of the egg up in his hand, flung it on to the plate and strode away to the kitchen.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter, releasing the tablecloth and standing up, partly to avoid the last oozings of the egg yolk, partly in acknowledgment of Miss Ferguson who was hovering behind her father. ‘That was kind. May I introduce my friend, Harry Bentink.’

‘Hello, Bentink. We have met in a manner of speaking. And I heard a great deal about you last night.’

‘How do you do,’ I said, half standing up with a bit of fried bread impaled on my fork which I waved nonchalantly at the girl. The bread fell on to the table.

‘You’re not having much luck with this table, are you?’ said Ferguson. ‘Come and share ours.’

He did not stay for an answer but moved across to the corner where he had been sitting the night before. We followed.

‘My daughter, Annie,’ he said. The girl smiled politely but said nothing. I got the impression she was scrutinizing me very closely behind her impassive façade.

‘Are you here on holiday or business?’ I asked.

‘Bit of both,’ he said. ‘Never know what you’ll see on the mountains.’

‘That’s true,’ said Peter in what I recognized as his facetious tone. ‘We saw a blue and a white tit only yesterday, didn’t we, Harry?’

He kicked my leg gleefully under the table. I lashed back and caught the girl’s ankle. She drew away in greater unease than I felt the situation warranted.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Will you excuse me?’

She rose and left. She’d only had a thimbleful of grapefruit juice. I let my practised eye recreate the limbs under the skirt as I watched her go through the door and smiled approvingly.

She did not come back and we finished the meal practically in silence.

Replete, Ferguson folded his napkin neatly, looked at each of us in turn and asked, ‘What are your plans today?’

‘We’re going to see the sea,’ said Peter. ‘But first we’re going on a mysterious train journey.’

Ferguson laughed.

‘Oh, Lile Rattie,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Peter.

‘The miniature railway. It’s great fun if the weather’s fine. And it runs to time.’

Peter looked across at me and raised his eye-brows apologetically at having spoilt my surprise. I grinned back and looked suggestively at my watch. He nodded.

‘Well, Mr Ferguson, thank you for the use of your table. We must be off, however, while the day is young.’

We all stood up and shook hands.

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ said Ferguson.

‘You too.’

As we went out of the dining-room I looked at Peter curiously.

‘Why didn’t you answer Marco?’ I knew he spoke excellent Italian.

He shrugged.

‘He was just being rude.’

‘What did Ferguson say to him, then?’

Peter laughed.

‘He told him to bugger off or risk losing his unmentionables!’

Half an hour later we were striding down the road into the railway station. More than a station, it is a terminus and the incongruity of both setting and proportion have always endeared the place to me. Peter looked without comment at the narrow track and the low platform. There were not many people around at this time of the morning, I mean not many waiting to catch the train to Ravenglass, though when the train itself arrived it was quite full of trippers and hikers. They got out and dispersed. We put our knapsacks in one of the tiny open compartments and walked up the track to inspect the locomotive. Peter examined everything very closely, full of amused delight.

‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not an intrusion into the place. Not like all those bloody motor-cars you find parked all over the place. You could run up Helvellyn in something like this and even Wordsworth wouldn’t object.’

The exhilaration of feeling the rush of air on your face, of being able literally to lean out and pick flowers as you pass is almost indescribable. Perhaps the sense of inhabiting in reality for a while the imaginative world of childhood has something to do with it. Certainly the (so it seemed) inevitable sun, the royal blue sky, the smell of things growing, to which the occasional whiff of steam or smoke seemed a natural addition, all these contributed to the enchantment of the moment. Peter looked like a child on a perfect birthday.

‘Thalatta, thalatta,’ he murmured softly to himself, eyes straining ahead to take everything in. ‘Soon we will see the sea.’

I nodded happily, acquiescingly. Soon we would see the sea.

Beckfoot came and went. Then Eskdale Green, Irton Road and the descent down the flank of a wooded fell to Muncaster. All too soon it seemed our journey was over and the sturdy little engine pulled us round an easy bend into the Ravenglass terminus.

I sat back for a few seconds, reluctant to move. But Peter was already on his feet.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’

‘All right.’ I took my knapsack and we walked slowly up to the small booking-kiosk and the exit.

There were two men standing by the gate. They were dressed in rather shabby grey suits cut in a style that was archaic by London standards and must have been a bit behind the times even for Ravenglass.

One was reading a newspaper. The other, a smaller, altogether less restful-looking man, registered our approach and touched his companion on the arm. I was reminded of the Fergusons when we came into dinner the previous night.

The larger man glanced up, folded his newspaper into a squat little packet and thrust it into his jacket pocket. The anxious little man was already heading towards us. The big man strolled in his wake.

‘Not more waiters, I hope,’ I said to Peter.

He laughed. ‘Not mine if they are.’

It was obvious that the men were heading for us. There hadn’t been many people on the train and most of those had already disappeared.

‘I think they are policemen,’ said Peter.

I felt a sudden panic. To intercept us on holiday like this meant something pretty urgent. Something at the office? Hardly. A fire at home? Something happened to Jan?

‘Mr Bentink? Mr Thorne? We are police officers, I am Detective-Constable Armstrong and this is Detective-Constable Lazonby.’

Peter and I nodded inanely. For a moment, overlaying worry, came the thought of how amusing it would be if we all shook hands and then went our separate ways. But only for a moment.

‘We wonder if you would mind helping us in some enquiries we are making.’

‘Certainly, if I can,’ said I, my relief that none of my personal fears seemed to be realized making me more enthusiastic than I normally am in my dealings with the police.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said little Armstrong. ‘Then if you’d come this way. We have a car.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Can’t we chat here just as easily as in a car?’

Armstrong stood on his toes in his anxiety.

‘I wasn’t thinking of talking in the car, Mr Bentink.’

‘No,’ said Lazonby in a much less conciliatory tone. ‘We’d like you to come to the station.’

I didn’t like the sound of that, but what followed I liked even less.

‘In Keswick,’ added Armstrong with reluctant honesty.

‘Keswick!’ Peter screeched.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Armstrong. I found to my surprise we were moving quite rapidly towards the car-park.

‘Detective-Superintendent Melton would like you to assist him with an enquiry he is in charge of.’

Superintendent. I knew enough to know this meant it wasn’t trivial.

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘Just what is this case, and how can we help?’

Armstrong looked at Lazonby with dog-like appeal.

‘Detective-Superintendent Melton is in charge of the investigation into the deaths of Miss Olga Lindstrom and Miss Sarah Herbert. He thinks you may be able to help him with his enquiries,’ recited Lazonby.

‘Which girls? Oh, not those girls – the Swedish pen friend and – but how did they die? An accident on the fells?’

‘Accident?’ said Lazonby. ‘If you can strangle somebody by accident, and rape them by accident, then it might be a bloody accident. Come on.’

Stunned, we followed. A few minutes later we were in a police car on the road to Keswick.

Some time later as the car began to labour up into the fells we thought we had turned our backs on, it began to rain.