Her hair was as long, as golden and nearly as thick as Lyn’s. It fell down over her shoulders and she pushed it back away from her face. She laughed at his look of consternation. It wasn’t Lyn’s face at all but sharp and knowing, the nose sprinkled with freckles, the eyes a cat’s green.
‘I can’t tie my head up for the rest of my life,’ she said.
She was holding her empty glass. Stephen didn’t want to have to buy her another drink. He had begun to feel uneasy, taking a woman into a pub, buying a drink for her, being seen with her perhaps. It had never happened to him before and he felt it wasn’t quite a fair way to behave to Lyn.
‘Time I was on my way.’
She seemed surprised. ‘Let me buy you one.’
‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘I’ve a long walk ahead of me.’
In spite of what he had just said he might have shirked it if the 6.15 bus hadn’t just gone. He set off but it was wearisome to have to stick to the road. What did Malm’s parting shot mean? That he was forbidden the moor? For how long? And what possible right had the police to lay such injunctions on an innocent man? Stephen had the impotent, resentful, revengeful feeling about that which a lover has when warned by more powerful authority off a girl. And he shared that lover’s certainty that if he obeyed his life wouldn’t be worth living. There was no time, since the departure of his mother, when the moor had not been to him a refuge, a domain, and in some curious way, a closer friend than any human being. It brought him a hollow, slightly sick, sensation to think of being estranged from it.
He must keep to the road. To the left of him now were the Foinmen, to the right the Banks of Knamber, but he must not go among the standing stones nor the birch trees, it was as if an invisible wall had been erected between them and him. And this had been brought about by the murderer of those girls, this man who had usurped Vangmoor and made himself a greater master of it than he.
It was a beautiful evening, the air soft and hushed, the distant hills floating in a bluish haze. But Stephen kept his eyes on the white road ahead as if he were a blinkered horse or as if there were rows of houses, identical and dull-facaded, on either side of him. At the stop nearest to Knamber Hole he waited and caught the 7.15 bus.
8
Next day the CID sent for him again.
This time it was like a psychotherapy session, or what Stephen imagined such a session would be, only with three psychiatrists and one patient-victim. Manciple wasn’t there. Instead of him there was a chief inspector called Hook. Hook did most of the talking. It was easy to see he had been called in because he was used to this kind of thing, to asking the right kind of cutting-through-to-the-bone questions and perhaps to breaking men. Only you couldn’t break and confess when you had done nothing.
Hook wanted Stephen’s life described to him. He wanted Stephen to say exactly what he did on one typical day. What was there so special about the moor that he was so attached to it? Was it a fact that he was accustomed to ten- or even twenty-mile walks? How long had he been married? Why had he no children?
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’
‘You’re not ashamed to tell us, are you? There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some would say there are too many people in this world without you adding to them.’
‘Let’s say that’s the answer, then.’
Hook said he understood, he had been told, that Stephen was a grandson of Tace the Vangmoor novelist. How had that come about since Tace had apparently been childless? Oh, through an illegitimate child? He was by way of being an illegitimate grandson of Tace’s?
Coffee and biscuits arrived at ten. It was a misty morning and to Stephen’s relief the sun was sluggish in appearing. The room was cool and smelt of some sort of antiseptic that had been used in the water when the floor was washed. Troth had a pustule on his chin which worried him. He didn’t scratch it but constantly brought his fingers close to it, tenderly palpating the greasy, pitted skin around it. Hook was a tall man who might have been good-looking but for his bulbous, shapeless, pugilist’s nose. He drank in a curious way, holding his coffee cup in both hands. In the middle of a series of questions he broke off and said to Stephen à propos, it seemed, of nothing that had gone before, his eyes fixed and narrowed, his forefinger pointing across the table, ‘We’re looking for a psychopath — would you agree to that? Would you agree that a man who kills the way this one does, for no more motive than that a girl’s young and has got long blonde hair, a man who’s driven by some impulse to kill in this way, he would be a psychopath?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘A man who is apparently a conformist, young and physically very strong, a man who needs routine because any other kind of existence he can’t handle. A man who has a fantasy life, maybe delusions of grandeur, a man with a morbid interest in death. I’m describing a certain type of psychopath. Aren’t I also describing you, Whalby?’
Stephen said nothing. What could he say?
‘So we have a blueprint and here we have a man who fits that blueprint — or so it seems to me. Don’t you think any detached observer would see it like that? Our man knows Vangmoor. He knows it so well he can find his way about it in the dark. He’s so strong and he knows the moor so well he can carry a dead body miles across it by night.’
‘I haven’t a morbid interest in death.’ Stephen tried a dismissive laugh and felt he had succeeded. ‘What was I supposed to do when I found Marianne Price’s body? Not tell you? Go home as if nothing had happened?’
‘We’ll ask the questions, Whalby,’ said Malm.
Stephen had never seen Troth smile or even look pleasant, but now as he sat a little apart from the others, sat with a certain air of deference to the others, his hand moving slightly in the vicinity of that red spot with its yellow blob, there was something in his face that Stephen recognized as amusement. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t even a lifting of those tight, bunched facial muscles, but rather a light in his eyes. Troth was amused, vastly entertained, by the spectacle of a defenceless person being insulted.
True to his word, Malm launched into a spate of questions. This time they were all concerned with the geography of the moor and Manciple, who knew it better than they, had to be called in to assist. It seemed to Stephen that he had already, dozens of times, described the walks he took and the climbs he did, but they wanted it all again. Then the door opened and a man came in. Stephen didn’t even look up, he was so sure it must be their lunch sandwiches arriving, but there was no tray and no sandwiches, only another one of those whispered messages of the kind, no doubt, that yesterday had made him into a psychopath and a murderer. Malm, Hook and Manciple all left the room. Stephen was left alone with Troth.
Troth behaved exactly as if he wasn’t there. He did something Stephen felt no man would do in the company of another unless he felt that other to be less than the dust. There was no mirror in the room but the street plan was framed and glazed. Troth got up. Achieving a passable reflection of his face in the glass, he squeezed the spot on his chin between his two forefingers. He gave a low grunt of pain and blood spurted, a tiny bead of it plummeting onto the frame.
Stephen sat and waited. Troth made him feel acutely uncomfortable by getting behind him and standing there, presumably to look out of the window. He resolved that whatever happened, if they kept him there for hours, if they kept him there all day, he wouldn’t speak to Troth. He stretched his legs and shifted in the chair. His whole body felt tense. They couldn’t do anything to him, could they? They must be bluffing. They couldn’t actually charge an innocent man.