He closed the flaps on top of the box. He considered performing some other act to show Rip he had been there. But what other act was necessary? What disturbance could he make or message could he leave that wouldn’t slightly undo the subtlety of what he had already done?
Back along the coffin-shaped winze he made his way, along the left-hand fork and into the egress chamber, half-expecting all the time to meet Rip returning. He emerged with a feeling of letdown into the close white air, remembering that first time all those years ago and the stranger boy’s freckled face looking down at him. And this sense of disappointment and growing fear remained with him, darkening his mind. It intensified as he plodded homewards across the spongy, sodden peat. It was as if he had used up all his resources in the strategic placing of Lyn’s body and the depositing in Rip’s Cavern of her hair, and now a kind of reckoning had come. The time had arrived to think instead of act and he began to see that he hadn’t thought well.
For Rip, of course, there had never been need of thought. He had only to kill, cut off the girl’s hair and hide in the mine until it was safe to resume whatever daily life it was that he led. But Stephen had murdered his own wife. It was his own wife that was missing and, as the successor to Ian Stringer and Roger Morgan, he should have been the first to search for her.
He tried to imagine himself not her murderer but the husband only of a woman missing on Vangmoor. She would have been missing by now for something like twenty-four hours. He had told her mother on the previous evening he was going to meet her in Hilderbridge. When she wasn’t there, when he hadn’t been able to find her, wouldn’t he naturally have told someone? If not the police at that juncture, wouldn’t he have told her parents?
None of this had struck Stephen before. He felt a little sick and his skin prickled. It was after one when he got back to Chesney. Surely a man living in a village on Vangmoor, where two girls with long fair hair had been murdered in the past three months, would suspect the same might have happened to his wife, a girl with long fair hair, if she didn’t come home all night? The natural thing would have been to have conferred with her parents last night, to have got in touch with the police last night, to have organized a search party last night. He had been too busy last night to think of any of that. If he went to the police now the first thing they would ask was, hadn’t he been worried when she didn’t come home? Why hadn’t he reported her disappearance on the previous evening? Knowing the danger as he did, he who had found the body of the first victim, he who had been so exhaustively questioned by the police, why had he done nothing until lunchtime the next day?
As he came along Tace Way he saw ahead of him a crowd of people in the Simpsons’ front garden. It was too late to turn back and wait somewhere until they had gone in. Mrs Newman was waving at him. He went on, the question pounding in his head: what was he going to say when they asked where Lyn was? What was he going to say?
‘There you are then, Stephen. Wherever’s Lyn got to?’
‘Isn’t she in?’ he said, stammering a little.
‘She hasn’t been in all the morning. I said to Joanne, you give her a ring and get her to come over and see Chantal and Joanne did but she didn’t get any reply or anything, did you, Joanne? So I went over, thinking the phone might be on the blink or whatever you call it, but the whole place locked up and not a sign of her.’
His sister-in-law was sitting in a wicker chair that had evidently been brought out into the garden for that purpose, holding in her arms the small, red-faced child, its face wet and gleaming in patches with saliva or tears or both. It had large dark blue eyes in red wrinkled sockets and a little wispy reddish hair. Kevin was talking to a couple of neighbours and his brother to another pair from the far end of Tace Way, but it seemed to Stephen that as Joanne spoke they all fell silent and turned to look at him.
‘I’ve just never known Lyn be out on a Sunday morning. What’s got into her? I mean, it has to be deliberate. I come home with my baby and she’s not even in and then Mum says you’re going out this evening.’
Stephen didn’t answer. Joanne looked at him and her lip quivered.
‘Is it jealousy? Is that what it is? She only came in once to the hospital, and she does work in town, she was there. What does she expect, that I wasn’t to have a baby because she hasn’t got one?’
‘Joanne,’ said her father.
‘Now come on, love,’ said Kevin. ‘Lyn’ll come over the minute she gets back, won’t she, Steve?’
Two of the neighbours discreetly escaped. Joanne burst into noisy tears and this made the baby start crying. She jumped up and rushed into the house.
‘Typical post-partum neurosis,’ said Trevor.
Mrs Newman looked at Stephen with her head on one side. ‘Where is Lyn, anyway?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, when she gets back mind you get her to pop across the road. If Joanne’s going to get in a paddy like that it’s bound to upset the milk, it always does. There was a woman lived in one of those houses round the back of the church when my three were little …’
But what had happened to this woman Stephen never knew, for he turned away abruptly and without a word and crossed the road and entered his own house by the front door. To leave them like that was a stupid thing to do in the circumstances, he knew that, but it might have been worse if he had stood there any longer. He had already begun to tremble and he seemed to have no voice. At the kitchen sink he drank a glass of cold water and did some more deep breathing. When Lyn didn’t appear in the course of the afternoon either Mrs Newman or Joanne would certainly come here. They would want to know where Lyn was. He had no idea what he would say to them.
Because he and Lyn had seldom drunk alcohol they usually had a plentiful supply in the cupboard Dadda had made them. Stephen found a nearly full bottle of whisky and poured himself a generous measure. Again he hadn’t eaten, he wasn’t used to whisky, and it rushed immediately in a pounding tide to his head. He sat down on the green velvet settee.
Why hadn’t he gone to the police last night? Obviously he couldn’t go now, yet any time now Lyn’s body would be found. When it had been found and identified the Newmans and the Simpsons and those neighbours would remember how he had stood trembling and tongue-tied when they asked where Lyn was. Mrs Newman would remember how he had said on the previous evening that he was going into Hilderbridge to pick Lyn up at the bus stop. They would remember seeing him carry out to the car something in a sack, something far too large to be the broken bust of Tace.
He put his head into his hands. But it was panic he was beginning to feel rather than despair. He was convulsed with terror so that he leapt up and began walking feverishly about the house. He drank some more whisky. Every hour that went by made it more strange and suspicious that he hadn’t reported Lyn’s disappearance, and every hour that went by increased the likelihood of her body being found.
Certainly he had given her parents and her sister the impression that she had spent last night at home in her own bed. If he hadn’t actually told that lie he had acted it. He had allowed them to make the assumption. They would remember that when Malm and Manciple and Troth came asking. Made unsteady by the whisky he had been drinking, Stephen staggered into the study and fell into the chair at his desk. Broken-headed Tace gazed at him with sad irony, with a cynical gleam in his eye that came perhaps from his battered appearance and the way a watery sun gleamed in on his features.