The shock of it prostrated Stephen. He lay face downwards on the floor in his study. He listened to Lyn’s footsteps moving about the house, to her voice and her mother’s, a distant wordless sound like the twittering of birds, to the front door closing. By that time he knew it had been Lyn, was Lyn, not a ghost or some frightful emanation from his own fear or guilt. He knew by then that it was Lyn who had walked into the bedroom and therefore that he hadn’t killed Lyn on Saturday afternoon.
He got up and went across the passage and into his bedroom and looked out of the window. Bale’s van had gone. The baby’s pram stood on the Simpsons’ lawn but both women had gone in. It had stopped raining and a pale sun was shining through the layers of cloud. He could remember so clearly the events of Saturday afternoon. He had come home and seen Lyn standing at the window, standing there in her blue jeans and white tee-shirt, her hair cloaking her shoulders, and without motive, without even particularly wanting to do it, with nothing but a desire too urgent to resist, he had sprung at her and killed her. Yet just now he had seen her and heard her speak.
Was he going mad? Was it that his mind hadn’t been able to stand the battering it had lately received? The death of Helena, the defection of Lyn, the reappearance of — his mother. Had it all driven him mad so that he believed he had done things he hadn’t done? Perhaps the events were no longer so clearly memorable. He could recall his fingers digging so hard into Lyn’s neck that it seemed he must behead her, but quite lost were the details of his drive to the pony level and the times and sequences of the steps he had taken after the killing. Half an hour ago he would have sworn he had hidden her body but now the remembrance had grown vague, confused, like a dream at morning. He could remember nothing clearly of that killing but the feel of her neck in his hands. Yet even that must be a false memory, a dream …
Hook had told him he had fantasies and therefore must be a psychopath. At any rate now there would be no fresh confrontation with Hook. He hadn’t killed Lyn. He hadn’t cut off her hair, folded it into a sack, buried the sack in the mine. He hadn’t put the hair with that of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan into the box in Rip’s Cavern. Part of the shock of seeing Lyn had been the sight of her veil of pale bright hair.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. For a while he had been Rip’s equal. The whole thing, he supposed, had been no more than a sort of wish-fulfilment. He had wanted to be on a level with Rip, so fooled himself he could do, had done, what he did. Stephen gave a dry mirthless laugh. He must recover from it now, take up the reins of life again, never never let his emotions get such a hold over him again.
He went down to the kitchen, made himself scrambled eggs, a mug of coffee, cut off two hunks of bread. Perhaps it was because he had been starving himself that he had had these delusions. When he had eaten he felt so much better, clearer-headed, calmer, that he could look back on his imaginings and laugh at himself. He actually did laugh aloud. There, alone in the house, he laughed so uproariously as he went back up the stairs that he got a stitch in his side.
In the study he tore up the sheet of paper on which he had attempted those first puny sentences of an article the night before. A fresh sheet went into the typewriter. Now Helena was dead he need never see a Naulls again. This would show them, this would be something more pungent than the ending of the drought, than an account of a thunderstorm. It was a chance for him that Tace’s birthday happened to fall this week, a peg to hang his article on.
‘The present writer’s maternal grandfather, Alfred Osborn Tace, would have been ninety-eight years old this week had he lived. His sole descendant will be honouring the great man’s birth date as he always does, as he always did himself, by private celebrations of the beauty of his beloved Vangmoor, in short, by going out on the moor for a picnic on one of our fine August days …’
Stephen said a good deal more about his relationship with Tace and invented two Tace anecdotes as told him by his grandmother when he was a child. He didn’t quite dare say he remembered Tace or even that he had been told of being dandled on his knee, since Tace had died three years before he was born. When the article was finished he thought it the best thing he had ever done. He put it in an envelope, addressed it to the Echo, and went off down to the post box on the green to post it.
From St Michael’s churchyard one obtained the best view in the village of Knamber Foin. Stephen leaned over the lychgate and gazed across the intervening land. Had he truly suffered so much agony and fear sitting in the car at Thirlton, driving down the long bleak road to the ‘bridge’ over the portal, lying sleepless and tortured in his bed, or had that too been a dream? He stared, perplexed, across the moor. The wind was getting up. A breeze blew out of the west, ruffling, then smoothing, the birch foliage in the Banks of Knamber as if an invisible hairbrush had passed over it. Why shouldn’t he take the car and drive to the pony level now? It might be that Saturday wasn’t a dream while this morning was. The dead Lyn might lie over there, the dream Lyn have appeared to him …
He told himself not to be a fool and he chuckled out loud at the very thought of having such ideas. Back at home again, he walked about the house, thinking of changes he would make now Lyn was gone and the place all his. Tomorrow he would have to shop for food, replenish the fridge, cancel half the milk, remember to buy bread. For a while he amused himself tidying the kitchen, rearranging things, putting Peach’s food dish and all the tins of cat food into the dustbin.
The repeat showing of Saturday’s episode of Elizabeth Nevil began at 7.30. Stephen switched on the television as they were playing the by now familiar, even famous, introductory music. The first episode started with Joseph Usher’s finding Apsley Sough while walking his Irish wolfhounds in Goughdale. The joke was that the scriptwriter and the director had no more known where the mineshaft was than Tace had. Stephen laughed aloud at the sight of the actor playing Usher peering down a hole a few feet away from the George Crane Coe. A rabbit warren, that’s all that was. And when they showed the inside of the mine it was obviously something rigged up in the studio and not at all like the real thing. Stephen wondered if Rip was also watching and laughing. After that they didn’t show any more of the moor, but only interiors and the ‘lovely dresses’ Helena’s fellow-inmates of Sunningdale had talked about.
He lost interest because the scriptwriter hadn’t stuck very closely to Tace’s text. He kept thinking of the body in the pony level, the body that wasn’t there, that had never been there. Yet he had only to close his eyes to see it lying there, face downwards and with its shorn head, the light of his small torch playing faintly on it. He had knelt down and cut off the hair and coiled it into a skein and rolled it up in the sack. Then, on the following morning, he had taken it out of the sack and put it in the pocket of his zipper jacket, only to think immediately that this was an unwise move in case any hairs adhered to the lining of the pocket. Surely he had done those things, surely he had done them yesterday morning, had wrapped the skein of hair in clinging film, put it into his rucksack with the rope and the torch while he waited for Kevin to depart and the coast to be clear.
He turned off the television and went to the hall cupboard. His zipper jacket was hanging there. He brought it to the living room window but the daylight wasn’t strong enough to see much by. Under the central light he turned the pocket inside out. A single blonde hair clung to the slightly magnetic nylon lining.
Stephen pulled the hair off and dropped it onto the carpet. He put on the zipper jacket and went out and got into the car. There he sat for a moment or two, breathing deeply, for his heart was racing and his hands were unsteady. He had to concentrate on keeping his hands from trembling as he drove out of Tace Way and down into the village.