The Long Kill. Reginald Hill
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Chapter 3
Summer was dying like a lady this year. Leaves flushed gently from olive to ochre with no savage assault of gale to rip them down; bracken singed at the edges and heather burned purple with no landscape-blackening downpour to dampen the glow. The locals assured Jaysmith, not without nostalgic pride, that it was not always thus.
Jaysmith took their word for it. Though he had presented William Hutton as a long-time lover of the Lake District, his only real previous acquaintance had been as a small boy on a day trip to Windermere with his mother and stepfather, who had stared indifferently at the mountains and lake, explored the souvenir shops, eaten ice cream and fish and chips, and left him in the coach with a packet of crisps at each of the many pub-stops on the sixty-mile journey back to Blackburn in Lancashire.
His mother had died when he was fifteen. His stepfather, to do him credit, had supported him through the loss and the next couple of years at school till he got the exam results needed to take him to university. But first had come National Service. After basic training he had been posted to Hong Kong. He went home on embarkation leave, and the night before his departure his stepfather had told him apologetically but firmly that his stepbrother, four years his senior, was getting married and coming to live in the family home. His wife-to-be was pregnant. The strains this would put on the limited accommodation made it sensible for him to think from now on of making arrangements to look after himself.
He had never been back to Blackburn since that day.
His first taste of the East had brought balm to his pain. From the very moment its first rich warm exotic scents came drifting over the sea, he was fascinated. He had been planning to read French and German at university, but within a couple of months of reaching Hong Kong, he was writing to ask if he could transfer courses to the School of Oriental Languages. The facility with which he learned Chinese made him a highly valued member of his unit, but it was another talent which the Army spotted and nurtured that won him all those privileges and comforts a regiment bestows on those that bring it honour. He turned out to be a natural marksman capable of winning trophies at the highest level, and thus rapidly promoted to sergeant, well out of the way of any parades, fatigues or guard duties which might dull his eye.
For his part, he enjoyed his unsuspected excellence, and even let his enjoyment spill over into civilian life, becoming a prominent member of his university shooting team. But he never dreamt that this was a talent with any commercial value. It had taken fate at its most unpredictably tragic to nudge him onto that path.
And now it had taken a fractional weakening of the right eye to nudge him off it.
For the next three days he put past and future out of his mind and set out to turn his pretended intimacy with the fells into fact. A need to be fit and the demands of his job had taken him into some of the roughest terrain in the world. He was expert both practically and with maps. But hitherto his expertise had been focused on one thing only – the job in hand. Landscape to him was considered solely in terms of best approach, best hide, best line of fire, best escape. Here in the Lake District for the first time in two decades he went exploring simply in search of delight. He did not have far to seek. Eschewing guide books in his desire for personal discovery, he spent the days in long high walks, armed only with map and compass. Any feeling of condescension for this somewhat narrow area of rather lowly mountains soon disappeared. The physical demands were great; he never had to look far for the exhilaration of danger; and whether he was standing windblown on the bald head of Gable with the stark wildness of Wasdale stretching below, or descending from the gentle swell of Silver Howe in the gathering dusk towards the sun-gilt shield of Grasmere which at the end of a long day felt very like home, he was ravished by the sheer beauty of it all.
Small the Lake District might be, but three days’ exploration was scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its great variety and when Parker greeted him on Sunday evening with the excited news, ‘She’s made up her mind! Miss Wilson. She’s definitely going. I can arrange for you to see Rigg Cottage tomorrow!’ Jaysmith felt surprisingly put out.
He had what looked like a perfectly splendid walk mapped out for Monday and it was most irritating to be forced to postpone it for what was now an unnecessary piece of role-playing.
Doris Parker who was standing alongside her husband sensed his hesitation. She was a pleasant, calm, down-to-earth woman who was used to coping with her husband’s enthusiasms.
‘Don’t take any notice of Philip’s hard sell, Mr Hutton,’ she said. ‘There’s not need to look at Rigg Cottage unless and until you want to. I only heard at church tonight that Miss Wilson is definitely selling.’
‘But the whole point is for Mr Hutton to get in quick before it comes on the open market,’ protested Parker.
‘It might be worthwhile,’ conceded his wife. ‘She’ll certainly not be happy about paying an agent’s commission. But it’s up to Mr Hutton if he wants to see it, dear.’
Her broad-set grey eyes fixed speculatively on Jaysmith and he smiled at her and said, ‘Of course I’d like to, if you can arrange it. I’m really very grateful.’
Triumphantly Parker went to the telephone and returned a few minutes later with the news that eleven o’clock the following morning would suit Miss Wilson very well.
Jaysmith nodded his agreement. He’d have preferred to get the tedious business out of the way even sooner, but at least he would have the whole afternoon for the mountains. In any case, he could stay as long as he liked. The mountains weren’t going anywhere without him!
The next morning he used his unexpected post-breakfast period of non-activity to read the newspapers in detail. There was no reference to any violent death in St-John’s-in-the-Vale and there had been nothing on the local TV and radio news either. Presumably Jacob had not been able to make new arrangements before the deadline elapsed. That would not please him.
He put the thought out of his mind and drove up the winding road out of the village to keep his appointment.
Miss Wilson was curiously almost exactly as he had pictured her. Anything between seventy and ninety, she had snow-white hair and clear blue eyes in a cider-apple face. But any impression of gentle cosiness was soon dissipated. She carried her five feet three inches as straight as a guardsman, albeit with some help from a stick, and when she spoke it was in a clipped, brusque, no-nonsense tone.
‘I’d not be moving from here if it wasn’t for this leg,’ she informed him sternly, as if he had hinted suspicion of some less creditable motive. ‘Now the place is getting too big for me, the garden’s taking over, and the hill’s too steep. Not that I can’t climb it, but it takes me twice as long as it once did, and me mind’s back here already doing me jobs while me body’s still halfway up the bank, and there’s nowt so ageing as always letting your mind race on ahead of itself.’
Politely Jaysmith agreed, which seemed to surprise her, not because she anticipated disagreement but because she could see no need for a mere man to affirm that she spoke plain truth.
She proved remarkably unsentimental about Rigg Cottage and talked about it as if it were already settled that he would buy.
‘The sitting room fire smokes in an east wind,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to get it fixed these thirty years. That’ll be your job now.’
She sounded almost gleeful.
It occurred to Jaysmith that this was a house whose faults could be freely pointed out because its more than compensatory attractions advertised themselves. Built of grey-green Lakeland slate, it stood foursquare to the east, as simple and appealing as a child’s drawing. The sloping garden which overlooked the lake was full of shrubs, mainly rhododendrons and azaleas whose blossom in June, Miss Wilson proudly and poetically assured him, burned like a bonfire. Now, however, the colours of autumn were beginning to glow, with Michaelmas daisies challenging the turning leaves to match their rich orange, while mountain ash and pyracantha were pearled with red berries which the blackbirds would soon devour.
It