Dead Man Riding (34 page)

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I found Imogen in our loft. She'd folded her mattress in two and was sitting on it like a cushion with her back against the wall, reading.

‘I've got something to confess,' I said.

She looked downright scared at that, so I explained my clumsiness over the letter. Considering that we'd managed to get ourselves on bad terms already, I expected her to be angry with me. She took it better than I expected.

‘Should I have told him?'

‘I don't know. It seemed to surprise him. Shock him, almost.'

‘I suppose that's why I didn't tell him. I knew he'd be angry. ‘

‘And they'd have had their argument earlier than they did.'

She let the book fall to the floor. ‘Did Alan tell you about that?'

‘Yes. I'd guessed something happened and you wouldn't tell me, so I asked him.'

Again I was expecting her to flare up, but she didn't. She seemed exhausted, the skin on her forehead pale to the point of transparency.

‘I didn't want to talk about it – to you or anyone else. I felt so … so ashamed for Kit, I suppose.'

‘For loving you?'

‘Guilty too. I know it isn't my fault, but I still felt guilty.'

I said I'd leave her to her reading and bent to pick the book up from the floor. Plato's
Republic
again. It had splayed open and I looked round for something to mark her place. The margins were crammed with sprawling pencilled notes.

‘That's not your writing, is it?'

‘No, it's Alan's. I lent my copy to Midge so he gave me his.'

I went down the stairs, my brain worrying away at what had happened that night. There had been four hours, probably less than that, between the time that Alan got back to the barn and I went out for my early morning swim, and at around one o'clock Nathan was still snoring – or rather, Alan supposed he was. But would Alan have noticed either way? That night he'd become Imogen's lover and quarrelled with his best friend, more than enough to drive a mundane matter like snoring out of his mind. The same applied to Kit after the quarrel. I supposed I should find him and ask him but that would mean admitting that I knew what had happened between them.

I walked away from the house, back up the track towards the barn field but kept on the outside of the hedge. Alan had gone from the place under the hawthorn bushes. I went on towards the maple tree and stood under its branches. The argument between Kit and Alan had happened there, after Alan had pushed through the hedge. Alan had actually struck him. ‘Do what you like. You can't hurt me any worse.' I didn't know why I'd needed to come to the place where the words had been said but there was a terrible fascination about them, something humbling and terrifying about that naked need. No wonder Imogen had been horrified that this was happening because of her. The whole sex business simply wasn't fair. I thought about that, wandering a little way up the track. My feet scuffed dead and dry hazel leaves, unexpected in full summer until I remembered why they were there. There'd been so much else to think about that I'd forgotten finding the Old Man's carriage whip but it had been stuffed into the hedge, just a few steps up from where Alan and Kit had their argument. I stared at the hedge and the rabbit holes in the bank underneath it, feeling things moving round in my mind like uprooted trees in a hurricane. A letter. A book.
Oh my dear, the other and better half of me.

I said to the hedge, ‘Surely he must have known. He must have known all the time.'

The rabbit holes and the hedge still looked the same as a few seconds ago but the rest of the world had gone spinning round them and changed beyond recognition.

Chapter Twenty-one

I
LEFT THE HOUSE, KNOWING IT WAS FOR
the last time, in the early hours of Monday morning while it was still dark. As I went down the stairs Midge woke up and asked sleepily where I was going. I didn't answer. I was sure Imogen was awake, but she said nothing. There was no moon but the sky was full of stars. This time there was nobody standing outside the house but I walked fast up the track to the road just in case. At the crossroads I headed away from the town and took the Caldbeck road, walking more slowly now I knew nobody was following me. I had hours of time, eight hours at least before the public houses would be open for hikers and farmworkers with midday thirsts. Or, in Nathan's case, a midday craving for tobacco. I'd been going over in my mind that evening when he ran away from us and dropped one of his precious tobacco tins. Nathan living as a wild man on the fells without company was almost unthinkable – without the sweet clouds from his pipe unthinkable altogether. In a numb way, I was pleased that my mind was still working well on details like that. In fact, it was working all too well, fitting things together, throwing up scenes from the past few months with the vividness of magic lantern slides on a white wall. The one that kept coming back was the evening of the play, the white moths in the candlelight, the two swans and the men with their eyes on Imogen. That and Meredith in the train corridor, looking out at the fells and wondering how we managed to convince ourselves that being in love was an enviable state.

When it was light enough I stopped, drank water from a little beck and looked at the map. The area of the fells where we'd seen Nathan was sparsely populated even by Cumberland standards, but I remembered a remote little inn at a crossroads a long way from anywhere else. I walked on, passed only by the occasional farm wagon, and long before midday I had it in sight. It was a white-painted house in a cluster of outbuildings. There were only two or three other houses in sight and it was hard to see where it would get its customers. Perhaps it had been built to serve cattle drovers and shepherds or even travelling tinkers. Today there was nobody, only a sheepdog sleeping in the sun, stretched out across the front door. I turned off the road before I came to the inn, climbed a little way up the hill and found a shady place to sit in the bracken where I could watch for people coming and going. As the sun rose higher the white walls shimmered in the heat haze and the dog got up, stretched itself and limped into the shade of an outhouse wall. A woman in an apron came out and brushed the step, then went in again. When the sun was directly overhead and flies were buzzing round the bracken, drunk with heat, two men who looked like farm labourers appeared on the road from the Caldbeck direction. I watched them from about half a mile off as they closed slowly on the inn, like snails to a lettuce leaf. They went inside. The dog got up, turned round, went back to sleep again. I was beginning to think I'd been wrong about Nathan. There was no point in going to look for him in the lonely fells behind me. It could take days to find him again and I didn't have days, less than one day now. A small cart drawn by a grey cob with half a dozen barrels on it came slowly along the road from the same direction as the two men and turned into the forecourt of the inn. The driver got down and a plump man who was probably the landlord came out from the porch. Together they started unloading the barrels while the cob stamped and twitched against the flies. I got up, brushed bracken off my skirt and walked down the slope to the inn yard. No question of going inside of course. Respectable women didn't do that and the landlord, whether I liked it or not, would rate me as respectable. I waited until the last barrel had been rolled into the porch and the driver was back on his seat turning the cart round before introducing myself.

‘Good morning. I wonder if you happen to have seen a friend of mine.'

Until then the landlord had been intent on the barrels and hadn't seen me. He whirled round, looking alarmed at an alien voice and probably wondering where I'd sprung from. He relaxed a little when he saw my hiking boots and pack.

‘You lost, miss?'

‘No, but I was hoping to meet my friend here. Big tall man with a beard.'

His face cleared, he even laughed. ‘Would that be the artist, miss?'

‘Yes. Yes, I'm sure it would.'

‘He usually comes in about now for a pipe and a pint. Look, there he is.'

He pointed up the slope. A battered panama hat, moving fast downhill, was just visible above the bracken. As it came lower I saw the red face beneath it and the familiar tangle of beard and sideburns. He was concentrating on where he was stepping, not looking at us. When he got clear of the bracken on to the open grass just above the inn I saw that his clothes were more than usually unkempt, one boot sole gaping so that a naked big toe was visible poking through a hole in his sock. But in spite of that there was as always something so amiable, so reassuring about the sight of Nathan that even now I had to fight a mad impulse to rush up the slope towards him and hug him like a brother.

‘That your friend, miss?'

‘Yes.'

He didn't see me until he came right down to the yard. When he did it looked for a moment as if he was going to flee straight back up the hill.

‘Hello Nathan,' I said. ‘Please don't run away again. I've got to talk to you.'

The landlord looked from Nathan to me and back again. I could see he was registering possible trouble, of the emotional kind.

‘Bring your beer and tobacco out here if you like, sir. And a lemonade for the lady?'

There was a bench in the angle between the house and porch. Nathan sat down heavily on it, his legs stuck out in front of him, and sighed.

‘How's Midge?'

‘She's all right, or as all right as anybody can be in the circumstances. You know the inquest is tomorrow?'

He nodded. The landlord came out with a pint of beer, a glass of cloudy home-made lemonade and a stone tobacco jar. Nathan took his pipe out of his pocket and filled it, making the process last until the landlord had gone in.

‘Of course, you knew that the day you went away,' I said. ‘You decided you'd stay out here until the inquest was over and there was a suicide verdict. Was that your own idea or did somebody else suggest it?'

He took matches out of his pocket and went through the usual long pantomime of getting the tobacco to light. I was fuming long before the pipe was.

‘Nathan, I'm not going to the police with this. I've already worked out most of what happened but I need to know for sure. It's nothing to do with the inquest. It's for us – all of us.'

Clouds of blue smoke wafted round us. It didn't smell as sweet as Nathan's usual tobacco, but at least it kept the flies away.

‘I've been hoping against hope that all this had nothing to do with us,' I said. ‘I was so sure that it was young Mawbray, or his father, or Dulcie even. We were the innocent ones, the unlucky ones who just happened to be here. Only that's not true and you've known it for a lot longer than I have.'

He moved his big paw of a hand, wafting some of the smoke away from us, trying to waft a lot of other things as well.

‘All of you've known, you four men. There I was, thinking you were all together in the barn the night the Old Man died but that just wasn't true. Alan was out with Imogen and Kit was out quarrelling with Alan. You knew that.'

He looked at me through the two veils of beard and smoke, eyes big and pleading.

‘Nell, this isn't going to do anybody any good. Just leave it while you can.'

‘I can't leave it. Imogen's in love with Alan. She wants to spend the rest of her life with him. She's my friend. Can I just stand back and let it happen while there's any doubt at all?'

His eyes turned pained and troubled. He looked away from me.

‘Nell, I can promise you it wasn't Alan. Can we leave it at that now?'

‘No. I wish we could, but we can't.'

‘Don't you believe me?'

‘At the moment I don't believe anybody. That night, Alan went out to meet Imogen.'

‘A lady's reputation—'

‘Bother a lady's reputation. Midge and I were in the same room with her. We know she went out and I know she and Alan met. She was back with us around one o'clock and by then Alan and Kit had met and quarrelled very badly. What time did the two of them get back?'

‘I'm not sure. I was asleep.'

‘I don't think you were. I don't think any of you slept much. You must have had an idea what was happening between Kit and Alan. So when did Alan get back?'

‘Around one o'clock.'

‘Did he say anything?'

He looked at me pleadingly. I'd have given almost anything to do what he wanted – to say ‘Don't worry, it isn't important. Drink your beer and smoke your pipe and be the Nathan we all know and love.' Instead I just kept looking at him and he shook his head, like a tired horse trying to get rid of a fly that's sucking its blood.

‘Not to me. He and Meredith were talking. My bed was a bit away from the others because of—'

‘Your snoring. Yes I know. Alan thought you were snoring when he came in.'

‘I was pretending. I didn't want to hear what they were saying. I knew … I knew this thing with Alan and Kit was coming to a head. I just didn't want to know about it. And none of us wanted you or Midge or Imogen to know.'

‘Very protective of you. So Alan got back to the barn about one o'clock?'

‘Yes, and he stayed there for the rest of the night. Nell, I promise you you don't have to worry about Imogen. She's not marrying a…'

‘A murderer?'

He nodded.

‘And Kit? What time did Kit get back?'

‘Nell, how could Kit have done it? He can only use one arm remember, and he's scared of horses. He wasn't pretending. He can hardly go near the beasts.'

‘I know. We all know. So what time did Kit get back?'

‘Later. A lot later. He didn't come in. He just called from outside the barn.'

‘Called what? What did he call?'

Nathan clapped his head between his big paws like a hurt animal at bay.