The Long Kill

He shook his head.

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Last night was the first broken night I’ve had in years.’

Broken from within, that was. There had been plenty of early risings and sudden alarums. But he could hardly explain this to the woman who was looking at him curiously, and he found he didn’t particularly want to press her to reveal the grounds of her own despair at this moment.

‘So, where are we going?’ he asked brightly.

She responded to his change of mood, saying, ‘Well, I knew a Himalayan man wouldn’t want to waste his time on pimples, so I thought we’d do Bow Fell via the Crinkles, but to fit it into our limited time allowance I’ve decided to cheat by starting at the top of Wrynose.’

He nodded as if this made sense to him while he worked it out on his mental imprint of the relevant OS sheets. They had climbed out of Grasmere, passing Rigg Cottage en route, and now they were dropping down again. He glimpsed the blue sheet of Elterwater before they entered its tiny village and left it on the Little Langdale road. Soon they were climbing again and now they were on a steep, serpentine single-track road, with intermittent passing places, and viciously demanding on bottom gear both for ascent and descent. This was Wrynose Pass.

He said, ‘This would take us all the way across into Eskdale, right?’

‘Right. It’s the old drove road, of course. Hard Knott dropping into Eskdale’s even worse, I think.’

‘Then I’m glad we’re not going that far,’ he said firmly.

‘Oh I think you should. Halfway up the side of Hard Knott there’s a Roman Fort; perhaps you’ve been there?’

He shook his head.

‘It’s a place to go on a wild winter’s day,’ she said. ‘Almost a thousand feet up in country that’s still wild, so God knows what it was like all those centuries ago; looking out to the west towards a sea which offers only Ireland between you and the limits of habitable creation; thinking of Rome, and Tuscan wine, and the long summer sun, while the sleet blows in your face and you can hear the stones of your castle cracking in the frost during the night watches. You ought to go.’

He looked at her curiously.

‘That was … poetic,’ he said. ‘I’m not being sarcastic either. But why do you insist I ought to go?’

‘No, I don’t really,’ she answered, faintly embarrassed. ‘All I meant was, it must have taken a certain kind of man to survive all that.’

‘And you think I could be such a man?’ he said lightly. ‘Should I be flattered?’

‘I meant I would be interested in hearing you decide whether you could have been such a man,’ she said slowly. ‘As for whether you should be flattered, that depends on what you feel such a man ought to be.’

‘Or had to be,’ he said. ‘Another test?’

She laughed and said with a hint of bitterness, ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’

She parked the car by the Three Shires Stone which marked the head of the pass. Their path was clear, the ground firm, the gradients easy, and they walked side by side at a good pace, in a silence which was companionable rather than introspective. The Crinkle Crags, their first destination, at first merely an undulating ridge a couple of miles in the distance, assumed a different aspect as they got near. Instead of a gentle ridge, Jaysmith saw that they did in fact consist of a series of crags, jagged broken buttresses of rock, five in all, each a distinct and separate entity. Their ascent was no more than a pleasant scramble, and moving from one to another was easy enough also. But as Jaysmith enjoyed the exhilaration of the magnificent views, he was aware that this was not a place where he would care to be if the weather closed in and visibility was measured in inches instead of miles. There were precipitous rock faces and narrow steep gullies filled with shattered boulders waiting to crack bones and rip flesh.

They sat on the third Crinkle and drank coffee and looked eastwards. The sun was high in its southern swing and the contours of the fells were picked out in light and shade.

‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ said Jaysmith, almost to his own surprise.

‘You sound as if you’d just noticed,’ laughed the woman.

‘Perhaps I have. I’m still not sure why it’s beautiful, though.’

‘Oh, all kinds of reasons. Space, airiness, sublimity. The sense it gives of something more important than mere human guilts and sorrows.’

She spoke very seriously and her features had slipped back into that ageing watchful look.

‘Oh is that all?’ he mocked. ‘Like marijuana? It’s a long way to walk for a fix.’

It worked. She laughed and lay back, hands clasped behind her head, eyes closed against the light.

‘All right. If you want a purely sensuous explanation, I think it’s something to do with the way the light shows us all the curves and hollows of the slopes. It’s like drapery. Have you never noticed how important that is in painting? As if artists knew that there was some special magic in all that cloth; gowns, dresses, cloaks, curtains, all hanging and trailing in mysterious, fascinating pleats and folds and creases.’

‘Not forgetting sheets,’ he said. ‘And blankets.’

‘That is the kind of art you like, is it?’ she said. ‘That too. And the naked human figures lying on them. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Curves and angles and hollows all washed with light.’

She spoke softly, almost dreamily. It sounded almost like an invitation and he leaned over and kissed her.

He knew at once he had been wrong. Her eyes opened wide with shock and her body stiffened as though holding back from some more violent act of repudiation.

‘Sorry,’ he said, sitting up.

‘No need,’ she replied, quickly regaining her composure. ‘It didn’t bother me. Though a respectable gent like you should be careful.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You may think you can come up here and toy with the milkmaids with impunity. But you’re very exposed. There’s a hundred places where someone could be lying this very moment, drawing a bead on us.’

His eyes flickered round in such alarm that she laughed and said, ‘Hey, I’m joking. You’re not going to turn out to be so important that you can’t afford to be photographed making a pass on a mountain, are you? A mountain pass!’

It wasn’t a very good joke but they both laughed and Jaysmith said, ‘No, I’m not that important.’

She regarded him shrewdly, as if doubting him, then said, ‘No matter. Aunt Muriel will know all about you when you exchange contracts, won’t she? Have you contacted your solicitor yet?’

‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘Actually, he suggests it would be simpler if I got hold of a local man. I don’t think he really believes there’s much law beyond Hampstead. I think he’s probably right, about using a local, I mean. There’ll be searches and things, won’t there? It’d certainly be more convenient. I wondered if you had any suggestions?’

‘Perhaps. But should you be asking me? In a sense, I’m an interested party.’

‘I hope so. But as your interest is to ensure that Miss Wilson’s sale goes smoothly, you’ll be careful to recommend only the best, won’t you?’

‘Are you always so logical?’ she asked.

‘Very occasionally I act on impulse. And, as you’ve just proved, it usually gets me into trouble.’

She was not to be tempted back to that topic. In a swift easy movement she rose and said, ‘Time to go. The hard bit lies ahead.’

The hard bit wasn’t all that hard, a fairly steep pull up the last five hundred feet of Bow Fell after they had descended from the Crinkles. There they ate their lunch and chatted familiarly enough, but still, despite or perhaps because of the kiss, at a level far removed from the centre of either of them. But it was interesting enough for them to linger overlong and Anya, glancing at her watch, said accusingly, ‘You’ve kept us here too long.’

‘I have?’

‘You’re the official timekeeper, aren’t you? Come on. We’ll need our running shoes.’

In fact by dint of skirting the western face of the Crinkles as much as possible, they were able to retrace their steps to Three Shires Stone nearly an hour more quickly than they had come. Jaysmith walked a little behind for much of the way, admiring the easy movement of her athletic body as she set a spanking pace. He had no difficulty in keeping up with it, but he shouldn’t have cared to try to overtake.

She dropped him in Grasmere after a descent of Wrynose he did not care to remember. When he tried to speak as he got out of the car she said crisply, ‘Sorry. I hate being late. I’ll be in touch,’ and drove off without more ado.

A brush-off? he wondered.

He didn’t think so. On the other hand, her reaction to his kiss had not been promising. Perhaps some panic button had been pressed and she was now in full retreat.

He ate his dinner with little appetite and wondered where it was all going to lead. The euphoria of his decision to retire now seemed light years away. Then it had seemed to usher in an Indian summer of careless peace; now new cares seemed to be pressing in on him from all sides.

‘Telephone call for you,’ said Doris Parker as she brought his coffee.

The words filled him with alarm. He was convinced it must be Jacob, so much so that he almost said, ‘Jaysmith here,’ when he picked up the phone. Fortunately twenty years of caution made him growl, ‘Hutton.’

‘You don’t sound happy,’ said Anya. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.’

‘No,’ he said, curt with relief. ‘I’d finished.’

‘Good. I enjoyed our walk today.’

‘Me too. Many thanks.’

‘Were you serious about wanting me to recommend a solicitor?’ she asked.

‘Certainly.’

‘All right. Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Mr Steven Bryant of Bryant & Grose will see you in his office in Keswick. Have you got a pen? I’ll give you his address.’

He noted it down with directions.

He began to thank her but she went on, ‘Afterwards, would you care to have lunch with me? I should warn you that I will be cooking it.’

‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,’ he said.

‘No need to be fulsome,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

He realized she hadn’t given him directions to her home after he put the receiver down. No matter. Presumably this Mr Steven Bryant would be able to do that, and if not, he was still sure that nothing could stop him finding her.

He took this certainty to bed with him and lay awake for a while, feeling his happiness lapping round his body like the warm waters of an eastern sea. When at last he slipped into sleep, he took his euphoria with him. Soon it developed form and flesh and suddenly it was Anya’s body, lean, brown and naked beneath his, and above them the sharp bright stars of the Lakeland sky.

They wrestled and rolled, locked together in an ecstasy of contact which threatened to climax in death. As they rolled, each gaining the ascendancy in turn, Jaysmith saw that the stars were wheeling too, shifting their positions and relationships, till the familiar pattern of the northern sky was quite destroyed and another pattern, richer in background, softer in glow, but just as familiar, took its place.

And he knew without needing to look that the flesh against his was no longer the lean, brown body of Anya Wilson, but had become softer, rounder, a deep honey gold. And now he wanted to look and he rose on his elbows so that he could see the delicately boned face, the huge dark eyes, the uncertain smile, at once shy and inviting. Her arms were still round his neck, but he wanted to see more and, despite her protest, he pushed himself upright, breaking her grip, and looked down on the slight but exquisitely rounded body, laughing in his turn as her hands flew to cover her peach-like breasts and the velvety darkness between her thighs.

‘I love you, Nguyet,’ he said, letting his tongue relish the strange cadence of the name which was also the Vietnamese word for moon.

Then, smiling, he added, ‘You are my moon,’ but gave the English word the tonal value which turned it into mun, which in her language meant carbuncle. It was an old joke between them and she giggled and gave the ritual reply, ‘And you are my sun,’ turning sun into the verb used to describe the decaying of teeth.

He laughed with her, then laughter left her eyes, driven thence by the cloudy onslaught of desire.

‘Come close, Harry,’ she whispered.

Gladly he stooped to her again, but found he could no longer get close. There were strong hands gripping his arms, voices shouting. He could no longer see her, there was a door between them, the door of her apartment. Despite the strength of those trying to hold him back, he burst through that door. And now he saw her again, still naked, still prostrate, but her eyes now wide with terror, blood caking her flared nostrils and more blood smudging the honey gold of her wide splayed thighs.

The room was full of soldiers who glared at him angrily. One of them, a dog-faced man in a colonel’s uniform, chattered commands. A rifle butt was driven into his kidneys while a hand dug viciously into his mop of hair and dragged him backwards screaming, ‘Nguyet! Nguyet! Nguyet!’ as he woke up.

He flung back the blankets and fell out of the bed like a drunken man. He sat on the floor feeling the cool night air trace the runnels of sweat down his naked body. Last night, Jacob. Tonight, Nguyet. Why was he once again so vulnerable after all these years? He rose and went to the window and pulled back the curtain. Above the shadowy bulk of fells was the high northern heaven, pricked with countless stars. He watched it for a long time, defying it to do its planetarium act again and rearrange its crystal spheres into the lower, richer, warmer maze of the stars above Saigon.

Nothing happened. Why should it? Once again, it was only a dream. He closed the curtain and went back to bed.

He was early for his appointment next day. Keswick was a very small town and Anya’s directions were precise. The offices of Bryant & Grose, Solicitors were on the second floor of an old house now given over entirely to business and commerce. He thought of killing time with another turn round the block but instead he went in and announced himself.

‘Mr Hutton? You’re expected,’ said the young girl in the outer office. ‘Just go right in.’

As he approached the door indicated, it opened and Anya appeared. She stopped on the threshold and smiled at his surprise.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘So you’ve decided to be early this morning? And shaven too! That’s a good sign. I was just on my way to start your lunch, but I might as well introduce you now you’re here. Step inside. I’d like you to meet your new solicitor, Mr Steven Bryant. Oh, by the way, he happens to be my father too!’

She stepped aside as she spoke and started to laugh at the expression on Jaysmith’s face.

‘Don’t look so dismayed,’ she said. ‘It may be nepotism, but he really is the best solicitor I know. Pappy, I’d like you to meet William J. Hutton. I shall expect my usual commission for the introduction. And I’ll see you both in not more than an hour. ‘Bye.’

She left and Jaysmith slowly advanced to take the hand proffered by the man behind the desk.

‘You’ll excuse my daughter, I hope, Mr Hutton,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s so good to see her enjoying a joke, that I can excuse her almost anything.’

‘Of course,’ said Jaysmith. ‘It’s of no consequence.’

But it was of more consequence than he had yet had time to apprehend. And he was very glad that Anya had given him some excuse for this expression of amazement, but it had nothing to do with her revelation that the solicitor was her father.

No, that was wrong. It had everything to do with it.

For the last time he had seen the creased leathery features of the man whose hand he now held had been a week earlier, framed in the usually fatal circle of his telescopic sight.

Chapter 7

An hour later any faint doubts about the identification had been completely removed.

Jaysmith was sitting in the front garden of the red-tiled house called Naddle Foot. Alongside him, filling the bright air with the pungent smoke of a Caporal, was Steven Bryant. And by turning his head just forty-five degrees, he believed he could actually see the entry hole left in the flower bed by his aberrant bullet. He shifted his chair slightly to remove the temptation to stare and looked instead across the valley to the opposing fellside where he had patiently prepared to kill his host.

‘Another sherry?’ said Bryant in a voice roughened almost to a growl by a lifetime of chain-smoking.

Jaysmith realized he had emptied his glass unawares.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘One before lunch is enough.’

He studied the other man as he spoke. Distance had made him overestimate his age. The venerable halo of silver hair was belied by his shrewd brown eyes and his ease of movement. Early sixties rather than early seventies, an estimate confirmed in the office when Bryant had said, ‘To be quite honest, Mr Hutton, I’ve more or less given up practising law. There’s a book I want to write and I’ve been devoting more and more time to it over the past ten years, and when I got to sixty, three years ago, I thought, to hell with the law’s tediums! I still dabble a bit, however, so Anya has not deceived you entirely. But now that she’s played her little trick, to which I was not a party, I assure you, I would recommend you let me pass the actual job of conveyancing over to my partner, Donald Grose. He’s very able, much better tempered than I am, and to tell the truth, I don’t really fancy getting into any business dealings with old Muriel Wilson. She can be a tiresome old stick.’

Jaysmith could understand why Anya had wanted her father to look him over, if, as he suspected, that was the serious purpose behind her little trick. Beneath this friendly, apparently open approach, he was aware of a keen analytical scrutiny. There was no hint of cross-questioning, but questions were constantly being asked. He guessed that Anya valued her father’s judgement highly and did his best to impress the man. But all the time, his concentration was being distracted by his own speculations about the other. He could not be what he seemed, a simple country solicitor. Jaysmith’s expensive talents were not turned loose on such prey. But none of his own gentle probings had so far produced even the slightest clue. All he could say was that already he sensed in Bryant a strength of will that might mean ruthlessness, and a dark watchfulness that might mean guilt; but his feeling was vague and might itself be the creation of his own uncertainties.

There was one other possible clue, but this too might just be a creation of his own straining after information. From time to time his sharp linguist’s ear felt it detected just the slightest nuance of ‘foreignness’ in Bryant’s speech, vanishing as soon as suspected and probably a simple by-product of his tobacco-growl. There was nothing else to suggest non-English origins, except perhaps the name Anya, but that was just the kind of name pretentious middle-class parents might give their daughter anyway.

On the other hand, whatever else Bryant was, he gave little sign of belonging to the pretentious middle class. Beneath his smart clothes and civilized conversation, there was an earthiness and, if Jaysmith was not mistaken, a strong vein of sensuality too, untouched as yet by his age.

The probing questions had ceased as though by mutual agreement during lunch, which was a simple though delicious meal of baked trout and green salad followed by a freshly baked bramble pie, all washed down with a crisp Moselle. Bryant was industrious in topping up Jaysmith’s glass, and when it was suggested they return to the garden to drink their coffee, the accompanying brandy balloon was full enough to swim a goldfish.

Still icily sober, Jaysmith decided to let the relaxation Bryant obviously hoped for work for him.

‘Anya,’ he said mellowly as she handed him a cup of coffee. ‘That’s a lovely name you chose for your daughter, Bryant.’

Glancing at him with surprise, the woman said, ‘Less buxom than Annie, certainly. We established that.’

Jaysmith smiled and she smiled back, a shared joke which momentarily excluded her father.

Bryant said abruptly, ‘It was my mother’s name. Anya Winnika.’

‘Polish?’ said Jaysmith, trying to make his interest casual. ‘Were you born in Poland then?’

Bryant did not look as if he was going to answer, but Anya, as if concerned at any hint of rudeness to their guest, said quickly, ‘Pappy was a law student in Warsaw till 1939. He got out when the Nazis invaded.’

‘And the Russians,’ interrupted Bryant harshly. ‘Don’t forget the Russians came in from the east at the same time.’

‘And your parents, did they get out with you?’

Bryant lit another Caporal from the one he was smoking.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They thought they could sit it out. Why not? How many invasions over the centuries had poor Poland had to sit out! I wasn’t any wiser than they were, just younger and more impatient. I followed the provisional government first to France then to England. I found out later that when the Nazis came, they requisitioned our family house for one of their senior officers. As for my parents, they were moved into the ghetto. My mother was Jewish, you see. Not orthodox; far from it; and she had cut herself off completely by marrying a Gentile. It took the Nazis to reunite her with her people. My father went with her of course. He was a gentle man, trusting in human nature almost to the point of foolishness. But they’d have had to shoot him to stop him accompanying mamma. The next time I saw Warsaw it was in ruins. Our house had survived but now there was a Russian general in it. It was a small change, hardly noticeable.’

‘And your parents?’

He shrugged massively.

‘Who knows? The ghetto uprising of ’43; the resistance uprising of ’44; in one or the other they died, and so many with them that nowhere in the whole of that ruined city could I find a memory or a trace of their passing. Think of that, Mr Hutton, if you can. Think of that!’

Anya put her hand on her father’s arm and Jaysmith sipped his brandy for warmth. The sun still shone, but a chill seemed to have risen in this peaceful valley.

‘You speak excellent English,’ said Jaysmith with a deliberate banality.

It worked. Bryant coughed a laugh and said, ‘And why the hell shouldn’t I? I’ve been speaking it longer than you, Hutton. I learned it first from my grandfather when I was a child. He was an Englishman, you see, sent to look after his firm’s affairs in Gdansk – Danzig, it was then – in the 1880s. He never went back. When World War One came, he took his Polish wife’s name and moved to Warsaw. And after the Second World War was over and I saw that the Russians had a stronghold on my country, and realized that my life was to be in England, well, I reversed the process and reverted to my true patronym. I really am Steven Bryant, Hutton. Or, more properly, Stefan Bryant. Much more reassuring, isn’t it, than something full of Ks and Zs?’

‘Reassuring to whom?’

‘To solid English burghers looking for someone to do a bit of conveyancing for them,’ said Bryant. ‘But I’m sorry to have bored you with my family history. In the interests of equity, I will now keep quiet, and you must take your chance of telling us something about the Huttons and their origins.’

He smiled satirically as he spoke and he and Anya settled into near-caricatures of close attentiveness.

A trade-off! thought Jaysmith. He would much rather have relaxed and examined what Bryant had told him, looking for clues to his potentially fatal connection with Jacob.

But he needed all his mental powers now to concentrate on the lies he was about to tell. Glancing at Anya, he was filled with shame, but there seemed to be no choice. But rescue was at hand. Inside the house a voice called, ‘Mum? Gramp?’

Anya turned her head, tautening the line from chin through neck in a way which caught at Jaysmith’s breath, and called, ‘Jimmy! We’re out in the garden.’