The Long Kill

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 also occurred to him that if he really were looking for a house in the Lake District, this might very well be the kind of house he was looking for.

A thought stirred in his mind.

Why not?

He dismissed it instantly. It was once again the voice of that forgotten young man who played the ostler twenty-odd years ago. Jaysmith, however, knew the dangers of sentiment and impulse. It was one thing to decide on the spur of the moment to treat himself to an extra week in the Lake District, quite another to invest a large sum of money and, by implication, a large piece of his life here.

William Hutton, holiday-maker and property-seeker, would have to speak soon. Miss Wilson had shown him the outside first, as if reluctant to miss any moment of this glorious autumn morning. Now they moved indoors, and all was exactly as it should be, the right old furniture in rooms of the right dimensions, with just enough of light coming through the leaded windows and just enough of heat coming from the small fire in the huge grate.

‘Old bones need a fire almost all the year round,’ she said, seeing his glance. ‘That’s what we started with, that’s what we end with.’

Curiously he had no difficulty in understanding this enigmatic statement. Man’s move away from the beast was emblematized by a group crouching around a fire. And Jaysmith had felt the need of that fire in many a long cold hour spent in patient, motionless waiting.

The door bell rang. Miss Wilson left him and returned a moment later with another woman whom, with that tendency to instant mini-biography he had already noted in denizens of the area, she introduced as her niece, Annie Wilson, a widow, who lived out Keswick way, just back from her holidays and come for lunch.

Jaysmith was presented in similar terms with all of William Hutton’s known and assumed background and purposes spelt out. He guessed that Parker had been rigorously cross-examined.

The newcomer shook his hand. He put her age as early to mid-thirties. She had a long, narrow, not unpleasantly vulpine face, with a sallow complexion, watchful brown eyes and thin nose, slightly upturned, giving the impression that her nostrils were flared to catch the scent of danger. She was dressed in gloomy autumn colours, dark brown slacks and a russet shirt, with her long brown hair pulled back severely from her brow and held back with a casually knotted red ribbon. Her body was lean and rangy and she moved with athletic ease.

Jaysmith felt she regarded him with considerable suspicion. Its cause soon emerged.

‘You’re selling Rigg Cottage!’ she exclaimed to her aunt.

‘That’s right. I’ve talked about it often enough.’

‘I know, but it’s so sudden. Didn’t you discuss it with anyone? With pappy or Granddad Wilson?’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Miss Wilson tartly. ‘As you well know, else your father would have told you when you got back and James would have told you when you were staying with him. I’ve always made up me own mind and always will, so there’s an end to it. Now tell me about you and young Jimmy. When’s he coming to see me? I thought he might come with you today.’

Annie Wilson laughed and suddenly a decade was wiped off her face. Jaysmith watched, fascinated by the transformation.

‘He started back at school today, auntie. He’ll be round next Sunday as usual, I promise you.’

‘Just see he is,’ grumbled the old lady. ‘He could have been here yesterday if you’d got back earlier. It’s not right leaving it till the day before school starts. Too much of a rush.’

‘Granddad Wilson wanted us to stay as long as possible,’ said the young woman. ‘He doesn’t see much of Jimmy.’

‘Then he should get himself up here more often,’ retorted Miss Wilson. ‘The wedding, the christening and the funeral, that’s been about the strength of it these past few years.’

Annie Wilson’s face lost its animation and the ten years came back with whatever was causing the pain visible in the depths of her eyes.

‘Jimmy bought you a present in London,’ she said abruptly. ‘He asked me to give it to you.’

She handed over a packet in gaily coloured wrapping paper.

Miss Wilson said, ‘I’ll look at it later. I’ve got to show Mr Hutton upstairs yet.’

‘I’ll show him,’ offered the younger woman. ‘You sit down and open your present.’

For a second the old woman looked doubtful, then she agreed. Jaysmith guessed that despite her independence, she might value her niece’s opinion of him as a prospective buyer, and he guessed also that Annie Wilson wanted a chance to check him out for herself.

He played William Hutton to the best of his ability as she showed him round the bedrooms, enthusing over the view from the main bedroom window. It looked out over the valley, across the lake to Town End with the great swell of Seat Sandal looming behind.

‘Yes it’s hard to beat anywhere in the world,’ she said. ‘Have you set your heart on Grasmere, Mr Hutton, or will anywhere in the Lakes do?’

He almost admitted that his knowledge of the area was limited to what he’d been able to garner in the past three days, but this would have sounded very strange from William Hutton, prospective resident and eager house-hunter.

‘I love it all,’ he said expansively. ‘But Grasmere best of all.’

‘And you walk, of course?’

He gestured towards the eastern heights.

‘It’s the only way to get up there, isn’t it?’

She nodded, and suddenly thirsty for more of her approval, he went on, ‘I wouldn’t like to count the happy hours and the glorious miles I’ve passed on the tops.’

Which was quite true, he told himself ironically. The reward for his boast was to make her laugh and shed those years once more.

‘You’re as keen as that, are you?’ she said, gently mocking his grandiloquence. ‘You’ll be telling me you’re Wainwright next.’

He didn’t know if he succeeded in not registering his shock. Wainwright was a cover name he’d used on the Austrian job. How the hell did this woman know …? Then it came to him that, of course, she didn’t. The name had some significance he didn’t grasp, that was all.

He smiled and said lightly, ‘Just plain William Hutton. Is this the last bedroom?’

She nodded, her face losing its rejuvenating lines of laughter and settling to the stillness of a mountain tarn, momentarily disturbed by a breeze. He wondered if she’d noticed something odd in his reaction after all. But when she opened the bedroom door and motioned him in, something about her stillness focused his attention on the room itself. It was small with a single bed and a south-facing casement window with a copper beech almost rubbing against the glass. On the walls hung several photographs of what he saw were early climbing groups, young men, often moustachioed and bearded, garlanded with ropes and wearing broad-rimmed hats and long laced-up boots, standing with the rigid insouciance required by early cameramen. The background hills were unmistakable. Even his limited acquaintance enabled him to recognize the neanderthal brow of Scafell and the broad, nippled swell of Scafell Pike. The pictures apart, there was no sense of the personality of the occupier of this room, or indeed any signs of recent occupation. But twenty years of nervous living had honed his sensitivity to atmosphere and suddenly he heard himself saying, ‘Your aunt brought up your husband, didn’t she?’