Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16) Page 5

  *

  Unless the parson drove into Helmsley it would be a long while before the fuzz came in. Before making for Helmsley myself I intended to take a thorough look around without disturbing any possible clues helpful to the police investigation. That was difficult, but not impossible; drawers, for instance, could be opened carefully and searched without too much hassle, and secret hiding places could be looked for with equal care. Stummerl had a desk like any writer and I went right through it. I found nothing. I found nothing in either of the two upstairs bedrooms. Stummerl didn’t leave evidence around; the cottage held nothing whatsoever that could be considered incriminating, in the form of letters or anything else. Maybe he just had a good memory.

  I went back to the living room.

  “More tea?” Felicity asked.

  “Good idea.”

  “Right. I’ll brew up.”

  “Mash,” I said. “This is Yorkshire.” I followed Felicity into the kitchen, stepping carefully round the body. The blood had dried right up now, and had turned a dull red-brown; the morning had darkened rather suddenly, and, looking out of the window, I saw snow falling again. It was coming down heavily, almost a blizzard. Yorkshire was a great place all right, but it did have its disadvantages, at any rate if you lived in Loxa Mill, down in a hole, virtually, at the foot of the fells, or maybe I should say moors on this side of the county. I reckoned the village could simply fill up if the snow went on for long enough. Then, thinking of things filling up, I remembered something: when I’d been in the Jaguar earlier, there had been an indication that after death at Plug’s hands my body was to have been dropped down a well. That well could have been the one belonging to Stummerl’s cottage; Loxa Mill didn’t have the look of a mains water supply.

  It might be worth taking a look, and I told Felicity that that was what I was going to do.

  “Why?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Could be a useful hiding place.”

  “For what?” She looked blank.

  “I don’t know — yet. Bodies? Weapons — who knows?”

  She said, “If you’re really going to, I’ll come with you.”

  “You’ll get wet and very, very cold.”

  “I’ve got an anorak. And I’m not staying in here alone and I don’t care what you say!”

  “That doesn’t sound like a 6D2 field person.”

  “Forget the person,” she snapped. “Sometimes, I’m a woman.”

  *

  It was bitterly cold. A wind had come up now, and was blowing the snow into drifts and into our faces as we pushed through the blizzard looking for Stummerl’s well. God, that garden was bleak! The going was rough, and we kept stumbling over hillocks and mole-hills and whatnot. There was a derelict clothes-line, with its rope whipping in the wind like a parted stay aboard a ship in a heavy sea. The wind how led as w ell as blew and I thought again about those olden days when this had been the Devil’s stamping-ground. Apart from us it was as deserted right now as it had been then. I imagined scenes of witchcraft and black magic after the Devil had been exorcised from the moors and people had come in to live and scratch out a living from the soil; the memories of Satan would have lived on, fortified by the memories of the ancient rites of superstition derived from that pagan past. There would have been the holy crosses guarding the little cots in the name of God, but Yorkshire folk like to make doubly sure and today I certainly didn’t blame them for any past propitiations of the Devil. We bent our bodies against the icy blast, opening our eyes only with difficulty and a degree of torture.

  We found the well; we damn nearly fell over its superstructure, in fact. The snow had drifted right up against it. I got the lid off with some difficulty and crouched to stare down. I caught the faintest gleam of water. The bucket swung in the wind on its rope, almost decapitating me. I steadied it. I could see no means of easy access, no metal rings, for instance, set in the wall for a man to climb down.

  To peer down was not easy either, but I fancied I saw something floating on the water and my mind was currently very much body-orientated.

  “I’m going down,” I said to Felicity. “On the bucket.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  I disregarded that. I said, “The rope looks strong enough. Pay it out, and pay it out bloody carefully. And make sure the handle doesn’t run away with you. If I’m too heavy to wind back up again, I’ll shin up the rope once you’ve lowered it to its fullest extent. All right?”

  “Take care,” she said. That was all, but I knew she was suffering. She didn’t want to see me go down; there had been quite a lot between us and I think she saw the end coming. I was far from keen myself; if I had to go down any well at all, I wouldn’t choose the North Yorkshire Moors in a blizzard, near a house with a body on the kitchen floor. But I had no choice; I thought of Max sitting comfortably in Focal House, and I thought of my duty, and I sent up a prayer. I watched Felicity lower the bucket a little way for embarkation, then I clambered into the opening, feeling with my feet for the bucket and holding tight to the rope as Felicity paid out efficiently. She was strong for a woman, and the PT Instructor at FH had made her more so. I knew I could rely on her.

  Down I went, slow but sure. I couldn’t see much in the faint and dwindling light from above and I wasn’t certain yet whether or not there was a body beneath me. There was a dank smell, not exactly foetid, but not fresh either. The brick walls looked slimy, and when I touched them, they were. Horrible, like a slug’s stomach. Filings, which in fact were probably slugs or leeches, adhered to them. Above me the primitive lowering mechanism was creaking and groaning; I hoped I wasn’t straining it too much with my weight.

  Suddenly and forebodingly the descent stopped, and I dangled and swung. Then there was a high scream, a woman’s scream, and I went down at speed in mv bucket, still holding fast to the rope. Just a moment after that I hit the water, and then I saw something falling. It plunged in, went down and came up again, gasping, and trod water like me. It was Felicity Mandrake.

  Looking up, I saw the rector’s face, framed in the well’s opening and backed by the falling snow.

  The rope had gone slack in my hands now: up top, the rector had cut it. Its coils came down, flop in the water. There was no way out. No likely rescue either: it was reasonably clear that Rowbottom had no intention of going for the police. It could be days before Heinz Stummerl was missed by anyone other than Miss Salderthwaite, who might or might not return to the cottage. I rather thought not, the way things had turned out; the rector would dream up some yarn to keep her away. Our combined shouts might, just might, attract attention if anyone was within earshot. That was doubtful, but the parson evidently decided to cover it. His face vanished for a moment, then came back, and he thrust something through the opening, and I heard a hollow booming phut-phut-phut. A silenced revolver; bullets spattered around. I thrust Felicity hard back against the wall and hoped for the best. The rector kept it up for a while, then the wooden cover went back on with a sound of total finality.

  “We’re alive,” I said in a whisper.

  “For what it’s worth.”

  “Any damage?” I asked.

  She said no, she was all right and what about me? I’d taken a couple of close shaves, literally: one down my left upper arm, the other down the right-hand side of my rib-cage. ‘There was bleeding but it couldn’t be helped.

  “What do we do?” Felicity asked. Her voice shook, as did her body. First time down a well; me, too! And to have been put there by a man of the cloth, a clerk in Holy Orders, somehow made it worse. A lurking man of God, hanging about to watch for our next move … if the Church could do all this, what hope was there?

  I answered Felicity’s question, my lips close to her ear as we hung onto a projection in the brick lining. “God knows,” I said. “Other than sham dead for a while. If Rowbottom — Clutch — thinks we’re dead, he’ll leave the well alone. He’ll bugger off soon, out of Loxa Mill, and vanish till he feels a need to show again
, leaving everything neatly tied up behind him … not that Heinz Stummerl is very neat, but you know what I mean.”

  “Clutch will cover his tracks well enough?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You and I are the only ones who know.”

  “Know what?”

  “‘That your hypothesis was dead right after all. That Clutch killed Heinz Stummerl. But I’d dearly love to know why! When we get out of here, I’ll be finding out.”

  She didn’t say anything, no comment on my volte face or on my apparent optimism. And sheer optimism it was: I hadn’t any notion at all how we were ever to get out, other than try to climb the sheer wall and negotiate the inward slope at the top, where the well narrowed to form a neck. Hopeless! All that slime. In effect, we were right inside a greasy pole. Just the same, it was the only way. There just might be footholds if the brickwork wasn’t in good condition, and I might be able to hang by my finger-nails and heave myself up. In the meantime, our wallowing around in seclusion had convinced me there was no other body: what I’d seen had been a trick of the imagination, or of the poor light filtering into the well. In passing I wondered why the rector hadn’t thrown Stummerl’s body down the well, but being such a small man I doubted if he would have been able to manage on his own anyway. Stummerl, who was big, would have been a massive weight to drag clandestinely through the snow.

  I told Felicity I was going to try climbing out. I said, “If I make it, I’ll haul you up. I’ll take the rope with me, tied round my waist. Where’s the bloody thing got to?”

  “Here,” she said. In the total darkness, I felt her pass the rope to me, and I secured it around myself, leaving the end dangling. I took Felicity in my arms as we floated on the scummy surface and gave her a kiss, then I lost no time. I felt the wall behind me, running my hands over the bricks, searching for crumbled pointing. No luck. A couple of strokes took me to another sector of wall, and I tried again, this time with better luck: I found a good grip for my hands and some sort of projection below the water for my feet.

  I heaved myself up, and came clear of the water from the knees up. Then, scrabbling around, my fingers found another purchase, and I heaved up again. It was fine until the brickwork crumbled away and down I went, splash. It was when I hit the water again that I started to worry about just how intense the cold was; it was absolutely bitter. That alone would finish us off before much longer.

  “Exercise,” I said. “Keep moving. Swim about.”

  We did, for a while. Then I decided to have another go at the wall, before a personal numbing freeze set in. That brickwork had been very crumbly, very weakened with age I supposed. I racked my brain, trying to dredge up all I knew — which wasn’t much — about the sinking of wells, with particular reference to how they used to line them. Until hard ground had been reached, once the soft earth had been excavated, the sides of the shaft were held temporarily by a lining of iron rings either hung from the top or supported by iron pegs driven into the sides, with planks banged in behind the rings. When the hard rock was reached, an iron crib, or sometimes a wooden one, was inserted, made in segments and bolted together by cover strips. That was laid on the prepared bed, alter which the brick wall was built up. More or less like that, anyway; and it could offer hope. If I could pull out the bricks where I found a really bad patch, wouldn’t it be possible to get through to the pegs or rings?

  In theory, maybe. In practice maybe, too. But time! It would take far too long; Felicity would have succumbed to the cold long before I could get anywhere near the top.

  Yet I had to try. You can’t just give up.

  *

  It was murder. I found no rings, no pegs, no anything; but I did make progress, and quite good progress, simply by painfully excavating away where I could. My fingers became raw. The sheer physical labour kept out the cold. I didn’t know how time was passing; my water had struck brick in my original fall, and the well cover was too tight to show any signs of the movement of day towards evening. The air was growing fouler, and I’d realised long since that the snow, if it was falling still, would seal us in from any air penetration. It was likely enough that by now the whole of the well-head would be covered to invisibility and might even freeze up. I tried not to think about that, not to envisage a successful climb ending in an immovable cover; but of course I couldn’t help being aware of it as I laboured a way below those frozen, wind-swept, lonely moors, beneath a dead man’s garden, and thought about Jason Clutch beating it for safety. Up I went, teeth gritted, fearing that I might slip back at any moment. However, there was consolation in the fact that each time I made myself a hand or foot hold, it remained ready for use, always assuming that after a fall back into the water I could find my starting-point again. So long as I could do that, things might not be too bad. Each time a little more progress would be made. In that sense, I was at least better off than Robert the Bruce’s spicier; presumably the poor beast had had to start a fresh spin each go. It must have been maddening.

  So on up — up until I met the neck, where the tumble-home, to use a seafaring term, started. I took a breather, hanging tight to my anchor-points, knowing that now I would have to climb at a backward angle, with all my weight responding to the gravitational pull, a fly upside-down on a ceiling as I neared the entry. Praying, I started.

  I didn’t get far. Really, I don’t suppose I ever would have. I was reaching backwards with my hands and feeling desperately insecure when I heard the cover being lifted off. Still holding on, I saw daylight and clear skies beyond, no snow. Between me and the sky stood Miss Salderthwaite, looking bewildered because there was no rope and bucket. I called out to her. “Miss Salderthwaite,” I said from the dark cavern, and she gave a scream of pure terror and, as she fled, dropped something down into the well, something that hit me on the head so that I lost my handhold and plunged. I missed Felicity by inches and went deep. Surfacing, I swore bitterly, angry at myself as much as with Miss Salderthwaite.

  I said savagely, “Now she knows the old yarns were true!”

  “What yarns?”

  “That Satan lives in the North Yorkshire Moors. Not just the moors … right beneath Stummerl’s blasted vegetable patch!”

  *

  Of course, she came back. I shouted out my identity through the open well-mouth until I was hoarse, and anyway Miss Salderthwaite was good Yorkshire stock which meant she was both capable and basically sceptical and she lived, all said and done, in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, she was still scared as she put her face over the hole and looked down.

  “Who’s there?” she called nervously.

  I gave my name again. “Both of us,” I said. “Can you find a rope somewhere, Miss Salderthwaite?”

  “How ever did you get there?” she asked.

  This was no time to mention the rector; and I hoped it wouldn’t be to the rectory that Miss Salderthwaite would go to Find a rope. I called up, “We fell. How about that rope before we die from cold? What about the farm?”

  “I’ll get Mr Appleyard,” she said, to my relief, and vanished again. We had a long wait before Mr Appleyard, who turned out to be the farmer who lived way up the track through Loxa Mill, arrived with a stout rope, which he cast down. Mr Appleyard, when at last we reached his side, very much the worse for wear, was the typical blunt Yorkshire-man, leathery-faced and solid, with shrewd blue eyes that raked us from head to toe and looked disapproving. He was accompanied by a large dog.

  “Foony goings on,” he said as though accusing us of having gone down the well together for improper purposes.

  “I’m sorry — ”

  “Not so often you find a man and woman down t’well.” Mr Appleyard scratched his nose. “Doan’t know what things are rooming to, eh. Miss Salderthwaite?”

  And then I saw his shotgun. He had no need to tell me that, having had time to think about it, he had come to the conclusion we were the murderers of Heinz Stummerl. Miss Salderthwaite said, “Mind, I did tell him you arrived alter Mr Stummerl’s death
, but he insisted nobbut you could have clone it.”

  Felicity and I sat in Stummerl’s living room, under the farmer’s gun. The dog sat by the door, fully alert, all ready to pounce if its master told it to. Nothing I could say had any effect on Mr Appleyard; he was as thick as a door and he just didn’t believe a word, though he hadn’t stopped Miss Salderthwaite organising towels and a change of clothing from Stummerl’s wardrobe for me, and some of her own for Felicity, who looked grotesque and knew it. Also, Miss Salderthwaite had now lit a fire; and she prepared food and cups of tea, clucking round us like an old hen and plainly antagonistic towards Appleyard, who didn’t give a hoot. Even Germans were entitled not to be murdered. I was fuming with impatience; I had an urgent need to be away and after Jason Clutch. I said so to Miss Salderthwaite. I said I’d like to know if he was at home, which I was dead sure he was not, but confirmation would be nice. He could just have been potting at rats in the well, by some mad flight of fancy … Miss Salderthwaite said she would go and find out from her one remaining neighbour, Mrs Barnsley, who ‘did’ for the rector. Miss Salderthwaite was quickly back: Mrs Barnsley was a worried woman; the rector had left in his car without a word to her and hadn’t come back. She was sitting in her window, watching the drive. She feared for his safety, which was more than I did, in the snow drifts. The roads were summat terrible.

  But as late afternoon’s darkness began to come down, a vehicle got through: a yellow Post Office van. I saw it through the window before Miss Salderthwaite drew the curtains across; and half an hour later the telephone rang. Appleyard, keeping his eye and his gun on us, got up and took it. He gave Stummerl’s number and listened. “Oh, all,” he said, and rang off. I assumed it had been a Post Office check. It had. Appleyard said, “Now Ah’m going t’all police station at Helmsley.”

  More waiting. When at last the police arrived, looking grim, I produced my 6D2 pass, which Appleyard had scorned, appearing to think it had been issued by the Mafia or something. The police were different. When they’d had a word with the farmer he said, “Oh, ah, but it were funny, weren’t it, being down int’ well,” and went off with his gun and his dog without a word of apology. I put the Detective Sergeant in the picture about the finding of Heinz Stummerl, and about the rector’s second birth after being Jason Clutch; but I didn’t say anything about Hitler’s brain, or about the overall threat behind it. Some finger-printing was done and when mine and Felicity’s had been taken in the interest of elimination, I asked if we were needed further.