Asking for the Moon (13 page)

away at one of his choir concerts, though in truth she had no more real idea of the reason than she had of her reason for marrying her cousin eight years earlier. Perhaps she had needed to show Kate Lightfoot and John Swithenbank that their alliance meant nothing to her. But she lacked the temperament for self-analysis, managing to find even in the worst day something that made the next day seem worth waiting for. She knew there was something wrong between her and her husband, even had a notion of what that something was, but had no solution to offer for the problem other than to wait and see and enjoy herself as best she could along the way.

Peter Davenport on the other hand believed he understood all too well his reasons for marrying Ursula and had long since recognized them as inadequate and selfish. But other more pressing matters had been occupying his mind and his conscience in recent months. Like Ursula, he had lived from day to day, but unlike her, he felt an impulsion to definitive, even desperate action, which he could not resist much longer.

'I've got nothing to wear tonight,' she averred.

He thought bitterly of the stuffed wardrobes upstairs, then dismissed the uncharitable thought. Ursula had been eager to put her inherited money into the common pool; he had resisted. He was glad he had. At least that couldn't be held against him.

'It'll be very informal, surely,' he said.

'Informal doesn't mean scruffy,' she retorted.

'No, it doesn't,' he said. 'Lexicographers the world over would agree with you. Who's going to be there anyway?'

'The usual lot,' she said. The usual conversations, the usual tedium.'

'Isn't John going to be there?' he asked.

She looked at him sharply.

'What difference will that make?'

'A breath of fresh air from the great outside world.'

She laughed and said, 'You may be right. I was talking to Boris earlier. He hinted at a surprise but wouldn't say what.

You know how he loves being mysterious. Perhaps Kate has come back from the . . . wherever she's been.'

Davenport put down his pen sharply and stood up.

'Not even Boris would keep back such news just for effect,' he said sternly. 'Poor John. A whole year now. It must have been hell for him.'

'That depends on what the previous year was like, doesn't it?' said his wife. 'Let's have a drink, shall we? It might warm us up.'

'All right. What time do we have to go?'

'Half seven, something like that,' she said vaguely. 'I thought we'd walk it. Along the old drive.'

'What on earth for?' he protested strongly. 'It looks like rain. And it'll ruin your shoes.'

'I just feel like the exercise. Besides, it's traditional. Vicars and their ladies must have taken that route when summoned to the Big House for a couple of centuries at least.'

'Perhaps. It's not a pleasant walk. At this time of year, I mean.'

He shivered and she regarded him curiously.

'Shouldn't a vicar know how to put ghosts in their places?'
she mocked. *

'What do you mean?'

'Joke,' she said. 'Though come to think of it, sometimes there does seem a rather excessive amount of noise and movement in the churchyard. Not just foxes and owls, I mean, though some of it's so overgrown it could hide a tiger. You really ought to insist that something's done about it, Peter.'

'Yes, yes. I'll have a word,' he said. 'Let's have that drink.'

He poured the gin with a generous hand and was pouring himself another before his wife had done more than dampen her full red lips on her first.

'My name's Pascoe. I'm a police inspector. Could I have a word with you, Mr Lightfoot?'

Arthur Lightfoot viewed him silently, then went back into the cottage as though indifferent whether Pascoe followed or not.

Reckoning that if he waited for invitations round here, he was likely to become a fixture, Pascoe went in, closed the door behind him, pursued Lightfoot into a square, sparsely furnished living-room and sat down.

The room occupied the breadth of the building and Pascoe could see that the uncurtained windows at the back were new and the plaster on the wall had been recently refurbished.

'You had a fire?' he said conversationally.

'What do you want, mister?'

Pascoe sighed. One of the more distressing things about his job was the frequency with which he met Yorkshiremen who made Dalziel sound like something from Castiglione's
Book of the Courtier.

'It's about your sister, Kate. I've got no news of her, you understand,' he added hastily for fear of creating a false optimism.

He needn't have worried.

'I need no news of our Kate,' said Lightfoot.

'I don't understand. You mean you don't want to hear anything about your sister?'

It was a genuine semantic problem. Lightfoot's face showed a recognizable expression for a moment. It was one of contempt.

'I mean I need no news. She's dead. I need no bobby to come telling me that.'

'Well, if you know that, you know more than I do,' rejoined Pascoe. 'What makes you so sure?'

'A man knows such things.'

Oh God, that awful intuition again. No, not intuition,

superstition. This was a medieval peasant who stood before him, but without any feudal inhibitions.

'We can't be sure,' insisted Pascoe gently. 'Not till ... well, not till we've seen her.'

'I've seen her.'

'What?

'What do you know, mister? Nowt!'

Lightfoot spoke angrily. It was clearly only the gentler responses that were missing from his make-up.

'I've heard her voice in the black of night and I've risen from my bed and I've seen her blown this way and that in the night wind,' proclaimed Lightfoot with terrifying intensity.

Pascoe began to regret that he had sat down as the man loomed over him describing his lunatic visions. Looking for an excuse to get to his feet, he spotted a framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

'Is this your sister, Mr Lightfoot?' he asked, rising and edging past the man. The picture showed a slim girl in a white dress and a wide-brimmed floppy hat from beneath which a pair of disproportionately large eyes looked uncertainly at the photographer. Like a startled rabbit, thought Pascoe unkindly. The background to the picture was a house which could have been The Pines, but identification was not helped by the fact that the print had been torn in half, presumably to remove someone standing alongside the girl.

Lightfoot snatched the frame from his hands, a rudeness perhaps more native than aggressive.

'What do you want?' he demanded once more.

'I'm on my way to see your brother-in-law,' answered Pascoe, deciding that the more direct he was, the quicker he could make his exit. 'There have been some phone calls, and a letter, suggesting that he knows more about your sister's disappearance than he's letting on. We're eager to find the person who's been making these suggestions.'

'So you single me out!' said Lightfoot accusingly.

'No,' said Pascoe. 'I was in Wearton yesterday, and I spoke to Mr Swithenbank then, but I didn't have time to contact

anyone else. Later on tonight I'm going to see a variety of people at Wear End, Mr Kingsley's house. I thought I'd drop in on you en route, that's all.'

'You guessed I wouldn't be at t'party then?' said Lightfoot.

Pascoe looked uncomfortable and Lightfoot laughed like a tree cracking in a strong wind.

'Yon bugger wouldn't invite me to suck in the air on his land,' he said.

'Mr Kingsley doesn't care for your company?' said Pascoe redundantly.

'He cares for nowt but his own flesh,' said Lightfoot. 'Like father, like son.'

He replaced the photograph on the mantelpiece with a thump that defied Pascoe to touch it again.

'Is it your brother-in-law that's been torn off the picture?' enquired Pascoe.

'I wanted none of his face around my house,' said Lightfoot.

'Why's that?'

'No reason.'

'Do you not like him either?'

'They're all the same, them lot,' said Lightfoot. 'Kate'd be still living to this day likely if she hadn't got mixed up with them.'

'Surely they were her friends,' protested Pascoe.

'Friends! What need of friends when there's family? Are you done, Mr Detective? There's others have to work late hours besides t'police.'

On the doorstep Pascoe turned and said, 'Have you made any calls to Mr Swithenbank or sent the police a letter, Mr Lightfoot?'

'That's direct,' said Lightfoot. 'I wondered if you'd get round to asking. The answer's no, I haven't. If I knew definite who'd harmed her, I . . .'

'You'd what?'

'I'd know, wouldn't I? Do you question Swithenbank so direct?'

'If the occasion demands,' said Pascoe.

'Then ask him this. What was he doing skulking around the churchyard at midnight night before last? You ask him.'

'All right,' said Pascoe. 'As a matter of interest, what were
you
doing skulking round the churchyard, Mr Lightfoot?'

The door was shut hard in his face. Pascoe whistled with relief as he strolled through the gate and got into his car. There was something frightening about Lightfoot in a primal kind of way. A man who had commerce with ghosts must be frightening! Though a man so certain of his sister's death might have other reasons for his certainty, and that was more frightening still.

Behind him in the comfortless cottage Lightfoot returned to the job which Pascoe's arrival had interrupted. Seated at the kitchen table, he oiled and polished the separated parts of his shotgun till he was satisfied. Then he reassembled it and sat motionless for a long time while outside the light faded, rooks beat their way homeward to the nest-dark trees, a light mist drifted out of the dank fields till a wind began to rise and bore it away and drove the darkness over the land.

Then Lightfoot stood up, put on a black donkey jacket, set his gun in the crook of his arm and went out into the night.

Arthur Lightfoot was in many people's minds that night.

Geoffrey Rawlinson as he shaved in preparation for the party at Wear End found himself thinking of Lightfoot. Even in his democratic teens when as a matter of faith such things were not allowed to matter, he had always been conscious of a vague distaste for calling on Kate at her brother's cottage. There was something so brutishly spartan about the place, and in that atmosphere Kate herself, so unnoticing of or uncaring for the near squalor, seemed a different person. By

his early twenties, Rawlinson was openly wrestling with the choice he had to make. If he married Kate, he was marrying a Lightfoot. The two major elements of his make-up - the draughtsman's love of order and shape and the naturalist's love of energy and colour - clashed and jarred against each other like boulders in a turbulent sea. His sister looked pityingly at him but refused to speak. It had to be his own choice and he was ashamed of himself for having such a superficially Victorian reason for hesitating.

Then Ursula told him one morning the news she had learnt the previous night and he realized to his amazement that his sense of critical choice had been fallacious.

Now he lived in a framework of meticulous order which he felt both as a scaffolding and a cage.

But even now, even when he regretted the past most passionately, the memory of Arthur, spooning stew into his mouth at the kitchen table with the encrusted sauce bottle and the curded milk bottle on guard before him, made Rawlinson twitch with distaste.

But that memory was just a mental feint to keep his mind from contemplating - as now he did, looking into his own reluctant eyes in the shaving mirror - the events of a year ago, and the pain, mental and physical, he had suffered since that dreadful night.

Stella Rawlinson thought of Arthur, too, and wondered for the thousandth time, with a cold self-analysis which had nothing to do with control, why the humiliation of a fourteen-year-old girl should lay marks on her which persisted throughout womanhood. It was not unusual for a pubescent girl to have a crush on her best friend's elder brother. Nor could it be too unusual that recognition of this should cause dismissive and hurtful amusement. But rarely could this amusement be couched in such terms or such circumstances as to create a hatred stretching beyond maturity.

Only one other person had ever been aware of what she suffered. What were best friends for? But a sharing is as likely

to mean a doubling as a halving, she had long ago decided. It was a mistake to be rectified if possible, certainly not one to be repeated. So even with her husband she kept her peace and when he showed signs of wanting to commit the same error of confidence, she turned away.

And Boris Kingsley, too, thought of Arthur as he arranged the chairs and filled the decanters in his library. But he thought of many other things besides as he opened the wardrobes in his bedroom and dressed for his party.

And for a while as his guests arrived he thought of nothing but making them welcome. He didn't like most of them but there are less expensive ways of manifesting dislike than over your own drink in your own house, so he smiled and chatted and poured till a clock chimed and he glanced anxiously at his watch.

Then he smiled again but this time secretively, excused himself, closed the door firmly behind him, and picked up the telephone.

>

The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of 'Mother'.

'You've met my mother?' said Swithenbank.

'Briefly,' said Pascoe. 'How do you do?'

He shook hands with the woman and wondered if he was being conned. Surely this wasn't the woman he had spoken to outside the house the previous day. There had been something distinctive . . . yes, her hair had been a sort of purpley-blue, not the rich auburn of the woman before him.

'You approve my coiffure, Mr Pascoe?' she said and he realized he was staring.