I leave Belkeld behind; go back the way I came, out onto the fell again.
My fell.
I walk against the grain, straying from the path and travelling upward. The grass is thicker this way and I am filled with a strange, forbidden thrill, despite the fact that this is Ramsay land. A part of me expects a shout with every step – someone asking me to come back; what the hell do I think I’m doing?
That voice never comes.
About a hundred metres up the slope of the fell, I’m out of breath; my thighs burn and my cheeks feel raw from the wind that has begun whipping its razor-edge around the upper reaches. Spots of gorse cling to Scarclaw, fewer and further between, the higher I go.
In my rucksack there’s a walking pole that dad bought and never used. I loop the handle over my wrist and lean into it. After a while I fall into the shade of the fell’s claw. The ground hisses at the touch of my boots and water rises through the grass.
That forbidden thrill again. I’ve crossed the boundary from the stark fellside into the boggy shadow of the claw. Someone needs to tell me to stop, to come back. Someone needs to tell me it isn’t safe.
I’m glad of the stick in my hand. Metal. Its end is sharp.
I press on through the upper marshlands. The air is decidedly cooler, here, almost thick with the iron scent of rain.
There was an opinion piece in last week’s Telegraph about Six Stories – mainly about Scott King. I try not to read them, so I did so with one eye closed, waiting for some dismissive coda about me, about dad, about The Hunting Lodge. It never came. Instead, the article focussed on how clever the format of this series was, the impact on society that unearthing these old cases had. ‘Digging up the Dead’ was its title. Two paragraphs in and I was filled with a terrible guilt, my cheeks flushed, as if I still had something to disclose, as if I could have changed the way things went.
I could have told the police about the figure we were pursuing that night; but so could the others. I could have told Scott King about it, too. But to what end? Would it have made a difference or sent a hundred monster-hunters onto my father’s land?
Tomo, Jus and I, we made a promise, a pact that we would not mention what we saw that night – not unless the outcome of the case depended on it.
The postscript of the Telegraph article spoke about how there might even be a full review of the Tom Jeffries case. I wonder how his mother and father feel about that. The Jeffries family have not spoken a word since Six Stories began. Scott King says his job is raking up old graves. When he says that I cannot detect a smile in between his words.
I manoeuvre back around the side of the fell; this way is shorter in distance, but the going is harder. I look out for rocks and skeletons of trees to hold on to. Between Belkeld and The Hunting Lodge, the fell holds this land.
I am foolish to even consider being its owner.
I’m close now to my next stop on this tour of memories. If it had been raining we would have stayed inside the Woodlands Centre, I’m sure of it. However, the downpour granted us respite, so we scrunched over the muddy gravel to Tomo’s car. The light of the boot felt conspicuous and the dogs were going berserk. I was in charge of them and a few times genuinely expected to be pulled off my feet.
‘They’ve caught the scent.’ Tomo said, in control now, gun in hand, black North Face zipped under his chin.
His words were like a line from some film. The handles of the dog leads were cutting into my palms.
‘I can’t hold them much longer,’ I said in a voice that was not my own.
In that moment I realised what was happening.
None of us had ever been in such a situation as this, not by ourselves; not without the guidance of some relation or other. We were reacting the way they react in films, on TV; the way writers who’ve never been in these situations write. We were saying everything we’d heard and never done.
‘Let’s go.’
Tomo and Jus held a lamp each and looked at me. In their faces, half hidden by the flickering shadows, I saw expectancy.
‘Come on.’ I said it more to the dogs.
One of them whined slightly as he pulled me on, desperate to breach the bulwark of thrashing vegetation. Desperate to reach his quarry.
I didn’t tell them, I kept my mouth shut the deeper we drove into the woods, with the dogs snarling and throwing themselves off into the undergrowth and the lamps casting a terrible corpse-light, while the wind and the rain battered us. I didn’t tell them about what Dad had told me the last time he came out here to work on the final plans for The Hunting Lodge. What he thought he saw on the fell.
I wanted to but the words would not come.
Sometimes I think that it was the first sign, they say family notice things are amiss; a change in routine, a face forgotten. But this, this wasn’t like that. Dad wasn’t a dreamer; he thrived on pure logic, sometimes infuriatingly so. What he said he saw skulking across Scarclaw Fell, I have told myself was the first sign of what was coming – the change in the air that animals can sense before an onslaught of weather. It was as if Dad’s brain was battening down, preparing for a storm.
I reach the other side of the marsh faster than I expect to. This is not far from where they found the body … we found the body, or what remained of it. It’s about a quarter of a mile downhill from here, at the edge of the trees. Along with the black shape at the window of the Woodlands Centre, and Dad’s insistent story, I relegate these notions to the limits of imagination, speculation. The devil, a long, black man, Nanna Wrack, Alzheimer’s. We like to give things names, personify our darkness. Maybe that’s some innate human trait? If so, I wonder what purpose it serves.
I’m careful, picking my way through the thickest parts of the marsh-grass, its tube-like stems penetrating my trousers. It’s like walking over the surface of a nettle. I don’t worry that I might be sucked in, slip below the surface of the mud. I do worry, though, that the damp earth might suck at my feet hard enough to pitch me forward, make me twist an ankle. No one’s out here to hear me scream.
I reach an alder that clings to the last of its life – its roots jut from the ground and I perch on top of one of them, holding hands with the last of the green catkins. Last time I stood here, I stared for a long time at the grinning green skull of a long-dead sheep. I imagined it caught out here in the marsh. Maybe its leg became tangled in the roots of this very tree and it tried to run, collapsed and died, its wool soaking with the foul water, its bleats fading into nothing.
I lean against the damp trunk of the tree and squint out. I can see what I’m looking for; it rises from the marshes like a single, skeletal digit, ensconced with moss and ivy. The remains of a wall and a single chimney – the engine house that was one day the beating, industrial heart of this land, pumping water from the mineshafts below.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
The rain had resumed, and the wind was hurling it down into the forest; it clattered against the leaves with such a volume that we had to shout.
Tomo shone his light off into the undergrowth. We couldn’t see the dogs, but we could hear them yelping.
‘They’ve found something!’ Tomo shouted back.
He and Jus could not keep the lights still; like twin searchlights they rode the canopy before us.
‘It went toward that ruin thing…’ Tomo was pointing into the black distance. His words were just audible above the screech of the wind and the rattle of the trees.
The gun was in my hands now. I could not remember how or why, but I was holding it, my arms trembling with cold and the weapon’s dead weight. I begged myself not to shoot the moment one of the dogs burst back out of the undergrowth.
‘Fuck me!’
I nearly did it. I felt my nearly numb finger squeeze the trigger as one of the lurchers, its scant fur plastered to its wiry frame, bounded back into the clearing where we stood, eyes blazing.
‘That’s where it lives, that’s where it…’ Tomo was shouting.
But we weren’t looking at him anymore.
He stopped, turned back. Followed our gaze to what the Lurcher had dropped from its jaws into the mud before us.
The animal wagged its tail and its tongue lolled.
We stared.
I never forgot that black shape. The one at the window of the Woodlands Centre nearly twenty years ago. But we didn’t speak of it again; we didn’t give it a name. And for that I will always be grateful. Of course, any one of us could have said something; we could have told the police that Tom Jeffries’ murderer lured us out onto the fell, just as it had perhaps lured Tom himself. And then what? Would anyone have believed us? Believed any of it: a shadowy black ghoul leering through the window at three drunken toffs?
In the end, what mattered more than why we were out there in the first place was what we found. I’m sure Tom Jeffries’ family would agree…