George Magruder wandered about the silent house, unable to concentrate on his work, irritated at what he saw now was his own stupidity. In the kitchen he switched on the transistor radio which Louise used when she was cooking. It was some disc-jockey programme, a slimily ingratiating English voice smeared by what the idiot fondly imagined was an American accent. It made him even more irritated. How often in arguments back home had he used the B.B.C. as an example of public-interest broadcasting? Now it sounded like a third-rate copy of the worst kind of American huckstering.
He heard the disc-jockey say news time was approaching. He walked through to the dining-room and then into the sitting-room. What he missed was people. This was life in a vacuum. The sooner he could wrap up Branksheer the sooner they would leave this place.
Behind, in the empty kitchen, the news-reader gave details of a new wage freeze. Then...
“Henry Robert Niles is missing from an ambulance which crashed while taking him to Two Waters. Niles, who was found guilty but insane at two separate murder trials ten years ago – one after he’d escaped and murdered a third child – was being taken from Trebovir County Hospital. At a public inquiry into his escape it was stated that he had a mental age of eight and would never be allowed to leave a maximum security institution. Police say snow and bad visibility on Tornmoor are hampering their search. Niles is wearing a white shirt, brown jacket and grey trousers. Two other men are reported to be critically injured after the crash...”
In the sitting-room George Magruder punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He decided he would walk down to the school. It was ridiculous to stay cooped up here, like some neurotic in the early stages of paranoia. Maybe in a crowd Louise would be more reasonable.
He put on the old rubber boots in the kitchen. The news reader said heavy snow would continue through the night in the west. He switched off the radio. Nothing like the jolly old British to tell you the obvious. It was snowing heavily outside. They probably made up their weather forecasts by looking out of the window.
He took his nylon jacket from a hook, zipped up the front and pulled the parka-hood over his head, tying the strings under his chin.
“Here we go, one man against the primeval elements,” he said, out loud, as he slammed the door. “A hundred miles to Nome and the wolves are howling for food. On – into the raging blizzard.”
By the time he reached the end of the lane, his head bent to protect his face against the driving snow, he was engaged in a fantasy which was a combination of Chaplin’s Gold Rush and a James Stewart film, the name of which, for the moment, escaped him...
* * *
The children’s party was so happy Louise felt like crying. The Rev. and Mrs Hood had met everybody at the door, shaking hands and giving out sweets.
“And this is Karen, that’s your name, isn’t it?” said the curate, bending slightly, his hands on his knees, smiling into Karen’s face. “Merry Christmas, Karen, I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time with all these lovely boys and girls.”
“Say Merry Christmas to Mr and Mrs Hood, Karen.” Louise smiled at the curate and his wife. “This is the first time Karen’s been to a Christmas party in England.”
“You must tell us about Christmas in America, Karen,” said Mrs Hood. Mr Hood patted her head. Karen ducked away. “Don’t be shy now, we’re all friends here.”
Louise saw Mrs Jean Knapman and two other women standing at the head of the long trestle table on which the children’s cakes and oranges were already laid, a Christmas cracker by each plate.
Jean Knapman introduced Louise to Mrs Venner and Mrs Hedden.
“We’ve already met,” Louise said to Bobby Hedden’s mother. Mrs Hedden smiled briefly. Louise was very glad of Jean Knapman’s friendliness, for she had been a little nervous about the party. She had the feeling they were not particularly popular in the village.
Small boys were already racing up and down the centre of the hall. At first the girls tended to stay by their mothers, but soon little groups began to form.
“You sit beside Karen, Lucy,” Jean Knapman said to her daughter when the Rev. Hood announced that it was time to take places for tea. Louise watched Karen walking shyly to the table. There was something almost sad about little girls of that age, something solemn and proud. Or was she just feeling sad herself?
“Come on, Janice,” said Mrs Hedden. “You like cake, don’t you?”
“Isn’t it a shame?” said Louise as they watched Mrs Hedden lead Janice to the table. “Isn’t there any chance she’ll ever be any better?”
“The doctors don’t seem to think so,” said Jean Knapman. “The Heddens wanted her put in one of they homes but there wasn’t no room, not when she was just a baby. Now, well, it would be terrible, wouldn’t it, to take her away from what she knows?”
Louise felt a strong upsurge of pity for the little girl with the blank face. Why should an innocent child have its life taken away before it had started? She wanted to cry at the stupidity of it all.
After tea, eaten in a rising crescendo of noise from the two lines of children, the mothers cleared the trestle tables of dirty paper cups and plates and crumbs. Children stampeded up and down the small hall. Louise was glad to see that Lucy Knapman and Karen seemed to have made friends. They sat together when forms were pushed in front of the small stage, where the Rev. Hood made a small speech about the meaning of Christmas and then introduced Mr Hankinson, the conjurer.
Little girls sat with wide eyes and open mouths, little boys ooohed, older boys muttered and giggled and jostled each other, their heads down in subversive conspiracy. Mr Hankinson tore newspapers and magically made them whole again. He told weak jokes as he lifted his left trouser leg to show a red sock and his right trouser leg to show a black sock. He dropped his trouser legs and when he lifted them again the socks had changed over. Louise tried to think how he had done it. Was it one of those small boys who’d strangled their cat? She frowned. All day she’d been trying to forget the cat. Somebody must have come up their lane at night. It was the sort of thing small boys did. What small boys were out after dark on a night of heavy snow? Maybe the cat had wandered – chased hens. That could be it, it had been caught by someone and that was their way of telling strangers not to let their cats run wild. It was too preposterous, nobody would be so warped.
A trick with a glass of water under a Chinese box did not turn out so well. As Mr Hankinson lifted the box with a sweeping gesture – presumably to reveal the glass of water mysteriously emptied – he knocked it on to the floor. The children roared with laughter as he blushed and bent down to pick up the fragments. Louise winced. It was one of those stupid, irrational childhood things, she knew that, but she just could not stand the sound of glass breaking. Once she’d been to a cowboy picture with George and they’d been shooting at empty bottles on a fence and she’d almost been sick.
After the conjurer the mothers went among the children with Christmas crackers left unpulled by the younger children. Jean Knapman gave one to her Lucy and one to Karen.
“Why don’t you let little Janice pull your cracker, Karen?” said Louise. Karen made a face. “Go on, she wants some fun, too, you know.”
Karen and Lucy went over to where Mrs Hedden sat with her arm round Janice’s shoulders. When Mrs Hedden saw what the two girls wanted to do, she was almost pathetic in her blushing gratitude.
The three women talked together for a few moments, until they heard Janice screaming. They turned to see what had happened. Janice had one end of a cracker and was trying to hold it against her chest, yelling when Lucy and Karen tried to take hold of the other end.
“She doesn’t understand,” Mrs Hedden apologised. They went over to the little girls. They told Karen and Lucy to pull one cracker to show Janice what she was meant to do. Janice refused to give up her cracker. Louise sensed that the other women in the hall were looking unsympathetically. They probably didn’t like the idea of Janice being there at all. She felt the need to make some gesture. She sat down beside Janice and put her arm round her shoulders.
“It’s all right, darling,” she said, “we’re not going to take it away from you.”
Janice stopped screaming, but she held on to the cracker.
“Santa Claus will be here in a moment,” said Jean Knapman to the girls. They’d seen the Rev. Hood leave to change into the Santa suit. “I wonder what’ll he have for you from the tree.”
Children were already crowding round the tree in the corner near the door.
“Why don’t you and Lucy take Janice to see Santa Claus, Karen?” said Louise. “Take care of her, won’t you?”
“I should go with her,” said Mrs. Hedden, doubtfully.
“They’ll be all right,” said Jean Knapman. “Lucy is very responsible for her age.”
Louise was on the point of saying that Karen was just as responsible as Lucy, but she stopped herself.
They watched the three little girls walk to the edge of the crowd, trying to find a gap in the semi-circle of excited children.
“Time for a cup of tea!” said Jean Knapman. She introduced Louise to some of the other mothers who stood at the opposite end of the hall from the Christmas tree, enjoying a brief respite. For the first time Louise felt there was a chance of becoming part of the life of Dando Monachorum. She but wished there was some way George could be introduced in the same way. Maybe she could ask Jean Knapman if her husband wouldn’t take George down to the Inn some night. It was very important – to be introduced by someone the villagers accepted as one of their own.
The scream rang out above the hubbub. The mothers turned, cups held between saucers and mouths. There was another scream. Then they saw the door open and slam shut. Santa Claus had just stepped among the crowd of children, like a man wading through a field of corn. He stopped, his hooded head turned to the door. Some of the mothers sensed trouble. It took them some moments to push through the press of clamouring children. Neither Lucy nor Karen were to be seen.
‘Where’s my Janice?” Mrs Hedden asked the children. They didn’t seem to hear her in the excitement of Santa’s arrival. Louise shoved children aside to reach the door. The small porch was cold – and empty.
She opened the outside door, a blast of wind smacking her face, snow whirling into the little vestibule. Jean Knapman and Mrs Hedden came behind her.
They went out into the miniature storm of snowflakes that danced under the light above the porch door.
“Karen! Karen!”
Louise ran across the playground, the soles of her boots slipping on hard-trodden snow. The three mothers stood in the road, shouting the names of their daughters. Then Karen and Lucy appeared, two small shapes out of the driving snow.
“Oh, Mummy, Janice ran out and we couldn’t see where she went,” said Lucy.
“She was frightened when Santa came in,” said Karen. “We couldn’t stop her.”
The three mothers ran a few yards either way up the road but it was dark and as soon as they were out of range of the school lights, the darkness was solid, a cold wall of down-pouring snow. Jean Knapman ran back to her car for the torch in the dashboard compartment. Mrs Hedden stood in the middle of the road, shouting “Janice! Janice!” Jean Knapman ran to the nearest cottage.
Karen Magruder burst into tears.
The first police car which attempted the road from Compton Wakley to Fourway Cross struggled for a mile down the narrow lane before it ran into a wheel-high drift and came to a halt. The two constables got out of the white Mini and decided there was no hope of pushing on. The wind plastered their uniforms white as they bent their backs and strained to shove the Mini backwards out of the drift. They radioed that they were turning back.
At Compton Wakley Police Station it was decided that it didn’t matter. Henry Niles was in bad health and even a strong man would have had great difficulty in getting off the Moor in that kind of weather. They decided to put car patrols on the main roads on both sides of the Moor so that he couldn’t cross over and lose himself in the rabbit warren of narrow lanes and small villages of Dando. Other police cars drove up and down the road across the Moor until fast-falling snow made this impossible.
“You’d have to feel sorry for the poor bugger,” said a police sergeant staring at snowflakes eddying thickly in the beam of the headlights. “He’ll freeze to death.”
“Won’t be much of a loss,” said the constable. “Lunatics like that shouldn’t be in a position to get out.”
“You’d hang him, would you?”
“Maybe not hang him. An injection. He’s a liability – to himself much as anything.”
“The Two Waters folk say he’s not dangerous any more. Bad health.”
“Can’t be bad enough for my taste. You ever see the photographs of the kids he done in? Gave me nightmares for months, they did.”
“Aye, I know. But he’s no better than a kid himself. He isn’t responsible.”
“That’d be a lot of comfort to they kids. And their mothers.”
In the morning, it was decided, policemen and soldiers could make a sweeping search of the part of the Moor where the ambulance had crashed.
“I don’t suppose we’ll find the body till the snow melts,” said an inspector. “They say you die peaceful enough when it’s this cold. Just go to sleep in the snow.”
It seemed an ideal solution...
When George Magruder walked towards the door of the school two men stopped him.
“It’s that American from Trencher’s,” said one.
“What’s going on?” asked George. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You better get your wife and kid home quick’s you can,” said the other. “Niles the maniac’s escaped from Two Waters.”
“He could help look for Janice Hedden,” said the first man.
“What’s going on?” George demanded. “I want to see my wife.”
“Little Janice Hedden’s disappeared,” said the other man. George didn’t understand. He pushed past them into the porch. Opening the inner door he was confronted by groups of white, strained faces.
“What’s going on?” he asked Louise. She told him about Janice Hedden.
“Mr Hood’s gone to phone round the nearest farms,” she said. “We need search parties but the mothers won’t leave their children.”
“I’ll drive you back to the house,” he said. “The road may be blocked if we wait much longer. I’ll come back and help them once I’ve got you and Karen safe home. Come on.”
“I should stay and help. Mrs Hedden’s in a terrible state. They’re fetching the doctor.”
“There’s plenty of people to help her. Just get Karen and let’s go. Some maniac has escaped from Two Waters.”
He was speaking loudly and she felt conspicuous.
“Everybody else is waiting,” she said, quietly, pulling him close by clutching the elbow of his jacket. “They’ll think it funny us going off.”
“Don’t argue. It’ll look funnier if I go off on my own. Do you want to walk two miles in this damn snow?”
Trying to avoid the faces of the other women, she told Jean Knapman that they were going home and that George would be coming back to join the search parties. Jean Knapman said it was the best thing they could do, but Louise felt ashamed. They were the only people leaving the hall. Karen sat between them in the car. The clicking of the windscreen wipers formed an insistent rhythm which seemed to grow louder and louder as their mutual silence lengthened. At last Louise could no longer keep her temper bottled up.
“I don’t appreciate you being bossy in public,” she said.
“Bossy? With some sex-maniac on the loose and the road closing up? Use your commonsense, Louise, you –”
“Don’t talk to me about commonsense, you bastard!”
“Louise! Not in front of Karen!”
“Yes, in front of Karen, it’s time she knew, there’s no use letting her grow up in a bloody dream-world. You had to come and spoil everything, didn’t you, just as –”
“Louise, for the last time, will you –”
The snow was a steeply-angled cascade of white feathers. Out of it, into the beam of the headlights, came the figure of a man.
Instinctively Louise grabbed Karen with both arms.
“George!”
She felt a bump. George shouted something she didn’t catch. He stopped the car.
“We hit him, we hit him, I couldn’t stop at that distance, I couldn’t –”
“For God’s sake! Get out and see what’s happened!”
She and Karen watched through the windscreen as George walked round to the front of the car, his shoulders hunched against wind and snow. He bent down out of sight: Then he stood up and shouted. Louise opened her door, immediately shivering with a cold whip of wind on her legs. George came round towards her.
“Back up,” he called. “He’s underneath. Back up about a yard.”
She pulled Karen across her lap and got behind the wheel. The thought of getting the wrong gear made her feel even more hysterical. The car seemed to jump backwards. George waved. George bent down and they saw him come up with the dark shape in his arms. Staggering slightly he came round to the rear door. Louise leaned back to open it from the inside. George struggled to lift the man on to the back seat. Louise twisted round, trying to see his face.
“Is he –”
“We’d better get him to the house, I don’t think I hit him too hard.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go, huh?”
Once or twice the car looked as though it might stick in snow but by reversing and starting forward again Louise forced it through the drifts.
“His eyes are open,” George said from the back seat. “I’ll carry him inside, you get the car into the garage. Karen, you stay in the car till your mother parks it.”
As he carried the man – who was almost worryingly light – up the path, George tried to remember what he knew about First Aid, but the only lesson he could remember from the Boy Scouts was not to move an injured person. The man was so light he was able to hold him up with one arm while he felt for the keys. Then he picked him up and carried him in both arms into the sitting-room, where he laid him on the couch.
Louise came in.
“I couldn’t get the garage doors open, there’s so much snow lying,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter, we won’t be going anywhere in the car. Look, his eyes are open but he doesn’t seem to be looking at anything.”
“Is he breathing?”
“Yeah. I don’t think I hit him too hard, not hard enough to knock him out.”
“How could you tell?”
“I just know, that’s all. We’d better get those clothes off him, he’s wet. What the hell was he doing out in the snow without a coat? Louise, get some blankets, will you?”
“Shouldn’t we give him brandy – or something?”
“In a minute. Karen, see to the fire, will you? Turn it all the way up.”
Karen seemed ready to burst into tears. Since coming into the sitting-room she’d stood on one spot in the middle of the floor.
“The fire, Karen!”
She turned the air gauge up to eight, its limit, and worked the lever which shook dead ash into a tray. Louise ran upstairs and pulled blankets off one of the spare beds. Her hands trembled.
When she went downstairs George had pulled off the man’s shoes and socks and trousers and was unfastening the buttons of his shirt. When he was down to his vest and pants – which to Louise’s relief seemed quite clean – he rubbed the man’s thin legs and small, white feet with a bathroom towel. Louise kept thinking she’d have to wash the towel and the blankets. She could hear her mother – library books and coins and strange men, they were dirty, they carried germs and disease. The little man’s mouth opened and closed several times, but his eyes showed no life. George tucked the blankets round his body and under his feet.
“I’ll phone the doctor,” he said. “I don’t know what we should give him to drink. There isn’t any brandy anyway.”
“There’s whisky and gin – and some sherry.”
George grinned.
“He might like ice with it. You’d better hang up his clothes in the drying cupboard.”
“I’m not touching his clothes.”
“All right, I’ll do it.”
The drying cupboard was upstairs in the bathroom. As he shook out the man’s clothing, George tried to give Louise the benefit of the doubt. He was sure she hadn’t always been like this, yet when he tried to think of what she was like before he couldn’t remember the actuality. The man’s jacket was a wet, cold lump. He opened it out and shoved his hand down the sleeve, to turn it inside out. Maybe some farm-worker dressed up in his best. Clean enough. His eye was caught by a white patch on the inside of the collar. He pulled the sleeve out and held up the jacket to look at the patch. The white material was soggy and wet and for a moment he couldn’t make out what letters were formed by the red cotton stitches.
He moved over to the light.
He saw then. The stitching made five, run-on letters.
NILES.
Niles?
Niles the –?
He heard footsteps on the stairs. Where was Karen?
“Louise!” he shouted, running to the bathroom door.