Reginald Hill - The Stranger House

“You agree with me then?”

“Yes. Now I understand why Sam’s apparition held out the stones to me. It was a message I couldn’t understand, one that I would never have understood without you. That’s why we were both brought here.”

Bloody typical! she thought. It wasn’t her immaculate reasoning that got him agreeing with her but the way it fitted in with his mumbo-jumbo!

She felt a huge exasperation welling up inside her, but recognizing it as that kind of exasperation compounded with affection which she had previously only felt when provoked by her ma or pa or, bless her memory, Gramma Ada, she battened it down. This wasn’t the time or place for a falling-out, especially on a side issue.

The main point was she’d reasoned herself into making a good case that her namesake, Sam Flood the curate, had been murdered, and the man she now knew to be her great-grandfather was the killer. Eu-bloody-reka!

“So what do we do now?” said Mig.

She liked the we. Exasperating he might be, but at least he wasn’t ducking out.

She said, “I don’t know. There’s no evidence, just logic, and law’s got nothing to do with logic.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked gently.

“I want to go away and forget about all of this stuff,” she heard herself saying. “But I know I can’t. These ideas about Saintly Sam just muddy the water even more. I’d like to set them aside completely till I get things straight with regard to Gerry. In fact, I wish I’d never got into the Sam stuff at all. But now I know what I think, I’ve got to tell Thor and Edie at least. They’ve spent forty years blaming themselves for Sam’s death. They’ve a right to know what we think really happened.”

He put his arms around her and drew her close.

“You know, despite all your efforts to hide it, you’re a good old-fashioned moral… woman,” he murmured.

“Yeah? If you’d said girl I’d have kneed you in the crotch, and how moral would that have been? Let’s get away from this place. It gives me the creeps.”

They turned and made their way back downhill. As they neared the track they saw the pickup approaching from Foulgate, moving at a speed which wasn’t good for its suspension.

“Thor’s in a hurry,” said Sam. “Perhaps he got a dusty welcome.”

She waved her hand, expecting the vehicle to slow down, but if anything it came faster.

It was Mig who spotted it first.

“That’s not Thor driving!” he said. “It’s Gowder!”

Then it was past them in a cloud of dust and swinging round the curve that marked the descent to the Hall.

“Oh shit,” said Sam. “Where’s Thor? What do you think’s happened to him?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Mig. “Come on.”

He set off at a fast jog along the track toward Foulgate.

“Don’t you think we should try to warn them at the Hall that he’s coming?” panted Sam, for the first time finding herself stretched to keep up with him.

“No way to warn them, he’ll be there long before we could get close. No, we need to check that Thor’s all right,” said Mig grimly.

She checked his logic and found, rather to her surprise, that it was totally without flaw. Then Mig’s concern for Winander proved infectious and images of him lying in the farmyard with his head stove in began to fill her mind.

It was with huge relief that she heard Mig cry, “I think I see him!”

She strained her eyes through the gathering gloom of the impending storm and saw way ahead a figure moving toward them. Another couple of seconds confirmed it was Thor and a few moments later they met.

There was no sign of blood, but there were the beginnings of a livid bruise on his right temple and he looked as if he’d been rolling in dust and mud.

“Did you see him?” he yelled.

“Yes. He went past us like a bat out of hell,” said Sam. “What happened?”

“The bastard thumped me!” said Thor. “I met him coming out of his barn. I tried to speak to him and next thing I was flying through the air. Then he got into the pickup, turned it round and took off. He’d have backed it clean over me if I hadn’t rolled out of the way. Come on, we need to get down to the Hall!”

“Why? What do you think he’s likely to do there?” gasped Mig as they set off jogging back along the track.

“God knows,” said Thor. “All I know is when I saw him he was carrying an axe and a jerrycan full of petrol, so I don’t think he’s going for tea!”

Afterward all Sam recalled, not without shame, of running along that seemingly endless track was the pain in her legs and lungs, her shock that she was finding it hard to keep up with a sexagenarian and an invalid, and her determination that she wasn’t going to be beaten.

The shame derived from her later realization that what motivated the two men to break their pain barriers was unselfish concern for the inmates of the Hall. Perhaps, she tried to explain to Mig, it was a gender thing. She, being a woman, found it impossible to imagine the worst Laal Gowder might do. They, being men and thus tarred with the same brush, had no delusions.

Even to herself it did not sound a reasonable argument.

But they all shared an equal relief when at last the twisted chimneys of Illthwaite Hall came into sight.

A few moments later, as they reached the viewpoint where Mig had paused the previous day, Thor stopped. The others, taking their lead from him, came to a halt too and peered down the fellside toward the house.

The pickup was parked close against the wall, its driver’s door wide open. Up the slope opposite the kitchen window they could see Laal Gowder. He was standing alongside the great carved trunk that had killed his brother, swinging a longhandled axe with practiced ease and driving its head into the fatal wood.

Into Sam’s mind came words from the Reverend Peter K.’s Guide:

Experienced woodmen found their axe-edges blunted. Finally Barnaby Winander, the village blacksmith and a man of prodigious strength, swung at the cross with an axe so heavy none but he could raise it. A contemporary account tells us that the razor-sharp edge rang against the stump with “a note like a passing-bell,” the shaft shattered, and the axe-head flew off…

No such problem, diabolic or human, here. No bell-like sound either. Just a solid crunch! as the blade drove deep into the bole sending woodchips flying off to left and right.

“He’s decapitating it,” said Thor. “He’s taking the Wolf-Head right off.”

“But why?” asked Mig, which seemed to Sam an odd question for a religious guy to ask when a paid-up atheist like herself had no problem with following the superstitious irrationalities of Gowder’s psyche.

“Because it killed his brother,” said Thor. “I always knew that sodding thing was evil. I should never have listened to Frek. At least Gowder is taking it out on something inanimate… Oh shit!”

A figure had appeared at the kitchen window. Sam couldn’t make it out, but Thor had no doubt who it was, nor of the possible consequences.

“It’s Gerry,” he said. Then he bellowed, “Stay inside, you stupid bugger! Don’t come out!”

Even Thor’s mighty shout could hardly have reached the man in the kitchen. He vanished from the window. Sam looked toward the kitchen doorway, then realized she could only see the top of it because the pickup was parked so close to the wall. The door opened, but the vehicle blocked exit. There might have been space for someone as skinny as she was to crawl out alongside the wheel, but not for a thickset man like Woollass.

There was a cry of triumph, more an animal howl, as one last blow from Gowder’s axe separated the Wolf-Head from the bole. But he wasn’t finished yet.