Reginald Hill - The Long Kill

She smiled at him, her face suddenly alive with humour and mischief, and then she was gone.

That night before dinner Jaysmith studied the Cumbrian telephone directory in the bar. There were only two Lion and Lambs listed. One was in Gosforth which a glance at his map told him was about fifteen miles to the west as the crow flew but a long drive along high, narrow winding roads as the car went. The other was in Wigton, thirty odd miles north and almost at Carlisle. Neither was what he would call local.

‘Can I help?’ enquired Parker who’d been observing his search from the bar.

‘It’s nothing really,’ said Jaysmith. ‘I just made a casual arrangement to meet a friend in a pub locally and I can’t remember its name. I thought it was the Lion and the Lamb, but I see there’s nothing nearer than Gosforth.’

‘I don’t know a pub of that name round here,’ said Parker. ‘What about you, dear?’

His wife had just come into the bar to get some drinks. She shook her head when the problem was explained and said, ‘No, there’s only one Lion and Lamb round here that I know of.’

After she’d gone, Jaysmith said casually, ‘What did she mean?’

Parker gave him the same look of surprise he’d shown at his ignorance of Wainwright.

‘Up there, of course,’ he said.

He pointed at the window. Evening was well advanced but there was still light enough in the sky to provide a foil for the massive outlines of the nearer fells. One in particular seemed to loom over the hotel.

‘Helm Crag,’ said Parker. ‘Home of Grasmere’s tutelary deities.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry, my mind was too much on pubs,’ smiled Jaysmith, not having the faintest idea what was being said to him.

Later in his bedroom he made sense of it by looking up Helm Crag in his newly purchased guide book. He found it described as possibly the best-known hill in the country because of the rock formation on the summit whose silhouette was said to resemble a lion couchant and a lamb. The Lion and the Lamb!

He cursed himself mildly. Such ignorance displayed a week ago when he was still planning the kill would have been a real error of security. It would have been too large a task for the police to interrogate every hotelier and guest house proprietor in the Lakes, but there would certainly have been media exhortations for them to report any oddities in their recent guests. Parker was just the man to volunteer his services.

But now it didn’t matter. He enjoyed the feeling of perfect relaxation once more. It didn’t matter!

Except, of course, for the fact that Annie Wilson might have been testing him.

He examined the proposition and quickly dismissed it. As a test it was pointless. He must have been the only person within fifty miles who didn’t know what the Lion and the Lamb was. Such ignorance was scarcely credible and all too easily remediable.

So, no test. Just an invitation to a picnic.

He switched off the light and his thoughts simultaneously. It was a trick of mental discipline he had developed over twenty years. Usually he could fall to sleep within a minute. Tonight for some reason it took just a little longer but the sleep when it came was as dark and undisturbed as ever.

The ascent of Helm Crag was a delight; not much over a thousand feet but full of interest and beauties. He had set off in plenty of time and it was not much after noon when he reached the summit.

He removed his rucksack and laid it on the ground at the foot of the group of rocks which he presumed gave the fell its nickname. But that was not the only interesting formation; the whole of the summit ridge was strewn with shattered slabs and broken boulders among which he wandered for a while, musing on that sense of peace underpinned with menace which mountains always gave him.

When he returned to his rucksack, it was gone.

‘Over here,’ called Annie Wilson.

He looked around. She was sitting in a well-sheltered declivity looking westward. His rucksack lay at her feet with hers.

‘You move fast,’ she said approvingly. ‘I was barely five minutes behind you when you started climbing, but you must have gained ten on the way up.’

‘I never saw you,’ he said frowning.

‘Move like the old brown fox, that’s me,’ she said.

He sat down beside her. The old brown fox; he recalled his first sense, quickly modified, of a certain foxiness in her features; still, the description fitted well enough, except for the old. Dressed today in a heather-mixture shirt and dark green slacks which clung a little closer than walking trousers really ought to, she reclined among the rocks like a creature of them rather than a visitor to them. Her long black hair hung free today and there were some small green lichens in it picked up from the boulder behind her. The brown eyes in that narrow intelligent face had instantly registered his appraisal so he made no real attempt to conceal it.

‘Will I do?’ she asked.

‘You fit the occasion perfectly,’ he said. ‘And me?’

She looked him up and down, her eyes lingering on his well-worn but beautifully maintained boots. Custom-made many years ago, they were a perfect fit, light and supple, with great reserves of strength, and with the lace lugs, like the lace tags themselves and all metal parts on all of his equipment, veneered a non-reflective brown.

‘You don’t stint yourself do you?’ she said touching the leather.

‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing best,’ he said lightly. ‘I’ve brought tongue sandwiches and a piece of salmon quiche. What about you?’

‘Apple, cheese, and a bramble pie,’ she said.

‘We complement each other perfectly. Do you mind drinking Chablis out of a cardboard cup?’

‘As long as it doesn’t come out of a cardboard box first,’ she said.

They began to eat. Conversation flowed easily, but shallowly too. She refused to let him penetrate far into her personal life, and as he was by need as well as nature reticent about his own background, he could hardly suggest a fair exchange.

‘When shall you move into Rigg Cottage?’ she asked.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

On what happens between me and you, he thought but did not say. It was not that he was afraid to say it; simply that he was not yet ready. Her response might be indignation, but he did not think so. If it were, it would be on her aunt’s behalf, not her own. More baffling would be the simple question, ‘What do you want to happen between us?’

The truth was, he didn’t know. He was attracted to her, but this might simply be a symptom of reaction to his decision to retire. He felt relaxed, able to enjoy himself, and the first attractive woman to come along was ipso facto in the right place at the right time. He was surely too old for love at first sight. He had even begun to think he was getting a little too old for lust at first sight. Indeed, this did not feel like mere lust, though desire was moving languorously through his veins as she brushed pastry crumbs from her swelling shirt and stretched her long slim legs.

‘On business,’ he said vaguely.

‘What precisely is your business, Mr Hutton?’ she asked rather sharply, as if provoked by his vagueness.

‘To tell the truth it’s almost non-existent,’ he said. ‘I ran a little management consultancy firm, almost a one-man show, but the recession’s been too much. I’ve sold out to a competitor while there’s still something to sell out. So now, like thousands of my fellow citizens, I’m drifting into early retirement. Just a few loose ends to tie up, that’s all.’

‘None of these loose ends could affect your purchase of Rigg Cottage?’ she asked, suddenly alert.