Haweswater (30 page)

He bends down and places her boneless arms over her body, gathers her up, lifting with extreme care. Through the woods he carries her, the two joined like an awful and subverted walking pietà. As they reach the cluster of prefabricated houses and huts he sets her down into the grass, careful to gather the flags flying from her body and bring her together as best he can. With difficulty, the dawn is coming, above the forest, inhibited by rain clouds.

The navvy walks to the large building at the end of the row of huts and opens the door. He ghosts through the house, past the milky kitchen, along the living-room corridor to the back of the dwelling, where there is soft breathing, searching until he finds the master bedroom.

Gregory Barber turns in sleep, for a last minute contented, then gradually he senses a presence near by, outside the realm of warm slumber, and he wakes under the heavy stare. His vision struggles with the absence of background light. Pupils spill outwards, pour back in. A figure emerges. At the foot of his bed is a gargoyle, a leering monster. The eyes of the intruder are white in the dimness, luminous. A frame of skull. Throwing off sleep he starts back against the headboard. The mattress creaks under his legs. Vision restores itself after unconsciousness. The ghoul is a man, a sub-human, no, one of the crew, a navvy, he can tell by the swell of the shadow, its stance, the unblinking, lurid eyes. The naked upper body, primitive, its gleaming skin.

At once the foreman is certain of his death, his fears and suspicions confirmed about this strange breed of labourer. Since their arrival at the work site he has never been sure of their capabilities, the scope of their dark souls. Now the diffuse foreboding becomes an accurate arrowhead of criminal motive. It hits him it the middle gut and his spleen haemorrhages fear. Beneath the covers he reaches for the body of his wife. She is warm, living. He turns his face to her. Her mouth is open, sucking air, her hair tied in rag-curlers under the headscarf. She will witness his death first then, his body cut open by the navvy, for it will be a deep and unerring murder, or perhaps a precisely timed swinging fist, bludgeoning his head to the beat of that cold internal song which moves them all.

He emits a startled cry in the darkness, his own imagination now governing his panic. And this is what Gregory Barber reduces himself to: pure, inebriated fear. There are no quick thoughts of bribery for life, reason leaves him and instincts of survival ebb away. Panic flicks at his temples.

The silent worker at the foot of the bed leans in. He gestures with his thick neck for the man to follow him, a jerk over one shoulder, and he disappears, white eyes suddenly leaving space. Gregory Barber is delirious with relief. His
bowels spasm as if he needs to void himself urgently. He collects a dressing gown and slippers, careful not to wake his wife as he leaves the room, shaking.

Outside the house, Barber can see the back of the silent man moving away, down the path in front of the row of huts. He catches up with him, careful to hang back a little. In the premature light he can see blood on the bare foot lifting in front of him. Under the man’s arms, on his naked flanks, dark smears are also visible. Murder might not then be out of the question. He says nothing, marginal fear returning, but continues after the navvy. At the patch of grass at the end of the village the man leading stops and moves aside. An animal carcass is curled on the ground. The navvy has killed a stray lynx, or a rabid dog. The foreman leans in to make sure the creature is dead. He is about to kick at the underbelly but the shape of a girl emerges.

– Holy mother, no … no … Oh, sweet Jesus.

The foreman clutches at lurid air. He leans away, vomits thickly. He heaves in oxygen, waits until the rising bile subsides. Then, spitting the taste away, composing himself, he searches the ground for the bloody feet and a way to restore manliness, to shrug off his embarrassment. They are gone. Barber looks up and around, but the navvy has disappeared.

Unknown to Gregory Barber, the man had gone back to the dam site, moving steadily through the trees, to gather evidence. He paused at the cabin hut to gather his boots, a shirt, a few belongings, and as silently as he last exited he closed the door on the sleepers. In ten minutes he reached the dam site again. He took his broad handkerchief and spread it on the ground before collecting pieces of sodden dress, a candle, the ruptured detonation device. These he placed on the handkerchief and wrapped the corners up tight, a precise, four-pointed knot to secure her witchcraft leavings. He picked up the girl’s leather
satchel, slung it over his back, under his shirt where it would not be seen. Then the navvy took to the Naddle forest above the concrete byway. Within an hour he had reached the Shap road, and three miles outside the village itself he paused along the quiet wayside.

At a bend in the road was an ancient-looking oak. It had two heavy branches which thrust out from the trunk horizontally before thinning and growing upwards. A three-pronged tree that sat like a buried wooden fork at the bend in the road. The man dug a hole between its earth-receding roots and buried the bundle of objects and the satchel, placing moss over the shifted sods of earth. As if the ground had never been opened or disturbed at all. Then he continued on through the village, an ugly beautiful man whose face had been damaged by years in the sun and whom history had torn through for a few brief moments. In half a day he would be in Langwathby, another two and he would be gone from the county, crossing the border into Scotland, where law and language blur and at some point separate as different smoky elements under the same crown. Nothing remained in the shanty village to suggest that he was ever there, except for a deck of old cards and the impression of his head in the slim pillow of the bunk. His bloody feet that Gregory Barber swore once existed.

Word of the dead girl spread quickly through the village of Burnbanks. The men came out of the huts at five o’clock expecting breakfast from the canteen, the usual routine. But the mechanisms of the village had ground to a halt. The two cooks had deserted, leaving congealing vats of oatmeal, unsteeped tea, and gibbering about murder and curses, encouraged on by each other’s hysteria. The men gathered around the body on the grass. Gregory Barber sat next to the girl, smoking cigarettes, unable to suggest order, unable to leave it to anyone else. The taste of sickness would not leave under the hard cut of tobacco on his tongue. Unwillingly, he had taken charge of the corpse. His eyes skipped to and from her form, constantly pulled back as if he was not able to avoid the terrible sight. Greenish sweat gathered on his brow. His screaming wife had been sent to the infirmary to telephone for the Shap doctor and the Bampton policeman, though there was little hope that either could restore what had been brutally ripped from the girl. It was not known to her then, but Mrs Barber was the first person in the village to use the national emergency number which had come into operation only several weeks before, although, had she been so informed, her screams would not have ceased. The men goggled at the bloody mass, smaller than a human should be, they removed work caps, and searched for a framework of appropriate action, or inaction.

After the initial shock they began to murmur, curious and stepping neatly into the role of gossiping onlookers. Who was she? Who was the dead girl in the grass? What had killed her? Coming round to the babble of voices, Barber stood shakily, began to interrogate the workers. He was met with a wall of
ignorance. Nobody could answer his questions. Soon he became frantic, holding their collars with clenched hands.

– Where is that man? The man who found her. Have you seen him, one of yours? Who is she? Who was fucking her? Who is responsible for her?

A shaken head. Men avoiding Barber’s hysterical touch, his violent eyes. Descriptions of the navvy were useless. Tall, graceful, dark. Eerie blue eyes. Bloody feet like a man who has traversed a battlefield after the slaughter. Barber could not offer them more than a mirror in which they saw themselves. But his only link to the dead girl had slipped out, into the grasping hands of the onlookers, and theories began to multiply, solidify. So at that point the workers began grinding the rumours which would sit in the valley like cats in the grass for years to come, similar, and breeding. She had been killed by a navvy, her partner, who had disappeared, abandoning her to the injuries. Or a rape and murder, random, without personal vendetta, without previous carnal involvement. At the back of the crowd, several men moved off like quiet stags.

A search party returned from the dam site with word of the damage, seemingly a large explosion of some kind. The destruction was extensive, but only on the superficial outer wall and the work area itself. There was no vital structural damage. The massive dam was internally secure. But there was no sighting of the man in question either, the man with the answers, perhaps, to the mystery of her death. Quickly, Barber ran to the site. Nothing but the wreckage and a small patch of blood being lost into the ground gave any indication of a crime. There was no equipment, no clues. He returned to find that the policeman had arrived, and there followed a short, painful dialogue between the men.

– Who is the dead girl in the grass, sir?

– I’m not sure, it’s hard to say. Perhaps one of the farmers’ daughters. No, no. I don’t know.

– You found the body. Has it been moved or otherwise tampered with?

– Yes. No, I didn’t find her. A man carried her here, I think.

– What man?

– I don’t know. He’s … vanished. One of the workers here.

– Vanished, sir?

Barber, fearing arrest, broke into a constant, suspicious sweat. He was conscious that his position was riddled with damning interpretations. The Bampton policeman called for reinforcements from Penrith. By eight o’clock the doctor had arrived. Uselessly pronouncing the young woman dead, he gave an estimated time of death and covered her over with a coarse blanket. Immediately it began to soak against her face and body, as if she was weeping beneath it, weeping so hard that her reddish tears were streaming through the wool. The doctor placed another blanket over her. Still she cried blood. The sight haunted the workers, marched widely through the sub-region of their minds. It was supernatural, they told each other. She was possessed by a spirit, her blood was still living, still being made in her body. It was necromancy, they said, black art. And the rumours became seamed with sorcery. Thunder broke the sky, added to the tension, to the mood of the crowd.

Nobody would go to work that day. It was the first halted work day mid-week since Christmas. They lingered and were lined up for individual interview, four hundred men with nothing to say, no information to give. Barber’s hands were shaking, by now he was poisoned by nicotine. He sat, stood, twitching around the body. He wanted desperately to leave it in the grass, to get far away. He wanted to bring in the dogs to consume the remains, pour petrol over it and flick in a match. Again the police questioned him, this time a chief inspector from the town. Again he sweated and clutched at half-clues left by the navvy, and the bombing of the dam. He was edgy and quick to anger, paranoid in his role as secondary overseer to the tragedy.

– How did it happen?

– An explosion by the dam, I think. I wasn’t there. Fuck’s sake …

– Has it breached?

– No. We’re not flooded, are we? I’m sorry. It’s just distressing. The reservoir isn’t viable yet. All this talk of her bleeding is … well it’s thrown me.

– Do you suspect sabotage? Have any devices been found?

– No. She must have been there … by accident, I suppose. Oh, God. Just a girl. Has her family been found yet? Do you want to move her, only I can’t stand the sight you see. I can’t …

Barber brought prayer-shaped hands to his mouth and swallowed. The chief inspector narrowed eyes at him, turned a page in his notebook.

– And the man you say brought her here, can you give a description of him? Would he have wanted to sabotage the building? Has he a grudge? Was there some kind of political agenda here? Are any of the men union members?

Barber shrugged. The contusions in the sky finally issued water. Rain pattered over the dirt and the grass, pinged off the drains on the hut roofs. The workers were herded into the canteen and worship room to continue being interviewed. Gingerly, the body was carried inside and laid out under the stained blankets. Gregory Barber remained out in the dampness, his cigarette spotted with drips of water, the orange tip singeing in the rain.

Samuel Lightburn had been awake since early that morning, since the first rumbles of thunder along Helton Fell as the weather moved over from Ullswater, east across the region. He had been working since six. Three of his sheep were missing, a ewe and two of her lambs, they were not fully hefted yet, he was trying to introduce them to the scar, but for now they could not be relied on for faithfulness to a piece of moorland. This was only the third night they had been left out on the fell instead of brought back down to the farm sheds. He had
taken his cart and driven down to the Bampton commons, where livestock usually wandered off to, in search of the animals with his dog. He stopped the cart intermittently and whistled for Chase to run up and check sections of the lower moors. At the stone weir over the stream she began barking excitedly, and Samuel followed her ruckus. By now it was raining. A blue, surrounding rain that seemed as if it would go on and on without stopping. A pure Westmorland rain, which would stop, effortlessly, gently, as if it had intended to all along.

The ewe had drowned in a deep pool next to the concrete structure. It lay afloat against the banks of the weir, tipped on its side. The lambs were nowhere to be seen. There was an iron ladder leading down into the pool. Samuel climbed down it to the water and pulled the bloated creature over to him with a boot. He stepped down further into the cold liquid, up to his thigh, fastened a rope twice around its belly. Then he climbed back out and began to haul it upwards, bracing his feet against the rim of the concrete pool. The sheep was weighted down with water and it took much of his strength to haul it out. Hand over hand he drew it up. When it was positioned at the lip he reached over and yanked the ewe to him. Holding it by the rope, he threw the sodden body on to the back of his cart.

Samuel was driving back along the rutted moor path when he noticed company on the rough grass. A group of men was walking towards him up the fell. He had never seen them before, except for one man. With them was Ian Marshall, another farmer from the Bampton village. As they drew close to the cart, Ian held up his hand and Samuel pulled back on the reins to stop the horse. The man approached him.

– Bin an accident, Sam. A bad un.

– Oh, aye.

– Up at dam. Fellas want yer t’ go identify body, Sam, in ces’ it’s a local lassie. Me an’ all. They say summet about an explosion at the works.

– Git up then, lads.

The four men climbed into the cart, Ian at the front, and Samuel flicked the reins. Chase ran alongside the cart and leapt up into the back. All five men remained quiet for a time, braced against the rain, but Samuel’s stomach was burning. He was suddenly thinking of his family. Of his wife, with her tightly bound core, her uncompromising love, and of Isaac, with his briny skin that always looked damp, and his sudden maturity. He was thinking of his sick and grieving daughter, sleepless in her bed, or sleeping by the river. How her collarbones had deep shadows, and in them hung the carcasses of animals in the savannah. He was thinking how much her hair had grown back since the winter of Jack Liggett’s death, and that he would buy her some lily soap from Penrith the next visit he made to town. Just as he used to. And her hair would smell of it when he bent and kissed her.

– Lassie, y’say, eh? Owt else, Ian? Owt else known of her?

– Not a drop Sam. Not a drop.

When they reached the Burnbanks settlement Samuel stopped the cart next to the crowd of men and jumped down. The rain was letting up again and the workers, with nothing to do, had emerged from the shelter inside. The site of the dam was still under inspection and work could not resume anyway, but the labourers had been asked not to leave Burnbanks village. Not until some kind of accident report had been pieced together.

Chase wove a path through the legs of the workers standing outside the infirmary doors, as if following a secret scent trail. She began to whine. Samuel and Ian Marshall followed and the crowd parted to let them pass. Multiple pairs of eyes slithered over the two men but the farmers did not meet any one gaze. Their faces were the single masks which contained many expressions at once, weathered one over the other,
unreadable. As was common of men throughout the region. The doors swung closed as the men passed through. The crowd waited silently outside, eager for any indication that the body might be recognized, and given a name. That the girl who cried blood would be identified, and, with her, her family.

Inside, Samuel moved to the covered form. He moved without hesitation, knowing that he had little choice. He bent and pulled off the blankets and witnessed the body, emotionless, as he had been with the dead sheep not two hours previously. A ruined girl lay beneath. She had fronds of green grass caught on her red skin, from lying on the field outside. Ian Marshall hung back, waiting for a nod, or a shaken head. Neither came. Nothing came.

Then Samuel bent and wrapped the blanket around the girl. He lifted the pelt of his dead daughter into his arms and he walked out through the doors of the infirmary with her, his face an expressionless, expression-filled mask as he passed through the swarming assembly of men. Under his feet trickling rivers of water ran, altering direction around simple stones and around the heels of his boots. Samuel walked like a man towards certain death, when nothing can be achieved except that final trip to the firing-squad wall, to the gallows, to the gates. At his cart he set down the body, next to the drowned, sodden sheep. Still enough free blood in her body to mark the wooden surface. And the river water and the blood mixed.