Master of the Moor Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a basket on the floor by her side.
    ‘Just till he gets used to us.’
    ‘Good Lord, darling,
I
don’t mind.’ Stephen had his bath in the mornings. He washed his hands and face and cleaned his teeth with the water pick he had bought with Dadda’s Christmas money. The time was after eleven and he was tired but he could never sleep without reading for a few minutes at least. Currently he was rereading Tace’s autobiography of which the author had completed only Book One, dying in themidst of describing his thirtieth year. He read for a quarter of an hour and Lyn read, and then Lyn put her book face downwards on the floor by the cat’s basket. Stephen put a leather marker with an engraving of Tower Foin on it in his book and switched out the bedlamp.
    ‘Good night, darling.’
    ‘Good night, Stephen,’ said Lyn. ‘Sleep well.’
    A pathologist called Dr Paul Fleisch described how Marianne Price had died. He used a lot of abstruse terms like ‘cricoid’ but what it amounted to was that she had been strangled. The murderer had done it with his bare hands. Before this evidence Stephen had had to give his. He was the first witness at the inquest. Once he had begun he didn’t feel nervous, he spoke slowly and levelly, and once his part was over he began to enjoy the rest of the proceedings.
    Ian Stringer, sitting with the dead girl’s parents, he recognized at once. At school he had been an ace rugby player and had become a big burly man. The inquest was adjourned and Stringer came up to Stephen outside the court.
    ‘I don’t know if you remember me. Byss Comprehensive. I think I was a year behind you.’
    Stephen nodded and took Stringer’s outstretched hand.
    ‘It’s only — well, I thought I’d ask you — how she looked when — I mean they say some people who die like that, they look sort of, their faces …’
    ‘Good Lord, no, there was nothing like that. She looked as if she was asleep.’
    Stringer didn’t believe him but he was grateful for the kindness. Together they walked along the High Street towards the Market Place where they parted,Stephen for Whalbys’, Stringer to return to Cartwright-Cageby’s where he was a foreman fitter. Dadda was out, doing something to a very ancient, very special ceiling in Jackley Manor with Tudor roses carved on its beams. Stephen worked on the armchairs till lunchtime. After he had had a sandwich in the Market Burger House, he loaded the van with small stuff to be returned and went out delivering. There was an early nineteenth-century firescreen to go back to a house in Trinity Street. Next to Trinity Church where Dadda and Mother had been married was the old people’s home called Sunningdale. Stephen parked the van and delivered the screen. The matron of Sunningdale was an easy-going woman who let visitors come pretty well when they pleased, this entailing no great inconvenience as few did please.
    Helena Naulls was in the day room with the dozen or so other old women and the two old men. In the Three Towns, as elsewhere, the men died and the women lived on and on. A big colour television set was on and one or two were looking at it, at a programme designed for seven-year-olds, but most were just sitting. One woman was knitting, an old man was reading the
Daily Mirror
. Mrs Naulls was among those who just sat.
    Seeing her there, Stephen had to remind himself — for nothing in her bearing hinted at it and no vestige of handsome looks remained — that she had once been the mistress of Alfred Osborn Tace. She was a scrawny flabby woman who had once been stout. Her face had become big and vacant, the eyes sluggishly furtive, the mouth vague. Her hair, snow white and abundant, had been lopped off in a ragged uneven way by the home’s hairdresser. Today — such muddles often happened — she was wearing a cardigan of matted grey wool belonging to a much smaller and slighter inmate, a longbrown skirt, brown stockings that wrinkled round her still-narrow ankles,