The Travelling Man (32 page)

Kit Dailey’s swarthy face was transfixed with an evil excitement. Annie watched him tear down the curtain at the bottom of the stairs, clawing at it until the worn material tore into hanging strips. In that moment she realised that they were enjoying themselves; that they were also half-crazed with drink.

She stopped struggling, closing her eyes to shut out the
dreadful
sight of a grown man and woman destroying for destruction’s sake. But she couldn’t shut out the sound of crashing crockery, of bentwood chairs that had lasted for two or more generations being dashed against a wall till they splintered into kindling sticks.

Soon their feet pounded on the bare wooden stairs as they climbed to the bedrooms. She heard them shouting and swearing; at one time she thought the ceiling would give, and wondered bleakly if she would ever come out of this alive. She wished she could pray, but found there were no words. The gag was choking her and the animal sounds coming from her throat were surely not being made by her? She felt sick and had a growing feeling of bowel discomfort. Her head slumped forward as she anticipated the moment when they came downstairs empty-handed.

Suddenly, Kit Dailey was standing in front of her, holding a section of wooden floorboard in his hand.

‘Clancy!’ He stabbed it into her chest. ‘The money’s gone! We found the hiding-place but the money isn’t there!’ He jerked the piece of wood up with such force that a rusty nail caught her cheekbone, tearing it down its full length. Beside himself with rage, he wrenched the gag from her mouth. ‘So where is it? Them floorboards have been tampered with not all that long ago.’ He raised the wood again, glanced round wildly, and sent the sewing-machine crashing from the table. His face was so contorted with fury that his features seemed to blur one into the other. ‘Where is it, Clancy?’

‘I don’t know!’ Shameful tears flooded Annie’s breast, her throat; it was a pain swelling into more tears, but she blinked them back. ‘I don’t even know if there was any money. Why should Adam tell
me
?’

‘Because you was his fancy woman!’

Johnson came from behind Kit Dailey, stepping suddenly into the pool of light from the lamp. ‘She’s telling the truth, Kit. Her sort’s not capable of lying.’ Her pale face now had a mottled look about it. The worst of her
anger
being spent, she looked ill and pinched, and very plain. She seemed to shrink where she stood, sinking down into the folds of the voluminous coat. ‘The silly old fool most likely buried it. Out on the fells. So now it’s gone for ever.’

Slowly Kit lowered the piece of wood, then tossed it on to the fire. ‘So what do we do now? An’ what do we do with her?’

Johnson’s eyes were slits of venom. ‘We can stop here till morning. Nobody up at the house knows where we’ve gone. An’ she can stop here too.’ She handed over the gag. ‘Just make sure she spends a quiet night.’

‘No!’ Annie twisted her head from side to side. ‘I can’t breathe properly with that thing on me. Please … please!’

As he tied the sodden strip of stuff, knotting it three times, Kit got no satisfaction from Annie’s stifled cry of pain. The euphoria of the past hour had drained from him; he felt weak, tired to the point of exhaustion. He saw the way the cloth was flecked with blood; he averted his eyes from the deep scratch down her cheek. Annie looked so ill, so beat, it came to him that of all the bad things he had done in his life, this was surely the worst.

‘We can’t leave her here like this. Not all night. She’s gasping for breath now. Suppose she pegs out?’

Johnson could hardly bear to look at him. She’d suspected for a long time that he was all wind and shout and not much else. Picking up the lamp she gave him a push, almost sending him sprawling.

‘Stop acting like a big soft lad. She’ll still be here when we come down in the morning. Just make sure her legs are tied tight enough to the chair rungs, and stop taking your time about it. You’ve had a bit of a soft spot for her since that first day.’ She walked to the foot of the stairs, holding the lamp high. ‘You’re only in on this with me because she wouldn’t look at you!’

She led the way up the narrow stairway. What was she
to
do with Kit Dailey without the money to make up for his lack of spirit? He had sworn it was in the cottage, said that the gardener had dropped many a hint about having a tidy sum put by.

She banged her way angrily into the front bedroom, lay on top of the bed without removing her coat, and motioned for Kit to lie down beside her. The opportunity to make love was here, the privacy they had once thought they craved, but now the inclination, the lust she had once felt for him had gone.

‘What are we to do without the money?’ There were tears of anger in her voice, anger and frustration. ‘There’s no saying we’ll get taken on, not without references.’

‘Something’ll turn up,’ Kit said, without hope. He sat up, straining his eyes into the darkness. ‘Suppose she dies? Suppose they come to look for her and find her dead? There’s nobody going to come looking for us as it is, but if there’s a corpse sitting in that chair they’ll put two and two together and know it was us. Then there’ll be nowhere for us to hide.’ He swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘I’m going down to check I’ve not half throttled her.’

‘So she can get free to run screaming for help?’

Kit felt his shoulder gripped as if in a vice, and when he tried to twist away she reached up for his hair with both hands, tugging and pulling till he thought his eyes would pop out with the agony of it.

‘You go down those stairs and I’ll kill you!’ she hissed, her face not an inch away from his own. ‘Then I’ll kill her.’ Her hands were on his throat now. He could feel the agonising pressure of her thumbs on his windpipe. His eyes strained and bulged from their sockets.

It was ludicrous, it was unbelievable. To be pinned down on a bed by a woman, even if she did have the strength of a man. He tried to prise her hands away from his throat only to feel the relentless pressure increase …

Annie heard them shouting and fighting up there in Adam’s room. For a long time Johnson’s voice was dominant.

Suddenly the house was quiet. The glow from the dying fire lingered on the upturned chairs, the spilled drawers, the shattered ornaments. The sewing-machine on its end, its bobbin of white cotton still in position.

The inside of her mouth felt raw where the gag cut into it. As she twisted her hands in a vain endeavour to free herself, the thick twine seared into her wrists sending waves of pain up her arms. She could see the blood from her grazed ankles staining her stockings. Soon the fire would go out, and in her thin working skirt and blouse she was already achingly cold. The afternoon sunshine had given way to rain; she could hear it splattering half-heartedly against the window. There was a sighing in the trees and when the last glimmer from the coals finally faded she would be in darkness, with a long night stretching ahead in blackness as thick and heavy as Laurie Yates had once told her it was down the pit.

Ember by flickering ember Annie watched the fire die, until all that was left was a tiny pinprick of a glow in the very heart of the grate. With the total darkness came the cold, seeping from cracks in the stone floor, whispering in from the gap at the bottom of the back door. It curled up round her numbed ankles; it turned her into stone.

Her eyes were wide, staring at nothing. The pressing dark was all around her. There could be anything out there in it, anyone, and she would never know until she felt their touch. She moved her head, then wished she hadn’t as the gag tightened, thrusting her tongue back until she retched and heaved deep down in her throat. A sob burst from her, then another. The hard pain in her chest dissolved into tears. They ran down her cheeks, she tasted the sad saltiness of them as they trickled into her tortured mouth. She struggled yet again to free her hands, straining and twisting until
she
felt the warm stickiness of blood running down her fingers.

How much longer would they leave her like this? Was it God’s way of punishing her for sending Adam to his death? Annie rocked her body to and fro, certain in her heart that the two upstairs had nothing in common with God. The devil then? She shivered. The maid Johnson was evil, she was sure of that. Johnson was capable of walking away when it came light and leaving her there.

How long would it be before they searched for her? Dear God, it could be days …

Seth woke up with a start, with the feeling he had heard some kind of noise from downstairs. Yet out on the landing he hesitated. If Biddy had got up from her bed, she would have taken a candle down with her and he’d be able to see the light shining beneath the kitchen door. He leaned over the banisters staring down into an inky blackness. Not a sliver of grey light seeped in from the tall landing window. It was all total darkness.

Feeling foolish he went back to bed, but not to sleep. He could hear the rain falling steadily and he knew that unless it stopped soon the stream would flood yet again. He could almost see the sloping stone floor of his surgery inches deep in water, the daffodils bent over, their heads trailing in a sea of mud. The picture in his mind was so vivid he could imagine the willow tree once again surrounded by a swirling torrent. He decided to go out at first light to make sure the new-born calves in Reynolds’s farm were dry and safe and not up to their hocks in flood water.

An hour later he gave up trying to sleep and, pulling on his long woollen dressing-gown, went downstairs and into his den where the banked-up fire needed only a touch of the poker to burst into flame.

He tried to read but found he lacked concentration. He reached for his pipe, but not even the comforting rigmarole of lighting it gave him ease. He cursed his
restlessness
, cursed the rain, wondered at the vague anxiety eating away at him. He went back to bed, to dream that he saw a woman’s bloated body in the flood water, her full skirts caught by a hanging branch. Though her long hair was black-wet he knew that when it was dry it would be a glorious red-tinged gold.

The rain was keeping Edith Morris from her fought-for sleep. So she went downstairs and coaxed the fire into life with the pile of sticks drying in the side-oven.

The guttering along the roof was blocked again. She could hear the rain gushing down in a steady stream by the front window. It was almost two years since that same length of guttering had been cleared out, and even then the man next door had said it needed replacing. It would have to be done again, but not by the man next door. Now he spent his days crouched over the fire coughing what was left of his lungs away, a victim of the disease that came to so many miners.

Mick Malone would have the guttering cleared out in a jiffy. Edith warmed her hands round a mug of tea. Maybe he wouldn’t charge her anything, as a gesture to their friendship, in token of their friendship. But she couldn’t ask him, even though she’d have no trouble in finding him. It was said he was down there in the Ram’s Head every single night till chucking-out time. It was said he was hardly ever sober.

Before she went back to bed she brought down and refilled her stone hot-water bottle, wrapping it carefully in one of her mother’s old bed-jackets to protect her feet. When she slept at last she dreamed that Annie Clancy came back to the street. Dead in her coffin, strapped on to a cart. With her father and his terrible wife walking behind to the cemetery, arm in arm, swaying and laughing together, as they did every Friday night on their way to drink themselves sodden, with money that should be spent on food.

Hours later the weeping inside Annie stopped. Worn out, cold and cramped into a blessed state of semi-consciousness, her head fell forward, staying there for a short while until the agonizing pull of the gag jerked her cruelly awake for another few tortured minutes.

‘We’ve got to untie her. She looks half dead to me.’

‘What? And have her going straight to the house and setting them on after us! His lordship would hunt us down as if we were foxes.’ Johnson snorted her disgust. ‘Then we’d be up before the magistrates and clapped into prison for God knows how long. A fine start to a new life that would be!’

Kit Dailey’s head throbbed like a tom-tom drum. By all that was holy she was a hard nut. He stared at her. In the cold morning light with her hair coming down, her face bloated with drink, he was beginning to wonder how he had ever desired her or ached in his bones to touch her.

Annie was a small slumped figure in the chair. The ashen pallor of her face was scaring him witless. When her eyes did open briefly they stared at him with a mute pleading. Reminding him suddenly of a puppy he’d had in County Down when he was a boy. Its paw had been caught in a snare. It had looked at him in just the same way.

‘She won’t be missed till this afternoon when she doesn’t turn up for work at the house. She’ll have been tied up for nigh on twenty-four hours.’ He caught Johnson by the elbow as she moved to walk past him and swung her round to face him. ‘Suppose she dies like I said? There’d be no place for us to hide then.’

With a careless shrug of her shoulders Johnson walked to the door and, as Kit fell reluctantly in step beside her, her mouth twisted into a sneer.

They walked for over a mile, keeping to the field paths. The overnight rain had left the ground bogged down with mud, but the floods had receded a little. The
fences
down by the river had been broken by the passing weight of logs and branches. The sun was already rising high in an almost cloudless sky and when they began to climb up the Nab’s steep slope a lone sheep appeared from behind a stone wall, bleating anxiously.

Suddenly Kit dropped the sack he was carrying over his shoulder and whirled round to face back down the hill.

‘Today’s the Mayday feasting! Oh, dear God! Annie Clancy won’t be working today. She won’t be missed. Not today! They’ll be run off their feet with us gone, too busy to miss her.’ He yelled at the top of his voice. ‘Are you listening to me, you hard-faced devil? She could sit in that chair for another day and another night! And beyond that mebbe. I’m going back!’