The Body in the Beck Read online

  BODY IN THE BECK

  Joanna Cannan

  © Joanna Cannan 1952

  Joanna Cannan has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1952 by Gollancz.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Dorothea

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – Compleat Mountaineer

  Chapter Two – A Queer Lot

  Chapter Three – Via Dolorosa

  Chapter Four – Down Dale

  Chapter Five – Civilization

  Chapter Six – Bird’s-Eye View

  Chapter Seven – He’s Skipped It

  Chapter Eight – Something Hit Me

  Chapter Nine – The Hills Sleep On

  Chapter One – Compleat Mountaineer

  The Fells drank the sunshine. In all the length of the dale from the larch copse at the head of Berrins Water to the summit of the pass there was no shadow; only where the semicircular cliffs of Berrins Pike rise above the sombre Highbeck valley the gullies striped the sunlit rock with blue. And as the sun soaked into your body so, Francis thought, the silence soaked into your spirit, the silence of the hills that all this long day would be broken only by the sound of the running water of High Beck and Berrins Beck, the voices of young lambs calling to their mothers, and the light, infrequent trickle of sun-loosened stones falling in the gullies of the Pike. Sunshine, silence, solitude . . . ‘gifts that all mankind can use and all refuse’ . . . after the long tiresome Hilary Term with its floods and its ’flu, its disastrous Torpids, the fuss there had been about young What’s-his-name and his boy-friend, the tedious row between the Dean and the Bursar, the bluff he had tried with Harriet and she had called it, it was bliss to be alone, to sweat and feel your face reddening, to hear water and sheep and stones and no human voices soliciting your support for Dean or Bursar, sobbing, ‘Oh, Francis, how can you?’ nattering of sodomy and of being bumped by Cat’s. In an hour on the pass there would be David, but David made no demands on you. He didn’t want you to love him, agree with him, listen to him, decide for him or even, apparently, speak to him. He only wanted, if it happened to suit your plans, to climb with you. From Wasdale Head, where David had stayed on Saturday night, he had rung up the Berrinsdale Hotel on the chance that Francis was there and in the mood to attempt the new traverse of the Angel Rock, which they had planned last year. The Rock, springing from the summit of the pass, standing away like a bad child from its mild parent mountain, faced the north; the climb would be sunless and, according to Francis, whose dislike of the cold was almost a phobia, could only be attempted in perfect weather. David, who worked in an engineering firm at Carismouth on the Lancashire coast, could climb only at the week-ends, and it had been too much to hope that perfect weather would coincide with a week-end during Francis’s vacation. Over the telephone Francis said, ‘And for God’s sake don’t come beetling over the pass in a howling gale because you think it may clear later. I want the rock absolutely dry and the sun so hot that the shade will be pleasant.’

  ‘Okay, Skipper,’ said David, who had been cursed for saying ‘Mr Worthington’ and then for saying ‘Worthington,’ but could not bring himself to say ‘Francis.’

  In Berrinsdale Francis slammed down the receiver. A medievalist, he deplored ‘Okay’; an ex-naval officer, he detested ‘Skipper’. In Wasdale David, smiling as he crossed the hall, littered with ropes and climbing boots, thought: Mr Worthington and his weather . . . anyone who didn’t know him would think him a sissy. Francis was wrong in believing that David made no demands on him: for the conqueror of Chowolunga, David had built a high and splendid pedestal and to step from it would do more harm than Francis could ever do his susceptible but resilient Harriet or that steadfast if nattering body, the Warden Fellows and Scholars of the College of Saint Crispin in the University of Oxford.

  When Gloria, who combined the duties of chambermaid and waitress at the Berrinsdale Hotel, brought a thick white cup of early morning tea to Francis lying in a double bed of iron and brass in the best of the bedrooms, she said, ‘It’s a grand morning, Mr Worthington — just right for your new climb.’ Gloria, the pretty hard-working younger daughter of Highbeck Farm, was engaged to a youth who worked in a garage in Ambleside, but she preferred Francis; Gordon, besides being only a boy, had pale straight hair slicked back with Brylcreem, a spotty forehead, prominent ears, a receding chin and a manner which Gloria described as not knowing if he was coming or going: Francis, in his middle thirties, had finished with spots, if he had ever had them; his black hair curled; his thin brown face was reticent and resolved. Handsome is what handsome does, she knew — it was one of Mum’s sayings — but it had been in the papers how he was the first to climb a great awful snow mountain somewhere near India, and then, during last winter, just by chance she had seen his name in the Radio Times and Dad had said that plenty of people had the same names and it needn’t be her Mr Worthington, but she had listened in, in spite of it being the Third Programme, and not only had she recognized his voice, but the announcer chap had said that he belonged to an Oxford college. His talk had been smashing, telling you how people had gone on long ago before any modern inventions, but Gordon, who had come up to the farm on his motor-bike, as he usually did on her evening off, said that it was daft because Mr Worthington had finished up by saying that, in spite of sickness and dirt and poverty, England in those old days had been Merrie England, which it wasn’t now, because people then had something more important than modern inventions: they had faith. Gordon had asked how faith could make up for being poor and not being able to get about anywhere, and Gloria had replied that a clever man like Mr Worthington knew better than a spotty bit of a boy like Gordon, and they had quarrelled and upset Mum, who was of a practical temperament and anxious to see her girl settled before she went.

  Francis in wine-coloured pyjamas sat up and knowing his Lake District said warily, ‘Really fine, or do you mean that it’s not actually raining?’

  ‘Look for yourself,’ retorted Gloria, pulling back both the serge and the Nottingham lace curtains. ‘The sun’s shining and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. The bath water’s hot too,’ she added. ‘You’ll have a lovely bath if you look sharp and get in there before the gentleman from Reading.’

  So Francis had a hot bath, which was a rarity at the Berrinsdale Hotel, and after a breakfast of ham and eggs he went out to look at the morning. By now the sun was over the serrated ridge of Silver Screes; the ell formed by the white-washed inn and its outbuildings was a sun trap; the dry-stone wall on which Francis was leaning was warm under his hands. On the other side of the wall in a small green meadow a trio of black-faced lambs scuttered around their mothers; at the foot of the meadow through a larch copse, carpeted with primroses, Berrin shone and sang on its wide bed of stones. Francis adored the Berrin, knowing it from its infancy as a little brown trickle in the grasses, seeping from the flat green bogs on the summit of the pass; as a bright small stream splashing among the boulders, gathering water from the cataracts of the Pike and the runnels that drained the green shoulder of Stone Fell; as the torrent that tumbled into the shadowy ghyll, over the rock ledges and then out into the sunshine to its rendezvous with High Beck at the old bridge where the Berrinsdale road ended and a gated cart-track wound on up the Highbeck Valley to the farm. Below the bridge, Berrin, almost a river now, ran broad and shallow, but up in the ghyll there were deep brown pools for bathing; the biggest and the brownest at the bottom of the ghyll was invaded at times by hikers coming down from the pass or youngsters from the Youth Hostel, which had been lately converted from a pair of disused cottages belonging to th
e farm. But higher up in the ghyll there was a smaller, deeper, sunnier pool which Francis regarded as his own, and when, having put on his boots and collected his sandwiches, he found that he had more time than he needed to the top of the pass, he thought that he would spend the twenty minutes to spare in inspecting his pool for a possible dead sheep or tourists’ litter which might spoil a bathe on the way down.

  He crossed the bridge, passed through the iron gate in the last of the stone walls and followed the track which, always ascending, crosses the foot of the Pike; so that Silver Screes, descending into Berrins Water, was soon behind him; on his left the airy buttresses of the Pike ran up to the summit and on his right the ground dropped to the ghyll, then rose towards the shoulder of Stone Fell. Before and above him the pass between the two mountains lay green against the sky’s cerulean blue and every moment he could see a little more of the Angel Rock, dramatic, discordant against the grassy northern slopes of the fell. The pass called to him. Up there he would sit on a rock and reconsider his climb . . . Old Meade had said last night that they’d never cross the buttress . . . perhaps it would be better not to look at that grim black thrust of rock too long. So, after all, he turned from the track and went down over the springing turf strewn with boulders to the ghyll and stood on the rock platform where the cataract spilled over, and looked down into the brown water of the pool. Well, there was no dead sheep, no tins or chocolate paper, but where the pool ran out on either side of a smoothed boulder, there was something even more revolting — it looked like a bundle of old clothes thrown in and caught up against the rock wall and the boulder. Cursing the human race aloud, Francis walked round the rim of the rock basin until he stood directly above the offending object; it still looked like a bundle of old clothes and he had nothing to hoick it out with, but nevertheless he swung himself down the fifteen feet of rock wall and with his boots in the water could reach and gingerly touch the bundle. It floated out from the boulder. It had a face; it had hands, all ash-pale, sodden, wrinkled. A current caught it. It swayed and the ghastly face was hidden again under the overhang of the boulder.

  Francis straightened, swallowed and set his wits to work. There was nothing to be done . . . no use for the artificial respiration he had learned at his prep. school as a reluctant Boy Scout. The chap was dead as mutton . . . look at his skin . . . those lads from B.N.C. who’d got drowned in Sandford lasher . . . bodies didn’t float till they’d been a week in water . . . Damn it, there’d be no bathe. Above this fall there was no pool deep enough . . . Well, all he could do was to report a body in the beck at the inn tonight, and Will Hardwick would ring up the local police and they’d see to it . . . Francis shinned up the rocks and regained the track, hoping he’d never drown and leave his remains to lie about and soak in cold water . . . better to fall off a mountain . . . Grant I may pass with strength undimmed and find the sleep that is more ancient than the hills . . . but considering his luck in the war it looked as if he were predestined to pass peacefully away at eighty in the Acland Home. Old Meade, on the other hand, expected him to fall today off the buttress. ‘No belay, no belay,’ old Meade had muttered, but probably he’d missed that flake of rock which would make the traverse as safe as houses, and, though admittedly the wall of the gully sloped the wrong way, there would be underhand-holds . . . with an adequately long rope the second man needn’t move till the leader was firm on the chockstone . . .

  Pondering the climb, Francis slogged on and, as he gained height, over the skyline the great, the storied mountains rose up to greet him: Scawfell and Scawpike and wintry Great End and his best beloved Great Gable. Now he trod the level boggy grass flecked with the white heads of the bog cotton; on his left ascended the undistinguished shoulder which was the easy way up Berrins Pike; on his right the Angel Rock gloomed dark, forbidding, above its tell-tale screes. And here came David, his coat and rope strapped to his knapsack, his dam’ nuisance of a camera round his neck . . . hold it a moment, Skipper, when you were hanging by the grace of God and one finger. ‘You haven’t brought that dam’ thing again,’ groaned Francis without greeting.

  David, tall and young and handsome with the sun on his yellow hair and the sky behind him a deeper blue than his blue eyes or his blue short-sleeved shirt, opened his shapely mouth, revealing perfect teeth, and in a slight but unmistakable Lancashire accent said, ‘Good morning, Skipper. And it’s a beaut, isn’t it? Yes . . . well . . .’ He pulled his camera over his head and stuffed it into his hip pocket. ‘As it’s a new climb, a few snaps might be of interest.’

  ‘If it was yourself you snapped I shouldn’t mind,’ said Francis, and turned towards the rock.

  David followed him grinning. He thought: the dear old Skipper, he doesn’t change, does he? That first time on the Pillar . . . I could climb, but I came down a climber. Never dreamt there’d be another time though, much less the Alps . . . whatever does he see in me, he who could climb with anyone? They were on the scree now and in the shadow of the rock, and Francis halted, took off his knapsack and pulled out a light nylon rope, his coat, a flask and a thin packet of sandwiches. He put on his coat, pushed the flask and the sandwiches into his pockets and began to unwind the rope. David dumped his knapsack beside Francis’s; he wouldn’t need his coat. He asked, ‘Shall we want my rope, Skipper?’

  ‘No,’ said Francis, who detested what he called contraptions and contrivances — extra ropes, crampons, oxygen. ‘Might as well come back this way,’ he added. ‘I’d thought of a bathe on the way down, but that’s out. Someone’s left his corpse in my pool, damn him.’

  There was a pause while David assimilated this unusual and so casually delivered information. Then, ‘A corpse?’ he cried. ‘Were they fishing it out or something?’

  ‘No one else has found it yet, at least not that I know of,’ said Francis as he tied the rope round his middle. ‘On my way up I went to inspect the pool for litter and there was litter with a vengeance.’ He turned to look at the rock. ‘You know, young David, the west gully is really unworthy of this climb, but I suppose it’s only logical to start there.’

  ‘Didn’t you inform the police?’ asked David.

  ‘We haven’t a telephone kiosk on the pass yet, thank God,’ said Francis. ‘Hardwick can ring the police when we get down tonight. It won’t hurt the poor chap to wait a few hours — it must be a week since he took wing, to judge from his appearance.’

  ‘But, Mr Worthington, the police will think that they should have been informed immediately . . .’

  ‘Oh, damn the police,’ said Francis and set off across the scree and started up the gully.

  Climbing up the first hundred feet, which, as Francis had complained, was only of moderate difficulty, David thought it’s daft . . . he should have gone back and phoned at once, but there you are — that night on Chowolunga when he rescued the Tibetan porter, nothing the Himalayas could put up had stopped him . . . Come to think of it, it sounds a bit phoney. ‘He’ he said . . . ‘grown men don’t fall into becks . . . perhaps he was bathing.’ David and Francis were moving together and David, taking in the rope, caught up with his leader. ‘I say, was the body clothed, Mr Worthington?’

  Francis said, ‘Can’t you say, Francis? And why do you keep harping on that corpse? It’s morbid.’

  ‘I thought perhaps he got drowned when bathing. I mean, men don’t fall into becks. Suppose it was murder?’

  ‘Well, suppose it was?’ said Francis.

  ‘The police would expect to be informed at once,’ said David, but while he spoke Francis, who had been looking up at the great black wall of the gully, moved away from him, and now he was out on the virgin rock and all of a sudden there was nothing in David’s mind but the rock and the rope and the route that in a moment he himself would be taking . . .

  *

  II

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Francis, pulling out his sandwiches.

  ‘It’s a grand climb. How will you class it?’ asked David.

  Francis
said with his mouth full, ‘Severe except for the buttress, which makes it very.’

  ‘I thought I was stuck there,’ said David, breaking a slab of chocolate.

  ‘You were all right,’ said Francis, taking a drink of the light red wine he always carried and holding out his flask to David.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll wait till we get to the beck,’ said David, who didn’t fancy foreign wines since he had seen the grapes trodden in Italy.

  Francis gave his sudden infectious and, to David, often inexplicable laugh. ‘I forgot you’d a thing about it. Stick to the beck, but remember to drink above the pool, young David. The chap there is even less hygienic than the white feet of laughing girls whose sires have marched to Rome. Come on. Let’s get off this damned cold mountain . . .’

  They raced down the grass slope and over the boulder-strewn base of the rock to the scree at the foot of the west gully where they collected their knapsacks and, with a sigh of relief from Francis, moved out into the sunshine. The sun was westering. The Pike threw a shadow now halfway across the peat hags on the pass, but where the Berrinsdale track wound over the slopes below the soaring buttresses, the grass was steeped, it seemed, in the long hours’ flood of gold. To Francis the first step from a summit was always a heartbreak, but that over, he loved the descent; he loved swinging down, the day’s purpose accomplished, mind at peace, tired muscles relaxed, into the homeliness of the darkening dales. But tonight his pleasure was marred by David, who had made a considerable diversion in order to drink at a runnel from the Pike, and now rejoined him to suggest, ‘Shall I take a dekko at the scene of the fatality, Skipper?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Francis indifferently.

  ‘I don’t like,’ protested David; ‘but I thought it might be useful if I could confirm your evidence.’