Fell of Dark
‘One of Britain’s most consistently excellent crime novelists’ Marcel Berlins, The TimesA friendship renewed; a marriage going sour; Harry Bentick heads for the Lake District not knowing if he’s going in search of something or running away.Then two girls are found murdered in the high fells, and suddenly there’s no doubt about it.He’s running.Set in his native Cumberland, this was Reginald Hill’s very first novel, a unique blend of detective story, psychological thriller and Buchanesque adventure that was to lay the groundwork for many books to come, taking him into the top ranks of British crime fiction.
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REGINALD HILL
FELL OF DARK
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1971
Copyright © Reginald Hill 1971
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007334797
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007389162 Version: 2015-09-16
For my mother
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw.
—G. M. Hopkins
CONTENTS
I possess the Englishman’s usual ambivalent attitude to the police. They are at once protectors and persecutors. They tell you the way, but they make you feel guilty for asking.
I watch, or I used to watch, most of the ‘realistic’ TV series based on police-work with that fascinated revulsion which makes them so compelling. But I had often wondered why innocent people allowed themselves so readily to be manipulated by the police, why invitations to proceed to the station were not more frequently refused.
Now I knew. Or at least I knew in my case. From the moment we had been stopped, a terrible passivity had begun to settle on me. It was a feeling that the quickest and surest way of getting back to normal was to sit very quietly and do as I was requested. It was rather like a child with a visit to the dentist in the offing, sitting as small as possible, hoping to be unnoticed, trying desperately not to obtrude.
There hadn’t been any suggestion that we were doing anything but ‘helping with enquiries’. No question of our guilt or innocence seemed to be involved. I didn’t see how it possibly could be involved. But I didn’t feel innocent. And with Peter it was worse. Sitting pushed up against the car door (locked, I suspected), his unseeing gaze fixed on the rain-spattered window-pane, he didn’t even look innocent. I was much more concerned about him than I was about myself.
At least that was what I liked to think. That was what I had been telling myself for a long time now. It was true! I assured myself fiercely. Of course it was true!
If I looked back into the past, I would be able to prove quite convincingly that what had brought me to this police car, boring steadily through the rain up into the Lakeland fells, was a combination of my own altruism and the accidents of fate.
Convincingly to anyone other than Janet, my wife, perhaps. And perhaps the police.
And myself, perhaps.
Janet disliked Peter from the start. As his interests were in quite other directions, he never really expressed any opinion of her.
I met them both at about the same time, early during my three years at Oxford. Peter attracted my attention instantly. He was charming, witty, entirely unselfconscious, impulsive in his actions, generous in his attitudes. At least he seemed so to some of us. The sight of his slightly-overlong, over-thin figure, hands and arms waving in a graceful semaphore, was enough to make us smile with pleasure.
But to others he seemed like ‘a third rate actor cocking-up the role of Shelley’. I forget whether the words were Janet’s, but the attitude certainly was.
My relationship with Janet took much longer to develop. At first she seemed merely a pleasant enough girl, rather vain, capable of being amusingly bitchy about most of her fellows; a not uncommon type in university life. It was a chance meeting during my first summer vacation that started our relationship. It took place, by one of life’s little ironies, in the town towards which the police-car was now bearing my reluctant body, Keswick.
I had known vaguely that Jan was a Cumbrian. She had often made us all scream with laughter as she enacted in an almost incomprehensibly broad dialect ‘typical’ scenes of rural life, involving incest, witch-burning, or the pursuit of sheep.
