The Man on the Ridge

There is a stone sheepfold in the northeast corner of the orchard at Harrow Reach, and above it, on the ridge itself, in the broken country where the firebreak meets the boundary fence, there is a hut. It is a thing of the old coast: four walls of stacked stone, a slate roof, a door, and a single window with no glass in it, built by a shepherd in the 1870s and used by nobody since the fire of 1949 burnt the east slope and took the sheep with it.

I knew it was there because Cole had pointed it out on the first afternoon. On Friday afternoon, with Cole asleep at last and the house quiet, I broke the one rule I had given him and went up the ridge alone to look at ground I had only ever seen in fog, and I saw smoke.

I do not mean that I saw a fire. I saw, from two hundred yards below it, a single grey thread rising off the roof of the hut into a grey sky, gone in ten feet, of the kind that comes off a small wood fire that has been banked for the afternoon. I lay down in the wet fern and watched the hut for twenty minutes, and in that twenty minutes a man came out of the door and stood in the open for a moment, and I saw him against the sky at the top of the ridge with his collar up and his hands in his pockets and his head turned east toward the Drumble, and then he turned and went back in and shut the door.

He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, and he walked like a man carrying no weight at all, and I want to record that I came the rest of the way up that ridge in a state of considerable anger, because there is only one big man on God's earth who tells me to write letters by hand and then stands on a ridge in the fog looking at a bog.

The hut was empty when I got to it, and it was empty in the particular way that a place is empty when the person has just gone out and intends to come back. There was a bed of pine cut in the corner with a canvas bivvy bag and a new sleeping mat on it, and a stove, and food, and a lamp. And on the sill, under a pair of binoculars, where they would be found by anybody who came to the window, a notebook and a pen.

I opened the notebook. On the first page, in handwriting I know as well as my own, were two lines:

'Simon. You are standing in my sitting room and you have probably eaten my biscuits. I have gone down to the shore road; I shall be back by five. Please stay and do not touch anything. If you hear the sound, do not go toward it. R.V.'

I sat down on the crate in the hut of a man who had told me to go north alone so that he could hear the truth of what I saw, and I understood, all at once and with a clarity that made me laugh out loud in that cold little room, that Ronan Varley had been on this coast since Tuesday night.

I waited until half past five. I heard the sound twice while I waited, both times from the south and east, both times at a distance; the second time it was nearer, and it stopped as it always stopped, in the middle, as if a hand had been laid over a mouth.

When Varley came up the ridge he came in the dark with a lamp held low, and he came through the door of the hut and set the lamp on the sill and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and looked at me with an expression of enormous approval and profound annoyance, and he said:

"You walked up a ridge in the fog because you saw smoke, with no lamp, on a coast where somebody has been moving a dog around by night for a fortnight, and you brought no message to me and told nobody where you were going. Sit down. You have been a fool all afternoon and it has been useful to me, and I am going to tell you exactly why, and then you are going to tell me everything you have learned since Wednesday, and between the two of us we are going to work out which of these people wants that young man dead, because I will say this for the county of Mercy: they have given me four suspects and every one of them is a liar."