Chapter 5: Rung Down
At five on Friday morning Gill was at the lathe in the unit with the roller door shut and the radio off, turning a new pin for the hammer lever out of a length of bright mild steel. Fifteen millimetres. A hair over, so it would go into the worn hole in the quadrant with a tap of the mallet and never walk again. The swarf came off it in a long blue curl that she didn't stop to break.
She'd rung DS Ponsford from Martin's drive the night before, and the DS had listened to all of it and said, "A bell sounded different."
"Not different. Wrong. Somebody else had their hands on that rope."
"Then who?"
If somebody else rang the goodnight, Derek didn't. If Derek didn't ring it, he was already lying at the foot of that ladder when it started, at eight minutes past five. Everything since had stood on him being alive at quarter past: Philip's lie, the twenty-five past, the hand on the latch. Knock the goodnight out and Philip had been in the hall with a mug of tea when his father died.
Roy had called it the sweetest he'd ever heard. Ray had called it the best. Of course they had. For fifty years every ringer in Devon had wanted that handstroke on time. The only person alive who'd have missed the lateness was the one who'd been marking it.
So whoever rang it had done it to move the time. They'd been free between Moorcombe coming out and a quarter past. They could ring up a nineteen-hundredweight tenor on their own. And they had pulled her down snatching, on a rope that long, a rope they weren't used to, and the tail end of a heavy bell rung like that goes through your hands like a file. Gill turned her own right hand over under the lathe light and looked at the white ridge across it.
She went through them while the pin turned. Tony Westaway, who could ring that tenor one-handed. Ray, seventy-four, on the hall step with his cigarette. Martin, who couldn't ring her up if you gave him a week and a strapper. Roy, who couldn't either. Philip, in the hall.
And Callum. Callum, on his phone in the hall, by his own account, and who looks twice at a boy on a phone? Callum, whose grandfather had told him he'd never ring in that tower again if he went to Exeter. Callum, on the second, snatching at hand. She'd given him half a fault for it a fortnight ago and written in the margin, Callum, she'll wait for you.
She put the pin down on the bench and didn't pick it up again for a while.
At six she rang the DS.
"Tony Westaway."
"Was in a pub in Moretonhampstead at a quarter past five on the thirteenth," the DS said, as if she'd been sitting up with it, "buying a round for his team on a debit card. The till receipt says seventeen fourteen. His wife thinks he's been off the drink since Easter, which is why he wouldn't tell you. We did ask." A kettle went on somewhere. "Go to bed, Gill."
She drove out to Higher Shilstone at eight with the pin in her pocket. Philip was in the yard. He'd shaved for the first time in a fortnight and cut himself doing it, and had a bit of tissue stuck to his jaw.
She told him standing by the pen, in plain words. That whoever had rung the goodnight on the thirteenth, it wasn't his father. That his father was already gone when it started. That at twenty-five past five, when he'd stood at that door with his hand on the latch, there had been nothing on the other side of it anyone could have done anything about, and hadn't been for twenty minutes.
Philip listened with his eyes on the heifers. When she'd finished he didn't say anything. He went into the pen among them, the big red beasts shifting to let him through, and stood in the middle with his hand flat on the back of one of them.
After a while he came out.
"They gave me his wallet back," he said. "Tuesday. I can't open it."
It was black leather gone brown, the shape of a man's backside worked into it over forty years.
"I can't either," said Gill.
"You can. You do things." He put it in her hand. "After. When it's done. You open it."
Callum was forking silage into the next pen with his sleeves pushed up, bare-handed, because nobody had ever made him wear gloves. Gill went and leant on the barrier beside him.
"Show me your hands, my lover."
"Why?"
"Humour an old woman."
He stuck the fork in and held them out, palms up, puzzled. A ringer's hands, seventeen years old: hard skin at the base of the fingers where the sally sits, a blister healing on the left thumb from the fork. No line. Nothing across the heel. Nothing new.
Gill straightened up off the barrier.
"Is this about Grandad?"
"It's about rope."
"I was in the hall the whole time anyway." He went back to the fork. "Leanne had me buttering. She said I put it on like plaster."
Gill went back to the van and sat in it with the door open.
A big square plaster across the heel of the hand, held so the fist didn't have to close. Caught it on the freezer lid. That thing's a guillotine. At twenty to six, at the urn, with a jug in each hand.
She sat there long enough that Philip came over to ask if the van wouldn't start.
Leanne Squance lived in a bungalow on the Chagford road with a trampoline in the front garden and a sign on the gate about a dog that had died in 2021.
"Callum? Under my feet from five o'clock," Leanne said, on the step. "Eating the jam with a spoon. Ray was out the front with a fag he thinks nobody knows about. The boy was there the whole time, and I wanted to kill him." She heard what she'd said and went red. "Sorry."
"And Mandy."
"Wasn't, was she. Two minutes, she said." Leanne folded her arms. "She'd gone the back way. She always goes the back way, by the church path. You can be in that shop and out again and nobody in the square any the wiser. Eighteen minutes past, she came in. I looked."
Gill rang the DS from the lane, standing in a gateway with a field of barley going silver in the wind.
"The shop alarm. You'll have had the log."
"Unset sixteen fifty-seven. Set seventeen sixteen."
"And between?"
"Nothing between. It's an alarm. It's off or it's on."
"Then she could have been anywhere between." Gill had her free hand on the gate, holding it. "Helen. The stubs are in her writing. She told the meeting Derek wrote the cheques out, and every stub's in her round capitals. The invoice came out of the file in the back of her shop, and Derek couldn't have worked a printer if you'd put a gun to him. She rings the treble, and she snatches at hand, and I've marked her for it for six years. The goodnight was snatched. And at the tea she had a plaster across the heel of her hand that she said was the freezer."
The DS was quiet for long enough that Gill checked the call hadn't gone.
"Did you see under the plaster?"
"No."
"Then I've got a plaster and a word on a fault sheet. Her brief would have you say snatching to a jury forty times till it sounded like a sneeze." The DS blew her nose. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying bring me the hand."
"She's helping me with the muffles tonight. Seven o'clock. For the funeral."
"Then I'll be up at the forge in Roy's spot from half six, and you'll ring me the second you've seen it. And you will not go up any ladder with that woman underneath you. Are you hearing me?"
"She's frightened of ladders."
"So am I," said the DS. "I still went up one."
At seven Gill let herself into St Petrock's with Derek's own key on its brass tag, with Tyler behind her carrying the sack of muffles and complaining about it.
Mandy was in the nave doing the flowers, two great buckets of white stocks and hedge greenery, the smell of them filling the church. She had an apron on and a flask on the pew and her hands in the water, and she looked up and smiled the smile she'd been smiling at the whole village for a fortnight.
"I've done coffee. I'll not come up, mind. I'll call up the order from the ringing room if you want."
"I know the order, my lover."
"I'll call it anyway. Gives me something to do with my mouth." She pushed a stem in. "If I stop doing jobs I'll sit down, and if I sit down I'll not get up."
Tyler had his phone out. "I've not had tea."
"You had three sausage rolls at four."
"That was lunch. To be fair."
"Tyler, love, you'll want feeding." Mandy wiped her hands on her apron and found a tenner in its pocket. "Whiddon Down does chips till nine. Go on. She'll not need you for muffles, will you, Gill? It's only straps."
Tyler looked at Gill. Gill looked at the tenner. Saying no would have been saying something.
"If you're not back by eight," she said, "I'll eat a muffle."
He went, and the church door banged behind him, and Gill took the sack up the thirty-one steps herself.
In the ringing chamber she opened the muffle chest, the one with the iron-bound corner, and took out eight leather muffles stiff with years. The tenor's was the size of a baby's bonnet. She left it in the chest; it wanted new straps, and she'd do those last.
She went up to the clock chamber first and did the pin. The old one came out in her fingers, worn to a waist like an hourglass. The new one went in with three taps of the mallet and sat there bright and dead tight, and she tried it with her thumb and it didn't move. She put the old one in her pocket with Derek's wallet.
"There you are," she said to the lever. "Too late. Well, there we are."
Then on up the second ladder, the bolt slid back, the trap pushed up, and the bell chamber round her in the last of the light, eight dark shapes, mouths down.
Half-muffled means a pad of leather strapped to one side of each clapper, so the handstroke speaks open and the backstroke comes back dull, the bell answering itself from a long way off. Gill had fitted muffles in two hundred towers. She still couldn't hear it without her throat going.
"Treble!" called Mandy, from the ringing chamber, through two floors.
"Treble," said Gill, and lay down on the frame beside her, and reached up into her mouth.
It's a job done by feel. Leather round the clapper ball, the strap passed round the shank and through the buckle and pulled hard, and pulled again, because a muffle that comes adrift at a funeral will knock and slap and everybody will hear. She went round the frame pit by pit, on her knees. Mandy called each bell up through the floors a moment after Gill had started it, which was no use at all.
Second. Third. Fourth, fifth, sixth.
"Seventh!"
"That's the lot but the tenor," Gill called down. "Hers is in the chest. I'll come down for it."
"I'll bring it."
"You'll what?"
"I'll bring it up." There was a creak below that Gill knew in her bones: the ringing-chamber ladder taking weight. "Derek's not here to tell me I can't."
Gill knelt over the trap and looked down. Mandy was coming up the ladder Derek had fallen from, a rung at a time, with her face set and the big muffle held against her chest. She came up into the clock chamber and stood a moment on the boards with her eyes shut. Then she climbed the second ladder, three rungs, four, until her head was just under the trap, and held the muffle up to Gill one-handed, at arm's length, like someone feeding something through the bars of a cage.
Gill had her headtorch on. It lit the muffle and the hand that held it.
Mandy had had her hands in the flower buckets for an hour. The edge of the plaster had lifted and folded back on itself, and under it, across the heel of the palm and over the base of the fingers, ran a stripe of new skin, pink and shining and a finger wide, straight across the hand at a slant. A freezer lid makes a mark. A rope makes a line, because a rope runs.
Gill looked at it for one second longer than she should have, and knew it, and took the muffle.
"Thank you, my lover," she said, in her ordinary voice. "Go on down. Mind that ladder."
Mandy went down. Gill heard her on the rungs, and on the boards of the clock chamber, and then on the first ladder, and then on the boards of the ringing chamber, and then nothing.
She took her phone out. Nothing. She went round the frame to the south louvres, by the tenor's wheel, where the slats let in the last of the light and, some evenings, a bar. One bar. Seen it, she wrote to the DS. Rope burn. Come now. The phone thought about it and said Sending…, and went on saying it. She put it in her shirt pocket still saying it.
Then she sat back on her heels among the jackdaw sticks and thought about going down: two ladders, with Mandy Leaman at the foot of the first, where she'd stood under Derek. She thought she'd stay where she was. The bells were down. The DS was at the forge. Five minutes.
So she went to the tenor, because the tenor was the last job.
She lay on the frame in the tenor's pit and slid her head and shoulders up inside the bell, as she had on the morning of the competition, and the cold of her came round Gill's face and the clapper hung against her cheek. She got the leather round the ball. She passed the strap.
Below her, through the floor, the second ladder creaked again. Somebody coming back up. Three rungs.
Gill was coming out of the bell when the trap came down. It landed on its frame with a bang that went through every board in the room, and then the bolt went, and she knew that bolt; Derek had fitted it in 1990. She crossed the tenor's pit on the beams in four steps and got her hands under the trap and heaved. It lifted a quarter of an inch and stopped on the bolt.
"Mandy!"
Feet on the rungs below, going down. The boards of the clock chamber. The first ladder.
The phone. Gill went back over the tenor's pit to the south louvres and held it against the slats. Sending…
That was where she was, in the tenor's corner, on a ledge a foot wide between the tenor's wheel and the south wall, when the rope moved.
You feel it before you hear it. The wheel beside you turns a few degrees, and the bell turns with it, and the headstock creaks. Somebody below had the tail end and was pulling her off. The tenor swung a little and came back further, and the wheel came round past Gill's knees, and she pressed her back to the slats.
It was the wrong corner. The trap was across the room in the north-west, the far side of the tenor's pit. The seventh hung just beyond the tenor's headstock, and the headstock was going over now with every pull. There was no way across that didn't go through her swing. Gill had spent her life telling learners what nineteen hundredweight does to a person who's in the way.
In her hand the phone said Delivered.
On the third swing the clapper found the side of the bell for the first time. Gill's head had been inside that bell two minutes before, and the blow went through her teeth. Then the next. Then the next, louder, the gaps closing, the wheel going past her chest a hand's width off and further every time. Somebody below was ringing up the tenor of Upcott Petrock, open, at a quarter to eight on a Friday night, the night before Derek Coaker's funeral, and ringing her fast, pulling her down before she'd got to the top of herself. Snatching at hand.
The clock hammer sat on its bracket by Gill's knee. Pulled back off the bell on its wire, pinned, safe. She'd made it safe herself an hour ago, with a pin she'd turned at five that morning.
The wire was shackled to the hammer's tail with a D-shackle. She'd put it there herself in 2017. She knew the size of the pin.
She'd spent thirty-eight years keeping hammers out of wheels.
She got her fingers round the shackle pin and turned it. Stiff with her own paint. She turned it again, the knuckles skinning on the iron, the wheel going past her elbow, the bell above going round now, nearly round, speaking every time, the whole tower shaking with it. The pin came. The wire jumped free, and the hammer, with nothing holding it back, fell off its bracket toward the bell, as it had been wanting to for an hour, and the tenor came round and met it.
There was a crack like a tree going. Then a lot of noise at once, and something off the wheel hit Gill in the left shoulder like a cricket ball: spokes, the iron of the hammer arm, the rope coming off what was left of the wheel and whipping up and down through its hole in the floor. The tenor went over past the balance with nothing to hold her, and came back, and went over again, and then she stopped. She stood on her head, mouth up to the louvres, with the clock hammer jammed through the wreck of her wheel, and didn't move.
Gill's ears had nothing in them but a hum. A long way below, through two floors, there was a sound like somebody sitting down.
Ray Northcott was in the churchyard with his shears, at June's stone, when the tenor went up open on a Friday night. He told Gill afterwards that he'd stood there with his heart going and thought, it's him, he's come back for his goodnight, and that for about four blows he'd been glad. Then he'd heard how she was being rung, and run.
He came up the thirty-one steps at seventy-four in his gardening shoes, with the DS a flight behind him, and found Mandy Leaman sitting on the bench under the peal boards with her hands open in her lap, palms up, as if she were showing them to somebody. They were bleeding. The tenor's rope lay across the floor in loops where it had come down. Ray stepped over it and went up the ladder Derek had fallen from, and the next, and drew the bolt.
"Gill?"
"Here," said Gill, from the corner, who could hear him only as a shape. "Mind the tenor. She's on her head."
Mandy didn't run. There was nowhere in Upcott to run to; she'd have had to go past the shop.
Gill came down and sat on the bench at the other end with her left arm held against her side. Ray stood on the stair. Gill took out her big cotton handkerchief, the one she kept for grease, and laid it across Mandy's hands, and Mandy closed her fingers on it.
The DS came in and said Mandy Leaman's name, and the words that go after it, in an ordinary voice, as if she'd been saying them to herself all day.
"I know," Mandy said. "I want to." She looked at the handkerchief. "You looked at my hand. Up there. You looked at it the way you look at a bell. I've watched you do it since I was five."
Gill didn't say anything.
"He signed whatever I put under his paper." Mandy was looking at the rope on the floor. "Every morning for twenty years he stood at my counter and read the deaths, and if there was something underneath he signed it without looking. That's how much he thought of me. I could have had the farm off him." She closed her hands on the handkerchief. "The shop was going. You don't know what it costs to keep a shop. I was always going to put it back."
She was quiet a moment.
"I came up after the Moorcombe lot. I'd gone out the back and waited in the church till they'd gone." Mandy's voice was very steady. It was her minutes voice. "He was going up that ladder. For the pin, he said. You'd told him to look at it."
Gill had her hand in her pocket on the old pin, the one worn to a waist. She held it hard enough to hurt.
"I said, what are you going to do. I said, Derek, please, what are you going to do. And he looked down at me and he said, you'll find out Monday, Amanda. And he went on up. He was laughing." Mandy shook her head. "He was always going to make me stand there. All my life. Till I'd said it twice."
On the stair, Ray made a sound.
"I only kicked the ladder. I only meant him to come down." She lifted her hands an inch and let them fall. "And then it was so quiet. That was the worst. Every competition since I was a girl there's been a goodnight, and they'd all hear there wasn't one, and they'd come. So I did it. I'd never rung her. He'd never let anybody. I thought, it can't be that different from the treble."
"It is," said Gill.
"It is," Mandy agreed. "It took the skin off." She looked at Gill for the first time. "Bellhangers have accidents. Everybody says so. Derek always said you'd come off a frame one day and nobody would be a bit surprised."
The DS took her down the thirty-one steps with a hand under her elbow.
Tyler came back at five past eight with two bags of chips and found blue lights in the square, and Ray Northcott holding the tower door, and his boss sitting on the bottom step of the spiral with her arm in a sling made out of a ringing shirt.
He looked at the sling, and the blue lights, and her.
"Is it weird if I eat these?"
"Yes."
"Right." He sat down two steps above her and ate them anyway, and after a minute he passed one down, and she took it.
Later, when the other cars had gone, she remembered the wallet.
Derek's driving licence from 1971, a boy with sideburns. An NFU card. A twenty and two fives. And a photograph of Pam on a beach in a headscarf, with something folded behind it, tucked where you'd only find it if you took the photo out. The police had listed the cards and the money on their form. Nobody had unfolded a dead woman on a beach.
It was a receipt from the bank in Exeter. Friday the twelfth of June: a transfer from Coaker D&P, Higher Shilstone, of nineteen thousand pounds, to the Upcott Petrock Bell Restoration Fund.
On the back, in carpenter's pencil, in capitals:
M.L. £100 A MONTH. 16 YRS.
NOBODY TO KNOW.
Gill read it twice. Sixteen years. He'd have been ninety-three.
"What is it?" said the DS, from the porch.
"It's Monday," said Gill, and gave it her.
They buried Derek Coaker the next morning under the south side of the tower, where its shadow would come over him every afternoon about four.
The bells were rung half-muffled before the service and after. They were rung on seven, because the tenor's wheel was in pieces on the bell-chamber floor, and Gill and Tyler had been up since five with the chain block, Tyler pulling and Gill telling him how, bringing her down off her head; she hung now mouth down and still among the others, unringable, with her clock hammer back on a new arm Gill had cut that morning. Nobody in Upcott said the ringing was wrong without her. Iris Kingdon said it was the best she'd heard them.
Ray rang the six. Philip rang the seventh with his son on the second, and Martin on the third, very carefully, and Leanne and Dean on the fourth and fifth. On the treble, for the first time in that band since she was sixteen, was Gill Vosper. Her shoulder was strapped under her shirt and complained at every pull. She took a coil of the tail end in her left hand the way she'd been taught in that room at eleven, by the man in the box in the nave below them, and at every handstroke she waited for the treble to come all the way up to the top of herself before she pulled her down. She marked herself the whole time, in her head. She'd have given herself two faults. Perhaps one and a half.
After the burial they went across to the hall, where somebody who wasn't Mandy had done the splits, and done them jam first, and nobody had the heart to say. Philip stood by the hatch with a mug of tea in both hands and talked to people. Callum told everyone he was going to Exeter in September to learn methods, and nobody stopped him.
At five to twelve Gill went back across the square and up the thirty-one steps on her own, and up the ladder, and stood in the clock chamber by the lever with the new pin in it. She drew the pin and let the lever up, and heard the wire run slack through the ceiling and the hammer go back onto its spring, a finger's width from the tenor's lip, where it belonged. In the red Silvine book, under her own last line, she wrote HAMMER ON. G.V., and the date.
She went down and sat on the bench under the peal boards and waited.
At twelve the clock struck. On the tenor, slow, one blow and then the next, across the square and the churchyard and the hall and the new earth on the grave, the way it had struck every hour of her childhood. Across the square she heard the hall go quiet to listen. Twelve blows. She'd have sworn the last one came late.