It was Detective Sergeant Troth. He appeared to recognize Stephen as quickly as Stephen recognized him, but the dark wedge face registered this only in a tightening of the mouth and a jerk of the chin. It was the other man, who rose now from his squatting position to be identified as Inspector Manciple, who spoke to him.

‘Good morning. It’s Mr Whalby, isn’t it?’

Stephen nodded. ‘There hasn’t been another — any trouble, has there?’

Troth said gruffly, ‘What d’you mean, trouble?’

‘To be frank with you,’ said Manciple, ‘there’s a young woman missing from Jackley. A married woman. This is her car.’

‘And you think …?’

‘We don’t think anything,’ said Troth in his flat Three Towns accent. His face, Stephen noticed, was badly marked with acne as if he were still in his teens, though he was years older than that. ‘Not yet we don’t,’ he said. ‘We don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘In the normal course of things we’d not treat such a disappearance seriously.’ Manciple sounded as if he were apologizing for the other man’s rudeness. He had a conciliatory air and he looked uneasy when Troth turned his back. ‘Only after what you found back in April, things aren’t normal. There’s a couple of search parties organized. I daresay you can make out one of them up across the Vale there.’

Stephen got back into the van and drove down into Hilderbridge. At Sunningdale the same collection of old people, arranged in much the same order, was watching television in the day room. On the screen a woman with bright blonde hair and red-rimmed glasses was teaching her audience how to make profiteroles. One of the old men was reading the Daily Mirror, the knitter was knitting, Helena Naulls was asleep, her mouth open and her dentures slipped out of alignment. She was wearing a pink cotton dress which evidently belonged, not to her, but to the fattest resident, a mountain of a woman who was also asleep, whom Stephen had never seen other than asleep in all his visits.

Mrs Naulls awoke as easily as she slept. The knitter pushed her shoulder and she sat up and opened her eyes. Stephen kissed her.

‘How’s tricks then, Grandmother?’

‘Just the same,’ said Mrs Naulls. ‘Have you brought me my jellies?’

‘What do you think?’ He put the box on her lap. ‘Whoa there, go easy!’ She grunted as her fingers scrabbled with the cellophane wrapping. ‘I reckon I’ll have one myself, I’m feeling a bit peckish, and what about this lady?’

‘Go on,’ said the knitter, ‘it’s a shame to tease her.’

‘Leonard was always a tease,’ said Mrs Naulls, putting a purple jelly into her mouth. ‘His dad tried to knock it out of him but it never made no difference.’

‘Knock one devil out and another in, I always say,’ said the knitter.

‘How’s Midge getting on, Peter?’

‘If you mean Lyn, she’s okay, and I’m Stephen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It looks as if there’s been another murder on the moor.’

‘Pardon?’ said Mrs Naulls, her mouth full.

‘We’re most of us a bit hard of hearing in here, dear,’ said the knitter.

‘Another murder on the moor,’ Stephen repeated more loudly.

The old man put his paper down. The fat woman opened her eyes and closed them again. Helena Naulls hesitated between a red jelly and a yellow one and finally chose the yellow.

Round-eyed, the knitter said, ‘It turns you cold all over to think of it. Was it another young girl, dear?’

‘It looks like it.’ Stephen jumped up. ‘Actually, I’m off to join the search party. They’re looking for the body now.’ In that moment he had made up his mind. It was what, half-consciously, he had been longing to do since he had got out of the van and talked to Manciple. He’d go back and explain to Dadda. Anyway, Dadda owed him a day off for working the Spring Holiday Monday to get those Chippendale chair seats done. ‘They’ll need someone like me, someone who knows the moor inside out.’

‘Mr Tace,’ said Mrs Naulls, smiling reminiscently, ‘he was a one for the moor. He did love it. He was a lovely man, one in a million. Bye-bye, Stephen. Mind you give my love to Lyn.’

The sun had appeared as a brighter white puddle in the white sky and the mist had begun to move. There was no sign of the search party. Stephen always kept an anorak and a pair of walking boots in the car. He parked in Loomlade and took the path that ran between Loomlade Foin and Big Allen, the direction in which Manciple had surely indicated the party was veering. It was near here that he had found the little white orchid. He came up to the Hilder at the point where the aqueduct pillars crossed it.

He could see the river winding away from its source in the springs of Pierce Foin. The land was marshy here, tussocky with reeds, the black peat showing through the heather. Distant Goughdale seemed deserted. He crossed the river by the stepping stones, wondering if they had yet searched the mine ruins. Mottle Foin, the only foin on which trees grew, little stunted pines making a black dappling on its surface, was the highest hill on the moor after Big Allen and now its rocky hump hid the Hilder’s northerly curves, Pierce Foin and all of Lustley Dale. Stephen had another couple of miles to walk before the view was open to him again and he saw the men in the distance, deployed out across the ground on the river’s right bank.

There must have been forty or fifty of them. One man had done that, one man had had the power to call them all out here on to the moor, away from their homes, their jobs. He had killed one girl and now, because another was missing, they had come as if he had called them, as if they were his slaves. Stephen went back across the river again, clambering over the boulders. Two or three of the men looked round, no one waved. A burly figure, tall and heavy, came towards him. It was Ian Stringer.

‘No luck yet?’ called Stephen.

‘Luck, d’you call it?’

‘Oh Lord, you know what I mean. I just thought I’d come up and lend a hand. I’m by way of being a bit of an expert on the moor, you know.’

Stringer shrugged. His blue shirt, open at the neck and showing a mat of black hair, was wet with sweat in the armpits and down the back. ‘You see that chap in the green? The little dark chap? That’s her husband, that’s Roger Morgan. We’re hoping, there’s just a chance, she left her car to pick wild flowers. She was fond of wild flowers, he says, and — well, she could have got lost or passed out or something.’

‘In that case she wouldn’t be all the way over here, would she?’

‘There’s a couple of policemen with us.’ Stringer pointed them out. ‘They’re sort of directing operations.’

Stephen had rather expected he would do that. But he joined the party as they tramped off towards Lustley Dale.

‘What was she dressed in?’ he asked the husband.

‘I can’t be absolutely sure.’ He had a middle-class, educated voice. ‘A red shirt, I think. Jeans.’ His face was grey with fatigue.

‘We’ve been out looking for her since five,’ said another man.

‘She’d gone to see her parents in Hilderbridge and I was with mine in Jackley.’ Morgan managed a wry grin. ‘We didn’t get on with our in-laws.’

Stringer said, low-voiced, as Morgan moved out of earshot, ‘We started at the Foinmen.’

‘Of course you would. Good Lord, yes.’

‘We’ve been at it — ’ He looked at the watch on his sinewy wrist with its furring of black hair ‘— like nine hours. There’s two other parties, one doing the southeast and one the Pertsey side.’

By mid-afternoon they were on the lower slopes of Lustley Foin. Stephen wasn’t hungry. He felt invigorated, exhilarated by the search. It wasn’t often that he had a whole day out on the moor. As he clambered over the rocks, parting the scrub and the brambles to peer into crevices, he heard a droning throb overhead and looked up to see a helicopter. It was circling slowly and very low down, almost touching, it seemed at one point, the summit of Big Allen.