Stringer cocked a thumb in Morgan’s direction. ‘That copter belongs to some mate of his father-in-law. Useful if she’s out in the open.’
A bramble whipped and clawed Stephen across the neck. He put his hand up to it and saw the blood streaked on his fingers. There was no point in climbing the foin, she wouldn’t be up there. They spread across the opening to the valley that was called Jackley Plain, and there Roger Morgan could go no further. He didn’t quite collapse. He sat down on a stone and put his head in his hands. Of all the members of the party he was the one from whom the most endurance was called, but of all the members of the party he was perhaps the only one unused to sustained walking or manual labour, and he was also the smallest. Stephen felt a flicker of contempt for him.
‘Sorry,’ Morgan said gruffly. ‘I’m dead beat. I’ve had no sleep since the night before last.’ He looked at Stephen with recognition. ‘You’re one of the Whalbys, aren’t you? You and your father came to our place to cover a settee.’
Stephen didn’t much like to be reminded of this in public. ‘Oh, yes. Jackley. St Edmund’s Avenue.’
Morgan nodded. ‘Better get on, I suppose.’
‘I should sit there a bit longer,’ one of the policemen said. ‘Then we’ll get you down to the road. We’ve got our vehicles at quarter mile intervals all the way from Hilderbridge to Jackley.’
Stephen started off again and the others began to follow him. He wasn’t going to be left behind, nursing Morgan. Overhead the helicopter circled once more, making a black locust-shaped shadow on the sunlit turf of the plain.
They stood admiring each other.
‘You’re lovely,’ said Nick.
‘So are you.’
‘I did make you happy, didn’t I?’
‘You know you did. Couldn’t you tell?’ She reddened, for she wasn’t yet used to this kind of talk. ‘I never knew it would be like that.’
‘I get a strange feeling when you talk that way. It’s a strange situation, isn’t it? It makes you more mine than if there’d been others or if your marriage had been real.’
She nodded. ‘And you more mine.’
‘Stay with me, Lyn. I don’t mean all night, I know you can’t, but stay with me for the evening.’
‘No.’ She began to put her clothes on, blue denim jeans, white tee-shirt, shoulders thin and straight with bones like white shell. ‘It’s seven now. I ought to have been home two hours ago.’
Nick said, but very gently to take the sting out of the words, ‘You’re not his mother.’
‘I’ll never be anyone else’s.’ She hunted in the bed for the ribbon that had come off her hair while they were making love.
Nick combed her hair and tied the ribbon himself, badly, too loosely. She had to do it again. He dressed and went downstairs with her. Where Peach’s pen had been in the window was a cage with a snake in it, curled up on straw. In the shop, in the dimness, she threw herself into Nick’s arms and kissed him. The snake’s skin trembled at the movement in the air.
She got the 7.15 bus, feeling as anxious as a mother who isn’t home in time for when her little boy comes back from school. People on the bus were talking about the number of police cars on the road and someone said another girl was missing.
When she rushed into the house in Tace Way Stephen wasn’t even there. It looked as if no one had been there since she left in the afternoon to go to Nick. Peach alone was in the house, having let himself in through the cat flap Stephen had fixed into the lower panel of the back door. He was sitting on one of the kitchen counters, paws folded, tail tucked up, gazing with stately patience at the larder door. Lyn fed him. She made herself a cup of tea, cut bread for toast, beat up eggs with grated cheese in a pan. At nine she put the television on for the news.
The first item was the discovery of Ann Morgan’s body. She had been found at two that afternoon by a party searching the Pertsey and north-west region of Vangmoor. The body was in a stone hut, formerly the powder magazine of the long-disused Duke of Kelsey’s mine. She had been strangled and her long fair hair shorn off at the scalp. Lyn switched off the set as Stephen came in at the back door.
7
Fingerprints were taken of all the men over sixteen and under sixty in the Three Towns. Then a man in a white coat took blood samples from their thumbs. Troth was ticking off names on a list. He gave Stephen the same pinched stare as that which he levelled at Lyn’s father and Trevor Simpson, as if he had never seen him before.
Stephen hadn’t been in the gatehouse lodge for years. As a child he had lived there half the time, for after his mother had left the obvious person to look after him had been Mrs Naulls, however much, and by then however much more, Dadda loathed all the Naulls family. He had been at school a year but they took him away and sent him to Chesney Primary so that Helena could fetch him and take him home with her until Dadda came at six to pick him up in the van.
It had been Naulls policy to close up on him whenever he spoke of his mother. Helena didn’t quite close up. She teased. If Uncle Leonard was a tease, you could tell where he got it from.
‘She’s on the moon, there!’ Helena would say in answer to his question, or, ‘Maybe she’s at the North Pole with the polar bears.’
While Helena went down to the shop and Arthur Naulls dozed in the old shiny armchair that smelt unaccountably of wet dog, Stephen hunted for letters, a photograph, an address. He found nothing, he never did find anything. Helena showed him what she thought it was good for him to see, pictures of Brenda as a young girl, a lock of her fair wavy hair, twisted into a circle and tied with a piece of thin red ribbon.
‘Where is she, Nanna?’
‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ said Helena.
Stephen had his fingerprints done and a sample taken of his blood. It was all very impersonal, a routine test for all the men. There were green baize notice boards and maps studded with pins hung up where the nasturtium paper had been, though faintly Stephen thought he could smell the old smell, that mixture of boiled greens and beeswax and unwashed woollen cloth. He came out into the sunshine and the scent of new-mown grass.
Lyn had gone to work an hour before on the bus, Stephen having escorted her to the stop and waited with her. No woman wanted to be alone on the moor or in the moorland villages, even in broad daylight. He saw the police car waiting outside his house a hundred yards before he got there himself. Manciple was sitting inside it with another, younger, man and the driver. He got out as Stephen approached.
The faintly hangdog, embarrassed air was stronger than ever this morning. Always red-faced, Manciple looked as if he was blushing for shame. He said in his awkward, apologetic way, ‘We’d like you to come down to the station, Mr Whalby. Have a chat.’
‘A chat about what?’
‘About the situation up here. Miss Price. Mrs Morgan. Just routine inquiries on an informal basis, Mr Whalby.’
He had no choice but to get into the car and go with them. He sat in the back with the other man. Manciple, in the passenger seat, remarked that it was a fine day, going to be warm. Apart from that, no one said a word all the way down to Hilderbridge.
They showed him into a different room this time, small, bare, on the ground floor. There was a metal table in it and three bentwood chairs, two benches, a calendar on one wall and on the opposite one a street plan in a frame. He waited in there alone for half an hour. Once, towards the end of the half-hour, he opened the door and looked out for a sign of anyone. It gave him a strange feeling to see a uniformed policeman sitting just outside the door like a warder in a film about prison.
Chief Superintendent Malm came in briskly and full of apologies like a conscientious chairman late for a board meeting. Apologies, not explanations. He had just sat down opposite Stephen on the other side of the table when Manciple came in and took the third of the bentwood chairs. The room was already growing very warm, for the large, metal-framed window, its panes still grimed with winter and spring dirt, received the full force of the sun. Malm had a grey suit on, Manciple a cheap-looking, thin sports jacket.