‘I certainly should!’

‘Would you mind telling me what they’ve been asking you?’

It was wonderful to be out in the fresh air again, the sunshine. It had felt like prison in there, or as if he could only be let out of that stuffy room into prison. Remembering jargon he had read somewhere, he said joyfully, ‘I’ll give you an exclusive story!’

They had walked into Market Square. The Market Burger House was the obvious place to go for a cup of something and a biscuit, but Stephen felt he had had enough cups of something and enough biscuits to last him a lifetime. The Kelsey Arms was just opening. Feeling extremely daring, Stephen held the saloon bar door open for her.

There were two customers in there already, a man and a woman, no one else. Stephen fetched himself and the girl two halves of lager. She told him her name was Harriet Crozier. It pleased him that she remembered he was an expert on Vangmoor and that she seemed to have forgotten the trade by which he earned his living. She referred to him as a nature writer. On an impulse, a little breathlessly, he told her whose grandson he was.

‘Can I use that?’

‘Oh Lord, it might be better to say “descendant”.’ He was thinking of Uncle Stanley making a fuss. Uncle Stanley read the Three Towns Echo very thoroughly. There was often something in it about himself. ‘Say “descendant”, and you could say some of his — well, his talent’s been passed on to me, something like that.’ Stephen began telling her about the two occasions on which he had spoken to Ann Morgan, though he left out the bit about covering the settee, how social conscience had led him to join the search party.

Harriet took it all down in what she called speedwriting but which looked to Stephen like ordinary words with the vowels left out. She had drunk her lager very quickly, and suddenly, announcing that she was terribly hot, she couldn’t stand that thing on her head any longer, she couldn’t stand it whatever the risk, she pulled off her scarf.

Her hair was as long, as golden and nearly as thick as Lyn’s. It fell down over her shoulders and she pushed it back away from her face. She laughed at his look of consternation. It wasn’t Lyn’s face at all but sharp and knowing, the nose sprinkled with freckles, the eyes a cat’s green.

‘I can’t tie my head up for the rest of my life,’ she said.

She was holding her empty glass. Stephen didn’t want to have to buy her another drink. He had begun to feel uneasy, taking a woman into a pub, buying a drink for her, being seen with her perhaps. It had never happened to him before and he felt it wasn’t quite a fair way to behave to Lyn.

‘Time I was on my way.’

She seemed surprised. ‘Let me buy you one.’

‘No, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘I’ve a long walk ahead of me.’

In spite of what he had just said he might have shirked it if the 6.15 bus hadn’t just gone. He set off but it was wearisome to have to stick to the road. What did Malm’s parting shot mean? That he was forbidden the moor? For how long? And what possible right had the police to lay such injunctions on an innocent man? Stephen had the impotent, resentful, revengeful feeling about that which a lover has when warned by more powerful authority off a girl. And he shared that lover’s certainty that if he obeyed his life wouldn’t be worth living. There was no time, since the departure of his mother, when the moor had not been to him a refuge, a domain, and in some curious way, a closer friend than any human being. It brought him a hollow, slightly sick, sensation to think of being estranged from it.

He must keep to the road. To the left of him now were the Foinmen, to the right the Banks of Knamber, but he must not go among the standing stones nor the birch trees, it was as if an invisible wall had been erected between them and him. And this had been brought about by the murderer of those girls, this man who had usurped Vangmoor and made himself a greater master of it than he.

It was a beautiful evening, the air soft and hushed, the distant hills floating in a bluish haze. But Stephen kept his eyes on the white road ahead as if he were a blinkered horse or as if there were rows of houses, identical and dull-facaded, on either side of him. At the stop nearest to Knamber Hole he waited and caught the 7.15 bus.

8

Next day the CID sent for him again.

This time it was like a psychotherapy session, or what Stephen imagined such a session would be, only with three psychiatrists and one patient-victim. Manciple wasn’t there. Instead of him there was a chief inspector called Hook. Hook did most of the talking. It was easy to see he had been called in because he was used to this kind of thing, to asking the right kind of cutting-through-to-the-bone questions and perhaps to breaking men. Only you couldn’t break and confess when you had done nothing.

Hook wanted Stephen’s life described to him. He wanted Stephen to say exactly what he did on one typical day. What was there so special about the moor that he was so attached to it? Was it a fact that he was accustomed to ten- or even twenty-mile walks? How long had he been married? Why had he no children?

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.’

‘You’re not ashamed to tell us, are you? There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some would say there are too many people in this world without you adding to them.’

‘Let’s say that’s the answer, then.’

Hook said he understood, he had been told, that Stephen was a grandson of Tace the Vangmoor novelist. How had that come about since Tace had apparently been childless? Oh, through an illegitimate child? He was by way of being an illegitimate grandson of Tace’s?

Coffee and biscuits arrived at ten. It was a misty morning and to Stephen’s relief the sun was sluggish in appearing. The room was cool and smelt of some sort of antiseptic that had been used in the water when the floor was washed. Troth had a pustule on his chin which worried him. He didn’t scratch it but constantly brought his fingers close to it, tenderly palpating the greasy, pitted skin around it. Hook was a tall man who might have been good-looking but for his bulbous, shapeless, pugilist’s nose. He drank in a curious way, holding his coffee cup in both hands. In the middle of a series of questions he broke off and said to Stephen à propos, it seemed, of nothing that had gone before, his eyes fixed and narrowed, his forefinger pointing across the table, ‘We’re looking for a psychopath — would you agree to that? Would you agree that a man who kills the way this one does, for no more motive than that a girl’s young and has got long blonde hair, a man who’s driven by some impulse to kill in this way, he would be a psychopath?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘A man who is apparently a conformist, young and physically very strong, a man who needs routine because any other kind of existence he can’t handle. A man who has a fantasy life, maybe delusions of grandeur, a man with a morbid interest in death. I’m describing a certain type of psychopath. Aren’t I also describing you, Whalby?’

Stephen said nothing. What could he say?

‘So we have a blueprint and here we have a man who fits that blueprint — or so it seems to me. Don’t you think any detached observer would see it like that? Our man knows Vangmoor. He knows it so well he can find his way about it in the dark. He’s so strong and he knows the moor so well he can carry a dead body miles across it by night.’

‘I haven’t a morbid interest in death.’ Stephen tried a dismissive laugh and felt he had succeeded. ‘What was I supposed to do when I found Marianne Price’s body? Not tell you? Go home as if nothing had happened?’

‘We’ll ask the questions, Whalby,’ said Malm.

Stephen had never seen Troth smile or even look pleasant, but now as he sat a little apart from the others, sat with a certain air of deference to the others, his hand moving slightly in the vicinity of that red spot with its yellow blob, there was something in his face that Stephen recognized as amusement. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t even a lifting of those tight, bunched facial muscles, but rather a light in his eyes. Troth was amused, vastly entertained, by the spectacle of a defenceless person being insulted.