These days when Lyn had a shock it made her shake. No matter how controlled and calm she might sound, her hands would shake and sometimes her whole body. Her mother said it was all nerves, but what had she to be nervy about? Her body began its trembling.
‘Oh, Stephen, no!’
‘Pretty frightful, isn’t it? She’s been murdered. Strangled, I should think. I’d be willing to bet she’s been strangled. Oh, Lord, now I’ve upset you.’
‘I’m all right,’ said Lyn. ‘Are you going to phone the police?’
‘I certainly am. Straightaway. I came back at once. I came back as fast as I could.’
‘Oh, Stephen …’
They were standing close, looking at each other. She put her arms round him and held him tightly. He allowed her to hold him but it was an effort, he was impatient to act, to get to the phone. She let him go.
‘Where?’ the man on the phone said.
It amazed Stephen how little local people knew of their countryside, their heritage really. Those Simpsons, for instance, who knew the Foinmen no better than they knew Stonehenge, Dadda who bragged he hadn’t been on Vangmoor these twenty years. ‘At the Foinmen,’ he repeated, ‘between the ninth and tenth stones on the north side.’
‘The best thing’ll be for you to show us, Mr Whalby. You stay where you are and we’ll come to you.’
Stephen wasn’t having that. ‘I’ll meet you on the green. I’ll be waiting for you on Chesney Green.’
While he was on the phone Lyn’s sister had come in, big-boned, yellow-haired Joanne, only nineteen and married six months. Her voice was as strident as Lyn’s was gentle.
‘I don’t reckon I ought to have shocks like that in my state of health.’
Lyn said worriedly, ‘I wish you hadn’t listened.’
‘Come on, love, don’t you know when I’m kidding? I’m going to dash back and tell Kev. Does Mum know?’
Stephen went out again. Joanne and her mother were talking on Joanne’s doorstep. He didn’t stop. He walked back down to the green and waited out of the wind on the churchyard side. Between the lychgate and St Michael’s ancient oak door was the Tace tomb, white marble, black bronze and Giacometti’s agonized angel with wings like fishbones. Stephen leaned over the gate, waiting for the police. The square tower of the church was built out of the dun-coloured limestone called foinstone and so were all the cottages and Chesney Hall itself. Long ago it had been quarried out of a deep pit called Knamber Hole. You could see Knamber Foin from here, a bleak mass of rubble rising out of a plain that was grey, smoky-looking with the leafless boughs of ten thousand little birch trees. Clouds shadowed densely those south-eastern parts, but the north and west were broadly lit by the sun, the higher hills gleamed in sunshine, and a flock of birds flew across the expanse of blue sky above Big Allen.
The wind was like a blade that just skims the skin. Stephen saw the police cars coming a long way off, three of them in a convoy coming up the white road from Hilderbridge. An army of police — well, enough to show they believed him. The cars parked one behind the other in a row on the road that crossed the green from the Hall to the church. Already there were a couple of people watching, Kevin Simpson’s mother and an old man whose name Stephen didn’t know, hungry for excitement on an empty April Saturday. He said to the police, ‘This way. We have to go up over the fell.’
There was a detective inspector, a thickset man of about his own age, athletic-looking but red in the face and with reddish hair, and a detective sergeant, a bit younger, dark with a wedge-shaped rodent face, a beanpole of a man. Then there were officers with particular functions, one whose job it was to be at the scene of the crime before the body was touched or moved. Stephen took them up the zig-zag track. If he had been on his own he would have gone straight up but he was more used to walking and climbing, no doubt, than these policemen. He fancied too that he felt the cold less than they did. They had stamped their feet and rubbed their hands while they were waiting about. The inspector said to him suddenly, ‘Are you the Stephen Whalby that writes that nature column for the Echo?’
‘”Voice of Vangmoor?” Yes. Yes, I am.’ No one had ever asked him that before and Stephen felt pleased. It was seldom, of course, that he met people who didn’t already know. ‘Are you —’ he tried to speak as a real writer would ‘— one of my regular readers?’
‘On and off,’ said the inspector. Stephen now remembered he had said his name was Manciple. ‘You must know the moor like the back of your hand.’
‘I know it pretty well.’ Stephen couldn’t resist boasting a bit. ‘I daresay I’m actually the greatest living authority on Vangmoor.’
Stephen said this very seriously but for some reason it made the wedge-faced sergeant guffaw. He had an unpleasant grating laugh and Stephen felt anyway that it was unseemly to laugh in these circumstances. He compressed his lips in silent offence.
The inspector gave no sign of noticing. ‘You’ll be watching “Bleakland” on the telly, I expect. They say that chap Alfred Tace who wrote the books, he knew the moor inside out.’
‘Alfred Osborn Tace,’ Stephen corrected him, and said after a little hesitation, ‘He was my grandfather.’
They were both impressed now. ‘Is that a fact?’ said Manciple, and the sergeant said, ‘You’ll maybe be getting a bit of money out of this series, then?’
‘Good Lord, no!’ He wanted to laugh, though it would have been a bitter laugh. ‘Actually, it was through the female line,’ he began, wondering how much he meant to explain, but they had ceased to listen to him. They were at the top of the hill and Foinmen’s Plain had unrolled itself before them. The wind scored shivering channels through the ling and bilberries, the growth of fine, dry grass. Against the bright, constantly changing sky the dolmen stood stark and black. ‘Look, over there.’ Stephen pointed.
They went forward slowly. They could all see it now, there was no need for hurry. The scene-of-crimes man stumbled as one of his feet went into a rabbit hole. Stephen liked to make a ceremony of his visits to the Foinmen, walking slowly the length of the avenue up to where the Giant stood, but there was none of this now. They didn’t even bother to use the gate but swung their legs over the low railing and walked straight in among the stones to where the girl was.
A small green insect with folded wings had settled on her forehead. They looked at her and for a time no one said anything. Then Manciple said, without touching her, without even bending down, ‘She’s dead all right.’
One of the men Stephen had taken for another policeman in plain clothes came closer, looked at the girl’s open blue eyes. The sergeant called him Doctor. ‘Of course she’s dead,’ the doctor said, and then, ‘A moors murder, my God. Sooner or later it had to be.’
A gust of wind roared across the plain and the insect, blown by it, took wing.
He was most of the day at Hilderbridge police station. Manciple disappeared and Stephen was questioned by a chief superintendent called Malm. Why had he been out on Vangmoor so early? Wasn’t it very cold to be out on the moor at that hour? Had he ever been to the Foinmen before? Dozens of times, maybe even hundreds? Then why had he gone this particular morning?
It was impossible to make Malm see that one might love the moor, enjoy walking, have become accustomed to the cold. The sergeant, whose name was Troth, came back and sat next to Malm. They were perfectly polite, curious, baffled. After an hour or so of that Malm changed his tack and wanted to know whom Stephen had met on that morning walk, everything he had seen.
‘I didn’t meet anyone. I hardly ever do.’ Stephen tried irony. ‘I saw a hare and after I’d found the body there was a sparrowhawk, a kestrel.’ He saw he had made Malm think him of unsound mind and he said quietly, earnestly, ‘There was nothing, nothing but what I’ve told you.’