After that they went back to why was he there and didn’t he mind the cold. They didn’t tell him the girl’s name or where she came from. He had to find that out from the television when he got home. Lyn jumped up when he came in.

‘That’s what you get for being public-spirited.’ Stephen forced a laugh. ‘They’re acting as if they think I did it.’

‘They can’t be, Stephen. It must be just their manner.’

‘I feel worn out, much more than I would if I’d been for miles on the moor. D’you know, that was the first dead body I’ve ever seen. It’s a strain on you. Have you ever seen a dead person?’

‘My grandmother, my mother’s mother. She just looked as if she was asleep. Would you like a drink, love? A proper drink or just tea? I’ve made supper, we can have it whenever you want.’

‘Put the box on, shall we? It’s time for “Bleakland”.’

Lyn brought tea in and then supper on two trays. She sat beside Stephen and held his hand. Vangmoor came up on the screen as if they were looking out of the window, but Vangmoor in summer without the wind and with leaves on the trees. Stephen had watched some of the film-making, the scenes they had shot in the Vale of Allen. It was a strange experience to see Lady Irene in her Edwardian dress, Alastair Thornhill in Norfolk jacket, Big Allen behind them, and then, when the romance was over, the episode ended, the real moor of today come onto the screen with the news. It was as if the moor were the whole world and there was nothing anywhere but the moor.

The announcer said that the dead girl had been called Marianne Price and that she was twenty. She had been stopped and killed while cycling home from Byss to Hilderbridge late on the previous night. A picture of her as she had been in life came up on the screen. A round face with a high forehead, blue eyes, short straight nose, a mantle of shining, fair hair. Stephen’s name wasn’t mentioned.

Police were searching for the missing bicycle, but the announcer said nothing about the missing hair. Stephen switched off the set. He went to the window and drew back the curtain. There was a bright, nearly full moon. The silhouette of Big Allen stood out densely black against a lustrous, opaque sky.

‘When I was a child I used to imagine the moor belonged to me, that I was a young prince or the heir to an estate or something. It was after Mother left that I started thinking like that.’

‘You needed something to make up for it.’ Lyn said.

He shrugged. ‘Yes — I suppose Freud and people like that would say I was compensating for losing my mother. I don’t know. I used to think of the moor as all my property, my kingdom, I suppose, and I’d decide where I was going to build my capital city and where I was going to have my hunting forest. And the Reeve’s Way, that was where I was going to march my army. You’ll laugh, but I was going to have a coronation. I was going to be crowned at the Foinmen, standing on the Altar.’

Lyn didn’t laugh. She had heard it all before but he always seemed to forget he had told her. His voice went up in pitch.

‘Good grief, when I think of some creature coming onto the moor and doing a vile thing like this! It makes my blood boil, it’s sacrilege!’

But Lyn said quietly, ‘I wish it hadn’t had to be you who found her.’

2

There were Sundays when Dadda didn’t come to lunch, when depression kept him from stirring out of doors. His depressions were an illness, not merely a feeling of lowness or irritability. They dragged him down into horrors he said no one could imagine. But between bouts, in a precarious euphoria that to others seemed like dourness, he drove up from Hilderbridge in Whalbys’ van.

The depression of last week had lifted like a fever passing when the patient sleeps or asks for food. Dadda looked shattered by it, though, bruised under the eyes. He wore his one good suit, grey with a white chalk stripe, and he had brought with him Lyn’s birthday present in an unwieldy brown paper parcel. He didn’t kiss Lyn, he never touched women, or men either for that matter, but he seemed to make a principle of shrinking from the touch of women.

Lyn unwrapped a small round table, high-polished, with curved legs and a top carved in a design of a chestnut leaf and cluster of spiny fruits.

‘It’s beautiful, Dadda. You are good to us.’

‘Don’t go ruining it with hot cups.’

‘What a lovely piece of work!’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Early Victorian, isn’t it?’

‘Late,’ said Dadda. ‘You ought to be able to see that with half an eye. You’re supposed to be in bloody trade.’

Lyn’s parents and Joanne and Kevin always came over on Sunday afternoons. Mr Newman was a small quiet man, half the size of Dadda, probably literally half his weight. He ran a finger along the carving.

‘We shan’t be able to compete with that.’

‘It’s not a question of competing,’ said his wife. ‘Lyn knows she’s getting a cardigan, anyway. Have to wait till Wednesday.’ She had brought two Sunday papers with her. Everyone had a paper except Dadda who never read anything. Mrs Newman’s face was round and healthy and high-coloured like Joanne’s. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘but in a place like this, a sort of open space, forest, moors, anywhere that’s National Trust, you always get killings. It’s a wonder we haven’t had them before.’

Joanne said, ‘What d’you mean “them”, Mum? There’s been one young girl killed so far as I know.’

‘So far. You get one now and another in a couple of weeks and folks are scared to go out or we women are. It’ll be one of those pathologicals.’

‘Psychopaths.’

‘Whatever they call them. Maniacs, we used to say.’

‘A proper ghoul, isn’t she, Tom?’ said Mr Newman.

Dadda didn’t answer but gave his awkward humourless grin. He sat with his huge shoulders hunched up. He was used to company but hopeless in it, he never improved. Many men are as tall as or taller than their fathers and Stephen was six feet, but Dadda still towered above him. He filled his armchair, all long, gaunt, bent limbs, that somehow suggested a cornered spider. All but he wanted to know how Stephen had got on with the police.

‘I’m their number one suspect. No, it’s a fact.’

‘He’s exaggerating,’ Lyn said.

Dadda spoke. ‘Beats me why he had to stick his neck out.’

‘Once I’d seen her,’ Stephen said, ‘I had to report it.’

‘I’d have shut me eyes and carried straight on. It all comes of this traipsing about the moor.’

‘Good grief, you sound just like the police! Can’t anyone understand a man can love the countryside? It’s a simple enough pleasure in all conscience, harmless enough, I’d have thought.’

Kevin winked. ‘I tell folks Lyn’s not a grass widow, she’s a moor widow.’

A grim smile moved Dadda’s mouth.

Mrs Newman said, ‘I should think this’d put you off anyway, Stephen. You won’t want to be up there with this maniac about. I don’t like that word widow, Kevin, that’s not very nice.’

Joanne and Kevin held hands on the sofa. ‘I knew that girl, that Marianne Price, Mum, did I tell you? Well, you must have known her, Stephen. She was at the cash desk in the Golden Chicken.’

‘The Market Burger House they call it now, Joanne.’

‘Whatever they call it. Don’t you get your lunch there, Mr Whalby?’

‘Me? I keep me feet under me own table. Stephen goes out for his dinner, he’s young.’

‘There you are, Stephen, like I said, you must have known her, you must have seen her hundreds of times.’

‘Good Lord, Joanne, how would I know? She’d have looked a bit different, I can tell, from what she was like lying up there with her hair all cut off.’

Joanne gave a little scream and put her hands up to her own abundant blonde hair.

‘She won’t be there tomorrow,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if they were to close tomorrow out of respect. I remember when you and your brother were little, Lyn, Joanne wasn’t born, old Mr Crane over at Loomlade got killed in his car and they closed the electric shop two days out of respect and the branch in Byss.’