‘Time I was on my way.’

Mrs Naulls said lucidly, as if veils had suddenly, when it was too late, fallen from her mind and her speech, ‘It was good of you to come, dear. Thank you for the jellies.’

The knitter waved. Stephen was sure his grandmother had fallen asleep before he was even out of the room. It had begun to rain. Soon it was raining hard enough, Stephen noted dismally, to keep him off the moor for the evening. He felt as he had done when a small boy and rain or some other calamity of nature had kept him from a picnic, resentful and somewhat indignant.

It was the end of the week before Lyn took the cat basket back. There were ten birthday cards on the mantelpiece, but they had been there two days and she took them down. Two of them made her feel, not old exactly, but as if life was passing her by. They were the one from Joanne that said, ‘You’ve reached a quarter century’ and the one from Stephen, ‘My dearest wife’. She was uneasy about going to the pet shop. In her imagination she saw Nick Frazer as a young version of his uncle, a young wolf instead of an old one. But if she didn’t take it back he would only come along and ask for it. She was surprised he hadn’t already. Peach was sitting on the window sill, watching the raindrops run down the outside of the glass and trying to catch them with his paw. He behaved as if they were insects. Lyn stroked him and reminded him she would be back at lunchtime.

Nick Frazer was locking up the shop when she came along at one. She had remembered him quite differently from what he really was. He looked at her with a preoccupied air before he recognized her, perhaps because she had put up her hair rather severely — deliberately — into a tight knot on the back of her head. The pleasant, serious face, the steady brown eyes, disconcerted her. Was this the wolf who was going to make double-edged remarks, even a pass, at her? He took the basket, thanked her quietly, locked the shop door again. She was so surprised by the warmth of his smile, by his being able to smile so frankly, so like a friend, that when he said he was going to lunch at the Blue Lagoon and would she come too, she said yes, all right, without thinking.

They walked along by the river. The rain had almost stopped. The Blue Lagoon was the old Red Lion renamed, no one knew why, on the corner of Bankside and Trinity Street. She had already had second thoughts.

‘I ought to get back to Peach.’ She had told him what the cat was called.

He smiled again. ‘The great beauty of keeping cats is they don’t tie you.’

She sat at a table while he went to get their lager and ploughman’s lunches. Lyn took off her gloves. She saw that her left hand was bare. In washing her hands after breakfast she had taken off her wedding ring and must have left it on the side of the basin. It was the kind of ring you had to take off to wash, a kind of chased inlay of platinum and gold that Stephen had had specially made on Dadda’s advice. She was always taking it off and forgetting it. Kevin’s brother, who fancied himself as an amateur psychologist, said you didn’t really forget things like that and it meant Lyn must unconsciously want not to wear it — ergo, not to be married.

Nick brought their drinks and food on a tray.

‘And how is Peach?’

‘Quite happy, I think. He’s not shaking any more.’

‘But you are,’ Nick said.

It was true. Her hands were trembling, she could hardly hold the glass. She managed to laugh, held her hands for a minute in her lap. ‘It’s a nervous thing I have.’

He made no comment on that. It was then that she noticed how gravely and interestedly he was looking at her, had looked at her ever since they met outside the shop. It was as if he was very concerned with her as a person. But when he spoke it was not of her but of Peach, how to feed him, what sort of supplements he should have, that although he had had his routine immunizations, he must have a booster at a year old and also an injection against a new sort of feline virus.

‘How is it you know so much when you only took the shop over last week?’

‘Well —’ Again that warm, frank smile. ‘I’m a vet.’

‘Are you really?’ A hangover from Lyn’s childhood — a mother who cleaned at Chesney Hall, a father at Cartwright-Cageby’s — was to feel respect that had once amounted to awe for the professional man. But good sense asserted itself. ‘Why aren’t you being one then?’

‘I’ve only just qualified.’ He added almost apologetically, ‘It takes a long time. I’ve got a job waiting for me in London, but I can’t start till August when the man retires. Hence Hilderbridge and Uncle Jim.’

‘And are you living over the shop?’

‘I think Uncle rather hoped I’d live in the two rooms at the back but they smell a bit too powerfully of monkey and parrot so I’ve moved up into his flat. It’s nice, you must come and see it.’

This was a remark that three days before she would have thought of as wolfish. Now it seemed merely friendly. But she didn’t answer it. She was afraid he would ask her about herself and to forestall this she asked him to tell her about his training and what he hoped for in the future. He talked. They ate their bread and cheese. Lyn’s hands had stopped shaking.

‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you.’

I am twenty-five, I am married, I was married in church and have lived with my husband four years, so I must be married, I have no children and never shall have, but I am waiting, waiting, for what I don’t know … ‘Nothing to tell,’ she said. And there was nothing, nothing she could tell. Mr Bale would come back in two or three weeks and she need never see Nick Frazer again. ‘I really must go now.’

While they were in the pub, in a corner far from a window, the rain had come on heavily, the kind of rain that will soak you to the skin in two minutes. Nick stopped her inside the door.

‘Will you wait for me? I’ll be very quick.’

He came back, and he had been very quick, with an umbrella from which, as he plunged in through the swing door, he was tearing the plastic wrapping.

‘You bought it specially!’

‘I had to have an umbrella to walk you home.’

‘But I live in Chesney,’ she said. ‘I’m going on the bus.’

‘To walk you to your bus stop then.’

It was something she hadn’t looked for and she was almost dismayed. Under the umbrella they had to walk very close together and after a while he took her hand and hooked it through his arm. It was precisely the action of Joseph Usher in The Mountainside, and Isabella Thornhill had slapped his face for it before rushing off, unprotected, into the downpour. Lyn felt the blood come up into her face. She held Nick’s arm and felt him warm and somehow tough against her side. He talked about the town, how he had never before been to this part of the country, how one day soon he must try to get out on the moor. There was an opening for her here. My husband, who is in fact the grandson of Alfred Osborn Tace, is really quite an authority on Vangmoor … She didn’t take it. She would have found it hard to speak, anyway. It was taking all her concentration to breathe normally, not to begin shaking again, with their arms linked and their bodies so close.

The bus saved her. As they turned up River Street it was coming down the hill and there wouldn’t be another for an hour.

‘There won’t be another for an hour!’ she cried.

‘Would that be so terrible?’

‘Oh, yes, yes, it would. Thank you for lunch, thank you very much. Goodbye!’

He stood on the pavement, smiling in perplexity, making swirls in the air with the umbrella. Her cheeks burned and she turned away from the window. The bus pulled away, through the rain, up towards the moor.

A full week had gone by and it was Saturday again before Stephen went out on the moor. There was not a soul to be seen, though it was a weekend and the sun was shining after many days of rain. The week before last, when it had been colder, he had seen parties of hikers, a fisherman coming from the Hilder, cyclists on the Loomlade road, campers with tent and calor gas stove and blankets on their backs. This morning Vangmoor was deserted. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the murder had emptied it.