It was when the pale flood of light returned that Stephen saw the man. He was quite a long way off, not far in from the road, and he was standing quite still as if waiting for someone or watching. There was no reason why this man shouldn’t be out on the moor on a fine spring night, except that hardly anyone but Stephen ever was. What was more remarkable was that he was not walking but standing still. The figure remained absolutely still among the little birch trees and right in the path Stephen had mapped out for himself to take. He walked on steadily. Although nothing could be seen of him but a silhouette Stephen was sure the man was looking at him, staring insolently at this approaching form across the intervening, pallid, tundra-like land. Stephen perceived that he had no torch, or that if he had one he wasn’t bothering to use it, which meant he must know the moor well, as well perhaps as Stephen himself did. He felt a mounting resentment. Although he could see no more than the man’s black outline, he sensed it was a rival he was moving towards, one who saw himself as having rights in the moor, even rights of possession over it.
Stephen had no clear idea, no idea at all really, as to what he would do when he and the man encountered each other. Now no more than a hundred yards separated them. He wasn’t afraid, though the man was evidently waiting for him, not moving at all. To defy the man, to show him, he began to run this last lap. The man went on waiting, almost as if he were teasing Stephen, and when at last he did move, it was suddenly and with a strange dancing skip. It seemed to Stephen that he was skipping among the trees.
The moon went in. At one moment the Banks of Knamber were bathed in pale light, at the next a gush of cloud had obscured the spotty yellow orb of the moon. As it vanished, absorbed in the veils of blackness, Stephen stumbled over a twisted root and fell headlong.
He wasn’t hurt. But when he picked himself up he was shivering in the darkness. Where the man was, gone or waiting for him behind the next tree, he had no idea. It was now impossible to see more than a few yards. He knew roughly where he was, or he knew in theory, and he stumbled slowly along in a westerly direction, sometimes holding onto the trunk of a birch tree. Once he thought he heard a movement among the trees to the left of him, as of footfalls rustling the grass. He stood still and listened but the sound came no more. Then, it seemed hours later, when he sensed or smelt or somehow divined that he was almost at the road, there came, as likely as not out of his own imagination, the delicate sound of an indrawn breath.
It was midnight when he came home to Tace Way. Lyn was in bed but not asleep. She came down to him and made him a hot drink and felt his forehead which was burning hot and covered in drops of sweat.
In the past Stephen had sometimes been like this after being out late on the moor, feverish next day and light-headed. Lyn left him in bed and took the car to work, promising to be back early to give him his lunch. It was to salve her conscience, she thought, and make up for her obsessional preoccupation with Nick Frazer.
Although she hadn’t seen him again, he was always in her thoughts. In her mind she talked to him, telling him about her life, day-to-day things, carrying on with him a long intimate dialogue. It was in vain that she told herself he was a stranger, a man who had probably by now forgotten her. This revolving of him in her mind led invariably to the same end, the same fear, that he would go away from Hilderbridge without her seeing him and then she would never see him again.
When her morning’s work was finished she thought, as she thought every day, that she would walk along the Mootwalk to Bale’s and at last set her mind at rest. But she didn’t do this. She drove home. She was afraid Nick might treat her with coldness and pretend he had forgotten who she was.
Stephen was still in bed but sitting up and there were books on Vangmoor all over the quilt. Lyn put a cloth on a tray and laid it and on an impulse picked a small blue iris and put it in a vase to go on the tray as well. Stephen’s dark blue eyes were very bright and there was a flush on his cheekbones. Otherwise he seemed much better and he ate his lunch like a hungry schoolboy.
‘I say, Lyn, did I ever tell you how I actually got into one of the old mines when I was a kid?’
She shook her head. Vangmoor bored her. Sometimes she even found it oppressive, living in the middle of it. Their bedroom window, by a lucky chance for Stephen, had the best view of the moor of any house in Tace Way. The curtains were drawn back as far as they would go, and whenever she looked up the green-brown panorama confronted her and the pale bowl of sky. She made an effort. ‘Aren’t they very dangerous?’
‘Kids don’t care about that. We’d heard there was a way into the Goughdale Mine somewhere on the slopes of Big Allen. Actually it’s mentioned in one of the Bleakland books, though I hadn’t read them then. I was about twelve. I went looking for it with my cousin Peter.’
‘Peter Naulls?’
Stephen nodded. ‘Uncle Leonard’s son. We started looking for the hole in the long summer holidays. We were jolly methodical, I can tell you. Each day we covered a set area and we marked the bit we’d covered with sticks. But it took us weeks and weeks to find it.’ He hesitated. He had begun his account, intending to tell Lyn the whole of it, but now that he had reached the point of disclosing the site of the hole into the mine and of describing it and what happened there, he felt uneasy. Dadda he had told, though even to him he had given only a vague location, but he hadn’t said a word to his grandmother and he was sure Peter wouldn’t have told Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge. Why divulge the secret now? ‘We found it,’ he said and lied, ‘but we didn’t go in or anything. Too scared for that.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said.
‘It was pretty enterprising of us to have found it, wasn’t it? Dadda thought so. He said what a waste of bloody time and then he gave me a five-pound note.’
‘How exactly like Dadda.’ She straightened his pillows. She took away the tray. There was no point in asking him if he would like the curtains drawn. He would come down soon anyway and say he was all right and going out on the moor again. Perhaps she could write to Nick and explain things. Explain what? Even if she were to write she knew she would never post the letter.
‘You were wrong about another one being killed in a couple of weeks, Mum,’ Joanne said on a Sunday afternoon. ‘It’s been more like six.’
‘Listen to who’s counting,’ said Kevin. ‘Thank God there hasn’t is what you ought to say.’
‘Well, I do. I do say that. I only meant it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another.’
‘Early days,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘It could just be he hasn’t been able to catch anyone.’
Joanne shrieked. She was big now and the child vigorous. The women had been amused — though the men, especially Dadda, embarrassed — when its movements, or so Joanne averred, had bounced a plate off her lap. Stephen told them how that morning he had seen a girl out on the moor alone.
‘Some folks want their heads examined,’ said Mr Newman. ‘I just hope you two girls have got more sense than ever to set a foot out there.’
Dadda, voyaging day by day farther out on his black sea of depression, made his one contribution to the talk. ‘That’s right, keep your feet under your own table.’
Joanne got to her feet ponderously. Her belly swayed, her ankles were like those of a woman with dropsy. ‘I go climbing hills every day, of course. Like a mountain goat, aren’t I, Kev?’
There was laughter at that, shamefaced from Mr Newman. Joanne fetched more biscuits, her current craving. Stephen hadn’t much to say. The first thing he had thought of when he awoke that morning was that it was his mother’s birthday, 25 May, and he had been thinking about it ever since, as he always did on that day. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, she must be celebrating it. She and her husband and Barnabas and Barbara …