It took him nearly two hours to find the hole into the mine. His memory had played him false. He thought he could remember that he and Peter had fastened their rope to a spur or spike of rock and accordingly it was for such a feature that he searched. But the limestone took no such jagged form in the area where he knew the sough must be located, it was smooth and curved. He found instead the only possible protuberance to which they could safely have anchored their rope. This was in the slope of the mountainside above the shelf and below the scree on which Peter had slipped. He crawled along the shelf, peering, feeling with his hands. And there it was — a long way from where he remembered it, quite differently sited, but there beyond a doubt, a cleft into the foot of the mountain under a pendulous lip of stone.
He lay down and looked in. There was nothing more interesting to be seen than if this had been the entrance to a rabbit warren, nothing but a tunnel that led down into darkness. It smelt of earth. He got to his feet again and walked back across Goughdale, pausing at each ruin of a mine building to check if any more entrances to the underground workings remained unblocked. The George Crane Mine, the Duke of Kelsey’s, the Goughdale. He had looked before, of course, he and Peter had looked, and years later he had once more investigated the rough hillocky ground, but then and now he found nothing. The mines were dangerous, the mines were not to be left open as an invitation to any foolhardy visitor. He had found, and rediscovered, what was almost certainly the only inlet remaining accessible to that network of subterranean passages, galleries and chambers, that other world beneath the moor.
The sun had set and dusk was closing in. Stephen would have preferred to walk back across the Vale of Allen and Foinmen’s Plain but he had no torch and tonight there would only be a thin, new moon. So he made for the Jackley road from which nearly all the traffic had now disappeared.
He was surprised to see the yellow car still there. It had been parked on that spot for at least three hours, probably much longer, for whoever had parked it had very likely done so before the evening traffic build-up. People who wanted to get rid of old cars sometimes dumped them on the moor, the kind of behaviour that maddened Stephen. But this car wasn’t of that sort. From its registration number it was only three years old, and it looked well-kept, the front tyres were new. He looked through the windscreen and then through the driver’s window. A knitted sweater of cream wool hung across the back of the passenger seat and there was a striped silk scarf, cream, red and black, on the dashboard shelf. The driver’s window was partly open. He tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. Once he had opened the door, though, there seemed nothing to do but close it again.
The owner must be somewhere about. It could only be someone who had gone for a marathon walk or a solitary picnicker who had lain down and fallen asleep. But as he passed the crossroads and came to that part of the road that wound down into Chesney he couldn’t help recalling the man he had seen skipping among the trees. He looked long and searchingly at the Banks of Knamber that tonight were as they had been then before the moon rose, grey and pale as a sky dotted with tiny black clouds. But tonight there was no one among the trees.
In the morning he picked up the van in Hilderbridge and drove to Jackley the long way round through Byss, having a newly upholstered chaise longue to deliver before he made the Jackley collection. His last call would be in Trinity Road, Hilderbridge, so he stopped at a confectioners and bought a box of fruit jellies. It was a day of white sky, ground mist, chilly, an expectant day, waiting for the sun to come through.
The soft, thin mist gave to the foins a mysterious air. Their peaks seemed to float above the ground. Stephen drove south by the main road and as he came through Goughdale it occurred to him that the yellow Volkswagen might still be there. It was. He saw the spot of bright buttercup colour as he rounded the last curve before the crossroads. But the car was no longer the only vehicle parked there. It had gathered to itself, in the still white mist, on the verge of the Vale of Allen, half a dozen more cars and a large van. Stephen slowed down. Two of the cars were police cars, marked Police and with blue lamps. A man in a raincoat was standing by the rear of the Volkswagen while another was squatting down, peering underneath it.
Stephen pulled in on the opposite side of the road. He got down from the cab. He could see now that there was a driver in each of the police cars. He went across the road. Immediately the standing man called out to him, ‘Nothing for you to bother about, sir, thank you very much. This is a police matter.’
It was Detective Sergeant Troth. He appeared to recognize Stephen as quickly as Stephen recognized him, but the dark wedge face registered this only in a tightening of the mouth and a jerk of the chin. It was the other man, who rose now from his squatting position to be identified as Inspector Manciple, who spoke to him.
‘Good morning. It’s Mr Whalby, isn’t it?’
Stephen nodded. ‘There hasn’t been another — any trouble, has there?’
Troth said gruffly, ‘What d’you mean, trouble?’
‘To be frank with you,’ said Manciple, ‘there’s a young woman missing from Jackley. A married woman. This is her car.’
‘And you think …?’
‘We don’t think anything,’ said Troth in his flat Three Towns accent. His face, Stephen noticed, was badly marked with acne as if he were still in his teens, though he was years older than that. ‘Not yet we don’t,’ he said. ‘We don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘In the normal course of things we’d not treat such a disappearance seriously.’ Manciple sounded as if he were apologizing for the other man’s rudeness. He had a conciliatory air and he looked uneasy when Troth turned his back. ‘Only after what you found back in April, things aren’t normal. There’s a couple of search parties organized. I daresay you can make out one of them up across the Vale there.’
Stephen got back into the van and drove down into Hilderbridge. At Sunningdale the same collection of old people, arranged in much the same order, was watching television in the day room. On the screen a woman with bright blonde hair and red-rimmed glasses was teaching her audience how to make profiteroles. One of the old men was reading the Daily Mirror, the knitter was knitting, Helena Naulls was asleep, her mouth open and her dentures slipped out of alignment. She was wearing a pink cotton dress which evidently belonged, not to her, but to the fattest resident, a mountain of a woman who was also asleep, whom Stephen had never seen other than asleep in all his visits.
Mrs Naulls awoke as easily as she slept. The knitter pushed her shoulder and she sat up and opened her eyes. Stephen kissed her.
‘How’s tricks then, Grandmother?’
‘Just the same,’ said Mrs Naulls. ‘Have you brought me my jellies?’
‘What do you think?’ He put the box on her lap. ‘Whoa there, go easy!’ She grunted as her fingers scrabbled with the cellophane wrapping. ‘I reckon I’ll have one myself, I’m feeling a bit peckish, and what about this lady?’
‘Go on,’ said the knitter, ‘it’s a shame to tease her.’
‘Leonard was always a tease,’ said Mrs Naulls, putting a purple jelly into her mouth. ‘His dad tried to knock it out of him but it never made no difference.’
‘Knock one devil out and another in, I always say,’ said the knitter.