‘How’s Midge getting on, Peter?’
‘If you mean Lyn, she’s okay, and I’m Stephen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It looks as if there’s been another murder on the moor.’
‘Pardon?’ said Mrs Naulls, her mouth full.
‘We’re most of us a bit hard of hearing in here, dear,’ said the knitter.
‘Another murder on the moor,’ Stephen repeated more loudly.
The old man put his paper down. The fat woman opened her eyes and closed them again. Helena Naulls hesitated between a red jelly and a yellow one and finally chose the yellow.
Round-eyed, the knitter said, ‘It turns you cold all over to think of it. Was it another young girl, dear?’
‘It looks like it.’ Stephen jumped up. ‘Actually, I’m off to join the search party. They’re looking for the body now.’ In that moment he had made up his mind. It was what, half-consciously, he had been longing to do since he had got out of the van and talked to Manciple. He’d go back and explain to Dadda. Anyway, Dadda owed him a day off for working the Spring Holiday Monday to get those Chippendale chair seats done. ‘They’ll need someone like me, someone who knows the moor inside out.’
‘Mr Tace,’ said Mrs Naulls, smiling reminiscently, ‘he was a one for the moor. He did love it. He was a lovely man, one in a million. Bye-bye, Stephen. Mind you give my love to Lyn.’
The sun had appeared as a brighter white puddle in the white sky and the mist had begun to move. There was no sign of the search party. Stephen always kept an anorak and a pair of walking boots in the car. He parked in Loomlade and took the path that ran between Loomlade Foin and Big Allen, the direction in which Manciple had surely indicated the party was veering. It was near here that he had found the little white orchid. He came up to the Hilder at the point where the aqueduct pillars crossed it.
He could see the river winding away from its source in the springs of Pierce Foin. The land was marshy here, tussocky with reeds, the black peat showing through the heather. Distant Goughdale seemed deserted. He crossed the river by the stepping stones, wondering if they had yet searched the mine ruins. Mottle Foin, the only foin on which trees grew, little stunted pines making a black dappling on its surface, was the highest hill on the moor after Big Allen and now its rocky hump hid the Hilder’s northerly curves, Pierce Foin and all of Lustley Dale. Stephen had another couple of miles to walk before the view was open to him again and he saw the men in the distance, deployed out across the ground on the river’s right bank.
There must have been forty or fifty of them. One man had done that, one man had had the power to call them all out here on to the moor, away from their homes, their jobs. He had killed one girl and now, because another was missing, they had come as if he had called them, as if they were his slaves. Stephen went back across the river again, clambering over the boulders. Two or three of the men looked round, no one waved. A burly figure, tall and heavy, came towards him. It was Ian Stringer.
‘No luck yet?’ called Stephen.
‘Luck, d’you call it?’
‘Oh Lord, you know what I mean. I just thought I’d come up and lend a hand. I’m by way of being a bit of an expert on the moor, you know.’
Stringer shrugged. His blue shirt, open at the neck and showing a mat of black hair, was wet with sweat in the armpits and down the back. ‘You see that chap in the green? The little dark chap? That’s her husband, that’s Roger Morgan. We’re hoping, there’s just a chance, she left her car to pick wild flowers. She was fond of wild flowers, he says, and — well, she could have got lost or passed out or something.’
‘In that case she wouldn’t be all the way over here, would she?’
‘There’s a couple of policemen with us.’ Stringer pointed them out. ‘They’re sort of directing operations.’
Stephen had rather expected he would do that. But he joined the party as they tramped off towards Lustley Dale.
‘What was she dressed in?’ he asked the husband.
‘I can’t be absolutely sure.’ He had a middle-class, educated voice. ‘A red shirt, I think. Jeans.’ His face was grey with fatigue.
‘We’ve been out looking for her since five,’ said another man.
‘She’d gone to see her parents in Hilderbridge and I was with mine in Jackley.’ Morgan managed a wry grin. ‘We didn’t get on with our in-laws.’
Stringer said, low-voiced, as Morgan moved out of earshot, ‘We started at the Foinmen.’
‘Of course you would. Good Lord, yes.’
‘We’ve been at it — ’ He looked at the watch on his sinewy wrist with its furring of black hair ‘— like nine hours. There’s two other parties, one doing the southeast and one the Pertsey side.’
By mid-afternoon they were on the lower slopes of Lustley Foin. Stephen wasn’t hungry. He felt invigorated, exhilarated by the search. It wasn’t often that he had a whole day out on the moor. As he clambered over the rocks, parting the scrub and the brambles to peer into crevices, he heard a droning throb overhead and looked up to see a helicopter. It was circling slowly and very low down, almost touching, it seemed at one point, the summit of Big Allen.
Stringer cocked a thumb in Morgan’s direction. ‘That copter belongs to some mate of his father-in-law. Useful if she’s out in the open.’
A bramble whipped and clawed Stephen across the neck. He put his hand up to it and saw the blood streaked on his fingers. There was no point in climbing the foin, she wouldn’t be up there. They spread across the opening to the valley that was called Jackley Plain, and there Roger Morgan could go no further. He didn’t quite collapse. He sat down on a stone and put his head in his hands. Of all the members of the party he was the one from whom the most endurance was called, but of all the members of the party he was perhaps the only one unused to sustained walking or manual labour, and he was also the smallest. Stephen felt a flicker of contempt for him.
‘Sorry,’ Morgan said gruffly. ‘I’m dead beat. I’ve had no sleep since the night before last.’ He looked at Stephen with recognition. ‘You’re one of the Whalbys, aren’t you? You and your father came to our place to cover a settee.’
Stephen didn’t much like to be reminded of this in public. ‘Oh, yes. Jackley. St Edmund’s Avenue.’
Morgan nodded. ‘Better get on, I suppose.’
‘I should sit there a bit longer,’ one of the policemen said. ‘Then we’ll get you down to the road. We’ve got our vehicles at quarter mile intervals all the way from Hilderbridge to Jackley.’
Stephen started off again and the others began to follow him. He wasn’t going to be left behind, nursing Morgan. Overhead the helicopter circled once more, making a black locust-shaped shadow on the sunlit turf of the plain.
They stood admiring each other.
‘You’re lovely,’ said Nick.
‘So are you.’
‘I did make you happy, didn’t I?’
‘You know you did. Couldn’t you tell?’ She reddened, for she wasn’t yet used to this kind of talk. ‘I never knew it would be like that.’
‘I get a strange feeling when you talk that way. It’s a strange situation, isn’t it? It makes you more mine than if there’d been others or if your marriage had been real.’
She nodded. ‘And you more mine.’
‘Stay with me, Lyn. I don’t mean all night, I know you can’t, but stay with me for the evening.’
‘No.’ She began to put her clothes on, blue denim jeans, white tee-shirt, shoulders thin and straight with bones like white shell. ‘It’s seven now. I ought to have been home two hours ago.’
Nick said, but very gently to take the sting out of the words, ‘You’re not his mother.’