“The Moss? Mecklin Moss, would that be?”

“You’re remarkably well informed for a stranger,” said Winander. “If you stay another couple of days, we’ll have to elect you queen. Yes, it was Mecklin. I was helping a neighbor haul out a beast of his that had got bogged down when we chanced upon this. Something in that bit of bog must have preserved it, I don’t know how. I hauled it out, cleaned it up and left it standing here till it told me what it wanted to be.”

“And it told you, wolf?”

“Not really. In fact it was Frek Woollass who came up with that idea. She saw something lupine in the twist of the grain. She offered to commission me. I said I didn’t want her money just her body so we shook hands on that. As many hours modeling for me as I took on the wolf head.”

“So you’ve been dragging your feet,” suggested Sam.

“Perish the unprofessional thought!” said Winander, twinkling. “I’ve had to prepare a site too. She wants her grandfather to have a view of it from his window. Gerry, her dad, isn’t keen on having a view of it from anywhere. Too pagan for his taste. But like most young women of my acquaintance, it’s Frek who calls the tune. So it will be in place as promised before she goes back to Cambridge which is this coming weekend.”

“ Cambridge? You mean the university?”

“That’s the one. Our Frek is a real-life don. Eddas and sagas and Nordic mythology’s her thing, hence maybe her fancy for the wolf. You don’t seem impressed?”

“Seems a waste of good money teaching that stuff at university,” she said.

“An opinion I’d keep to yourself if Frek’s around,” he said. “Anyway, this is promised, but if anything else takes your fancy, we’ll see if we can work out a deal.”

Another twinkle. He was irrepressible, she thought, as he flung open the double barn door and led her into the workshop. This was relatively tidy after the yard. Bang in the middle, lit by the rectangle of light falling in through the open door was a wide-eyed marble angel brooding over a headstone. Sam stood before it, struck by a sense of familiarity stopping short of recognition. She lowered her gaze to read the inscription:

BILLY KNIPP

taken in his 17th year

sadly missed by his grieving mother

“Think what a present thou to God hast sent”

“This the boy they buried yesterday?” she said.

“Yes. Almost done. I’ll be setting it up later.”

“Nice inscription,” she said.

“ Milton. If you knew Billy, you might think it a touch ironical.”

He gave her a twinkle as if expecting curiosity about the boy.

Instead she asked, “So what are you, Mr. Winander – international artist or village jobbing craftsman, like your ancestors, according to Peter K.?”

He was hard to put down.

“From the stuff I see winning the Turner Prize year after year, the latter is the nobler designation. I am proud of the fact that once upon a time round here the Winanders did everything that needed to be done with hammer and chisel and saw and adze. First Winander son was the blacksmith, second the mason, third the carpenter.”

“What did they do with daughters? Stake them out on a hillside?”

“You’ve definitely been reading up on us,” he laughed.

“So what number son are you?”

“I was unique,” he said. “So I had to do it all.”

“Including the wild pranks I read about in the Guide?”

“Especially the pranks. Seen enough?”

“I reckon.”

As she turned from the memorial she noticed something on the floor concealed by a piece of sacking. She pulled it aside and found herself looking at a reclining nude, half life-size, in some kind of creamy, almost white wood. It was a piece full of energy with the violent chisel marks clearly visible and nothing classical in the pose. It was blatantly sexual, legs splayed, vulva boldly gouged. Yet it had the same pensive features as the marble angel. And suddenly she knew whose they were.

“Miss Woollass certainly keeps her side of a bargain,” she said.

If she hoped to surprise him, she failed.

“Yes, you know where you are with Frek,” he said.

“You can even see where you’ve been,” she said ironically. To her surprise her response made him roar with far more laughter than it deserved.

He led her from the workshop now into the house.

“Find yourself a seat in there if you can,” he said. “Won’t be a second.”

Chaos resumed in the room he left her in. The only chair with space enough to sit on looked as if it had been cleared by natural slippage and her feet rested on a slew of books. The floor was littered with artifacts ranging from a Valkyrie bust in sandstone to a giant wrought-iron corkscrew twisted into a granite cork. The main ceiling beam was covered with hooks from which depended a row of grotesque and sexually explicit corn-dollies which dangled there like Execution Dock on a bad day.

The only conventional piece on show was a portrait enjoying sole occupancy of the broad chimney breast. Its subject was a smiling young man with tousled blond hair standing beside an apple tree just beginning to blossom. He was leaning forward with his outstretched hands cupping a nest in which half a dozen chicks had just broken out of sky-blue eggs. Around his feet were primroses, cowslips, wood anemones, all the flowers of spring, while the hills behind were bright with the yellow of gorse. Yet nothing in this exuberance of vernal color reduced the brightness radiating from the youth. On the contrary, he seemed its center if not its source.

“Ready for another?” said Winander.

He’d pulled on a T-shirt with the inscription Love is an extra. She checked the can in her hand, found once more it was empty. Beer and toast just vanished in Illthwaite.

She caught the new can he sent flying toward her, crushed the old one in her hand and looked for somewhere to deposit it.

“Chuck it in the corner,” he said. “I’ll probably be able to sell it to some rich Yank. Now, Miss Flood, as you’ve made it pretty clear you’re not interested in either my art or my body, what is it you’ve come for?”

“I told you before. I want to hear about my namesake. Look, let’s not pussyfoot, you saw me find the inscription on the church wall. You were up the tower, right?”

It was a guess but he didn’t even argue.

“Yes, I went up the ladder, partly because I don’t attend religious ceremonies, also to check to see if there were any evidence of your claim to have heard someone up there.”

“Why didn’t you just ask your Neanderthal chum? I was convinced I’d just made a mistake till I realized in the pub there were two of them.”

“I did wonder. But you don’t get far asking Laal questions he doesn’t want to answer.”

“Laal? That’s what you called the one digging the grave, wasn’t it? It can’t have been him up there, must have been the other. What’s his name?”

Winander took a suck of lager and said, “Laal.”

“They’ve got the same name? Isn’t it hard enough telling them apart anyway?”

“Impossible. That’s the point. But here in Skaddale we find a way of dealing with impossibilities. So the rule is, whichever one you’re talking to is Laal, which incidentally means little. The other one’s Girt, meaning big. But as you never talk to him, to all intent and purposes, he doesn’t exist.”

He cocked his head on one side as if expecting bewilderment, or at least dissent.

Instead, after a moment’s thought, she nodded vigorously.

“I like it,” she said. “It’s algebraic. And, paradoxically, even though it’s a device to counter the problem of differentiation, I presume they go along with it because to object would be to allow themselves to be differentiated?”

He shook his head and said, “Too subtle for me, Miss Flood. I’m just a simple Cumbrian marra.”

“Don’t know what that means exactly, but I know it’s a load of bull. You saw me read your inscription, Mr. Winander – ”