They set off up the narrow sheep-trod toward the Moss. As they got nearer and the character of the place became more and more apparent, Sam said, “Thor wasn’t exaggerating when he said it was dreary.”

“I did tell you. Yesterday when I was here at least I could lift my eyes to the hills, but not much point today.”

He was right. The storm’s battle plan was clear. It had sent its cloudy columns probing out of the west to occupy the high ground and now most of the surrounding hills were visible only as dark islands in a sea of billowing grays. Directly above them the sun still shone, but it gave at best a lurid light. The shadows they cast seemed to move around them with an independent life. The wind had dropped and the air felt menacingly heavy.

“Good day for Ragnarok,” said Sam. “With as many k’s as you like.”

“You’ve been talking to Frek,” said Mig.

“Well, she is my auntie,” said Sam, trying to keep things light. But her attempt fell flat, even for herself, and they walked on in silence over increasingly boggy ground till Mig stopped abruptly and said, “This I think must have been the site of Mecklin Shaw.”

“The wood where they crucified your namesake,” said Sam. “And up ahead where those big pools are, I presume that’s where my namesake was drowned.”

“I think so. There is nothing to mark either spot,” said Mig.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sam. “Seems well enough marked to me.”

He turned to face her, looking very serious.

“Sam, what exactly are we doing here?” he asked.

She said, “Look around you. See any stones?”

He looked, with a little satirical exaggeration.

“Stones? No. I don’t believe I do. I should have thought your scientific mind would have worked out that anything of any weight would have sunk into this stuff eons ago. Why do you keep going on about stones?”

“Because,” she said with the patience of a teacher explaining something to a slow child, “the inquest record says that Saintly Sam, the curate, had filled his pockets with stones to make his body sink more quickly when he topped himself.”

He put his hand to his brow as if to massage away a headache.

“What inquest record?”

“The one on Sam Flood, dummy!”

“You’ve seen it? But how…? Why…?”

“I’ve got connections,” she said, echoing Noddy Melton. “So where did the stones come from? That was one question no one seemed to ask.”

“Why should they?” he said dismissively. “He probably picked them up as he came up Stanebank. I didn’t pay much attention, but I seem to recall the surface of the track consists largely of fragments of rock. I presume that’s what stane means. Stone.”

“Thanks for the linguistic lesson,” said Sam dismissively. “I did pay attention. Yes, you’re right. Fragments, lumps, slivers, broken pieces ground down over the years. Nothing like these.”

She reached into her bumbag and grasped the stones she’d removed from the tub in Thor’s yard. Then, cupping them in her hands, she held them out for Mig to examine.

It was, she felt, a minor coup de théâtre. The way Mig reacted, it could have been the end of Don Giovanni. She reminded herself he didn’t get out much.

He was staring transfixed at the shiny smooth ovoids. When he spoke, there were two false starts before the words came out.

“What are these?” he asked.

“These are the kind of stones Sam had in his pockets to weigh him down. I’ve seen the actual stones, and believe me, they look just like these.”

She spoke triumphantly, but Mig’s reply was uttered so softly he seemed to be speaking to himself.

“Stones,” he murmured. “Stones, not eggs.”

“Sorry?” she said. “What the hell have eggs got to do with it? Not much point stuffing your pockets with eggs if you want to drown.”

He raised his eyes from her hands to her face and said with a quiet urgency, “When I saw the portrait at the Forge, the only thing that wasn’t quite the same was that he had a nest in his hand, full of fledglings bursting out of their eggshells. My ghost was showing me what I thought were whole eggs, and big ones too, more like hens’ or ducks’ than songbirds’. But now I see it wasn’t eggs he was showing me… it was stones… like these stones…”

She shook her head impatiently. Here she was doing important detective work and all he could do was go drifting off into his dreamworld.

She said, “Look, the point is, where did curate Sam get these stones from? One possibility is he picked them up from the Forge, which is where I got these three. Thor uses them, or used to, in making some kind of mosaics. He did one up at the Hall way back. In fact he worked on it in the spring of 1961, around the time it all happened – Pam being shipped off to Oz, the suicide…”

Mig had made a visible effort to focus all his attention on what she was saying.

“Hold on,” he said. “Are you suggesting this poor devil was still so much in control of himself that he decided on his way up the Bank that it might be useful to weigh himself down, so he made a diversion to have a look for some suitable ballast? Surely if such an idea did occur, he’d simply have grabbed handfuls of broken stone from the track before he turned off and headed up here?”

Sam looked at him approvingly.

“There is a brain in there after all,” she said. “You’re dead right. That’s what he’d have done. So?”

He looked at her hopelessly and shrugged. She felt like shaking him. His mind had spent so long wrestling with the mystery of apparitions and messages from beyond that he couldn’t follow a trail of reasoning as clear and as simple as 2n = 4. She wished she had a blackboard so she could spell it out.

But in truth she knew that it was only now, up here, in this place, that she was beginning to let herself spell it out completely.

She said very clearly, “He must have had a reason for diverting. We know that he knew Thor wasn’t at home because he’d just caught him shagging Edie down at the Stranger. It’s just possible he might have visited the Forge to find something to aid his suicide that would leave a clear message to Thor. If so, he made a lousy choice. And from what I’ve heard of him he wasn’t that kind of guy. So that leaves the Hall.”

“But why should he visit the Hall?” asked Mig.

“Don’t you listen to anything unless it’s in a burning bush or can walk through walls?” she demanded. “Here’s what we know. Sam goes to the Stranger to see Edie. Why? To talk about their future? Wrong. He goes there because young Pete has just told him that the little girl he’d tried to take care of, my grandmother, had been raped and that Dunstan’s motive in shipping her off to Australia, far from being charitable, had been to get her as far away from Illthwaite as humanly possible before she could open her mouth. Sam is furious, on the kid’s behalf, and on his own because he’s been made a fool of. Catching Edie on the nest can’t have improved his state of mind. But I don’t believe he’d be suicidal. He’d be angrier than ever. I think he was heading up Stanebank to have it out with Dunstan Woollass!”

There. The first half of the blackboard was full. She looked at her calculations and found no flaw.

“But didn’t he meet Dunstan driving down Stanebank or something?” said Mig.

“That’s the evidence Dunstan gave. Said hello, thought the fellow looked distracted, reported this the same evening, soon as he heard the curate had gone missing. What a load of garbage! Think about it: was Sam Flood going to pass the man who’d dumped on little Pam and shut young Pete up with a nod and a hello?”

“You think that he confronted Dunstan?”

“Yes. And not on Stanebank. I think he went up to the Hall. Perhaps Dunstan was getting his car out of the garage. They quarrel. Perhaps Saint Sam is a bit more intemperate than usual. He had cause. And then…”