‘There was a woman lived in Hall cottages when you girls were little,’ said Mrs Newman, ‘used to feed her family on cat food. Out of tins, I mean. She used to give them Pedigree Chum too, but it was mostly cat food. She liked the fishiness.’

‘No thanks, Lyn,’ said her father, ‘I won’t have another sandwich.’

‘And she had this baby and it had a birthmark like a cat’s face on its stomach.’

‘Ours’ll have a Mars bar.’

‘I’ve no doubt it’s true,’ said Trevor. ‘Could be a rare form of imprinting, could even be stigmata.’

Peach jumped up onto Lyn’s lap. He lay there, purring. His pale golden, ringed tail hung down and sometimes the tip of it twitched. Dadda was the first to leave. He hadn’t come in the van. Bob Newman offered him a lift but he wouldn’t accept it, he said he would get the bus. Joanne and her mother lingered, gossiping, by their adjoining gates as if they wouldn’t see each other again for half a year. Lyn washed the dishes. She got out the mower to cut the back lawn.

‘I say, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘I think I’ll go out for a bit, blow the cobwebs away.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’

His eyes became opaque. She could see he didn’t want her. ‘That wouldn’t be much fun for you. You have a rest, put your feet up.’

Was she still trying to retrieve something? Still hoping for something from him? ‘I’m twenty-five,’ she said, with the edge to her voice that was the nearest she got to temper.

‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that. I only meant you look tired. Why don’t you go out somewhere? Take the car.’

‘Perhaps I will.’ She seemed to hear Nick’s voice saying, We are going to love each other.

‘All right if I’m not back till late, then?’ Stephen said, eager for her approval.

‘Of course it’s all right, of course.’

He set off jauntily, whistling. Golden eyes looked at him from among the leaves of the yellow maple tree where Peach sat cleverly camouflaged. Stephen walked along the Jackley road, past the crossroads and up to the Vale of Allen. It had been a white day, white blank sky, white thin sun, warmish and dull. The sky was white and still, unmarked by cloud or blue.

A car was parked by the roadside, on the left hand side and facing north. Stephen thought it a curious place to leave one’s car, blocking, or partly blocking, the northbound roadway, while taking it a farther ten yards on would have enabled its driver to pull in onto the bridlepath that traversed the Vale as far as the Reeve’s Way. The car was a small yellow Volkswagen. Stephen couldn’t see a sign of its owner. The land here was dotted about with gorse bushes and he half-expected a dog to come bounding out from among them. But apart from the gentle, almost mesmeric, hum of the bees, all was silent and still.

He climbed up on to the Reeve’s Way and followed it northwards into Goughdale. The owner of the car was nowhere to be seen, nowhere in all these wide plains that lay about him, though the car was still there, a bright yellow dot on the distant road. The causeway commanded a view of all this region of the moor, but once he had jumped down and was in the shallow bowl of Goughdale, he could see nothing except the remains of surface workings and the louring slopes of Big Allen.

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.’