True to his word, Malm launched into a spate of questions. This time they were all concerned with the geography of the moor and Manciple, who knew it better than they, had to be called in to assist. It seemed to Stephen that he had already, dozens of times, described the walks he took and the climbs he did, but they wanted it all again. Then the door opened and a man came in. Stephen didn’t even look up, he was so sure it must be their lunch sandwiches arriving, but there was no tray and no sandwiches, only another one of those whispered messages of the kind, no doubt, that yesterday had made him into a psychopath and a murderer. Malm, Hook and Manciple all left the room. Stephen was left alone with Troth.

Troth behaved exactly as if he wasn’t there. He did something Stephen felt no man would do in the company of another unless he felt that other to be less than the dust. There was no mirror in the room but the street plan was framed and glazed. Troth got up. Achieving a passable reflection of his face in the glass, he squeezed the spot on his chin between his two forefingers. He gave a low grunt of pain and blood spurted, a tiny bead of it plummeting onto the frame.

Stephen sat and waited. Troth made him feel acutely uncomfortable by getting behind him and standing there, presumably to look out of the window. He resolved that whatever happened, if they kept him there for hours, if they kept him there all day, he wouldn’t speak to Troth. He stretched his legs and shifted in the chair. His whole body felt tense. They couldn’t do anything to him, could they? They must be bluffing. They couldn’t actually charge an innocent man.

It seemed like many hours but in fact it was just over twenty minutes before Hook came back. He came back alone. Troth was sitting at the table again, wiping his chin on a dirty, bloodstained handkerchief.

‘Right, Mr Whalby, you can go. Thank you for your cooperation.’

‘You mean you’ve finished for today?’

Hook looked anything but pleased. He looked dismayed, defeated. ‘I mean we’ve finished.’

‘Why? What’s happened? You mean that’s all you’ve got to say after putting me through the third degree for the best part of two days?’

‘We put you through no third degree.’

‘At least you can tell me why I’m to be let off the hook now.’

Troth laughed. It must have been at Stephen’s unconscious pun. His laugh was like a schoolboy’s crow and when he had uttered it he left the room. Hook muttered something about new evidence but Stephen didn’t bother to listen to him, he felt too angry and indignant. If he had encountered Troth then, out in the corridor, he would have hit him as hard as he could and damn the consequences! Troth, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was Inspector Manciple who came up to Stephen and said he wanted to explain about the ‘small misunderstanding’.

They had just received the result of a complex analysis of the blood taken from Ann Morgan’s fingernails. Stephen was suddenly conscious again of the scratch on his neck. He actually felt it itch and tingle as Manciple spoke. The blood belonged to group B which was Stephen’s own group and to which only 6 per cent of the population belonged. With highly sophisticated forensic techniques, Manciple explained, they could now narrow down blood types much more closely than that, and further analysis had shown features in the blood found in the fingernails which Stephen’s own didn’t share.

‘Pity that couldn’t have been done before,’ Stephen said. ‘I must say I take rather a dim view of being treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever.’

But it was over, he hadn’t made a fool of himself, and now he was free. There wasn’t even a threat hanging over him that they might start on him again tomorrow, for they knew now that he wasn’t their man, that it couldn’t be he. His relief was immeasurably greater than that he had felt the day before, walking out of here with Harriet Crozier. It was almost as if — though this was ridiculous — he had done it, had killed those girls, and was sick with joy at having escaped justice.

The sun had come through and the day was going to be hot. Sunlight and mist lay on the distant peaks of the moor and it shimmered in a golden haze. He could go there again, with his freedom the ban was lifted, he could walk there, climb, go whenever he chose.

He went into the hardware shop on the opposite side of the square to the Kelsey Arms and bought rope. It was a self-service store and in the electrical section they had on a display of campers’ flashlights. Stephen chose a big one with a handle like a jug, a tubular element and a battery guaranteed to last for several hours. Because they had large-size jute sacks on cheap offer he bought two with an idea they might come in useful.

The library next for a book on old mine workings. They had one, they said, but it wasn’t in stock. Would he like to order it? Stephen decided against that. It probably wasn’t necessary. He had been successful enough at getting into the Goughdale mine without a book when he was twelve, so why should he need one now?

Dadda, downstairs at Whalbys’, chain-smoked his little cigarettes. With exquisite delicacy and fastidiousness he was replacing the beading on the doors of a glass-fronted cabinet he had just reglazed. He was currently on an emotional peak, at the zenith of his cheerful or manic phase, and he essayed wit, something he did on an average once a year. He looked at the coil of rope and his face split into a nutcracker grin.

‘Happen they’d done away with hanging in this country.’

Stephen laughed heartily. He laughed the way one does at the jokes of a man who needs to make them but hardly ever can. ‘Good Lord, Dadda, I’m not for the high jump this time, I’m glad to say. They’ve let me go without a stain on my character.’

‘I should bloody think so.’ Dadda dabbed on a flick of glue, pressed in another inch or two of carved rosewood. He looked up at Stephen, ‘That aunt of yours has been round asking for you.’ Dadda had never addressed or referred to his in-laws by their given names. ‘That one, Mrs Pettitt, they call her,’ as if they called her something to which she had no right. ‘She wanted to tell you your grandma’s been taken into Hilderbridge General with a stroke.’ He paused reflectively, wiped a spot of glue from a finger. ‘Old Mother Naulls,’ he said, and savagely, ‘the old bitch, the old bitch!’

That policeman had more or less called him a psychopath. His euphoria past, Stephen smarted when he remembered those insults. He would have liked to take action over that, legal action, and get a public apology out of the man, but he had an idea that that kind of thing was privileged. In an interrogation, inside a police station, they could say what they liked to you and get away with it. How much more might they have said, though, if they had known he had once made a violent attack on his grandmother!

Her life was nearly over. He supposed they had taken her into hospital to die. How old would she be now? Eighty or thereabouts. She had always seemed old to him, old as the hills even in those days when he had badgered her about his mother.

‘Why won’t you tell me where she is?’

‘Because I won’t, that’s why. She’s got a family of her own, she’s got a boy and a girl, and she don’t want you upsetting them all. Now then!’

‘But she’s married to —’ He had almost said, ‘married to us.’

‘No, she’s not. She’s married to Mr Evans and she’s got Barnabas and Barbara.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Don’t you call me a liar, young Stephen.’

He had been ‘young’ Stephen then, small Stephen who didn’t come much more than up to her shoulder. A year later he had grown six inches, and in the following year …

‘He’ll be towering above me soon,’ said Arthur Naulls, ‘towering above me.’

‘You can tell me her address. I could write to her.’