Stephen felt light and free once he had decided against telling the police. What had they ever done for him that he should help them? Insulted him, called him a psychopath. When he went back to the mine he would go alone.

Lyn went into the bedroom and picked the dead shrew off the counterpane with a handful of tissues. Peach, who had accompanied her upstairs, walking beside her and chattering to her in little chirping mews to announce, perhaps, what awaited her, watched the removal of his tribute with arched back and raised tail.

‘What d’you expect me to do with it?’ Lyn said. ‘Eat it?’ She flushed the tiny velvety corpse down the lavatory. ‘I should have thought a poor little mite like that would have been beneath your dignity.’

Peach stalked into Stephen’s room and jumped up onto the table where the bust of Tace stood. Stephen didn’t like Peach in his study. Lyn went to fetch him out but was distracted by the calendar, the Echo’s ‘Moorland Views’, the Hilder at Loomlade for the month of July. Calendars, dates, the passing of time, she had become obsessed with them. For the third or fourth time that day she counted up the number of days since 24 June. It was easier, but more unrelenting and uncompromising, to do it on a calendar. Ten days. She had made it nine this morning, doing it in her head, but it was ten. Unless, of course, she had made a mistake over 24 June and it really should have been 1 July. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had made that kind of mistake, though in the past it had hardly mattered whether she made a mistake or not.

She picked Peach up. He was very soft and though his body was warm the rosy-gold fur felt cool and sleek to the touch. The rejected shrew forgotten, he began a sonorous purring. Lyn counted the days on the calendar again and made it either ten days or three, but she was sure it was ten. Her body felt unchanged, static, stilled in its rhythmic cycle and waiting. She went downstairs slowly, carrying the cat. It was a warm afternoon, the kind of sunny, cloudy, faintly breezy day that sometimes means a heatwave is coming, but Lyn tied her hair up in a scarf. She tucked in the wisps of hair that showed. There was a chicken and rice dish in the oven for Stephen and Lyn set the timer to start it cooking at five. She wouldn’t leave him a note, she never did. Because of what had happened to him in his childhood, he didn’t like notes left.

She walked along Tace Way and up the village street and across the green to wait outside St Michael’s gates for the bus from Jackley. She thought of how it would be, coming back later in the dark, but Nick wouldn’t let her come back in the dark, he would bring her in Bale’s van. Out alone in Chesney she often felt a little afraid, even in broad daylight. She wondered sometimes if the man who had killed those two girls knew which girls had long blonde hair and which did not, if perhaps he had marked them out for a long time, so it made no difference whether you covered your hair or not. She wasn’t quite alone now, though. In the churchyard the American professor in a broad-brimmed felt hat and blue jeans and Dr Scholl sandals was standing in front of the angel on Tace’s grave. He came out into the road and raised his hat very courteously to Lyn and said good afternoon, though he didn’t know her at all.

The bus came and she sat in the front. She was longing to see Nick, though she hadn’t long to wait, had seen him that morning and the evening before. And yet sometimes, when she thought of Stephen, she wished she had never met him. All this was very like the way she felt about those ten days, dreading as if it were the end of the world that she might be going to have Nick’s child, yet hoping it was true.

Next day the hot weather began. Every morning, very early, a mist hung over Vangmoor and then the sun came up into a sky without clouds, without even those shreds of cirrus that over the moorland nearly always flecked the expanse of blue. It was very hot in Goughdale and the Vale of Allen and each day was a little hotter than the last until there was a short break of coolness and cloud but not of rain before the heatwave came back with a renewed fierceness.

Stephen went out on to the moor every evening. Once he was sure he was going to keep the secret of the mine to himself, his feelings for the man who had found and furnished the underground chamber began to undergo a change. It was as if he had done the man a particular favour in not betraying him, and this seemed to bring them closer together. They were joined now in a common bond. Stephen no longer felt fear of the man, he no longer felt abhorrence. He even imagined their meeting and himself being invited into the chamber as a fit associate of its denizen.

When, after a week or so, he went back again he examined everything carefully to see if any changes might indicate a return during his own absence. The candles looked exactly as they had done after he had blown them out on that last visit. This time he had brought a ruler with him and he measured them, in centimetres to achieve greater accuracy. One was 18.5 centimetres long, the other only 6. The bed and bedding seemed unchanged. Nothing had been removed from the boxes or added to their contents and the pile of clothes was just as he had seen it before. The hair lay coiled and as if sleeping in its burial place.

That evening he remained for a long time on the slopes of Big Allen, crouched down among the heather, watching for someone to come. What exactly he would do when the figure appeared, climbed up the ledge and lowered itself into the mouth of the shaft, Stephen didn’t know. And he need not have speculated, for no one came that night or the next, though he remained out on the hillside, waiting, until long after the sun had gone. He had to find his way home in the dark.

Perhaps it was due to the suspense of waiting or perhaps to sunburn, for he had been out in the dale since noon and his face and arms were fiery, that he fell into another of those fevers of his. He woke up in the night in a sweat that soaked his thin pyjamas and crying, ‘The master of the moor! The master of the moor!’

There was no abatement of the heatwave. On a Wednesday afternoon, an early closing day, Lyn and Nick drove up on to Vangmoor for Nick to see it. He wanted to see the Foinmen and the Hilder and Bow Dale. They sat on the turf in the deep dark shade the standing stones made and looked over to Big Allen and down across Foinmen’s Plain to the roofs of Hilderbridge glittering in the sun, and they saw that as far as they could see, as far as they had been able to see in all their drive and climb up here, they were the only people on the moor. A universal fear had brought them solitude.

‘I haven’t been up here for years,’ Lyn said, ‘and I expect it’ll be years before I come again. There’s something chills me about it even on a day like this.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘So is that snake in your shop but I wouldn’t want to live with it.’

‘You don’t like living here?’

‘It’s rather hard to answer that when I’ve never lived anywhere else.’

She turned on her side away from him. She was sure now. It was nearly three weeks. Tomorrow she would take her specimen into St Ebba’s and have the test and then she would know for certain — but she knew for certain anyway. The child would be born in February, by which time Nick would have been gone six months. She hadn’t told him about the baby and she thought it might be better not to tell him, not ever. She had a plan forming in her mind for Stephen and herself and the child.

Nick touched her shoulder and turned her face towards him. He kissed her lips. ‘Your hands don’t shake any more.’

‘No.’

‘I think you’re the gentlest person I’ve ever known,’ he said.

‘I think you mean I’m a weak person.’

‘No, not a bit. Gentle and strong. Lyn, we’re going to change things, aren’t we? We’re not going to go on like this, never talking of your marriage, never talking about what we’re going to do when next month comes. I have to go away next month. Lyn, look at me.’