Down on the road he felt safer. He knew better than to take shelter under a tree, it was too late anyway to take shelter now. There was no one about, the village was deserted. The rain came down in a steady crashing cascade and in Tace Way people had put lights on inside their houses as if it were evening. The gutters streamed with gurgling rivers. There were no lights on in his own house and he took heart and hurried this last lap, past his car, down the sideway to the back door.

It wasn’t quite closed. A corner of the doormat was turned up and caught between the frame and the door, preventing it from closing. His heart ran into a fast irregular beat. He kicked off his sandals and pushed open the door and went in, padding across the kitchen floor to the open doorway into the living room.

He stopped. In the false dusk he could see Lyn standing close up against the front window, her back to him, looking out at the darkness and the rain. Her fair hair, long and hanging loose and covering half her back, had a higher burnish in the weak light than in strong. It gleamed like spun metal. She hadn’t heard him come in. His body galvanized, tensing as a runner’s does at the starting line. He saw the window and the womanly shape against it and the woman’s hair, and then the shape blurred, its outlines becoming fuzzy, mirage-like. He shuddered once. A dazzlement half-blinded him and fused the past and the recent past and the present, and he took a running bound, barefooted across the room, seized Lyn by the throat, grasped her neck till his nails met round it, and dug in his fingers.

She began a choking cry his hands immediately stifled. She fell forward, first into a kind of dreadful curtsey, then to her knees, then prone, face downwards to the floor. He was pulled with her, his hands anchored to the thin stalk of her neck, until he lay upon her body as he had never done in life. He lay and held on. It seemed to him, so locked were his hands and so enduring the clutch, that when he took them away her head must come away with them. And when at last he did release his grip, his fingers were swollen and his palms marked with weals as hands are that have carried heavy baggage.

Stephen, huddled in his sodden clothes, rolled over on to his face and fell at once into a deep sleep.

13

The storm was over and rain was falling silently. The cat awakened Stephen. He awoke when Peach rubbed himself against his outflung hand. His sleep, he saw from his watch, had lasted an hour and a half and had restored him to a thinking aware being without deluding him as to what he had done. Tentatively, not looking, he reached out one finger and touched one of Lyn’s fingers. It was cold.

Peach sat on the carpet between the living and the dead, washing his face. Stephen got up and went into the kitchen. The back door had been open all the time, had now blown wider open. Anyone could have come in. That made him understand what the future might hold. He filled a glass with water and drank it. He locked the back door. Then he went upstairs and took off his cold, damp and wrinkled clothes, put on a clean pair of jeans and a clean shirt, went into his study and fetched one of the cheap-offer sacks he had bought when he bought the rope and the torch. The glue on Tace’s head hadn’t held, and he sat there on the desk, contemplating the moor, with a hole in his skull like a shrapnel wound.

He took the sack downstairs. From the top of the bookcase Peach watched him with placid, light-filled, yellow eyes, his pendent tail swaying gently. Stephen couldn’t stand that. He shut the cat in the kitchen and, keeping his eyes averted — for this time he wasn’t attracted by the sight of the dead as he had been by Marianne Price — he bundled the body into the sack and fastened the top with the hemp strings attached to it.

It was five o’clock but much less dark. Lights no longer showed in any of the houses on the other side of the street. As he watched, Kevin’s car came splashing down Tace Way and turned into the driveway opposite. Kevin got out from the driver’s side, Mrs Newman from the other, and with coats pulled up over their heads they plunged to their front doors. Joanne and the baby hadn’t yet been brought home, Stephen noted. If they had it would have been difficult, almost impossible, for him to have explained Lyn’s absence.

He lifted the sack in his arms and laid it between the settee and the wall, pushing the settee back against it so that it was entirely concealed. There, for a while, it could stay while he thought what to do. The attack, the murder, had broken nothing in the room but Lyn herself, had left no signs of what had happened but an overturned stool and a displaced cushion. He picked up the stool and put the cushion back, repeating the word ‘murder’ to himself. Although he could scarcely quite believe it yet, he had done murder, he had done what Rip had done and they were equal. He reached behind the settee and felt through the sacking the shape and firmness of the body in order to convince himself. It was true, he must believe, he had done murder.

And having done what Rip did, why shouldn’t he dispose of his victim as Rip did of his, by laying the body on some chosen spot on the moor? Why shouldn’t it be the third in the slowly progressive series of murdered girls, long-haired, blonde and young?

Even though this time it was his own wife who was dead, there could be no question of the police suspecting him. This time there would be no interrogation in a little stuffy room. Hadn’t Manciple told him he was exonerated from suspicion because his blood subgrouping wasn’t that of the killer of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan?

Stephen sat down on the green velvet cushions under which Lyn’s body lay and began to think what he would do. His car was on the driveway with its bonnet pointing towards the road. Before putting the sack in under the hatchback it would probably be safer to wait until dark. Marianne Price had lain among the Foinmen, Ann Morgan in the powder house of the Duke of Kelsey’s Mine. This time should it be the George Crane Coe perhaps or Knamber Hole? It might be risky to attempt to carry a body across the broad and exposed Goughdale, and on a dark, wet, moonless night impossible.

A sudden knocking on the back door made him jump. He looked quickly round the room to check that all was well. The cat slipped past him as he went into the kitchen. Through the frosted glass he could make out the shape of Mrs Newman. Suppose he hadn’t locked that door and the body had still lain where he left it while he slept!

His mother-in-law came in, untying a plastic rainhat, tipping her umbrella into the sink.

‘I don’t know when I’ve seen rain like it. And all that lightning! My auntie was a one for storms, she used to cover up all the mirrors. In the war they had one of those Morrison shelters, Morrison or Anderson, whatever they call them, and after the war was over my auntie said to her husband they’d keep it so as she could get in it in a storm. Where’s Lyn?’

‘Well, actually, she went charging off into Hilderbridge before it all started and I expect she thought it was too jolly wet to try and get back.’

‘Why ever didn’t she take the car?’ Mrs Newman asked, but she didn’t pursue it. ‘I just popped over to say we won’t come in tomorrow, Stephen. Joanne’s being fetched home in the morning with Chantal, but Kevin says you and Lyn come over in the evening and I’m to say they’d love to see you. You haven’t seen my little grandbaby yet, have you?’

Stephen said eagerly but without preparatory thought, ‘Good Lord, I’m terribly sorry but we’re going out tomorrow night.’

Well might Mrs Newman look astonished. When had they ever gone out together on a Sunday night or on any other night, come to that? He said hastily, ‘To be perfectly honest with you, my uncle Stanley asked us after the funeral yesterday and in the circumstances I couldn’t say no.’