It was the region of Vangmoor least familiar to him. But he took the long, low, rubble-crowned crest of Knamber Foin as his landmark. There was no moon, but no matter how dense the sky and how dark it grew, the irregular, tumbled shape of the foin never quite became invisible, but was always a deeper blackness against the dark. And as deep a silence prevailed. For all that distance he saw only two cars, saw them by their lights that threw up arcs into the indigo air.

When he reached the portal to the pony level, coming up to it from below out of Bow Dale, he put on his torch. It gave a poor thin light. He had grown used to the other one and had forgotten how inadequate the small one was. But he didn’t need much light, not really. The scissors were in his other pocket.

He knelt down on the shale splinters, the small flat stones, that formed the floor of the tunnel, untied the mouth of the sack and pulled the sack down off the body. It lay face-downwards, the hair which cloaked it colourless and dully lustrous in the weak little beam of light.

A car passed over the ‘bridge’. Stephen froze. He switched off the torch and knelt there in the pitch darkness. But the car wasn’t going to stop or even slacken speed. When Stephen thought about the geography of the place, the way the road passed right over where he was as a road might over a railway tunnel, he knew he or his little spot of light couldn’t possibly have been seen. For all that, it was unnerving.

After a little while he put on the torch again. He took the scissors out of his pocket and clipped off all the hair close to the scalp. Another car passed along the road above his head and he felt the roof of the tunnel rumble. He twisted the single thick hank of hair into a skein, laid it in the bottom of the sack and rolled the sack up around it.

14

The morning was dull and grey, the air still. Before leaving the house Stephen phoned Dadda, intending to tell him not to come for lunch as Lyn wasn’t well. But Dadda himself had entered that phase of his depression which was a kind of dark night of the soul. He picked up the phone but he didn’t speak. Stephen only knew the phone had been answered because the ringing stopped. Then he heard breathing and catches of breath.

‘Dadda? Stephen.’

The voice when it came sounded infinitely remote and small. ‘You needn’t expect me, I shan’t be coming.’

‘Right. Well, you know best, Dadda.’

‘Aye. I know I’d be bloody better off dead.’

Peach was sitting on the kitchen counter, staring at the fridge. Stephen remembered he hadn’t fed him the night before. He opened a can of cat food and Peach, though never quite abandoning a calm stateliness, fell upon it. The cat would have to go, Stephen thought. The kindest thing would be to have it destroyed, better than finding it yet another home. He’d see about it tomorrow.

He took the hair out of the sack and put it into the pocket of his zipper jacket. Then it occurred to him that if by some mischance the house and his clothes were to be searched, it would look bad for him to have a stray blonde hair found inside his jacket pocket, He wrapped the hair in a length of plastic clinging film and put it in his rucksack with the sack, the rope and the torch. Kevin was getting his car out to go down to St Ebba’s and fetch Joanne and the baby home. Stephen waited until he had gone and then he too left Tace Way.

The moor, as if its thirst had been quenched, lay calm and sleepy under the low, still mass of cloud. The roads were dry now and the surface of the moor appeared so, except that sometimes where Stephen trod a puddle of water would well up around his boot. He met a fisherman coming away from the Hilder with his tackle and an umbrella. Along the Reeve’s Way two boys were walking with an Alsatian. People were easing their way back onto Vangmoor, but today or tomorrow when Lyn’s body was found it would be cleared again and this time surely for good. That would be the final scouring that must make it over exclusively to Rip and himself.

Big Allen was veiled in whitish cloud like a sheet of frayed net that hung part of the way down its slopes. In the dale the stillness was such as to make Stephen feel that the whole bleak landscape with its ruined coes, paved circle and skeletal windlass was waiting with held breath for something to happen, For drama, for tragedy, for some violent act. A gust of wind would have blown away that impression in a moment, but there was no wind and the air hung with suspended moisture.

By now he thought he could have descended Apsley Sough without the rope but he used it for safety’s sake. It was cold in the shaft and the walls felt clammy. When he reached the bottom he made his way not directly to Rip’s Cavern but along the winze that must lead under the George Crane Coe. It seemed to him that, since the rain of the night before, there was more water underfoot than formerly, so that the feeling he had had of walking on the seashore was heightened. The shale lay in at least an inch of water, and as he came towards the place where the subterranean lake was, water was trickling steadily down the walls of the passage.

But he didn’t go to look again at the lake. He went into the chamber where egress had been blocked by a fall and there, under the heap of fallen rubble, he buried the sack. He found he was breathing rather shortly and rapidly and when he tried to light one of the candles the pinpoint flame guttered and went out. Something in the atmosphere, something no doubt brought about by the rain, was depleting the oxygen in the mine.

The air was pure enough back the way he had come. This time the candle flame burned steadily. At the fork he took the right-hand winze and here the only sign that the atmosphere above ground and the weather had changed was a strengthening of the metallic smell, the smell perhaps of vestiges of lead. Stephen paused on the threshold of Rip’s Cavern, moving the candle in a slow surveying circle.

What he saw made him blow it out and shine his torch. There were new candles in the bottles and a third candle in a brass candlestick. An unopened bottle of cider stood there also and a tankard, and between them was a box of Swan Vestas with a spent match on top of it. But what most excited Stephen, almost making him gasp aloud, was that the sleeping bag on the mattress lay half unzipped and on the pillow in a worn white cotton pillowslip was the impress of where a head had rested. Rip had passed the previous night here.

Stephen went farther into the chamber. The biscuits and the corned beef had been eaten, all the beer had been drunk. Never before had Stephen been so conscious of the recent presence of Rip in the chamber. It was as if he had left only minutes before he arrived, perhaps even while he was at the other end of the mine, burying the sack, or that they had passed each other, ghostlike, unhearing, unperceiving, one taking the passage out to the sough, the other padding along the winze to the newly vacated chamber. Stephen trembled with excitement. He had to sit on the floor, on the carpet of sacks, and breathe deeply to calm himself.

After a little while he undid the flaps on the top of the secret box. It occurred to him that he should have brought some small possession of Lyn’s, a hair fastener or a brooch or even that cairngorm ring Dadda had given her, to put with the mementoes of Marianne Price and Ann Morgan. The most important thing, though, he had remembered. Carefully he unwrapped the long smooth skein of hair. In colour it came somewhere between the shades of the other two, being darker than the dazzling white-blonde Stephen liked to think of as Marianne’s and fairer than Ann Morgan’s deep corn gold. He put the hair he had brought beside the others and tried to imagine Rip’s feelings when next he opened the box and saw it for himself. Astonishment, wonder, amusement — it might even make him laugh. Somehow Stephen didn’t think he would feel fear.