At first he disliked this thought. It meant that the moor had in the past few days become known not as somewhere unique and beautiful but as the place where a young girl had been killed. Then, as he crossed the Loomlade road and entered the Vale of Allen, his feelings underwent a change. The moor seemed more his own when it was unpeopled, so that his childhood fantasy might have become real and he be the lord of this wild country.

Big Allen, the highest peak of the foinland, which was so often veiled in mist or appeared as a blurred blue shape, this morning showed every crevice and crag on its slopes, every wind-bent bilberry, every clump of ling. The air was as clear as the air only is after prolonged rain. The crinkle-crankle path that traversed the hillside was a bright brown hairpin, woven between the green and purplish and silvery heather. Now, in the dales beyond he could see the remains of the old mine workings. No lead had been mined on Vangmoor for a hundred years, but the engine houses and the housing for water wheels, once deemed so hideous, now in ruin had a beauty of their own. He climbed the lower slopes of Big Allen and stood, looking westwards. From here the Foinmen were hidden by the bulk of Ringer’s Foin with the rock on its top like a bell. In order to see them he would have had to climb a couple of hundred feet more. But the Hilder revealed itself, running down like a tinsel thread, crossed at one point by stepping stones, at another by the massive stone pillars that once had supported an aqueduct bringing water to the buildings of the Goughdale Mine. The waters of the river were broken and scintillating, splashing in bright sparks where it bounded over rocks on its way to the town. And Hilderbridge lay in the sunshine, its slate roofs all turned to planes of silver, its spires sharp needles, as if a silversmith had made it and dropped it in the valley between the meadows and the moor.

Beneath where he stood, under the western slopes of the foin and the wastes of Goughdale, was a network of subterranean chambers and passages and galleries. The last of the mines had been closed around the time of Tace’s birth and the entrances to the shafts had been closed or blocked by rockfalls. Stephen walked down and back to Loomlade. An hour later he was in Chesney, having seen no animate thing but two bumble bees and a rook. The gatehouse lodge to Chesney Hall that the police had taken over also looked deserted today. David Southworth, who owned the hall and who was the nephew of Tace’s widow, had done up the lodge as a home for his wife’s mother but since her death it had stood empty. Stephen went up the path and looked in the window. He hadn’t been in the lodge since Helena Naulls had left it on the death of her husband. The old wallpapers, nasturtiums in the living room, stripes and posies and true lovers’ knots in the hall, were gone and the walls painted white. There seemed to be no dark corners left, no little cupboards and half-hidden shelves through which a boy could hunt for evidence of his lost mother.

A man was sitting at a desk, typing, another stood by a filing cabinet. Both had their backs to him. Stephen moved away before they could become aware of his head blocking out some of their light. He walked home through the quiet and at this hour deserted village.

4

The fanbelt on the car broke, making Lyn late for work. Stephen tied it up but the string broke and he had to drive the car into Hilderbridge very slowly and carefully so as not to overheat the engine. Mr Gillman had had to attend to his own patients. He said to Lyn, ‘The young chap from Bale’s was in here asking for you. Asking for “Miss” Whalby actually, but I put him right on that one.’

Lyn took off her coat and came back to where her desk and typewriter and appointments book were. Two women had come in and she asked them to wait, giving them magazines to look at. She felt disproportionately upset. It was ridiculous to be upset at all, since she had herself intended to tell Nick she was married as soon as she saw him, or to make sure he saw her left hand on which today she had taken care to wear her wedding ring. She was imagining him shocked by what Mr Gillman said, leaving without a word, returning to the pet shop and alone there ever since, brooding on his disappointment and her treachery. But why should he have reacted like that? How did she know it had been like that? She could hardly ask Mr Gillman. Nick might have laughed when Mr Gillman told him — ‘I didn’t know she was married’ or even, ‘Married, is she? Just my luck.’ Come to that, he might have been relieved. He might have thought he had said too much on Friday, buying the umbrella specially and walking arm in arm with her, and be afraid she would think he had meant more than he had. Why couldn’t she believe that and stop thinking about it?

‘Mr Gillman’s ready for you now,’ she said to the older of the women, and helped her gently into the consulting room.

Of course it couldn’t be that Nick had been relieved. In calling at Gillman’s at all, he must have been coming to ask her to go out with him. The idea burst into her mind, a sudden radiant solution, that she could rush along to the pet shop at lunchtime and apologize, ask him to forgive her and make everything all right. Just as swiftly, she saw that this was absurd. How could she apologize to a man for being married to someone else? And even supposing she did, what then? Could she unmarry herself? Make Stephen vanish? And for what? To go to the cinema with Nick Frazer?

She could unmarry herself. She could have done that any time these past four years. It would only have taken a word and the simple, undeniable proof. She had often thought of it and each time she did Stephen’s face came before her eyes, as clear as some mystic’s vision, the most vulnerable face she had ever seen, the face of a brave child.

* * *

It was cloudy for most of the day of 30 April but the sky cleared in the late afternoon and by five the sun shone out boldly. At about half past six Stephen set out to take the crinkle-crankle path up the fell, the way he had brought the policemen three weeks before. Never, since he was a child, had he missed coming up to the Foinmen on Beltane.

There was little enough to see, of course. On 29 April and 1 May the setting sun’s rays were scarcely differently placed, but an ancient tradition attached to the eve of May Day. The rays, just as the red orb of the sun sank beneath the slope of Ringer’s Foin, touched the very centre of the Altar. Long ago, thousands of years ago perhaps, a rune had been carved in the centre of the broad flat stone, and the faint marks which still remained indicated that the rune had been in the shape the shadows of the Foinmen made at sunset. No doubt some very holy ceremony had once taken place there on Beltane. Stephen liked to stand and watch, to imagine the druidical forms as they must have been, going about their ritual, and to wait in silence and stillness for the sun to perform his precise function.

It had not always been possible for him to observe the phenomenon on his own. Others often came to watch too. Once there had even been a party of tourists, disturbing the peace with their groans and giggles as they struggled up the steep path from their coach. On sunless Beltanes he had invariably found himself alone there, but never on such a glorious evening as this. Nevertheless, he had met no one, could see no one on the whole spread of Foinmen’s Plain. In the past days people had begun cautiously to return to the moor, but not this evening and not here.

It was much warmer than on that last visit and warmer than last year. There was scarcely a breath of wind. The stones threw long, flaring shadows that suggested the shape of some ancient harp, only lengthening imperceptibly as the sun’s angle grew more oblique. Great towering clouds were massing behind Big Allen but to the west the sky was as clear as the inside of a mother-of-pearl-lined shell, of a pale, tender, pinstained azure. A flock of birds flew homewards very high over Ringer’s Foin. Thin streaks of cirrus lay parallel to the horizon, and between them the sun’s orb had become a well-defined sphere of a rich rose-crimson. It was five to eight.