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demonstration had been entirely peaceful - too much so, Nick thought, for its own good. Whatever report he wrote, he could imagine its carrying some headline as PEAKS ACCEPT MISSILE BASE. Looks like another job for the masked man of the airwaves, he thought, his wry grin fading as he wondered how hard a time Julia would give him.
    He'd been broadcasting anonymously on her pirate waveband in Manchester for almost a year. They'd met at a fund-raiser for Amnesty International, not long after she'd started broadcasting. When she'd learned he was a reporter she'd begun to probe his feelings, his frustration at seeing his reports toned down or distorted, how he'd resigned himself to being satisfied when the newspaper let a token left-wing observation of his slip through into print - the best you could expect when the newspapers were owned by fewer and fewer proprietors and were becoming mouthpieces for bigger and bigger mouths. But there was an alternative, she'd told him, her eyes sparkling. He wouldn't be the only reporter who was using her radio station to say what his paper refused to let him say.
    He turned off the Manchester road and drove across the moors. There ought to be a town on the moorland road, if he wasn't mistaken, or at least a pub for a late lunch. He'd grown fond of Julia; over the months during which he'd visited her sagging Victorian house in Salford, with the radio equipment in the cellar, they'd made love several times. But recently her attitude toward him had changed: people must know who he was on the air, she kept saying. He ought to name himself and see what his editor did then - Nick's name would make the authorities think twice about closing her down. Nick doubted that his name carried much weight, and touched though he was by her promise that she would always have a job for him, he didn't think he would achieve anything by putting his career at risk. Lately, to placate Julia, he'd taken to attacking himself by name on the air.
    He switched on the car radio in case he could hear her, but her waveband was swamped by an American evangelical station, a rock group singing 'Have a nice day, Jesus, have a nice day.' He turned the radio off and planned how to scathe Nick Reid. He thought of Julia's soft lips, long, cool arms, long legs wrapped around his. The car sped across the moors, miles from the main road now, and he wondered if he'd been mistaken about the pub. He'd stopped the car so as to consult the road map when he heard the singing.
    He rolled the window down. Moors divided by infrequent drystone walls glowed sullenly under the packed sky. A bird caught by the wind plummeted and swooped, water trickled in the ditch beside the road. A shift of wind brought him another snatch of song from somewhere ahead. It sounded like a choir.
    He put away the AA book without consulting it. There must be a town ahead that was conducting an outdoor service of thanksgiving, as the townsfolk often did in the Peaks. He drove up the next slope and saw the town, past a couple of farmhouses and a blue-and-white cottage. It looked typical, terraces built of limestone and gritstone, small gardens brimming with flowers, a narrow main street that cut off his view of the rest of the town as soon as he drove in. The shops were locked, the streets deserted.
    He parked the car in the town square and got out, stretching. A telephone rang somewhere, a dog barked. The pub was locked too, he saw. It didn't seem worth driving in search of another so close to closing time. The choir was still singing, out of sight above the town. He locked the car and went up.
    A path at the end of a terrace of cottages led him onto the moor. As he stepped over the edge, the singing surged toward him. There was a moment when it seemed to come from everywhere on the empty slopes, then from the churning sky. He went along the trampled grassy path through the heather toward a stretch of bare rock from beyond which he thought the sound was welling. He