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apologetically, ‘It takes a long time. I’ve got a job waiting for me in London, but I can’t start till August when the man retires. Hence Hilderbridge and Uncle Jim.’
    ‘And are you living over the shop?’
    ‘I think Uncle rather hoped I’d live in the two rooms at the back but they smell a bit too powerfully of monkey and parrot so I’ve moved up into his flat. It’s nice, you must come and see it.’
    This was a remark that three days before she wouldhave thought of as wolfish. Now it seemed merely friendly. But she didn’t answer it. She was afraid he would ask her about herself and to forestall this she asked him to tell her about his training and what he hoped for in the future. He talked. They ate their bread and cheese. Lyn’s hands had stopped shaking.
    ‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you.’
    I am twenty-five, I am married, I was married in church and have lived with my husband four years, so I must be married, I have no children and never shall have, but I am waiting, waiting, for what I don’t know … ‘Nothing to tell,’ she said. And there was nothing, nothing she
could
tell. Mr Bale would come back in two or three weeks and she need never see Nick Frazer again. ‘I really must go now.’
    While they were in the pub, in a corner far from a window, the rain had come on heavily, the kind of rain that will soak you to the skin in two minutes. Nick stopped her inside the door.
    ‘Will you wait for me? I’ll be very quick.’
    He came back, and he had been very quick, with an umbrella from which, as he plunged in through the swing door, he was tearing the plastic wrapping.
    ‘You bought it specially!’
    ‘I had to have an umbrella to walk you home.’
    ‘But I live in Chesney,’ she said. ‘I’m going on the bus.’
    ‘To walk you to your bus stop then.’
    It was something she hadn’t looked for and she was almost dismayed. Under the umbrella they had to walk very close together and after a while he took her hand and hooked it through his arm. It was precisely the action of Joseph Usher in
The Mountainside
, and Isabella Thornhill had slapped his face for it before rushing off,unprotected, into the downpour. Lyn felt the blood come up into her face. She held Nick’s arm and felt him warm and somehow tough against her side. He talked about the town, how he had never before been to this part of the country, how one day soon he must try to get out on the moor. There was an opening for her here. My husband, who is in fact the grandson of Alfred Osborn Tace, is really quite an authority on Vangmoor … She didn’t take it. She would have found it hard to speak, anyway. It was taking all her concentration to breathe normally, not to begin shaking again, with their arms linked and their bodies so close.
    The bus saved her. As they turned up River Street it was coming down the hill and there wouldn’t be another for an hour.
    ‘There won’t be another for an hour!’ she cried.
    ‘Would that be so terrible?’
    ‘Oh, yes, yes, it would. Thank you for lunch, thank you very much. Goodbye!’
    He stood on the pavement, smiling in perplexity, making swirls in the air with the umbrella. Her cheeks burned and she turned away from the window. The bus pulled away, through the rain, up towards the moor.
    A full week had gone by and it was Saturday again before Stephen went out on the moor. There was not a soul to be seen, though it was a weekend and the sun was shining after many days of rain. The week before last, when it had been colder, he had seen parties of hikers, a fisherman coming from the Hilder, cyclists on the Loomlade road, campers with tent and calor gas stove and blankets on their backs. This morning Vangmoorwas deserted. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the murder had emptied it.
    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