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Up here she was connected.
    Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had noticed this and given his professional blessing to Moon’s plan, despite the fears of her brother Denny, who was jittery as hell about it. ‘ She can’t do this. You got to stop her. SHE CANNOT LIVE THERE! OUT OF THE FUCKING QUESTION! ’
    But she was a grown woman. What were they supposed to do, short of getting her committed to a psychiatric hospital? Lol, who’d been through that particular horror himself, was now of the opinion that it should never happen to anyone who was not dangerously insane.
    When he first saw Moon on the ramparts, even though her face was turned away, he thought she’d never seemed more serene.
    She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘OK?’
    ‘Yes.’ She turned back to the view over the city. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Look. Look at the Cathedral and All Saints. Isn’t that amazing?’
    From here, even though they were actually several hundred yards apart, the church steeple and the Cathedral tower overlapped. The sky around them was a strange, burned-out orange.
    Moon said, ‘Many of the ley-lines through other towns, you can’t see them any more because of new high-rise buildings, but of course there aren’t any of those in Hereford. The skyline remains substantially the same.’
    Lol realized he’d seen an old photograph of this view, taken in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, the Hereford gentleman who’d first noticed that prehistoric stones and mounds and the medieval churches on their sites often seemed to occur on imaginary straight lines running across the landscape. Most archaeologists thought this was a rubbish theory, but Katherine Moon was not like most archaeologists. ‘It’s at least spiritually valid,’ she’d said once. He wasn’t sure what she meant.
    ‘Moon,’ he said now, ‘why do some people call it a holy hill?’
    She didn’t have to think about it. ‘The line goes through four ancient places of worship, OK? Ending at a very old church in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow.’
    ‘In the poetic sense.’
    ‘In the spiritual sense. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there. Over a thousand Celtic people lived up here.’ She paused. ‘My ancestors.’
    There was a touching tremor of pride in her voice.
    ‘So it’s kind of…’ Lol hesitated, ‘… holy in the pagan sense.’
    ‘It’s just holy.’ Moon still had her back to him. ‘This was before the time of Christ. Over a thousand people keeping sheep and storing grain, doing their spinning and weaving and dyeing. It would’ve been idyllic – for a time.’
    ‘What happened to them? The Dinedor People.’
    ‘Some of them never went away. And the spirit remains.’
    Moon gazed down over the spread of the city towards the distant Black Mountains and Welsh border. Slowly she turned towards him.
    ‘And some… some of us have returned.’
    He saw tears shining in her eyes.
    And then he saw the black thing clasped to her stomach.
    Katherine Moon …
    Dick Lyden, the therapist, had briefed Lol as best he could about three months ago.
    Twenty-six. Bright girl, quite a good degree in archaeology, but an unfortunate history of instability. Runs in the family, evidently. Her brother Denny, he’s the sanest of them; might look like a New Age traveller, but Denny’s a businessman, has his head screwed on .
    After university, Dick said, Katherine had spent a couple of years freelancing on various archaeological digs across Britain. This was how she became obsessed with dead Celtic civilizations. Began wearing primitive clothing and strange jewellery, smoking too much dope, tripping out on magic-mushroom tea. When she arrived back in Hereford, the Katherine bit had gone; she was just Moon, and more than a little weird.
    The reason she’d