Master of the Moor by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

without her seeing him and then she would never see him again.
    When her morning’s work was finished she thought, as she thought every day, that she would walk along the Mootwalk to Bale’s and at last set her mind at rest. But she didn’t do this. She drove home. She was afraid Nick might treat her with coldness and pretend he had forgotten who she was.
    Stephen was still in bed but sitting up and there were books on Vangmoor all over the quilt. Lyn put a cloth on a tray and laid it and on an impulse picked a small blue iris and put it in a vase to go on the tray as well. Stephen’s dark blue eyes were very bright and there was a flush on his cheekbones. Otherwise he seemedmuch better and he ate his lunch like a hungry schoolboy.
    ‘I say, Lyn, did I ever tell you how I actually got into one of the old mines when I was a kid?’
    She shook her head. Vangmoor bored her. Sometimes she even found it oppressive, living in the middle of it. Their bedroom window, by a lucky chance for Stephen, had the best view of the moor of any house in Tace Way. The curtains were drawn back as far as they would go, and whenever she looked up the green-brown panorama confronted her and the pale bowl of sky. She made an effort. ‘Aren’t they very dangerous?’
    ‘Kids don’t care about that. We’d heard there was a way into the Goughdale Mine somewhere on the slopes of Big Allen. Actually it’s mentioned in one of the Bleakland books, though I hadn’t read them then. I was about twelve. I went looking for it with my cousin Peter.’
    ‘Peter Naulls?’
    Stephen nodded. ‘Uncle Leonard’s son. We started looking for the hole in the long summer holidays. We were jolly methodical, I can tell you. Each day we covered a set area and we marked the bit we’d covered with sticks. But it took us weeks and weeks to find it.’ He hesitated. He had begun his account, intending to tell Lyn the whole of it, but now that he had reached the point of disclosing the site of the hole into the mine and of describing it and what happened there, he felt uneasy. Dadda he had told, though even to him he had given only a vague location, but he hadn’t said a word to his grandmother and he was sure Peter wouldn’t have told Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge. Why divulge the secret now? ‘We found it,’ he said and lied, ‘but we didn’t go in or anything. Too scared for
that
.’
    ‘Oh, well,’ she said.
    ‘It was pretty enterprising of us to have found it, wasn’t it? Dadda thought so. He said what a waste of bloody time and then he gave me a five-pound note.’
    ‘How exactly like Dadda.’ She straightened his pillows. She took away the tray. There was no point in asking him if he would like the curtains drawn. He would come down soon anyway and say he was all right and going out on the moor again. Perhaps she could write to Nick and explain things. Explain what? Even if she were to write she knew she would never post the letter.
    ‘You were wrong about another one being killed in a couple of weeks, Mum,’ Joanne said on a Sunday afternoon. ‘It’s been more like six.’
    ‘Listen to who’s counting,’ said Kevin. ‘Thank God there hasn’t is what you ought to say.’
    ‘Well, I do. I do say that. I only meant it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another.’
    ‘Early days,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘It could just be he hasn’t been able to catch anyone.’
    Joanne shrieked. She was big now and the child vigorous. The women had been amused — though the men, especially Dadda, embarrassed — when its movements, or so Joanne averred, had bounced a plate off her lap. Stephen told them how that morning he had seen a girl out on the moor alone.
    ‘Some folks want their heads examined,’ said Mr Newman. ‘I just hope you two girls have got more sense than ever to set a foot out there.’
    Dadda, voyaging day by day farther out on his black sea of depression, made his one contribution to the talk. ‘That’s right, keep your feet