Master of the Moor Read Free

the heir to an estate or something. It was after Mother left that I started thinking like that.’
    ‘You needed something to make up for it.’ Lyn said.
    He shrugged. ‘Yes — I suppose Freud and people like that would say I was compensating for losing my mother. I don’t know. I used to think of the moor as all my property, my kingdom, I suppose, and I’d decide where I was going to build my capital city and where I was going to have my hunting forest. And the Reeve’s Way, that was where I was going to march my army. You’ll laugh, but I was going to have a coronation. I was going to be crowned at the Foinmen, standing on the Altar.’
    Lyn didn’t laugh. She had heard it all before but he always seemed to forget he had told her. His voice went up in pitch.
    ‘Good grief, when I think of some creature coming onto the moor and doing a vile thing like this! It makes my blood boil, it’s sacrilege!’
    But Lyn said quietly, ‘I wish it hadn’t had to be you who found her.’

2
    There were
Sundays when Dadda didn’t come to lunch, when depression kept him from stirring out of doors. His depressions were an illness, not merely a feeling of lowness or irritability. They dragged him down into horrors he said no one could imagine. But between bouts, in a precarious euphoria that to others seemed like dourness, he drove up from Hilderbridge in Whalbys’ van.
    The depression of last week had lifted like a fever passing when the patient sleeps or asks for food. Dadda looked shattered by it, though, bruised under the eyes. He wore his one good suit, grey with a white chalk stripe, and he had brought with him Lyn’s birthday present in an unwieldy brown paper parcel. He didn’t kiss Lyn, he never touched women, or men either for that matter, but he seemed to make a principle of shrinking from the touch of women.
    Lyn unwrapped a small round table, high-polished, with curved legs and a top carved in a design of a chestnut leaf and cluster of spiny fruits.
    ‘It’s beautiful, Dadda. You are good to us.’
    ‘Don’t go ruining it with hot cups.’
    ‘What a lovely piece of work!’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Early Victorian, isn’t it?’
    ‘Late,’ said Dadda. ‘You ought to be able to see that with half an eye. You’re supposed to be in bloody trade.’
    Lyn’s parents and Joanne and Kevin always came over on Sunday afternoons. Mr Newman was a small quiet man, half the size of Dadda, probably literally half his weight. He ran a finger along the carving.
    ‘We shan’t be able to compete with that.’
    ‘It’s not a question of competing,’ said his wife. ‘Lyn knows she’s getting a cardigan, anyway. Have to wait till Wednesday.’ She had brought two Sunday papers with her. Everyone had a paper except Dadda who never read anything. Mrs Newman’s face was round and healthy and high-coloured like Joanne’s. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘but in a place like this, a sort of open space, forest, moors, anywhere that’s National Trust, you always get killings. It’s a wonder we haven’t had them before.’
    Joanne said, ‘What d’you mean “them”, Mum? There’s been one young girl killed so far as I know.’
    ‘So far. You get one now and another in a couple of weeks and folks are scared to go out or we women are. It’ll be one of those pathologicals.’
    ‘Psychopaths.’
    ‘Whatever they call them. Maniacs, we used to say.’
    ‘A proper ghoul, isn’t she, Tom?’ said Mr Newman.
    Dadda didn’t answer but gave his awkward humourless grin. He sat with his huge shouldershunched up. He was used to company but hopeless in it, he never improved. Many men are as tall as or taller than their fathers and Stephen was six feet, but Dadda still towered above him. He filled his armchair, all long, gaunt, bent limbs, that somehow suggested a cornered spider. All but he wanted to know how Stephen had got on with the police.
    ‘I’m their number one suspect. No, it’s a fact.’
    ‘He’s