Master of the Moor Read Free Page A

exaggerating,’ Lyn said.
    Dadda spoke. ‘Beats me why he had to stick his neck out.’
    ‘Once I’d seen her,’ Stephen said, ‘I had to report it.’
    ‘I’d have shut me eyes and carried straight on. It all comes of this traipsing about the moor.’
    ‘Good grief, you sound just like the police! Can’t anyone understand a man can love the countryside? It’s a simple enough pleasure in all conscience, harmless enough, I’d have thought.’
    Kevin winked. ‘I tell folks Lyn’s not a grass widow, she’s a moor widow.’
    A grim smile moved Dadda’s mouth.
    Mrs Newman said, ‘I should think this’d put you off anyway, Stephen. You won’t want to be up there with this maniac about. I don’t like that word widow, Kevin, that’s not very nice.’
    Joanne and Kevin held hands on the sofa. ‘I knew that girl, that Marianne Price, Mum, did I tell you? Well, you must have known her, Stephen. She was at the cash desk in the Golden Chicken.’
    ‘The Market Burger House they call it now, Joanne.’
    ‘Whatever they call it. Don’t you get your lunch there, Mr Whalby?’
    ‘Me? I keep me feet under me own table. Stephen goes out for his dinner, he’s young.’
    ‘There you are, Stephen, like I said, you must have known her, you must have seen her hundreds of times.’
    ‘Good Lord, Joanne, how would I know? She’d have looked a bit different, I can tell, from what she was like lying up there with her hair all cut off.’
    Joanne gave a little scream and put her hands up to her own abundant blonde hair.
    ‘She won’t be there tomorrow,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if they were to close tomorrow out of respect. I remember when you and your brother were little, Lyn, Joanne wasn’t born, old Mr Crane over at Loomlade got killed in his car and they closed the electric shop two days out of respect and the branch in Byss.’
    But next day the Market Burger House was open for business as usual. Stephen took particular note of it after he had taken Lyn to the Mootwalk and parked the car in the market square. The restaurant was the only one in Hilderbridge, in the Three Towns probably, that served breakfast. People were breakfasting, some were just having coffee. An Indian girl in a blue sari was at the cash desk in Marianne Price’s place. Stephen went across the square to Whalbys.
    Dadda lived alone in the three-storey house in King Street, a narrow foinstone house, one room deep and heated with oilstoves. The workshop was the coachhouse next door and the room above it. Over the double doors, painted dark brown, was a sign in gilt lettering that said:
Whalby and Son. Restorers of fine furniture
. The sign was peeling and you couldn’t read it from the other side of the square but the Three Towns knew who Whalbys’ were without that. A Whalby and his son had been there for as long as anyone could remember and Dadda used sometimes to boast on his good days that Alfred Osborn Tace hadhimself been a customer and that Whalbys had recovered the seats of the Hepplewhite chairs at Chesney Hall.
    Stephen said hallo to Dadda before going upstairs to start work on the three-piece suite they had brought in on Friday. Dadda was smoking. Between his nutcracker lips was one of the thin twisted little cigarettes he made himself. The frames of the furniture were sound, a lot better than the kind of stuff they manufactured nowadays. He began tearing off the old, almost ragged, tapestry and prising out tacks. The scent of tobacco was wafted up the stairs. Dadda only smoked when he was contented and then he would get through forty or fifty a day, bringing on a cough and staining his fingers yellow-brown. Dadda might have been a lot different, Stephen thought, if his wife hadn’t deserted him. Or was it because he was the way he was that she had walked out one day when Dadda was at work and he at school, leaving a note on the kitchen table and the remains of the week’s housekeeping money? He had been too