Master of the Moor Read Free Page B

young to read the note but he could still remember how that table had looked when he came in, its top at the time the height of his own shoulder. He could still remember the piece of folded exercise book paper, the three pound notes and the pile of coins at eye level.
    Dadda never spoke of her directly. When, a long time ago now, Stephen had tried to call him Dad or Father and drop the babyish name, he had shouted that Stephen was all he had in the world and couldn’t he have a little bit of kindness and call him by the one name that meant something? And sometimes he had clasped Stephen to him, almost crushing the breath out of his body, muttering his tortured affection. It was only in such oblique ways that he referred to his state ofdeserted, now divorced, husband. There were no photographs of her in the house in King Street, and the photographs Stephen had seen he had wrested out of old Mrs Naulls. He guessed she had been named after Lady Irene Nevil’s daughter in
Wrenwood
. She had Tace’s colouring. She was slender and very fair with long golden hair and as unlike as possible any Naulls that had ever been.
    The wind had dropped and a cold whitish mist from the river lingered in patches. Lyn walked across the cobbles and over the Old Town bridge. This morning the water was clear and silvery, chuckling a little as it lapped over the smooth, oval, brown stones. A pair of swans drifted down towards the town centre.
    She was early for work as usual because Dadda liked Stephen to be in soon after nine. She whiled away time walking along the Mootwalk, an ancient wooden cloister that faced the Hilder and under which was a row of shops: an optician’s, a hairdresser’s, a wine shop, a jeans and sweater boutique, a newsagent, the pet shop. There was a pale green sweater in the window of Lorraine’s she thought she might buy. That sort of green, a clear, pale jade, was her colour. The newsagent’s Sunday paper placard was still outside: ‘Local Girl in Moors Murder’.
    A few cars passed along the cobbles or parked, a few people on foot were on their way to work, not many. The great influx would be north of the river, the other side of town where Cartwright-Cageby’s mill employed 60 per cent of the working population of Hilderbridge. Down here it was always quieter, it was older, it was peaceful. The ramparts of the moor could be seen in the distance, its peaks blurred against a leaden sky, their lower slopes wrapped in mist.
    Lights came on in the Mootwalk shops as one by one they began to open. Out of the pet shop window a cat looked at Lyn with champagne-coloured eyes. It was in a wire pen on top of some tortoises and under a pair of lop-eared rabbits. The cat looked at Lyn and opened its mouth in a soundless mew.
    Lyn didn’t much like the old man who kept the shop. He ogled her and once he had come out and asked her if she would like a dear little puppy dog to keep her warm in the night. He wasn’t there this morning. Instead, there was a man of about her own age, no older, tidying up the cartons of fish food on a shelf behind the counter. She pushed the door and went in.
    ‘I’ve been looking at the cat in your window.’
    He came out to her. ‘Attractive colour, isn’t it?’
    ‘I wanted a ginger kitten, but it’s not exactly ginger.’
    ‘More beige, wouldn’t you say? Or even peach. It’s not a kitten either, it’s more than half-grown. Someone brought it in on Saturday and said she had to go to Africa and would I take it.’
    Lyn was indignant. ‘That’s awful, taking it to a pet shop. You wouldn’t know who might buy it. It would be kinder to have it put down.’
    ‘Oh, come. Not this pet shop. Not under my management.’
    Lyn glanced up at him. She had trained herself not to look at men, a restraint that wasn’t difficult to practise in this case. He was rather nondescript, not very tall, thin, mousy-haired, as unlike dark handsome Stephen as could be. But what on earth made her compare