Master of the Moor by Ruth Rendell Page A

tease,’ said Mrs Naulls, putting a purple jelly into her mouth. ‘His dad tried to knock it out of him but it never made no difference.’
    ‘Knock one devil out and another in, I always say,’ said the knitter.
    ‘How’s Midge getting on, Peter?’
    ‘If you mean Lyn, she’s okay, and I’m Stephen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It looks as if there’s been another murder on the moor.’
    ‘Pardon?’ said Mrs Naulls, her mouth full.
    ‘We’re most of us a bit hard of hearing in here, dear,’ said the knitter.
    ‘Another murder on the moor,’ Stephen repeated more loudly.
    The old man put his paper down. The fat woman opened her eyes and closed them again. Helena Naulls hesitated between a red jelly and a yellow one and finally chose the yellow.
    Round-eyed, the knitter said, ‘It turns you cold all over to think of it. Was it another young girl, dear?’
    ‘It looks like it.’ Stephen jumped up. ‘Actually, I’moff to join the search party. They’re looking for the body now.’ In that moment he had made up his mind. It was what, half-consciously, he had been longing to do since he had got out of the van and talked to Manciple. He’d go back and explain to Dadda. Anyway, Dadda owed him a day off for working the Spring Holiday Monday to get those Chippendale chair seats done. ‘They’ll need someone like me, someone who knows the moor inside out.’
    ‘Mr Tace,’ said Mrs Naulls, smiling reminiscently, ‘he was a one for the moor. He
did
love it. He was a lovely man, one in a million. Bye-bye, Stephen. Mind you give my love to Lyn.’
    The sun had appeared as a brighter white puddle in the white sky and the mist had begun to move. There was no sign of the search party. Stephen always kept an anorak and a pair of walking boots in the car. He parked in Loomlade and took the path that ran between Loomlade Foin and Big Allen, the direction in which Manciple had surely indicated the party was veering. It was near here that he had found the little white orchid. He came up to the Hilder at the point where the aqueduct pillars crossed it.
    He could see the river winding away from its source in the springs of Pierce Foin. The land was marshy here, tussocky with reeds, the black peat showing through the heather. Distant Goughdale seemed deserted. He crossed the river by the stepping stones, wondering if they had yet searched the mine ruins. Mottle Foin, the only foin on which trees grew, little stunted pines making a black dappling on its surface, was the highest hill on the moor after Big Allen and now its rocky hump hid the Hilder’s northerly curves, Pierce Foin and all of Lustley Dale. Stephen had another couple of miles to walk before the view was opento him again and he saw the men in the distance, deployed out across the ground on the river’s right bank.
    There must have been forty or fifty of them. One man had done that, one man had had the power to call them all out here on to the moor, away from their homes, their jobs. He had killed one girl and now, because another was missing, they had come as if he had called them, as if they were his slaves. Stephen went back across the river again, clambering over the boulders. Two or three of the men looked round, no one waved. A burly figure, tall and heavy, came towards him. It was Ian Stringer.
    ‘No luck yet?’ called Stephen.
    ‘Luck, d’you call it?’
    ‘Oh Lord, you know what I mean. I just thought I’d come up and lend a hand. I’m by way of being a bit of an expert on the moor, you know.’
    Stringer shrugged. His blue shirt, open at the neck and showing a mat of black hair, was wet with sweat in the armpits and down the back. ‘You see that chap in the green? The little dark chap? That’s her husband, that’s Roger Morgan. We’re hoping, there’s just a chance, she left her car to pick wild flowers. She was fond of wild flowers, he says, and — well, she could have got lost or passed out or something.’
    ‘In that case she