Soon after turning on to the A635, he became aware that he was now following in the murderers’ footsteps. This was the road they would have taken — there was no other — and he doubted very much had changed since the sixties. Chinese restaurants probably wouldn’t have existed then, not in the small towns, nor would shops that sold computers, but everything else looked at least a century old. The rows of terraced housing, the factories, the stations, the churches: he was seeing what the two murderers would have seen. And the moors always there above the rooftops, their brooding presence softened that day by a sprinkling of snow…
On the high street in Mossley he passed a car coming the other way. The driver was a woman with blonde hair, the top half of her face hidden by a lowered sunshield. Only the blunt curve of her chin was visible, and a hard mouth made even harder by her bright-red lipstick. That scorched sensation round his heart again. The urge to hurry home.
After Greenfield, the road began to climb, and in no time at all he was up on the moor, the land stretching away on either side, wild and deserted. The air thickened, and turned white. Sometimes the sun pressed through the murk — a silver disc, sharp-edged but misty, dull. He parked in a lay-by, then put on gloves, a woolly hat and wellingtons. He stood quite still beside the car. A silence that was eerily alive, like the silence when you answer the phone and there’s someone on the other end not talking. He set off down a track, making for an outcrop of rocks known as the Standing Stones. One of the victim’s bodies had been found near by.
Before long the track narrowed, and he struck out across open country, thinking it would be more direct, but the yellow grass was coarse and wiry, which slowed him down, and the light covering of snow hid lethal troughs and hollows. He could sprain an ankle if he wasn’t careful, or even break it. As he walked, he noticed that he kept looking over his shoulder. He needed to be able to see his car, he realised, and the further he went, the greater this need became. He felt nervous, almost distressed. In these icy conditions, the countless slabs of rock that pushed up through the moor looked black. His car was black too, and merged with the landscape perfectly. Once, as he glanced behind him, he trod in a boggy hole, and his right leg sank in up to the knee. He had to tug and tug to get it out.
Not until he was returning from the Standing Stones did he feel easier in himself. The fog had thinned. A weak sun shone. He began to think about the boy whose body was still missing, and fell into such a strange, trance-like state that when the ground seemed to leap up in front of him, he let out a cry and jumped backwards. He watched, startled, as a huge, ash-grey hare bounded away, its black ears showing clearly against the frost-encrusted grass. When the hare had vanished, he studied the place where it had been crouching, a patch of crumbly, peat-dark earth beneath an overhang. Before he knew it, he was scraping at the soil with his boot. The hare was a marker, he felt, like a cross on a map: if he dug here, something might come to light — a pair of spectacles, a shoe…He stood back. What was he thinking? The moor had been searched again and again, by hundreds of people. Besides, the top layer had shifted over the years; areas of peat that had been exposed in the sixties would now be thoroughly grassed over. But a miraculous discovery, he realised, was what he had been hoping for. That, in part, was why he’d come.
Before he left the moor, he crossed the road and climbed up to Hollin Brown Knoll, another of the murderers’ favourite spots. Stopping for breath, he saw three men with rifles striding towards the Standing Stones, a black dog with them. He thought of the hare and hoped that it was safe. On the knoll itself was a rock that was the same height as a chair, and slightly concave too, but when he sat down on it he had such a powerful sense of the woman’s presence that he instantly got up again and moved away.
Further on, the land levelled out, and he came across several shallow gullies that meandered off in a northerly direction. The streams had frozen over; black water squirmed through narrow channels beneath the ice. While up there, he saw a tree, its twisted trunk growing along the ground as if seeking shelter, then veering up into the air, the thin grey branches trembling. Once again, he had the feeling there was something to be discovered, but it was like having a word on the tip of your tongue and knowing you would never remember it. There were things here that couldn’t be grasped or squared away — not by him, in any case. He stared off into a gully, imagining a man leading a small boy by the hand. After a minute, only the man’s head and shoulders showed above the bank, and the boy wasn’t visible at all…
The snow had blown in from the east the night before, and now it was coming again, the air closing in, surrounding him, a whirl of tiny flakes.
He turned and started back towards the car.
8
Glancing at his mobile on the table, Billy was reminded of the text Sue had sent. Sometimes, when she bombarded him with messages, each one more desperate and abbreviated than the last, or when she asked the impossible of him, as she had that afternoon, he would wonder why he put up with it. Where had Susie Newman disappeared to? And when? Don’t go travelling, he had said, and she hadn’t. She had got a job with a firm of marketing consultants, and later, in October of that year, she had moved in with him. They’d lived in his little two-room flat on Frederick Street, just round the corner from the police station. Christ, the sex they’d had back then. The love they’d had. He used to run home from work to see her. Actually run. But he had never taken her to India or Thailand; he hadn’t paid enough attention to her dreams. Fourteen years had passed, and certain possibilities had slipped through their fingers, and now she was turning into somebody he didn’t recognise. He would get flashes of how she used to be, but it was as if he were trying to tune into a foreign radio station with a weak signal; mostly all he received was interference, static, nothing he could make any sense of. What about the feeling of familiarity he’d had, though, when he stood in Murphy’s garage on that sunny morning in 1988? Had that been an illusion, some sort of trick? Or had he failed to look after what he’d been given? And if it was gone, was it gone for ever, or could it be recovered?
He was going round in circles.
He saw her again, standing by the front door in the cold, her face lowered, her arms folded tightly across her chest. There were days when he couldn’t seem to please her, no matter what he did or didn’t do, and it would occur to him that she might simply have grown tired of him, that he might be less than she had imagined him to be, less than she’d wanted. Certainly there were those who took that view. Her father, for one. Peter Newman never missed an opportunity to let Billy know that she deserved better. Not that Newman was such a great advertisement for marriage: he had left Susie’s mother when Susie was just thirteen.
Billy first met Peter Newman in a wine bar in Manchester in the summer of 1989. Though wine bars were no longer a novelty — they had started appearing in the north-west at least five years earlier — Billy had never set foot in one before, a fact that Newman seemed to intuit almost immediately. Newman had a couple of business associates with him. The three men wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders, which made them look American, and Billy was painfully aware of his cheap black shoes and the soiled bandage on his right hand, an injury sustained while arresting a drunk at a rugby-league game the previous Saturday.