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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