The poor woman seemed so eager to be lied to that Julian found himself just as eager to oblige her. “We hadn't quite got to yes or no yet. That's what last night was supposed to be about.”

“Was she… Did she seem pleased? I only ask because she'd seemed to have… Well, she'd seemed to have some sort of plans, and I'm not quite sure…”

Carefully, Julian speared a mushroom. “Plans?”

“I'd thought… Yes, it seemed so.”

He looked at Nan. Nan looked at him. He was the one to blink. He said steadily, “Nicola had no plans that I know of, Nan.”

The kitchen door swung open a few inches. The face of one of the Grindleford women appeared in the aperture. She said, “Mrs. Maiden, Mr. Britton,” in a hushed voice. And she used her head to indicate the direction of the kitchen. You're wanted, the motion implied.

Andy was leaning against one of the work tops, facing it, his weight on his hands and his head bowed. When his wife said his name, he looked up.

His face was drawn with exhaustion, and his growth of peppery whiskers fanned out from his moustache and shadowed his cheeks. His grey hair was uncombed, looking windblown although there wasn't any wind to speak of this morning. His eyes went to Nan, then slid away. Julian prepared himself to hear the worst.

“Her car's on the edge of Calder Moor,” Andy told them.

His wife drew her hands into a fist at her breast. “Thank God,” she said.

Still, Andy didn't look at her. His expression indicated that thanks were premature. He knew what Julian knew and what Nan herself might well have acknowledged had she paused to probe for the possibilities that were indicated by the location of Nicolas Saab. Calder Moor was vast. It began just west of the road stretching between Blackwell and Brough, and it comprised endless expanses of heather and gorse, four caverns, numerous cairns and forts and barrows spanning time from Paleolithic through the Iron Age, gritstone outcroppings and limestone caves and fissures through which more than one foolish tripper had crawled for adventure and become hopelessly stuck.