together, or buy a new one.
‘Drive then/ she said. ‘But as far as I can see, we’re heading towards - what do they call it around here? - the moon’s backside.’
The Back of the Moon,’ said Murfin.
‘All right. But I think I prefer my version.’
A few minutes later, they were out of Edendale and heading north into the Hope Valley, approaching the village of Bamford.
‘Are you planning to go over the Snake Pass?’ said Fry, trying to follow their route on the map.
‘Yes.’
‘Is that the best way, Gavin?’
‘Definitely.’
Fry looked for the area called Longdendale. This was where a body had been found early that morning, but it was a long valley, which ran right across the map. She studied the adjacent terrain in growing disbelief. Apart from the thin red ribbon of the A628 trunk road snaking its way from east to west through the valley, and the blue of the reservoirs in the valley bottom, the map had no features at all. No, that wasn’t quite true. There were masses of thin brown lines that swirled everywhere, clustering tightly together here and there. They were contour lines. The closer together the lines were, the steeper the slope of the land - she knew that from some distant geography lesson. But crossing these brown lines were almost as many pale blue ones - little snaky things that ran down from all the summits, branching and trickling away in every direction. They looked like the worst case of varicose veins she had ever seen.
Many of these pale blue lines were labelled ‘doughs’, ‘slacks’ or ‘groughs’. They were streams and rivulets feeding down into the valleys. She could imagine how boggy the ground between them would be, because this was certainly peat moor.
Sure enough, there were lots of little clusters of black dots on the map, too. Fry checked the key for the meaning of the symbol. Rough grassland. In some places, those flecks turned blue. That meant marsh - a polite name for boggy ground that was like wet
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Christmas pudding to walk through, the sort of ground that the Dark Peak seemed to specialize in. She sighed. If anyone tried to persuade her to walk across one yard of those barren acres of peat moor, she would refuse. There had to be a tarmacked street somewhere in this place.
Fry looked closer, searching the map for features she could recognize. Some of the moors had their own names - she saw Dead Edge Flat, Bleakmires and Withens Moss. She could make out the line of a disused railway tunnel running under the hills. But the moors themselves were empty.
Then she laughed. Not quite empty. There were actually some features to be found marked among the brown contour lines and the tangled systems of doughs and slacks. The features were labelled on the map as ‘mound’ and ‘pile of stones’.
‘Unbelievable/ she said.
But Murfin just smiled.
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12
The Renshaws’ sitting room was almost colourless. There were no reds or blues in the decor or in the furniture, only shades of brown, cream and off-white, as if the life had been bleached from the house. Diane Fry wondered if it had always been like this, or whether the Renshaws had changed the look of the house since Emma had disappeared, consciously or unconsciously reflecting the draining of the colour from their own lives.
Sarah Renshaw showed Fry and Murfin into the room and made them sit together on the leather settee. Murfin sat down gingerly, trying not to touch the teddy bear that sat at the end of the sofa, against the arm. It was about eighteen inches tall, and it had a red ribbon tied round its throat. Its eyes stared glassily at the Japanese screen in front of the fireplace, and one of its arms was raised as if to take an invisible cup of tea.
Despite the washed-out look of the room, Sarah Renshaw seemed to gain vitality from the moment she was given a chance to talk about Emma. It was the one aspect of her life that seemed to mean anything at all to her now. That, and the endless analysis of her own guilty feelings.
‘We can still sense Emma in the house/ said Sarah. ‘Can’t you?’
‘No, I’m sorry. But I never knew her.’
‘The house is full of all the things that mean a lot to Emma. Her books, her drawings, and her poems. Her violin and her paints. And, of course, her teddy bears.’
Teddy bears?’
‘Yes. Emma was starting a collection. We gave her a big eighteenth birthday party here, you know. It was a wonderful party,
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with all her friends, and a disco and everything. Emma said it was the best day of her life.’
Sarah Renshaw’s voice died, and her thoughts seemed to drift away for a moment. Fry could almost see the little black fist of reality that was trying to break through her bubble in those few seconds. It hammered, but failed to get in. Fry felt her throat constrict, and experienced a brief pain in the exact spot where the surgeon had left a small, fleshy vestige of her tonsils when he removed them years ago.
But then Sarah recovered herself and was just as composed as before, smiling at Fry as if she had made some small social gaffe.
‘Anyway, Emma was starting a collection of teddy bears,’ she said, ‘and lots of people brought her teddies for her collection on her birthday. Most of them are in her room upstairs, but we keep her favourite ones down here. Edgar there was her very first one, and he’s rather special. We gave him to Emma ourselves. He’s sitting there waiting for her to come home.’
Murfin looked at the teddy bear on the settee, and tried to edge further away from it. But he found himself nudging up against Fry. She gave him a look, and he edged back again, his trousers, squeaking on the soft leather.
‘You know,’ said Sarah, ‘every morning when I wake up, there’s a moment when I feel like my old self again. It’s a wonderful moment, when Emma is about to arrive home, just as she was that day two years ago. And for a brief time it feels as though nothing was ever wrong at all. I always try to cling on to that moment and bring it into
