Midnight Sun

TWENTY-THREE

Ellen's sleep was so profound and dreamless it felt like an absence of self. When the children's cries roused her, she struggled back to consciousness, feeling as if the stillness had accumulated on her, a weight whose impalpability made it all the more difficult to throw off. It filled the room, more than the room. She forced her eyelids wide and shoved herself clumsily into a sitting position, dislodging her pillow, which struck the carpet with a soft thud. How much had she overslept for the room to be as bright as this? She frowned at the clock, which was insisting that the alarm wasn't due for another ten minutes, as the children came racing upstairs. They both knocked on the bedroom door, inched it open, piled into the room. "It's snowed," Johnny shouted.

"It always will," Ben said.

Ellen hadn't realised he was awake; she wasn't sure even now that he was. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, his face as expressionless as his murmur had been. She put her finger to her lips and slipped quietly from under the duvet. Tiptoeing to the curtains, she looked through the gap.

The world had turned white. Beneath a blue sky which seemed almost as bright as the sun, snow like a sketch that reduced the moors and fields to their merest outlines sloped to the horizon, to the newly risen mountains which were clouds. Sheets of snow were folded over all the roofs of Stargrave. A few cars encrusted with white were proceeding slowly along the main road towards the bridge. A bird of prey hovered above the moors, its wings shining as if they or the sky around them were being transformed into crystal. It swooped to a small animal which dashed across the snow, seized it in its claws and wheeled away across the dazzling moors as the children wriggled under Ellen's arms to see the view. "Can we get dressed and go out?" Margaret whispered.

Ellen steered them out of the room. Though Ben's eyes were closed, she sensed he was awake; she thought he might be trying to shape his tale. "All right, but don't get too cold and wet. I'll call you when there's something hot to put inside you."

While she was making breakfast, having closed the kitchen blinds to shut out the glare of the swollen forest, she heard the slam of the workroom door. When she'd fed the children and brushed the melting snow out of their hair and ensured that they didn't spend too little time in the bathroom, she sent Johnny to tell his father that breakfast was in the oven. Johnny knocked on the workroom door and gabbled the message and raced downstairs, out of the house.

Once they were off the main road, the middle of which was already a mass of slush, Ellen let Margaret and Johnny run ahead, collecting snow from garden walls and shying it at each other. The streets were full of children doing so, as though a custard pie fight had taken over the town. She left the two of them, pink-faced in anoraks, at the school gates and tramped carefully downhill. Despite all the sounds – the creak of compressed snow underfoot, the scrape of spades on paths, the revving of car engines, shouts of greeting and speculations about the weather – the town seemed laden with silence which massed around her as she trudged beyond the newsagent's and along the edge of the rough track to the forest. Over the muffled squeak of her footsteps, she heard the phone ringing at the top of the house.

It continued to ring while she slithered towards the front door. Why hadn't Ben answered it? As she unlocked the door, the ringing ceased. She stamped her boots clean of snow and stepped into the house, and heard the workroom door open. "Ellen? Call for you," Ben shouted down. "Sally Quick."

He must have been elsewhere in the house when the phone began to ring, though he was blinking as if he'd just come back to himself. "Don't forget your breakfast," she said, and he wandered downstairs as she picked up the receiver. "Hi, Sally."

"Fancy a trip to the moors?"

"Do you mean what I think you mean?"

"I've just had a call from Richmond. Someone who's supposed to have come over here yesterday for a walk and a clamber has been reported missing by his family. He didn't bother to let us know what he was doing," Sally added with a sigh. "Four of us should be enough to be going on with if we start from High Ridge and work our way down either side in twos."

"I'll meet you as soon as I've got my togs on, shall I?"

"Lucy's coming in on her day off. She'll be here in five minutes and then I'll pick you up."

Ellen had pulled on her waterproofs and was lacing up her boots when she heard the Landrover approaching along the track. She zipped up the pocket in which she'd put her compass in case the weather grew opaque, and went to find Ben. He'd opened the blinds and was dawdling over his breakfast, staring out of the kitchen window at the woods, whose burden of snow made the treetrunks look as black as the depths of the forest. "Someone's missing on the moors," she told him. "If I'm not back in time you'll be here to collect the children, won't you?"

"I'll be here."

She kissed him on the forehead. "You'd better be, for me."

Sally was turning the Landrover. Ellen ran through the churned slush and hoisted herself into the passenger seat as Sally set the wipers squealing back and forth on the windscreen before she drove down the track. She was a muscular redhead with a wide face which always looked humorous because of her lopsided mouth. "Did I interrupt anything?" she said. Don t worry.

"You wouldn't tell me if I had, would you? My niece says you're one of the stars of the college. Just you make sure you appreciate yourself."

She swung the vehicle onto the road in a flurry of slush and drove alongside the railway line, all traces of which had been erased by snow. An older Landrover was waiting outside the tourist information centre. Les Barns, who sold climbing equipment in the centre, was behind the wheel, and Frank from the butcher's was next to him. The walkie-talkie on Sally's lap cleared its throat as she drove up. "Men and their toys," she murmured to Ellen as Les said "Testing, testing."

"Head for the heights," Sally told him.

As she drove onto the moor the houses seemed to sink into the snow. She had reached the lowest crags when the green Stargrave bus appeared in the distance. The walkie-talkie spluttered. "Bus coming," Les announced.

"Thank you, Les. We had noticed."

When the meandering road eventually brought the bus and her Landrover face to face, Sally flashed her headlights. The driver slid his window open and leaned out of the cab, a frown supplementing the wrinkles of his weathered forehead. "There's a car abandoned just over the ridge."

"Did you happen to notice the number, Tom?"

"I did." He dug in his breast pocket and produced a tattered notepad no bigger than the palm of his hand. Licking his thumb, he leafed through the pad as though he was dealing cards. "There you are, you little bugger," he muttered at last, and read Sally the registration number. "Any help to you?"

"I'm afraid so. Thanks, Tom."

The phone harrumphed, but Sally ignored it while she made for the ridge and parked where the road was widest. Moors which looked to Ellen more than ever like a picture waiting for its details to be added surrounded the vehicle, sloping back to the crags above Stargrave and ahead more gently towards Richmond. A few hundred yards ahead a white mound stood beside the road, only its shape and the number-plate, which the bus driver must have scraped clear, showing that it was a car. The other Landrover pulled up behind Sally's, and the walkie-talkie said "Is that our man's car?"

Sally stepped onto the road and waited for the men to do so. "It's his all right. We'd better look inside."

"You'd think Tom would have," Frank complained.

"He mustn't have wanted to deny you the pleasure," Sally said, so innocently that Ellen had to suppress a nervous giggle as she followed her along a rut the bus had crushed in the snow. Usually the murmur of the motorway in the distance beyond the horizon would be faintly audible, but now the only sounds were the breathing and the flattened footfalls of the search party. Frank marched up to the car and thumped on the roof to break the crust of snow, then he dragged off one of his gloves and cleared the windscreen, his nails squealing on the glass, his face as morose as it was every weekday at the butcher's. He leaned on the windscreen and squinted through it. "Nothing in here but a mucky old map."

Sally shaded her eyes and surveyed the moor, then used her binoculars. "This isn't going to be easy."

"Do we know what he was wearing?" Ellen said.

"Orange all over."

That made Ellen feel there was something she ought to have noticed on the way to the ridge. "Can I use your binoculars?"

"Have them. Maybe an artist's eye will help."

At first Ellen could see only snow, brought dazzlingly closer. She moved from rut to snowy rut to change her view, and then she halted, one foot skidding. "There."

The lenses planed the crags into shapes like slices of icebergs. Almost at the top of the crag closest to the unseen forest, a patch of snow was tinged faintly but unmistakably orange. She passed the binoculars to Sally, who admitted "It could be. We'll drive down while the men start searching here."

She turned the Landrover, crunching the ribs of snow between the ruts. It seemed to Ellen that the cold intensified as the vehicle headed for Stargrave, but perhaps that was partly her reaction to the patch of orange, whose shape was beginning to suggest the outlines of a body huddled against the rock. Sally parked by the stile above the town and raised the binoculars towards the crag, then she used the walkie-talkie. "I think we've found him where Ellen was looking."

Ellen followed her over the slippery stile in the gritstone wall. The women were trudging up the obscured path when Les Barns' Landrover screeched to a halt alongside the wall. He and Frank vaulted with inventive clumsiness over the stile and ran splashily along the path. "You girls can wait here if you like," Les shouted.

"Don't be daft," Sally said.

Ellen wouldn't have minded dawdling. The air was undoubtedly colder than it had been on the ridge. Perhaps that had something to do with the shadows of the crags, shadows whose blackness on the snow appeared to shine, but she felt threatened by an uncontrollable fit of shivering. She sent herself ahead of the rest of the party, through the shadows to the foot of the crag.

It looked like a massive ancient monument preserved in ice, and the orange blotch made her think uneasily of human sacrifice. She moved into the sunlight, moved again as the shadow of the crag inched towards her while Les and Frank fetched climbing gear from their Landrover. How long had the man been up there, near the top of the winding path which weather and climbers had worn in the limestone? She had to assume that he'd been trapped there by yesterday's premature darkness and had lost his nerve. Surely nothing could have made him scramble up the path after dark.

Les strode up to the crag, brandishing a spade, as Frank toiled up from the stile with the equipment. "Let's see about clearing a way up," Les said.

As soon as he dug the spade into the snow on the limestone path, Ellen began shivering. Each scrape of metal on rock seemed to vibrate her gritted teeth. She was trying to brace herself when Sally cried out and pulled her away. The spade had undermined all the snow which was clinging to that side of the crag.

A jagged diagonal fissure which reminded Ellen of an eggshell cracking streaked up from the stretch of path Les had scraped clear. In a couple of seconds the fissure stretched to the top of the crag, and the snow under the line began to slip. The next moment the snow above it lost its hold on the rock. To Ellen it looked so much like a collapsing wall of marble that its sounds, a soft rush followed by a wide lingering thud, seemed unnaturally muffled. A veil of white spray filled the air between the searchers and the crag. The veil sank to the mound of fallen snow which had engulfed the first yards of the path up the limestone, and the searchers stayed where they were; they all seemed to be waiting for someone else to venture forwards or even to speak. Ellen felt choked by her heartbeat, able to take only short harsh thin breaths. At last Sally spoke in a high panicky voice, as if any words were preferable to the silence. "Oh, bless him," she wailed.

The man high on the side of the crag appeared to have died while trying to shelter. He was huddled into a niche at a bend in the path, pressing his spine against the rock. His arms were outstretched as if to fend something off – the snow, Ellen told herself. It was his face which made her turn away: his lips were drawn back as if he was grinning in terror, his eyes in his whitened face appeared to be the colour of snow. Rigor mortis might have given him that expression, she thought, and perhaps snow had lodged on his closed eyes. She risked one more glance. Rigor mortis must have affected his posture on the crag. He looked as if the cold which had killed him had rearranged his body, posed it against the limestone in an almost perfectly symmetrical shape.