To get to the top of the moor, Jenny had to dismount and wheel the Kokomo up the steepest part of the path. She knew she was almost there when she reached the twisted Heart Stone, twelve feet high, with iron hand and foot holds driven into its sides.

At the top, the sandy track was cycleable, as long as you avoided the exposed rocks in the middle. It crossed a plateau of dark heather and whinberry, with patches of rhododendron on the southern slopes. There were old quarries on two sides, and sharp crags and edges on the east and south, where the plateau fell away into the valleys.

The crossing of the main paths was marked by a wooden sign scrawled with the name of the Nine Virgins and a yellow arrow. Around the sign was an area worn by many feet. Someone living in the valley had a peacock; its long drawn-out shriek drifted across the moor before dying away in the wind.

By the time she reached the Virgins, Jenny could feel the perspiration standing out on her forehead. Her Lycra cycling shorts were tighter on her hips and buttocks than they should have been, and the skin of her legs was pink and blotched from the exertion and the chafing of the wind.

She didn’t mind the wind, or the cold, or even the exertion. Up here on the moor they helped to blow away the thoughts that would sit in the corners of her mind all the rest of the week, dark and evil-eyed. Nowhere else could she do that; certainly nowhere in Sheffield, where the crowded streets and the traffic only fed her anxieties.

In early November, the weather kept most people off the moor. But she could see that someone was sitting against the trunk of a tree near the stone circle, playing a few notes on a flute, toying with a tune that was vaguely familiar. She couldn’t see the musician clearly, but she had an impression of long, fair hair and a multi-coloured sweater.

Jenny turned the handlebars of the bike away from the Nine Virgins and headed towards a path that ran down through deep bracken. The path turned into a stream bed later in the winter, and the ground was scoured to its sandy bottom. Tree roots ran close to the surface, bursting through to form ragged steps in the steepest parts. Beechnuts crunched underfoot and the bracken was head high. It pressed close around her, its brown, dead hands brushing against her legs and rattling on the spokes of her wheels.