There was a good track here, traversing rising ground. He followed it for about a mile farther, then paused once more in the shelter of some thorns. He felt refreshed and invigorated. He leaned back against a drystone wall, letting the past wash away from him. He looked up at the constellations and tried to identify them; he shifted his feet, glanced down, and saw the girl.

With a low exclamation he bent down. Until he touched her, he was almost sure he had imagined her, that she was a trick of moonlight and shadow, an accidental resemblance, a composite of dead branches and white stones.

Then he touched her, and understood: this was no illusion, the woman was real. Her legs and feet were bare, and she was dressed in dark clothes. He pushed some brambles aside, touched a cold hand; the woman did not move.

She was huddled against the side of the ditch, and her face was obscured. With practiced hands he felt her neck, then her spine. When he was sure there was no injury there, he risked moving her. Very gently, he turned her toward him, into the recovery position, on her right side.

Her body was limp and unresisting. As he moved her, moonlight struck her face, and Rowland froze. She was very young, little more than a child. Her eyelids had some metallic paint on them; there was mud on her face, and her lips were blackish. He felt for a pulse on her neck but could not find one. He reached for her wrist, and as he did so, he saw that the backs of her fingers were tattooed with the word HATE, one letter to each finger, and that the fingers were already beginning to stiffen into claws.

He felt a cold anger, then a flood of pity. He checked again for a pulse, although he knew he would not find one, not in a girl who must already have been dead several hours. He laid her gently back down, took off his overcoat, and covered her. Then he rose and ran back the way he had come, two miles to Max’s, to a phone.

By two-fifteen he had called the police, roused Max, told him where the girl was, and was on his way back across the fields.

It seemed right that someone should stay with her, so he stood beside her body, staring out across the hills. He tried to puzzle out how someone so young, dressed in this way, should end up in this remote place, when it was so late, and so cold.

Shock had slowed his thinking, and it was several minutes before he made the connection between the lights, the music he had heard, and the girl. He swung around, realizing for the first time that the music had stopped. The only sound he could now hear was his own breathing, and the wind as it moved the branches of the thorns.

But if the music explained the girl’s presence, it did not explain her death. He knelt beside her huddled shape, trying to work out how she came to be here, and dead, when she seemed physically uninjured and unharmed.