It wasn’t on the phone. It was on the track beyond my window. Of course this needn’t mean I hadn’t heard one in Dancers Oak as well. I laid the phone on its back on my desk, and its face turned as blank as my mind. I stared at the observations I’d typed on the computer – thoughts about books for next term – and then I fetched Thelma’s journal. Soon I was consulting the map on my phone before heading for my car. If only so as to be prepared in case I had to discuss Roy and Bella’s expeditions with his mother, I wanted to see some of the places in the journal for myself.

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

It Speaks

“In half a mile leave the motorway by the first exit.”

The navigator on my phone had the voice of a butler out of Hollywood, and sounded surer of itself than I felt. All around me the flat land that stretched to the horizon beneath an undecided whitish August sky was strewn with clumps of grey stone houses, and I wondered how it had looked to my aunt. What could have brought her here? Perhaps she had already known more about Halfway Halt than I’d managed to discover, which might as well have been nothing at all.

“At the top of the ramp take the first exit onto Sunward Way…” The broad road – four lanes divided in half by a protracted sliver of verge – wound east through grey Yorkshire villages that appeared to be staining the sky beyond them. Each one had a pub and a church, and the succession of ecclesiastical towers put me in mind of a painting of Thelma’s, an early work in which all the spires of an English countryside were linked by horizontal lightning, the bearer of some unspecified mystical message. Had she subsequently found this inspiration too conventional? That didn’t explain how she’d learned about Halfway Halt or anywhere else in her journal.

“In five miles take the second exit onto Northerly Lane…” This was a road just wide enough for two large vehicles to pass each other. Hedges barbed with outsize thorns fended trespassers away from fields and obscured bends that grew progressively sharper. At least I met no traffic, in fact no signs of life on the move except for the delicately jagged flights of butterflies, and once a head that rose over a gate to watch me as best it could while its eyes crawled with insects. It was a cow, but I was glad to leave the spectacle behind, especially when it poked out a considerable tongue onto which flies swarmed at once.