‘Come over here … have lunch with me.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m going to Hylam Peak … it’s a good walking day. I’ll get a pub lunch.’
‘Brooding?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I’ll ring you later.’
Simon put the phone down. His sister knew him too well. Brooding? Yes. When he felt like this he was not good company, he needed to put distance between himself and home and, as Cat herself had once said, walk the brooding out of his system. It was everything – having to break off his time in Venice, Martha, and still the hangover from last year. The following Wednesday he would be back at work. He needed to brood now.
Hylam Peak was one of a chain of hills that ran thirty miles to the west of Lafferton, approached by a twisting road that climbed across open moorland. A few damp villages huddled in the shadows of the steep dips between the peaks. In summer the tracks were bright with slow-moving trains of walkers, climbers hung like spiders from ropes attached to the rocky outcrops. These peaks were Bevham’s playground. People got out of the city to fly kites and microlights, hang-glide and race mountain bikes.
For the rest of the year, especially in bad weather, no one came. Simon liked it best on days like this, when he could sit at the top of Hylam Peak among the cries of the sheep and the soaring buzzards and look across three counties, draw, think, even sleep on the dry patchy grass, and speak to no one.
He wondered how people survived in families and crowded places of work, buses, trains, busy streets day in, day out, without a solitary escape to wild empty places.
He was the only one in the roughly fenced-off area that served as a car park. He took out his canvas satchel, immobilised the steering wheel and zapped down the locks. Nothing at all was left in the car apart from an old rug and neither radio nor CD player was fitted. The park might be deserted now but places like this were easy targets for thieves whatever the season.
An hour and a half later, he sat alone on the rock slab at the summit of the Peak. The March sun chased shadows like hares across the landscape below him. The air was clear and filled with the melancholy bleating of hundreds of the native long-fleeced sheep scattered over the hills.
He felt idle. He had been up here times without number and drawn the peaks and the cloudscapes over them as well as the sheep in every season, every weather until, at least for now, there was nothing left for him to put his pencil to.
Brooding, Cat had said. But now that he was up here he felt light-headed in the cool spring air and he did not brood. The sun was on his face. He rolled on to his back and crossed his hands behind his head. A single lark spiralled up into the blue sky and higher, to the whiteness beyond.
Its trail of song was sliced into and drowned by the judder of a helicopter and its shadow fell across Simon’s face, blotting out the sun. He sat up, shocked. The thing was skimming the peaks in a whirl of metal blades. He saw its undercarriage, so close he might have reached up his hand to touch it and as he watched it cross the valley, going east, he could make out the outline of two of the figures inside. It was neither the air ambulance nor a police helicopter but, so far as he could tell, a private one.
As it moved across the landscape the terrified sheep fled up and down the slopes in all directions, trying to get away from the noise and the slipping shadow. The machine itself was well out of sight before the silence came down again.
The lark’s song was severed.
Simon pulled himself to his feet and slung the canvas bag across his back. The intrusion of ugly sound and sight had fractured his peace and sense of ease as it had unsettled the sheep and silenced the bird.
He took the path that led steeply down the Peak, following the fingerposts to Gardale.