Margaret Lowe arrived at the observatory at four fifty in the morning, which was her usual time on observation days, the drive from the village taking just under half an hour on roads that wound up through the dale and then onto the open moorland where the tarmac narrowed and the verges became rough grass and heather and the headlights of the car picked out the white painted stones that marked the edge of the track on the steeper sections near the summit, the stones painted a long time ago and repainted periodically, their whiteness one of the things that stayed constant on a road she had driven so many times it existed in her body as well as in her knowledge.
She parked in the small gravel area beside the observatory and sat for a moment with the engine off, which was a habit she had developed not from intention but from the accumulated custom of thousands of arrivals, the engine cutting out and leaving a quality of air that she always noticed, a release from the noise and the vibration of the drive into something that was not quite silence but was close enough that the body registered the difference. The wind was there, a south-westerly at perhaps fifteen knots, the long grass on the slope below the car park bending in one direction and holding there, the steady bend of a consistent flow rather than the oscillation of a gusty wind, the grass pressed over and staying pressed.
The sky above the car park was uniformly dark. She looked up and found no stars in any direction, the sky from horizon to horizon the same absolute dark grey that she associated with complete overcast, the cloud above too thick to transmit even the faintest suggestion of starlight. On a partly cloudy night the sky had a particular variable quality, the clouds themselves visible as darker patches against the lighter sky between them, the stars in the gaps casting enough light to make the cloud edges visible. This sky had none of that, the darkness complete and even, and she noted it before she got out of the car and walked across the gravel to the door.