A PLACE OF EXECUTION

Val McDermid

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1999

Copyright © Val McDermid 1999

Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007217144

Ebook Edition © MAY 2009 ISBN: 9780007327591

Version: 2020-05-20

Praise for A Place of Execution

‘This book changed everything I thought I knew about crime fiction’ Belinda Bauer, bestselling author of Snap

‘Every now and then, a writer transforms the landscape of the literary canon: Val McDermid is one such writer … It both moves and shocks, and yet compels us to read on. A Place of Execution reveals her as a master of her craft’ Fiona Cummins, bestselling author of Rattle

‘From the first pages, we know we’re in the hands of a master. This book will earn its author a place in that rare pantheon – the truly literary suspense novel’ Jeffrey Deaver

‘One of the best detective stories I’ve read’ Ruth Rendell

‘Just mesmerizing’ Joseph Knox, bestselling author of Sirens

‘A brilliant book. Val McDermid develops each character and location exquisitely, while the story blazes to an astonishing ending’ Holly Watt, award winning author of To the Lions

‘Beautifully written … It may be that McDermid will write better novels than this in the future, but I do not see how’ Daily Telegraph

‘A substantial book and an impressive one, possibly the best McDermid has written and it takes this most accomplished writer into higher territory’ Sunday Telegraph

‘A Place of Execution is a wake-up call to crime writers everywhere. A terrific and original novel, brilliantly executed’ Mirror

Dedication

To my evil twin; laissez les bon temps rouler, cher.

Epigraph

You shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and thence to a place of lawful execution, and there you shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and afterwards your body shall be buried in a common grave within the precincts of the prison wherein you were last confined before your execution; and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

The formal death sentence of the English legal system

LE PENDU: THE HANGED MAN

Divinatory meaning: The card suggests life in suspension. Reversal of the mind and one’s way of life. Transition. Abandonment. Renunciation. The changing of life’s forces. Readjustment. Regeneration. Rebirth. Improvement. Efforts and sacrifice may have to be undertaken to succeed towards a goal which may not be reached.

Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling S. R. Kaplan

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for A Place of Execution

Dedication

Epigraph

BOOK 1

Introduction

Prologue

PART ONE: The Early Stages

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

PART TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART THREE

The Remand

The Murder Charge

The Committal

The Trial 1

The Trial 2

The Trial 3

The Trial 4

The Trial 5

The Trial 6

The Trial 7

The Verdict

A Place of Execution

BOOK 2

PART ONE

PART TWO

1 February 1998

2 October 1997 – February 1998

3 February 1998

4 February/March 1998

5 April 1998

6 May 1998

7 May 1998

8 May/June/July 1998

9 August 1998

PART THREE

1 August 1998

2 August 1998

3 August 1998

4 August 1998

5 August 1998

6 August 1998

7 August 1998

8 August 1998

9 August 1998

10 October 1998

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Val McDermid

About the Publisher

BOOK 1

Introduction

Like Alison Carter, I was born in Derbyshire in 1950. Like her, I grew up familiar with the limestone dales of the White Peak, no stranger to the winter blizzards that regularly cut us off from the rest of the country. It was in Buxton, after all, that snow once stopped play in a county cricket match in June.

So when Alison Carter went missing in December 1963, it meant more to me and my classmates than it can have done to most other people. We knew villages like the one she’d grown up in. We knew the sort of things she’d have done every day. We suffered through similar classes and cloakroom arguments about which of the Fab Four was our favourite Beatle. We imagined we shared the same hopes, dreams and fears. Because of that, right from the word go, we all knew something terrible had happened to Alison Carter, because something we also knew was that girls like her – like us – didn’t run away. Not in Derbyshire in the middle of December, anyway.

It wasn’t just the thirteen-year-old girls who understood that. My father was one of the hundreds of volunteer searchers who combed the high moorland and the wooded valleys around Scardale, and his grim face when he returned home after a fruitless day scouring the landscape is still sharply etched in my memory.

We followed the hunt for Alison Carter in the newspapers, and every day at school for weeks, someone would be bound to start the speculation rolling. All these years later, I still had more questions for George Bennett than the former policeman could answer.

I have not based my narrative solely on George Bennett’s contemporaneous notes and current memories. While researching this book, I made several visits to Scardale and the surrounding area, interviewing many of the people who played a part in the unfolding of Alison Carter’s story, gathering their impressions, comparing their accounts of events as they experienced them. I could not have completed this book without the help of Janet Carter, Tommy Clough, Peter Grundy, Charles Lomas, Kathy Lomas and Don Smart. I have taken some artistic licence in ascribing thoughts, emotions and dialogue to people, but these sections are based on my interviews with those of the surviving protagonists who agreed to help me to try to create a truthful picture both of a community and the individuals within it.

Some of what happened on that terrible December night in 1963 will of course never be known. But for everyone who has ever been touched, however remotely, by Alison Carter’s life and death, George Bennett’s story is a fascinating insight into one of the most heartless crimes of the 1960s.

For too long, it has remained hidden in the shadow of the understandably more notorious Moors Murders. But Alison Carter’s fate is no less terrible for coming at the hands of a killer who had but a single victim. And the message of her death is still as important today. If Alison Carter’s story tells us one thing, it is that even the gravest of dangers can wear a friendly face.

Nothing can bring Alison Carter back. But reminding the world of what happened to her might prevent others coming to harm. If this book achieves that, both George Bennett and I will feel some satisfaction.

Catherine Heathcote Longnor, 1998

Prologue

The girl was saying goodbye to her life. And it was no easy farewell.

Like any teenager, she’d always found plenty to complain about. But now that she was about to lose it, this life suddenly seemed very desirable. Now at last she began to understand why her elderly relatives clung so tenaciously to every precious moment, even if it was riven with pain. However bad this life was, the alternative was infinitely worse.

She had even begun to regret things. All the times she’d wished her mother dead; all the times she’d wished that her dream of being a changeling would come true; all the hate she’d expended on the children at school who had called her names for not being one of them; all the fervent longings to be grown up, with these miseries behind her. It all seemed irrelevant now. The only thing that mattered was the uniquely valuable life she was about to lose.

She felt fear, inevitably. Fear of what lay beyond as well as what lay immediately ahead. She’d been brought up to believe in heaven and in its necessary counterweight, hell, the equal and opposite force that held things stable. She had her own very clear ideas of what heaven would be. More than she had ever hoped anything in her short life, she hoped that that was what lay in wait for her, so terrifyingly close now.

But she was desperately afraid that what she was going to was hell. She wasn’t so clear about what hell would consist of. She just knew that, compared to everything she’d hated about her life, it would be worse. And given what she knew, that meant it was going to be very bad indeed.

Nevertheless, there was no other possible choice for her. The girl had to say goodbye to her life.

For ever.

PART ONE The Early Stages

Manchester Evening News,

Tuesday, 10th December 1963, p. 3

£100 reward in boy hunt

Police continued to hunt for 12-year-old John Kilbride today – and hoped that a £100 reward might produce a new lead.

For a local managing director has offered £100 to anyone who gives information which leads directly to the discovery of John who vanished from his home in Smallshaw Lane, Ashton-under-Lyne 18 days ago.

1

Wednesday, 11th December 1963. 7.53 p.m.

‘Help me. You’ve got to help me.’ The woman’s voice quavered on the edge of tears. The duty constable who had picked up the phone heard a hiccuping gulp, as if the caller was struggling to speak.

‘That’s what we’re here for, madam,’ PC Ron Swindells said stolidly. He’d worked in Buxton man and boy for the best part of fifteen years and for the last five, he’d found it hard to shake off a sense that he was reliving the first ten. There was, he reckoned, nothing new under the sun. It was a view that would be irrevocably shattered by the events that were about to unfold around him, but for the moment, he was content to trot out the formula that had served him well until now. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he asked, his rich bass voice gently impersonal.

‘Alison,’ the woman gasped. ‘My Alison’s not come home.’

‘Alison’s your lass, is she?’ PC Swindells asked, his voice deliberately calm, attempting to reassure the woman.

‘She went straight out with the dog when she came in after school. And she’s not come home.’ The sharp edge of hysteria forced the woman’s voice higher.

Swindells glanced automatically at the clock. Seven minutes before eight. The woman was right to be worried. The girl must have been out of the house near on four hours, and that was no joke at this time of year. ‘Could she have gone to visit friends, on the spur of the moment, like?’ he asked, knowing already that would have been her first port of call before she lifted the telephone.

‘I’ve knocked every door in the village. She’s missing, I’m telling you. Something’s happened to my Alison.’ Now the woman was breaking down, her words choking out in the intervals between sobs. Swindells thought he heard the rumble of another voice in the background.

Village, the woman had said. ‘Where exactly are you calling from, madam?’ he asked.

There was the sound of muffled conversation, then a clear masculine voice came on the line, the unmistakable southern accent brisk with authority. ‘This is Philip Hawkin from the manor house in Scardale,’ he said.

‘I see, sir,’ Swindells said cautiously. While the information didn’t exactly change anything, it did make the policeman slightly wary, conscious that Scardale was off his beat in more ways than the obvious. Scardale wasn’t just a different world from the bustling market town where Swindells lived and worked; it had the reputation of being a law unto itself. For such a call to come from Scardale, something well out of the ordinary must have happened.

The caller’s voice dropped in pitch, giving the impression that he was talking man to man with Swindells. ‘You must excuse my wife. She’s rather upset. So emotional, women, don’t you find? Look, Officer, I’m sure no harm has come to Alison, but my wife insisted on giving you a call. I’m sure she’ll turn up any minute now, and the last thing I want is to waste your time.’

‘If you’ll just give me some details, sir,’ the stolid Swindells said, pulling his pad closer to him.

Detective Inspector George Bennett should have been at home long since. It was almost eight o’clock, well beyond the hour when senior detectives were expected to be at their desks. By rights, he should have been in his armchair stretching his long legs in front of a blazing coal fire, dinner inside him and Coronation Street on the television opposite. Then, while Anne cleared away the dishes and washed up, he’d nip out for a pint and a chat in the lounge bar of the Duke of York or the Baker’s Arms. There was no quicker way to get the feel of a place than through bar-room conversation. And he needed that head start more than any of his colleagues, being an incomer of less than six months’ standing. He knew the locals didn’t trust him with much of their gossip, but gradually, they were beginning to treat him like part of the furniture, forgiving and forgetting that his father and grandfather had supped in a different part of the shire.

He glanced at his watch. He’d be lucky to get to the pub tonight. Not that he counted that a great hardship. George wasn’t a drinking man. If he hadn’t been obliged by his professional responsibilities to keep his finger firmly on the pulse of the town, he wouldn’t have entered a pub from one week to the next. He’d much rather have taken Anne dancing to one of the new beat groups that regularly played at the Pavilion Gardens, or to the Opera House to see a film. Or simply stayed at home. Three months married, and George still couldn’t quite believe Anne had agreed to spend the rest of her life with him. It was a miracle that sustained him through the worst times in the job. So far, those had come from tedium rather than the heinous nature of the crimes he encountered. The events of the coming seven months would put that miracle to a tougher test.

That night, however, the thought of Anne at home, knitting in front of the television while she waited for him to return, was far more of a temptation than any pint of bitter. George tore a half-sheet of paper off his scratch pad, placed it among the papers he’d been reading to mark his place, and firmly closed the file, slipping it into his desk drawer. He stubbed out his Gold Leaf cigarette then emptied his ashtray into the bin by his desk, always his last act before he reached for his trench coat and, self-consciously, the wide-brimmed trilby that always made him feel faintly silly. Anne loved it; she was always telling him it made him look like James Stewart. He couldn’t see it himself. Just because he had a long face and floppy blond hair didn’t make him a film star. He shrugged into the coat, noting that it fitted almost too snugly now, thanks to the quilted lining Anne had made him buy. In spite of the slight straining across his broad cricketer’s shoulders, he knew he’d be glad of it as soon as he stepped into the station yard and the teeth of the biting wind that always seemed to be whipping down from the moors through the streets of Buxton.

Taking a last look around his office to check he’d left nothing lying around that the cleaner’s eyes shouldn’t see, he closed the door behind him. A quick glance showed him there was nobody left in the CID room, so he turned back to indulge a moment’s vanity. ‘Detective Inspector G. D. Bennett’ incised in white letters on a small black plastic plaque. It was something to be proud of, he thought. Not yet thirty, and a DI already. It had been worth every tedious minute of the three years of endless cramming for the law degree that had eased him on to the fast track, one of the first ever graduates to make it to the new accelerated promotion stream in the Derbyshire force. Now, seven years from swearing his oath of allegiance, he was the youngest plain-clothes inspector the county force had ever promoted.

There was no one about to see the lapse of dignity, so he took the stairs at a run. His momentum carried him through the swing doors into the uniformed squad room. Three heads turned sharply as he entered. For a moment, George couldn’t think why it was so quiet. Then he remembered. Half the town would be at the memorial service for the recently assassinated President Kennedy, a special Mass open to all denominations. The town had claimed the murdered leader as an adopted native son. After all, JFK had practically been there only months before his death, visiting his sister’s grave a handful of miles away in Edensor in the grounds of Chatsworth House. The fact that one of the nurses who had helped surgeons in the fruitless fight for the president’s life in a Dallas hospital was a Buxton woman had only strengthened the connection in the eyes of the locals.

‘All quiet, then, Sergeant?’ he asked.

Bob Lucas, the duty sergeant, frowned and raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand. ‘We were until five minutes ago, sir.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s probably summat and nowt,’ he said. ‘A pound to a penny it’ll be sorted before I even get there.’

‘Anything interesting?’ George asked, keeping his voice light. The last thing he wanted was for Bob Lucas to think he was the kind of CID man who treated uniforms as if they were the monkeys and he the organ grinder.

‘Missing lass,’ Lucas said, proffering the sheet of paper. ‘PC Swindells just took the call. They rang here direct, not through the emergency switchboard.’

George tried to picture Scardale on his mental map of the area. ‘Do we have a local man there, Sergeant?’ he stalled.

‘No need. It’s barely a hamlet. Ten houses at the most. No, Scardale’s covered by Peter Grundy at Longnor. He’s only two miles away. But the mother obviously thought this was too important for Peter.’

‘And you think?’ George was cautious.

‘I think I’d better take the area car out to Scardale and have a word with Mrs Hawkin, sir. I’ll pick up Peter on the way.’ As he spoke, Lucas reached for his cap and straightened it on hair that was almost as black and glossy as his boots. His ruddy cheeks looked as if he had a pair of Ping-Pong balls tucked inside his mouth. Combined with glittering dark eyes and straight black eyebrows, they gave him the look of a painted ventriloquist’s dummy. But George had already found out that Bob Lucas was the last person to let anyone else put words in his mouth. He knew that if he asked a question of Lucas, he’d get a straight answer.

‘Would you mind if I came along?’ George asked.

Peter Grundy replaced the phone softly in its cradle. He rubbed his thumb along a jaw sandpaper-rough with the day’s stubble. He was thirty-two years old that night in December 1963. Photographs show a fresh-faced man with a narrow jaw and a short, sharp nose accentuated by an almost military haircut. Even smiling, as he was in holiday snaps with his children, his eyes seemed watchful.

Two calls in the space of ten minutes had broken the routine peace of an evening in front of the TV with his wife Meg, the children bathed and in bed. It wasn’t that he hadn’t taken the first call seriously. When old Ma Lomas, the eyes and ears of Scardale, took the trouble to subject her arthritis to the biting cold by leaving the comfort of her cottage for the phone box on the village green, he had to pay attention. But he’d thought he could wait till eight o’clock and the end of the programme before he did anything about it. After all, Ma might be dressing up the reason for her call as concern over a missing schoolgirl, but Grundy wasn’t so sure it wasn’t just an excuse to stir things up for the lass’s mother. He’d heard the talk and knew there were a few in Scardale as thought Ruth Carter had been a bit quick to jump the broomstick with Philip Hawkin, even if he had been the first man to put roses in her cheeks since her Roy had died.

Then the phone had rung again, bringing a scowl to his wife’s face and dragging him out of his comfortable armchair into the chilly hall. This time, he couldn’t ignore the summons. Sergeant Lucas from Buxton knew about the missing girl, and he was on his way. As if it wasn’t bad enough having Buxton boots tramping all over his ground, he was bringing the Professor with him. It was the first time Grundy or any of his colleagues had ever had to work with somebody that had been to university, and he knew from the gossip on his occasional visits to the sub-division in Buxton that they were none of them comfortable with the idea. He hadn’t been slow to join the mutterings about the university of life being the best teacher for a copper. These graduates – you couldn’t send them out of a Saturday night on to Buxton marketplace. They’d never have seen a pub fight in all their born days, never mind know how to deal with one. As far as Grundy could make out, the only good thing that could be said about DI Bennett was that he could turn a handy bat at cricket. And that wasn’t reason enough for Grundy to be happy about him arriving on his patch to upset his carefully nurtured contacts.

With a sigh, he buttoned up his shirt collar. He pulled on his tunic jacket, straightened his cap on his head and picked up his overcoat. He stuck his head round the living room door, a conciliatory smile fastened nervously on his face. ‘I’ve to go to Scardale,’ he said.

‘Shh,’ his wife admonished him crossly. ‘It’s getting to the exciting bit.’

‘Alison Carter’s gone missing,’ he added, spitefully closing the living room door behind him and hurrying down the hall before she could react. And react she would, he knew only too well. A missing child in Scardale was far too close to home for Longnor not to feel a chill wind on its neck.

George Bennett followed Sergeant Lucas out to the yard where the cars were parked. He’d have far preferred to travel in his own car, a stylish black Ford Corsair as new as his promotion, but protocol demanded he climb into the passenger seat of the liveried Rover and let Lucas drive. As they turned south on the main road through the market square, George tried to stifle the prickle of excitement that had stirred in him when he had heard the words, ‘missing lass’. Chances were, as Lucas had rightly pointed out, that it would all come to nothing. More than ninety-five per cent of cases of children reported missing ended in reunion before bedtime, or at worst, before breakfast.

But sometimes, it was a different story. Sometimes, a missing child stayed missing long enough for the certainty to grow that he or she would never come home. Occasionally, that was from choice. More often, it was because the child was dead and the question for the police then became how long it would take them to find a body.

And sometimes, they seemed to vanish as cleanly as if the earth had opened up and gulped them down.

There had been two cases like that within the last six months, both of them less than thirty miles away from Scardale. George always made a careful note of bulletins from outside forces as well as other Derbyshire divisions, and he had paid particular attention to these two missing persons cases because they were just close enough that the children might fetch up on his patch. Dead or alive.

First had been Pauline Catherine Reade. Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, sixteen years old, a trainee confectioner from Gorton, Manchester. Slim build, about five feet tall, wearing a pink and gold dress and a pale-blue coat. Just before eight on Friday, 12th July, she had walked out of the terraced house where she lived with her parents and her younger brother to go to a twist dance. She was never seen again. There had been no trouble at home or at work. She had no boyfriend to fall out with. She had no money to run away with, even if she’d wanted to. The area had been extensively searched and three local reservoirs drained, all without a trace of Pauline. Manchester police had followed up every report of a sighting, but none had led them to the vanished girl.

The second missing child appeared to have nothing in common with Pauline Reade apart from the inexplicable, almost magical nature of his disappearance. John Kilbride, 12 years old, 4ft 10 ins tall with a slim build, dark-brown hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion. He was wearing a grey check sports jacket, long grey flannel trousers, a white shirt and black, chisel-toed shoes. According to one of the Lancashire detectives George knew from cricket, he wasn’t a bright lad, but a pleasant and obliging one. John went to the cinema with some friends on Saturday afternoon, the day after Kennedy died in Dallas. Afterwards, he left them, saying he was going down to the marketplace in Ashton-under-Lyne, where he often earned threepence making tea for the stallholders. The last anyone saw of him, he was leaning against a salvage bin around half past five.

The resulting hunt had been given a last desperate boost only the day before when a local businessman had offered a £100 reward. But nothing appeared to have come of it. That same colleague had remarked to George only the previous Saturday at a police dance, that John Kilbride and Pauline Reade would have left more traces if they’d been abducted by little green men in a flying saucer.

And now a missing girl on his patch. He stared out of the window at the moonlit fields lining the Ashbourne road, their rough pasture crusted with hoarfrost, the dry-stone walls that separated them almost luminous in the silvery light. A thin cloud crossed the moon and in spite of his warm coat, George shivered at the thought of being without shelter on a night like this in so inhospitable a landscape.

Faintly disgusted with himself for allowing his eagerness for a big case to overwhelm the concern for the girl and her family that should have been all that was on his mind, George turned abruptly to Bob Lucas and said, ‘Tell me about Scardale.’ He took out his cigarettes and offered one to the sergeant, who shook his head.

‘I won’t, thanks, sir. I’m trying to cut down. Scardale’s what you might call the land that time forgot,’ he said. In the short spurt of light from George’s match, Lucas’s face looked grim.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s like the Middle Ages down there. There’s only one road in and out and it comes to a dead end by the telephone box on the village green. There’s the big house, the manor, which is where we’re headed. There’s about a dozen other cottages and the farm buildings. No pub, no shop, no post office. Mr Hawkin, he’s what you might call the squire. He owns every house in Scardale, plus the farm, plus all the land a mile in all directions. Everybody that lives there is his tenant and his employee. It’s like he owns them an’ all.’ The sergeant slowed to turn right off the main road on to the narrow lane that led up past the quarry. ‘There’s only three surnames in the place, I reckon. You’re either a Lomas, a Crowther or a Carter.’

Not, George noticed, a Hawkin. He filed the inconsistency away for later inspection. ‘Surely people must leave, to get married, to get work?’

‘Oh aye, people leave,’ Lucas said. ‘But they’re always Scardale through and through. They never lose it. And every generation, one or two people do marry out. It’s the only way to avoid wedding your cousins. But often as not, them as have married into Scardale come out a few years later looking for a divorce. Funny thing is, they always leave the kids behind them.’ He cast a quick glance at George, almost to see how he was taking it.

George inhaled his cigarette and kept his own counsel for a moment. He’d heard of places like this, he’d just never actually been in one. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be part of a world so self-contained, so limited, where everything about your past, present and future must be information shared with an entire community. ‘It’s hard to believe a place like that could exist so close to the town. What is it? Seven miles?’

‘Eight,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s historical. Look at the pitch of these roads.’ He pointed up at the sharp left turn into the village of Earl Sterndale where the houses built by the quarry company to house their workers huddled along the hillside like a rugby scrum. ’Before we had cars with decent engines and proper tarmac roads, it could take you the best part of a day to get from Scardale to Buxton in the winter. That’s when the track wasn’t blocked with snowdrifts. Folk had to rely on their own. Some places around here, they just never got out of the habit.

‘Take this lass, Alison. Even with the school bus, it probably takes her the best part of an hour to get to and from school every day. The county have been trying to get parents to agree to sending children like her as boarders Monday to Friday, to save them the journey. But places like Scardale, they just flat refuse. They don’t see it as the county trying to help them. They think it’s the authorities trying to take their children off them. There’s no reasoning with them.’

The car swung through a series of sharp bends and began to climb a steep ridge, the engine straining as Lucas changed down through the gears. George opened the quarterlight and flicked the remains of his cigarette on to the verge. A draught of frosty air tinged with smoke from a coal fire caught at his throat and he hastily closed the window. ‘And yet Mrs Hawkin wasn’t slow to call us in.’

‘According to PC Swindells, she’d knocked every door in Scardale first, though,’ Lucas said drily. ‘Don’t take me wrong. It’s not that they’re hostile to the police. They’re just…not very forthcoming, that’s all. They’ll want Alison found. So they’ll put up with us.’

The car breasted the rise and began the long descent into the village of Longnor. The limestone buildings crouched like sleeping sheep, dirty white in the moonlight, with plumes of smoke rising from every chimney in sight. At the crossroads in the centre of the village, George could see the unmistakable outline of a uniformed officer, stamping his feet on the ground to keep them warm.

‘That’ll be Peter Grundy,’ Lucas said. ‘He could have waited indoors.’

‘Maybe he’s impatient to find out what’s happening. It is his patch, after all.’

Lucas grunted. ‘More likely his missus giving him earache about having to go out of an evening.’

He braked a little too hard and the car slewed into the kerb. PC Peter Grundy stooped to see who was in the passenger seat, then climbed into the back of the car. ‘Evening, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Sir,’ he added, inclining his head towards George. ‘I don’t like the sound of this at all.’

2

Wednesday, 11th December 1963. 8.26 p.m.

Before Sergeant Lucas could drive off, George Bennett held up one finger. ‘Scardale’s only two miles away, yes?’ Lucas nodded. ‘Before we get there, I want to know as much as possible about what we’re getting into. Can we give PC Grundy a couple of minutes to give us some more details?’

‘A minute or two can’t do any harm,’ Lucas said, easing the car back into neutral.

Bennett squirmed round in his seat so he could see at least the dim outline of the local man’s face. ‘So, PC Grundy, you don’t think we’re going to find Alison Hawkin sitting by the fire getting a tongue-lashing from her mother?’

‘It’s Carter, sir. Alison Carter. She’s not the squire’s daughter,’ Grundy said with the faint air of impatience of a man who sees a long night of explanations ahead of him.

‘Thank you,’ George said mildly. ‘You’ve saved me putting my foot in it over that at least. I’d appreciate it if you could give us a quick briefing on the family. Just so I have an idea what we’re dealing with.’ He held out his cigarettes to Grundy to defuse any idea the man might have that he was being condescended to.

With a quick glance at Bob Lucas, who nodded, Grundy slipped a smoke from the packet and fumbled in his overcoat pocket for a light.

‘I’ve told the inspector the set-up in Scardale,’ Lucas said as Grundy lit his cigarette. ‘About how the squire owns the village and all the land.’

‘Right,’ Grundy said through a swathe of smoke. ‘Well, until about a year ago, it was Hawkin’s uncle who owned Scardale. Old Mr Castleton. There’ve been Castletons in Scardale Manor as far back as parish records show. Any road, old William Castleton’s only son was killed in the war. Flew bombers, he did, but he got unlucky one night over Germany and the last anyone heard was he was missing believed killed in action. His parents had been a good age when young William were born, and there were no other children. So when Mr Castleton died, Scardale went to his sister’s son, this Philip Hawkin. A man that nobody in the place had cast eyes on since he was in short trousers.’

‘What do we know about him?’ Lucas asked.

‘His mother, the squire’s sister, she grew up here, but she married a wrong ’un when she wed Stan Hawkin. He were in the RAF back then, but that didn’t last long. He always claimed he’d taken the rap for one of his senior officers, but the long and short of it was they threw him out for selling tools out the back gate. Any road, the squire took it on himself to see Hawkin right, and he got him a job with an old pal of his, selling cars down south. From all accounts, he never got caught on the fiddle again, but I reckon a leopard never changes its spots, and that’s why the family stopped coming up for visits.’

‘So what about the son, Philip?’ George asked, trying to speed up the story.

Grundy shrugged, his bulk making the car rock. ‘He’s a good-looking beggar, I’ll say that for him. Plenty of charm and smarm, an’ all. The women like him. He’s always been all right wi’ me, but I still wouldn’t trust him to hold the dog while I went for a pee.’

‘And he married Alison Carter’s mother?’

‘I was just getting to that,’ Grundy said with slow dignity. ‘Ruth Carter had been a widow close on six years when Hawkin arrived from down south to take up his inheritance. According to what I’ve heard, he was right taken with Ruth from the off. She’s a fine-looking woman, it’s true, but it’s not every man who’d be willing to take on another man’s child. Mind you, from what I’ve heard, that were never a problem to him. He never let up on Ruth, though. And she wasn’t averse to it, either. He put a sparkle back in her eye and no mistake. They were wed three months after he first showed his face in Scardale. They made a handsome couple.’

‘A whirlwind romance, then?’ George said. ‘I bet that caused a bit of ill feeling, even in a place as tight-knit as Scardale.’

Grundy shrugged. ‘I’ve heard nowt of the sort,’ he said. George recognized a stone wall when he saw it. He’d clearly have to earn Grundy’s trust before the village bobby would hand over his hard-won local knowledge. That the knowledge was there, George didn’t doubt.

‘Right then, let’s head on into Scardale and see what’s what,’ he said. Lucas put the car in gear and drove through the village. At a ‘no through road’ sign, he took a sharp left off the main road. ‘Well signposted,’ George commented drily.

‘Anybody that needs to go to Scardale knows the road there, I reckon,’ Bob Lucas said as he concentrated on driving up a narrow track that seemed to double back on itself in a series of switchback rises and falls. The twin cones of the headlamps made only a slight impression on the darkness of the road, hemmed in as it was by high banks and uneven dry-stone walls that bulged and leaned at apparently impossible angles against the sky.

‘You said when you got in the car that you didn’t like the look of this, Grundy,’ George said. ‘Why’s that?’

‘She seems like a sensible lass, this Alison. I know who she is – she went to primary school in Longnor. I’ve got a niece was in the same class and they went on to the grammar school together. While I was waiting for you, I popped in and had a quick word with our Margaret. She reckons Alison were the same as usual today. They came home on the bus together, just like always. Alison were talking about stopping off in Buxton after school one night this week to buy some Christmas presents. Besides, she says, Alison’s not one for running. If there’s ever owt wrong, she faces it head on. So it looks like whatever’s happened to Alison, it’s likely not happened from choice.’

Grundy’s heavy words sat like a stone in George’s stomach. As if to mirror their ominous nature, the roadside walls disappeared, replaced by steep cliffs of limestone, the road weaving through the narrow defile in a route entirely dictated by topography. My God, George thought, it’s like a canyon in a Western. We should be wearing stetsons and riding mules, not sitting in a car.

‘Just round the next bend, Sergeant,’ Grundy said from behind, his breath bitter with tobacco.

Lucas slowed the car to a crawl, following the curve of an overhanging pinnacle of rock. Almost immediately, the road ahead was blocked by a heavy barred gate. George drew his breath in sharply. If he’d been driving, unaware of the obstacle, he’d have crashed, for sure. As Grundy jumped out and trotted to open the gate, George noticed several paint scrapes in a variety of colours along the rock walls on either side of the road. ‘They don’t exactly welcome strangers with open arms around here, do they?’

Lucas’s smile was grim. ‘They don’t have to. Beyond the gate, technically it’s a private road. It’s only in the last ten years that it’s been asphalted. Before that, nothing that wasn’t a tractor or a Land Rover got up or down the Scardale road.’ He eased the car forward, waiting on the far side of the gate for Grundy to close up and rejoin them.

They set off again. Within a hundred yards of the gate, the limestone cliffs fell back, sloping away on either side to form a distant horizon. Suddenly they’d emerged from gloom into full moonlight once more. Against the starry sky, it looked to George as if they’d emerged from the players’ tunnel into a vast stadium, at least a mile across, with an almost circular ring of steep hills in place of tiers of seats. The arena was no sports field, however. In the eerie light of the moon, George could see fields of rough pasture rising gently from the road that bisected the valley floor. Sheep huddled together against the walls, their breath brief puffs of steam in the freezing air. Darker patches revealed themselves as areas of coppiced woodland as they drove past. George had never seen the like. It was a secret world, hidden and separate.

Now he could see lights, feeble against the moon’s silver gleam, but strong enough to outline a straggle of buildings against the pale limestone reefs at the far end of the dale. ‘That’s Scardale,’ Grundy said needlessly from the back seat.

The conglomeration of stone soon resolved itself into distinct houses huddled round a scrubby circle of grass. A single standing stone leaned at an angle in the middle of the green, and a telephone box blazed scarlet at one side, the only vivid splash of colour in Scardale by moonlight. There looked to be about a dozen cottages, none identical, each separated from its neighbours by only a few yards. Most were showing lights behind their curtains. More than once, George caught a glimpse of hands making a gap for faces to peer through, but he refused to be drawn into a sideways look.

At the very back of the green was a sprawl of ill-assorted gables and windows that George assumed must be Scardale Manor. He wasn’t sure quite what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this glorified farmhouse that looked like it had been thrown together over several hundred years by people who’d had more need than taste. Before he could say anything, the front door opened and an oblong of yellow light spilled out on to the yard in front of it. Against the light a woman’s form was silhouetted.

As the car drew to a halt, the woman took a couple of impulsive steps towards them. Then a man appeared at her shoulder and put an arm round her. Together they waited while the police officers approached, George hanging back slightly to let Bob Lucas take the lead. He could use the time Lucas was taking for the introductions to note his first impressions of Alison Carter’s mother and stepfather.

Ruth Hawkin looked at least ten years older than his Anne, which would put her in her late thirties. He reckoned she was about five feet three, with the sturdy build of a woman used to hard work. Her mid-brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which emphasized the drawn look around grey-blue eyes that showed signs of recent weeping. Her skin looked weather-beaten but her pursed lips showed faint traces of lipstick in their cracks. She wore an obviously hand-knitted twin set in a blue heather mixture over a pleated grey tweed skirt. Her legs were encased in ribbed woollen stockings, her feet shod sensibly in ankle boots with a zip up the front. It was hard to square what he was seeing with Peter Grundy’s description of Ruth as a good-looking woman. George would not have looked twice at her in a bus queue except for her obvious distress, which showed in the tightness of her body, arms crossed defensively across her chest. He assumed it had also drained her attractiveness from her.

The man standing behind her seemed far more at ease. The hand that wasn’t lightly touching his wife’s shoulder was thrust casually into the pocket of a dark-brown cardigan with suede leather facings. He wore grey flannel trousers whose turn-ups flopped over well-worn leather slippers. Philip Hawkin hadn’t been out knocking on village doors with his wife, George noted.

Hawkin was as handsome as his wife was ordinary. A couple of inches under six feet, he had straight dark hair swept back from a widow’s peak, lightly brilliantined to hold it in place. His face reminded George of a shield, with a broad, square forehead tapering to a pointed chin. Straight brows over dark-brown eyes were like an heraldic device; a slender nose seemed to point to a mouth shaped so that it appeared always to be on the point of a smile.

All of this George itemized and filed away in his memory. Bob Lucas was still speaking. ‘So if we could come in and take some details, we can get a clearer picture of what’s happened.’ He paused expectantly.

Hawkin spoke for the first time, his voice unmistakably alien to the Derbyshire Peaks. ‘Of course, of course. Come inside, officers. I’m sure she’s going to turn up safe and well, but it doesn’t hurt to follow the procedures, does it?’ He dropped his hand to the small of Ruth’s back and steered her back into the house. She seemed numb, certainly incapable of taking any initiative. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been dragged out on such a cold night,’ Hawkin added smoothly as he crossed the room.

George followed Lucas and Grundy across the thresh-old and into a farmhouse kitchen. The floors were stone flagged, the walls rough stone brightened with a coat of white distemper that had discoloured unevenly, depending on its proximity to the wood-burning stove and the electric cooker. A dresser and several cupboards of differing heights painted hospital green ranged round the walls, and a pair of deep stone sinks were set under the windows that looked out towards the end of the dale. Another pair of windows gave a view of the village green, the phone box bright against the darkness. Various pans and kitchen implements hung from the black beams that crossed the room a few feet apart. It smelled of smoke, cabbage and animal fat.

Without waiting for anyone else, Hawkin sat down immediately in a carving chair at the head of a scrubbed wooden table. ‘Make the men some tea, Ruth,’ he said.

‘That’s very kind of you, sir,’ George interjected as the woman lifted a kettle off the stove. ‘But I’d rather we pressed on. Where it’s a matter of a missing child, we try not to waste any time. Mrs Hawkin, if you could sit down and tell us what you know.’

Ruth glanced at Hawkin as if seeking his permission. His eyebrows twitched upwards, but he nodded acquiescence. She pulled out a chair and sank into it, folding her arms on the table in front of her. George sat down opposite her, with Lucas beside him. Grundy unbuttoned his overcoat and lowered himself into the carver at the opposite end to Hawkin. He took his pocketbook from his tunic and flipped it open. Licking the end of his pencil, he looked up expectantly.

‘How old is Alison, Mrs Hawkin?’ George asked gently.

The woman cleared her throat. ‘Thirteen past. Her birthday’s in March.’ Her voice cracked, as if something inside her were splintering.

‘And had there been any trouble between you?’

‘Steady on, Inspector,’ Hawkin protested. ‘What do you mean, trouble? What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything, sir,’ George said. ‘But Alison’s at a difficult age, and sometimes young girls get things out of all proportion. A perfectly normal ticking-off can feel like the end of the world to them. I’m trying to establish whether there are any grounds for supposing Alison might have run away.’

Hawkin leaned back in his seat with a frown. He reached behind him, tipping the chair back on two legs. He grabbed a packet of Embassy and a small chrome lighter from the dresser and proceeded to light a cigarette without offering the packet to anyone else. ‘Of course she’s run away,’ he said, a smile softening the hard line of his eyebrows. ‘That’s what teenagers do. They do it to get you worried, to get their own back for some imagined slight. You know what I mean,’ he continued with a man-of-the-world air that included the police officers. ‘Christmas is coming. I remember one year I went missing for hours. I thought my mum would be so glad to see me back home safe that I’d be able to talk her into buying me a bike for Christmas.’ His smile turned rueful. ‘All I got was a sore backside. Mark my words, Inspector, she’ll turn up before morning, expecting the fatted calf.’

‘She’s not like that, Phil,’ Ruth said plaintively. ‘I’m telling you, something’s happened to her. She wouldn’t worry us like this.’

‘What happened this afternoon, Mrs Hawkin?’ George asked, taking out his own cigarettes and offering them to her. With a tight nod of gratitude, she took one, her work-reddened fingers trembling. Before he could get his matches out, Hawkin had leaned across to light it. George lit his own cigarette and waited while she composed herself to respond.

‘The school bus drops Alison and two of her cousins at the road end about quarter past four. Somebody from the village always goes up and picks them up, so she gets in about the half-hour. She came in at the usual time. I was here in the kitchen, peeling vegetables for the tea. She gave me a kiss and said she were off out with the dog. I said did she not want a cup of tea first, but she said she’d been shut in all day and she wanted a run with the dog. She often did that. She hated being indoors all day.’ Ambushed by the memory, Ruth faltered then stopped.

‘Did you see her, Mr Hawkin?’ George asked, more to give Ruth a break than because he cared about the answer.

‘No. I was in my darkroom. I lose all sense of time when I’m in there.’

‘I hadn’t realized you were a photographer,’ George said, noticing Grundy shift in his seat.

‘Photography, Inspector, is my first love. When I was a lowly civil servant, before I inherited this place from my uncle, it was never more than a hobby. Now, I’ve got my own darkroom, and this last year, I’ve become semi-professional. Some portraiture, of course, but mostly landscapes. Some of my picture postcards are on sale in Buxton. The Derbyshire light has a remarkable clarity.’ Hawkin’s smile was dazzling this time.

‘I see,’ George said, wondering at a man who could think about the quality of light when his stepdaughter was missing on a freezing December night. ‘So you had no idea that Alison had come in and gone out?’

‘No, I heard nothing.’

‘Mrs Hawkin, was Alison in the habit of visiting anyone when she went out with the dog? A neighbour? You mentioned cousins that she goes to school with.’

Ruth shook her head. ‘No. She’d just go up through the fields to the coppice then back. In summer, she’d go further, up through the woodland to where the Scarlaston rises. There’s a fold in the hills, you can hardly see it till you’re on it, but you can cut through there, along the river bank, into Denderdale. But she’d never go that far of a winter’s night.’ She sighed. ‘Besides, I’ve been right round the village. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of her since she crossed the fields.’

‘What about the dog?’ Grundy asked. ‘Has the dog come back?’

It was a countryman’s question, George thought. He’d have got there eventually, but not as fast as Grundy.

Ruth shook her head. ‘She’s not. But if Alison had had an accident, Shep wouldn’t have left her. She’d have barked, but she wouldn’t have left her. A night like tonight, you’d hear Shep anywhere in the dale. You’ve been out there. Did you hear her?’

‘That’s why I wondered,’ Grundy said. ‘The silence.’

‘Can you give us a description of what Alison was wearing?’ asked the ever-practical Lucas.

‘She had on a navy-blue duffel coat over her school uniform.’

‘Peak Girls’ High?’ Lucas asked.

Ruth nodded. ‘Black blazer, maroon cardie, white shirt, black and maroon tie and maroon skirt. She’s wearing black woolly tights and black sheepskin boots that come up to mid-calf. You don’t run away in your school uniform,’ she burst out passionately, tears welling up in her eyes. She brushed them away angrily with the back of her hand. ‘Why are we sitting here like it was Sunday teatime? Why aren’t you out looking for her?’

George nodded. ‘We’re going to, Mrs Hawkin. But we needed to get the details straight so that we don’t waste our efforts. How tall is Alison?’

‘She’s near on my height now. Five foot two, three, something like that. She’s slim built, just starting to look like a young woman.’

‘Have you got a recent photograph of Alison that we can show our officers?’ George asked.

Hawkin pushed his chair back, the legs shrieking on the stone flags. He pulled open the drawer of the kitchen table and took out a handful of five-by-three prints. ‘I took these in the summer. About four months ago.’ He leaned across and spread them out in front of George. The face that looked up at him from five coloured head-and-shoulders portraits was not one he’d forget in a hurry.

Nobody had warned him that she was beautiful. He felt his breath catch in his throat as he looked down at Alison. Collar-length hair the colour of set honey framed an oval face sprinkled with pale freckles. Her blue eyes had an almost Slavic set to them, set wide apart on either side of a neat, straight nose. Her mouth was generous, her smile etching a single dimple in her left cheek. The only imperfection was a slanting scar that sliced through her right eyebrow, leaving a thin white line through the dark hairs. In each shot, her pose varied slightly, but her candid smile never altered.

He glanced up at Ruth, whose face had imperceptibly softened at the sight of her daughter’s face. Now he could see what had attracted Hawkin’s eye to the farmer’s widow. Without the strain that had stripped gentleness from Ruth’s face, her beauty was as obvious as her daughter’s. With the ghost of a smile touching her lips, it was hard to imagine he’d believed her plain.

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ George murmured. He got to his feet, picking up the photographs. ‘I’d like to hang on to these for the time being.’ Hawkin nodded. ‘Sergeant, if I could have a word outside?’

The two men stepped from the warm kitchen into the icy night air. As he closed the door behind them, George heard Ruth say in a defeated voice, ‘I’ll make tea now.’

‘What do you think?’ George asked. He didn’t need Lucas’s confirmation to know that this was serious, but if he assumed authority now over the uniformed man, it was tantamount to saying he thought the girl had been murdered or seriously assaulted. And in spite of his growing conviction that that was what had happened, he had a superstitious dread that acting as if it were so might just make it so.

‘I think we should get the dog handler out fast as you like, sir. She could have had a fall. She could be lying injured. If she’s been hit in a rock fall, the dog could have been killed.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got four extra uniformed officers on duty at the Kennedy memorial service. If we’re quick, we can catch them before they go off duty and get them out here as well as every man we can spare.’ Lucas reached past him to open the door. ‘I’ll need to use their phone. No point in trying the radio here. You’d get better reception down the bottom of Markham Main pit shaft.’

‘OK, Sergeant. You organize what you can by way of a search party. I’m going to call in DS Clough and DC Cragg. They can make a start on a door-to-door in the village, see if we can narrow down who saw her last and where.’ George felt a faint fluttering in his stomach, like first-night nerves. Of course, that’s exactly what it was. If his fears were right, he was standing on the threshold of the first major case he’d been entirely responsible for. He’d be judged by this for the rest of his career. If he didn’t uncover what had happened to Alison Carter, it would be an albatross round his neck for ever.

3

Wednesday, 11th December 1963. 9.07 p.m.

The dog’s breath swirled and hung in the night air as if it had a life of its own. The Alsatian sat calmly on its haunches, ears pricked, alert eyes scanning Scardale village green. PC Dusty Miller, the dog handler, stood by his charge, one hand absently fingering the short tan and brindle hair between its ears. ‘Prince’ll need some clothes and shoes belonging to the lass,’ he told Sergeant Lucas. ‘The more she’s worn them, the better. We can manage without, but it’d help the dog.’

‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Hawkin,’ George interjected before Lucas could assign anyone to the task. It wasn’t that he thought a uniformed officer would be deficient in tact; he simply wanted another chance to observe Alison Carter’s mother and her husband.

He walked into the warm fug of the kitchen, where Hawkin was still sitting at the table, still smoking. Now he had a cup of tea in front of him, as did the WPC who sat at the other end of the table. They both looked up as he entered. Hawkin raised his eyebrows in a question. George shook his head. Hawkin pursed his lips and rubbed a hand over his eyes. George was pleased to see the man finally showing some signs of concern for his stepdaughter’s fate. That Alison might be in real danger seemed finally to have penetrated his self-absorption.

Ruth Hawkin was at the sink, her hands among the suds in the washing-up bowl. But she wasn’t doing the dishes. She was motionless, staring intently into the unbroken dark of the night. The moonlight barely penetrated the area behind the house; this far down the valley, the tall limestone reefs were close enough to cut off most of it. There was nothing beyond the window but a faint, dark outline against the grey-white of the cliffs. An outbuilding of some sort, George guessed. He wondered if it had been searched yet. He cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Hawkin…’

Slowly, she turned. Even in the brief time they’d been in Scardale, she seemed to have aged, the skin tightening across her cheekbones and her eyes sinking back into her head. ‘Yes?’

‘We need some of Alison’s clothes. To help the tracker dog.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll fetch something.’

‘The dog handler suggested some shoes, and something she’s worn a few times. A jumper or a coat, I suppose.’

Ruth walked out of the room with the automatic step of the sleepwalker. ‘I wonder if I could use your phone again,’ George asked.

‘Be my guest,’ Hawkin said, waving his hand towards the hallway.

George followed Ruth through the door and made for the table where the old-fashioned black Bakelite phone squatted on a piecrust table next to a wedding photograph of a radiant Ruth with her new husband. If Hawkin hadn’t been so handsomely unmistakable, George doubted he would have identified the bride.

As soon as he closed the door behind him, he felt icy coldness grip him. If the girl was used to living in temperatures like this, she’d stand a better chance outside, he thought. He could see Ruth Hawkin disappear round the turn in the stairs as he lifted the receiver and began to dial. Four rings, then it was picked up. ‘Buxton four-two-two,’ the familiar voice said, instantly soothing his anxieties.

‘Anne, it’s me. I’ve had to go out to Scardale on a case. A missing girl.’

‘The poor parents,’ Anne said instantly. ‘And poor you, having that to deal with on a night like this.’

‘It’s the girl I’m worried about. Obviously, I’m going to be late. In fact, depending on what happens, I might not be back at all tonight.’

‘You push yourself too hard, George. It’s bad for you, you know. If you’re not back by bedtime, I’ll make up some sandwiches and leave them in the fridge so there’s something for you to eat. They’d better be gone by the time I get up,’ she added, her scolding only half teasing.

If Ruth Hawkin hadn’t reappeared on the stairs, he’d have told Anne how much he loved the way she cared about him. Instead, he simply said, ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch when I can,’ and replaced the receiver. He moved to the foot of the stairs to meet Ruth, who was clutching a small bundle to her chest. ‘We’re doing all we can,’ he said, knowing it was inadequate.

‘I know,’ she said. She opened her arms to reveal a pair of slippers and a crumpled flannelette pyjama jacket. ‘Will you give these to the dog man?’

George took the clothes, noting with a stab of nameless emotion how pathetic the circumstances had rendered the blue velveteen slippers and the pink sprigged jacket. Holding them gingerly, to avoid contamination with his scent, George walked back through the kitchen and out into the night air. Wordlessly, he handed the items to Miller and watched while the dog handler spoke soft words of command to Prince, offering the garments to its long nose.

The dog raised its head delicately, as if scenting some culinary delight on the wind. Then it started nosing the ground by the front door, its head swinging to and fro in long arcs, inches above the ground. Every few feet, it gave a snorting snuffle then looked up, thrusting its nostrils towards Alison’s clothes and her scent, as if reminding itself what it was supposed to be seeking. Dog and handler moved forward in tandem, covering every inch of the path from the kitchen door. Then, at the very edge of the dirt track that skirted the back of the village green, the Alsatian suddenly stiffened. As rigid as a child playing statues, Prince paused for long seconds, hungrily drinking in the scent from the scrubby grass. Then in one smooth, liquid motion, the dog moved swiftly across the grass, its body close to the ground, its nose seeming to pull it forward in a low lope.

PC Miller quickened his step to keep up with the dog. On a nod from Sergeant Lucas, four of the uniformed men who’d arrived minutes after the dog team fell into step behind them, fanning out to cover the ground with the cones of their torch beams. George followed them for a few yards, not certain whether he should join their party or wait for the two CID officers he’d summoned but who hadn’t arrived yet.

Their path touched the village green at a tangent then, via a stone stile, into a narrow salient between two cottages that gave out into a larger field. As the dog led them unwaveringly across the field, George heard a car grumbling down the road into the village. As it pulled up behind the cluster of police vehicles already there, he recognized the Ford Zephyr of Detective Sergeant Tommy Clough. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder at the tracker team. Their torches gave their positions away. It wouldn’t be hard to catch up with them. He turned on his heel, strode over to the bulky black car and yanked open the driver’s door. The familiar ruddy harvest moon face of his sergeant grinned up at him. ‘How do, sir,’ Clough said on a wave of beer fumes.

‘We’ve got work to do, Clough,’ George said shortly. Even with a drink in him, Clough would still do a better job than most officers sober. The passenger door slammed and Detective Constable Gary Cragg slouched round the front of the car. He’d watched too many Westerns, George had decided the first time the lanky DC had swaggered into his line of vision. Cragg would have looked fine in a pair of sheepskin chaps with matching Colt pistols slung low on his narrow hips and a ten-gallon hat tipped over his hooded grey eyes. In a suit, he had the air of a man who’s not quite sure how he got where he is, but wishes with all his heart he was somewhere else.

‘Missing girl, is that right, sir?’ he drawled. Even his slow voice would have been more at home in a saloon, asking the bartender for a shot of bourbon. The only saving grace, as far as George could see, was that Cragg showed no signs of being a maverick.

‘Alison Carter. Thirteen years old,’ George briefed them as Clough unfolded his chunky body from under the steering wheel. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘She lives in the manor house, stepdaughter of the squire. Her and her mother are Scardale natives, though.’

Clough snorted and clamped a tweed cap over his tight brown curls. ‘She’ll not have had the sense to get lost, then. You know about Scardale, don’t you? They’ve all been marrying their cousins for generations. Most of them would be hard pressed to find their backsides in a toilet.’

‘Alison managed to make it to grammar school in spite of her handicaps,’ George pointed out. ‘Which, as I recall, is more than we can say for you, Sergeant Clough.’ Clough glared at the boss who was three years his junior, but said nothing. ‘Alison came home from school at the usual time,’ George continued. ‘She went out with the dog. Neither of them’s been seen since. That was the best part of five hours ago. I want you to do a door-to-door round the village. I want to know who was the last person to see her, where and when.’

‘It’ll have been dark by the time she went out,’ Cragg said.

‘All the same, somebody might have seen her. I’m going to try and catch up with the dog handler, so that’s where I’ll be if you need me. OK?’ As he turned away, a sudden chill thought struck him. He looked round the horseshoe of houses huddled round the green, then swung back to face Clough and Cragg. ‘And every house – I want you to check the kids are where they should be. I don’t want some mother having hysterics tomorrow morning when she discovers her kid’s missing too.’

He didn’t wait for an answer, but set off for the stile. Just before he got there, he checked his stride and turned back to find Sergeant Lucas in the middle of directing the remaining six uniformed officers he’d managed to rustle up from somewhere. ‘Sergeant,’ George said. ‘There’s an outbuilding you can see from the kitchen window of the house. I don’t know if anyone’s checked it yet, but it might be worth taking a look, just in case she didn’t go for her usual walk.’

Lucas nodded and gestured with his head to one of the constables. ‘See what you can see, lad.’ He nodded to George. ‘Much obliged, sir.’

Kathy Lomas stood at her window and watched the darkness swallow the tall man in the mac and the trilby. Illuminated by the headlights of the big car that had just rolled to a halt by the phone box, he’d borne a remarkable resemblance to James Stewart. It should have been a reassuring thought, but somehow it only made the evening’s events all the more unreal.

Kathy and Ruth were cousins, separated by less than a year, connected by blood on both maternal and paternal sides. They had grown into women and mothers side by side. Kathy’s son Derek had been born a mere three weeks after Alison. The families’ histories were inextricably intertwined. So when Kathy, alerted by Derek, had walked into Ruth’s kitchen to find her cousin pacing anxiously, chain-smoking and fretting, she’d felt the stab of fear as strongly as if it had been her own child who was absent.

They’d gone round the village together, at first convinced they would find Alison warming herself at someone else’s fire, oblivious to the passing of time, remorseful at causing her mother worry. But as they drew blank after blank, conviction had shrivelled to hope, then hope to despair.

Kathy stood at the darkened window of Lark Cottage’s tiny front room, watching the activity that had suddenly bloomed in the dismal December night. The plain-clothes detective who had been driving the car, the one who looked like a Hereford bull with his curly poll and his broad head, pushed his car coat up to scratch his backside, said something to his colleague, then started towards her front door, his eyes seeming to meet hers in the darkness.

Kathy moved to the door, glancing towards the kitchen where her husband was trying to concentrate on finishing a marquetry picture of fishing boats in harbour. ‘The police are here, Mike,’ she called.

‘Not before time,’ she heard him grumble.

She opened the door just as the Hereford bull lifted his hand to knock. His startled look turned into a smile as he took in Kathy’s generous curves, still obvious even beneath her wraparound apron. ‘You’ll have come about Alison,’ she said.

‘You’re right, missus,’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Clough, and this is Detective Constable Cragg. Can we come in a minute?’

Kathy stepped back and let them pass, allowing Clough to brush against her breasts without complaint. ‘The kitchen’s straight ahead. You’ll find my husband in there,’ she said coldly.

She followed them and leaned against the range, trying to warm herself against the cold fear inside, waiting for the men to introduce themselves and settle round the table. Clough turned to her. ‘Have you seen Alison since she got home from school?’

Kathy took a deep breath. ‘Aye. It was my turn to pick up the kids off the school bus. In the winter, one of us always drives up to the lane end to collect them.’

‘Was there anything different about Alison that you noticed?’ Clough asked.

Kathy thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘Nowt.’ She shrugged. ‘She were just the same as usual. Just…Alison. She said cheerio and walked off up the path to the manor. Last I saw of her she was walking through the door, shouting hello to her mum.’

‘Did you see any strangers about? Either on the road or up at the lane end?’

‘I never noticed anybody.’

‘I believe you went round the village with Mrs Hawkin?’ Clough asked.

‘I wasn’t going to leave her on her own, was I?’ Kathy demanded belligerently.

‘How did you come to know Alison was missing?’

‘It was our Derek. He’s not been doing as well as he should have been at school, so I took it on myself to make sure he was doing his homework properly. Instead of letting him go off with Alison and their cousin Janet when they got home from school, I’ve been keeping him in.’

‘She makes him sit at the kitchen table and do all the work his teachers have set him before she’ll let him loose with the girls. Waste of bloody time, if you ask me. The lad’s only going to be a farmer like me,’ Mike Lomas interrupted, his voice a low rumble.

‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ Kathy said grimly. ’I tell you what’s a waste of time. It’s that record player Phil Hawkin bought Alison. Derek and Janet are never away from there, listening to the latest records. Derek was desperate to get over to Alison’s tonight. She’s just got the new Beatles number one, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. But it was after tea before I let him out. It must have been just before seven. He came back within five minutes, saying Alison had gone out with Shep and hadn’t come home. Of course, I went straight over to see what was what.

‘Ruth was up to high doh. I told her she should check with everybody in the village, just in case Alison had popped in to see somebody and lost track of the time. She’s always sitting with old Ma Lomas, her and her cousin Charlie keeping the old witch company, listening to her memories of the old days. Once Ma gets going, you could sit all night. She’s some storyteller, Ma, and our Alison loves her tales.’

She settled herself more comfortably against the range. Clough could see she was on a roll, and he decided just to let her run and see where her story took them. He nodded. ‘Go on, Mrs Lomas.’

‘Well, we were just about to set off when Phil came in. He said he’d been in his darkroom, messing about with his photographs, and he’d only just noticed the time. He was going on about where was his tea and where was Alison? I told him there were more important things to think about than his belly, but Ruth dished him up a plate of the hotpot she’d had cooking. Then we left him to it and went knocking doors.’ She came to a sudden halt.

‘So you never saw Alison again after she got out of the car coming back from school?’

‘Land Rover,’ Mike Lomas growled.

‘Sorry?’

‘It were a Land Rover, not a car. Nobody has cars down here,’ he said contemptuously.

‘No, I’ve not seen her since she walked in the kitchen door,’ Kathy said. ‘But you’re going to find her, aren’t you? I mean, that’s your job. You are going to find her?’

‘We’re doing our best.’ It was Cragg who trotted out the formulaic placebo.

Before she could utter the angry retort Tommy Clough could see coming, he spoke quickly. ‘What about your lad, Mrs Lomas? Is he where he should be?’

Her mouth dropped open in shock. ‘Derek? Why wouldn’t he be?’

‘Maybe the same reason Alison’s not where she should be.’

‘You can’t say that!’ Mike Lomas jumped to his feet, his cheeks flaming scarlet, his eyes tight with anger.

Clough smiled, spreading his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Nay, don’t take me wrong. All I meant was, you should check in case something’s happened to him an’ all.’

By the time George got over the stile, the lights from the tracker team’s torches were no more than a hazy wavering in the distance. He guessed they had entered some woodland by the way the yellow beams seemed suddenly to disappear and reappear at random. Switching on the torch he’d borrowed from the police Land Rover that had brought some of the men over from Buxton, he hurried across the uneven tufts of coarse grass as quickly as he could.

The trees loomed up sooner than he’d expected. At first, all he could see was undisturbed undergrowth, but swinging the torch to and fro soon revealed a narrow path where the earth was packed hard. George plunged into the woodland, trying to balance haste against caution. The torch beam sent crazy shadows dancing off in every direction, forcing him to concentrate harder on the path than he’d had to do in the field. Frosted leaves crunched under his feet, the occasional twig whipped his face or brushed his shoulder, and everywhere the decaying mushroomy smell of the woodland assailed him. Every twenty yards or so, he snapped off his torch to check his bearings against the lights ahead. Absolute darkness swallowed him, but it was hard to resist the feeling that there were hidden eyes staring at him, following his every move. It was a relief to snap his torch on again. A few minutes into the wood, he realized the lights before him had stopped moving. Putting on a spurt that nearly sent him flying over a tree root, he almost collided with a uniformed constable hurriedly retracing his steps.

‘Have you found her?’ George gasped.

‘No such luck, sir. We have found the dog, though.’

‘Alive?’

The man nodded. ‘Aye. But she’s been tied up.’

‘In silence?’ George asked incredulously.

‘Somebody taped her muzzle shut, sir. Poor beast could barely manage a whimper. PC Miller sent me back to fetch Sergeant Lucas before we did owt.’

‘I’ll take responsibility now,’ George said firmly. ‘But go back anyway and tell Sergeant Lucas what’s happened. I think it might be wise to keep people out of this piece of woodland until daylight. Whatever’s happened to Alison Carter, there might be evidence that we’re destroying right now.’

The constable nodded and took off along the path at a trot. ‘Bloody mountain goats they breed around here,’ George muttered as he blundered on down the path.

The clearing he emerged into was a chiaroscuro of torchlight and strangely elongated shadows. At the far end, a black and white collie strained against a rope tied round a tree. Liquid brown irises stood out against the white of its bulging eyes. The dull pink of the elastoplast that was wound round its muzzle looked incongruous in so pastoral a setting. George was aware of the stares of the uniformed men, looking him over speculatively.

‘I think we should put that dog out of its misery. What do you say, PC Miller?’ he asked, directing his question to the dog handler, who was methodically covering the clearing with Prince.

‘I don’t think she’ll argue with you on that, sir,’ Miller said. ‘I’ll take Prince out of the way so he won’t upset her.’ With a jerk on the dog’s leash and a word of command, he made for the far side of the clearing. George noticed his dog was still casting around as he’d done outside the house earlier.

‘Has he lost the scent?’ he asked, suddenly concerned about more important matters than a dog’s discomfort.

‘Looks like the trail ends here,’ the dog handler said. ‘I’ve been right round the clearing twice, and down the path in the opposite direction. But there’s nothing.’

‘Does that mean she was carried out of here?’ George asked, a cold tremor twitching upwards from his stomach.

‘Like as not,’ Miller said grimly. ‘One thing’s for sure. She didn’t walk out of here unless she turned straight round and walked back to the house. And if that’s what she did, why tie up the bitch and muzzle her?’

‘Maybe she wanted to creep up on her mum? Or her stepdad?’ one of the constables hazarded.

‘The dog wouldn’t have barked at them, would she? So there’d be no need to muzzle her, or leave her behind,’ Miller said.

‘Unless she thought one or other of them might be with a stranger,’ George said, half under his breath.

‘Aye well, my money says she never left this clearing under her own steam.’ Miller spoke with finality as he walked his dog down the path.

George approached the dog cautiously. The whimper in the dog’s throat turned to a soft grumble. What had Ruth Hawkin called it? Shep, that was it. ‘OK, Shep,’ he said gently, holding his hand out so the dog could sniff his fingers. The growl died away. George hitched up his trousers and kneeled down, the frozen ground uneven and ungenerous beneath his knees. Automatically, he noticed the elastoplast was the thicker kind, from a roll two inches wide with a half-inch band of lint bulging up the middle of it. ‘Steady, girl,’ he said, one hand gripping the thick hair at the scruff of the dog’s neck to hold her head still. With his other hand, he picked at the end of the elastoplast till he had freed enough to pull clear. He looked up. ‘One of you, come over here and hold the dog’s head while I get this stuff off.’

One of the constables straddled the nervous collie and grasped her head firmly. George gripped the end of the elastoplast strip and pulled it as hard as he could. Inside a minute, he’d yanked the last of it free, narrowly avoiding the snapping teeth of the collie, panicking in response to having chunks of her fur ripped away with the tape. The constable behind her hastily jumped clear as she swung round to try her chances with him. As soon as she realized her mouth was free, Shep dropped to the ground and began to bark furiously at the men. ‘What do we do now, sir?’ one of the constables asked.

‘I’m going to untie her and see where she wants to take us,’ George said, sounding more confident than he felt. He walked forward cautiously, but the dog showed no sign of wanting to attack him. He took out his penknife and sawed through the rope. It was easier than trying to untie it while the dog was straining against it. And it had the advantage of preserving the knot, just in case there was anything distinctive about it. George thought not; it looked pretty much like a standard reef knot to him.

Instantly, Shep lunged forward. Taken by surprise, George gouged a slice out of his thumb as he tried to hold on to the sheepdog. ‘Damn!’ he exploded as the rope whirled through his fingers, burning the skin where it touched. One of the constables attempted to grab the rope as the dog fled, but failed. George clutched his bleeding hand and watched helplessly as the dog raced down the path Miller and Prince had taken from the clearing.

Moments later, there was the sound of a scuffle and Miller’s voice shouting sternly, ‘Sit.’ Then silence. Then an eerie howling split the night.

Groping in his pocket for a handkerchief, George followed the dog’s path. A dozen yards into the wood, he came upon Miller and the two dogs. Prince lay on the ground, his muzzle between his paws. Shep sat on the ground, her head lifted towards the sky, her mouth opening and closing in a long series of heart-stopping wails. Miller held the rope, securing the straining collie. ‘She seems to want to go this way,’ Miller said, gesturing with his head down the path away from the clearing.

‘Let’s follow her, then,’ George said. He wrapped his bleeding thumb with the handkerchief then took the rope from the handler. ‘Come on, girl,’ he encouraged the collie. ‘Show me.’ He shook the rope.

Immediately, Shep bounded to her feet and set off down the trail, tail wagging. They wove through the trees for a couple of minutes, then the track emerged from the trees on to the banks of a narrow, fast-flowing stream. The dog promptly sat down and looked back at him, her tongue hanging out and her eyes bewildered.

‘That’d be the Scarlaston,’ Miller’s voice said behind him. ‘I knew it rose in these parts. Funny river. I’ve heard tell it just sort of seeps out of the ground. If we have a dry summer, it sometimes vanishes altogether.’

‘Where does it lead?’ George asked.

‘I’m not sure. I think it flows either into the Derwent or the Manifold, I can’t remember which. You’d have to look at a map for that.’

George nodded. ‘So if Alison was carried out of the clearing, we’d lose the trail here anyway.’ He sighed and turned away, guiding his torch beam over his watch. It was almost quarter to ten. ‘There’s nothing more we can do in darkness. Let’s head back to the village.’

He practically had to drag Shep away from the Scarlaston’s edge. As they made their slow progress back to Scardale, George fretted about Alison Carter’s disappearance. Nothing made sense. If someone was ruthless enough to kidnap a young girl, surely they wouldn’t show mercy to a dog? Especially a dog as lively as Shep. He couldn’t imagine a dog with the collie’s spirit meekly submitting to having elastoplast tightly wound round its muzzle. Unless it had been Alison who’d done the deed?

If it had been Alison, had she acted on her own initiative or had she been forced to silence her own dog? And if she’d done it for her own ends, where was she now? If she’d been going to run away, why not take the dog with her for protection, at least until dawn broke? The more he thought about it, the less he understood.

George trudged out of the woods and through the field, the reluctant dog trailing at his heels. George found Sergeant Lucas conferring with PC Grundy in the light of a hurricane lamp hanging from the back of the Land Rover. Briefly, he explained the scenario in the woods. ‘There’s no point in trampling through there in the dark,’ he said. ‘I reckon the best we can do is put a couple of men on guard and at first light, we search the woodland inch by inch.’

Both men looked at him as if he’d gone mad. ‘With respect, sir, if you’re intending to keep the villagers out of the wood, there’s not a lot of point in leaving a couple of men to catch frostbite in the field,’ Lucas said wearily. ‘The locals know the lie of the land far better than we do. If they want to get into those woods, they will, and we’ll never know about it. Besides, I don’t think there’s a soul in the place who hasn’t already volunteered to help searching. If we tell them what’s what, they’ll be the last ones to destroy any possible clues.’

He had a point, George realized. ‘What about outsiders?’

Lucas shrugged. ‘All we have to do is post a guard on the gate on the road. I don’t imagine anybody’ll be keen enough to hike in from the next dale. It’s a treacherous path up the Scarlaston banks at the best of times, never mind on a frosty winter night.’

‘I’m happy to trust your judgement, Sergeant,’ George said. ‘I take it your men have been searching the houses and outbuildings?’

‘That’s right. Not a trace of the girl,’ Lucas said, his naturally cheery face as sombre as it could manage. ‘The building out the back of the manor, it’s where the squire develops his photographs. Nowhere for a lass to hide in there.’

Before George could respond, Clough and Cragg appeared from the shadows on the village green. Both looked as cold as he felt, the collars of their heavy winter coats turned up against the chill wind that whistled up the valley. Cragg was flipping back the pages of his notebook. ‘Any progress?’ George asked.

‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Clough complained, offering his cigarettes round the group. Only Cragg took one. ‘We spoke to everybody, including the cousins she came back from school with. It was Mrs Kathy Lomas’s turn to pick them up at the road end, which she did as per usual. The last she saw of Alison, the lass was walking in the kitchen door of the manor. So the mother’s telling the truth about the lass getting home in one piece. Mrs Lomas went indoors with her lad and never saw Alison again. Nobody saw hide nor hair of the girl after she came home from school. It’s like she vanished into thin air.’

4

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 1.14 a.m.

George looked around the church hall with an air of resignation. In the pale-yellow light, it looked dingy and cramped, the pale-green walls adding to the institutional flavour. But they needed an incident room large enough to accommodate a CID team as well as the uniformed officers, and there were precious few candidates within striking distance of Scardale. Pressed, Peter Grundy had only been able to come up with either the village hall in Longnor or this depressing annexe to the Methodist Chapel that squatted on the main road just past the Scardale turn-off. It had the advantage not only of being closer to Scardale, but of having a telephone line already installed in what claimed, according to the sign on its door, to be the vestry.

‘Just as well Methodists don’t go in for vestments,’ George said as he stood on the threshold and surveyed the glorified cupboard. ‘Make a note, Grundy. We’ll need a field telephone as well.’

Grundy added the telephone to a list that already included typewriters, witness-statement forms, maps of assorted scales, filing cards and boxes, electoral rolls and telephone directories. Tables and chairs were no problem; the hall was already well furnished with them. George turned to Lucas. ‘We need to draw up a plan of action for the morning,’ he said decisively. ‘Let’s pull up some chairs and see what we need to do.’

They arranged a table and chairs directly below one of the electric heaters that hung suspended from the roof beams. It barely dented the damp chill of the icy night air, but the men were glad of any relief. Grundy disappeared into the small kitchen and returned with three cups and a saucer. ‘For an ashtray,’ he said, sliding the saucer across the table towards George. Then he produced a Thermos flask from inside his overcoat and plonked it firmly on the table.

‘Where did that come from?’ Lucas demanded.

‘Betsy Crowther, Meadow Cottage,’ Grundy said. ‘The wife’s cousin on her mother’s side.’ He opened the flask and George stared greedily at the curl of steam.

Fortified by tea and cigarettes, the three men began to plan. ‘We’ll need as many uniforms as we can muster,’ George said. ‘We need to comb the whole of the Scardale area, but if we draw a blank there, we’ll have to widen the search down the course of the Scarlaston river. I’ll make a note to contact the Territorial Army, to see if they can spare us any bodies to help with the searching.’

‘If we’re spreading the net wider, it might be worth asking the High Peak Hunt if they can help us out,’ Lucas said, hunched over his tea to make the most of its warmth. ‘Their hounds are used to tracking, and their riders know the land.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ George said, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette as if it could warm his frozen core. ‘PC Grundy, I want you to make a list of all the local farmers within, say, a five-mile radius. At first light, we’ll send some men out to ask them all to check their land to see if the girl’s there. If she was running away, she could easily have had an accident, wandering around in the dark.’

Grundy nodded. ‘I’ll get on to it. Sir, there was one thing I wanted to bring up?’ George nodded. ‘Yesterday was Leek Cattle Market and Christmas Show. Fatstock and dairy cattle. Decent prize money, an’ all. So that means there would have been a lot more traffic than usual on the roads in these parts. There’s a lot go over to Leek for the show, whether they’ve got cattle entered or not. Some of them will have been doing their Christmas shopping at the same time. They could have been heading for home round about the time Alison went missing. So if the lass was on any of the roads, there’s a better than average chance that she’ll have been spotted.’

‘Good thinking,’ George said, making a note. ‘You might want to ask the farmers about that when you talk to them. And I’ll mention it at the press conference.’

‘Press conference?’ Lucas asked suspiciously. He’d been reluctantly approving of the Professor this far, but now it looked like George Bennett was planning on using Alison Carter to make a name for himself. It was a move that failed to impress the sergeant.

George nodded. ‘I’ve already been on to headquarters asking them to arrange a press conference here at ten o’clock. We need all the help we can get, and the press can reach people quicker than we can. It could take us weeks to contact everybody who was at Leek Market yesterday, and even then we’d miss plenty. Whereas with press coverage, nearly everybody will know there’s a missing girl in a matter of days. Luckily, today’s press day for the High Peak Courant, so they should be able to get the news on the streets by teatime. Publicity’s vital in cases like these.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have done much for our colleagues in Manchester and Ashton,’ Lucas said dubiously. ‘Other than waste officers’ time chasing down false leads.’

‘If she has run away, it’ll make it harder for her to stay hidden. And if she’s been taken anywhere else, it increases our chances of finding a witness,’ George said firmly. ‘I spoke to Superintendent Martin, and he agrees. He’s coming out here for the press conference himself. And he’s confirmed that for now, I’m in overall charge of the operation,’ he added, feeling slightly awkward at his assertiveness.

‘Makes sense,’ Lucas said. ‘You being here from the first shout.’ He got to his feet, pushing his chair back and leaning forward to stub out his cigarette. ‘So, shall we head back to Buxton now? I don’t see there’s much we can do here. The day-shift men can set it up when they come on at six.’

Privately, George agreed. But he didn’t want to leave. Equally, he didn’t want to appear to push his authority by insisting they hang around pointlessly. With some reluctance, he followed Lucas and Grundy out to the car. Little was said on the way back to Longnor to drop Grundy off, still less on the seven miles back to Buxton. Both men were tired, both troubled by their private imaginings.

Back in the divisional headquarters in Buxton, George left the sergeant to type up a list of orders for the day shift and the extra officers drafted in from other parts of the county. He climbed behind the wheel of his car, shivering at the blast of cold air that issued from his dashboard vents when he turned the engine on. Within ten minutes, he was drawing up outside the house that Derbyshire Police decreed was appropriate for a married man of his rank. A three-bedroomed stone-clad semi, it sat in a generous garden, thanks to the sharp bend in the street. From the kitchen and the back-bedroom windows, there was a view of Grin Low woods stretching along the ridge to the beginning of Axe Edge and the grim miles of moorland where Derbyshire blurred into Staffordshire and Cheshire.

George stood in the moonlit kitchen, looking out at the inhospitable landscape. He’d dutifully taken the sandwiches out of the fridge and brewed himself a pot of tea, but he hadn’t eaten a bite. He couldn’t even have said what the sandwiches contained. There was a thin pile of Christmas cards on the table, left by Anne for his attention, but he ignored them. He cradled the fragile china cup in his broad square hands, remembering Ruth Hawkin’s ravaged face when he’d brought the dog back and broken into her private vigil.

She’d been standing by the kitchen sink, staring out into the darkness behind the house. Now he came to think about it, he wondered why she wasn’t devoting her attention to the front of the house. After all, if Alison was going to return, she’d presumably come from the direction of the village green and the fields she’d set off towards earlier. And any news would come that way too. Perhaps, George thought, Ruth Hawkin couldn’t bear to see the familiar scene criss-crossed by police officers, their presence a poignant and forceful reminder of her daughter’s absence.

Whatever the reason, she’d been gazing out of the window, her back to her husband and the WPC who still sat awkwardly at the kitchen table, there to offer a sympathy that clearly wasn’t wanted. Ruth hadn’t even moved when he’d opened the door. It was the sound of the dog’s claws on the stone flags that had dragged her eyes away from the window. When she turned, the dog had dropped to the floor and, whimpering, crawled towards Ruth on her belly.

‘We found Shep tied up in the woods,’ George had said. ‘Someone had taped her mouth shut. With elastoplast.’

Ruth’s eyes widened and her mouth twisted in a rictus of pain. ‘No,’ she protested weakly. ‘That can’t be right.’ She dropped to her knees beside the dog, who was squirming round her ankles in a parody of obsequious apology. Ruth buried her face in the dog’s ruff, clutching the animal to her as if it were a child. A long pink tongue licked her ear.

George looked across at Hawkin. The man was shaking his head, looking genuinely bewildered. ‘That makes no sense,’ Hawkin said. ‘It’s Alison’s dog. It would never have let anybody harm a hair on Alison’s head.’ He gave a mirthless bark of laughter. ‘I lifted a hand to her one time, and the dog had my sleeve in its teeth before I could touch her. The only person who could have done that to the dog was Alison herself. It wouldn’t even stand for me or Ruth doing something like that, never mind a stranger.’

‘Alison might not have had any choice,’ George said gently.

Ruth looked up, her face transformed by the realization that her earlier fears might truly be reflected in reality. ‘No,’ she said, her voice a hoarse plea. ‘Not my Alison. Please God, not my Alison.’

Hawkin got to his feet and crossed the room to his wife. He hunkered down beside her and put an awkward arm round her shoulders. ‘You mustn’t get into a state, Ruth,’ he said, casting a quick glance up at George. ‘That won’t help Alison. We’ve got to stay strong.’ Hawkin seemed embarrassed at having to show concern for his wife. George had seen plenty of men who were uncomfortable with any display of emotion, but he’d seldom encountered one so self-conscious about it.

He felt enormous pity for Ruth Hawkin. It wasn’t the first time George had watched a marriage crack under the weight of a major investigation. He’d spent less than an hour in the company of this couple, but he knew instinctively that what he was witnessing here was not so much a crack as a major fracture. It was hard enough at any time in a marriage to discover that the person you had married was less than you imagined, but for Ruth Hawkin, so recently wed, it was doubly difficult, coming as it did on top of the anxiety of her daughter’s disappearance.

Almost without thinking, George had crouched down and covered one of Ruth’s hands with his own. ‘There’s very little we can do just now, Mrs Hawkin. But we are doing everything possible. At first light, we’ll have men scouring the dale from end to end. I promise you, I won’t give up on Alison.’ Their eyes had met and he’d felt the intensity of a clutch of emotions far too complicated for him to separate.

As he stared out towards the moors, George realized there was no way he could sleep that night. Wrapping the sandwiches in greaseproof paper, he filled a flask with hot tea and softly climbed the stairs to pick up his electric razor from the bathroom.

On the landing, he paused. The door to their bedroom was ajar, and he couldn’t resist a quick look at Anne. With his fingertips, he pushed the door a little wider. Her face was a pale smudge against the white gleam of the pillow. She lay on her side, one hand a fist on the pillow beside her. God, she was beautiful. Just watching her sleep was enough to make his flesh stir. He wished he could throw his clothes off and slide in beside her, feeling her warmth the length of his body. But tonight, the memory of Ruth Hawkin’s haunted eyes was more than he could escape.

With a soft sigh, he turned away. Half an hour later, he was back in the Methodist Hall, staring at Alison Carter. He’d pinned four of Hawkin’s photographs of her to the notice board. He’d left the other at the police station, asking for it to be copied as a matter of urgency so it could be distributed at the press conference. The night duty inspector seemed uncertain whether it could be done in time. George had left him in no doubt what he expected.

Carefully, he spread out the Ordnance Survey map and tried to study it through the eyes of a person who’d decided to run away. Or a person who’d decided to steal someone else’s life.

Then he walked out of the Methodist Hall and started down the narrow lane towards Scardale on foot. Within yards, the dim yellow light that spilled out of the high windows of the hall was swallowed by the blanketing night. The only glimmers of light came from the stars that broke through the fitful clouds. It took him all his time to avoid tripping over tussocks of grass at the road’s edge.

Gradually, his pupils expanded to their maximum extent, allowing his night vision to steal what images it could from the ghosts and shadows of the landscape. But by the time they resolved themselves into hedges and trees, sheep folds and stiles, the cold had sneaked up on him. Thin-soled town shoes were no match for frosty ground, and not even his cotton-lined leather gloves were proof against the icy flurry that seemed to use the Scardale lane as a wind tunnel. His ears and nose had lost all sensation except pain. A mile down the lane, he gave up. If Alison Carter was abroad in this, she must be hardier than him, he decided.

Either that or beyond sensation altogether.

Manchester Evening News, Thursday, 12th December 1963, p.11

Boy camper raises hopes in John hunt POLICE RACE TO LONELY BEAUTY SPOT By a Staff Reporter

Police investigating the disappearance of 12-year-old John Kilbride of Ashton-under-Lyne rushed to a lonely beauty spot on the outskirts of the town.

A boy had been seen camping out.

Hopes soared when the boy was said to be safe and well. But it turned out to be a false alarm.

The boy they found had been reported missing from home and was about the same age as John – but it was 11-year-old David Marshall of Gorse View, Alt Estate, Oldham.

He had been missing for only a few hours.

After ‘getting into trouble’ at home, he packed his belongings – and a tent – and went to camp out near a farm in Lily Lanes, on the Ashton-Oldham boundary.

It was another frustrating incident in the 19-day-old search for John, of Smallshaw Lane, Ashton.

Police said today: ‘We really thought we were on to something. But at least we are glad we were able to return one boy home safe and well.’

David was spotted at his lonely bivouac by a visitor to the farm who informed the police immediately.

‘It shows the public are really cooperating,’ said police.

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 7.30 a.m.

Janet Carter reminded George of a cat his sister had once had. Her triangular face with its pert nose, wide eyes and tiny rosebud mouth was as closed and watchful as any domesticated predator he’d ever seen. She even had a scatter of tiny pimples at either end of her upper lip, as if someone had tweezed out her whiskers. They faced each other across the table in the low-ceilinged kitchen of her parents’ Scardale cottage. Janet was picking delicately at a piece of buttered toast, small sharp teeth nibbling crescents inwards from each corner. Her eyes were downcast, but every few moments she’d give him a quick sidelong look through long lashes.

Even in his younger years, he’d never been comfortable with adolescent girls, a natural result of having a sister three years older whose friends had regarded the fledgling George first as a convenient plaything and later as a marvellous testing ground for the wit and charms they planned to try on older targets. George had sometimes felt like the human equivalent of training wheels on a child’s first bike. The one advantage he’d gained from the experience was that he reckoned he could tell when a teenage girl was lying, which was more than most of the men he knew could manage.

But even that certainty faded in the face of Janet Carter’s self-possession. Her cousin was missing, with all the presumptions that entailed, yet Janet looked as composed as if Alison had merely nipped out to the shops. Her mother, Maureen, had a noticeably less sure grip on her emotions, her voice trembling when she spoke of her niece, tears in her eyes when she shepherded her three younger children from the room, leaving George to interview Janet. And her father, Ray, was already up and gone, lending his local knowledge to one of the police search parties looking for his dead brother’s child.

‘You probably know Alison better than anybody,’ George said at last, reminding himself to stick with a present tense that seemed increasingly inappropriate.

Janet nodded. ‘We’re like sisters. She’s eight months and two weeks older than me, so we’re in a different class at school. Just like real sisters.’

‘You grew up together here in Scardale?’

Janet nodded, another new moon of toast disappearing between her teeth. ‘The three of us, me and Alison and Derek.’

‘So you’re like best friends as well as cousins?’

‘I’m not her best friend at school because we’re in different classes, but I am at home.’

‘What kind of things do you do?’

Janet’s mouth twisted and furled as she thought for a moment. ‘Nothing much. Some nights Charlie, our big cousin, takes us into Buxton for the roller-skating. Sometimes we go to the shops in Buxton or Leek, but mostly we’re just here. We take the dogs for a walk. Sometimes we help out on the farm if they’re short-handed. Ali got a record player for her birthday, so a lot of the time me and Ali and Derek just listen to records up in her room.’

He took a sip of the tea Maureen Carter had left for him, amazed that someone could make stronger tea than the police canteen. ‘Has anything been bothering her?’ he asked. ‘Any problems at home? Or at school?’

Janet raised her head and stared at him, her eyebrows coming together in a frown. ‘She never ran away,’ she said fiercely. ‘Somebody must have took her. Ali wouldn’t run away. Why would she? There’s nothing to run away from.’

Maybe not, thought George, startled by her vehemence. But maybe there had been something to run away to. ‘Does Alison have a boyfriend?’

Janet breathed heavily through her nose. ‘Not really. She went to the pictures with this lad from Buxton a couple of times. Alan Milliken. But it wasn’t a date, not really. There was half a dozen of them all went together. She told me he tried to kiss her, but she wasn’t having any. She said that if he thought paying her in to the pictures meant he could do what he liked, he was wrong.’ Janet eyed him defiantly, animated by her outburst.

‘So there isn’t anybody she fancies? Maybe somebody older?’

Janet shook her head. ‘We both fancy Dennis Tanner off Coronation Street, and Paul McCartney out of the Beatles. But that’s just fancying. There isn’t anybody real that she fancies. She always says boys are boring. All they want to talk about is football and going into outer space on a rocket and what kind of car they’d have if they could drive.’

‘And Derek? Where does he fit in?’

Janet looked puzzled. ‘Derek’s just…Derek. Anyway, he’s got spots. You couldn’t fancy Derek.’

‘What about Charlie, then? Your big cousin? I hear they spent a lot of time together round at his gran’s.’

Janet shook her head, one finger straying to a tiny yellow-headed spot beside her mouth. ‘Ali only goes round to listen to Ma Lomas’s tales. Charlie lives there, that’s all. Anyway, I don’t understand why you’re going on about who Ali fancies. You should be out looking for whoever kidnapped her. I bet they think Uncle Phil’s got loads of money, just because he lives in a big house and owns all the village land. I bet they got the idea off Frank Sinatra’s lad being kidnapped last week. It must have been on the television and in the papers and everything. We don’t get television down here. We can’t get the reception, so we’re stuck with the radio. But even down in Scardale we heard about it, so a kidnapper could easily have known about it and got the idea. I bet they’re going to ask for a huge ransom for Ali.’ Her lips glistened with butter as the tip of her tongue darted along them in her excitement.

‘How does Alison get along with her stepfather?’

Janet shrugged, as if the question couldn’t have interested her less. ‘All right, I suppose. She likes living in the manor, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’ A sparkle of malice lit up Janet’s eyes. ‘Whenever anybody asks her where she lives, she always says, right out, “Scardale Manor”, like it’s something really special. When we were little, we used to make up stories about the manor. Ghost stories and murder stories, and it’s like Ali thinks she’s really the bee’s knees now she’s living there.’

‘And her stepfather? What did she say about him?’

‘Nothing much. When he was courting her mum, she said she thought he was a bit of a creep because he was always round their cottage, bringing Auntie Ruth little presents. You know, flowers, chocolates, nylons, stuff like that.’ She fidgeted in her seat and popped a spot between fingernail and thumb, unconsciously trying to mask the action behind her hand.

‘I think she was just jealous because she was so used to being the apple of Auntie Ruth’s eye. She couldn’t stand the competition. But once they got married and all that courting stuff stopped, I think Ali got on all right with him. He sort of left her alone, I think. He doesn’t act like he’s very interested in anybody except himself. And taking pictures. He’s always doing that.’ Janet turned back to her toast dismissively.

‘Pictures of what?’ George said, more to keep the conversation going than because he was interested.

‘Scenery. He spies on people working, too. He says you’ve got to get them looking natural, so he takes their pictures when he thinks they’re not looking. Only, he’s an incomer. He doesn’t know Scardale like we do. So mostly when he’s creeping about trying to stay out of sight, half the village knows what he’s doing.’ She giggled, then, remembering why George was there, covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes wide.

‘So as far as you know, there was no reason why Alison should run away?’

Janet put down her toast and pursed her lips. ‘I told you. She never ran away. Ali wouldn’t run away without me. And I’m still here. So somebody must have took her. And you’re supposed to find them.’ Her eyes flicked to one side and George half turned to see Maureen Carter in the kitchen doorway.

‘You tell him, Mum,’ Janet said, desperation in her voice. ‘I keep telling him, but he won’t listen. Tell him Ali wouldn’t run away. Tell him.’

Maureen nodded. ‘She’s right. When Alison’s in trouble, she takes it head on. If she had something on her mind, we’d all know what it was. Whatever’s happened, it’s not from Alison’s choice.’ She stepped forward and swept Janet’s teacup away from her. ‘Time you and the little ’uns were over to Derek’s. Kathy’ll run you up to the lane end for the bus.’

‘I could do that,’ George volunteered.

Maureen looked him up and down, clearly finding him wanting. ‘That’s kind of you, but there’s been enough upset this morning without mucking up their routine any further. Go on, Janet, get your coat on.’

George held his hand up. ‘Before you go, Janet, just one more question. Was there any special place you and Alison used to go in the dale? A den, a gang hut, that sort of thing?’

The girl gave her mother a quick, desperate look. ‘No,’ she said, her voice revealing the opposite of her word. Janet crammed the last of her toast into her mouth and hurried out, waving her fingers at George.

Maureen picked up the dirty plate and cocked her head. ‘If Alison was going to run away, she wouldn’t do it like this. She loves her mum. They were right close. It comes of being on their own for so long. Alison would never put Ruth through this.’

5

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 9.50 a.m.

The Methodist Hall had undergone a transformation. Eight trestle tables had been unfolded and each was the centre of some particular activity. At one, a constable with a field telephone was liaising with force headquarters. At three others, maps were spread out, thick red lines drawn on them to separate search areas. At a fifth table, a sergeant was surrounded by filing cards, statement forms and filing boxes, collating information as it came to him. At the remaining tables, officers pounded typewriters. Back in Buxton, CID officers were interviewing Alison Carter’s classmates, while the dale that surrounded Scardale village and shared its name was being combed by thirty police officers and the same number of local volunteers.

At the end of the hall nearest the door, a semi-circle of chairs faced a proper oak table. Behind it there were two chairs. In front of it, George was finishing his briefing of Superintendent Jack Martin. In the three months since he’d arrived in Buxton, he’d never had personal dealings with the uniformed officer in overall charge of the division. His reports had crossed Martin’s desk, he knew, but they’d never communicated directly about a case. All he knew about the man had been filtered through the consciousness of others.

Martin had served as a lieutenant in an infantry regiment in the war, apparently without either distinction or shame. Nevertheless, his years in the army had given him a taste for the minutiae of military life. He insisted on the observance of rank, reprimanding officers who addressed their equals or juniors by name rather than rank. A Christian name overheard in the squad room could raise his blood pressure by several points, according to DS Clough. Martin conducted regular inspections of his uniformed officers, frequently bawling out individuals whose boots failed to reflect their faces or whose tunic buttons were less than gleaming. He had the profile of a hawk, and the eyes to match. He marched everywhere at the double, and was said to loathe what he saw as the sloppy appearances of the CID officers under his nominal charge.

Beneath the martinet, however, George had suspected there was a shrewd and effective police officer. Now he was about to find out. Martin had listened carefully to George’s outline of events to date, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows meeting in a frown of concentration. With finger and thumb of his right hand, he rubbed his carefully manicured moustache against the grain then smoothed it back again. ‘Smoke?’ he said at last, offering George a packet of Capstan Full Strength. George shook his head, preferring his milder Gold Leaf tipped. But he took the overture as permission and immediately lit up himself. ‘I don’t like the sound of this one,’ Martin said. ‘It was carefully planned, wasn’t it?’

‘I think so, sir,’ George said, impressed that Martin had also picked up on the key detail of the elastoplast. Nobody went for a casual walk with a whole roll of sticking plaster, not even the most safety-conscious Boy Scout leader. The treatment of the dog had screamed premeditation to George, though none of his fellow officers had appeared to give it as much weight. ‘I think whoever took the girl was familiar with her habits. I think he might have watched her over a period of time, waiting for the right opportunity.’

‘So you think it’s a local?’ Martin said.

George ran a hand over his fair hair. ‘It looks that way,’ he said hesitantly.

‘I think you’re right not to commit yourself. It’s a popular hike, up Denderdale to the source of the Scarlaston. There must be dozens of ramblers who do that walk in the summer. Any one of them could have seen the girl, either alone or with her friends, and resolved to come back and take her.’ Martin nodded, agreeing with himself, flicking a morsel of cigarette ash off the cuff of his perfectly pressed tunic.

‘That’s possible,’ George conceded, though he couldn’t imagine anybody forming that sort of instant obsession and hanging on to it for months until the right opportunity presented itself. However, the principal reason for his uncertainty was quite different. ‘I suppose what I’m saying is that I can’t picture any member of this community doing something so damaging. They’re incredibly tight-knit, sir. They’ve got accustomed to supporting each other over generations. For someone from Scardale to have harmed one of their own children would be against everything they’ve grown up believing in. Besides, it’s hard to imagine how an insider could get away with stealing a child without everybody else in Scardale knowing about it. Even so, on the face of it, it’s much likelier to be an insider.’ George sighed, baffled by his own arguments.

‘Unless everybody’s wrong about the direction the girl went in,’ Martin observed. ‘She may have broken with her usual habits and walked up the fields towards the main road. And yesterday was Leek Cattle Market. There would have been more traffic than usual on the Longnor road. She could easily have been lured into a car on the pretext of giving directions.’

‘You’re forgetting about the dog, sir,’ George pointed out.

Martin waved his cigarette impatiently. ‘The kidnapper could have sneaked round the edge of the dale and left the dog in the woodland.’

‘It’s a big risk, and he’d have had to know the ground.’

Martin sighed. ‘I suppose so. Like you, I’m reluctant to see the villain of the piece as a local. One has this romantic view of these rural communities, but sadly we’re usually misguided.’ He glanced at the hall clock then stubbed out his cigarette, shot his cuffs and straightened up. ‘So. Let us face the gentlemen of the press.’

He turned towards the trestle tables. ‘Parkinson – go and tell Morris to let the journalists in.’

The uniformed bobby jumped to his feet with a mumbled, ‘Yessir.’

‘Cap, Parkinson,’ Martin barked. Parkinson stopped in his tracks and hurried back to his seat. He crammed his cap on and almost ran to the door. He slipped outside as Martin added, ‘Haircut, Parkinson.’ The superintendent’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile as he led the way to the chairs behind the table.

The door opened and half a dozen men spilled into the hall, a haze of mist seeming to form around them as their cold shapes hit the airless warmth of the hall. The clump separated into individuals and they settled noisily into their folding chairs. Their ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-fifties, George reckoned, though it wasn’t easy to tell with hat brims and caps pulled low over faces, coat collars turned up against the chill wind and scarves swathed around throats. He recognized Colin Loftus from the High Peak Courant, but the others were strangers. He wondered who they were working for.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Martin began. ‘I am Superintendent Jack Martin of Buxton Police and this is my colleague, Detective Inspector George Bennett. As you are no doubt already aware, a young girl has gone missing from Scardale. Alison Carter, aged thirteen, was last seen at approximately four twenty p.m. yesterday afternoon. She left the family home, Scardale Manor, to take her dog for a walk. When she failed to return, her mother, Mrs Ruth Hawkin, and stepfather, Mr Philip Hawkin, contacted police at Buxton. We responded to the call and began a search of the immediate environs of Scardale Manor, using police tracker dogs. Alison’s dog was found in woodland near her home, but of the girl herself, we have found no trace.’

He cleared his throat. ‘We will have copies of a recent photograph of Alison available at Buxton Police Station by noon.’ As Martin gave a detailed description of the girl’s appearance and clothing, George studied the journalists. Their heads were bent, their pencils flying over the pages of their notebooks. At least they were all interested enough to take a detailed note. He wondered how much that had to do with the Manchester disappearances. He couldn’t imagine that they would normally have turned out in such numbers for a girl missing for sixteen hours from a tiny Derbyshire hamlet.

Martin was winding up. ‘If we do not find Alison today, the search will be intensified. We just don’t know what has happened to her, and we’re very concerned, not least because of the extremely bitter weather we’re experiencing at the moment. Now, if you gentlemen have any questions, either myself or Detective Inspector Bennett will be happy to answer.’

A head came up. ‘Brian Bond, Manchester Evening Chronicle. Do you suspect foul play?’

Martin took a deep breath. ‘At this point, we rule nothing out and nothing in. We can find no reason for Alison being missing. She was not in trouble at home or at school. But we have found nothing to suggest foul play at this stage.’

Colin Loftus lifted his hand, one finger raised. ‘Is there any indication that Alison might have met with an accident?’

‘Not so far,’ George said. ‘As Superintendent Martin told you, we’ve got teams of searchers combing the dale now. We’ve also asked all the local farmers to check their land very carefully, just in case Alison has been injured in a fall and has been unable to make her way home.’

The man on the far end of the row leaned back in his chair and blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘There seem to be some common features between Alison Carter’s disappearance and the two missing children in the Manchester area – Pauline Reade from Gorton and John Kilbride from Ashton. Are you speaking to detectives from the Manchester and Lancashire forces about a possible connection to their cases?’

‘And you are?’ Martin demanded stiffly.

‘Don Smart, Daily News. Northern Bureau.’ He flashed a smile that reminded George of the predatory snarl of the fox. Smart even had the same colouring: reddish hair sticking out from under a tweed cap, ruddy face and hazel eyes that squinted against the smoke from his panatella.

‘It’s far too early to make assumptions like that,’ George cut in, wanting for himself this question that echoed his own doubts. ‘I am of course familiar with the cases you mention, but as yet we have found no reason to communicate with our colleagues in other forces over anything other than search arrangements. Staffordshire Police have already indicated that they will give us every assistance should there be any need to widen our search area.’

But Smart was not to be put off so easily. ‘If I was Alison Carter’s mum, I don’t think I’d be impressed to hear that the police were ignoring such strong links to other child disappearances.’

Martin’s head came up sharply. He opened his mouth to rebuke the journalist, but George was there before him. ‘For every similarity, there’s a difference,’ he said bluntly. ‘Scardale is isolated countryside, not busy city streets; Pauline and John went missing on a weekend, but this is midweek; strangers would be a common sight to the other two, but a stranger in Scardale on a December teatime would put Alison straight on her guard; and, probably most importantly, Alison wasn’t alone, she had her dog with her. Besides, Scardale is a good twenty-five, thirty miles away. Anybody looking for children to kidnap would have to pass a lot by before he got to Alison Carter. Hundreds of people go missing every year. It would be stranger if there weren’t similarities.’

Don Smart stared a cool challenge at George. ‘Thank you, Detective Inspector Bennett. Would that be Bennett with two t’s?’ was all he said.

‘That’s right,’ George said. ‘Any further questions?’

‘Will you be draining the reservoirs up on the moors?’ Colin Loftus again.

‘We’ll let you know what steps we’re taking as and when,’ Martin said repressively. ‘Now, unless anyone’s got anything more to ask, I’m going to close this press conference now.’ He got to his feet.

Don Smart leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘When’s the next one, then?’ he asked.

George watched Martin’s neck turn as red as turkey wattles. Oddly, the colour didn’t rise into his face. ‘When we find the girl, we’ll let you know.’

‘And if you don’t find her?’

‘I’ll be here tomorrow morning, same time,’ George said. ‘And every morning until we do find Alison.’

Don Smart’s eyebrows rose. ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ he said, gathering the folds of his heavy overcoat around his narrow frame and drawing himself up to his full five and a half feet. The other journalists were already straggling towards the door, comparing notes and deciding how they would lead off their stories.

‘Cheeky,’ Martin pronounced as the door closed behind them.

‘I suppose he’s only doing his job,’ George sighed. He could do without someone as stroppy as Don Smart on his back, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except to avoid letting the man needle him too much.

Martin snorted. ‘Troublemaker. The others managed to do their job without insinuating that we don’t know how to do ours. You’ll have to keep an eye on that one, Bennett.’

George nodded. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, sir. Do you want me to carry on in operational charge here?’

Martin frowned. ‘Inspector Thomas will be responsible for the uniformed men, but I think you should take overall command. Detective Chief Inspector Carver won’t be going anywhere with his ankle still in plaster. He’s volunteered to take care of the CID office in Buxton, but I need a man here on the ground. Can I rely on you, Inspector?’

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ George said. ‘I’m determined that we’re going to find this girl.’

Manchester Evening Chronicle, Thursday, 12th December 1963, p.1.

POLICE COMB ISOLATED DALE Dogs in manhunt for missing girl By a Staff Reporter

Police with tracker dogs were today hunting for a 13-year-old girl missing from her home in the isolated Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale since yesterday teatime.

The girl, Alison Carter, vanished from Scar-dale Manor where she lives with her mother and stepfather after saying she was going to take her collie Shep for a walk.

Alison set off to walk across the fields to nearby woods in the limestone dale where she lives. She has not been seen since.

After her mother alerted police, a search was carried out. The dog was discovered unharmed, but no trace of Alison was found.

Questioning her neighbours and friends at Peak Girls’ High School has provided no reason why the pretty schoolgirl should have run away.

Today her mother, Mrs Ruth Hawkin, aged 34, waited anxiously for news as the comb-out of the dale continued. Her husband, Mr Philip Hawkin, aged 37, joined neighbours and local farmers who helped police search the lonely dale.

A senior police official said: ‘We can find no reason for Alison being missing. She was not in trouble at home or at school. But we have found nothing to suggest foul play at this stage.’

The search will continue tomorrow if Alison is not found by nightfall.

Don Smart threw aside the early edition of the Chronicle. At least they hadn’t stolen his line of questioning. That was always the danger of trying something a bit different at a press conference. From now on, he’d try to break away from the pack and dig for his own stories. He had a feeling in his water that George Bennett was going to be great copy, and he was determined that he’d be the one to squeeze the best stories out of the handsome young detective.

He could tell that the man was a bulldog. There was no way George Bennett was going to give up on Alison Carter. Smart knew from past experience that for most of the cops, the disappearance of Alison Carter would be just another job. Sure, they felt sorry for the family. And he’d have bet that the ones who were fathers themselves went home and gave their daughters an extra-tight hug every night they were out on those moors searching for Alison.

But he sensed a difference with George. With him, it was a mission. The rest of the world might have given up on Alison Carter, but George couldn’t have been more passionate in her cause if she’d been his own daughter. Smart could sense how intolerable failure would be to him.

For him, it was a godsend. His job in the northern bureau of the Daily News was his first on a national newspaper, and he’d been on the lookout for the story that would take him to Fleet Street. He’d already done some of the News’s coverage of the Pauline Reade and John Kilbride disappearances, and he was determined to persuade George Bennett or one of his team to link them to Alison Carter. It would be a terrific page lead.

Whatever happened, Scardale was a great backdrop for a dramatic, mysterious story. In a closed community like that, everybody’s life would be put under the microscope. Suddenly all sorts of secrets would be forced into the open. It was guaranteed not to be a pretty sight. And Don Smart was determined to witness it all.

Back at the Methodist Hall, George Bennett also threw aside the evening paper. He had no doubt that the morning would bring a less palatable story in the pages of the more sensational Daily News. Martin would have apoplexy if there was any suggestion of police incompetence. He stalked out of the Methodist Hall and crossed the road to his car.

Driving down to Scardale in daylight was scarcely less intimidating than approaching at night or in the early-morning darkness. At least blackness obscured the worst of the rock overhangs that George could all too easily imagine splitting off and crushing his car like a tin can beneath a steamroller. Today, though, there was one crucial difference: the gate across the road stood wide open, allowing free passage to vehicles. A uniformed constable stood by it, peering into George’s car, then snapping a salute as he recognized the occupant. Poor beggar, George thought. His own days standing around in the cold had been thankfully short-lived. He wondered how the bobbies who weren’t on the fast track could bear the prospect of week after week of pounding pavements, guarding crime scenes and, like today, tramping fruitlessly through inhospitable countryside.

The village was no more enhanced by daylight than the road. There was nothing charming about the dour little cottages of Scardale. The grey stone buildings seemed to crouch low to the ground, more like cowed hounds than poised animals ready to spring. One or two had sagging rooflines and most of the wood could have done with a lick of paint. Hens wandered at will, and every car that drove into the village provoked a cacophony of barking from an assortment of sheep and cow dogs tied up to gateposts. What had not changed was the eyes that watched the arrival of every newcomer. As he drove in, George was aware of the watchers. He knew more about them than he had the night before. For one thing, he knew they were all female. Every able-bodied man from Scardale was out with the searchers, adding both determination and local knowledge to the hunt.

George found a space for his car on the far side of the village green, tucked down the side of the wall of Scardale Manor. Time for another chat with Mrs Hawkin, he’d decided. On his way to the house, he paused by the caravan that had arrived that morning from force headquarters. They were using it as a liaison point for searchers rather than an incident room, and a pair of WPCs were occupied with the continuous task of brewing tea and coffee. George pushed the door open and silently congratulated himself on winning his private bet that Inspector Alan Thomas would be settled comfortably in the warmest corner of the caravan, pot of tea to one side of his broad hands, ashtray containing his briar pipe to the other.

‘George,’ Thomas said heartily. ‘Come and park yourself here, boy. Bitter out, isn’t it? Glad I’m not out there combing the woods.’

‘Any news?’ George asked, nodding acceptance at the WPC who was offering him a mug of tea. He sugared it from an open bag and leaned against the bulkhead.

‘Not a dicky bird, boy. Everybody’s drawn a blank, more or less. The odd scrap of clothing, but nothing that hasn’t been there for months,’ Thomas said, his Welsh accent somehow rendering the depressing news cheerful. ‘Help yourself,’ he added, waving a hand towards a plate of buttered scones. ‘The girl’s mother brought them in. Said she couldn’t be doing with sitting about waiting.’

‘I’m going to bob in and see her in a minute.’ George reached across and grabbed a scone. Not half bad, he decided. Definitely an improvement over Anne’s. She was a great cook, but her bakery skills left a lot to be desired. He’d had to lie, say he didn’t really like cakes that much. Otherwise he knew that he’d end up praising her because he didn’t know how to criticize. And he didn’t want to condemn himself to fifty years of heavy sponges, chewy pastry and rock cakes that seemed to have come straight from the local roadstone quarries.

Suddenly, the door crashed open. A red-faced man wearing a heavy leather jerkin over several layers of shirts and jumpers lurched into the caravan, panting hard and sweating. ‘Are you Thomas?’ he demanded, looking at George.

‘I am, boy,’ Thomas said, getting to his feet accompanied by a shower of crumbs. ‘What’s happened? Have they found the girl?’

The man shook his head, hands on knees as he struggled to get his breath back. ‘In the spinney below Shield Tor,’ he gasped. ‘Looks like there’s been a struggle. Branches broken.’ He straightened up. ‘I’m supposed to bring you there.’

George abandoned tea and scone and followed the man outside, with Thomas bringing up the tail. He introduced himself and said, ‘Are you from Scardale?’

‘Aye. I’m Ray Carter. Alison’s uncle.’

And Janet’s dad, George reminded himself. ‘How far is this from where we found the dog?’ he asked, forcing his legs to full stride to keep up with the farmer, who could move a lot faster than his stocky build suggested.

‘Maybe quarter of a mile as the crow flies.’

‘It’s taken us a while to get to it,’ George said mildly.

‘You can’t see it from the path. So it got missed the first time through the spinney,’ Carter said. ‘Besides, it’s not an obvious place.’ He stopped for a moment, turning to point back at Scardale Manor. ‘Look. There’s the manor.’ He swivelled round. ‘There’s the field that leads to the wood where the dog was found, and to the Scarlaston.’ He moved round again. ‘There’s the way out the dale. And there,’ he concluded, indicating an area of trees between the manor and the woodland where Shep had been restrained, ‘is where we’re heading. On the way to nowhere,’ he added bitterly, encompassing the high limestone cliffs and the bleak grey skies with a final wave of his hand.

George frowned. The man was right. If Alison had been in the spinney when she was snatched, why was the dog tied up in a woodland clearing a quarter of a mile away? But if she’d been captured without putting up a fight in the clearing and the struggle had taken place when she’d seen the chance to get away from her captor, what were they doing in the dead end of the dale? It was another inconsistency to file away, he thought, following Ray Carter towards the narrow belt of trees.

The spinney was a mixture of beech, ash, sycamore and elm, more recent planting than the woodland they’d been in the previous night. The trees were smaller, their trunks narrower. They appeared to be too close together, their branches forming a loose-woven screen through which almost nothing could be seen. The undergrowth was heavy between the young trees, too thick to readily provide a way through. ‘This way,’ Carter said, angling towards an almost invisible opening in the brown ferns and the red and green foliage of the brambles. As soon as they entered the spinney, they lost most of the afternoon light. Half blind, George could see why the first wave of searchers might have missed something. He hadn’t fully appreciated how intransigent the landscape was or how easy it could be to miss something as big as, God forbid, a body. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out shrubby undergrowth among the trees. Underfoot, the path was slimy with trampled dead leaves. ‘I’ve been telling the squire for months now, this spinney needs thinning out,’ Carter grumbled, pushing aside the whiplash branches of a low-growing elder. ‘You could lose half the High Peak Hunt in here and never be any the wiser.’

Suddenly, they came upon the rest of the search team. Three PCs and a lad stood in a cluster at a bend in the path. The lad looked no more than eighteen, dressed like Carter in leather jerkin and heavy corduroy trousers. ‘Right,’ said George, ‘who’s going to show me and Mr Thomas what’s what here?’

One of the constables cleared his throat. ‘It’s just up ahead, sir. Another team had already been through here this morning, but Mr Carter here suggested we should take another look, on account of the undergrowth being so dense, like.’ He waved George and Inspector Thomas through and the others stood back awkwardly to let them pass. The PC pointed to an almost undetectable break in the undergrowth on the south side of the path. ‘It was the lad spotted it. Charlie Lomas. There’s a very faint track of broken twigs and trampled plants. A few yards in, it looks like there’s been a struggle.’

George crouched down and peered at the path. The man was right. There wasn’t much to see. It was a miracle that any of them had spotted it. He supposed that the inhabitants of Scardale knew their territory so well that what appeared unobtrusive to him would leap out and hit them between the eyes.

‘How many of you trampled over there in your size tens?’ Thomas asked.

‘Just me and the Lomas lad, sir. We were as careful as we could be. We tried not to disturb anything.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ George said. ‘Mr Thomas, could one of your lads phone up to the incident room and get a photographer down here? And I’d like the tracker dogs here as well. Once the photographer’s finished, we’ll also need a fingertip search of the area.’ Without waiting for a response, George carefully held back the branches that overhung the faltering trail and moved forward, trying to keep a couple of feet to the left of the original track. Here, it was even more dim than on the path, and he paused to let his eyes adapt to the gloom.

The PC’s description had been admirable in its accuracy. Half a dozen cramped steps, and George found what he’d been looking for. Broken twigs and crushed ferns marked an area about five feet by six. He was no countryman, but even George knew that this was recent damage. The shattered branches and stems looked freshly injured. One evergreen shrub that had been partially crushed was only wilted, not yet entirely dead. If this wasn’t connected to Alison Carter’s disappearance, it was a very odd coincidence.

George leaned forward, one hand clinging to a tree branch for support. There might be important evidence here. He didn’t want to walk over this ground and cause any more harm than the searchers had already done. Even as the thought crossed his mind, his close scrutiny revealed a clump of dark material snagged on the sharp end of a broken twig. Black woolly tights, Ruth Hawkin had said. George’s stomach clenched. ‘She’s been here,’ he said softly.

He moved to his left, circling round the trampled area, stopping every couple of steps to examine what lay before him. He was almost diagonally opposite the point where he’d left the path when he saw it. Just in front of him and to the right, there was a dark patch on the startling white bark of a birch tree. Irresistibly drawn, he moved closer.

The blood had dried long since. But adhering to it, unmistakably, were a dozen strands of bright blonde hair. And on the ground next to the tree, a horn toggle with a scrap of material still attached.

6

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 5.05 p.m.

George took a deep breath and raised his hand to knock. Before his knuckles could connect with the wood, the door swung open. Ruth Hawkin stood facing him, her drawn face grey in the evening light. She stepped to one side, leaning against the doorjamb for support. ‘You’ve found something,’ she said flatly.

George crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him, determined not to provide the watching eyes with more spectacle than was inevitable. His eyes automatically swept the room. ‘Where’s the WPC?’ he asked, turning to face Ruth.

‘I sent her away,’ she said. ‘I don’t need taking care of like a child. Besides, I reckoned there must be something she could do that would be more use to my Alison than sitting on her backside drinking tea all day.’ There was an acerbic note in her voice that George hadn’t heard there before. Healthy, he thought. This was not a woman who was going to collapse in a whimpering heap at every piece of bad news. He was relieved about that, because he believed he definitely qualified as the bearer of evil tidings.

‘Shall we sit down?’ he said.

Her mouth twisted in a sardonic grimace. ‘That bad, eh?’ But she pushed herself away from the wall and dropped into one of the kitchen chairs. George sat opposite, noticing that she was still dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing the night before. She’d not been to bed, then. Certainly not slept. Probably not even tried.

‘Is your husband out searching?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I don’t think he was keen. He’s a fair-weather countryman, my Phil. He likes it when the sun shines and it looks like one of his picture postcards. But days like today, cold, damp, a touch of freezing fog in the air, he’s either sitting on top of the stove or else he’s locked in his darkroom with a pair of paraffin heaters. I’ll say this for him, though. Today, he made an exception.’

‘If you like, we can wait till he comes back,’ George said.

‘That won’t alter what you’ve got to say, will it?’ she said, her voice weary.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’ George opened his overcoat and removed two polythene bags from the inside poacher’s pocket. One contained the soft, fluffy ball of material snagged on the broken twig; the other, the smooth, ridged toggle, its natural shades of brown and bone strange against the man-made plastic. Attached to it by strong navy thread was a fragment of navy-blue felted wool. ‘I have to ask you, do you recognize either of these?’

Her face was blank as she reached for the bags. She stared at them for a long moment. ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ she asked, prodding the material with her index finger.

‘We think it’s wool,’ George said. ‘Perhaps from tights like Alison was wearing.’

‘This could be anything,’ she said defensively. ‘It could have been out there for days, weeks.’

‘We’ll have to see what our lab can make of it.’ No point in trying to force her to accept what her mind did not want to admit. ‘What about the toggle? Do you recognize that?’

She picked up the bag and ran her finger over the carved piece of antler. She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. ‘Is this all you found of her? Is this all there is to show?’

‘We found signs of a struggle in the spinney.’ George pointed in what he thought was the right direction. ‘Between the house and the wood where we found Shep, down towards the back of the dale. It’s dark now, so there’s a limit to what we can achieve, but first thing in the morning, my men will carry out a fingertip search of the whole spinney, to see if we can find any more traces of Alison.’

‘But that’s all you found?’ Now there was eagerness in her face.

He hated to dash her hopes, but he couldn’t lie. ‘We also found some hairs and a little blood. As if she’d hit her head on a tree.’ Ruth clapped her hand to her open mouth, suppressing a cry. ‘It really was very little blood, Mrs Hawkin. Nothing to indicate anything but a very minor injury, I promise you.’

Her wide eyes stared at him, her fingers digging into her cheek as if physically holding her mouth closed could somehow contain her response. He didn’t know what to do, what to say. He had so little experience of people’s responses to tragedy and crisis. He’d always had senior officers or colleagues with more experience to blunt the acuteness of other people’s pain. Now he was on his own, and he knew he would measure himself for ever according to how he dealt with this stricken woman.

George leaned across the table and covered Ruth Hawkin’s free hand with his own. ‘I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t grounds for concern,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing to indicate that Alison has come to any serious harm. Quite the opposite, really. And there is one thing that we can be sure of now. Alison hasn’t run away of her own accord. Now, I know that probably doesn’t seem like much of a consolation to you right now, but it means that we won’t be frittering away our resources on things that are a waste of time. We know that Alison didn’t go off on her own and catch a bus or a train, so we won’t be devoting officers to checking out bus and railway stations. We’ll be using every officer we have to follow lines of inquiry that could actually lead us somewhere.’

Ruth Hawkin’s hand fell away from her mouth. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

George gripped her hand. ‘There’s no reason to think so,’ he said.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. ‘I ran out a while back.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I should have sent yon WPC up to the shop at Longnor for me. That would have been useful.’

Once they were both smoking, he took back the plastic bags and pushed the cigarettes across in their place. ‘You keep these. I’ve more in the car.’

‘Thanks.’ The tightness in her face slackened momentarily and George saw for the first time the same smile that made Alison’s photograph so remarkable.

He let enough time pass for them both to gain some benefit from the nicotine. ‘I need some help, Mrs Hawkin,’ George said. ‘Last night, we had to work against the clock to try and find traces of Alison. And today, we’ve been searching. All the mechanical, routine things that are often successful, that we have to do. But I’ve not had a proper chance to sit down and talk to you about what kind of girl Alison was. If someone has taken her – and I won’t lie to you, that is looking increasingly likely – I need to know everything I can about Alison so that I can work out where the point of contact is between Alison and this person. So I need you to tell me about your daughter.’

Ruth sighed. ‘She’s a lovely lass. Bright as a button, always has been. Her teachers all say she could go to college if she sticks in at her books. University even.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘You’ll have been to university.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yes. I studied law at Manchester.’

She nodded. ‘You’ll know what it’s like then, studying. She never has to be told to do her homework, you know, not like Derek and Janet. I think she actually likes schoolwork, though she’d cut her tongue out soon as admit it. God knows where that comes from. Neither me nor her dad were ones for school. Couldn’t get out soon enough. She’s not a swot, mind you. She likes her fun an’ all, does our Alison.’

‘What does she do for fun?’ George probed gently.

‘They’re all daft about that pop music, her and Janet and Derek. The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, all that lot. Charlie too, though he’s not got the time to be sitting round every night listening to records. But he goes to the dances at the Pavilion Gardens, and he’s always telling Alison what records she should get next. She’s got more records than the shop, I’m always telling her. You’d need more than two ears to listen to that lot. Phil buys them for her. He goes into Buxton every week and chooses a selection from the hit parade as well as the ones Charlie tells her about…’ Her voice tailed off.

‘What else does she do?’

‘Sometimes Charlie takes them into Buxton to the roller-skating on a Wednesday night.’ Her breath caught in her throat. ‘Oh God, I wish he’d been taking them last night,’ she cried, sudden realization felling her. Her head dropped and she drew so hard on her cigarette that George could hear the tobacco crackle. When she looked up, her eyes brimmed with tears and held an appeal that cut directly through his professional defences to his heart. ‘Find her, please,’ she croaked.

He pressed his lips together and nodded. ‘Believe me, Mrs Hawkin, I intend to do just that.’

‘Even if it’s only to bury her.’

‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ he said.

‘Aye. You and me both.’ She exhaled a narrow stream of smoke. ‘You and me both.’

He waited for a moment, then said, ‘What about friends? Who was she close to?’

Ruth sighed. ‘It’s hard for them, making friends outside Scardale. They never get the chance to join in anything after school. If they get invited to parties or owt, chances are they can’t get back home afterwards. The nearest they can get on a bus is Longnor. So they just don’t go. Besides, folk in Buxton are set against Scardale folk. They think we’re all heathen inbred idiots.’ Her voice was sarcastic. ‘The kids get picked on. So they stick to their own, by and large. Our Alison’s good company, and I hear tell from her teachers that she’s well enough liked at school. But she’s never really had what you’d call a best friend apart from her cousins.’

Another dead end. ‘There’s one other thing…I’d like to look at Alison’s room, if I may. Just to get a sense of what she was like.’ He didn’t add, ‘and to help myself to the contents of her hairbrush so the forensic scientists can compare what we found sticking to the blood on the tree in the spinney.’

She got to her feet, her movements those of a woman far older. ‘I’ve got the heater on up there. Just in case…’ She left the sentence unfinished.

He followed her into the hall, which was no warmer than it had been the night before. The transition nearly took his breath away. Ruth led the way up a broad flight of stairs with barley-sugar-twist banisters in oak turned almost black by years of polishing. ‘One other thing,’ he said as they climbed. ‘I presume that the fact that Alison is still called Carter means your husband hasn’t formally adopted her?’

The tensing of the muscles in her neck and back was so swift George could almost believe he’d imagined it. ‘Phil were all for it,’ she said. ‘He wanted to adopt. But Alison were only six when her dad…died. Old enough to remember how much she loved him. Too young to see he was a human being with faults and failings. She thinks letting Phil adopt her would be a betrayal of her dad’s memory. I reckon she’ll come round in time, but she’s a stubborn lass, won’t be pushed where she doesn’t want to go.’ They were on the landing now and Ruth turned to him, face composed and unreadable. ‘I persuaded Phil to let it lie for now.’ She pointed past George, down a corridor that made a strange dog-leg halfway down where the building had been extended at some indeterminate period. ‘Alison’s room is the last one on the right. You won’t mind if I don’t come with you.’ Again, it was a statement, not a question. George found himself admiring the way this woman still managed to know her own mind, even under such extreme stress.

‘Thanks, Mrs Hawkin. I won’t be long.’ He walked along the passage, conscious of her eyes on him. But even that uncomfortable knowledge wasn’t sufficient distraction to prevent him noting his surroundings. The carpet was worn, but had clearly once been expensive. Some of the prints and watercolours that lined the wall were spotted with age, but still retained their charm. George recognized several scenes from the southern part of the county where he’d grown up as well as the familiar stately historic houses of Chatsworth, Haddon and Hardwick. He noticed that the floor was uneven at the jink in the corridor, as if the builders had been incompetent in all three dimensions. At the last door on the right, he paused and took a deep breath. This might be the closest he’d ever get to Alison Carter.

The warmth that hit him like a blanket seemed curiously appropriate to what was, in spite of its size, a snug room. Because it was on the corner of the house, Alison’s bedroom had two windows, increasing the sense of space. The windows were long and shallow, each divided into four by deep stone lintels which revealed the eighteen-inch thickness of the walls. He closed the door and stepped into the middle of the room.

First impressions, George reminded himself. Warm: there was an electric fire as well as the plug-in oil radiator. Comfortable: the three-quarter-sized bed had a thick quilt covered in dark-green satin, and the two basket chairs had plump cushions. Modern: the carpet was thick brown shag pile with swirls of olive-green and mustard running through it, and the walls were decorated with pictures of pop stars, mostly cut from magazines by the looks of their skewed edges. Expensive: there was a plain wooden wardrobe and matching dressing table with a long, low mirror and a vanity stool in front of it, all so unscarred they had to be relatively new. George had seen bedroom suites like that when he and Anne were choosing their own furniture and he had a pretty good idea how much it must have cost. Cheap it wasn’t. On a table under the window was a Dansette record player, dark red plastic with cream knobs. A deep stack of records was piled haphazardly underneath. Philip Hawkin was clearly determined to make a good impression on his stepdaughter, he surmised. Maybe he thought the way to her heart was through the material goods she must have lacked as the child of a widow in a community as impoverished as Scardale.

George moved across to the dressing table and folded himself awkwardly on to the stool. He caught his eye in the mirror. The last time his eyes had looked like that had been when he’d been cramming for his finals. And he’d missed a patch of stubble under his left ear, a direct result of the lack of vanity of the Methodist faith. The absence of a mirror in the vestry had forced him to shave in his rear-view mirror. No self-respecting advertising agency would hire him to promote anything except sleeping pills. He pulled a face at himself and got to work. Alison’s hairbrush lay bristles upwards on the dressing table, and George expertly removed as many hairs as he could. Luckily, she’d not been too fastidious and he was able to accumulate a couple of dozen, which he transferred to an empty polythene bag.

Then, with a sigh, he began the distasteful search of Alison’s personal possessions. Half an hour later, he had found nothing unexpected. He’d even flicked through every book on the small bookcase that stood by the bed. Nancy Drew, the Famous Five, the Chalet School, Georgette Heyer, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre held neither secret nor surprise. A well-thumbed edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury contained only poetry. The dressing table yielded schoolgirl underwear, a couple of training bras, half a dozen bars of scented soap, a sanitary belt and half a packet of towels, a jewellery box containing a couple of cheap pendants and a baby’s silver christening bracelet inscribed, ‘Alison Margaret Carter’. The only thing he might have expected to find but hadn’t was a bible. On the other hand, Scardale was so cut off from the rest of the world, they might still be worshipping the corn goddess here. Maybe the missionaries had never made it this far.

A small wooden box on the dressing table yielded more interesting results. It contained half a dozen black and white snapshots, most of them curled and yellowing at the edges. He recognized a youthful Ruth Hawkin, head thrown back in laughter, looking up at a dark-haired man whose head was ducked down in awkward shyness. There were two other photographs of the pair, arms linked and faces carefree, all obviously taken on the Golden Mile at Blackpool. Honeymoon? George wondered. Beneath them was a pair of photographs of the same man, dark hair flopping over his forehead. He was dressed in work clothes, a thick belt holding up trousers that looked as if they’d been made for a man much longer in the torso. In one, he was standing on a harrow hitched to a tractor. In the other, he was crouched beside a blonde child who was grinning happily at the camera. Unmistakably Alison. The final photograph was more recent, judging by its white margins. It showed Charlie Lomas and an elderly woman leaning against a dry-stone wall, blurred limestone cliffs in the background. The woman’s face was shadowed by a straw hat whose broad brim was forced down over her ears by the scarf that tied under her chin. All that was visible was the straight line of her mouth and her jutting chin, but it was obvious from her awkwardly bent body that she was far too old to be Charlie Lomas’s mother. As if they were being captured by a Victorian photographer, held still by dire warnings of moving during the exposure, Charlie stood stony-faced and gazed straight at the camera. His arms were folded across his chest and he looked like every gauche and defiant young lad George had ever seen protesting his innocence in a police station.

‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. The photographs of her father were predictable, though he’d have expected to see them framed and on display. But that the only other image Alison Carter treasured was one that included the cousin who had made the convenient discovery in the copse was, to say the least, interesting to a mind as trained in suspicion as George’s. Carefully, he replaced the photographs in the box. Then, on second thoughts, he removed the one of Charlie and the old woman and slipped it into his pocket.

It was among the records that he found his first examples of Alison’s handwriting. On scraps of paper torn from school exercise books, he found fragments of song lyrics that had obviously had some particular meaning for her. Lines from Elvis Presley’s ‘Devil in Disguise’, Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry if I Want To)’, Cliff Richard’s ‘It’s All in the Game’ and Shirley Bassey’s ‘I (Who Have Nothing)’ painted a disquieting picture of unhappiness at odds with the image everyone had projected of Alison Carter. They spoke of the pains of love and betrayal, loss and loneliness. There was, George knew, nothing unusual about an adolescent experiencing those feelings and believing nobody had ever been through the same thing. But if that was how Alison had felt, she’d done a very efficient job of keeping it secret from those around her.

It was a small incongruity, but it was the only one George had found. He slipped the sheets of paper into another plastic bag. There was no real reason to imagine they might be evidence, but he wasn’t taking any chances with this one. He’d never forgive himself if the one detail he overlooked turned out to be crucial. Not only might it damage his career, but far more importantly, it might allow Alison’s killer to go free. He stopped in his tracks, his hand halfway to the doorknob.

It was the first time he’d admitted to himself what his professional logic said must be the case. He was no longer looking for Alison Carter. He was looking for her body. And her killer.

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 6.23 p.m.

Wearily, George walked down the front path of Scardale Manor. He’d check in at the incident room in the Methodist Hall in case anything fresh had cropped up, then he’d drop off the hair samples at divisional HQ in Buxton and go home to a hot bath, a home-cooked meal and a few hours’ sleep; what passed for normal life in an investigation like this. But first, he wanted to have a few words with young Charlie Lomas.

He’d barely made it as far as the village green when a figure lurched out of the shadows in front of him. Startled, he stopped and stared, struggling to believe what he was seeing. His tiredness tripped a giggle inside him, but he managed to swallow it before it spilled into the misty night air. The shape had resolved itself into something an artist might have fallen into raptures over. The bent old woman who peered up at him was the archetype of the crone as witch, right down to the hooked nose that almost met the chin, complete with wart sprouting hairs and black shawl over her head and shoulders. She had to be the original of the photograph he carried in his pocket. The strange suddenness of the coincidence provoked an involuntary pat of the pocket containing her facsimile. ‘You’d be the boss, then,’ she said in a voice like a gate that creaked in soprano.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Bennett, if that’s what you mean, madam,’ he said.

Her skin crinkled in an expression of contempt. ‘Fancy titles,’ she said. ‘Waste of time in Scardale, lad. Mind you, you’re all wasting your time. None of you’ve got the imagination to understand owt that goes on here. Scardale’s not like Buxton, you know. If Alison Carter’s not where she should be, the answer’ll be somewhere in somebody’s head in Scardale, not in the woods waiting to be found like a fox in a trap.’

‘Perhaps you could help me find it, then, Mrs…?’

‘And why should I, mister? We’ve always sorted out our own here. I don’t know what possessed Ruth, calling strangers to the dale.’ She made to push past him on the path, but he stepped sideways to block her.

‘A girl’s missing,’ he said gently. ‘This is something Scardale can’t sort out for itself. Whether you like it or not, you live in the world. But we need your help as much as you need ours.’

The woman suddenly hawked violently and spat on the ground at his feet. ‘Until you show some sign of knowing what you should be looking for, that’s all the help you’ll get from me, mister.’ She veered off at an angle and moved off across the green, surprisingly quick on her feet for a woman who couldn’t, he reckoned, be a day under eighty. He stood watching until the mist swallowed her, like a man who has found himself the victim of a time warp.

‘Met Ma Lomas, then, have you?’ Detective Sergeant Clough said with a grin, looming out of nowhere.

‘Who is Ma Lomas?’ George asked, bemused.

‘Like with Sylvia, the question should be not, “Who is Ma Lomas?” but, “What is she?”’ Clough intoned solemnly. ‘Ma is the matriarch of Scardale. She’s the oldest inhabitant, the only one of her generation left. Ma claims she celebrated her twenty-first the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, but I don’t know about that.’

‘She looks old enough.’

‘Aye. But who the hell in Scardale even knew Victoria was on the throne, never mind how long she’d been there for? Eh?’ Clough delivered his punchline with a mocking smile.

‘So where does she fit in? What relation is she to Alison?’

Clough shrugged. ‘Who knows? Great-grandmother, second cousin once removed, aunt, niece? All of the above? You’d need to be sharper than Burke’s Peerage to work out all the connections between this lot, sir. All I know is that according to PC Grundy, she’s the eyes and ears of the world. There’s not a mouse breaks wind in Scardale without Ma Lomas knowing about it.’

‘And yet she doesn’t seem very keen to help us find a missing girl. A girl who’s a blood relative. Why do you suppose that is?’

Clough shrugged. ‘They’re all much of a muchness. They don’t like outsiders at the best of times.’

‘Was this the kind of attitude you and Cragg came up against last night when you were asking people if they’d seen Alison Carter?’

‘More often than not. They answer your questions, but they never volunteer a single thing more than you’ve asked them.’

‘Do you think they were all telling you the truth about not having seen Alison?’ George asked, patting his pockets in search of his cigarettes.

Clough produced his own packet just as George remembered leaving his with Ruth Hawkin. ‘There you go,’ Clough said. ‘I don’t think they were lying. But they might well have been hanging on to information that’s relevant. Especially if we didn’t know the right questions to ask.’

‘We’re going to have to talk to them all again, aren’t we?’ George sighed.

‘Like as not, sir.’

‘They’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Except for young Charlie Lomas. You don’t happen to know where he is, do you?’

‘One of the turnips took him up the Methodist Hall to make a statement. Must be half an hour ago now,’ Clough said negligently.

‘I don’t ever want to hear that again, Sergeant,’ George said, his tiredness transforming into anger.

‘What?’ Clough sounded bemused.

‘A turnip is a vegetable that farmers feed to sheep. I’ve met plenty of CID officers who’d qualify for vegetable status ahead of most uniformed officers I’ve met. We need uniform’s cooperation on this case, and I won’t have you jeopardizing it. Is that clear, Sergeant?’

Clough scratched his jaw. ‘Pretty much, aye. Though with me not managing to make it to grammar school, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to remember it right.’

It was, George knew, a defining moment. ‘I tell you what, Sergeant. At the end of this case, I’ll buy you a packet of fags for every day you manage to remember it.’

Clough grinned. ‘Now that’s what I call an incentive.’

‘I’m going to talk to Charlie Lomas. Do you fancy sitting in?’

‘It will be my pleasure, sir.’

George set off towards his car, then suddenly stopped, frowning at his sergeant. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were still on night shift till the weekend?’

Clough looked embarrassed. ‘I am. But I decided to come on duty this afternoon. I wanted to give a hand.’ He gave a sly grin. ‘It’s all right, sir, I won’t be putting in for the overtime.’

George tried to hide his surprise. ‘Good of you,’ he said. As they drove up the Scardale lane, George wondered at the sergeant’s capacity to confound him. He thought he was a pretty good judge of character, but the more he saw of Tommy Clough, the more apparent contradictions he found in the man.

Clough appeared brash and vulgar, always the first to buy a round of drinks, always the loudest with the dirty jokes. But his arrest record spoke of a different man, a subtle and shrewd investigator who was adept at finding the weakness in his suspects and pushing at it until they collapsed and told him what he wanted to hear. He was always the first to eye up an attractive woman, yet he lived alone in a bachelor flat overlooking the lake in the Pavilion Gardens. He’d called round there once to pick Clough up for a last-minute court appearance. George had thought it would be a dump, but it was clean, furnished soberly and crammed with jazz albums, its walls decorated with line drawings of British birds. Clough had seemed disconcerted to find George on his doorstep, expecting to enter, and he’d been ready to leave in record time.

Now, the man who was always first to claim overtime for every extra minute worked had given up his free time to tramp the Derbyshire countryside in search of a girl whose existence he’d had no knowledge of twenty-four hours previously. George shook his head. He wondered if he was as much a puzzle to Tommy Clough as the sergeant was to him. Somehow, he doubted it.

George put his musings to one side and outlined his suspicions of Charlie Lomas to his sergeant. ‘It’s not much, I know, but we’ve got nothing else at this stage,’ he concluded.

‘If he’s got nothing to hide, it’ll do him no harm to realize we’re taking this seriously,’ Clough said grimly. ‘And if he has, he won’t have for long.’

The Methodist Hall had a curiously subdued air. A couple of uniformed officers were processing paperwork. Peter Grundy and a sergeant George didn’t know were poring over detailed relief maps of the immediate area, marking off squares with thick pencils. At the back of the room, Charlie Lomas’s lanky height was folded into a collapsible wooden chair, his legs wound round each other, his arms wrapped round his chest. A constable sat opposite him, separated by a card table on which he was laboriously writing a statement.

George walked across to Grundy and drew him to one side. ‘I’m planning on having a word with Charlie Lomas. What can you tell me about the lad?’

Immediately, the Longnor bobby’s face fell still. ‘In what respect, sir?’ he asked formally. ‘There’s nothing known about him.’

‘I know he hasn’t got a record,’ George said. ‘But this is your patch. You’ve got relatives in Scardale –’

‘The wife has,’ Grundy interrupted.

‘Whatever. Whoever. You must have some sense of what he’s like. What he’s capable of.’

George’s words hung in the air. Grundy’s face slowly settled into an expression of outraged hostility. ‘You’re not seriously thinking Charlie’s got something to do with Alison going missing?’ His tone was incredulous.

‘I have some questions for him, and it would be helpful if I had some idea of the type of lad I’m going to be talking to,’ George said wearily. ‘That’s all. So what’s he like, PC Grundy?’

Grundy looked to his right then to his left, then right again, like a child waiting to cross the road correctly. But there was no escape from George’s eyes. Grundy scratched the soft patch of skin behind his ear. ‘He’s a good lad, Charlie. He’s an awkward age, though. All the lads his age around here, they go out and have a few pints and try to get off with lasses. But that’s not right easy when you live in the back of beyond. The other thing about Charlie is that he’s a bright lad. Bright enough to know he could make something of his life if he could bring himself to get out of Scardale. Only, he’s not got the nerve to strike out on his own yet. So he gets a bit lippy from time to time, sounding off about what a hard time he has of it. But his heart’s in the right place. He lives in the cottage with old Ma Lomas because she doesn’t keep so well and the family likes to know there’s somebody around to bring in the coal and fetch and carry for the old woman. It’s not much of a life for a lad his age, but that’s the one thing he never complains about.’

‘Was he close to Alison?’

George could see Grundy considering how far he could push it. That was one of the hardest parts of his job, this constantly having to stand his ground and prove himself to his colleagues. ‘They’re all close down there,’ Grundy finally said. ‘There was no bad blood between him and Alison that I ever heard.’

However, it wasn’t bad blood that George was interested in where the two Scardale cousins were concerned.

Realizing he’d gained all he could from Grundy, he nodded his thanks and strolled towards the rear of the hall, praying he didn’t look as exhausted as he felt. Probably he should wait till morning to interview Charlie Lomas. But he preferred to make his move while the lad was already on the back foot. Besides, there was always the million to one chance that Alison was still alive, and Charlie Lomas might just hold the key to her whereabouts. Even so slim a chance was too much to throw away.

As he approached, George picked up a chair and dropped it casually at the third side of the table, at right angles to both Charlie and the uniformed constable. Without being told, Clough followed his example, occupying the fourth side of the small table and hemming Charlie in. His eyes flicked from one to the other and he shifted in his seat. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, Charlie?’ George asked.

The youth nodded.

‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Clough said roughly. ‘I bet that’s what your gran always tells you. She is your gran, isn’t she? I mean, she’s not your auntie or your niece or your cousin, is she? Hard to tell down your way.’

Charlie twisted his mouth to one side and shook his head. ‘There’s no call for that,’ he protested. ‘I’m helping your lot.’

‘And we’re very grateful that you’ve volunteered to come and give a statement,’ George said, falling effortlessly into Good Cop to Clough’s Bad Cop. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you one or two questions. Is that OK with you?’

Charlie breathed heavily through his nose. ‘Aye. Come ahead.’

‘It was impressive, you finding that disturbed spot in the spinney,’ George said. ‘There had been a whole team through there ahead of you, and none of them so much as picked up a trace of it.’

Charlie managed a shrug without actually releasing any of his limbs from their auto-embrace. ‘It’s like the back of my hand, the dale. You get to know a place right well, the slightest little thing just strikes you out of place, that’s all it were.’

‘You weren’t the first from Scardale through there. But you were the first to notice.’

‘Aye, well, happen I’ve got sharper eyes than some of you old buggers,’ he said, attempting bravado but not even making the halfway line.

‘I’m interested, you see, because we find that sometimes people who have been involved in a crime try to include themselves in the investigation,’ George said mildly.

Charlie’s body unwound as if galvanized. His feet slammed on the floor, his forearms on the table. Startled policemen looked around from the front of the hall. ‘You’re sick,’ he said.

‘I’m not sick, but I’ve got a good idea that somebody around these parts is. It’s my job to find out who. Now, if somebody wanted to take Alison away or do anything to her, it would be a lot easier to manage if it was somebody she knew and trusted. Obviously, you know her. She’s your cousin, you grew up with her. You tell her what records to get her stepfather to buy her. You sit by the fire with her in your cottage while your granny spins her tales of bygone days in sunny Scardale. You take her to the roller rink in Buxton on Wednesdays.’ George shrugged. ‘You’d have no trouble persuading her to go somewhere with you.’

Charlie pushed himself away from the table, then thrust his trembling hands into his trouser pockets. ‘So?’

George produced the photograph he’d taken from Alison’s room. ‘She kept a photo of you in her bedroom,’ was all he said as he showed it to Charlie.

His face twitched and he crossed his legs. ‘She’ll have kept it because of Ma,’ he said insistently. ‘She loves Ma, and the old witch hates having her photo taken. This must be about the only picture of Ma in existence.’

‘Are you sure, Charlie?’ Clough interjected. ‘Because we think, my boss and me, that she fancied you. A nice young lass like that hanging around, worshipping the ground you walk on, not many blokes would say no to that, would they? Especially a lovely lass like Alison. A ripe fruit, ready for the plucking, ready to fall right into your hand. You sure that’s not what it was like, Charlie boy?’

Charlie squirmed, shaking his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, mister.’

‘Has he?’ George asked pleasantly. ‘So how was it, Charlie? Was it embarrassing for you, having this kid trailing around after you when you went to the roller rink? Did Alison cramp your style with the older girls, was that the problem? Did you meet her in the dale yesterday teatime? Did she push you too far?’

Charlie hung his head and breathed deep. Then he looked up and turned to face George. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you treating me like this? All I’ve done is try and help. She’s my cousin. She’s part of my family. We look out for each other in Scardale, you know. It’s not like Buxton, where nobody gives tuppence about anybody else.’ He stabbed his finger at each of the policemen in turn. ‘You should be out there finding her, not insulting me like this.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Do I have to stop here?’

George stood up and gestured towards the door. ‘You’re free to leave whenever you want, Mr Lomas. However, we will need to speak to you again.’

Clough rose and walked round to George’s side as Charlie stalked angrily out of the door, all raw-boned clumsiness and outrage. ‘He’s not got the gumption,’ he said.

‘Maybe not,’ George said. The two men walked out in Charlie’s wake, pausing on the threshold as the youth set off down the Scardale road. George stared after Charlie, wondering. Then he cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be heading home now. I’ll be back before first light in the morning. You’re in charge, at least of CID, till then.’

Clough laughed. It seemed to die in a puff of white breath in the oppressive night air. ‘Me and Cragg, sir, eh? That’ll give the villains something to think about. Was there any line of inquiry in particular you wanted us to pursue?’

‘Whoever took Alison must have got her out of the dale somehow,’ George said, almost thinking aloud. ‘He couldn’t have carried her for long, not a normally developed thirteen-year-old girl. If he took her down the Scarlaston valley into Denderdale, he’d have had to hike about four miles before he got to a road. But if he brought her up here to the Longnor road, it’s probably only about a mile and a half as the crow flies. Why don’t you and Cragg do a door-to-door in Longnor this evening, see if anybody noticed a vehicle parked by the side of the road near the Scardale turn?’

‘Right you are, sir. I’ll just find DC Cragg and we’ll get to it.’

George returned to the incident room and arranged for the tracker dogs to work Denderdale the following morning, spent half an hour in Buxton Police Station filling out requisition forms for the forensic lab on the evidence from the spinney and Alison’s hairbrush, then finally set off for home.

The villagers would just have to wait till tomorrow.

7

Thursday, 12th December 1963. 8.06 p.m.

George couldn’t remember ever closing his front door with a greater sense of relief. Before he could even take off his hat, the door to the living room opened and Anne was there, taking the three short steps into his arms. ‘It’s great to be home,’ he sighed, drinking in the musky smell of her hair, conscious too that he’d not washed since the previous morning.

‘You work too hard,’ she scolded gently. ‘You’ll do nobody any favours if you work yourself into the ground. Come on through, there’s a fire on and it won’t take me five minutes to warm up the casserole.’ She moved back from his embrace and looked critically at him. ‘You look worn out. It’s a hot bath and bed for you as soon as you’ve finished your tea.’

‘I’d rather have the bath first, if the water’s hot.’

‘And so you shall. I’ve had the immersion on. I was going to have a bath myself, but you’d better take the water. You get yourself undressed and I’ll run the bath.’ She shooed him upstairs ahead of her.

Half an hour later, he was in his dressing gown at the kitchen table, wolfing down a generous helping of beef and carrot stew accompanied by a plate of bread and butter. ‘Sorry there’s no spuds,’ Anne apologized. ‘I thought bread and butter would be quicker and I knew you’d need something as soon as you got in. You never eat properly when you’re working.’

‘Mmm,’ he grunted through a mouthful of food.

‘Have you found her, then, your missing girl? Is that why you’re home?’

The food in his mouth seemed to congeal into an indigestible lump. George forced it down his gullet. It felt like swallowing a hairball the size of a golf ball. ‘No,’ he said, staring down at his plate. ‘And I don’t think she’ll be alive when we do.’

Anne’s face paled. ‘But that’s awful, George. How can you be sure?’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘I can’t be sure. But we know she didn’t go off of her own free will. Don’t ask me how, but we know. She’s not from the kind of family where she’d be kidnapped for a ransom. And people who steal children generally don’t keep them alive for long. So my guess is she’s already dead. And if she’s not, she will be before we can find her, because we’ve got absolutely nothing to go on. The villagers act like we’re the enemy instead of on their side, and the landscape is so difficult to search properly it feels like even that’s conspiring against us.’ He pushed his plate away and reached for Anne’s cigarettes.

‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘How can her mother begin to cope with it?’

‘She’s a strong woman, Ruth Hawkin. I suppose if you grow up in a place where life is as hard as it is in Scardale, you learn to bend rather than break. But I don’t know how she’s holding together. She lost her first husband in a farming accident seven years ago, and now this. The new husband’s not a lot of use either. One of those selfish beggars who see everything in terms of how it’s going to affect them.’

‘What? You mean a man?’ Anne teased.

‘Very funny. I’m not like that. I don’t expect my tea on the table when I walk through the door, you know. You don’t have to wait on me.’

‘You’d soon get fed up if it wasn’t.’

George conceded with a shrug and a smile. ‘You’re probably right. Us men get used to you women taking care of us. But if our child ever went missing, I don’t think I’d be demanding my tea before my wife went out looking for her.’

‘He did that?’

‘According to one witness.’ He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘Who am I going to tell? The only people I know here are other coppers’ wives. And they’ve not exactly taken me to their bosom. The ones my age are all lower ranks’ wives so they don’t trust me, especially since I’m a qualified teacher and none of them have ever done anything more challenging than working in a shop or an office. And the officers’ wives are all older than me and treat me like I’m a silly girl. So you can be sure I’m not going to be gossiping about your case, George,’ Anne said with an edge of acerbity.

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not been easy for you to make new friends here.’ He reached out to grip her hand in his.

‘I don’t know how I’d go on if I lost a child.’ Almost unconsciously, her free hand slipped to her stomach.

George’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ he asked sharply.

Anne’s fair skin flushed scarlet. ‘I don’t know, George. It’s just that…well, my monthly visitor’s overdue. A week overdue. So…I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to say anything till I was sure, what with it being a missing child case you’re on. But yes, I think I might be expecting.’

A slow smile spread across George’s face as her words sank in. ‘Really? I’m going to be a dad?’

‘It could be a false alarm. But I’ve never been late before.’ She looked almost apprehensive.

George jumped to his feet and swung her out of her chair, spinning her around in a whirl of joy. ‘It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’ They staggered to a halt and he kissed her hard and passionately. ‘I love you, Mrs Bennett.’

‘And I love you too, Mr Bennett.’

He pulled her close, burying his face in her hair. A child. His child. All he had to do now was figure out how to manage what had been beyond every parent since Adam and Eve: how to keep it safe.

Up to that point, Alison Carter had been an important case to Detective Inspector George Bennett. Now it had symbolic importance. Now it was a crusade.

In Scardale, the mood was as brooding as the limestone crags surrounding the dale. Charlie Lomas’s experience at the hands of the police had flashed round the village as fast as the news of Alison’s disappearance. While the women checked anxiously and regularly that their children were all in bed asleep, the men had congregated in the kitchen of Bankside Cottage, where Ruth and her daughter had lived until her marriage to Hawkin.

Terry Lomas, Charlie’s father, chewed the stem of his pipe and grumbled about the police. ‘They’ve got no right to treat our Charlie like a criminal,’ he said.

Charlie’s older brother John scowled. ‘They’ve got no idea what’s happened to our Alison. They’re just making an example of Charlie so it looks like they’re doing something.’

‘They’re not going to let it go at that, though, are they?’ Charlie’s uncle Robert said. ‘They’ll go through us one by one if they get no change out of Charlie. That Bennett bloke, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Alison, you can tell.’

‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Ray Carter chipped in. ‘It means he’s going to do a proper job. He’s not going to settle till he’s got an answer.’

‘That’s fine if it’s the right answer,’ Terry said.

‘Aye,’ Robert said pensively. ‘But how do we make sure he doesn’t get distracted from what he should be doing because he’s too busy persecuting the likes of young Charlie? The lad’s not tough, we all know that. They’ll be putting words in his mouth. For all we know, if they can’t get the right man, they’ll decide to have Charlie anyway and to hell with it.’

‘There’s two roads we can go,’ Jack Lomas said. ‘We can stonewall them. Tell them nothing, except what we need to cover Charlie’s back all ways. They’ll soon realize they’ll have to find another scapegoat then. Or we can bend over backwards to help them. Maybe that way they’ll realize that looking at the people who cared about our Alison isn’t going to find the lass or whoever took her.’

There was a long silence in the kitchen, punctuated by Terry sucking on his pipe. Eventually, old Robert Lomas spoke. ‘Happen we can do both.’

Without George, the work went on. The searchers had given up for the day, but in the incident room, uniformed officers made plans for the following day. Already, they had accepted offers from the local Territorial Army volunteers and the RAF cadets to join the hunt at the weekend. Nobody was voicing their thoughts, but everyone was pessimistic. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t cover every inch of Derbyshire if they had to.

Up in Longnor, Clough and Cragg were awash with tea but starved of leads. They’d agreed to call it a night at half past nine, a farming community being earlier abed than the townies in Buxton. Just before close of play, Clough struck lucky. An elderly couple had been coming home from Christmas shopping in Leek and they’d noticed a Land Rover parked on the grass at the side of the Methodist Chapel. ‘Just before five, it was,’ the husband said definitely.

‘What made you notice it?’ Clough asked.

‘We attend the chapel,’ he said. ‘Normally, it’s only the minister who parks there. The rest of us leave our cars on the verge. Anybody local knows that.’

‘Do you think the driver parked off the road to avoid being noticed?’

‘I suppose so. He wasn’t to know that was the one parking place that would make him conspicuous, was he?’

Clough nodded. ‘Did you see the driver?’

Both shook their heads. ‘It was dark,’ the wife pointed out. ‘It didn’t have any lights on. And we were past it in moments.’

‘Was there anything you did notice about the Land Rover? Was it long wheelbase or short wheelbase? What colour was it? Was it a fixed top or a canvas one? Any letters or numbers from the registration?’ Clough probed.

Again, they shook their heads dubiously. ‘We weren’t paying much attention, to be honest,’ the husband said. ‘We were talking about the fatstock show. Chap from Longnor took one of the top prizes and we’d been invited to join him for a drink in Leek. I think half the village was going to be there. But we decided to come home. My wife wanted to get the decorations up.’

Clough glanced around at the home-made paper chains and the artificial Christmas tree complete with its pathetic string of fairy lights and a garland of tinsel that looked as if the dog had been chewing it since Christmas past. ‘I can see why,’ he said, deadpan.

‘I always like to get them done the day of the fatstock show,’ the woman said proudly. ‘Then we feel like Christmas is coming, don’t we, Father?’

‘We do, Doris, yes. So you see, Sergeant, our minds weren’t really on the Land Rover at all.’

Clough got to his feet and smiled. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘At least you noticed it was there. That’s more than anybody else in the village did.’

‘Too busy celebrating Alec Grundy’s heifers,’ the man said sagely.

Clough thanked them again and left, rendezvousing with Cragg in the local pub. He’d never believed that the rule about not drinking on duty need be strictly applied, especially on night shift. Like high-grade oil to an engine, a couple of drinks always made his mind run more smoothly. Over a pint of Marston’s Pedigree, he told Cragg what he’d heard.

‘That’s great,’ Cragg enthused. ‘Professor’ll like that.’

Clough pulled a face. ‘Up to a point. He’ll like the fact we’ve got a pair of witnesses who saw a Land Rover parked where locals knew not to park. He’ll like the fact that this unusual piece of parking happened around the same time Alison disappeared.’ Then Clough explained what he thought George wouldn’t like.

‘Bugger,’ Cragg said.

‘Aye.’ Clough took two inches off his pint in a single swallow. ‘Bugger.’

Friday, 13th December 1963. 5.35 a.m.

George walked into Buxton Police Station through the front office to find a uniformed constable attaching festive bells of honeycomb paper to the wall with drawing pins. ‘Very jolly,’ he grunted. ‘Sergeant Lucas here?’

‘You might just catch him, sir. He said he was going to the canteen for a bacon sandwich. First break he’s had all night, sir.’

‘The red bell’s higher than the green one,’ George said on his way out.

The PC glared at the door as it swung shut.

George found Bob Lucas munching a bacon sandwich and staring glumly at the morning papers. ‘Seen this, sir?’ he greeted him, pushing the Daily News across the table. George picked it up and began to read.

Daily News, Friday, 13th December 1963, p.5

MISSING GIRL: IS THERE A LINK? Dogs in manhunt for Alison By Daily News Reporter

Police yesterday refused to rule out a link between missing schoolgirl Alison Carter, 13, and two similar disappearances less than thirty miles away within the last six months.

There are striking similarities between the three cases, and detectives spoke privately of the need to consider whether a joint task force should be set up among the three police forces investigating the cases.

The latest manhunt centres round Alison Carter, who vanished from the remote Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale on Wednesday. She had taken her collie, Shep, for a walk after school, but when she failed to return home, her mother, Mrs Ruth Hawkin, alerted local police at Buxton.

A search led by tracker dogs failed to find any trace of the girl, although her dog was discovered unharmed in nearby woods.

Her mystery disappearance comes less than three weeks after 12-year-old John Kilbride went missing in Ashton-under-Lyne. He was last seen in the town’s market at teatime. Lancashire police have so far failed to come up with a single positive sighting of him since.

Pauline Reade, 16, was going to a dance when she left her family home in Wiles Street, Gorton, Manchester in July. But she never arrived and, as with John and Alison, police have no idea what happened to her.

A senior Derbyshire police officer said: ’At this point, we rule nothing out and nothing in. We can find no reason for Alison being missing. She was not in trouble at home or at school.

‘If we do not find Alison today, the search will be intensified. We just don’t know what has happened to her, and we’re very concerned, not least because of the very bitter weather we’re experiencing at the moment.’

A Manchester CID officer told the Daily News, ‘Of course, we hope Alison is found quickly. But we would be very happy to share the fruits of our investigations with Derbyshire if this case drags on.’

‘Bloody journalists,’ George complained. ‘They twist everything you say. Where’s all the stuff I said about there being more dissimilarities than there are similarities? I might as well have saved my breath. This Don Smart’s just going to write what he wants to write, no matter what the truth is.’

‘It’s always the same with the Fleet Street reporters,’ Lucas said sourly. ‘The local lads have to stay on the right side of the truth because they have to come back to us week after week for their stories, but that London lot don’t give a monkey’s whether they upset the police in Buxton or not.’ He sighed. ‘Were you looking for me, sir?’

‘Just something I wanted you to pass on to the day shift. I think it’s time we located any known sex offenders in the area and brought them in for questioning.’

‘In the whole division, sir?’ Lucas sounded weary.

Sometimes, George thought, he understood exactly why some officers remained locked inside their uniforms for the duration of their careers. ‘I think we’ll concentrate on the immediate area round Scardale. Maybe a five-mile radius, extending it up on the northern side to include Buxton.’

‘Hikers come from miles around,’ Lucas said. ‘There’s no guaranteeing our man isn’t from Manchester or Sheffield or Stoke.’

‘I know, Sergeant, but we’ve got to start somewhere.’ George pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I’m off to Scardale. I’ll be there all day, I expect.’

‘You’ll have heard about the Land Rover?’ Lucas said, his voice as neutral as his face was smug.

‘Land Rover?’

‘Your lads turned up a pair of witnesses in Longnor last night. Saw a Land Rover parked off the road near the Scardale turn-off round about the time young Alison left the house.’

George’s face lit up. ‘But that’s fantastic news!’

‘Not entirely. It were dark. The witnesses couldn’t give any description except that it was a Land Rover.’

‘But we’ll be able to get impressions from the tyres. It’s a start,’ George said, his irritation with Lucas and the Daily News forgotten in his excitement.

Lucas shook his head. ‘Afraid not, sir. The spot where the Land Rover was parked? Up the side of the Methodist Chapel. Right where our cars were in and out all night and day yesterday.’

‘Bugger,’ said George.

Tommy Clough was nursing a mug of tea and a cigarette when George arrived at the incident room. ‘Morning, sir,’ he said, not bothering to get to his feet.

‘You still here?’ George asked. ‘You can go off duty now, if you like. You must be exhausted.’

‘No worse than you were yesterday. Sir, if it’s all right with you, I’d rather stop on. This is my last night shift anyway, so I might as well get used to going to bed at the right time. If you’re interviewing the villagers, happen I could be some help. I’ve seen most of them already, I’ve picked up a fair bit of the background.’

George considered for a moment. Clough’s normally ruddy face was paler than usual, the skin around his eyes puffy. But his eyes were still alert, and he had some of the local knowledge that George lacked. Besides, it was about time George established a working partnership with one of his three sergeants that went deeper than the surface. ‘All right. But if you start yawning when some old dear decides to tell us her life story, I’m sending you straight home.’

‘Fine by me, sir. Where do you want to start?’

George crossed to one of the tables and pulled a pad of paper towards him. ‘A map. Who lives where and who they are. That’s where I want to start.’

George scratched his head. ‘I don’t suppose you know how they’re all related?’ he asked, staring down at the map Tommy Clough had sketched out for him.

‘Beyond me,’ he confessed. ‘Apart from the obvious, like Charlie Lomas is Terry and Diane’s youngest. Mike Lomas is the eldest of Robert and Christine’s. Then there’s Jack who lives with them, and they’ve got two daughters – Denise, who’s married to Brian Carter, and Angela, who’s married to a smallholder over towards Three Shires Head.’

George held up his hand. ‘Enough,’ he groaned. ‘Since you’ve obviously got a natural talent for it, you’re officer in charge of Scardale genealogy. You can remind me of who belongs where as and when I need to know it. Right now, all I want to know is where Alison Carter fits in.’

Tommy cast his eyes upwards as if trying to picture the family tree. ‘OK. Never mind cousins, first, second or third. I’ll stick with just the main relationships. Somehow or other, Ma Lomas is her great-grandmother. Her father, Roy Carter, was David and Ray’s brother. On her mother’s side, she was a Crowther. Ruth is sister to Daniel and also to Terry Lomas’s wife Diane.’ Clough pointed to the relevant houses on the map. ‘But they’re all interconnected.’

‘There must be some fresh blood now and again,’ George objected. ‘Otherwise they’d all be village idiots.’

‘There are one or two incomers to dilute the mixture. Cathleen Lomas, Jack’s wife, is a Longnor lass. And John Lomas married a woman from over Bakewell way. Lasted long enough for her to have Amy, then she was off somewhere she could watch Coronation Street and go out for a drink without it being a military operation. And of course, there’s Philip Hawkin.’

‘Yes, let’s not forget the squire,’ George said thoughtfully. He sighed and stood up. ‘We could do with finding out a bit more about him. St Albans, that’s where he hails from, isn’t it?’ He took out his notebook and jotted down a reminder. ‘Don’t let me forget to follow that up. Come on then, Tommy. Let’s have another crack at Scardale.’

Brian Carter wiped the teats of the next cow in line and, with surprising gentleness, clamped the milking machine on to her udder. Dawn had still been a few hours away when he’d left the warm bed he shared with his new wife, Denise, in Bankside Cottage, the two-bedroomed house where Alison Carter was born on a rainy night in 1950. Tramping up through the silent village with his father, he’d been unable to avoid thinking bitterly how much his cousin’s disappearance had changed his world already.

His had been a simple, uncomplicated life. They’d always been very self-contained, very private in Scardale. He’d grown used to getting called names at school and later in the pubs when folk had had a few too many. He knew all the tired old jokes about inbreeding and secret black magic rituals, but he’d learned to ignore all that and get on with his life.

When there was light, Scardale worked the land and when there wasn’t, they were still busy. The women spun wool, knitted jumpers, crocheted shawls and blankets and baby clothes, made preserves and chutneys, things they could sell through the Women’s Institute market in Buxton.

The men maintained the buildings, inside and out. They also worked with wood. Terry Lomas made beautiful turned wooden bowls, rich and lustrous, the grain chosen for its intricate patterns. He sent them off to a craft centre in London where they sold for what seemed ridiculous sums of money to everyone else in the village. Brian’s father David made wooden toys for a shop in Leek. There wouldn’t have been time for the wild pagan rituals that gullible drinkers speculated about in Buxton bars, even supposing anyone had been interested. The truth was, everyone in Scardale worked too bloody hard to have time for anything except eating and sleeping.

There was little need for contact with the outside world on a daily basis. Most of what was consumed in Scardale was produced in the circle of looming limestone – meat, potatoes, milk, eggs, some fruit and a few vegetables. Ma Lomas made wine from elderflowers, elderberries, nettles, dandelions, birch sap, rhubarb, gooseberries and whinberries. If it grew, she fermented it. Everybody drank it. Even the children would get a glass now and again for medicinal purposes. There was a van came on Tuesdays selling fish and greengrocery. Another van came from Leek on Thursdays, a general grocer. Anything else would be bought at the market in Leek or in Buxton by whoever was there selling their own produce or livestock.

It had been strange, the transition from being at school, where he’d gone out of the dale five days a week, to being an adult, working the land and sometimes not leaving Scardale from one month to the next. There wasn’t even television to disrupt the rhythm of life. He remembered when old Squire Castleton came back from Buxton with a TV he’d bought for the Coronation. His father and his Uncle Roy had erected the aerial and the whole village had crowded into the squire’s parlour. With a flourish, the old man had switched on, and they all stared dumbfounded at a February blizzard. No matter how David and Roy had fiddled with the aerial, all it did was crackle like fat on a fire, and all they could see was interference. The only kind of interference anybody in Scardale had a mind to put up with.

Now it was all changed. Alison had disappeared and all of a sudden, their lives seemed to belong to everybody. The police, the papers, they all wanted their questions answering, whether it was any of their business or not. And Brian felt like he had no natural defences against such an invasion. He wanted to hurt someone. But there was no one to hand.

It was still dark when George and Clough reached the outskirts of the village. The first light they came to spilled out of a half-closed barn door. ‘Might as well start here,’ George said, pulling the car over on to the verge. ‘Who’s this going to be?’ he asked as they tramped over the few yards of muddy concrete to the door.

‘It’ll likely be Brian and David Carter,’ Clough said. ‘They’re the cowmen.’

The two men in the barn couldn’t hear their approach over the clattering and heavy liquid breathing of the milking apparatus. George waited till they turned round, taking in the strangely sweet smells of dung, sweating animal and milk, watching as the men washed the teats of each cow before clamping the milking machine to her udder. Finally, the older of the two turned. George’s first impression was that Ruth Hawkin’s careful eyes had been transplanted into an Easter Island statue. His face was all planes and angles, his cheeks like slabs and his eye sockets like a carving in pink wax. ‘Any news?’ he demanded, his voice loud against the machinery.

George shook his head. ‘I came to introduce myself. I’m Detective Inspector George Bennett. I’m in charge of the investigation.’ As he walked towards the older man, the younger stopped what he was doing and leaned against the massive hindquarters of one of his Friesians, arms folded across his chest.

‘I’m David Carter,’ the older man said. ‘Alison’s uncle. And this is my lad Brian.’ Brian Carter gave a stately nod. He had his father’s face, but his eyes were narrow and pale, like shards of topaz. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty, but the downward cast of his mouth appeared to have been set in stone.

‘I wanted to say we’re doing everything we can to find out what’s happened to Alison,’ George said.

‘Haven’t found her though, have you?’ Brian said, his voice sullen as his expression.

‘No. We will be searching again as soon as it’s light and if you want to join us again, you’d be more than welcome. But that’s not why I’m here. I can’t help thinking that the answer to what happened to Alison was somewhere in her life. I don’t believe that whoever did this acted on the spur of the moment. It was planned. And that means somebody left traces. Whether you know it or not, someone in this village saw something or heard something that will give us a lead. I’m going to be talking to everybody in the village today, and I’ll say the same to you all. I need you to search your memories for anything out of the ordinary, anyone you saw that didn’t belong here.’

Brian snorted. He sounded surprisingly like one of his cows. ‘If you’re looking for somebody that doesn’t belong here, you don’t have to look very far.’

‘Who did you have in mind?’ George asked.

‘Brian,’ his father warned.

Brian scowled and fumbled in the pocket of his overall for a cigarette. ‘Dad, he doesn’t belong here. He never will.’

‘Who are we talking about?’ George persisted.

‘Philip Hawkin, who else?’ Brian muttered through a mouthful of smoke. His head came up and he stared defiantly at the back of his father’s head.

‘You’re not suggesting her stepfather had anything to do with Alison’s disappearance, are you?’ Clough asked, an edge of challenge in his voice that George suspected Brian Carter would find irresistible.

‘You didn’t ask that. You asked who didn’t belong here. Well, he doesn’t. Ever since he turned up, he’s been sticking his oar in, trying to tell us how to farm our land, as if he’s the one been doing it for generations. He thinks if you read a book or an NFU pamphlet, suddenly you’re an expert. And the way he courted my Auntie Ruth. He wouldn’t leave her alone. The only way she was ever going to get any peace was if she married him,’ Brian blurted out.

‘Didn’t think you minded that,’ his father said sarcastically. ‘If Ruth and Alison hadn’t moved out of Bankside Cottage, you and Denise would have had to start your married life in your old bedroom. I don’t know about you, but I could do without the bedhead banging on the wall half the night.’

Brian flushed and glowered at his father. ‘You leave Denise out of this. We’re talking about Hawkin. And you know as well as me that he doesn’t belong here. Don’t act like you don’t spend half of every day maunging on about what a useless article he is and how you wish the old squire had had more sense than leave the land to an incomer like Hawkin.’

‘That doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Alison going,’ David Carter said, rubbing his hand over his chin in what was clearly a familiar gesture of exasperation.

‘Your father’s right,’ George said mildly.

‘Maybe so,’ Brian muttered grudgingly. ‘But he always has to know best, does Hawkin. If he lays down the law in the house the way he does on the land, then my cousin’s got worse than a dog’s life. I don’t care what anybody says, she can’t have been happy living with Hawkin.’ He spat contemptuously on the concrete floor then turned away abruptly and stalked off to the far end of the milking shed.

‘Take no notice of the lad,’ David Carter said wearily. ‘His mouth works harder than his brain. Hawkin’s an idiot, but according to Ruth, he thought the world of Alison. And I’d take my sister’s word ahead of that son of mine.’ He shook his head and half turned to watch Brian fiddling with a piece of machinery. ‘I thought marrying Denise would knock some sense into him. Too much to hope for, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll be out with the searchers, Mr Bennett. And I’ll think on what you’ve said. See if I can think of owt.’

They shook hands. George could feel Carter’s cool eyes appraising him as he followed Clough out into the grey-streaked light of dawn. ‘No love lost between young Brian and the squire,’ George commented as they walked back to the car.

‘He’s saying nothing that the rest of Scardale doesn’t think, according to PC Grundy. We had a chat with him last night after we’d done the door-to-door interviews. He says all the villagers reckon Hawkin’s in love with the sound of his own voice. He likes people to be in no doubt who the boss is, and they don’t take kindly to that in Scardale. The tradition here has always been that the villagers get on with working the land the way they see fit and the squire collects his rents and keeps his nose out. So you’re going to hear a lot of complaints about Hawkin,’ Clough said.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

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