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Thursday, 12^th 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, 12^th 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.