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Thursday, 12^th 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, 13^th 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, 13^th 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.