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‘Aye, certain,’ said Garnett. ‘They say the lass has run off with some boyfriend.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve not heard that. It wasn’t in the briefing. Just that she was missing.’
‘Huh. Missing my arse. Mark my words, she’ll be off shagging some spotty youth somewhere. Fifteen years old, what do you expect these days?’
‘Maybe you’re right. We have to go through the motions all the same.’
‘Mind you, if one of my two did it, I’d murder ’em all right.’
Garnett thrashed at a small elder sapling so hard that the stem snapped in two, the tender young branches collapsing to the ground and leaking a tiny trickle of sticky sap. Then he trod on the broken stem and crushed it into the grass with his police-issue boot. Cooper hoped that, if there were any fragile evidence to be found in the woods, he would see it before Garnett reached it.
Then he looked at the PC and smiled suddenly, recognizing that the man had no harm in him. He might be a middle-aged dad whose ambitions were withering as his waistline expanded, but he had no harm in him at all. Cooper could almost sense the ordinary little niggles that teemed in Garnett’s mind, from his disappearing hairline to the recurring ache at the base of his spine and the size of his telephone bill.
‘Just be thankful for the overtime,’ he said. ‘We could all do with a bit of that.’
‘Ah yes, you’re right there, lad. Too right. It takes something like this to get the fingers of those tight-fisted bastards off the purse strings these days, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s the budget cuts.’
‘Budgets!’ Garnett said the word like a curse, and they both paused for a moment to listen to its sound, shaking their heads as if it symbolized the end of everything they had known.
‘Accountants, you can keep ’em,’ said Garnett. ‘We’re not coppers to them any more, just a load of figures on a sheet of paper. It’s all flashy operations and clear-up rates. There’s no room for old-style coppers these days.’
He threw a bitter glance along the hillside towards where the Task Force squad was beating its way through the scrubland beyond a row of Lombardy poplars like a set of dark spikes dropped into the landscape.
‘Of course, you’ll know all about that, lad. You’re different. A chip off the old block, they reckon. Good for you. Wish you luck, though.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
Cooper had only just returned from a fortnight’s summer leave. On his first day back on duty he had been thrown straight into the search for Laura Vernon, fifteen years old and missing from home since Saturday night. They were looking for a girl with short dark hair dyed red, wearing a silver nose stud, five foot six inches tall, mature for her age. Failing that, they were looking for her clothes – black denims, a red short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, a white sports bra, blue bikini pants, blue ankle socks, a pair of Reeboks, size-five, slim-fit. Nobody thought it necessary to point out that if they found her clothes, they were also looking for a body.
‘This lass, though. She’s miles away, if you ask me,’ said Garnett. ‘Run off with the boyfriend. Some yob on a motorbike from Manchester, maybe. That’s what teenage girls get up to these days. The schools teach them about contraceptives before they’re twelve, so what can you expect? ’Course, the parents never have a clue. Not parents like this lot, anyway. They don’t know the kids exist half the time.’
Cooper’s legs were still aching from the rock climbing he had done on the sheer, terrifying faces of the Cuillin Hills of Skye. His friends Oscar and Rakesh were members of the Edendale Mountain Rescue Team and could never get enough of the mountains. Just now, though, he could really have done with a quiet day behind his desk at Division, making a few phone calls maybe, catching up on what had been happening during the last fortnight, getting up to date with the gossip. Anything but clambering up and down another hillside.
But he knew this area well – he was himself from a village a few miles down the valley. Most of the men recruited for the search parties were from the section stations, or even from out of the division. A few of them were city boys. On the hills around here they would be falling down old mine shafts in their dozens without someone to tell them which way was up and which was down.
And, of course, PC Garnett could well be right. It had happened so often – youngsters bored with life in the villages of the Peak District, attracted by the glamour and excitement of the big cities. And very likely there was a boyfriend, too – no doubt someone the parents found unsuitable. According to the initial reports, the Vernons claimed there had been no trouble at home, no family rows, no reason at all for Laura to walk out. But didn’t parents always say that? So much could remain misunderstood among families, or never even suspected. Especially if they were a family who didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to each other much.
But there were other factors in this case. Laura had taken no clothes with her, very little money, no possessions of any kind. And initial enquiries had brought a sighting of her talking to a young man on Saturday night, at the edge of the expanse of hillside scrub and woodland known as the Baulk.
Once he got out on the hill below the village of Moorhay, Cooper had remembered that he had even been to Laura Vernon’s home once. It was the big white house they called the Mount, which stood somewhere above the search party, hidden behind the trees on its own spur of land. It was a former mine owner’s house, big and pretentious, with formally laid out grounds full of rhododendrons and azaleas, and with a stunning view over the valley from the terrace. Cooper had been invited to the Mount for the eighteenth birthday party of a classmate, a lad everyone at the old Edendale High School knew had well-off parents even before they were given the tour of the big house. That hadn’t been the Vernons, but the people before them – they had been local people, the family of a man who had inherited a string of small petrol stations scattered throughout the Peak. The business had expanded from Edendale and its surrounding villages, beyond the borders of Derbyshire, in fact, into South Yorkshire and the fringes of the cities.
Eventually, of course, he had sold out to one of the larger companies, cashed in and moved away to somewhere better. Abroad, they said. The South of France and Italy were popular guesses.
The Mount had stood empty then for some time, waiting out the recession. Photographs of its elegant facade featured regularly in the adverts of upmarket estate agents in glossy county magazines. The village people would sit in the doctor’s waiting room, pointing out to each other the multiplicity of bathrooms, wondering what a utility was and shaking their heads in astonishment at the number of noughts in the asking price. Then the Vernons had moved into the Mount. No one knew where they had come from, or what Mr Vernon did, except that he was ‘in business’. He drove off every day in his Jaguar XJS in the direction of Sheffield, sometimes staying away from home for days on end. Was he another one just pausing for a while in the Peak while he booked his ticket to Tuscany?
‘You’ll be glad of the extra cash too, though, won’t you? Just been on holiday?’ said Garnett.
‘Scotland,’ said Cooper.
‘Bloody hell. Scotland? It’s just the Peak District, but with a bit more water, isn’t it? Can’t see the point of that, myself. Me, I want a bit of sun and sand when I go on leave. Not to mention the cheap booze, eh? I like Ibiza. There’s loads of English pubs and casinos and stuff. A few bottles of sangria, a paella, and a go on the fruit machines. You can’t beat it, that’s what I say. Besides, the wife’d divorce me if I suggested anything else. She’s on about the Maldives next year. I don’t even know where it is.’
‘Somewhere east of Ibiza, I think,’ said Cooper. ‘But you’d like it.’
The line was moving forward again, and Cooper waved away a cloud of flies from his face. Sun and sand and cheap booze were far from his mind. Even during his fortnight on Skye, his thoughts had kept slipping away from the rock face, back to the promotion interviews that were coming up, now just a few days away. There would soon be a detective sergeant’s job available at E Division. DS Osborne had been on sick leave for weeks now, and it was said that he would go the usual way – early retirement on health grounds, another pension to be paid for from the creaking police authority budget. Ben Cooper thought he was the natural successor to Osborne. Ten years in the force, and five in CID, and he had more local knowledge than most of the rest of his shift put together. The sergeant’s job was what he wanted and needed. More – it was what his family wanted. Cooper thought of his mother, and the desperately hopeful look in her eye when he came home from work, the question as often unspoken as asked out loud. He thought about her many times a day, every time he saw someone ill or old. He thought of her seemingly endless pain and grief, and the one thing she thought might ease it. He ached to give her what she longed for, just this once.
The line of men were deep into the trees again now, the canopy over them muffling the noise of the police helicopter that was still moving along the valley, sweeping the woods with its thermal imaging camera. The sudden transition from glaring sun to deep shade made it difficult to make out the details of the undergrowth below the trees. In places there could have been an entire SAS platoon lying concealed in the chest-high bracken and willowherb, waiting for some bobby in blue overalls to stumble into them armed with nothing but a slug-encrusted pole.
A pheasant clattered in alarm and took off somewhere nearby. From further away, there was another sound. The trees were too thick to tell which direction it came from, or exactly how far away it was. But it was the sound of a dog, and it barked just once.
2 (#ulink_de1c5da9-2e4c-58e0-889c-0a01e441e2bb)
Charlotte Vernon had been in the same position for a quarter of an hour. Whether it was the effects of the tablets or the alcohol, or simply the frantic activity of her imagination, throughout the day she had been alternating between phases of restlessness and immobility. It was as though she managed to blank out her thoughts entirely for short periods before being overwhelmed afresh by surges of terror. The waiting had become an end in itself.
Now Charlotte stood on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, watching the helicopter passing overhead. She followed the movement of the rotor blades as if she hoped to read a message in their flickering blur. On a table near her hand stood a half-drunk glass of Bacardi and an ashtray filled with damp and crushed butts, their filters stained with smears of vermilion.
She had been on the terrace all afternoon, hardly seeming to notice as the heat of the sun gradually moved away from her shoulders and dipped behind the house until she stood in shade and the stone flags around her began to whisper and contract. She had stirred only when the phone rang behind her in the house, her muscles tensing, her fingers gripping tighter on the balustrade for a few seconds each time, as Graham answered it. She would strain to catch his muttered words, then cover her ears as if she didn’t want to hear them at all.
But all the calls were enquiries from friends. Some were even business calls, which Graham dealt with in a lowered voice, glancing towards his wife’s back as he turned guiltily away. He seemed relieved to have an excuse not to look at her as she posed against the view of the Witches, her head raised to the sky like a heroine in an Arthurian romance, waiting for news of a distant battle.
After the latest call, Graham replaced the phone and turned back towards the windows.
‘That was Edward Randle from AET,’ he said. ‘He sends his thoughts. And he wanted to know whether he and Martina should still come tomorrow night.’
Graham waited for Charlotte to speak. But he could only hear the faint buzzing of the fans and the distant bark of a dog somewhere down in the village.
‘I told him of course they should come. We can’t put people off, can we? Life goes on.’
Graham wondered whether she had heard what he said. She was in some world of her own where Allied Electronics and other such trivialities didn’t exist. Graham moved closer to her, wondering whether he should offer to touch her, whether it would be what she wanted just now, or whether it would only make things worse. He couldn’t tell.
When he stepped on to the terrace, he could smell the sun oil on her body. Her bleached hair hung straight on her neck, falling slightly on to the collar of her wrap. The backs of her slim, well-tanned legs were visible to the edge of her bikini, her muscles tense and stretched. Graham felt a surge of physical desire, but tried to suppress it. Maybe tonight his wife would be restored to her usual receptive mood. Maybe tomorrow.
‘Did you hear me, Charlie?’
‘I wish we could take the phone off the hook.’
‘But then we wouldn’t hear … if there was news.’
‘When they find her, you mean.’
Charlotte’s voice was tired now, the strain of the past forty-eight hours taking its toll, though she would be reluctant to admit it.
‘They will find her, won’t they, Graham?’
‘Of course they will.’
Graham repeated the same reassurance he had been giving for two days. He put as much sincerity as he could into his voice, though he doubted his wife really believed him. He certainly didn’t believe it himself.
The helicopter started to turn, its rotors dipping and fading from sight against the hillside behind it. Charlotte looked dejected at its disappearance, as if she had failed to decipher the message because she had not tried hard enough. From the terrace, none of the houses in the village were visible. The only human habitation in view consisted of a couple of farms high on the opposite slope, their weathered stone walls blending into the hillside as if they had grown there. No wonder Charlotte hadn’t wanted the helicopter to go away. It was the only sign of life she could see from the Mount.
‘You hear of girls running off and disappearing for ever,’ she said. ‘To London. Would she go to London, Graham? How would she get there?’
‘She’s only fifteen,’ he said. ‘They would bring her back.’
‘How would she get there?’ she repeated. ‘Where would she get the money? She could have hitched, I suppose. Would she know how to do that? Why didn’t she take any clothes?’
For two days she had asked too many questions that Graham couldn’t answer. He would have liked to tell her that he was sure Laura could have got no further than Bakewell, and that the police would pick her up before the night was over. He had tried to tell her, but the words dried up in his throat.
‘Don’t you want to come in now? It’s time to eat.’
‘Not just yet,’ she said.
‘It’s starting to go dark. You’ll want to change at least.’
‘I want to be out here,’ she said.
‘Charlie –’
‘As long as they’re still looking,’ she said. ‘I want to be out here.’
A book had been turned face down on to the table. Very little of it had been read, but it didn’t need to be. Graham could see from the cover that it was the latest in a best-selling series about an American pathologist who was for ever dissecting dead bodies and catching serial killers. The illustration showed a barely identifiable part of a naked body, set against a dark background.
‘I can’t think of anywhere else that she might have gone,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ve been trying and trying, racking my brains. But we’ve tried everywhere, haven’t we, Graham? Can you think of anywhere else?’
‘We’ve tried them all,’ said Graham.
‘There’s that girl in Marple.’
‘We’ve tried there,’ said Graham. ‘Her parents said she was in France for the summer.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
‘If she’s met up with the wrong sort of people …’
‘How could she?’ said Charlotte quickly. ‘We’ve been so careful. How could she meet the wrong people?’
‘We have to face it, it does happen. Some of her friends … Even if they’re from the best families, they can go astray.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ve heard there are these rave things. Some of them go on all weekend, they say.’
Charlotte shuddered. ‘That means drugs, doesn’t it?’
‘We’ll have to talk to her about it seriously, when she’s back.’
After the helicopter had moved away to hover somewhere along the valley, the faint sound of voices could be heard, carried towards the house on the evening breeze. Graham and Charlotte could see no one because of the heavy tree cover, but both of them knew, without discussing it, that there were many men out there on the hillside, calling to each other, searching for their daughter.
‘Of course, there were probably friends she didn’t tell us about,’ said Graham. ‘We have to face up to that. Places she went that she didn’t want us to know about.’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘Laura didn’t keep secrets from me,’ she said. ‘From you, of course. But not from me.’
‘If you say so, Charlie.’
A small frown flickered across Charlotte’s face at his calm acceptance. ‘Is there something you know, Graham? Something that you’re not telling me?’
‘Of course not.’
He was thinking of his last conversation with Laura. It had been late on Thursday night, when she had slipped into his study and persuaded him to let her have a glass of his whisky. Her face had been flushed with some other excitement, even before the whisky had begun to take effect. She had perched on the edge of his desk and stroked his arm, smiling at him with that mature, seductive smile she had learned had such an effect on their male visitors. She had dyed her hair again, a deeper red than ever, almost violet, and her fingernails were painted a colour so dark it was practically black. Then she had talked to him, with that knowing look in her eyes and that sly wink, and told him what she wanted. The following morning, he had sacked Lee Sherratt. The second gardener they had lost that year.
‘No, of course not, Charlie.’
She accepted his word. ‘And the boy, Lee?’
Graham said nothing. He closed the abandoned novel, slipping a soft leather bookmark between the pages. He collected the book and the half-full glass of Bacardi from the table. The sun had almost gone from their part of the valley now. But the jagged shapes of the Witches were bathed in a dull red light that was streaked with black runnels where the rocky gulleys were in shadow.
‘What about him, Graham? What about the boy?’
He knew Charlotte still thought of Laura as pure and innocent. It was the way she would think of her daughter for ever. But Graham had begun to see her with different eyes. And the boy? The boy had already been punished. Punished for not dancing to the tune that Laura had played. Lee Sherratt had been too stubborn to play the game – but of course, he had been busy playing other games by then. And so Graham had sacked him. It was what Laura had wanted.
‘The police have spoken to him. He told them he hasn’t seen Laura for days.’
‘Do you believe that?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows what to believe just now?’
‘I want to speak to him. I want to ask him myself. Make him tell the truth.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Charlie. Leave it to the police.’
‘They know about him, don’t they?’
‘Of course. They’ve got him on their records anyway. Over that stolen car.’
‘What?’
‘You remember. The car that was taken from the car park at the top of the cliff. It belonged to some German people. Laura told us about it.’
‘Did she?’ said Charlotte vaguely.
At last she allowed him to lead her back into the room, where she began to touch familiar objects – a cushion, the back of a chair cover, the piano stool, a series of gilt-framed photographs in a cabinet. She opened her handbag, touched up her lipstick and lit another cigarette.
‘Who else is supposed to be coming tomorrow night?’ she said.
‘The Wingates. Paddy and Frances. And they’re bringing some friends of theirs from Totley. Apparently, they’re building up a big computer business, installing systems in Doncaster and Rotherham. Paddy says they’ve got a really good future. They’d make an ideal account, but I need to get in quickly and make the contact.’
‘I’d better see to the food then.’
