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  from home all the time, of course, and generally turned up a

  ‘‘ojr

  few days later, hungry and shamefaced. Laura had money — her parents estimated there could have been as much as thirty pounds in her purse; obviously she was not a girl who was kept

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  short of cash. But she had taken no clothes and no possessions with her. That was a significant factor.

  And reactions had been quicker in this instance for two other reasons. One was the fact that a witness report had placed Laura Vernon talking to an unidentified young man behind her house shortly before her disappearance. Il had been the last sighting.*.

  of her for nearly two days now..Ť|

  The other pressing reason, understated in the action file but discernible as a thread running through the reports, was the so far unsolved murder of sixteen-year-old Susan Edson in neighbouring B Division a few weeks earlier.

  Everyone knew that the first two or three days of an enquiry were vital, if it did turn out to be a case of murder, or other serious crime. Within the first seventy-two hours the memories of witnesses were fresh, and the perpetrator had little time to dispose of evidence or construct an alibi. At the same time, speedy action also meant they had a better chance of finding Laura Vcrnon alive.

  Fry was interested to see that a name had been offered up to police as a ‘possible’ right from the start. A youth called Lee Sherratt had been named by the parents and had been interviewed by officers in the initial sweep. He had denied being the voung man seen talking to Laura, but his alibi was

  OJOO

  unsupported. Sherratt’s record had been pulled from the Police National Computer — a few petty crimes, some as a juvenile. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to leave his name at the top of the file until he could be eliminated.

  According to the reports, a uniformed inspector from Operational Support was now in charge of the search on the ground.

  DI Paul Hitchens was CID investigating officer, reporting to

  o o‘ ro

  Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby. Officers had already called at every house in the village of Moorhay, since there weren’t all that many. Enquiries had been made with all known friends and relatives in the area. No sign of Laura Vcrnon, no leads to her possible whereabouts.

  By now the painstaking inch-by-inch search of the surrounding countryside was well under way — off-duty officers had been called in, the search dog teams were out and the helicopter

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  was in the air. Peak Park Rangers and Countryside Rangers were helping the search, and the Mountain Rescue Team was somewhere up on the tops of the moors above the village. And, of course, Detective Constable ‘Mr Perfect’ was also out at Moorhay in person. Case solved, then.

  shee had met DI Hitchens on her first day. He was her CID boss — after DS Rennie, anyway, and she had already decided Rcnnio didn’t really count. Hitchcns was younger than the sergeant, and better educated. So an early promotion; maybe he was a fast-track graduate, like herself. He would certainly be destined for higher things, and his voice would be listened to

  oo ‘

  by more senior officers. Fry ached to be out there, on a major enquiry, at the right hand of DI Hitchens, getting the chance to impress. She wasn’t intending to hang around looking at car crime statistics for long. A murder enquiry was just the thing. But it had come too soon, while she was still too new. Hence her presence in the office with Rennie.

  In an hour or two they would have to call off the search for Laura Vernon anyway. Even in August dusk fell eventually over the hills, and the lines of men and women would disperse and wander dispiritedly home. Tomorrow there would be appeals in the papers and on TV, and civilian volunteers would be queueing up to swell the numbers of the search parties.

  Fry knew she had two choices. She either coasted along and filled in time until Rennie thought fit to allocate her some tasks; or she could speak up, take the initiative, start to show what she was made of. But she held her tongue. Now was not the time — she needed to be in a stronger position. Meanwhile, DS Rennie

  was not worth the effort of trying to impress.

  j or

  Then the door opened and DI Hitchens put his head round. ‘Who’s here? Oh yes.’

  He looked disappointed, like a captain left with the choice of the players no one wants when the teams are being chosen. Hitchens was in his shirt sleeves, with his cuffs rolled up a few inches over strong wrists covered in dark, wiry hair. He was in his thirties, and seemed to be permanently about to break into a smile. Fry caught his eye, looked from him to Rennie, who had barely moved except to shift his foot from his desk.

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  I

  Hitchens nodded. ‘All right to hold the fortfor a while,

  Dave?’f

  ‘Sir.’

  Fry jumped up eagerly. ‘Where are we going,sir? Is it the

  missing girl. Laura Vernon?’i

  c? o ‘ijg

  ‘What else? Yes, we’ve had a find called in. We’ve got a,,.

  Oflg

  good man out in the field now checking it out, but it sounds§

  &Ž3Ł.

  positive. Can you he ready in two minutes?’

  Till be ready.’

  When the DI had left, Diane Fry went back to her desk to clear away the car crime reports. She was careful to turn her back to Dave Rennie, so that he wouldn’t see her smiling.

  Edendale sat astride a wide valley in the gap between the two distinct halves of the Peak District. On one side the gentle limestone hills and wooded dales of the White Peak rolled away past Bakewell and Wyedale into B Division and the borders of Staffordshire. On the other side were the grim, bare gritstone moors of the sparsely populated Dark Peak, where the high slopes of Mam Tor and Kinder Scout guarded the remote, silent reservoirs below Snake Pass.

  It was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park — the other being Bakewell, a few miles to the south, where one of the E Division section stations was based. Other towns, like Buxton, headquarters of B Division, had been deliberately excluded from the National Park when the boundaries were drawn.

  At Buxton, as at Matlock and Ashbourne, the boundary took wide sweeps around the towns and back again. But Edendale was too deep within the hills to be excluded. It meant that the restrictive Peak Park planning regulations applied to the town as much as they did to the face of Mam Tor or to the Blue John caves of Castleton.

  Diane Fry was still learning the geography of the town and the dale. So far she was familiar only with the immediate area around the Victorian house on the outskirts of Edendale where she had rented a first-floor flat, and the streets near the station — including the view of the Edendale FC stand. But she was

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  38

  aware that, no matter which route you chose out of Edendale, the only way was up — over the hills, to the moorland hamlets or the villages in the next valley.

  Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But DI Hitchens chose to drive himself as they headed out of the town towards the great hump of moorland separating Edendalc from the next valley.

  ‘It’s just the one shoe/ said Hitchens.

  ‘A trainer?’ said Fry. ‘Reebok, size-five?’

  The DI looked at her, surprised, raising his eyebrow.

  ‘You’ve been reading up on the Vernon enquiry.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It was always a possibility from the start that something had happened to her, though you can’t tell the parents that. She had cash with her, but had taken nothing else. We’d already traced all her friends and contacts. Negative all round. It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, that her body will turn up somewhere.’

  ‘What sort of girl is she?’

  ‘Oh, comes from a well-off family, comfortable background. Never wanted for anything, I’d say. S
he attends a private school called High Carrs, due to take her GCSEs next year. She gets piano lessons, has a horse that her parents bought that’s kept at some stables just outside Moorhay. She takes part in riding events sometimes.’

  ‘Show jumping?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And is she good at any of those things?’

  Hitchens looked at her and nodded approvingly. ‘If you believe the parents, she’s perfect at everything. Bound to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and do her degree, but might decide to pursue a career as a concert musician later on. Unless she wins an Olympic gold medal in the meantime, of course. Her friends say different.’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘Of course. What else? Mum and Dad deny it, though. They say she’s too busy with her studies and her horse riding, all that. But we’re tracing the boyfriends, gradually.’

  ‘Rows at home? Anything like that?’

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  ‘Nothing. At least …’

  ‘Not according to the parents, right.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Hitchens was smiling again. Fry liked her senior officers to smile at her, within reason. She watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were strong hands, with clean and carefully trimmed fingernails. His nose was a little too large in profile. It was what they called a Roman nusc. But a man could get away ith that it gave him character. She looked again at his left hand. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But now she noticed a white scar that crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.

  o

  ‘The parents say that Laura had been shopping with her mother that afternoon,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’d been to the De Bradelei Centre at Belper.’

  ‘What’s there?’

  ‘Oh — clothes,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Not Dad?’

  The don’t suppose it was his sort of thing. Anyway, the females were buying him a birthday present, so he wouldn’t have been wanted, would he? He stayed at home to catch up on some work. Graham Vernon runs a financial consultancy business and says it’s going well. They do seem to be pretty well-off.’

  ‘And after they got home?’

  J O

  ‘It was about half past five by then. It was still hot, so Laura changed and went out into the garden for a while. She didn’t come back for her evening meal at half past seven. That’s when

  the Vernons began to panic.’

  or

  Fry admired the way he had all the details in his mind and could produce them without effort. Hitchens obviously had the sort of brain that was much valued in the police service these days. Many coppers could not have repeated the information without reading it from their notes.

  ‘Parents alibi each other?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she was seen talking to a young man before she disapO^OI

  peared, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Very good, Diane. Yes, we found a lady who was out

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  o!!ectin<7 wild flowers on the ecW of the scrubland at the

  i-JO

  top of the Baulk. She’s a WI member and is helping to create the decoration for a well dressing at Great Hucklow. She was embarrassed about admitting it, can you believe it? She thought we might arrest her for stealing wild flowers. Her children had told her it’s a crime against the environment. But the well dressing was obviously important enough to turn her to evil vvavs. Anyway, she came forward and identified Laura Vcrnon from her photograph as the girl she saw. She couldn’t describe the boy, though. Too far away.’

  ‘And now a trainer.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all we’ve got so far, but it looks hopeful. We’ve got Ben Cooper on the spot there — he was with one of the search parties. Ben’s got good judgement.’

  ‘I’m sure he has.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve met Cooper, have you? He’s only back from leave today.’

  ‘No, but I’ve heard the others talk about him.’

  ‘Right.’ Hitchens said nothing for a few minutes, negotiating a crossroads where heavy lorries thundered by at regular intervals, dusting the roadside verges with a coating of lime. Fry tried to read his thoughts, wondering if she had said something wrong. But she was sure of her ability to keep any emotion out of her voice. She had practised long and hard, and now, she felt, she only ever sounded positive.

  ‘How’s it going then, Diane? Settling into the CID room OK?’

  ‘Fine, sir. Some things are done a bit differently from what

  ‘to^

  I’ve been used to, but nothing I haven’t been able to pick up

  on pretty quickly.’

  ‘That’s good. Dave Rennie treating you all right?’

  ‘No problem,’ said shee. She noted that she had become ‘Diane’

  since getting into the car alone with the DI. She liked to keep

  a track of these things, in case they had any deeper meaning.

  Maybe she could manage without the ‘sir’ in return, and see if

  it struck the right note — a closeness of colleagues rather than

  a senior officer with a junior. But no further.

  ‘Not finding Derbyshire too quiet for you after the West

  Midlands?’

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  ‘It’s a nice change,’ said Fry. ‘But I’m sure E Division has its own challenges.’

  Hitchens laughed. ‘The other divisions call it “E for Easy Street”.’

  Fry had already been informed by her new colleagues that Fdendale had been chosen over Bakcwcll or Matlock as E Division Headquarters for purely alphabetical reasons. It was one of the oddities of the Derbyshire Constabulary structure that the territorial divisions were all based in towns that began

  o

  with the right letter — A Division in Alfreton, B Division in Buxton, C Division in Chesterfield and D Division in Derby.

  So it was inconceivable that E Division should have been based in Bakewell or Matlock. It would have been an outrage against

  o o

  corporate neatness. In fact, if there hadn’t already been a town called Edendale, some PR person in an office at County HQ would have had to invent one.

  ‘But I was thinking of the social life,’ said Hitchens. ‘Edendale

  o‘

  isn’t exactly the night spot capital of Europe. A bit tame after Birmingham, I expect.’

  ‘It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose.’

  He turned to look towards her, his hands resting casually on the wheel. ‘And what is Diane Fry looking for exactly?’

  What indeed? There was only one thing that Fry wanted to acknowledge to herself. Maybe it wasn’t what Hitchens was expecting to hear. But it was something he ought to know, now rather than later.

  ‘I want to advance my career,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ He raised his eyebrows, a smile lighting up his face. He was quite good-looking, and he wore no wedding ring.

  ‘I’m good at my job,’ she said. ‘I’ll be looking for promotion. That’s what’s important to me. At the moment.’

  ‘Fair enough. I like your honesty.’

  The main road towards Buxton climbed and climbed until it reached a plateau where the limestone quarries competed with the moors as background scenery. There was a well-placed pub here called the Light House, with tremendous views over two

  o‘

  neighbouring valleys and the hills beyond. Hitchens turned off the road before they reached the quarries, and they began a gentle

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  rollercoaster ride over smaller vallevs and hills, dipping gradually towards Wyedale. Farm gates flickered past occasionally, with black and white signs advertising the names of dairy herds and stacks of huge round bales of straw or black plastic-wrapped silage lying in the fields behind stone walls.

  ‘I’ve seen your record, of course,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s not bad.’

  Fry nodded. She knew it wasn’t bad. It was damn good. Her exam results had been
in the top few per cent all along the line. Her clear-up rate since her transfer to CID had been outstanding. She had had a good career lined up in the West Midlands, and they had been grooming her for big things; anybody could see that.

  ‘It was a pity you had to leave your old force,’ said Hitchens.

  She said nothing, waiting for the comment that she knew would have to come.

  ‘But it was understandable. In the circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  In the circumstances. That was exactly how Fry herself tried to think of it now. ‘The circumstances’. It was a wonderfully cool and objective phrase. Circumstances were what other people had, not something that turned your life upside down, destroyed your self-esteem and threatened to ruin everything you had ever held as worthwhile. You couldn’t get upset about circumstances. You could just get on with life and concentrate on more important things. In the circumstances.

  They were driving along a ridge now, with a steep drop on one side down rock-strewn slopes to a little river. Gradually the view became more and more obscured by trees. Here and there was a house set back from the road, not all of them working farms.

  o

  ‘No ill effects though?’ said Hitchens.

  Fry couldn’t really blame him for fishing. She had expected it sooner or later. The subject had been raised at her interview, of course, and she had answered all the carefully worded questions with the proper responses, very reasonable and unemotional. But it was bound to be in the minds of those, like DI Hitchens, that she had to rely on for her prospects of advancement. It was just another hurdle she had to get over.

  ‘None at all,’ she said. ‘It’s all behind me now. I don’t

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  think about it. I just want to get on with the business in hand.’

  ‘One of the hazards of the job, eh? Goes with the territory?’

  ‘I suppose you might say that, sir.’

  He nodded, satisfied. For a brief moment, Fry wondered how he would react if she did what a tight little angry knot deep inside her really wanted to do — screamed, shouted, lashed out with her fists to wipe the smug smile off his face. She was proud that she no longer did that; she had learned to keep the knot of anger tied up tight and secure.