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