Someone else was absent too, she noted. It had been interesting to observe over the past couple of weeks how reality in the shape of Zandra had edged out fiction in the form of Nina.
She said casually, ‘Nina wasn’t there then?’
‘No,’ said Rosie dismissively. ‘The nix got her again. Can I have a cold drink? I’m a bit hot.’
So much for imaginary friendship, thought Ellie. Now you’re here, now you’re back in the story book!
She said, ‘No wonder you’re hot after a day like that. Let’s see what we’ve got in the fridge, then I’ll rub some of my after-sun lotion on just to make sure you don’t start peeling like an old onion. OK?’
‘OK. Will Daddy be home before I go to sleep?’
She yawned as she spoke. The effort of telling her tale seemed to have drained all the energy from her.
‘I doubt it,’ said Ellie. ‘From the look of you, I think we’ll be lucky to get you into bed before you go to sleep.’
‘But he will be coming home soon as he finds the little girl?’
Oh, shit. Something else to remember from her own childhood, how sharp her ears had been to pick up and note down scraps of adult conversation.
She recalled Peter’s description of the missing child’s parents – like something’s been switched off – and another line came into her mind: so deep in my heart a small flame died.
She put her arms round Rosie and hugged her so hard the child gasped.
‘Sorry,’ said Ellie. ‘Let’s go find that cold drink.’
They are long, the days of midsummer, and usually their beauty lies in their length, with sunlight and warmth apparently unending and giving those able to relax a taste of that eternal bliss which was ours before the Great Banker in the Sky repossessed our first home and garden.
It was not so for the police working in Danby. There was not even that sense of growing urgency which the approach of night usually brings to a search team, that resentment at having the operation interrupted by several hours of darkness. From somewhere a dullness had stolen upon them, a feeling of futility. It sprang, Pascoe guessed, from the community’s close links with Dendale, from a common memory of what had happened there fifteen years ago, and from the link made in so many minds between the three Dendale children who had vanished without trace and Lorraine Dacre.
On the surface, Andy Dalziel fought against it, but in some ways it seemed to Pascoe he was a major contributor to it. It wasn’t that he gave the impression of a lack of urgency and involvement. On the contrary, he seemed to be more personally involved in this case than in any other Pascoe could recall. It was just that somehow he seemed to feel the whole physical and bureaucratic structure of the investigation – the search parties, the incident room, the house-to-house – was some kind of going-through-the-motions gesture, serving only as a sop to public morale.
For Pascoe, the machine was a comfort. It collected scraps of information, some negative, such as, this patch of ground or that outhouse had been searched and nothing had been found; some positive. You put these scraps in place, and joined them together carefully like the numbered dots in a child’s drawing book, and eventually with luck a recognizable shape emerged.
He wished Wieldy was here. When it came to making sense out of joined-up dots, no one came close to Sergeant Wield. But he and his partner were away for the weekend on a book-buying expedition in the Borders. At least that was what the partner, Edwin Digweed, antiquarian bookseller, was doing. Wield’s interest in books began and stopped with the works of H. Rider Haggard. He, as Andy Dalziel with instinctive salaciousness had put it when told of the sergeant’s non-availability, was just along for the ride.
About eight o’clock, Dalziel appeared in the incident room and told Pascoe he’d given instructions for the search to be wound down for the night.
‘Still a couple of hours of daylight,’ said Pascoe, slightly surprised.
‘We’re short-handed,’ said Dalziel. ‘And knackered. They’ll miss things in the dusk, start thinking of home, stop for a quiet drag, next thing we’ve got another grass fire down here and everyone’s up all night. I’ve called in on the Dacres, let them know.’
‘How’d they take it?’
‘How do you think?’ snarled the Fat Man. Then relenting, he added, ‘I pushed the no-news-good-news line. Never say die till you’ve got a body that has.’
‘But you don’t feel like that, sir?’ probed Pascoe. ‘From the start you’ve been sure she’s gone for good.’
‘Have I? Aye. Happen I have. Show me I’m wrong, lad, and I’ll give you a big wet kiss.’
Nobly, in face of such a threat, Pascoe persisted. ‘It could be abduction. There’s still some car sightings unaccounted for.’
This was straw-grasping stuff. All early-morning vehicle sightings had been eliminated except for three. A local farmer had seen a blue car heading up the Highcross Moor road at what he termed a dangerous speed; several people had noticed a white saloon parked on the edge of Ligg Common; and Mrs Martin, a short-sighted lady who’d gone early into St Michael’s Church to carry out her flower-arranging duties, thought she’d heard a vehicle going up the Corpse Road.
‘The Corpse Road?’ Dalziel echoed.
‘That’s right. It’s what they call the old track …’
‘… that runs over the Neb into Dendale, the one they used for bringing their dead ’uns across to St Mick’s for burying before they got their own church,’ completed Dalziel. ‘Don’t come the local historian with me, lad; I’m a sodding expert.’
He scratched his chin thoughtfully, then said, ‘Tell you what, fancy a walk? It’ll do you good, you’re looking a bit peaky.’
‘A walk …? But where …?’
‘You’ll see. Come on.’
Outside, the Fat Man plunged briefly into the boot of his car, from which he emerged with a small knapsack which he tossed to Pascoe.
‘You carry it up. I’ll carry it down.’
‘Up?’ said Pascoe uneasily.
‘Aye. Up.’
He led the way through a small gateway into the churchyard, through the green and grey lichened tombstones, past the church and out of the lych gate on the far side. A pleasant green track stretched ahead running between old elms and yews. At least it was pleasant for the first thirty yards or so, then it began to grow more rocky and steep.
‘Anything that came up here would need four-wheel drive. Or a tractor maybe,’ panted Pascoe. ‘Ground’s too hard to leave any traces.’
‘Well, thank you, Natty Bumppo,’ said Dalziel. ‘What’s been here then? Herd of cows in gum-boots?’
In a small clearing just off the track where the trees had thinned out considerably, he pointed to the crushed grass and powdered earth in parts of which tyre tracks were clearly visible.
‘Yes, well, OK,’ said Pascoe. ‘There’s been something up here. Well spotted, sir.’
He turned away and took a couple of steps back down the track.
‘Hey, sunshine, what’s your hurry? We’ve not got there yet.’
He looked back to see that Dalziel was still heading uphill where the track emerged from the trees and began to wind across the open fellside.
‘But why …? I thought you were just … Oh, sod it!’