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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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. She 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.
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‘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?’
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