voice, or to hear what the person at the other end of the line was saying. The fanfare would sound, and the electricity would surge through her body, stinging her hands and burning the skin of her face. And the mahogany wall clock would stop of its own accord at the exact moment, at the precise second and micro second, and it would never start again. Sarah would know.
Howard came into the sitting room, instantly dominating it with his bulk. He was wearing a thick, white Arran sweater that made her want to wrap her arms round him and bury her face in the wool. But he shook his head briefly, and averted his eyes.
Sarah had been standing at the bookcase near the door. She ran her hand along some of the spines, and touched a folded and dog-eared piece of paper that had been used to mark a page in Twentieth-Century Design. She tried to breathe in the scent of the books, but the familiar smells of paper and ink seemed fainter tonight. Subjects and Symbols in Art had a small stain on the cover that had almost faded now because Sarah had touched it too often. She took out Art Deco Graphics and a David Hockney book, and put them back the other way round.
Many of the books were inscribed in Emma’s own handwriting on the title page. She had only put her name and the date, but
the inscriptions seemed to offer a sort of continuity, a narrative reflecting a particular period in Emma’s life.
These were the books Emma had once handled and read, which meant that the words on their pages must have entered her mind and become part of her. Sarah was able to pick up a book that Emma had once opened, and read the words that Emma had studied.
Sarah Renshaw often found herself spending time rearranging the books. Perhaps by shuffling the dates on the books, she could change the order of events in Emma’s life. If she had read this book before that one, might things have been different? Would Emma have been at home now, complaining that her mum was messing up the order of her books?
Sarah wiped a tear from her eye. She caught herself just before she spoke aloud, and dropped her voice to a whisper, so that Howard wouldn’t hear her.
‘I’ll help you put them back exactly how you want them, dear. We’ll do it together.’
Sarah turned away from the bookcase and took down a calendar from the top of the TV set. She crossed off another day, neatly deleting it with two short, sharp strokes of a black marker pen.
It was Day 743. Emma Renshaw had been missing for over two years.
Now the laughter in the village had subsided, or the woman making the noise had moved out of earshot. Derek Alton stood in his church porch and listened to the sound of Neil Granger’s car engine as it moved slowly out of Withens. It climbed the road away from the village and began to cross the miles of bare moorland towards the valley of Longdendale.
Finally, even the sound of the engine disappeared behind the hill. The blackbirds settled into the yew trees, Alton’s breathing returned to normal. And as it grew dark, Withens became almost entirely silent. Except for the screaming.
10
Saturday
With a heave of his shoulders, a police officer in body armour swung
the battering ram. The door split at the first impact. He swung a
few more times, and the thump of steel hitting wood wrecked the
stillness of the early morning. A burglar alarm began to shriek as
the lock shattered, and the officer gave the door a kick with his
boot.
Standing in the damp bracken at the edge of the road, Detective Constable Ben Cooper watched officers wearing Kevlar vests burst into the house as their team leader began to shout instructions. The door had given way a bit too easily, he thought. Maybe the householder should have spent more money on security, and less on the plate glass and patios.
‘Well, they give the impression of people with nothing to hide/ he said. ‘But God knows what all that glass does to their heating bill.’
Cooper could feel a fine rain in the air, like feathers touching his face. Sunlight and showers were passing across the hills so quickly that it was almost dizzying. Though he was standing still, he seemed to be moving from darkness into light and back again, as the clouds obscured the sun, showered him with rain and were blown westwards by the wind. The raindrops hardly had a chance to dry on his waxed coat before the next bank of clouds reached him.
For some reason, PC Tracy Udall was wearing her body armour, too. No doubt it was a sensible precaution, but it looked a bit odd when the most dangerous thing in sight was a patch of stinging nettles. Besides, she seemed to Cooper like a candidate for a breast reduction operation to make the vest fit properly.
11
For the moment, PC Udall had left her yellow waterproot jacket in the car. But the banks oi darker clouds rapidly moving towards them 1’roin the east suggested that she might regret moving too far away from the car without it.
‘It we’re right about their source of income, they won’t be worrying about sharing a bit of it with Powergen/ she said.
He wiped the rain off his binoculars so that he could study the house more carefully. It had been a farmhouse at one time, but part of the side wall had been taken out and replaced with floor to-ceiling glass, which must let more light in than had ever been seen by several generations of Derbyshire hill-farming families. There was new glass at the back too, and dormer windows had been built into the stone-tiled roof.
The room he could see through the glass had a floor made from patterned blocks of light-coloured wood, where once there would surely have been stone flags. There was a glimpse of light from another window way down at the far end. That could only mean that an internal wall had been removed to create one large room running right through to the back of the house. An estate agent would probably call it an open-plan living space.
As they had descended into the valley,-the police team had been” careful not to disturb the dawn with the lights of their beacons and the wail of their sirens. But now the time for discretion had passed. On the way to the raid, one of the task force officers had joked that they’d need to get inside the house quickly to be out of the rain. Kevlar fibres were known to deteriorate if they got wet. Also if they were exposed to direct sunlight. That was why
