‘It sounds a bit like it. Can you sec him? He can’t have got far.’
‘He’ll be getting further and further away. But I don’t know in which direction.’
Cooper turned to look to the north and cursed again. The weather was changing rapidly. Fat, heavy clouds were bumping over the flanks of Blcaklow and Kinder Scout. On the further slopes he could see the snow already falling. He shivered as the
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first cold gusts of a northerly wind reached him and hit through his clothes.
He cast about along the edge of the road, damning the slush and the deep tyre marks of every vehicle that had stopped in the last couple of days. Then he found the beginning of some footprints. They were fresh ones, the snow newly broken on the edge of the moor.
‘I can see which way he went,’ said Cooper. “I should have guessed he’s heading towards Irontongue. But he’ll never make it across that snowficld. It’s treacherous under there. Groughs, loose peat, froy.cn bogs you can’t tell what you’re walking on.’
The sky was darkening. The wind started to bluster around him, alternately whistling and moaning like an animal. The first flakes
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of snow fell - big, soft flakes that settled on the slush and began to freeze. Within minutes, they would be piling up, covering all the surfaces. Soon, he would be able to sec nothing on the moor.
‘Damn, damn and damn.’
‘What are you doing?’ said Fry.
Cooper didn’t answer. He was opening the tailgate of the Tovota and taking off his shoes, balancing on one foot as he
y C* ‘ O
replaced his shoes with walking boots. He pulled on his cagoule, zipped up the hood.
‘Ben, answer me. What the hell are you doing?
‘ V C?
‘I’ll take the phone with me. I’ll try to keep in touch, depending what reception is like out there.’
He checked his rucksack for a compass, dry clothes, a torch.
‘Ben, stay right where you are. I’m only a couple of minutes away. We have to call out the mountain rescue team.’
‘They’ll take hours and it’s nearly dark already.’
‘We can get them to put a helicopter up.’
‘In a blizzard? Because if you take a look to the north, you’ll see there’s one on the way.’
‘Ben, I can see you now. Stay with the car.’
‘Diane, if we let him do this, we may never find Baby Chloe.’
Cooper shoved his phone into the front pocket of his rucksack. He pulled on a pair of gloves. Finally, he began to walk up the hillside, following Lawrence’s footsteps. He had gone a hundred yards when he heard a car pull up on the road.
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‘Ben!’
Cooper kept walking. Fry called after him again. But now there was an entirely different tone to her voice. No longer was there any anger, only tear and a strange appeal that made her sound like somebody else entirely.
He turned and stared at her wordlessly. It was entirely the wrong moment to try to think of words to say to her that could mean anything. Trust Diane Fry always to be choosing the wrong moment. For a second or two he looked at her, the snow landing on her shoulders and on her face, melting into damp patches that glistened on her cheeks. A remnant of common sense urged him
o o
to walk back towards her, so that they could sit in the car together and wait. He stared at her for so long that he thought he would see her red scarf (or ever.
Then he carried on walking on to the moor. Just once, Cooper looked back, and he could see Fry still watching him from the road in the dusk, with the snow falling thicker and thicker through the headlights of her car. Then his path led him over the top of a rise, and he couldn’t sec her any more.
V
Diane Fry made the necessary calls with a shaking hand. Once she had done that, all she could do was wait. Ben Cooper would know that she had more sense than to do anything else, that she had enough self-discipline not to go Hying in the face of procedures and the clear priorities of self-preservation and directing assistance.
Of course, Cooper would never in his life appreciate that she felt the same instincts that he did, that her first impulse had been to run after him into the snow. Not everybody could give way to those impulses otherwise, where would the world be? What sort of mess would they be in now?
And Cooper would never realize that waiting was the worst thing. He would never know how hard it was to sit alone in her car watching the sky darken and the snow fall heavier and heavier until it filled his tracks and obliterated signs of his presence. Fry switched on her wipers to clear her windscreen and looked at Cooper’s Toyota. He said it always got him through the snow. But now his car stood abandoned in the lay-by while he faced the
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snow alone. Knowing Cooper, he had probably forgotten even to lock it in his eagerness to be a hero.
Fry shivered despite the warm air from her car heater. Hor some reason, she remembered the rile she had in a locked drawer in her desk at West Street. She knew, in that moment, that she would destroy the Hie without
