not now. She’d wait until she got back to Dolphin Cove, she decided. The sooner they had another member of the police force here the better, no matter how many Heads of Commonwealth meetings there were. ‘With this amount of bleeding, someone is near death,’ she told him. ‘We may well have someone in a coma on our hands. This is major injury, Barry.’
He shrugged. Clearly the idea of a few drug runners dying on his patch didn’t unduly worry him.
‘So how many?’ he demanded.
‘At least two.’ Sarah played the flashlight over the floor of the cabin once more. And faltered. Her beam raked the floor again, and once again it stopped. ‘Oh, no…’
‘What?’ Alistair was following her beam but not seeing.
‘Barry, are you sure you’re the only person who’s been in here?’ she demanded, and the policeman nodded.
‘I’m sure.’
‘No children came with you in the initial rescue team?’
‘No.’
‘I might be wrong, but there… Is it a child’s footprint?’ she whispered. ‘See those smudges? It seems everyone has crawled out, leaving no identifying trace, and most footprints have been overlaid by Barry’s. But there, against the wall…’ She took a deep breath and refocussed. ‘Can you hold my hand, Alistair? Support me while I lean in? I don’t want to compromise this further.’
She climbed up into the cabin, stood just inside the doorway but didn’t enter, reluctant to disturb the scene more than it had been already. But balancing just within, leaning inward and letting Alistair take all her weight, she could reach right into the cabin without disturbing the blood or the pattern of the smudged knee and footmarks.
She leaned until she was right over the place where she’d directed the torch. For a long moment she stared down, and the look on her face was grim as death.
‘What is it?’ Alistair said gently, and she knew he’d seen from her expression how deeply disturbed she was.
‘It’s definitely a child’s,’ she whispered. She was following the outlines with her torch, but the more she looked at it the more she knew she was right. ‘It’s the outline of a sandal, or something similar, and it’s tiny. By the look of it we’re looking at the print of a four or five-year-old.’
It changed things. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it did. There was a deathly silence while they all took in this new piece of horror.
Finally Alistair eased her out. Sarah jumped down onto the soft sand and pushed her curls out of her eyes with an expression of intense weariness.
‘I can’t tell what’s happened,’ she said. ‘I don’t have the skills. But there are people who do. Footprints can give us age and weight, maybe even things like country of origin if the footwear is specific enough, but there’ll be more evidence than footprints. DNA can be isolated for everyone who was on this plane. Meanwhile I don’t know who they are or what they’ve done but I want them found. Barry, you might be right that they’re hiding, but no matter what you think about their motives this fact is absolute: we have a child, probably badly injured, who for whatever reason is somewhere in the hills around here. I don’t care what the security arrangements are for the Heads of Commonwealth. I’ll ask for experts. I want this place analysed by the best forensic team we have and I want it done now. Or sooner!’
CHAPTER FOUR
SARAH made a careful inspection of the site, but there was nothing else it could tell her. She roped off the plane so no one else could go near, but she knew it was futile. ‘It’s like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted, but it’s all I can do. I want technicians up here to take fingerprints. Anything. There’s been so much messed up already…’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alistair said ruefully as they left the beach.
There was no point in their staying. Jack, the capable mechanic Alistair had spoken of, had arrived. He was primed to stay close to Barry. Alistair needed to be back at the hospital and Sarah needed to set wheels in motion-wheels that required a phone and a lot of explanation.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about compromising the scene,’ Alistair told her. ‘I had a dead pilot on my hands, and almost the moment I saw him there were people demanding I get back to town fast to cope with the suspected coronary. I thought…’
‘You thought Barry might be depended on to preserve the site?’
‘Yes.’
She considered. ‘So, when he said there were others at the plane before him who messed with the footprints…’
‘There weren’t. He went out with the first group. I was following soon after, but Barry would have been first on the scene.’
‘So he just didn’t notice whether there were prints leading out of the plane before everyone else had stomped all over them.’ She sighed. ‘The man’s a liar as well as a fool.’
‘His mind’s not exactly on the job. He doesn’t want to be here.’
‘The easiest way for him to get out is to learn to be a decent cop,’ she said ruefully. ‘What are the authorities about, sending someone like this to be a sole policeman in this remote place? Professionals without back-up have to be the best.’
‘That’s not something Grant would have said.’
She cast him a look that was disturbed. Professionals without back-up having to be the best? Alistair was right. Grant would never have conceded that. Even if it meant criticising his brother.
Grant had done nothing but look down with disparagement on his twin, Sarah thought. How much had that hurt?
‘We were very young,’ she said softly.
He said nothing.
They walked on. She had to concentrate. The path was really rough. But it was easier returning than going. Alistair was walking behind her but he was moving branches aside, holding them. Making the way easier for her.
Why was he suddenly being nice?
She and Grant…they’d been so conceited. At first she’d even gone along with Grant’s disparagement of his family. Sure, she hadn’t disparaged them herself, but she’d laughed at Grant’s hayseed jokes.
Until she’d spent time with them.
Until she’d discovered what Alistair was really like.
‘What do we do now?’ Alistair asked, and she hauled herself back to the job at hand.
‘Worry,’ she said, trying to keep it light. ‘It’s what I’m principally good at.’
‘Yet you decided not to stay at the plane with Barry?’
‘I don’t think they’ll find them.’
‘Why not?’
She hesitated. Why not? Gut instinct? No. Something more.
‘They’re running,’ she said. ‘There are at least two blood groups there, which means at least two people. But there’s a child. I’m going to be really presumptuous here and assume if one’s a child then there’ll be parents. Why on earth would parents take an injured child and hide?’
‘Maybe the child’s hiding himself? Maybe the pilot was the kid’s father?’
‘He didn’t look like a father.’ She gave a rueful grin. ‘I know. There’s presumption again. But the passenger seat in the cockpit wasn’t used.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There are magazines, not only on the floor but caught in the seat belt. No one was in that seat when the plane crashed. That little plane is designed to carry a pilot, one passenger and cargo. At low altitudes. The hold isn’t
