There are a number of ways, given modern technology, of locating a missing vehicle. Unfortunately, most of them depend on having information that DCI Gorman lacked. He didn’t know the make, model or registration number of Saturday’s car, only that it was yellow. He didn’t know the name of the registered owners, only that it was the outfit Saturday had been working for. Though he assumed Saturday had a phone, he didn’t know the number or the network – the youth had turned up out of the blue and hadn’t, to the best of his knowledge, called anyone since he arrived. With enough time to find the yellow sportster on security cameras as it passed through Norbold, he could eventually get a readable plate and everything that would follow from that. And indeed, he set DCs Friend and Patton to collecting CCTV footage for just such a purpose. But time was an issue. They might get lucky and find a clear shot on the first clip they examined. Or they could stare and stare until their eyes burned and still find nothing helpful. And while they were staring, an eighteen-year-old boy could be dying in a ditch.
‘I want a helicopter,’ Gorman told Superintendent Maybourne. ‘The only useful information we have about that car right now is that it’s bright yellow – and a bright yellow car will be visible from the air in places it wouldn’t be visible on the ground from five metres away.’
Grace Maybourne paled. ‘You do know how much those things cost every hour?’
Gorman didn’t know and didn’t care. ‘Hazel’s stalker broke into her house when she was asleep. Then he kicked the shit out of Gabriel Ash. Now the kid who’s moved back in with Hazel has gone missing. He said he’d be back within a couple of hours, twenty-four hours ago. We don’t know where he went – but we do know that the man who stalked Hazel and attacked Ash took a photograph of him outside Hazel’s house. Whether or not this is the same guy who murdered Gillian Mitchell and Trucker Watts, if he has Saturday the kid’s in danger. We have to find him. And I need a helicopter to do it.’
Superintendent Maybourne offered no further argument. ‘I’ll make the call.’
As luck would have it the force’s helicopter, based halfway across the county, had been on a training exercise at the Clover Hill dam, only a few minutes’ flying time from Norbold. Two further factors improved the chances of success. It was a bright morning, the sun streaming down from what passed for its zenith this close to the winter solstice; and the trees were largely bare, allowing an almost uninterrupted view to ground level.
Still, neither DCI Gorman nor DS Presley underestimated the scale of the task. ‘On the bright side,’ said Presley, ‘if he’d been in a crash we’d know about it by now.’
‘The same probably applies if he’d had his head beaten in,’ said Gorman. ‘Trucker and the woman, and Ash, were all found where they were attacked. Whoever was responsible didn’t go to much trouble to hide them.’
‘Maybe the kid’s fine, he’s just gone back to London,’ suggested Presley. ‘He did it before, didn’t he? He has no real ties here any more. Maybe he just got bored and buggered off again.’
‘He left that note. He said he’d be back for tea.’
‘I think you can get tea in London, too.’
But Gorman had seen more of Saturday than Presley had, knew that he did have ties in Norbold – that his regard for Hazel had drawn him back, and the same thing would have prevented him from abandoning her now. He shook his head. ‘Something’s happened to him. Not a word from him, not a call, not a text, for damn near twenty-four hours. How many eighteen-year-olds do you know who stay out of touch that long?’
‘He was out of touch for over a year,’ Presley pointed out. ‘Compared with that, twenty-four hours is nothing. It’s too soon to assume the worst.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Gorman grimly. ‘But I think you’re wrong.’
Studley Row was constructed in the mid-Victorian period, when people were flocking to the new industrial centres of the Midlands to fill the thousands of jobs being created there. The only way to keep agricultural workers on the farms that needed them was to provide them, for the first time, with decent accommodation. When new, the dozen houses each had two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen with plumbed-in water, a convenient outhouse and a garden running to a fifth of an acre, an area judged adequate for a family to grow enough food to live on and perhaps keep a pig or a couple of goats.
The pigs were long gone, the outhouses replaced by fully functioning bathrooms; the gardens had been turned over mostly to flowers, and in many cases the cottages extended to include a third bedroom and another room downstairs. What had never been provided, and was only missed on cold wet windy nights by residents carrying a week’s worth of shopping, was a roadway along the front of the houses. There was a footpath, and a parking area at the end of the terrace.
Hazel saw Ash weighing up the distance from the car park to the furthest-but-one cottage. ‘You stay here,’ she said. ‘I shan’t be a minute. Even if he’s there, it won’t take him long to tell me what he told Saturday.’
‘I promised Dave Gorman …’
‘… That you wouldn’t let me out of your sight. Well, sit up straight and you’ll be able to see me all the way to the front door. If anyone tries to jump my bones between here and there, set Patience on him.’
On the back seat, Patience contrived to look both prim and smug.
There were roses round the door and a rustic bench under the front window. Hazel thought Benny Price might have made the bench himself: it had a homespun quality, sturdy and dependable rather than refined, and it afforded pleasing views over a shallow valley dotted with sheep to the woods cloaking the rising ground on the far side.
But Benny wasn’t enjoying the view today. There was no reply to Hazel’s knock; and when she tried his phone again, she couldn’t hear it ringing nor did he answer.
She wrote him a note and pushed it through his polished brass letterbox: ‘Need to speak to you urgently. Please call me as soon as you get this – Hazel Best.’ She wrote down her number. Then she walked back to the car.
‘No luck?’ asked Ash.
Hazel shook her head. ‘There’s no one in. I left a note.’
Concerned as he was for Saturday, Ash was almost relieved. He’d been afraid that Price would tell Hazel something that would encourage her to continue the search, and that he wouldn’t be able to persuade her to pass that information on to Dave Gorman and go home. ‘Back to Norbold, then?’
‘Can we give it ten minutes? In case he comes back.’
‘Of course.’
In fact they gave it half an hour, but Benny did not return. Hazel tried a couple of the other cottages, but even when someone answered the door, all she learned was that Mr Price had gone out early, in his Land Rover, and if he’d gone for a hike up the Malvern Hills he could be away all day. A big hiker, was Mr Price. He had the boots for it.
‘OK then – home,’ said Hazel, disconsolate. She started the car.
But as they drove back towards Norbold, an elderly jeep passed them heading in the opposite direction. There was just time to recognise the driver and Hazel braked sharply. ‘That’s him.’
Benny must have recognised her too, because the jeep pulled over, waiting. Hazel got out, trotted up the hill and leaned in at the driver’s door.
Even by sitting up straight, all Ash could see was Hazel resting an arm on the sill of the open window and occasionally nodding. The conversation continued for some minutes. Then she nodded again, and came back. ‘Gabriel, can you drive?’
If he was offended, he tried not to let it show. ‘I’ve always thought so. I never claimed to be Lewis Hamilton or Jenson Zip, but I think I’m reasonably competent …’
Hazel was rolling her eyes. ‘I mean, right now, with your ribs strapped up. Are you safe to drive?’
Embarrassed by the misunderstanding, he dipped his gaze. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then will you take my car home? Benny’s going to take me to the place he took Saturday yesterday morning. A waterfall in the woods. He thought – well, they both thought – it might be the place in the photograph. Benny found it in a book at the Town Hall. Saturday wanted to check it out, so Benny showed him the way. Then Saturday drove him home. But he may have gone back afterwards. Apparently he wasn’t happy with the photographs he took for me. Gabriel, maybe that’s what’s happened to him. If he went back into those woods alone, and slipped on some moss and broke his ankle …’
‘Wouldn’t he have phoned for help?’
She shrugged. ‘If he could get a signal. You know what it’s like out of town. Maybe he was lying out there all night, unable to get back to his car. I have to go and look. If he’s there, he’ll be in a bad way by now.’
‘Well, all right,’ Ash agreed reluctantly. ‘But why not take your car? Mr Price can lead the way.’
Hazel shook her head. ‘He says the track into the woods is pretty rough, and I don’t want my nice new car getting beaten up. Take it home for me, will you, Gabriel? There are only two seats in the Land Rover, and I’m not sitting in the load-bay in my good clothes and you’re not fit to. If we find Saturday, I’ll call Dave or an ambulance, or both, and get a lift into town with them. If not, Benny says he’ll drive me home.’
Ash wasn’t happy, but he couldn’t quite say why not. ‘You think that’s what’s happened? Saturday’s had an accident up in the woods?’
‘I think it’s the likeliest explanation, yes. Given that he and Benny were there earlier, playing at detectives.’ She lowered her fair brows at him. ‘Like some other people I could mention.’
‘Superintendent Maybourne’s got half Meadowvale out looking for him. Plus’ – he cocked an ear for the half-familiar sound – ‘I think she’s whistled up a helicopter as well. And you think he’s sprained his ankle?’
Now Hazel’s eyebrows soared. ‘You’d rather it was something worse? All right, maybe I over-reacted. You’re surprised? With two bodies in the morgue, you among the walking wounded, and someone prowling round my house at night? Even if it is just a sprained ankle, obviously he can’t get home by himself or he would have done. We have to find him. It’s midwinter, and he’s already spent one night outside. He might not survive another one.’
Ash took her point. ‘It’s just that, precisely because of everything that’s happened, do we really believe in a simple accident? What about the photograph of Saturday outside your house?’
Hazel shrugged. ‘All it proves is that my stalker had noticed him coming and going. Maybe he didn’t like that, any more than he liked you hanging around. But that doesn’t mean he did anything about it.’
‘He did something about it when he didn’t like me … visiting.’ Ash didn’t like the suggestion that he hung around her.
‘He knocked you down and kicked you in the ribs. All right, several times. What he did not do is kidnap you.’ She paused, considering. ‘Look, it’s Occam’s Razor, isn’t it? Simple is more likely to happen than complicated. Common happens more often than rare. And people have accidents a lot more often than they’re abducted by homicidal maniacs. Anyway, who’d want to kidnap Saturday? What would they do with him once they’d got him? He’s not worth ransoming, and he’s not well enough house-trained to keep as a pet.
‘Please, Gabriel, just do as I ask. Take the car home. Or stay here, if you prefer, and wait for me. I’ll go up to the woods with Benny, he can show me this waterfall, and if Saturday did go back there we’ll find him. Whether we do or not, I’ll be back in an hour. Yes?’
Ash still didn’t like it. If he’d been up to scrambling through a wet wood, he’d have insisted on going with her. He told himself that at least she wasn’t going alone, that Benny Price who had the proper boots for hiking could probably look after both of them in a bit of woodland less than three miles from the centre of Norbold. It wasn’t exactly the Fawcett expedition. ‘Well, all right. But – you know – be careful.’
‘I’m always careful,’ Hazel said, with more dignity than accuracy. ‘And by the way, it’s Button.’
Ash frowned. ‘What’s a button?’
‘Jenson Button. Not Zip.’
‘I wasn’t sure I’d got that right,’ admitted Ash.
I could go with her, volunteered Patience as they watched Hazel jog back to the jeep.
But Ash had taken Patience into woods before now. There were too many little furry things living in the undergrowth, and though she could boast an unusual talent, she was still descended from hunting dogs. If she gave Hazel the slip and compounded the offence with an attack of canine selective deafness, he’d never hear the end of it. ‘No, we’ll stay here. They’ll be back in an hour.’ He said it as if he believed it.