couple of miles away and walked over. Now, as they slogged up towards the tor, Luka was flagging.
‘Come on,’ Nathan said. ‘Iron rations when we get to the top.’
Ever the clever one in the family, Abi piped up. ‘I thought you said eat before you’re hungry?’
‘Stop before you’re tired, wrap up before you’re cold, eat before you’re hungry.’ Luka repeated the words like a mantra. ‘Abi’s right, Dad.’
‘OK then.’ Nathan stopped and reached into his pocket for a packet of glucose tablets. ‘Time for go-faster sweets.’
‘Yeah!’ Luka said.
‘And the first one to touch the rocks gets an extra biscuit.’ Nathan handed out the sweets and smiled at his wife. ‘On your marks, get set …’
Neither Abi nor Luka waited for the ‘go’. Instead, they sprinted away from their parents, attacking the hill with an energy born from youth rather than experience. Nathan and Jane laughed and began to plod up the slope, knowing they’d catch up with their children before long.
‘Great this,’ Jane said. ‘Precious moments, never to be repeated.’
‘Bloody good job.’ Nathan paused for a second and put his hands on his hips. ‘I’m all out of puff.’
‘There’s a solution for that. We need to get out more often, get you fit.’ Jane moved across to her husband and looped her arm round his waist. She pushed her fingers into the first sign of his middle-aged spread and then moved her hand down to Nathan’s crotch and gave a little squeeze. ‘There are other benefits to being fit too.’
‘Stuff sex.’ Nathan smiled. ‘Right now I’d settle for a cup of tea and a scone with plenty of cream and jam.’
‘Mum! Dad!’ Abi’s voice drifted down towards them. Nathan turned his head to where his daughter stood atop the tor. She waved her arms. ‘Hide and seek! Come and find us!’
With that she dropped out of sight, disappearing behind the huge hunk of granite.
‘Shit. That’s all we need.’
Nathan and Jane strolled the short distance to the rocks. Nathan suggested they should split up, Jane going to the right and him to the left. Once his wife had disappeared round the side of the tor, Nathan unhooked the rucksack from his back and dropped it to the floor. He opened the top flap, pulled out a bottle of squash and took several swigs of liquid. Then he packed the drink away, hoisted up the rucksack and set off again.
‘Ready or not, here I come!’
Instead of circling the rocks, he headed straight to the tor and began to clamber up. He pulled himself onto a large boulder and then edged round between two more until he could climb up the rock his daughter had been on a couple of minutes before. He stood for a moment and then slowly turned on the spot. He saw his wife on the far side of the tor but there was no sign of the children. He jumped down and began to navigate between the granite columns. He thought about putting on a monster voice, but then reasoned against it. Luka, in particular, might panic and slip and hurt himself. Instead he repeated his shout of ‘ready or not, here I come’.
He’d just squeezed into a narrow passage between two rocks when he heard something which made his blood curdle. A scream. Long, drawn-out and unmistakably belonging to his daughter.
‘Abi!’ Nathan yelled as he pushed through the gap and then, finding himself with more space, spun round trying to find the direction the scream had come from. ‘I’m coming, Abi. Stay where you are.’
Nathan scrambled up and over a couple of smaller boulders, at the same time thanking God he’d packed the first-aid kit in his rucksack that morning. He just hoped his daughter hadn’t hurt herself too badly.
The scream came again, this time accompanied by the voice of his son.
‘Dad! Come quickly.’
Nathan hauled himself up a final piece of granite and saw, as he did so, that his son and daughter stood together on a large plateau of rock. Relief flooded over him as he realised that neither appeared to be injured. The relief quickly turned to anger.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘I’ve told you we don’t joke about being hurt when we’re on the moor. Fooling around’s OK at home but when—’
‘Dad!’ Luka shouted again and pointed into a large crack between two boulders. ‘Down there.’
For a moment Nathan felt a wash of horror as he wondered if it had been his wife who’d slipped and fallen. But then Jane appeared a few metres away. She moved across to the children and stared down at where Luka was pointing.
‘My God!’ Jane reached her arms out and turned Abi and Luka away.
‘What is it?’ Nathan took a couple of strides and jumped across to the plateau the three of them were standing on. He looked at his wife for an explanation. ‘A sheep or something?’
Jane shook her head as she began to push the children down from the rock. ‘We need to phone the police.’
‘The police?’ Nathan stepped forward to peer into the shadows. He squinted and tried to take in what he was seeing. A hand with bright red fingernails, an arm leading to a bare shoulder and the round curve of a partially exposed breast, the skin pale and white. The rest of the woman’s body was hidden from sight beneath an overhanging ledge and for a split second Nathan found himself craning his neck in an effort to see more. Then he changed his mind and hurriedly stepped away, following his wife and kids down off the rocks and at the same time pulling his phone from his pocket.
Early Saturday evening found Savage standing in the kitchen with a glass of white wine in one hand, a bottle in the other. Pete worked vegetables back and forth in a large wok on the cooker, steam billowing up into the extractor hood. For somebody who’d spent several years commanding a frigate and having all his meals prepared for him, he wasn’t a bad cook. He reached out for the bottle of wine and took it from Savage, pouring a generous measure into the wok.
‘Careful,’ Savage said. ‘You’ll get the kids tipsy.’
‘Good, might help Jamie sleep,’ Pete said. ‘He seems to spend most of the small hours in our bed these days.’
‘Nightmares. It’s common enough at his age.’ Savage took a sip of her wine, thinking she could do with some sort of sedative too. Malcolm Kendwick had wormed his way into her dreams, his grinning face miraculously appearing as soon as she shut her eyes at night. ‘He’ll get over it.’
‘Well, I hope—’ Pete stopped mid-sentence as Savage’s work mobile rang. He cocked his head and sighed. ‘There goes another evening.’
By no means every call to her phone required immediate action, but Pete had an uncanny knack of guessing which did. Ten to seven on a Saturday evening, and it was a pretty good bet he was right. Savage moved over and picked the phone up from the kitchen table.
‘DI Savage,’ she said.
‘It’s DC Calter, ma’am,’ the voice on the end of the line said. ‘We’ve got a suspicious death on the moor. A young woman. From the sound of things it wasn’t an accident.’
