grinned. ‘Now that’s what I call an incentive.’
‘I’m going to talk to Charlie Lomas. Do you fancy sitting in?’
‘It will be my pleasure, sir.’
George set off towards his car, then suddenly stopped, frowning at his sergeant. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were still on night shift till the weekend?’
Clough looked embarrassed. ‘I am. But I decided to come on duty this afternoon. I wanted to give a hand.’ He gave a sly grin. ‘It’s all right, sir, I won’t be putting in for the overtime.’
George tried to hide his surprise. ‘Good of you,’ he said. As they drove up the Scardale lane, George wondered at the sergeant’s capacity to confound him. He thought he was a pretty good judge of character, but the more he saw of Tommy Clough, the more apparent contradictions he found in the man.
Clough appeared brash and vulgar, always the first to buy a round of drinks, always the loudest with the dirty jokes. But his arrest record spoke of a different man, a subtle and shrewd investigator who was adept at finding the weakness in his suspects and pushing at it until they collapsed and told him what he wanted to hear. He was always the first to eye up an attractive woman, yet he lived alone in a bachelor flat overlooking the lake in the Pavilion Gardens. He’d called round there once to pick Clough up for a last-minute court appearance. George had thought it would be a dump, but it was clean, furnished soberly and crammed with jazz albums, its walls decorated with line drawings of British birds. Clough had seemed disconcerted to find George on his doorstep, expecting to enter, and he’d been ready to leave in record time.
Now, the man who was always first to claim overtime for every extra minute worked had given up his free time to tramp the Derbyshire countryside in search of a girl whose existence he’d had no knowledge of twenty-four hours previously. George shook his head. He wondered if he was as much a puzzle to Tommy Clough as the sergeant was to him. Somehow, he doubted it.
George put his musings to one side and outlined his suspicions of Charlie Lomas to his sergeant. ‘It’s not much, I know, but we’ve got nothing else at this stage,’ he concluded.
‘If he’s got nothing to hide, it’ll do him no harm to realize we’re taking this seriously,’ Clough said grimly. ‘And if he has, he won’t have for long.’
The Methodist Hall had a curiously subdued air. A couple of uniformed officers were processing paperwork. Peter Grundy and a sergeant George didn’t know were poring over detailed relief maps of the immediate area, marking off squares with thick pencils. At the back of the room, Charlie Lomas’s lanky height was folded into a collapsible wooden chair, his legs wound round each other, his arms wrapped round his chest. A constable sat opposite him, separated by a card table on which he was laboriously writing a statement.
George walked across to Grundy and drew him to one side. ‘I’m planning on having a word with Charlie Lomas. What can you tell me about the lad?’
Immediately, the Longnor bobby’s face fell still. ‘In what respect, sir?’ he asked formally. ‘There’s nothing known about him.’
‘I know he hasn’t got a record,’ George said. ‘But this is your patch. You’ve got relatives in Scardale –’
‘The wife has,’ Grundy interrupted.
‘Whatever. Whoever. You must have some sense of what he’s like. What he’s capable of.’
George’s words hung in the air. Grundy’s face slowly settled into an expression of outraged hostility. ‘You’re not seriously thinking Charlie’s got something to do with Alison going missing?’ His tone was incredulous.
‘I have some questions for him, and it would be helpful if I had some idea of the type of lad I’m going to be talking to,’ George said wearily. ‘That’s all. So what’s he like, PC Grundy?’
Grundy looked to his right then to his left, then right again, like a child waiting to cross the road correctly. But there was no escape from George’s eyes. Grundy scratched the soft patch of skin behind his ear. ‘He’s a good lad, Charlie. He’s an awkward age, though. All the lads his age around here, they go out and have a few pints and try to get off with lasses. But that’s not right easy when you live in the back of beyond. The other thing about Charlie is that he’s a bright lad. Bright enough to know he could make something of his life if he could bring himself to get out of Scardale. Only, he’s not got the nerve to strike out on his own yet. So he gets a bit lippy from time to time, sounding off about what a hard time he has of it. But his heart’s in the right place. He lives in the cottage with old Ma Lomas because she doesn’t keep so well and the family likes to know there’s somebody around to bring in the coal and fetch and carry for the old woman. It’s not much of a life for a lad his age, but that’s the one thing he never complains about.’
‘Was he close to Alison?’
George could see Grundy considering how far he could push it. That was one of the hardest parts of his job, this constantly having to stand his ground and prove himself to his colleagues. ‘They’re all close down there,’ Grundy finally said. ‘There was no bad blood between him and Alison that I ever heard.’
However, it wasn’t bad blood that George was interested in where the two Scardale cousins were concerned.
Realizing he’d gained all he could from Grundy, he nodded his thanks and strolled towards the rear of the hall, praying he didn’t look as exhausted as he felt. Probably he should wait till morning to interview Charlie Lomas. But he preferred to make his move while the lad was already on the back foot. Besides, there was always the million to one chance that Alison was still alive, and Charlie Lomas might just hold the key to her whereabouts. Even so slim a chance was too much to throw away.
As he approached, George picked up a chair and dropped it casually at the third side of the table, at right angles to both Charlie and the uniformed constable. Without being told, Clough followed his example, occupying the fourth side of the small table and hemming Charlie in. His eyes flicked from one to the other and he shifted in his seat. ‘You know who I am, don’t you, Charlie?’ George asked.
The youth nodded.
‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Clough said roughly. ‘I bet that’s what your gran always tells you. She is your gran, isn’t she? I mean, she’s not your auntie or your niece or your cousin, is she? Hard to tell down your way.’
Charlie twisted his mouth to one side and shook his head. ‘There’s no call for that,’ he protested. ‘I’m helping your lot.’
‘And we’re very grateful that you’ve volunteered to come and give a statement,’ George said, falling effortlessly into Good Cop to Clough’s Bad Cop. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you one or two questions. Is that OK with you?’
Charlie breathed heavily through his nose. ‘Aye. Come ahead.’
‘It was impressive, you finding that disturbed spot in the spinney,’ George said. ‘There had been a whole team through there ahead of you, and none of them so much as picked up a trace of it.’
Charlie managed a shrug without actually releasing any of his limbs from their auto-embrace. ‘It’s like the back of my hand, the dale. You get to know a place right well, the slightest little thing just strikes you out of place, that’s all it were.’
‘You
