shrank back behind the policeman, but he was shrinking back as well.
The sergeant stood her ground and shouted into the darkness, ‘Call your dog off! This is the police!’
From the shadows a man appeared: the same man who had been holding Tammy’s bicycle, yelling, ‘Sheba! Come! Sheba! Sheba! She-baaa! Come!’
Eventually, the dog stopped growling and turned and joined the man. We all seemed to breathe out at the same time.
‘Sorry about that,’ said the man. ‘She’s a bit—’
The sergeant interrupted him. ‘Will you put that dog on a lead, please, sir?’ she said sharply. When the man hesitated, she added, ‘Now, please.’
It was a big German Shepherd, with a scar on its face and a patchy tail, and it sat while the man attached a length of string around its collar. I knew the man, sort of. Geoff something-or-other. He’s the security guard at the observatory on the top moor. He comes into the pub sometimes with another man who is his son.
‘Any news about the lass?’ said Geoff. ‘We came down here to look for ’er.’
We had emerged on to the little beach, where Geoff’s son was standing smoking a cigarette. I was still keeping a wary eye on the dog, who was pulling on her string lead.
‘No, sir,’ said the younger officer. ‘And this is now a secure area. We’ll have to ask you to leave and not to touch anything.’ He took out his notepad. ‘May I ask your names, please?’
The man who had been smoking threw his cigarette butt into the water, where it landed with a little hiss. He exhaled a plume of smoke and said, ‘Why do you need our names?’
The sergeant looked at him quizzically. ‘Just routine, sir. Is there a problem?’
Geoff shot his son a glance and said, ‘No problem at all, officer. We’re happy to help. My name is Geoffrey Mackay. G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y. Stop it, Sheba! This is also Geoffrey Mackay, Junior …’
He carried on giving his details and I moved away a few metres along the shore towards a rickety wooden jetty that extended a few metres over the water. That’s when I saw it, lying upside down on the black shingle, half submerged by the water.
The loose label from the present I had wrapped. On it was written: Miss Sheila Osborne.
This next bit is super sad. I’m just saying that to warn you because there is almost nothing worse than reading about someone else’s agony.
Dad, Mam, Gran and I were in total terror about Tammy that night as Christmas Eve tipped over into Christmas Day and all of the usual celebrations stopped. I don’t think anybody slept much. By 2am more police had arrived from Hexham.
By the time it was light, which was about eight o’clock, a huge group of people had gathered in the car park of the Stargazer, and were being coordinated by a police inspector in uniform and a man from Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue, who had turned up with twelve volunteers. They had all come out to help on a Christmas Day morning.
There was a Mountain Rescue Land Rover full of equipment. The two Geoffs were there as well, and Sheba was snarling at three well-behaved Mountain Rescue collies in high-vis jackets.
At one point, the permanent hubbub of the bar room died down completely and there was a silence, eventually broken by the pealing of the little village church’s solitary bell summoning people to celebrate Christmas morning. I thought about the vicar, Father Nick, looking out over the empty pews and wondering why nobody had turned up. (In fact, I saw him later. He had taken his vicar gear off and cancelled services in three other churches that he goes to just so he could join the search.)
The morning and the afternoon passed in a confused mash-up that combined periods of hope and activity. In the mid-morning we all spread out on the top moor and trudged through the snow with whistles and torches. Iggy joined us, and Gran in her winter running gear, and Cora; in fact, I think almost everyone in the village was involved in one way or another. They were kind: they didn’t intrude when Mam was crying, and told me, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll find her.’ The TV in the bar was turned off because virtually every channel was showing jolly Christmas stuff and nobody felt like it.
The weather up on the moors had worsened overnight. It had started to snow again, and everybody knew that that was not a good thing. If Tammy had somehow wandered off then she was not well equipped for a freezing night in the Northumbrian hills, even with her new puffer jacket.
That, however, was not the worst of our fears. There were worse options that nobody wanted to say out loud in case saying them out loud would somehow make them come true.
That afternoon, when we would normally be watching a funny film and eating sweets, I sat with Mam in the bar with its Christmas decorations and switched-off tree lights which suddenly looked like the saddest, most pointless things the world. We looked out of the pub window, which Tammy and I had sprayed with fake snow a couple of weeks earlier, and we watched as the people who run the sailing school on the other side of the reservoir pulled into the driveway with a small boat on a trailer with an outboard engine.
We knew what that meant. We knew it meant there was a possibility that Tammy had entered the water and not come out again. Drowned, in other words. Nobody needed to say anything, but when Mam collapsed in sobs, I did too, while Gran sat beside us and stared straight ahead, shaking her head sadly.
‘There’s shepherds’ huts up on the moors, you know,’ said Gran eventually. ‘They’re a bit further from where we searched. Perhaps Tammy …’
‘The Natrass boys have been up there already on their quad bikes,’ said Mam, flatly.
I thought the most likely thing – but I could hardly bear to imagine it – was that Tammy had been kidnapped. But why? I could not work it out, and I don’t think Mam could either.
Hours passed …
The Mountain Rescue teams returned …
The police continued to make enquiries and more police cars arrived, and a police Land Rover …
An ambulance turned up in case they found Tammy and she needed treatment …
Christmas Day stretched into a long evening. Dad came back with some of the people from Mountain Rescue and poured them all whiskies at the bar to warm them up. He had one himself, and then another, and another. When it got late, some people drifted back to their houses and their elderly relatives, and their ruined Christmas dinners, and their little children who had not been told what had happened so as not to spoil their day.
And that day sort of stumbled into the next day, and I found myself playing a part in a drama that I had seen enacted before on TV, only this time it was real.
The pub was turned into an HQ. There were Come Back, Tammy posters printed and put up everywhere from Carlisle to Newcastle. Ted from the B & B, whose brother was a printer in Hexham, got a load
