‘There must have been people coming and going all night. It’s hopeless.’

‘We need to cover all the ground again,’ said Fry. ‘But we should also be looking for things that weren’t done at the time. If Aidan Merritt had some connection with the Pearsons, we need to find out what it was.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘Talk to people who knew him. There must have been some at the Light House.’

‘We’ve got the name of a full-time barman, Josh Lane,’ said Irvine. ‘And a few of the kitchen staff. Then there are the customers Merritt spent time with. It’s a short list, though. Vince Naylor, Ian Gullick … and that’s about it. The person Mr Merritt seems to have talked to most is Betty Wheatcroft.’

‘The old biddy?’

‘That’s the one. From her statement, she sounds to be as odd as Merritt. But I suspect as well educated.’

‘Kindred spirits, then.’

Cooper surveyed his mental image of the bar at the Light House, managed to locate someone like Betty Wheatcroft sitting in a corner with a glass of Guinness and a plastic carrier bag. As Irvine had said, every pub had one. He might just be filling in the details from a hundred other old biddies sitting in the corner of a bar, but the image seemed real enough.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Villiers.

‘I’m thinking that I can see her already.’

‘Ben, there’s no need to start imagining things. Just stick to the facts. That was always your weakness, you know – you’re much too imaginative for a police officer.’

‘Thanks for the advice, DC Villiers. I’ll bear it in mind.’

Fry pulled on her jacket and turned to leave. Cooper caught up with her and stopped her with a touch on her arm.

‘Diane …’

‘Yes?’

‘Our tasks are overlapping now,’ pointed out Cooper. ‘There’s no way round it.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I realise your DCI has other irons in the fire on the Merritt inquiry – forensic evidence must be producing some leads?’

‘Yes.’

‘But we could be turning up some equally useful information from our end.’

‘Just keep feeding it into the inquiry through me,’ said Fry. ‘And we’ll assess its value.’

Cooper knew he’d have to accept that. He’d tried his best to get further into the inquiry, but he’d failed. Fry was a brick wall. He’d have to find another way, that was all.

‘There’s one more thing,’ he said.

‘Spit it out, then. I’ve got plenty of things to do.’

‘I think you’re coming down too hard on Luke and Becky. They’re my team. You don’t have any right to talk to them the way you do.’

Fry gritted her teeth before she spoke.

‘Have you any idea how frustrating this is for me?’

‘What is?’

‘To think that I’ve finally got away from this place – and then to find I have to come back, and it’s full of all these irritating little Ben Cooper clones that I’m supposed to work with.’

Cooper found himself breathing too quickly, the surge of anger coming so fast that it frightened him.

‘Luke and Becky? They’re good kids. I can’t believe you said that.’

‘Try taking a look at yourselves from the outside, that’s all.’

She began to turn away, which angered him even more.

‘You can’t—’

‘Yes I can,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I can do anything I like now. And there’s no way you can hold me back any more.’

DI Hitchens had his office door open, and called Cooper in when he saw him passing in the corridor. The DI still looked tired. Perhaps even more than ever. He had the air of a man battling a long, slow war of attrition. And a man who also knew he was losing.

‘We have a visitor arriving in Edendale tomorrow,’ said Hitchens.

‘Who?’

‘Mr Henry Pearson. That’s David Pearson’s father.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘He’s been campaigning for years to find out the truth about what happened to his son and daughter-in-law.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Cooper. ‘He was in the papers every week for quite some time.’

‘And on TV, making appeals to the public. Until the media eventually lost interest.’

‘As they always do.’

‘It was worse than that, though,’ said Hitchens.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There was that theory about what had happened to the Pearsons. The deliberate disappearance, you know?’

‘That was total conjecture, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it was picked up by the media with unholy enthusiasm. They don’t like stories where the outcome is just left hanging. Their readers get frustrated. So the suggestion that David and Trisha Pearson had planned their own disappearing act and were living abroad somewhere under false names was perfect fodder for them. They took it and ran with it for months. Even now, if you do an online search for their names, you’ll come up with page after page of stuff on the internet supporting that theory. Countries where they’re living have been suggested. People say they’ve seen evidence that they’re still alive – photos, emails, credit card purchases. You know the sort of thing.’

‘We must have pursued those leads at the time.’

Hitchens laughed. ‘Of course. Well, the ones that seemed to have any merit, anyway. You can’t just sit on your hands, no matter how much you think they’re rubbish. You’ve got to be seen to be doing something, especially these days. Otherwise you get bombarded with complaints about police inactivity and incompetence. turning a blind eye or looking the other way. Corruption even. So, yes – a lot of those reports were followed up, and none of them turned out to have any merit. It was all conspiracy theory stuff. People love it, don’t they?’

‘And Henry Pearson?’

‘He became a victim of the conspiracy theorists. Because he was so high profile, because he was so vociferous in his efforts to argue that David and Trisha had met some tragic end, he turned himself into a target. The accusations were that he was the cover-up man, that he was making as much fuss as possible to distract attention from what had actually happened. People said that all his emotional hand-wringing was just an act designed to influence the direction of the inquiry, to ensure that all our attention was focused on conducting a futile search for bodies.’

‘Did he do a lot of emotional hand-wringing?’ asked Cooper.

‘Actually, no,’ admitted Hitchens. ‘I always thought he was very calm and controlled. I was impressed with him. It seemed to me that he always put his points across powerfully, but very reasonably. There was a logic to his arguments. If you’ve had much experience of bereaved family members, you’ll appreciate how rare that is, Ben.’

‘Naturally. Very few people can keep emotion out of their reactions in a situation like that.’

Hitchens nodded. ‘Mind you, I’m not saying Mr Pearson was never emotional. He and his wife came up here when David and Trisha were first reported missing. They both went through the emotional stage. But Henry was the stronger of the two. He got himself under control pretty quickly. We found that very useful in the early days. He was able to give us all kinds of information that we asked for. In the end, though, that was one of the problems.’

‘Problems?’

‘In a sense. You see, the information Mr Pearson gave us actually supported the theory about a deliberate disappearance. Without Henry Pearson’s assistance, it would have taken us a lot longer to find out what his son had been up to.’

13

At the house in Manvers Street, on Edendale’s Devonshire Estate, the door was answered by a woman in her mid-forties, with hair in blonde streaks and a hint of hardness in her eyes. A lifetime spent in the pub business could leave some individuals jaundiced about humanity. In fact, any job where you dealt with the public all the time could do that to you, as Diane Fry knew only too well herself.