Caught Out in Cornwall Read Free Page A

children were with her mother. Janice was there and would have slept on the sofa if necessary but Carol could not bring herself to sleep in Beth’s room.
    The police had interviewed Carol the previous evening. ‘Since Sally and Michael split up I’ve only seen him once,’ she had told them. ‘He was good enough to deliver something my motherwas keeping for me.’ Carol thought it highly unlikely that Michael had anything to do with his daughter’s disappearance.
    The sisters’ father was dead but their mother still lived in Looe above the souvenir shop she now owned and ran. She had been devastated when she heard what had happened to her granddaughter, but even when she had stopped crying she could think of no one who would have taken her. She had rung Sally, offering to come down immediately, but Sally had refused the offer. It was obvious to the police who had called on Mrs Jones that there was no child on the premises, either in the shop and storerooms or in the flat above. Permission had been given freely for them to search. Alice Jones was not insulted; she knew it was part of their job.
    The telephone rang again. Janice picked up the receiver.
    ‘No go as far as Poole’s concerned,’ Jack Pearce told her. ‘We’ve kept an eye on him overnight and he didn’t leave the house. It’s also been confirmed that he kept all yesterday’s appointments. They were mostly in the Devon area. There just wasn’t time for him to have done it. He got home around seven last night, alone, and left again this morning.’
    ‘I see.’ Janice did see but she kept her thoughts to herself. If little Beth was not with one of the family, the most obvious place to start, the chances of finding her soon, or alive, were narrower. The puzzling thing was that if Mrs Trevelyan was telling the truth, and there was no reason to suspect otherwise, and the child had gone willingly, had even held up her arms to be carried, then it strongly suggested that she knew her abductor well. Or else Rose Trevelyan was mistaken, had seen only what she had expected to see, a father picking up his child, not a man snatching an unknown one from a beach. ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’
    ‘Say nothing for the moment, there’s no point in adding to her distress.’
    A little over an hour later Carol Harte arrived. Sally and Janice were sitting in armchairs each side of the fireplace. Wintry sunlight did nothing to cheer the room. Unlike her sister, Carol’s hair was its natural reddish brown. Her body was more rounded, but firm. The only thing they had in common was the pallor of their skin. She hugged Sally silently. There were no words to convey what they both felt and anything that could be said had been said the night before when Carol had come over as soon as the police hadleft. With Tamsin and Lucy at their grandparents’ there had been no babysitting arrangements to make. ‘Is there any news?’ she asked pointlessly because Sally’s face had already given her the answer.
    ‘No, nothing. Oh, God, Carol, what am I going to do?’ Without warning, tears streamed down her face. It kept happening, it was something over which she had had no control since yesterday afternoon.
    ‘It’ll be all right. They’ll find her.’ Carol hated herself for the platitudes but how could she say anything else – especially when all three women were beginning to doubt this was true?
    This time it was Carol who made the coffee. For the moment there seemed nothing else anyone could do.
     
    Detective Inspector Jack Pearce sat at his desk at the police station in Camborne and ran a hand through his thick, dark hair in which the odd streak of grey was beginning to appear. He could not be mistaken for anything but Cornish even before his accent gave him away. His family went back for generations. With a marriage in the distant past and two grown up sons who still came on regular visits, he was a reasonablycontented man. If Rose would agree to commit herself to