To Die Alone Read Free Page A

that things like this played well at headquarters down in Roxham. He knew the high-ups would be reading the same articles, basking in the reflected glory, and Harris had already pinned up the best of the cuttings on the CID room wall to encourage his small team of detectives. HR would like that, he reckoned. Staff motivation, that’s what they were always banging on about in their memos.
    Now, staring over the valley and gloomily turning the events of the day over and over in his mind, the inspector realized that his good mood had coloured his reaction when the call came in about Trevor Meredith shortly before lunchtime. He knew that he should have immediately sensed that something was amiss. The call had come from one of Trevor Meredith’s concerned fellow workers at the town’s dog sanctuary, reporting that he had not turned up that morning, that there was no sign of him at his home and that he was not answering his mobile phone, that he was a conscientious man and that such behaviour was out of character.
    The inspector, who happened to be passing the control room at the time, stepped in to listen in on the conversation, his initial instinct being to take no action. Jack Harris had long regarded it as a man’s inalienable right to be able to disappear for a few hours if he so wished. He had spent enough years concocting spurious inquiries as an excuse for heading out into the hills to think any different, and everyone at Levton Bridge Police Station knew it. A man was entitled, he had announced as he left the room, to walk his dog without having half the police force out looking for him. The control operators had smiled at the comment: they knew to take advantage of a good Jack Harris mood.
    The inspector’s viewpoint changed when his desk phone rang some time later. His mouth full of ham sandwich, he had taken the call to be told by control that a traffic officer heading along the moorland road between Levton Bridge and Roxham had spotted Trevor Meredith’s estate car. There was no sign of the driver and no note on the windscreen indicating where he had gone. A quick check had revealed a broken fanbelt. A quick call to Jasmine Riley’s workplace revealed that she had taken the day off, citing a family emergency. On hearing the news, Harris instinctively sensed that something was wrong. He had cursed then telephoned his old friend Crowther. The inspector, who had been a member of the search and rescue team ever since his return to the area several years previously, knew how dangerous the hills could be, especially in brutal weather like the storm battering his office window. Within minutes, the volunteers were leaving their jobs and heading for the organization’s hut on the edge of a small patch of open grass behind the police station, Harris among them, struggling into his waterproofs as he went.
    Once out on the hills, Crowther divided them into teams to cover as much distance as possible, meticulously retracing Meredith’s possible routes. The teams – Crowther’s working their way along the wooded valleys, a second one crossing the moor and the third moving their way steadily along the ridge – had been searching for more than three hours now but had produced little to suggest Meredith’s whereabouts. Few people were out on the hills and none of those the team had encountered, a shepherd and a couple on a hiking holiday, had seen him except for one vague report of a man with a dog, seen in the distance for a fleeting moment or two before they disappeared into the mist.
    By the time late afternoon arrived, the winds had dropped slightly and Crowther had called a short halt as the searchers entered the copse. As the volunteers sat and talked in low tones over snacks and hot tea, their mood continued to darken: they were starting to suspect that they would not find Trevor Meredith. Everyone knew that the forecast was for the storm to renew its energies as the evening wore on. Several of the rescue team were