When Will There Be Good News? Read Free

and was lost in the wheat.
    Later, when it was dark, other dogs came and found her. A stranger lifted her up and carried her away. 'Not a scratch on her,' she heard a voice say. The stars and the moon were bright in the cold, black sky above her head.
    Of course, she should have taken Joseph with her, she should have snatched him from the buggy, or run with the buggy Gessica would have). It didn't matter that Joanna was only six years old, that she would never have managed running with the buggy and that the man would have caught her in seconds, that wasn't the point. It would have been better to have tried to save the baby and been killed than not trying and living. It would have been better to have died with Jessica and her mother rather than being left behind without them. But she never thought about any ofthat, she just did as she was told.
    'Run, Joanna, run,' her mother commanded. So she did.
    It was funny but now, thirty years later, the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn't remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.

    Chapter II
    Today .
    Flesh and Blood .
    THE GREEN RAN THE WHOLE LENGTH OF THE VILLAGE, AND WAS bisected by a narrow road. The primary school looked over the village green. The green wasn't square, as he'd first imagined, nor did it have a duck pond, which was something else he had imagined . Y ou would think, coming from the same county, he would know this countryside but it was alien corn. His knowledge of the Yorkshire Dales was second-hand, garnered from TV and films -the occasional glimpse of Emmerdale, a semi-conscious night on the sofa watching Calendar Girls on cable.
    It was quiet today, a Wednesday morning at the beginning of December. A Christmas tree had been erected on the green but it was still as nature intended, undecorated and unlit.
    The last time (the first time) he had come here to scope out the village it had been a Sunday afternoon, height of the midsummer season, and the place had been humming, tourists picnicking on the grass, small children racing around, old people sitting on benches, everyone eating ice-creams. There was a kind of sand pit at one end where people -natives, not tourists -were playing what he thought might be quoits -throwing big iron rings as heavy as horseshoes. He hadn't realized people still did things like that. It was bizarre. It was medieval. There were still stocks on the green, by the market cross, and -according to a guidebook he had bought -a 'bull ring'. He'd thought of the Birmingham shopping centre of that name until he'd read on and discovered its purpose was bull-baiting. He presumed (he hoped) that the stocks and the bull ring were historic -for the tourists -and not still in use. The village was a place to which people drove in their cars in order to get out and walk. He never did that. If he walked, he started from where he was.
    He hid behind a copy of the Darlington and Stockton Times and studied the small ads for funeral homes and decorators and used cars. He thought it would be a less conspicuous read than a national newspaper, although he had bought it in Hawes rather than the village shop, where he might have drawn too much attention to himself. These people had a well-developed radar for the wrong kind of stranger. They probably burned a wicker man every summer.
    Last time he'd been driving a flash car, now he blended in better, driving a mud-spattered Discovery rental and wearing hiking boots and a fleece-lined North Face jacket, with an OS guide in a plastic wallet hanging round his neck that he'd also bought in Hawes. If he could have got hold of one, he would have borrowed a dog and then he would have looked like a clone of every other visitor. You should be able to rent dogs. Now there was a gap in the market.
    He had driven the rental from the station. He would have driven all the way (in his flash car) but when he had got into the driving seat and switched on the engine he found his car