“Maybe that’s all they needed. Maybe it’s enough.”

“You’re clutching at straws, Kev.”

Templeton smiled. “Just playing devil’s advocate, ma’m, that’s all. But if you’re right, then perhaps they don’t have quite the intelligence we’re crediting them with.”

“Okay. Point taken.” Annie looked at Gristhorpe. “But don’t you think it’s all a bit puzzling when you add it up, sir?”

Gristhorpe paused and made a steeple of his thick fingers on the desk before answering. “I do,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve had to deal with many kidnappings over the course of my career—and for that I thank the Lord, because it’s a cowardly crime—but I’ve dealt with a few, and none of them have been as riddled with anomalies as this one. What are your conclusions, Annie?”

“Either it’s an amateur job,” Annie answered. “Very amateur, like some junkie who saw the chance to get enough money for his next few fixes and now he’s too scared to go through with it.”

“Or?”

“Or it’s something else entirely. A setup, a diversion, the ransom demand merely to deflect us, confuse us, and something else is going on.”

“Like what?” Gristhorpe asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Annie answered. “All I know is that in either scenario the outcome looks bad for Luke.”

It wasn’t fair, thought Andrew Naylor, the man from the Ministry, as he drove his government Range Rover over the disinfectant pad at the entrance to the unfenced road above Gratly. He had nothing to do with foot-and-mouth control, yet in the eyes of the locals, all government employees were tarred with the same brush. Everyone knew him in the area, and before the outbreak no one had paid him much mind. Now, though, he was getting sick of the resentful looks he got when he walked into a shop or a pub, the way conversations stopped and whispers began, and the way people sometimes even expressed their anger to his face. In one pub, they had been so hostile toward him he thought they were going to beat him up.

It didn’t do the slightest bit of good to tell them that he worked for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, in the Water and Land Directorate, and that his job was water, because that only made them think of Yorkshire Water—of droughts, leakages, shortages and restrictions on washing their bloody cars and watering their lawns—and then they got even angrier.

It was part of Andrew’s job to collect water samples from local lakes, ponds, tarns and reservoirs, and these were later tested for contaminants at the Central Science Laboratory. Because some of these bodies of water were surrounded by open country, Andrew was one of the few with a special dispensation to visit them, after taking all the proper precautions, of course.

That day, his last call was Hallam Tarn, a godforsaken, hollowed-out bowl of water on the very top of the moor, beyond Tetchley Fell. Legend had it that the place used to be a village once, but the villagers took to Satanic practices, so God smote them with his fist and the tarn was created in place of the village. It was said that on certain days of the year you could see the old houses and streets beneath the water’s surface and hear the cries of the villagers. Sometimes, when the light was right and the curlew’s cry piped across the desolate moor, Andrew could almost believe it.