“Yes, there was nothing apart from a filed 999 call, marked as—”

“Picked up by MHS, I know about that one. I thought maybe the husband, Mr Tranter, anything on him?”

“Nothing.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s on his way. He was at work, in an office in the centre of town.”

She’d been sure Patrick was involved somehow. Perhaps she’d allowed her feelings about him to cloud her judgement. Careful, Harper, she told herself. Keep it professional. For the sake of those babies.

“Where are the search teams?”

“Everywhere, Sarge, but no one’s coordinating things strategically yet so it’s a scratch search, everywhere in the vicinity, everyone we can find. Major Crimes are on the way but it might be up to an hour before the search advisor is able to assist.”

“And, what have you found?”

“Nothing yet. We’ve got eighteen officers on the ground but there’s no sign of the missing infants. More uniform personnel are on the way; dispatch is directing resources from all over.”

Several sirens wheeled in the air, some close and some from further along the valley. Blue lights flashed in the road.

“What about cars?” said Harper. “Are you looking for suspicious vehicles?”

Atkinson nodded.

“We’ve got witnesses with descriptions of cars seen in the area at the time. We’ve started calling up data from road traffic cameras—”

“There aren’t any cameras for miles on this road,” said Harper.

“I know that,” said the constable, slightly tetchily, “but we can check which cars turned off the main road, because there’s CCTV that covers that junction. We’ll get the information soon and start to run background on them.”

That would take too much time. Each minute that passed meant that the chance of finding the twins alive diminished further.

“How long has it been, since they were taken?” said Harper.

Atkinson checked his watch, and his PDA. “Twenty-seven minutes from the 999 call.”

And, thought Harper, Lauren doesn’t even know how long she was asleep for, which added an unknown number of minutes to that total. “Shit. Could be absolutely miles away by now, if they’re in a car.”

The bench was a short walk upstream. Atkinson led the way. The area had been checked over already; nothing had been found but some scraps of litter.

“She was sitting here?” said Harper.

Atkinson nodded.

“Let’s get it cordoned off. It’s a crime scene.”

It was impossible to tell in which direction the stroller might have been taken, but from here there were three possible routes—upstream into the peaks, downstream towards the cafe or away from the water along an overgrown footpath leading to the road, and from there, with a vehicle, the possibilities started to spool in all directions.