“Right. But we planned to talk on the way.”

“Well, Nicola would never forget that,” Nan declared. “No woman is likely to forget she has a date to talk about marriage.” And then to her husband, “Which is something you ought to know very well.” She was silent for a moment, dwelling-so it seemed-on that final thought while Julian dwelt on the uneasy fact that Andy still had not answered his wife's questions about the phone call he'd made. Nan reached her own conclusion about this. “God. You've just phoned the police. You think that something's happened to her. And you didn't want me to know about it, did you?”

Neither Andy nor Julian replied. This was answer enough.

“And what was I to think when the police arrived?” Nan demanded. “Or was I just supposed to keep serving coffee?”

“I knew you'd worry,” her husband said. “There may be no cause.”

“Nicola could easily be out there in the dark, lying hurt or trapped or God knows what else and you-both of you-didn't think I should know? Because I might worry?”

“You're working yourself into a state right now. That's why I didn't want to tell you till I had to. It may be nothing. It's probably nothing. Julian and I agree on that. We'll have it all sorted out in an hour or two.”

Nan attempted to shove a handful of hair behind her ear. Cut in a strange fashion that she called a beret-long on the top and clipped on the sides-it was too short to do anything but flop back into place. “We'll set out after her,” she decided. “One of us must start looking for her at once.”

“One of us looking for Nicola isn't going to do much good,” Julian pointed out. “There's no telling where she went.”

“But we know all her haunts. Arbor Low. Thor's Cave. Peveril Castle.” Nan mentioned half a dozen other locations, all of them inadvertently serving to underscore the point that Julian had been attempting to make: There was no correlation between Nicola's favourite spots and their locations in the Peak District. They were as far north as the outskirts of Holmfirth, as far south as Ashbourne and the lower part of the Tissington Trail. It was going to take a team to find her.