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was Alice following the White Rabbit into Wonderland; brave against all odds, as the deaf girl surrounded by war in Mother Courage, she moved more than her parents to tears.
    All this brought her notice, gave her at least a surface confidence, earned her friends, the attention of boys. At fifteen she was sure she was in love – a seventeen-year-old with tattoos on his back and along his arms; who drank vodka from the bottle and occasionally sniffed glue. Susan’s parents read the riot act, laid down the law. She broke her curfew, threatened, pleaded, cried, stayed out till two. You don’t understand, she screamed, you just don’t understand. But her mother understood all too well.
    Then one day when Susan bunked off school to meet him, her beloved, he wasn’t there. On the street, he turned away. When she plucked up the courage to go up to him in the pub, where he was sitting with all of his mates, he laughed in her face.
    For six weeks her heart stayed broken, till one morning she woke up, got dressed, got on with whatever it was she had to do and realised, finally, she hadn’t thought of him at all. That night, to her dad’s annoyance, she and her mother giggled like sisters, talked in low voices for hours, held each other and cried.
    This holiday marked a new stage in her life: she would start sixth-form college in September, courses in English and drama, media studies, art and design. And then on the third Tuesday in August she disappeared: August, fourteen years ago.
    ♦
    Wearing two sweaters against the early morning chill, Elder walked the length of both piers sheltering the outer harbour. Dressed in all-weather gear, fishermen stood at intervals, rods propped against the rail, cigarettes a small glow inside cupped hands. Along by the fish market, one boat was unloading its night catch, another making its way in. He knew that in Britain almost ten thousand people went missing each year and that of that number roughly a third were never traced, never found.
    But he had promised her parents that he would find her, sworn it and been rewarded with trust, bright and anxious on their faces; and, in his gut, he feared she was long dead, her body undiscovered, still waiting to be claimed after all these years.
    ♦
    After breakfast, Elder climbed the hundred and ninety or so steps up to St Mary’s church and the abbey, turning back for a moment to gaze back over the town, the whale’s jawbone arched high on the west cliff on the far harbour side, the statue of Captain Cook close by. Beyond the town and the trees which marked the valley of the River Esk rose the moors, sullen and imposing beneath a patched grey sky.
    He walked a short distance inland, crossing through the ridged mud of a farm before meeting the coast path further along. From there it was half a mile or so to the point where Susan had last been seen, a sharp promontory that jutted out over the sea, tufted grass leading to an almost sheer drop down the ridged cliff on to the rocks below. It could be a wild spot but not wholly remote, the path well used by hikers in most weathers; yet it was here, at somewhere between three thirty and four in the afternoon, that Susan Blacklock had last been observed, here that she had, effectively, disappeared.
    Elder continued on, past the twin humps of reddish rock that broke the surface of the sea at Saltwick Nab, to the holiday park, a collection of white caravans clustered around a central site, a few brave tents pegged down on higher ground.
    Little seemed to have changed: the same small convenience store, albeit with a fresh sign above the door, the same launderette, the office, pool tables and bar food available in the family entertainment club. On a patch of open ground, six or seven small boys stormed around the makeshift goalmouth of a beleaguered dad. A young woman in a neat uniform looked up at him expectantly and Elder nodded and carried on. At the far side, where a white flagpole flying the Union Jack