Missing on Ilkley Moor

MISSING ON ILKLEY MOOR A Yorkshire kidnapping mystery Ric Brady Published by THE BOOK FOLKS London, 2023 © Ric Brady Polite note to the reader This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents is appropriate. You are invited to visit www.thebookfolks.com and sign up to our mailing list to hear about new releases, free book promotions and other special offers. We hope you enjoy the book. MISSING ON ILKLEY MOOR is the third standalone mystery in this series by Ric Brady. Look out for the first, MURDER ON A YORKSHIRE MOOR, and the second, BUTCHER ON THE MOOR. More details can be found at the back of this book. Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Also in this series Other titles of interest FREE BOOKS IN YOUR INBOX Chapter One A faint mist hung over the moorland. It wasn’t fog, but tiny droplets of rain that landed on cheeks and lips and drenched clothes. Henry walked up the incline, feeling his feet sink into the muddy ground with every step. The heather was brown and dead around him, and the air was below ten degrees. Not too cold for February, but not warm enough for spring either. He was on the plateau of wild uplands between Addingham and Ilkley. Normally, he’d be able to look to his left and see the River Wharfe and the town of Ilkley below, but today it was shrouded in white vapour as if he was hiking at a very high altitude. Which he wasn’t, as this hill was less than 500 meters high. He’d left his Skoda Octavia on a country lane nearby and had planned to do an hour’s walk before lunch at Mrs Whitehead’s. He’d been doing the same routine three times a week for a few months now. Come rain, shine, sleet, or snow. He’d made the effort to keep more active, and he was doing well from it. He felt fitter, his asthma was causing him less gip, and his hips weren’t as painful. As for them, he’d been seeing a physio near Leeds who’d been making him do stretches, lunges, and squats. All under supervision, of course. Henry didn’t like the idea of being left alone to do them. He’d injured himself while exercising in a gym once before. He carried on up the hill to find Tessa, his white and brown wire fox terrier who was now mostly brown thanks to the boggy ground. The fact she loved rolling in puddles didn’t help. He wondered if she’d stay seated on the plastic sheeting he’d put down in the boot of his car. She normally preferred to climb over the backseat and leave mucky paw prints everywhere. He’d considered getting one of those cages to separate the boot from the rest of the car, but he didn’t want to go that far because when people saw them, they assumed the dog was dangerous, and Tessa definitely wasn’t. She barely came up to his knee. His dog was barking again. He could no longer see her as she’d disappeared into the mist a while ago. He hoped she hadn’t found anything. He didn’t fancy getting embroiled in another murder investigation as he was still recovering from the last one. To tell the truth, he didn’t fancy getting involved in one just yet, he thought. He eventually reached the top of the hill after nearly slipping in the mud. Sucking in the humid air to cool his burning lungs, he looked around the summit. The white vapour hung around him and seemed to stretch up into the sky. He could see the droplets of rain getting bigger up here. “Tessa?!” he called out. She barked in response somewhere in the fog. He called for her again and used her second bark to guess her location. He strolled over to her, watching his footing as the ground had turned into a bog. A stream cut through the grass and heather and winded down the hill towards the valley. On hearing Tessa bark again, Henry followed it upstream. The cold water collided with rocks and pebbles, then swelled into a pool where it sloshed around. Tessa stood at the pool, which wasn’t as wide as a metre. She was covered paw-to-nose in dirt and yapped at a pink hat that floated in the water as if it was upsetting her. “Come over here,” Henry said. “It’s only a hat.” She didn’t leave the hat alone. Instead, she continued barking. “What’s this? Bloody Lassie Come Home?” he asked. Her black glassy eyes looked at him then back at the hat. She was whining, and Henry could see she was riled up and close to growling. The only times he’d seen her like this was when she was sitting at the window and saw a cat in the backyard, or when he was cutting up raw beef and she could smell its blood. Henry peered at the hat in the puddle. The soaked pink fabric had faint markings on it. Red markings. “What have we found here?” Henry said, kneeling at the pool’s edge, wishing he’d had more time to rest before picking up another case. * * * He put the sodden hat in one of the white plastic bags he kept in his pocket. He always had one or two with him in case he needed to collect Tessa’s business, so it wasn’t left on the pavement. Placing the damp bag in his pocket, he looked around the immediate area. There was no other sign of anything being amiss. A hat left up here wasn’t a sign of anything bad, he thought. But one covered in blood, well that was a different matter.