VAL McDERMID

Like Alison Carter, I was born in Derbyshire in 1950. Like her, I grew up familiar with the limestone dales of the White Peak, no stranger to the winter blizzards that regularly cut us off from the rest of the country. It was in Buxton, after all, that snow once stopped play in a county cricket match in June.

So when Alison Carter went missing in December 1963, it meant more to me and my classmates than it can have done to most other people....Because of that, right from the word go, we all knew something terrible had happened to Alison Carter, because something we also knew was that girls like her--like us--didn’t run away.