They had made good time on the motorway; Piers was an excellent driver and Georgia knew that, had the circumstances been different, right now she would have been awed and thrilled by the views outside the car windows as they drove through the Yorkshire Dales, with their vast sweeps of hillside and sky. The last village they had driven through had been small and pretty, with its stone cottages clinging to the banks of a crystal-clear river.
Piers had offered to stop, suggesting that Georgia might want to have something to eat and stretch her legs, but she had shaken her head, despite the fact that the only food she had had all day had been the piece of toast she had managed to force down at breakfast. She just wasn’t hungry. Anxiety gnawed at her stomach with sharply painful teeth, and the rolling hills of the Dales, bare apart from their flocks of sheep, which at any other time would have excited her admiration, right now only reinforced how empty and vast the area was, and how ill equipped a town-reared, pampered dog like Ben was to survive in such rugged terrain.
Despite Piers’s skilled driving it was almost four hours after they had left before they were bumping down the narrow lane that led to the Bowleses’ farm.
Anxiously Georgia scanned the skyline, hoping against hope to see Ben, and her first words as Piers stopped his godmother’s car in the yard and Mrs Bowles came hurrying out to greet them were, ‘Has Ben—? Have you—?’
‘No sight of him, I’m afraid,’ Mary Bowles told Georgia, adding to Piers, ‘If you wouldn’t mind parking your car in the empty barn at the bottom of the yard? That will leave room for Harry to turn the tractor when he comes in.
‘Come on inside,’ she invited Georgia, who had stopped to talk to the farm collie, who, much to Mary Bowles’s surprise, had actually allowed Georgia to stroke her.
‘You’re honoured,’ she told Georgia as she ushered her into the kitchen. ‘Meg doesn’t normally take to strangers.’
Jack, the mixed breed, extricated himself from his basket beside the old-fashioned Aga as they walked in. He was stiff and rheumatic and Georgia automatically checked his swollen joints as she stroked him.
‘Habit,’ she told Mary Bowles, who was watching her, and explained how she earned her living.
‘Best not tell Harry that,’ Mary counselled her with a laugh. ‘He’ll have you out on the hill looking at his precious sheep before you can turn round if you do!’
‘The police said that your husband thought Ben had been worrying his flock,’ Georgia responded unhappily.
‘Well, something has been at the lambs. It might have been the dog, but it could as easily have been a fox,’ Mary told her calmly.
‘He won’t... He wouldn’t...’ Georgia began huskily, unable to put into words her dread that Ben might be shot as a sheep-worrier before they could find him. But before she could vocalise her fears Piers came into the kitchen.
‘We thought, with your husband’s permission, that we’d go out ourselves and look for Ben,’ Piers informed Mary Bowles after he had accepted her offer of a cup of tea. ‘He’ll recognise both our voices, but especially Georgia’s, and if he is here the sound of a familiar voice might persuade him to come out of hiding.’
‘Oh, he certainly was here,’ Mary insisted. ‘I saw him myself...fed him... Nice-looking dog...
‘Yes, that’s definitely the dog I saw,’ she confirmed as Piers produced a photograph of Ben which Georgia realised he must have found amongst his godmother’s belongings.
‘Well, you won’t be the only ones looking for him,’ she told Georgia and Piers with a chuckle. ‘They’ve been giving it out on the radio all day that there’s a reward for his safe return.’
‘Good. The more people looking for him the better,’ Piers replied.
‘I thought he might have come down off the hill when I fed Meg and Jack again,’ Mary Bowles admitted. ‘I even left an extra bowl of food out just in case, but there was no sign of him.’
They had to wait half an hour for Harry Bowles to come in so that he could take them up on to the hill to show them just where he had seen Ben.
Cupping her hands together, Georgia called his name, the sound bouncing back to her and sending some nearby sheep scurrying fleet-footedly away. A narrow sheep track wound up across the hill, disappearing into the distance.
‘Perhaps if we follow the track calling his name?’ Piers suggested.
Nodding in acquiescence, Georgia fell into step beside him, leaving Harry Bowles to return to his farming duties.
‘Why didn’t he just stay at the farm?’ Georgia almost wept an hour later as she crested yet another hill without any sight of Ben.