Cooper & Fry

Can't say no, can I?

Go on. Get.

Shh!

All right, all right.

'This is Lee. Leave a message.'

Lee, where are you?

We were gonna talk about the seating plan tonight, remember?

And if you're not here,

I might end up putting you next to my mum on top table.

No, I haven't planned anything yet for dad's anniversary.

'Well, you'll need to get a move on.'

well, I'll have to come up with something, won't I, mum?

'Be quick.'

yeah. Listen, mum, I can't really talk about it now.

I'm at work, ok? I'll call you later. See you.

Now, a missing persons report has come in this morning.

Laura kirkham, 16 years of age.

Last seen at home lunchtime yesterday.

Her parents, Dominic and Charlotte kirkham,

are the new owners of the win low estate,

which means there's over 500 acres to be searched,

including dense woodland.

Boss, since when are we in the search-and-rescue business?

Since I agreed we'd help out.

Dominic and Charlotte were at lunch yesterday.

They got back to the house at about 4pm.

There was no sign of Laura.

They searched the house

and phoned emergency when it started to get dark.

Uniform attended and conducted a thorough search

of the property and the nearby buildings,

which means she's been missing for over 20 hours.

I take it she's not been answering her phone.

Dominic found her phone in her bedroom when he got up.

Teenagers don't leave their phones behind, sir.

Well, it's with digital forensics now.

Eland, you have this lot to interview.

It's a list of the people who work in the house and on the estate.

Ben, Diane, I want you to interview the kirkhams.

Try and get more of a sense of who Laura is.

And stay open-minded, because they both alibied each other.

Will do, sir.

So, this is the win low estate.

It's a bit run-down.

It's in the woburn family for generations.

When George woburn died last year, he didn't have an heir,

so it came up for sale.

Now it's kirkham's passion project, and he wants to restore it.

The kirkhams only have one daughter? Yeah. Why?

It just seems a bit much for three people.

Yeah.

You all right?

Yeah. It's nothing.

Looks like bad news to me.

It's fine.

Happy-looking family.

You're not gonna put a bad picture up, are you?

Rest assured, mrs kirkham,

we are doing everything we can to find Laura.

I mean, this is ridiculous.

I can't go and look for my own daughter.

We've got drones and search parties working their way across the estate,

and we've got uniformed officers up in town

asking people if they've seen Laura.

We've put the train and bus station on high alert

in case she tries to leave edendale.

You could help us by telling us a little bit more about her.

She's a good girl, very bright.

When she's not got her head in a book,

she'll be out at the stables with the horses.

Does she have a boyfriend?

No. No.

Laura doesn't have time to socialise outside of school.

She's too busy concentrating on her studies.

She's going to be a lawyer.

Was she stressed about her exams?

Could that have been a reason she ran away?

We had a parents' evening recently.

The teachers said she was doing ok.

Any significant life changes? Anything at all?

Yeah. She met Lee Bateman.

Who's that? Dominic.

He was the gardener.

About a month ago, I caught him with his shirt off,

flirting with our Laura when he was supposed to be working.

So I sent him to work away from the house,

and last week, I caught the pair of them smoking weed together.

So what do you do? I fired him on the spot.

Do you think Laura ran away with Lee Bateman?

No, I don't think she ran away with Lee Bateman, detective.

I think...

he's abducted her.

Dominic kirkham reckons we should be speaking to this guy, Lee Bateman.

He's pretty insistent that Lee's taken Laura off somewhere.

As you can see, he's known to us.

Got previous for theft, intent to supply, gbh.

And if you look a bit earlier down in his career...

Persuaded young girls to go and steal alcohol from the supermarket.

So he gets young girls to do his bidding.

Apparently, he got nasty with them

if they didn't bring back what he wanted.

And it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination

to guess what he wanted with a 16-year-old Laura.

Right.

I'll go and track down this Lee Bateman,

see if he's involved.

Meanwhile, Diane, can you go and join the searches?

And, Ben, we've had a call through the night.

Can you go and check it out? Yes, sir. Sir.

Helen.

My god. Ben Cooper.

I didn't expect you to turn up.

Please come in. Thank you.

Er, we had a call from Harry Dickinson

saying he'd found something on the estate.

I take it you know Harry.

Yeah. Harry's my uncle. I look after him from time to time.

He's the groundskeeper at win low.

Uncle Harry, it's the police.

Wow, Ben.

Haven't seen you since we left school.

Sounds about right. You look good.

So do you.

Last I heard, you were getting married to a farmer

just outside edendale?

I did, but it didn't work out. Sorry to hear that.

No, don't be. It's for the best. Right.

Get to spend all my time with my horses.

I run the stables up at pivy point.

How about you? Married to the job, I guess.

Here.

It's all over the village.

You're out looking for Laura kirkham.

This hers?

Where did you find this?

Jess picked it up outside raven's side.

Laura wouldn't have gotten far without it.

Size five and a half.

And they look exactly like the ones on Laura's photo as well.

'Who found it?' Er, Harry Dickinson.

He's the groundskeeper up at the kirkham's estate.

Found them this morning when he was walking in the woods

near raven's side.

Well, his dog did. 'Right.'

and I think we have a bit of blood here as well.

'Keep Harry in the house till I get there.'

will do.

I need you to stay put, mr Dickinson.

Do you want me to show you where I found this shoe or not?

But we have to wait for the search teams first.

What if Laura kirkham's lying in a ditch right now

with a broken ankle or worse?

She won't thank you for waiting. Come on.

Off we go, then.

Do you ever see anyone out here?

Only living things in these woods are the badgers and the fallow deer.

And we've got too many of them bloody things.

Dominic kirkham wants me to leave the deer alone.

Thinks they're pretty.

He'll change his tune once he hits one

with his shiny new 4x4.

They're reet in the woods from the ground up.

What we could really do with is some help from the black dog.

The black dog.

I remember hearing about it when I was a kid.

It was a good story, though.

It kept us from trespassing on the estate.

Come on. More than a story.

A few hundred years ago,

black dog used to come out of the woods at night,

hunting cattle and sheep.

Then it moved into the village, started taking babies from houses.

In the end, they caught it. Buried it under a plague stone.

Right, this is where Jess dropped the shoe.

She must have found it down there along the stream.

Off you go, then.

Careful, lad.

If you hurt yourself, I shan't be carrying you back.

Yes, noted, Harry. Thank you.

Good luck.

Come on.

I told you to keep Harry Dickinson back at the cottage

and wait for the search teams.

I thought if Laura was injured, you know...

We've protocol for a reason, Ben. Understood.

Dr Taylor, what can you tell us?

Well, off the record,

it's almost certainly the girl you've been looking for.

First impressions are she's got a significant injury

to the back of her head.

Most likely a blunt object.

Is that what killed her? In the end, probably, yes.

But I think after Laura was struck,

she ran through the forest to escape.

Socos are picking up a trail of hair and blood spots

through the trees that start way down there

and end up near the stream where she was found.

My guess is that she ran and kept running until she fainted,

lost consciousness, then bled out through the head wound.

So the initial attack could have happened