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1963, 2000s: In the quiet Peak District village of Scarsdale, 13 year old girls don’t just disappear….
1963, 2000s: In the quiet Peak District village of Scarsdale, 13 year old girls don’t just disappear….
Scarsdale is a quiet and unassuming place in the Peak District so when AlisonCarter goes missing in the winter of ’63, everyone knows she was murdered as children simply don’t run away here on their own accord.
Catherine Heathcote remembers the case well. She was only a child herself when Alison went missing and decades later as a journalist, she persuades DI George Bennett to speak about the case. However when a new lead emerges, he tries to stop the story. Catherine however feels she has to keep digging.
With overtones of the Moors Murders case, this investigation into a missing child takes us to the heart of rural Derbyshire. Scarsdale may be fictional for obvious reasons but the atmosphere is eerie and remote for there are only small communities here, who all look at each other with suspicion and at the outsider policeman who investigates the case. They feel he’s there investigating them, their way of life and their private lives and they don’t like the intrusion.
This is a fictional setting but is based on several villages in and round the area of White Peak.
The people in this insular and rural community of Scardale seem very reluctant to aid the police in any way and it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems amongst the locals. There is tension in the air, cigarette smoke in the air too and many a reference to a soothing cup of tea.
A real village in the Peak District and where Peter Grundy is picked up in order to help with the investigation.
In real life between July 1963 and October 1965 five children went missing some found buried in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor but one child is still missing.
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