Alex Randall had returned to the Long Mynd and was standing on the Burway, looking down into the crash site and Carding Mill Valley. An icy wind seemed determined to pierce his coat so he held it tighter around him as he studied the area. It was all too was easy to follow the trail of destruction the car had left: broken bushes, deep furrows in soft, muddy turf ending three hundred feet below at the bottom in a large oil slick. The wrecked car, which had been treated by the fire service with as little respect as a tin of baked beans, lay drunkenly on its side. Jagged shards of metal showed where Tracy Walsh had been cut out of her eight-year-old, post-office red VW Polo. Police tape fluttered everywhere, keeping the general public out though they peered from all four sides of the valley, curious. The area was as alive and busy as an ant hill but the Burway was firmly shut and would remain so until they had extracted every single piece of forensic evidence from the area and found the child.
