Moving back to Yorkshire was the last thing DI Tom Richmonds thought he would do. His superiors are also perturbed by his decision to transfer. Surely after the murder of the young girl, Yorkshire is the last place he should want to be? Is this Richmond's attempt to make peace with the past, or does he have ideas about reopening a bungled investigation? Whatever Richmond's intentions, events soon overtake him. When a local biographer is found murdered, the investigation leads Richmond straight to the Denshaw family. It's been ten years since eight-year-old Beth was killed, snatched from the garden of the Denshaw family home. Her corpse was found four months after her disappearance in the local park. Even though her mother confessed to the killing, there are still those - Richmond among them - who believe that Beth's stepfather, vicar Peter Denshaw, was actually responsible for her death. As Richmond's investigation of the biographer's death has him rummaging once again through the Denshaw family's dirty laundry, he cannot help but begin to see clues to the older murder as well. Marjorie Eccles was born in Yorkshire and spent her childhood there and on the Northumbrian coast. Later she lived for many years in the Midlands where the DS Gil Mayo Mystery Series is set. She currently resides in Hertfordshire, England. She has written over twenty novels as well as being a writer of short stories. hHer books have been translated into many languages and serialized in British and foreign magazines. Echoes of Silence 1It had always been a favourite walk of theirs. Approaching the top of the world must be something like this, Richmond used to feel, not being accustomed to hills as Isobel was, who'd been born and bred here.The view from the top was more than worth the hard pull, especially on clear, sunny days, and exhilarating, with the wind that always blew across Clough Edge, though it was bitter today, enough to cut your face in two. He left his Volvo by the side of the reservoir and steadily began to climb the stony track between the coarse moorland grass, hunching his shoulders into his jacket, bracing himself to walk into the wind. Early, transient snow powdered the higher hills, unexpected for the last days of October. Premature even here, where winter came early.His long strides took him to the top in minutes and, directly below him, there it was: Low Rigg. The old Hall and its cluster of cottages.And below that, where the moors ended, was Steynton, situated at the beginning of the urban sprawl of what he still liked to think of as the West Riding: a small, grey industrial town with roads climbing from the valley bottom at forty-five degree angles, a town built of weathered northern gritstone. Its lifeblood had once been wool and its accompanying trades - washing, combing, dyeing, spinning and weaving - until its raison d'être had declined with the advent of man-made textiles and cheap imports. Now, other enterprises and initiatives had brought it back to life. The once-predominant smell of greasy wool had been blown away, soot-spreading mill chimneys had been felled, and the many-storeyed mills which had created a dark tunnel of the main road were slowly being demolished, revealing views of the Pennine slopes not seen for a century and a half.He'd hoped and intended never to return. This town had always made too many demands on him.Yet he'd always felt it to be a basically good place, a compact,workaday town with a sense of permanence and solidity. Stone viaducts spanning the deep valleys, foursquare mills, old stone houses set with their backs to the hillsides, growing from them like a natural outcropping, part of the landscape - unlike the new estate of red-brick bungalows, visible for miles, like a rash on the far side of the valley. Even Rumsden was better than that, the suburb where rigid rows of Victorian back-to-backs were overshadowed by the bulk of Brackenroyd's Carpets, still the town's biggest employer.Rumsden. That small area cut off from the rest of the town, not by distance but intangibly by tradition and perhaps by superstition as well, and physically by a park of serpentine shape, its form ordained by the beck tumbling through it. Less of a park than a mere recreation ground, really, it was called East Park and its name just about summed it up - nondescript, with scrubby grass and melancholy shrubberies, the odd municipal flowerbed that was planted up in summer serving only to underly its inherent dreariness. The respectable residents on its western side avoided it, even choosing to exercise their dogs elsewhere. It was known as a place where Rumsden youth hung around, away from questions about their activities. Or as somewhere to get rid of the kids for a few hours by shunting them off to amuse themselves on the slide and the swings. An empty space for amateur soccer teams to kick a football around. There wasn't anything else to recommend it.Against himself, Richmond's gaze was drawn to