As soon as he opened the door, he could hear the screaming. It ripped through the damp air and shrieked in the yews. It echoed from the gravestones and died against the walls. It was like the sound of an animal, dying in pain. Yet this sound was human.

With every breath he took, Derek Alton seemed to draw the noise into his own lungs with the air, until something like an answering scream came from deep inside him. The asthmatic wheeze of his inflamed air passages was so high pitched that his ears couldn’t locate its direction, but identified it as a noise that came from the air around him. The pain in his upper chest told him where that noise came from.

And Alton knew where the screaming came from, too.

With shaking fingers, he brushed some of the dust from his sleeve. The exertion had made his collar stick to the back of his neck, and a few strands of hair had fallen over his forehead, where they lay like barbed wire on his skin. He rubbed at a fresh scratch on his knuckles, but managed only to smear a streak of blood across the back of his hand. He could taste dust in his mouth, too — old dust, the debris of years, stirred into the air by a random act of violence.

The screaming reminded Alton of the shriek of agony he had once heard from a rat, when a terrier had flushed it from its nest in a barn and its back had been broken under a farmer’s spade. The dying rat had squealed with its last strength, as its legs kicked and its pale claws clutched and uncoiled in the dry earth.

Now he waited, expecting to hear other noises. At first, there was only the stirring of the breeze in the yews and the drip of rainwater from the ivy on the church walls. But gradually he began to distinguish something else — a rhythmic thudding. It reverberated inside a room some distance away, well beyond the first houses on the road into Withens. It was like a ritual drumbeat, folding over on itself and creating multiple layers of sound. He shivered as he recognized the undertones of menace, which spoke of imminent death.

Then there was a burst of laughter somewhere in the village, followed by the slam of a door. A female voice shouted something that Alton couldn’t make out. It was just one sentence, half a dozen words, and then the voice had gone. Further away, a ewe called to its lambs on the slopes of Withens Moor, where the hefted flocks still roamed their territories on the heather and peat bog. Alton had seen Withens Moor. He had seen Black Hill and Hey Moss, too. And he knew the moors themselves were dying.

Death had been on Derek Alton’s mind all day. He had awoken with a jolt in the early hours of the morning, panicking that he might have disturbed Caroline with one of his bad dreams. But as soon as he opened his eyes and stared at the faint light on the bedroom curtains, he realized that his mind had been banging back and forth like a pendulum, swinging between the distant dualities of darkness and light, winter and spring, death and renewal. He might have been thinking of the end of winter and the first invasion of spring. But, mostly, he was sure he had been thinking of death.

Alton heard footsteps approaching through the aisle of the church. There were no carpets in St Asaph’s, and his visitor was wearing heavy work boots that thumped on the stone flags.

He turned back towards the nave and squinted at the figure moving slowly out of the light to stand beside him. Once they were standing close together, the porch of the church seemed far too small.

Neil Granger was wearing a black leather jacket of the kind that Alton thought of as motorcyclist’s gear, though he knew Neil didn’t have a motorbike, only the old Volkswagen Beetle he used for getting to and from his job at the Lancashire Chemicals factory in Glossop. He looked very tired.

‘You might as well go, Neil,’ said Alton. ‘You can’t do any more here tonight.’

Neil had sweat running from his temples into the black smudges on his cheeks. He wiped a hand down the side of his face, spreading the smudges even more. But he looked at Alton with concern when he heard his wheezing.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Alton. ‘I just needed some fresh air. And we ought not to do any more until the police have been to take a look.’

‘Don’t hold your breath, then. They might get here next Easter.’

‘I know, I know. But all the same...’

‘You want to do things by the rules.’

Alton sighed. ‘I wish there were still rules for this kind of thing.’

‘You like rules, don’t you? It goes with the job, I suppose.’

‘Well, there are the Ten Commandments.’ But Alton smiled to show that he knew it was a joke.

‘In Withens?’ said Neil.

‘Yes, even in Withens.’

‘I think you’ll find they’ve broken all the tablets of stone.’

A few feet away, a blackbird scuttled into the undergrowth over the horizontal gravestones that lay like fallen monoliths in front of the church. The blackbirds were always the last to go to their roosts in the dusk. They hopped jerkily across the graves in the half-light and rustled hopefully among the dead leaves, searching for insects and larvae. It was enough to make some people nervous of entering the church at this time of night. Even the blackbird had its duality. It was a creature of darkness, as much as of light.

Neil flapped the lapels of his jacket to fan his face. Alton could smell his sweat, and he felt a surge of affection and gratitude towards the young man for taking the trouble to stop by and help. Not many people would have done that. Not in Withens.

‘I appreciate what you’ve done, Neil,’ he said.

But instead of acknowledging Alton’s thanks, Neil turned his face away, staring out into the churchyard.

‘Vicar,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’ said Alton, surprised.

Neil waved a hand vaguely towards the village. ‘Well, all this. It’s not what you expected, is it? Not what you deserve really, I suppose.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Neil.’

Neil laughed, then coughed as the dust got into his throat. Alton caught the glitter of the rings in his ear and the sheen of his black hair. He wanted to put his hand round the young man’s shoulder and tell him it was all right. Whatever Neil was apologizing for, it was perfectly all right. But he hesitated, worrying that the gesture might be misinterpreted, then cursing himself for being so cautious. He ought to be able to give forgiveness, if that was what Neil Granger needed. But by the time the reactions had run through his brain, the moment had passed, and it was too late.

In any case, Neil immediately seemed to have forgotten what he had been saying, and his mood changed again.

‘Well, like I said, we’ll tackle the churchyard this weekend.’

‘Yes,’ said Alton. ‘We’ll do that.’

‘I was hoping Philip would help us, but he’s being mardy about it.’

‘Your brother is busy these days. I understand.’

‘Some new business he’s got involved in. I don’t know what he’s up to any more. But we’ll get it sorted between the two of us, eh? Remember, Vicar — death and renewal, winter and spring—’

‘The darkness and the light.’

‘That’s it. Time for a bit of light on the subject, I reckon.’

Neil turned to look at the vicar then, but Alton could barely see his eyes. They, too, were dark, and they were at the wrong angle to catch the light leaking into the porch from the nave. Alton couldn’t tell what expression was on Neil’s face. But a strange thought ran through his mind. If he had been able to read Neil’s eyes at that moment, he might not have seen any expression at all — only a reflection of the gravestones outside in the churchyard.

‘I’ve got to be up early in the morning, anyway,’ said Neil.

Alton nodded. ‘Do you remember, the year before last —?’

But Neil held up a hand before Alton could finish his question.

‘I don’t even want to think about it,’ he said. ‘Two years ago, Emma should have been there.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I suppose it seems a long time ago now, for most people. I don’t expect everybody to remember.’

‘But I do remember,’ said Alton. ‘And there are her parents, of course.’

‘Oh, her parents remember,’ said Neil.

Because of the failing light, Alton could see little beyond the wall of the churchyard now, except the streetlights in Withens. He was sure it wasn’t Caroline’s voice he had heard in the village earlier. Perhaps it had been Fran Oxley, or even Lorraine, or one of the other members of the Oxley family.

But it definitely wasn’t Caroline — she would never laugh like that, or shout so loudly in public. At this moment, Caroline would be walking past the Old Rectory, averting her eyes from the house and garden until she could turn into the crescent and reach their bungalow.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond the streetlights was Waterloo Terrace, where the Oxleys lived. Alton could picture the eight brick cottages, tightly packed like a row of soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder against the larger stone buildings that clustered around them.

Derek Alton and Neil Granger stood in the church porch a few moments longer, listening to the noises from the village. The screaming faded, then grew louder again.

‘Does that sound like a rat to you?’ said Neil.

‘Yes, it does.’

Neil nodded. ‘OK, then.’

He rubbed at his face as he began to walk away down the flagged path. His clothes rustled like the sound of the blackbird in the dead leaves. Alton lifted his head for a second to look towards the village. And when he turned back, he found that Neil had already disappeared into the darkness beyond the yew trees.

Later, Derek Alton would have a lot to regret. He would be sorry that he hadn’t watched Neil Granger leave, and hadn’t observed the moment when the young man passed out of his sight. Perhaps he could have called Neil back and said something that might have changed his mind. But he hadn’t. Alton had been too distracted by the noise coming from the village, and too absorbed in his own concerns. He would feel guilty for that, too.

But most of all, Derek Alton would regret not saying goodbye.

With a heave of his shoulders, a police officer in body armour swung the battering ram. The door split at the first impact. He swung a few more times, and the thump of steel hitting wood wrecked the stillness of the early morning. A burglar alarm began to shriek as the lock shattered, and the officer gave the door a kick with his boot.

Standing in the damp bracken at the edge of the road, Detective Constable Ben Cooper watched officers wearing Kevlar vests burst into the house as their team leader began to shout instructions. The door had given way a bit too easily, he thought. Maybe the householder should have spent more money on security, and less on the plate glass and patios.

‘Well, they give the impression of people with nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘But God knows what all that glass does to their heating bill.’

Cooper could feel a fine rain in the air, like feathers touching his face. Sunlight and showers were passing across the hills so quickly that it was almost dizzying. Though he was standing still, he seemed to be moving from darkness into light and back again, as the clouds obscured the sun, showered him with rain and were blown westwards by the wind. The raindrops hardly had a chance to dry on his waxed coat before the next bank of clouds reached him.

For some reason, PC Tracy Udall was wearing her body armour, too. No doubt it was a sensible precaution, but it looked a bit odd when the most dangerous thing in sight was a patch of stinging nettles. Besides, she seemed to Cooper like a candidate for a breast reduction operation to make the vest fit properly.

For the moment, PC Udall had left her yellow waterproof jacket in the car. But the banks of darker clouds rapidly moving towards them from the east suggested that she might regret moving too far away from the car without it.

‘If we’re right about their source of income, they won’t be worrying about sharing a bit of it with Powergen,’ she said.

He wiped the rain off his binoculars so that he could study the house more carefully. It had been a farmhouse at one time, but part of the side wall had been taken out and replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass, which must let more light in than had ever been seen by several generations of Derbyshire hill-farming families. There was new glass at the back too, and dormer windows had been built into the stone-tiled roof.

The room he could see through the glass had a floor made from patterned blocks of light-coloured wood, where once there would surely have been stone flags. There was a glimpse of light from another window way down at the far end. That could only mean that an internal wall had been removed to create one large room running right through to the back of the house. An estate agent would probably call it an open-plan living space.

As they had descended into the valley, the police team had been careful not to disturb the dawn with the lights of their beacons and the wail of their sirens. But now the time for discretion had passed. On the way to the raid, one of the task force officers had joked that they’d need to get inside the house quickly to be out of the rain. Kevlar fibres were known to deteriorate if they got wet. Also if they were exposed to direct sunlight. That was why police officers in body armour never went out in sunlight, or so they said. But at least it provided a lot more protection than if you had left it hanging in your locker at the station.

A few hundred yards beyond the target house was another cluster of roofs, including a number of old farm buildings, one of which had been converted into a double garage. But there was also a four-wheel-drive vehicle standing on the brick-paved driveway — a Toyota or a Mitsubishi, he couldn’t quite be sure from this distance. As he watched, a large, shaggy-haired dog wandered into sight, sniffed at the vehicle’s front near-side tyre, looked over its shoulder guiltily, and slunk off towards the back of the house. There was a paddock at the side of the driveway, newly fenced and containing a Shetland pony, a Jacob sheep and two Muscovy ducks.

‘What about the neighbours?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, the house actually belongs to an architect,’ said Udall. ‘Apparently, he’s employed by the Cooperative Society, and he designs grocery shops and crematoria for a living.’

Udall had an air of briskness that Cooper liked. In the car on the way from Glossop section station, she told him that she’d been in the force ten years. She was a single mother, and had joined up after her youngest child was old enough to attend nursery school. When she had been on the wrong shifts — which she usually was, she said — her mother had collected the children from school. Now her son was thirteen, and she was starting to get worried about him.

‘Grocery shops and crematoria?’

‘Or, as Sergeant Boyce puts it, “rashers to ashes”. He’s a scream.’

‘Every team needs a comedian.’

‘But the architect is working abroad. Somewhere in the Gulf States, I think. So he leased the house for a couple of years. The present occupier also has an address in South Manchester, where his neighbours say he’s a motor dealer.’

One of those brief, unnerving silences had developed down at the house. The officers waiting outside checked their earpieces. These moments never lasted long, but they were worse than any amount of overexcited shouting over the airwaves.

Cooper looked at the unused farm buildings and thought of his brother Matt, struggling more than ever now to support his family on the income from Bridge End Farm. Revenue from livestock farming had plummeted, and not just because of the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Farmers like Matt lived on a knife edge, wondering when the bank would pull the plug on their overdraft. There were some advantages to a regular salary from Derbyshire Constabulary, after all.

‘What about the barn conversion?’

‘Holiday lets,’ said Udall. ‘It’s divided into two studio apartments, with a shared patio round the back. No doubt they provide a useful bit of extra income, in case the crematorium market dries up.’

‘Not much chance of that. There’s no shortage of people to burn. And nowhere to bury them these days, either.’

‘No, the graveyards are really in demand. People are dying to get in them.’

‘Is that one of Sergeant Boyce’s, too?’

Udall flushed a little, but said nothing. She tugged at the bottom edge of her vest to pull it down over her hips, where her duty belt was heavily hung with baton, handcuffs, CS spray, and a series of leather pouches that Cooper had forgotten the use for. In fact, he didn’t think they even had all those things to wear in the days when he was in uniform. Changes happened fast in the police service, and six years away from a uniform was long enough to get out of touch.

Tracy Udall had dark hair pulled back almost painfully tightly into a short ponytail that protruded from her white trilby-style hat. Cooper had presumed from what she’d told him that the father of her child hadn’t been around from the word go. Now she must be only a couple of years on the other side of thirty. Unfortunately, Sergeant Jimmy Boyce was married, with four kids of his own.

Cooper knew he could probably learn a lot from PC Udall and her colleagues — the day-to-day, on the ground stuff about policing that had started to pass him by after six years at a CID desk in Edendale. It was his chief superintendent at E Division who had first uttered the words ‘lateral development’ when he had failed to get promoted to the detective sergeant’s job he had hoped for. Lateral development meant a move to a different speciality without the benefit of promotion, but it came with the suggestion that wider experience might count favourably towards future advancement. On the other hand, his mother might have said it was just a case of ‘always jam tomorrow’.

Yet, suddenly, here he was on a secondment to the Rural Crime Team — playing an advisory role to Sergeant Boyce’s pro-active squad of uniformed officers. These were people who knew the problems of the Peak District’s villages. They had gained their knowledge from years as community constables, liaising with the local people and listening to their troubles. Those troubles often involved a catalogue of burglaries, petty thefts, vandalism and car crimes that were committed with impunity, to all intents and purposes. Prioritization was the buzz word these days, and property crime was low priority. Members of the public in some areas could consider themselves lucky if they got any police response at all, except for the offer of a crime number for their insurance claim and a sympathetic letter from Victim Support.

Cooper was glad to help, if he could. But while he stood with PC Tracy Udall on this roadside in the Longdendale valley, he couldn’t help wondering if this was the first step on the path of his lateral development. Was Sergeant Boyce tipped to move onwards and upwards after the initial success of his team? Did a uniformed sergeant’s job await some lucky detective constable in a few months’ time? He wondered what Detective Sergeant Diane Fry would make of that, as his immediate supervisor. But it didn’t take much effort to imagine the smile on her face. She would be glad to be rid of him, he was sure of it.

Now Cooper was standing in sunlight, and he found he was sweating under his waxed coat. It was one of those spring days when you didn’t know what to wear when you went out in the morning. Whatever you chose, you knew you were going to get wet, or too warm. Probably both. There was nothing predictable about the weather in the Peak District at any time of the year, no matter how long you lived there. Outdoors, you were forever taking off layers of clothing and putting them back on again, as you passed from sweaty uphill slog to the biting wind of an exposed plateau. In April, you never knew from one moment to the next what sort of weather was going to hit you. A squall, a gale, a deluge of hailstones, or a warm burst of sun — you could get it all within an hour.

Down in the converted farmhouse, the suspects roused from their beds would be getting ready for a trip. With a bit of luck, they wouldn’t be seeing much sunlight for a while.

‘An isolated farmhouse is an ideal base for an illegal operation. And God knows, there are plenty of those between here and Edendale,’ said Udall.

‘Too many,’ said Cooper.

‘And they make great drugs factories particularly. It’s taking diversification a bit far, if you ask me. Definitely too far. If they can’t make a living at farming, they should stick to opening tea rooms and doing bed and breakfast.’

‘But there’s more money in drugs. And you don’t have to deal with tourists.’

‘The neighbours are going to get a shock,’ said Udall. ‘You can see they’ve got no security to speak of. There are no walls and no gates, and the lights are mostly to show off the garden and the fish pond. And the Afghan doesn’t look as though it would put up much of a fight.’

‘People are used to thinking that they don’t need to set up fortifications around their homes in this area.’

‘Ah, but the architect isn’t from this area. He lived in Sheffield until two years ago. He ought to know better.’

‘It’s the scenery,’ said Cooper. ‘It gives people a false sense of sanity.’

If Cooper were to be honest with himself, his short spell with the E Division Rural Crime Team was already starting to feel like a breath of fresh air. Winter in Edendale had been long and hard, and full of other complications. Diane Fry, for one.

And then he had chosen to move out of Bridge End Farm for the first time in his life. He had left home at almost thirty years old, and now he had all the business of looking after himself, and the unexpected implications of having property, even though his flat in Edendale was only rented. He had his own territory now, and that made life look different. That, and his looming thirtieth birthday, made a lot of things look different. It was as if he had suddenly been lifted out of his old, familiar rut and pointed in a different direction, so that he wasn’t quite sure who or what he was any more. In fact, he was a bit like the former farmhouse down there — designed for a different purpose entirely.

‘Besides, houses like this need security these days. Almost every house of any size in Longdendale has been targeted by thieves during the last eighteen months or so,’ said Udall. ‘Some of them have been hit more than once. If the thieves don’t get in the first time, they do a recce and come back later.’

‘Professionals, then?’

‘No doubt about it.’

‘Local? Or the travelling variety?’

‘Well, we definitely think they’re using somewhere on our patch to store the stuff they’ve nicked. Another isolated farmhouse, probably.’

‘What items are they going for?’

‘This lot go for antiques: clocks, porcelain — anything small that looks as though it might be worth a bit of money. There’s a huge market for that kind of thing. It’s likely they’re collecting enough for a vanload, then shipping it off to the States or somewhere in Europe. Easy money, all right.’

The Shetland pony was deliberately bullying the two Muscovy ducks, nudging them around the paddock until they began to flap their wings and quack angrily.

‘Did the architect design the alterations himself?’ said Cooper.

‘I believe so. But he seems to have designed them for looks, rather than with security in mind, doesn’t he?’

‘You’re right. He really should have known better. Here they come.’

The task force officers were escorting two men out of the target house. Each man had his hands cuffed behind his back and an officer gripping his elbow. They looked as though they had dressed hastily in whatever had come to hand first. Much as Cooper had done himself, in fact. But these two would have the chance to put their feet up for a while in a warm, dry cell when they reached the section station at Glossop.

Cooper turned the binoculars westwards, looking for more signs of civilization in the bare Dark Peak landscape of peat moors and heather. His attention was caught by a small, tree-lined valley and the glimpse of a church tower.

‘What’s over there?’ he said.

‘That? Oh, that’s Withens.’

Cooper could hardly see the village itself. It seemed to be lying in the bottom of a hollow, slipped casually into a narrow cleft in the moors. There were trees above the village on the lower slopes, through which the roofs of houses were barely visible. But the valley was so narrow that it looked as though the two facing slopes were only waiting for the right moment to slide back together and crush the village completely, and all its inhabitants with it.

‘Withens,’ said Cooper, trying the sound of the name in his mouth as he might taste an unfamiliar morsel of food, not sure whether it was going to be bitter or sweet, soft on the teeth or difficult to chew.

Above the village was a moorland plateau, a gloomy blend of dark khakis and greens, with no sign of the purple flowers of the heather that would bring colour in the summer. Much of the landscape up there would be quagmire — a wet morass of peat bog that shifted underfoot, sucking at the soles of boots and clinging to trousers. Across the valley, Bleaklow Mountain stood right on the watershed of England, and attracted sixty inches of rain a year to its wastes of haggs and groughs.

‘I thought we’d go down to the village and take a look when we’ve finished here,’ said Udall. ‘You might be interested to see it. Withens has its own problems. As it happens, the local vicar reported a break-in yesterday.’

‘Fine.’

Cooper noticed a pair of black shapes in the distance, circling over the moor. He turned the binoculars towards them, grateful for any sign of life in the landscape.

But this wasn’t the sort of life he welcomed. They were carrion crows. Though he couldn’t see what had attracted them, he guessed they probably had their eye on a weak lamb. Sometimes, before shearing, their prey might be an adult sheep that had rolled over and couldn’t get up again because of the weight of the unshorn fleece on its back. But in the spring it was the sickliest lambs that the crows were looking for as they flapped and circled over the moors. Just now, their diet would consist mostly of young grouse and the eggs of other birds. But a weak lamb was a great bonus. Its carcass would last them for days.

If they’d found a lamb up there, then they would land in a little while and perch on a handy rock as they waited patiently for it to weaken enough to be helpless. Then they would begin to work on its eyes, picking at the white flesh as if they were delicacies that had to be eaten fresh. And once the lamb was blind, the crows could eat the rest of it at their leisure, while it died.

Cooper lowered the binoculars and looked up at the dark bulk of the hills beyond Withens.

‘Tracy, have you noticed the smoke?’ he said.

Udall followed his gaze. ‘Hell!’

Black clouds were billowing across a wide stretch of the moor, with an occasional flicker of flame visible behind them. The seat of the fire looked as though it might be just below the horizon. PC Udall went off to her car to use the radio, but was back in a couple of minutes.

‘Moorland fire. They think it was started by some kids on a school outing from Manchester. The fire service are turning out all the crews they can muster, but it’s right on the summit above Crowden, so it’s pretty inaccessible. The poor bloody firefighters will have to do the last half-mile on foot with their equipment. They’re also saying they might have to mobilize the helicopter to bomb it with water from the reservoirs.’

‘Beyond our remit, anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘Thank God.’

A gust of wind blew along the road and another shower spattered their faces. But there was too little rain to help the firefighters.

‘I think they’re ready for us down there,’ said Udall.

‘OK.’

Cooper took one last look at the moors above Withens. The smoke was spreading in the wind rolling low over the heather. But in front of it, blacker even than the smoke, the two carrion crows were still circling.

DC Gavin Murfin had sandy hair and a pink face, and he always seemed to have dabs of tomato sauce on his lower lip. He was well past forty, yet he took no notice of any nagging about the condition of his heart. He had experience, though, and that was worth gold these days. Even Diane Fry had to admit it.

Fry found DC Murfin at his desk in the CID room, answering the phone with one hand and eating from a paper bag in the other. She waited impatiently until he put the phone down.

‘And I’ll complain to the Chief Constable about you too, madam,’ he said to the empty air. Then he looked up and grinned at Fry. ‘We’re not providing the high quality of customer service the lady expects for her Council Tax.’

‘I hope you were polite, Gavin,’ said Fry.

‘Polite? I charmed her so much that she’s coming round straight away to have sex with me.’

But Fry wasn’t in the mood for Murfin’s brand of humour.

‘Gavin, what are you doing at the moment?’

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing much, by the look of it.’

‘I’m just having a minute, like.’

‘Well, your minute’s up. There are crimes to be detected.’

‘I’ve already detected one this year, Diane.’

‘Well, it’s time to get your average up. Let’s see if we can make it one point five.’

Murfin sighed. ‘I’ll just finish this sarnie.’

Fry looked at his sandwich more closely. ‘Gavin, is that what I think it is?’

‘Bacon and sausage.’ Murfin licked a bit of the grease off his fingers, then wiped the rest of it on a forensics report.

‘There’s half an inch of fat on that bacon, Gavin. Have you never heard of cholesterol?’

‘Yes, of course I have. Me and the wife went there for two weeks’ holiday last summer.’

Fry breathed in slowly, suppressing an urge to begin screaming. She knew it came from the fear, not from anger at Murfin. It was something she would have to deal with later.

‘Get the jokes out of your system now, Gavin,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a couple called Renshaw coming in.’

Murfin gave a muffled groan from behind a mouthful of sausage. ‘You’re kidding! Not Emma Renshaw’s parents?’

‘Do you remember the case?’

‘Everyone remembers it. What have they been doing now?’

‘Who?’

‘The Renshaws, of course.’

‘Why should they have been doing anything?’

‘Well, they’re regulars. Ask Traffic.’

‘Gavin, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Then you ought to pull some of the files on the Renshaws before you talk to them. It might reduce the shock, like.’

Murfin answered the phone and pulled a face at Fry.

‘Too late. They’re here already.’

‘Bring them up then, Gavin. No, hold on a minute. Come here.’

Murfin stopped at Fry’s desk on his way out of the CID room. She opened a drawer and pulled a Kleenex tissue out of a box. She carefully wiped the tomato sauce off his chin, screwed up the tissue and threw it in the bin.

‘OK. Now you look a bit less like an overweight vampire. You won’t scare the Renshaws so much.’

‘You’re kidding. It’s me you ought to be worrying about, Diane. Those two are scarier than any vampire. They’re like something straight out of Night of the Living Dead.’

‘You’re watching the wrong videos again, Gavin. Try something a bit more sensitive.’

‘I don’t do sensitive,’ said Murfin, as he went to meet the Renshaws.

Fry sat down, took another breath and looked across the room. Opposite Gavin Murfin’s chaotic, paper-strewn desk was another that looked empty, almost abandoned. It had been cleared by its occupant before a secondment to the Rural Crime Team. The sight of the empty desk made Fry wonder if there would come a time when there was nowhere she could go for support when she needed it.

The first building they saw by the side of the road in Withens had long since collapsed. Its walls were tumbled and its timbers blackened, as if there had been a fire a long time ago. Maybe several fires. Now, grass was growing over the stones, and it looked well beyond conversion into a holiday home. Next to the ruins was a fallen oak tree covered in thick moss, which clung to the dead bark in pale green shrouds. Where the main bough of the tree had hit the ground, it had begun to rot back slowly into the earth.

Nearby, a burnt-out car stood on the grass verge. It was something about the size of a Ford Fiesta, with its tyres gone, its windows shattered, and its paintwork scorched down to the metal. But removal of abandoned cars was a problem for the local council.

The village itself was no more than a scatter of stone houses, a pub, a church, a phone box, and a few run-down farms. The farms still had yards that opened directly on to the main street, the way it had been in most Peak District villages at one time, until the demand for residential development drove up the price of land. Then the farmers had moved out of the villages that had originally grown up around them, and the old farmyards and dairies had been swept away, to be replaced by desirable residences in attractive rural settings.

It hadn’t happened in Withens. Perhaps nobody had found the village desirable enough. If the farms went out of business here — as looked more than likely from their condition — then their barns and dairies would probably remain rotting for decades before the demand for new housing reached Withens. For now, the presence of the farmyards meant that the main street was well plastered with mud that had dropped from tractor tyres and been churned by the feet of passing cattle.

On the face of the opposite hill, the air shafts looked from a distance like those Second World War gun emplacements known as ‘pill boxes’. They were round and squat, built to survive — though in this case, they had been intended to survive the weather that a century of Dark Peak winters could throw at them, rather than bombardment from the German navy.

Just past the Quiet Shepherd pub, a car park and picnic area had been created. There was a bus stop in the entrance to the car park. As Cooper parked his Toyota next to Udall’s liveried Vauxhall Astra, a little red, white and blue Yorkshire Traction bus turned in from the road. Along the side of the bus was an advert for a local firm of solicitors. After making a circuit of the car park, it drove out again. There were no passengers on board, and no one waiting at the stop.

‘No problem kids hanging around at the moment,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re joking,’ said Udall. ‘On a Saturday? It’s much too early. Come back in the evening, and it’ll be different.’

‘You’ve got two children, haven’t you, Tracy?’

‘A boy and a girl. But they’d damn well better be in their rooms with their PlayStations in the evening, not hanging around on the street.’

‘Or doing their homework?’

‘Well... I don’t expect them to be Einsteins.’

Then Cooper noticed something he hadn’t expected. From the centre of the village, looking towards the north east, he could see a wind farm. Three rows of tall, white turbines stood on a prominent summit, in a location where they would best catch the Pennine winds. Their vast arms turned slowly in the wind, and their blades glinted as they caught a bit of sun from a break in the clouds. They looked like the advance armies of the twenty-first century, marching over the hill towards Withens.

As soon as the Renshaws had left, Diane Fry got Gavin Murfin to pull out the files on them. Murfin had been right — it would have been helpful if she’d been warned beforehand. But everyone else in E Division seemed to know the whole story, so maybe they had assumed that she knew it as well. It was just one of those little breakdowns in communication that made life so frustrating sometimes. Probably everyone but DI Hitchens had also forgotten that she was herself from Warley, near to where Emma Renshaw had last been seen. Fry had spoken to very few people here in Edendale about her past. One too many, perhaps. But very few.

She supposed that Howard and Sarah Renshaw had been normal people once. Until that night two years ago, they had been a nice, middle-aged, middle-class couple living in their detached house in Withens. They probably had a barbecue patio and a holiday caravan at Abersoch, as well as a daughter studying for a degree in Fine Art in Birmingham.

There were a few little facts about them that Fry was able to glean from the files. Apparently, Howard had already been thinking of taking early retirement from his job as director of a major construction company in Sheffield. Maybe he had been wondering every morning whether his bald patch had grown too big to bother combing his hair over it any more. As for Sarah, she had been due to start a year as president of the local Women’s Institute. Probably she had been busy planning a series of events for her presidency, and calculating how much money she could spend on a wardrobe of new clothes.

One thing was for sure. Both of them had been looking forward to their daughter returning home from university for the Easter holidays, and they had invited their friends and neighbours Michael and Gail Dearden for dinner the following night to admire Emma’s achievements.

Now, though, the Renshaws had both become a little strange. Fry had seen for herself that they were a bit too inclined to those sudden stares and meaningful glances, to raised voices and flushes of colour, and to odd bursts of excitement, followed by dejection and tears.

But the files also recorded the fact that they had become a downright nuisance over the past twenty-four months, bombarding the police with theories and suggestions, pleas and demands, letters and phone calls, and dozens of personal visits to any officer whose name they could get hold of. They had repeatedly reported secondhand sightings of young women who vaguely resembled their daughter. Most worryingly, they had been picked up by traffic patrols several times after they had been found standing in the road, harassing motorists, asking questions that people didn’t like being asked. Twice the Renshaws had been brought in to be given words of advice.

And now they talked about getting guidance. It had turned out they meant guidance from some so-called psychic they’d been consulting, who was advising them where to look for Emma, and which roadsides to stand on at what time, in the hope of some miraculous encounter. Fry grimaced at the thought of the person who was taking advantage of the couple, ruthlessly exploiting their belief.

She supposed that the Renshaws were still a nice, middle-aged, middle-class couple with the house and a caravan. The difference was they no longer had a daughter. Yet they seemed to be living in a sort of alternate reality, where Emma was not only still alive, but perhaps simply planning to catch a later train from Birmingham. Two years later.

While PC Udall went to call in to see if the suspects were ready for interviewing, Ben Cooper tried to identify Waterloo Terrace, where the Oxley family lived.

There weren’t many places to choose from. Apart from the church, the pub, and the farms, there were a few detached homes and a little crescent of bungalows. But beyond the car park and below the road, Cooper could see a roofline and a series of brick chimney pots, just visible behind a thick screen of sycamores and chestnut trees. He began to wander towards it, intending only to take a look at the place.

Without the presence of any troublesome youngsters, Withens seemed eerily silent. There was no traffic on the road through the village, and it was protected from the noise of the A628 by the black humps of the peat moors in between. Cooper could hear only two sounds. One was the harsh cacophony of calls from a flock of rooks somewhere in the trees below the road. The other was the equally harsh, but higher-pitched, voice of a petrol-driven chainsaw.

To get to the houses that he could see, he had to pass the entrance to one of the farms. He paused at the farm gate and looked down through a jumble of buildings. Near the gate was an ancient stone barn with narrow, unglazed windows like arrow slits. Further from the road, the buildings were more recent, and a tractor was parked in the space between them. Cooper found he was looking downhill through a tunnel of buildings to a spectacular view of heather-covered slopes in the distance. The dark mass of Bleaklow lay directly across the valley.

He moved on a few yards, sticking to the grass verge because there were no pavements and the edges of the road were starting to crumble. There were streams of small stones at the roadside that had been swept down by the water running off the hills. Here and there, scraps of black plastic from torn silage bags lay like tattered oil slicks on the verges.

In Withens, water seemed to run wherever it chose. At this moment, it was running directly into the entrance to Waterloo Terrace. Because the terrace was on the downhill side of the road, the water was draining towards it in large quantities. And it had been doing so for some time, judging by the holes scoured in the surface of the track leading down to the terrace. Cooper had to step over vast, muddy puddles to reach the safety of drier ground.

In the wide entrance, there were gate posts, but no gate hung between them. Ceramic drainage pipes had been stacked in neat, geometric shapes nearby, so perhaps someone was thinking of putting proper drainage in one day. Horseshoes had been turned upside down and nailed to the gate posts — they were ready to catch luck or trap the Devil, whichever folklore you chose to believe.

There was nothing about Waterloo Terrace that resembled the romantic idea of a holiday cottage in the Peak District. There were no mullioned windows, no rose-filled front gardens, no honeysuckle growing on the walls. The eight houses were built of black brick that had weathered badly. It had become discoloured and was beginning to crumble at the exposed edges. Between each pair of houses, Cooper could see the arched mouth of a narrow passageway that ran towards the back of the terrace. The passages were completely enclosed and must run underneath the front bedrooms.

He stood where he could see into one of the passageways, and he could make out no light at the end of the brick tunnel. The passage seemed to turn a sharp corner at the far end, maybe providing access to a back yard, and all he could see was a blank wall. The builders hadn’t thought to install lights in these passages, either.

There was a sudden crack like a gunshot in the air above the rooftops. But it was only a couple of wood pigeons taking off, their wings clapping loudly as they accelerated and performed a circuit of the houses.

Waterloo Terrace puzzled Cooper. It stuck out like a sore thumb in this area, where all the buildings were built in the traditional style, from local stone. Gritstone was so plentiful on the hills all around here that it was difficult to imagine why anyone should have decided to use brick. And black brick at that.

In front of the row of houses there was a long stretch of garden that had been converted to growing vegetables at some time. But the effort had been abandoned, and weeds had been allowed to take over where the earth had been disturbed. There were a few sickly cabbages gradually being smothered by thistles and couch grass. Cooper wasn’t surprised by that. Withens was surely one of those places where the wind was strong enough to blow cabbages clean out of the ground — and not just during the winter, either.

Only in one part of the garden had the weeds been held at bay — and that was because black plastic sheeting had been laid over the earth. It was held down by stones and a variety of rusted metal objects that looked as though they had been lying around somewhere waiting for a useful purpose to be found for them. The plastic had torn in a few places, and strips of it flapped lazily in the breeze. The soil under there would be warm and weed-free, and full of worms and insects. But would anything actually be growing?

Across the track from the terrace stood a row of brick privies, with bright blue doors and sloping roofs of stone tiles overgrown with grass and moss. The iron hinges of the doors had been replaced several times, leaving their marks in the paintwork. And now the old privies were padlocked and unused.

Cooper walked on a bit further. The track felt gritty underfoot. The water running down it towards the road had washed away whatever surface had been there originally, leaving a wide channel between banks of grass splashed with dirty water. The wheel ruts of some heavy vehicle had worn through the remaining layer of grit in places to expose the hardcore underneath. Some of it was broken black bricks — presumably what was left over after Waterloo Terrace had been built, or perhaps the remains of some other buildings that had been demolished.

The rookery he had heard was in the chestnuts beyond the track. The birds were setting up a noisy accompaniment to his progress along the front gates of the terrace gardens. The overgrown gardens looked damper than they should have been, even after the morning’s showers. In fact, they looked impossibly wet — the peaty soil was waterlogged and washed away in places. No wonder the cabbages weren’t flourishing. Rice might have been a better crop to plant here. Presumably the water cascading off the hillsides ran straight through the gardens, too.

Cooper must have been tired, or lulled into inattention by the silence. He had lost awareness of his surroundings, and was taken completely by surprise when he heard the voice.

‘Don’t come any further, or you’ll regret it.’

When they got out of Eden Valley Software Solutions, Gavin Murfin stopped in the car park and pretended to spit out the imaginary gum he’d been chewing. He trod it into the tarmac and ground the toe of his shoe on it until he was satisfied.

‘Feel better now?’ said Fry.

‘Not until I get a piece of that pie inside me.’

‘Not in my car, you don’t, Gavin.’

‘I’ll be careful of the crumbs, honest.’

‘Do you know how much it cost me to get this car valeted?’

‘Look, I’ll not even take it out of the bag.’

‘No.’

Murfin’s face crumpled, and he sighed deeply. ‘Where to next, then?’

‘We need to speak to Neil Granger, but I tried to phone him, and he’s not at home.’

‘Does that mean we call it a day then?’

‘Yes. Until tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? It’s Sunday tomorrow, Diane.’

‘A good day for a drive to Withens, then.’

Murfin sniffed. ‘There’s no good day for a drive to Withens.’

Diane Fry stared straight ahead through her windscreen at the Sheffield streets, not wanting even to look at the man beside her in the car. She had let him stand by her passenger window for a few moments before she pressed the button to release the central locking. It wasn’t that she had any doubts who he was — his brown overcoat and sparse ginger hair were recognizable even through the rain streaking her car windows. It was just that there was always a little voice at the back of her brain that kept nagging at her when she was doing something stupid. There had been a short, internal battle before she had subdued the voice sufficiently to let him in.

Now that he was inside the car, all her senses were prickling at his presence, and her muscles were tensed for danger. Yet he had shown no sign of being a threat to her. Fry knew she had to take control of the situation to keep it that way.

‘What name is she going under?’ she said.

She could hear the man breathing. He wasn’t someone who answered questions too quickly — a habit he had probably learned the hard way.

‘Not the one you know,’ he said.

Fry was unduly conscious of his masculine bulk as he slumped in the seat next to her, with his right elbow and leg positioned too close, intruding a little too far into her personal space. The interior of a car was too confined for her ever to feel differently. And it didn’t matter who it was in the passenger seat — one of her DCs, Gavin Murfin or Ben Cooper — it was always the same. She had thought for a while of telling Murfin he’d have to ride in the back seat. But she knew he would have liked it, because he could pretend he was a passenger in a taxi, and she was his chauffeur. And God knew what damage it would do to her back seat. During the winter, there had been fungi growing from the carpet in the front, where Murfin had scattered his constant supply of junk food.

‘No, I didn’t think it would be the name I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’

He didn’t reply, and Fry knew that he was smirking, even without turning her head to look at him. She tried to remember whether she had any air freshener in her glove compartment. She would need to use it once he had left, to take away the memory of him.

‘I need a name,’ she said. ‘And I need an address.’

She could hear him fumbling around in his pockets, then realized that he had taken out a packet of cigarettes. She heard a click and saw the tiny flame reflected in the glass of the windscreen.

‘If you light that up in my car, I’ll shove it down your throat,’ she said.

The man laughed, but let the flame die.

‘What are you doing here on your own?’ he said. ‘Where’s your partner? Aren’t you supposed to work in pairs? I mean, it can be a bit dangerous, can’t it? Especially for a female.’

‘Not for me.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I believe you, love. Thousands wouldn’t.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn what you believe. I’m not here to discuss your powers of perception, or even whether you’re able to see what’s in front of your face. But if you push me, you’ll find out.’

‘All right, all right. Keep your hair on.’

Fry turned away to stare out of the driver’s side window, as if she might be able to forget that he was there if she couldn’t see him out of the corner of her eye. But she was still aware of him through the small noises of his movements, the sound of his breathing, his male smell, and the sulphurous whiff of the match he had struck. She knew there were drops of rain glistening on his scalp among the freckles and the tufts of ginger hair, and she was aware of the dark, wet patches on the shoulders of his coat. And with two of them sitting in a stationary car, the interior was getting too warm from their body heat and the glass was starting to steam up. She wound down the window a couple of inches.

They were parked in a street between the dark, blank walls of crumbling factories. But straight ahead, she could see traffic lights and a busier road that was well lit, with cars passing constantly, and a row of terraced houses with flickering TV screens visible through their curtains and shadows passing in front of lamps in upstairs windows. One of the factories must have a night shift. She could hear the rumble of machinery from somewhere nearby.

‘A name?’ she said impatiently.

‘She’s living with a bloke called Akerman. Johnny Akerman. Not many folks will mess with him. He’s well known around those parts.’

‘Which parts?’

‘Eh?’

‘I need an address.’

‘I can’t tell you that, love.’

‘Look, don’t waste my time.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Can’t, or won’t?’

She felt him turning towards her in his seat. His knee touched the gear stick. A fold of his coat fell over the handbrake towards her, and she instinctively flicked it away. He was holding out his hands in a gesture of appeal, and his face was a pale smear that she was much too aware of. He was willing her to meet his eyes, but she couldn’t.

‘It’s not worth it,’ he said. ‘It could get me a hell of a lot of bother. I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything in it for me, is there?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Fry. ‘You’re going to feel a whole lot better, after you tell me.’

‘I don’t think so, darling.’

Fry pressed the button to close the central locking and reached out to start the ignition.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he said.

‘I think we should go for a little ride.’

‘No way. I’m getting out.’

‘I suggest you put your seat belt on,’ said Fry. ‘It’s not safe without, you know.’

‘For God’s sake—’

She pulled out from the kerb and drove towards the lights at the end of the road.

‘This is the compromise,’ she said. ‘And it’s entirely for your benefit. You say you can’t give me the address for this Akerman. OK. I accept that. So what we do instead is, we go for a little drive.’

‘Where to?’

‘You decide,’ she said. ‘You give me directions.’

She could practically hear him working it out. He was wondering what the best way was to get out of this madwoman’s car.

‘Right, left or straight on at the lights?’ she said.

He was silent so long that she had almost reached the lights, and she was beginning to think that he wouldn’t go along with it. But he was, after all, a man who didn’t answer questions too quickly.

‘If I were you, I’d go left,’ he said. ‘It’s the scenic route.’

They drove for a few minutes. Fry’s passenger hardly spoke, but gave her directions by holding up a hand at junctions to indicate left or right. She guessed he was thinking that he would honestly be able to say that he had never told her anything.

‘Stop here,’ he said.

‘Is this it?’

‘I get out here.’

They were in a street of Victorian terraces, with little flights of steps to their front doors and drawn curtains. Fry pulled up in front of a row of shops, mostly boarded up, but for an Asian greengrocer’s where the lights were still on.

‘Is this it?’ she said again.

‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘The red door. But if you’re going to try to get in there, you’re crazier than I thought.’

‘Thanks for the concern. It’s touching.’

He got out, slammed the door and in a moment had vanished into the darkness, walking quickly in the shadow of the deserted shop fronts.

Fry had no intention of going into the house. She was prepared to wait for as long as necessary.

Sunday mornings had become a battleground for Ben Cooper. It was like going over the top in the trenches every time they opened the doors. In the minutes of waiting, he could see the whites of the eyes of the people alongside him, and feel their tension rising. Five minutes to ten, and there was still no sign of anyone on the other side of the glass.

The first time he went to do his weekly shop at Somerfield’s supermarket on Sunday morning, he thought he would be the only customer. But he was far from being alone in wanting to shop at that time. There had been a small crowd waiting outside the doors.

After his first few visits, Cooper realized he was seeing exactly the same faces each week. There was the man with the denim jeans so baggy they surely must never have fit him, and the old woman with a knitted hat pulled tight over an explosion of white curls. And then there was the little man with the walking stick and bent legs, who moved slower than everyone else and needed a shopping trolley to keep him upright and mobile.

Soon, members of this group had started saying ‘hello’ to him when he arrived, as if he’d been accepted into some sort of club. Each of them had their own little rituals once they got inside the store. Some browsed among the fresh vegetables, or rushed to be first in the queue at the delicatessen counter. Some headed straight for the cat food, or did a preliminary circuit to spot the ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ offers. Occasionally, they would pass each other in the aisles and complain that something had been moved again. There was always a small traffic jam by the cabinets where the frozen meals for one were kept.

When an assistant manager finally appeared and unlocked the doors, Cooper stood back to let most of the Sunday-morning crowd grab their trolleys and get in before him. The little man with the stick reached the doors last, as always. Cooper was just about to follow him, when his mobile phone rang. He pulled it from his belt and checked the number on the display. It was one he didn’t recognize. Work though, probably.

For some reason, the idea that the office was calling him on his rest day irritated him more than it ever had before. Previously, it had never seemed to matter. But now, the interruption of his Sunday-morning routine was different. It could upset his entire week. Sunday was for shopping, cleaning the flat or doing some ironing, a quick lunch, then an afternoon with the papers and TV before visiting his mother. Then he would finish off with an evening in the pub, where the usual crowd would be expecting him, and his usual drink would be on the counter almost before he got through the door. Even within three months, the routine had developed a reassuring predictability.

Cooper let the phone ring a couple more times as he pushed a trolley into the first aisle: fresh fruit and vegetables. In a second, the answering service would cut in, and he could pretend that he had been unavailable. Then someone else would have to take on whatever job it was they wanted him for. He wouldn’t even know what it had been until Monday morning. He wouldn’t know whether it had been something trivial, or the most exciting case of his life.

‘Oh, well,’ he sighed, as he caught the call before the next ring.

‘Hello, Ben. It’s Tracy Udall.’

Cooper had a moment’s difficulty in putting a face to the name. But then a picture of PC Udall in her body armour seemed to materialize in front of him, among the piles of carrots and parsnips.

‘Morning, Tracy. What can I do for you?’

‘I thought I’d mention that I’m on duty tomorrow, and I’ll be going up to Withens again in the morning.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to talk to the Oxleys. Or try to.’

‘Good luck, then.’

‘I’ll be setting off from Glossop section station about ten o’clock.’

‘I’m working tomorrow myself,’ said Cooper, trying to puzzle out what Udall was talking about. He had only been on loan for the day of the raid. There was more than enough work to be done in CID at Edendale, even on a Monday morning.

‘Fine,’ said Udall cheerfully. ‘See you around.’ And she rang off.

Cooper shook his head as he put his phone away. But it wasn’t worth worrying over. He had fruit and vegetables to think about.

He began to fill a plastic bag with apples. Just up the aisle, the man with the stick was poking a finger at some enormous oranges that looked as though they’d been pumped up with steroids. The old man liked to trail round the aisles with Cooper whenever possible, so that he could talk to him. This morning, he was deliberately lingering in the fruit section to allow Cooper to catch up. The man with the stick never bought oranges. He was a tinned peaches and pineapple chunks man.

Then Cooper’s phone rang again.

‘What now?’

He couldn’t let it ring for long this time. He saw that the number was one of the direct lines into E Division headquarters at West Street.

‘Ah, Cooper. I didn’t think you were going to answer.’

‘No, sir,’ said Cooper, recognizing DI Paul Hitchens’ voice immediately. ‘I mean, yes. I just had a bit of difficulty because my hands weren’t free.’

‘You’re not driving, are you?’

‘No, sir.’ Cooper tucked the phone between his shoulder and ear as he pushed his trolley past the apples and drew up to the dairy cabinets. He heard Hitchens take a breath.

‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you on your rest day, but something has come up, which you need to know about before you come on duty in the morning.’

‘A case, sir? Have we got an incident?’

‘Well, not exactly. We’re loaning you out again.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The Rural Crime Team were very pleased with you yesterday. They’ve asked if they can have you for a while longer. Apparently, they have some more enquiries coming to a conclusion.’

‘Oh, but sir—’

‘The RCT are flavour of the month at the moment, you know. Rural crime has a high profile, so it’s getting priority treatment at higher levels. You know what I mean.’

‘So you’re agreeing to an abstraction, sir?’

‘For a while, Cooper. We’ll see you back here before long, no doubt. You’ll have all this rural crime cleared up in no time. I’ve got every confidence in you.’

Cooper picked up a milk carton and stared at it blankly. The confidence of your senior officers was good. But Hitchens sounded a little too confident for Cooper’s liking.

‘How long will it be for?’

‘Well... I don’t know exactly. Not at the moment. But we’ll see how it goes.’ He paused. ‘Nothing to worry about, Ben,’ he said. ‘DS Fry will be keeping in touch.’

‘Is everybody happy with this, sir?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Hitchens. ‘Everybody’s happy.’

The police officers protecting the scene at the air shaft were starting to get a bit edgy. The place was difficult to find, and it had taken a couple of attempts by the fire service to guide them up the track. Another patrol car had been positioned at the gateway off the A628, but there was no sign yet of the rest of the team — the forensic medical examiner, the CID, the Scientific Support van, or the senior officer who would take charge.

The gradual arrival of daylight made the scene look even worse than it had in the light of their torches. PC Greg Knott was the more experienced officer. He had attended sudden deaths before, and he knew from the smell, and the condition of the area surrounding the body, that this death had occurred some time ago. The gases building up in the body as decomposition set in had begun to expel the contents of the stomach and intestines, and blood from the victim’s nose and ears caused a confusing picture of the injuries he had sustained.

Worst were the eyes, though. In the place where they should have been there were black, clotted pools that almost seemed to match the unnatural colour of the victim’s face.

With every moment that passed, PC Knott was getting more and more worried that there were things he ought to be doing. It had been a long, tedious night shift. And now, right at the end of it, Knott and his partner actually had an interesting call to attend. They were FOA at a suspicious death — the first officers to arrive. And that brought sudden responsibilities, the knowledge that the actions they took, or didn’t take, right now could affect the whole investigation, if it turned out to be a case of murder.

Their first priorities had been to assess and protect the scene. And he knew the first rule was not to interfere with anything at the scene, once they were sure that the victim was actually dead. But he hated standing around doing nothing. It went against his instincts. Knott wanted to poke around, to identify the victim, to try to figure out what had happened.

As more time passed, the urge to do something was becoming stronger. Knott told himself it would impress the senior officers when they arrived. But he looked at his partner, who was trying to find something secure to fasten the end of the blue-and-white tape to, and he was glad he wasn’t on his own. A bad mistake would be too easy to make. Above all things, any evidence at the scene had to be preserved from contamination. Knott looked at the sky, praying that the rain would hold off, because they had no means of protecting the body if the weather broke.

There was the noise of a car engine, whining as it approached.

‘Who’s that coming?’ said Knott.

‘Let’s hope it’s the medical examiner.’

They both looked down the hill, watching the spot where the track crested the rise and emerged from the banks of heather. Nothing appeared. Yet the sound of the engine became louder and louder, until it almost seemed to be on top of them.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Knott, spinning round. A black Mitsubishi pick-up was only a few yards away from them. But it was travelling down the hill, not up.

‘Where did that come from?’

‘I don’t know, but he’s going to drive right through the tape, if we don’t stop him,’ said Knott.

‘He’d better not, or we’re dead meat.’

‘Stop him, then.’

They both began waving and running towards the vehicle. The driver had already slowed to a crawl as he bumped over the stony track, and he finally came to a halt a few feet from the air shaft. He lowered the driver’s window.

‘What’s the problem?’ he said.

‘I’m afraid you can’t come through here, sir. This is a crime scene.’

‘A what?’

‘A crime scene, sir. There’s been a fatality.’

‘Oh.’

‘So if you don’t mind, sir—’

‘Has somebody been hurt, then?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Who is it?’

‘We don’t know. But I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to reverse back up the track. You need to turn round and go back the way you came.’

The driver leaned out of his window to look down the track. ‘I could just about squeeze past. The ground’s quite dry here, so I think the four-wheel drive could cope.’

‘No, sir. Go back, please.’

‘It’s a damned nuisance.’

‘Could I ask your name, sir?’

‘It’s Dearden.’

‘And whereabouts do you live?’

‘Over the other side of the hill. Shepley Head Lodge.’

Knott looked at his partner, who shrugged. ‘Surely you could take the road through Withens, Mr Dearden?’ he said.

‘Maybe.’

‘It would be much easier than negotiating this track, I would have thought. You’ll get a lot less damage to your suspension and your tyres, anyway.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Where are you heading for, sir?’

‘Glossop.’

‘Glossop? Well, this isn’t even a shortcut. You’d have to go back up the A628 to where the Withens road comes out anyway.’

‘All right, all right. I’m going.’

He revved the Mitsubishi, looked over his shoulder and began reversing up the hill towards where the track widened out at the old quarry.

Knott looked at the body of the young man. ‘If Mr Dearden lives nearby, maybe we should have asked him if he recognized the body,’ he said. ‘He might have been able to give us a quick ID.’

‘This lad won’t be from round here,’ said the other officer confidently.

‘You sure?’

‘They never are. Besides...’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t like the look of Mr Dearden too much. What was he doing driving over this way, when he could have gone up the Withens road? It would have been a lot easier and quicker for him. It doesn’t make sense.’

Knott shrugged. ‘Beats me. But take a note of his registration number before we lose sight of him anyway,’ he said, as he watched the Mitsubishi do a three-point turn. ‘We’ll pass his name on to CID. When they arrive.’

‘Who do you suppose we’ll get?’

‘Some bugger who’ll tell us we’ve done everything wrong,’ said PC Knott.

Michael Dearden turned out to be a lean, awkward man with a cold air. When Cooper showed him his ID on the doorstep, Dearden put on a poor pretence of incredulity and amazement.

‘So somebody has actually come to see us?’ he said. ‘Gail! Somebody from the police has come to see us!’

‘Were you expecting someone to call?’ said Cooper.

‘Expecting, no. Hoping, yes. But hoping doesn’t get us anywhere. We’ve phoned the police station so often that it’s on our “Friends and Family” list for discount calls.’

‘Actually,’ said Cooper, ‘I think you’ve probably been contacting South Yorkshire Police, haven’t you?’

‘Yes?’ said Dearden.

‘Well, I’m Derbyshire CID. You’re a bit out of my patch here, Mr Dearden. You’re over the county boundary. If you’ve been having problems of some kind, South Yorkshire will deal with them for you.’

‘Oh, will they?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well, think again. And think differently this time.’

A pale woman had appeared from upstairs and was staring at Cooper from the bottom step.

‘Gail, can you believe this?’ said Dearden. ‘Someone from the police finally comes to see us, and he turns out to be from the wrong force.’

‘I’m Derbyshire, not South Yorkshire,’ Cooper explained again. But the woman said nothing.

‘Ah, but,’ said Dearden, wagging a finger at him, ‘Withens is in Derbyshire, isn’t it? Withens is on your patch.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you can talk to us about the Oxleys.’

‘If you’d like to, Mr Dearden, I’d be happy to listen.’

On their way back through Withens from the Renshaws’ house, Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin noticed the police Vauxhall immediately.

‘Anyone we know?’ said Murfin.

‘I doubt it.’

‘I’m not so sure. Who’s that coming across the road?’

Fry stared. ‘What the hell’s Ben Cooper doing here?’

‘Not sightseeing, that’s for certain,’ said Murfin. ‘This place looks like something the cat ate and sicked up again.’

‘Pull up in front of the pub, Gavin.’

‘Ah. Now you’re talking.’

Fry wound down the window of the car as Cooper came across.

‘Well, well. I thought we’d lost you,’ she said.

‘It’s wonderful how people worry about me.’

‘No such luck, though, eh?’

‘No such luck. This is Tracy Udall, by the way, from the Rural Crime Team.’

Fry looked her up and down. Confident, capable-looking. Pretty much as she had been herself once, before she joined CID.

‘Hello.’

Gavin Murfin gave a cheerful wave from behind the steering wheel.

‘Hi,’ said Udall. ‘Withens hasn’t seen so much police activity for years. Folks round here will be getting paranoid.’

‘Some already are,’ said Fry.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Cooper.

‘To see the Renshaws.’

‘Ah,’ said Udall. ‘I see what you mean. Though paranoid isn’t quite the right word.’

‘Emma Renshaw’s parents,’ said Cooper. ‘I’d forgotten they lived in Withens. What’s happening with that? Have I missed anything?’

‘Well, that’s what happens when you get promoted to the Rural Crime Team.’

‘Has Emma been found? It can’t be a murder enquiry, I would have heard. Wouldn’t I, Diane?’

‘Well, I expect so.’ Then Fry took pity on him. ‘Of course you would have heard, Ben. I’d have been kicking up all kinds of stink to get you back, no matter what the Rural Crime Team said.’

She didn’t look at PC Udall, but Udall seemed to get the message.

‘Tell you what, I’ll see you back at the car, Ben,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some calls to make.’

Fry watched her walk away, giving a hitch to her duty belt. Full of confidence, totally unfazed.

‘She’s a good officer,’ said Cooper.

‘I’m sure.’

Fry saw the stubborn set of his face and suppressed an urge to wind him up some more. She had promised herself she was going to be nice to him. Besides, loyalty was one of his strong points, as she well knew.

‘So it isn’t a murder enquiry?’

‘Not until we get the bloodstains analysed,’ said Fry. ‘And then we’ll let you know.’

‘Where are you heading now?’

‘Tintwistle. To see if we can track down one of Emma Renshaw’s housemates. A young man by the name of Neil Granger, who we can’t seem to catch at home.’

Cooper put his hand on the car to stop them driving away.

‘Don’t be in too much of a rush,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s already found him for you.’

Ben Cooper was glad to get back to his flat in Welbeck Street that night. Withens and all the people connected with it had started to depress him, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the air of distrust he had met from everyone he had spoken to. They had been suspicious either of the police, or of each other, or even of the world in general. A police officer lived with suspicion, of course. But when it was unjustified, it was peculiarly depressing.

Cooper knew he was due to get a new neighbour in the upstairs flat. The previous tenant had been there for years, but had started to get a bit frail and had taken the chance of sheltered housing when she received an offer. Cooper expected his landlady, Mrs Shelley, to advertise the vacancy, as she had done with the ground-floor flat. ‘Reliable and trustworthy professional people only’. That’s what the advert had said in the bookshop that day, when he had seen it by sheer chance.

But Mrs Shelley showed no signs of advertising the flat, or even getting any maintenance work or decorating done when the old tenant’s belongings had been moved out. Cooper was curious to know what was going on. He had heard almost no noise from the old lady, but if someone less quiet moved in upstairs, it could have an impact on his life.

Funnily enough, Mrs Shelley had taken to him in a big way. He had thought she might have blamed him for the death of her nephew, who had died during the course of a murder enquiry three months earlier, with Cooper the only person present. But when everything had been explained to her, Mrs Shelley had decided that Cooper was a hero. In a way, he had actually taken the place of her nephew, and now she took a special interest in him. He thought he could probably have asked for anything and she would have said ‘yes’. But it was unfair to take advantage of her.

Mostly, he wanted to establish the flat as his own private territory and he was nervous of encouraging her too much, in case she decided to pop in every few minutes to see how he was. The bolts helped there, of course. Though she had keys for the locks, there was no way she could just walk into the flat when he was there. That privacy felt very precious to him at the moment. It was a privacy he had never enjoyed before, since he had lived at Bridge End Farm with his family all his life. Finally, approaching his thirtieth birthday, he felt free for the first time. He could create his own world in this little flat. And he was surprised at how territorial he had immediately become.

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life — which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

‘Where’s your friend, Randy?’

He called the other cat Mrs Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from the couple of months she had spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once new homes had been found for all the kittens among his family, Mrs Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more of a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back in to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas about what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home.

He’d asked Dorothy Shelley if he could be allowed access to the back garden. There was a door in to it from the conservatory, but the conservatory wasn’t part of his flat, according to the tenancy agreement, so he had no rights over it. In fact, it belonged more to the cats than to him.

Of course, the cats didn’t seem to belong to anyone, either. But that was perfectly normal. He had cleaned the cat hairs from the floor of the conservatory and washed the black specks of mould off the raffia chair that stood under the side window. He’d have liked to throw the chair out, but it wasn’t his property. He’d have liked to have a bonfire in the garden, and put the chair on top of it. But the garden wasn’t his.

The few possessions he had brought with him from Bridge End Farm were mostly in the sitting room — a Richard Martin print of Win Hill, a wooden cat on the window ledge. And, of course, the photograph over the fireplace — the one showing rows of solemn-faced police officers lined up in their uniforms, with Sergeant Joe Cooper standing in the second row. That would be his inheritance for ever.

DCI Kessen took up a position at the front of the room for the morning briefing. In front of him on the table were a series of exhibits relating to the Neil Granger enquiry.

‘He looks like a Greek god to me,’ said Gavin Murfin, taking a chair next to Ben Cooper.

‘Well, I think he’s more like Neptune,’ said Cooper.

‘Why?’

‘It’s the beard. The way it’s sort of... forked.’

‘Yeah. Like the Devil.’

Kessen was waiting impassively for everyone to settle down. Diane Fry came in and sat on the front row, where no one ever wanted to be.

‘I bet he’s worth a lot, though,’ said Murfin. ‘Thousands.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘How old would you say?’

‘A century or two, that’s all,’ said Cooper.

Kessen cleared his throat. The room gradually fell silent.

‘I know what you’re all wondering,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided to call him Fred.’

The DCI smiled without showing his teeth. The expression lacked humour. In fact, it looked more like a challenge to anyone who might dare to laugh.

‘Oh, my good Lord,’ said Murfin quietly.

Using both hands because of its weight, Kessen held up one of the evidence bags. It was made of clear plastic, and everyone could see what was inside it. There was also a large colour photograph of the item pinned up on one of the notice boards.

‘An antique bronze bust,’ said the DCI. ‘This was found in a vehicle belonging to the victim, Neil Granger. The vehicle in question is a Volkswagen Beetle, which had been left parked in a lay-by on the A628, a few hundred yards down the hill from where Mr Granger’s body was found.’

The bust was about nine inches high, with a dull green patina, and stood on a solid base. It represented the head of a man with a Roman nose, curly hair and a rather forked beard. Whoever he was, he gazed with blank eyes into the room. Cooper was reminded of a corpse he had once seen on the dissection table at the mortuary — a homeless Irishman who had been killed in a hit-and-run incident and left in a ditch. The Irishman’s hair had been black, but his face had carried a similar green tinge.

‘We know that there have been a number of burglaries from homes in the Longdendale area during the last few months,’ said Kessen. ‘During these burglaries, small antique items have been taken. This is a small antique item.’

The bust was heavy, and it landed with a thump when he rested it back on the table.

‘Initial enquiries into Neil Granger’s circumstances and his associates suggest that he may not have come into possession of this item in the normal manner.’

Kessen hesitated, and looked at the faces of some of the officers in the back row with an expression of disappointment.

‘We think it may have been stolen,’ he said.

‘Are we going to put photos of the bust in the media, sir?’ asked one officer.

‘Not just yet.’

‘We could get a quick identification that way, if the legitimate owner comes forward. Someone would be sure to recognize it if they saw it on TV or in the papers. It’s very distinctive.’

‘But we would also tip off the thieves that we have it,’ said Kessen. ‘I don’t want to do that yet. That’s a fact we’re going to keep to ourselves. Understood, everybody?’

There were nods, and a few shifty looks from officers who might already have mentioned the bronze bust to their wives or husbands.

‘We do have a bit of information about this item,’ said Kessen. ‘DI Hitchens will fill us in.’

‘Well, we e-mailed pictures of the bust to a couple of experts yesterday and asked them to give it the once-over,’ said Hitchens. ‘Apparently, it’s a copy of an original in marble that can be found in a museum in Florence. The character with the curly hair and beard is Lucius Verrus, an obscure Roman emperor. Closer to home, though, there’s a larger copy of this in Chatsworth House. That’s the Duke of Devonshire’s stately home, a few miles east of here.’

‘I think we know what Chatsworth House is,’ said Kessen.

Gavin Murfin put his hand up. ‘Have Chatsworth had any antiques lifted recently?’ he said. ‘I mean, I went in there once with the wife and kids, and the bloody place was stuffed with them. You could hardly move for antiques. God knows what the old Duke’s insurance premiums must be like.’

‘Thank you, Murfin,’ said Hitchens, with an uneasy glance at the DCI.

‘In fact, while we were there, I said to the wife that if I ever got kicked off the force I thought I’d go into the antiques trade. I could train the kids to sneak a few bits of china and silver out of Chatsworth now and then, and they’d never be missed. The place is massive. In fact, can you believe there was no one even living in the part of the house that we went in? So how would they know what they’ve got, and what they haven’t? Someone could make a mint that way, I reckon.’

‘Gavin...’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘We’re investigating a suspicious death,’ said Hitchens. ‘Not planning The Italian Job.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Are there prints on the bust, sir?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes, the victim’s. Neil Granger’s.’

‘He left his fingerprints on it? That’s a bit amateurish, if he’s involved in an organized gang.’

‘Well, they always make a mistake.’

‘Everybody knows not to leave fingerprints these days. It doesn’t feel right.’

‘It’s evidence,’ said Kessen. ‘Let’s see how it all adds up.’

Murfin leaned towards Cooper. ‘’Course it’s evidence,’ he said. ‘Why does he have to state the bleedin’ obvious all the time?’

‘What were the victim’s movements after he left the church at Withens?’ asked Cooper, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard Murfin.

The DCI looked at Hitchens, as if to suggest it was time he did something to earn his pay.

‘It seems he drove straight home,’ said Hitchens. ‘His next-door neighbours noticed Granger’s Volkswagen arrive. That was about twenty minutes after the Reverend Alton says he left the church.’

‘The neighbours saw him?’ said Cooper, who would like to have been able to speak to the neighbours himself, but hadn’t been given the task.

‘No, but the VW has a distinctive engine noise, they say. They also heard Granger’s front door close, and then some music later on, for about three-quarters of an hour.’

‘What music?’

‘Does it matter, Ben?’

‘I’m just wondering how thick the walls are. If the neighbours could tell what the music was, it might mean the walls are thin, and they would hear more of what went on next door.’

‘His neighbours are a different generation to Neil Granger,’ said Hitchens. ‘I don’t suppose they would have recognized the music if they’d been sitting with it blasting down their own headphones.’

‘Anyway, I think it was Nirvana,’ said Cooper.

‘How do you know that?’

‘The CD was still in the player when we visited the house with Granger’s brother. I checked. And it lasts about three-quarters of an hour.’

‘Brilliant.’

Cooper was conscious of a few heads turning towards him around the room.

‘But the thing is, the neighbours never heard Granger go out again,’ said Hitchens. ‘They seemed confident of it, too. They say they usually recognize the sound of his door closing and his car engine. I think they’re right — they would have noticed the same noises later at night, when it was quieter. But they sleep in a bedroom at the front of the house, and Granger keeps his car on some spare ground at the back.’

‘So Granger went out again after the neighbours had gone to bed.’

‘And now you’re going to ask what time that was,’ said Hitchens. ‘You might think they were early to bed, because they’re middle-aged. But in fact, the neighbours stayed up watching a late-night film on ITV.’

‘Schindler’s List,’ said Cooper.

‘Now, how the hell did you know that, Ben?’

‘I watched it myself. It finished at 1.30 a.m.’

There was a strange silence from the officers immediately around him. Even Gavin Murfin seemed to be trying to use his body language to pretend that he was sitting next to someone else entirely. Cooper realized he would probably get ribbed mercilessly in the CID room afterwards. His fellow DCs would be calling him Sherlock for weeks. But he never had quite learned when to keep his mouth shut.

DI Hitchens was staring at him with something like pity. Mr Kessen had gone all glassy-eyed, not unlike poor old Lucius Verrus on the table in front of him.

‘Damn right, Cooper,’ said Hitchens. ‘So the chances are that Neil Granger went out of the house some time between 1.30 a.m. and the time he was killed on Withens Moor later that morning. Unfortunately, we can’t be exact about the time he was killed. Or Mrs Van Doon can’t.’

Another officer across the room took up the challenge. ‘Granger’s VW was parked in a lay-by on the A628, so somebody might have noticed it.’

‘We’ve got teams tracking down lorry drivers who were on that route in the early hours,’ said Hitchens. ‘There’s an all-night roadside café a couple of miles down the road, and we’re hoping the owner might be able to put us on to some of his regulars who were on the road at that time. That might narrow the time down for us. If we’re really lucky, they might have seen another car in the same lay-by. Or even a car and occupants.’

‘Why did Granger park on the road when he could have driven up the track right to the air shaft? Wasn’t there a car that came down the track over the hill? It was seen by the first officers at the scene.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Hitchens. ‘DC Cooper?’

‘The driver’s name is Michael Dearden,’ said Cooper. ‘I went to see him yesterday. He lives just outside Withens at a house called Shepley Head Lodge, and he says he uses the track for a short cut. It’s an old quarry road, but it isn’t suitable for anything apart from a four wheel drive. Granger’s old Volkswagen wouldn’t have made it up the hill.’

‘Whoever met him might have had a four-wheel drive,’ said Hitchens. ‘So we have to bear in mind that they might not even have approached the scene from the A628. If this Dearden came over from the Withens direction, someone else could, too. There’s no restriction on the access at Dearden’s end, Cooper?’

‘No, sir. There’s an open gateway. Withens Moor is access land.’

‘We mustn’t neglect the possibilities. We’ll get someone to check out the lie of the land there.’

‘We’re going to take our time at the scene, too,’ said DCI Kessen. ‘We need to exploit every forensic opportunity.’

‘Unfortunately, sir, the SOCOs say the ground had been trampled thoroughly before the scene was secured.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘Well, the firefighters do tend to have rather large boots. On the other hand, we’ve had more luck from the lay-by where Granger’s car was parked. One of the SOCOs scraped up quite a wide range of samples from the ground there. If we can match the right combination to a suspect’s footwear, it would help us enormously.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kessen. ‘I want to make it clear that we’re going to limit the amount of information we release — particularly what we allow Neil Granger’s associates access to. So we should be circumspect.’

‘Yes, sir.’

DC Murfin leaned towards Cooper again. ‘What does that mean?’ he said. ‘I thought it was when you were Jewish, like.’

‘He means watch what you say.’

‘Ah. As if I’d do anything else.’

Cooper saw Diane Fry turn slightly to look at them over her shoulder, frowning as if she had caught a couple of pupils misbehaving in class.

‘Miss isn’t pleased,’ said Murfin.

‘Shhh.’

‘I can’t emphasize enough that we must be meticulous in preserving evidence,’ said Kessen. ‘This is going to be a real team effort, so we must work together and communicate fully. And remember, everybody — there’s no “i” in “team”.’

Cooper heard Gavin Murfin muttering under his breath.

‘There’s a “u” in bullshit, though,’ he said.

Before the briefing broke up, everyone seemed to need to take another look at the photographs of the victim from the scene. The colours looked so unreal, as if something had gone wrong with the film in the photographer’s camera. Granger’s face was streaked with blood from his head wounds, but it had dried blacker than normal where it lay against his skin. That was because it had streaked and mingled with the black make-up he wore everywhere but around his eyes.

‘If we can find out why and when Neil Granger had blackened his face with theatrical make-up, that might give us the lead we need,’ said DCI Kessen. ‘But at the moment, we keep this fact to ourselves, too.’

Ben Cooper stood in front of the black brick terrace, watching the grey shapes of the wood pigeons that were flying in a small flock now, out over the fields and back again. The sound of the chainsaw that was still operating somewhere behind the houses only seemed to accentuate the eerie silence. Waterloo Terrace stood below the road, sheltered by its screen of trees as if it lay in a cocoon, separate from the rest of the village.

‘Do the Oxleys own these houses?’ he asked.

‘No, they’re rented,’ said Tracy Udall.

‘Council property?’

‘A private landlord.’

‘They’re a bit run-down, aren’t they?’

‘I don’t suppose the Oxleys are ideal tenants.’

‘No.’

‘Where would you like to start, Ben?’

‘My choice, eh? Let’s see the list again.’

Udall’s list was very organized. Number 1 Waterloo Terrace was recorded as being occupied by Mr Lucas Oxley. Strangely, numbers 2 and 3 were listed the same way. Why would Lucas Oxley need three houses? But then his family was rather large, according to Derek Alton.

There were certainly more Oxleys nearby. The fourth house in the terrace was occupied by Mr Scott Oxley, and number 5 was Ms Frances Oxley. But 6 and 7 provided a bit of variety — their occupiers were Mr and Mrs Melvyn Tagg, and Mrs Ruby Wallwin respectively. The eighth house was said to be unoccupied.

‘Who should we tackle first?’ said Cooper to himself. ‘Eeny, meeny or mo? Oxley, Oxley or Oxley? I wonder if they’ve ever thought of starting a firm of solicitors?’

He looked at the terrace of houses again. Logic dictated that he should start at number 1 and see if Mr Lucas Oxley was home again. But he wasn’t feeling logical today, and something told him it might be helpful to approach the Oxleys at a tangent. Besides, he could still remember the dog.

‘Number 7 it is, then. Mrs Wallwin.’

Closer to, the bricks weren’t really black at all. They had an almost purplish tinge, as if they had been steeped in blackberry juice. Number 7 showed few signs of decoration. Its paintwork was a sort of chestnut brown, or had been at one time. The combination with the black bricks was somehow depressing. There were lace curtains in the windows, which gave it an old-fashioned air. It might have been part of a setting for one of those urban townscapes painted by L. S. Lowry. After all, the painter had lived for a number of years at Mottram, down the valley, so it was possible he had seen Waterloo Terrace.

To reach number 7, Cooper and Udall had to pass a fenced-off area where six green wheelie bins were stored. They reached the front walls of the row of gardens. All the gardens were long and narrow, and all were overgrown, despite the past efforts at growing vegetables. They walked up the path, avoiding the nettles that were spreading from the soil on to the stone flags. Cooper took a quick glance at number 8, which was on the other side of one of the dark brick passageways. Its windows were dirty and curtainless, and it had an air of neglect. There was nothing more depressing than a house that had been left empty for a long time, and in Waterloo Terrace it was more depressing than ever.

‘Neil had lived in Tintwistle for about nine months,’ said Philip Granger. ‘His house is right on the main road.’

‘Yes, we know. You went there with DC Cooper and some other officers yesterday,’ said DI Paul Hitchens patiently.

Granger nodded, but didn’t look at Ben Cooper, who was sitting next to the DI. Cooper gathered the impression that Philip Granger didn’t remember him. He’d already made a formal statement this afternoon about his brother, which had been pretty comprehensive. There were details in it that would be gone over again later, but not just now.

In the interview room at West Street, Granger looked as ill as he had the day before. Either he hadn’t shaved before he came out, or he had a bad case of five o’clock shadow. Cooper wanted to ask him if he was experiencing the survivor’s guilt that members of a victim’s family often suffered from — the irrational feeling that the wrong person had died. It should have been me, not him. And all those ‘if onlys’. Maybe it was even worse for an older brother.

‘Neil was forever complaining about the traffic jams in Tintwistle,’ said Granger. ‘They’ve been talking about a Longdendale bypass for years and years. He even went to some of the meetings of the campaign committee, but he didn’t like the other folk who were on it. He said they were pretentious gits with too much time on their hands.’

‘We’re continuing to examine your brother’s house, Mr Granger,’ said Hitchens. ‘As next of kin, you have the right to be present, if you wish.’

‘Next of kin,’ repeated Granger.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve got Neil’s car, too, haven’t you? The Beetle.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Have you found anything yet?’

Hitchens perked up with sudden interest. ‘In the car? Why do you ask?’

‘I thought there might be some clues in it. I mean, Neil might have given someone a lift that night, mightn’t he? He had a habit of doing that. I wouldn’t pick anybody up myself, because you never know who they might be these days. But Neil didn’t always see sense like that.’

‘I understand.’

Granger looked at Cooper for the first time.

‘It was the vicar that phoned me, you know,’ he said. ‘Mr Alton.’

‘Yes, you mentioned it in your statement,’ said Cooper. ‘Mr Alton was expecting Neil to help him in the churchyard on Saturday morning.’

‘I went round to Neil’s house, but there was no sign of him.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But I didn’t really think there was anything wrong. I didn’t think...’

Granger stopped. He seemed to feel the need to go over again some of the things he’d said in his statement. But only some of the things — those that affected himself. Perhaps they were the only facts he was sure of, and the rest of it he couldn’t believe.

‘The next-door neighbours couldn’t give a toss,’ he said.

‘Did your brother not get on with them?’

‘I don’t think they liked the look of him any more than me. But they hated me coming to his house on my bike.’

‘You don’t live too far away yourself, do you?’

‘I share a place with some mates in Old Glossop.’

Hitchens glanced at Cooper.

‘Five or six miles, something like that? So you’re only a few minutes away.’

‘It depends on the traffic.’

‘It must have been quite different for both of you, when you moved away from Withens,’ said Cooper. ‘You had plenty of family living nearby when you were there.’

‘We lived at Waterloo Terrace, near our uncle and aunt. Number 7.’

‘Number 7?’ said Cooper, surprised.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘For some reason, I thought it must have been number 8. It’s the empty one.’

‘That house has been empty a while,’ said Granger. ‘But we lived at number 7. My uncle fixed all that up with the landlords.’

‘So Mrs Wallwin has only been there a few months.’

Granger looked puzzled. ‘Who?’

‘The lady who lives in number 7 now.’

‘Oh.’

DI Hitchens coughed impatiently.

‘I’m sure you have a lot you need to do, Mr Granger. But one more thing I must ask you about before you go is this.’

Hitchens produced the bronze bust in its evidence bag. Granger reached out a hand to straighten the clear plastic, but made no attempt to touch the bust itself.

‘Do you recognize it at all, sir?’

‘No. I’m sorry,’ said Granger.

‘Do you recall your brother possessing something like this?’

‘Not at all.’

‘But you’re familiar with the interior of his house? Have you been inside recently? Before his death, I mean.’

‘A few days ago, yes.’

‘Did you see anything resembling this?’

‘No, I’d have noticed it. It would be out of place.’

‘Might your brother have bought it as a gift for someone, do you think? A girlfriend? Is there someone in his life who likes antiques?’

‘I’m sure there isn’t. It certainly doesn’t belong to Neil. It isn’t the sort of thing he would have in the house. I don’t remember seeing it when I was there yesterday—’

‘No, sir.’ Hitchens put the bag aside with a satisfied air. ‘It was in your brother’s car.’

Granger shook his head. ‘Could Neil have found it? Or I suppose somebody could have given it to him.’

‘Unlikely, sir, don’t you think? We understand it could be rather valuable.’

‘I can’t help you, then.’

Hitchens stood up and shook Philip Granger’s hand. ‘On the contrary, sir,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful indeed.’

‘You see?’ said Sarah Renshaw. ‘That could be Emma.’

Diane Fry handed back the paper. Her eyes had automatically been drawn to the next case study below it, which was headed ‘We find long-lost sister’. She didn’t want to read that one. She suspected how easy it would be for her, too, to become convinced that her case would be the next success story for the National Missing Persons Helpline.

‘We’re in touch with all the agencies,’ said Sarah. ‘They send us news regularly. We have Child Find and Missing Kids in the USA. The NMPH, of course. UK Missing Persons. People Searchers. We’ve listed Emma with them all, and we check regularly. If she turns up somewhere, they’ll let us know.’

‘You shouldn’t put too much faith in the system, Mrs Renshaw.’

‘Oh, but they get results all the time. I’ve looked at their websites on the internet. They have wonderful successes every week for somebody. They find missing persons who have been suffering from amnesia and don’t know who they are, or people who have gone off for some reason and then haven’t been able to get up the courage to contact their families. Every week, they find people like that. One week, it could be Emma that they find.’

‘But there’s no way you can keep up with every single missing or homeless girl in the world, is there?’

‘We have to try.’

Then Fry took out the photograph of Emma taken in Italy.

‘Who’s the other girl in this photograph?’ she asked.

‘One of the students on the same course,’ said Sarah. ‘I forget her name.’

Fry turned the photo over. ‘Emma and Khadi, Milan’ was scrawled on the back, with the date.

‘Her name seems to be Khadi. Do you know anything about her?’

‘No. I think she’s a local girl — from Birmingham, I mean.’

‘Did Emma know her well?’

‘I don’t think so. She isn’t one of the friends she socializes with. I think that’s a problem when students are local — they don’t live in the halls of residence, or in student accommodation, so they don’t mix in as much socially.’

‘Also, it probably means they’re still living at home with their parents,’ said Fry. ‘That can hinder their social lives a bit, in some cases.’

‘Yes, especially—’ Sarah Renshaw stopped.

‘Especially what?’

‘Well, she’s an Asian girl, isn’t she? I understand some Asian families don’t give their daughters quite as much freedom as we do. It’s different for sons, of course.’

‘Is that right?’

Fry had dealt with many Asian families during her time in the West Midlands. She had encountered young women with Asian backgrounds who had every bit as much freedom as Emma Renshaw had been given. Probably more, in fact. But it was true that if the girl called Khadi had lived with her parents, that could have been the reason she hadn’t socialized with Emma and her friends, whatever her background.

‘We never spoke to her, did we?’ said Howard. ‘I don’t think she can be a particular friend of Emma’s.’

‘I’m sure the local police would have spoken to her anyway, if she was,’ said Fry.

‘Well, I’m not sure of that at all.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Khadi. It sounded like a shortened form of some other name. Fry racked her brain, trying to cast her mind back to Birmingham and the Black Country. She seemed to have lost most of her cultural awareness in just a few months spent in the Peak District. There were a few Asians in Edendale, but most of them were Chinese and ran restaurants and take-aways. Sometimes, there were parties of Japanese tourists. But seeing a person from the Indian subcontinent, or an Afro-Caribbean, was still quite a rarity.

Khadija. Was that it? She made a note to get someone to contact the art school in Birmingham and track down a student with that name. The school would grumble, no doubt, but it was worth following up. It felt like a loose end.

‘I take it you’ve heard about what happened to Neil Granger?’ she said.

‘Yes, we heard yesterday.’

‘Yesterday? The day he was found?’

‘Gail Dearden told us. She’s a friend of ours.’

‘The Deardens live up the road a little way out of Withens,’ said Sarah. ‘They bought the former gamekeeper’s lodge.’

‘Is that Alex Dearden’s mother?’

‘That’s right. She said her husband Michael saw the body, and he thought he recognized Neil Granger.’

Fry frowned. She remembered that Dearden’s car had been intercepted by officers at the scene where Granger was found. She hadn’t visited the air shaft herself, but she was surprised that Dearden could have been allowed close enough to identify the body.

‘What was Mr Dearden doing there?’ she said.

‘We’ve no idea.’

‘Alex doesn’t live with his parents now, does he? He has a house in Edendale.’

‘He never really went back home after he graduated,’ said Sarah. ‘He got a job with a computer company in Edendale, and he moved to live there. I don’t think Michael and Gail see as much of him as they’d like. But he has a girlfriend, and it seems serious, so he has other things to think about than his mum and dad.’

‘Unfortunately, I never did get the chance to speak to Neil Granger about Emma.’

‘That’s a shame. Do you think he might have known where she is? We’ve never asked him, not since we went down to Bearwood two years ago.’

‘You’ve asked Alex Dearden often, he says.’

‘Yes, but that’s different. The Granger boys weren’t people we talked to very much.’

Fry sighed. It didn’t make sense to her. It seemed the fact that Sarah Renshaw had pestered Alex Dearden for news of Emma, but not Neil Granger, didn’t actually mean she thought Alex was more likely to know something.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to go over that last day again with you,’ she said.

‘Last day?’

‘The day Emma went missing.’

‘Ah.’

‘As I understand it, she was planning to get a taxi from the house at 360B Darlaston Road, Bearwood, to New Street railway station in Birmingham.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you certain she was getting a taxi? It’s only a few miles. Might she have caught a bus, as she did when she went in to college?’

‘I don’t think so, do you?’ said Sarah.

‘Well, I don’t know, Mrs Renshaw. Emma was a student — she might have decided she couldn’t afford a taxi. If she was a fit girl, she might have preferred to walk to the bus stop, even with her bags.’

‘But the others said she was getting a taxi.’

‘But did Emma tell you that herself?’

Sarah looked at her husband for guidance, but he shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t think so. Not in so many words.’

‘OK, thank you. Now, we believe Emma was due to catch a train from New Street station a few minutes before eleven o’clock that morning, and she would have to change at Manchester Piccadilly to get to Glossop, where you were supposed to collect her at twenty past one.’

‘That’s right. We tried to call her mobile phone, but we only got the message service.’

‘Mrs Renshaw, would you have expected Emma to have phoned you at some stage?’

‘Well, if her train was late, or she missed one...’

‘But before that? Wouldn’t you have expected her to phone to tell you she was setting off? Or to call you from the train? Or to let you know she’d arrived at Manchester?’

‘Well, perhaps. But she might not have been able to reach us,’ said Sarah. ‘I think I was in and out of the house all morning. I had some shopping to do, because we were having a dinner party to celebrate Emma coming home, and there were a few things I had to get.’

‘No messages? You have an answering machine?’

‘Call Minder. But there were no messages. Anyway, I think Emma would have been more likely to ring Howard’s mobile, since she knew he was driving to collect her at Glossop. But Howard was out on business all morning. You had some meetings, didn’t you, dear?’

‘Yes. I was trying to pack everything into the morning, so I was very busy.’

‘No voice mails?’

Howard shook his head.

‘In fact, it was a bit of a rush for Howard to get back here and pick up me up before he drove to Glossop,’ said Sarah, with a smile. ‘He arrived a bit stressed, poor man, because he’d been battling through the traffic in Sheffield and he thought he was going to be late. He said it would have been easier for him to have gone to Glossop on his own, but I wanted so much to be there to meet Emma.’

Fry wanted to stare at Howard Renshaw to see what she could read in his face, but she resisted the temptation.

‘So you both went to Glossop to meet your daughter. You hadn’t heard from her, so you assumed she was arriving on the twenty past one train. And when she didn’t get off the train, you waited for the next one.’

‘Yes.’

Fry had a painful image of Sarah standing on the station platform at Glossop, getting excited as the diesel units pulled in from Manchester, her hand already half-raised, ready to wave the moment she set eyes on her daughter. And when Emma didn’t arrive? Had Howard reassured his wife, checked the time of the next train, and taken her across the road for a coffee while they waited? How had he coped as the hours dragged on, and Emma still hadn’t appeared? How had Sarah herself coped?

But Fry didn’t need to wonder about that. Sarah had remained hopeful. Her hope had never died — it still shone from her face now, as she was obliged to go over the story for the umpteenth time.

Every time she spoke to the Renshaws, Fry found their air of belief palpable, even contagious. A few minutes later, as she was sitting in their lounge talking about Emma, someone rang the doorbell. Both the Renshaws gave a sharp intake of breath, and Sarah looked immediately at the clock. While Howard jumped up and went to the door, his wife fussed with the cushions and smoothed her dress, as if an important visitor were about to walk in.

The expectation was so strong inside the room that Fry felt obliged to get out of her chair to look out of the window. She half-expected to see Emma herself standing in the drive, two years older than her photos, but restored to living flesh and still wearing the blue jacket and jeans that Fry had so often seen mentioned in interview reports. But it wasn’t Emma Renshaw. Instead, it was a pale woman in a green jacket.

‘Who was that?’ she said, when Howard returned.

‘Gail Dearden. She had some news.’

‘Oh?’

‘Another sighting.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of who,’ Sarah corrected her with a smile. ‘Gail helps us to collect cuttings for the album.’

‘What album is this?’ said Fry, with a sinking feeling.

The album was sitting right there on a bookshelf. It was a thick volume with heavy blue covers that had been well-thumbed. Howard picked it up almost reverentially and passed it to her, with a glance at Sarah for her approval.

Reluctantly, Fry opened the album and glanced at the first few pages. She had been right to be apprehensive. A few minutes ago, she had casually remarked that the Renshaws couldn’t keep up with every single missing or homeless girl in the world. Mrs Renshaw had said that they could try. And boy, how they were trying.

‘Take it away with you for a while,’ said Sarah. ‘There are plenty of possibilities for you there, I think.’

Ben Cooper remembered the first time Diane Fry had mentioned her sister to him. It had made him feel guilty, as if he had dragged something painful out of her that she would rather have kept to herself. And he knew that Fry had been searching for that missing sister ever since she’d transferred to Derbyshire from the West Midlands. In fact, she had told him herself that it was the only reason she’d come to Edendale, desperately following a rumour that Angie was somewhere in one of the big cities to the north.

Cooper felt sure that it was desperation and hope that had driven Fry this far. Desperation to find the one remaining link to her own past, and therefore perhaps the confirmation she needed of her own identity. And hope that she might find her sister before it was too late.

Now he thought about it, Cooper knew he had never really believed that Diane’s hope would ever be justified. Too many possibilities awaited someone who had been a heroin addict by the age of sixteen — as Angie had been, according to her sister. Yet that desperate faith had actually been strong enough to produce Angie herself, right here in the flesh, in the sitting room of his flat at 8 Welbeck Street.

Cooper was so surprised by the fact that for a few minutes he could only stare at his visitor stupidly. He sat down on the arm of the sofa, suddenly feeling so disorientated that he was afraid his knees might otherwise crumple and leave him sprawled on the floor in an undignified heap. Then he stood up again immediately and opened his mouth to speak. But the only questions that came into his mind were ‘Why here?’ and ‘Why me?’, which sounded too discourteous to be uttered to a visitor.

‘How did you find out where I live?’ he said at last.

Angie Fry brushed a strand of hair from her forehead in a familiar gesture that he saw almost every day. ‘Oh, they told me at the police station.’

‘I see. They gave you my address?’

‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind. It’s important, or I wouldn’t have come here bothering you.’

Cooper realized his mouth was hanging open. He could neither believe what he was seeing, nor what he was being told. But the person standing in the middle of his rug was too like Diane Fry to be anybody except who she said she was. And his upbringing prevented him from blurting out what was in his mind.

Angie looked at him and smiled briefly. Cooper thought for a moment that it was a mocking smile, but it disappeared from her face too quickly for him to be sure.

‘Well, aren’t you going to offer me a coffee or something?’ she said. ‘You might even ask me to sit down, rather than leaving me standing here.’

‘Of course. Would you like coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’

‘Coffee would be great,’ she said. ‘White, no sugar.’

‘Just the way Diane has it. No sugar.’

‘Like they say, we’re both sweet enough already.’

‘Maybe.’

The kitchen of the flat was near enough for Cooper to continue holding a conversation with Angie while he made the coffee and lifted down a pair of Simpsons mugs from the dresser.

‘Did you call in at the station, or did you phone?’ he said.

‘Oh, I phoned.’

‘Who did you speak to?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Just wondering. Did you get put through to CID, or did you talk to someone on the enquiries desk? Male or female?’

He got no answer. Eventually, he went back into the room with two mugs of coffee and found Angie Fry sitting on the floor with her back against his sofa, staring at the ceiling. She’d taken off her rucksack and jacket, and he could see she was wearing an old sweatshirt with lettering that might have been the name of a university or a rock band, but was too worn to read.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Questions and more questions,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d treat me like this. You are a copper, after all. Suspicious lot, aren’t you?’

‘We’re trained to be. But, whether as a copper or just as another human being, I prefer to be told the truth.’

‘I am telling you the truth,’ she said.

‘I don’t think so.’

She said nothing, but sat and looked at him for a moment. He was relieved that she didn’t try to bluff it out, to bluster and lie barefaced, as he had heard so many people do in the interview rooms at West Street. So he didn’t hesitate in explaining what he meant.

‘They would never give out a police officer’s home address at the station,’ he said. ‘It’s the number one rule. You really ought to have known that.’

For a second, he thought she might laugh. But that mocking half-smile flitted across her lips again, then vanished. She nodded, lowering her eyes. Her shoulders slumped a little inside the sweatshirt.

‘I’m not a very good liar,’ she said. ‘I should have known not to try to lie.’

‘We get plenty of experience of hearing good liars,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, I expect you do.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘Are you going to tell me the truth?’

‘Perhaps I’d better,’ she said. But Cooper, listening carefully to the intonation of her voice, thought she might as well have shaken her head and said ‘no’. Unlike some of the regular customers they had to interview at West Street, Angie Fry had learned to lie only through her words. She hadn’t mastered the techniques of controlling her voice and the expression on her face, of disguising the tension in her body and the look in her eyes. He had listened to scores of much better liars than Angie Fry. Much better.

‘I heard you were a farm boy, Ben. So I looked in the local Yellow Pages for farmers called Cooper. Though I can’t imagine Di ever having any interest in farming.’

‘Di?’

The mocking smile was there this time, definitely. Cooper felt himself go a little pink in the neck. ‘Of course. Diane.’

‘We were always Di and Angie to each other, when we were little.’

Cooper nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, I was lucky for once. The first number I tried was the wrong Cooper, but the second was right. Bridge End Farm, was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And was that your dad I spoke to?’

Taken by surprise, Cooper tensed painfully, his fingernails stabbing into his palms as his hands clenched. The physical reaction to any unexpected mention of his father never failed to embarrass him.

‘I think it would have been my brother,’ he said.

‘Oh, right.’ She raised an eyebrow slightly. ‘An older brother, is he? Interesting.’

That smile was starting to become annoying. Each time it appeared, it seemed to linger a bit longer, and looked a little more openly mocking.

‘Yes, an older brother. What’s interesting about that?’

‘I don’t know really. Just the older brother/older sister thing. It can be complicated, can’t it?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Cooper, who had decided he wasn’t going to give away even the slightest detail of his private life that she didn’t know already.

‘Anyway, I made out I was an old college friend of yours who’d lost touch with you. I asked if you still lived there, at the farm. And your brother told me you’d moved out, and he gave me your new address. He’s not like you, is he? He wasn’t suspicious of me at all. I take it he’s not a copper.’

‘Of course not. He’s a farmer.’

That part of the story, at least, would be easy enough to check out with Matt. Bridge End Farm was certainly in the Yellow Pages, but Angie could have thought that through. As for where she had heard that he was a farm boy in the first place, it seemed to Cooper that there was only one person who might have told Angie Fry that. And it made no sense at all.

‘What else did you hear about me?’ he said.

‘Not very much.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. What else is there to know about you?’

‘Not very much. But I’m curious where you heard anything about me at all.’

She hid her face in her coffee mug, lowering her eyes. ‘I asked around. Everyone knows you.’

That last bit was true, at least — Cooper could hardly deny that. There were far too many people in Edendale who knew all about him. Diane had told him he was mad to move into this flat in the centre of town, where he would be so close to so many people who knew exactly who he was and might have reason to bear a grudge. But it had caused no problems for him. Not until tonight, anyway.

‘You’re looking happier,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘You’re smiling a lot. You weren’t smiling like that when you arrived.’

‘It must be because I feel at ease with you.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, you’re a good listener. But then, I suppose you’d say you’re trained to be.’

Cooper put down his mug. ‘You’d better get to the point and tell me what it is you want from me.’

‘Oh...’

He could feel himself starting to lose patience then. Angie was intruding into his private life uninvited and without a proper explanation, and he really didn’t have to be polite to her all evening, if he didn’t feel like it.

‘There’s no point in pretending you don’t want something,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have gone through all that business with the Yellow Pages and phoning up farmers called Cooper if you didn’t want something from me, Angie. So I don’t want to hear any more of this rubbish. Just cut to the chase, and tell me what you want. Then I can say “no” and go back to my own life.’

Angie looked down at her coffee mug. She was still clutching it, though he had watched her tip back the last drops of coffee several minutes ago. Her fingers were tight and white at the joints. They moved restlessly against the smooth porcelain, tracing the slightly raised shapes of Homer and Marge. Backwards and forwards her fingers went, following the shapes, keeping themselves moving. Reluctantly, Cooper found he couldn’t hold on to his burst of irritation.

‘Have you spoken to Diane recently?’ he said.

Angie shook her head.

‘When? Not since you left Warley?’

‘No.’

‘But that was years and years ago.’

‘It’s fifteen years.’

Cooper restrained an exclamation. It was beyond his comprehension how sisters could be apart for fifteen years without getting in touch with each other. But stranger things happened in families.

‘I know Diane has been looking for you,’ he said. ‘In fact, she’s been looking for you very hard recently. She once told me it was the reason she’d come to Derbyshire, because she’d managed to track you down as far as Sheffield and this was as near as she could get.’

‘Yes, I know she’s been looking for me.’

Cooper began to get impatient again. ‘Well, if you know that, what’s the problem? You’ve found me, so I’m sure you could have found Diane a whole lot easier. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to talk to Diane for you? Maybe arrange a meeting? You want to do it gradually, is that what you’re worried about? I know it’s going to be a shock for both of you, after so long.’

Angie listened him out with a defiant stare. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ she said. ‘Completely wrong.’

‘What then?’

She leaned forward suddenly, thrusting her narrow face towards him, so that he couldn’t avoid the stare of her pale eyes or miss the tiny lines clustered around her temples, lines etched by years of pain.

‘I want you to explain to her that I never want to see her again,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell her to leave me alone.’

Cooper sat back, shocked by the vehemence that was suddenly in her voice. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Mean it?’ Now she put the mug down on the table, with a crack like the noise of an air rifle. ‘Believe me, I don’t want my little sister back in my life. And I’m damn sure she doesn’t really need me back in hers. But there’s no way I can try to tell her that myself. She’s so damn stupid and pig-headed that she wouldn’t believe me. I know from past experience that she only believes what she wants to hear, and I could never do any wrong as far as she was concerned. She never saw the real me, no matter how much I shoved it in her face.’

‘People change a lot in fifteen years,’ said Cooper quietly.

‘Do you think she’s changed? Or would you say she was still like that?’

He sat back. ‘Go on.’

‘But you could convince her, couldn’t you? Diane would believe you. They say you’re the man who believes in things like telling the truth. Is that right? Or are you going to be another one who just pisses me about?’

‘If Diane wants to make contact with you again, who am I to make a different decision for her?’

‘It’s not your decision, it’s mine. And I’m her big sister, so I know best.’ Angie sighed. ‘OK, what can I do? Will you listen if I tell you the whole story?’

Cooper hesitated. From the little Diane had said, he wasn’t sure it was anything he really wanted to hear. But what else was he going to be doing this evening?

‘Like you said, I’m a good listener.’

So Angie told him. It took fifteen to twenty minutes, with frequent pauses. But Cooper got the sense of the girl who had rebelled against her family situation, who had been desperate to escape from the nightmare she had got herself trapped in. Any escape route must have looked attractive to her then. But she had only been leaving one trap to enter another.

‘We were both taken into care by Social Services. I was eleven, and Diane was nine. They said my parents had been abusing me. Well, of course they had. My dad anyway, and my mum knew. No point trying to pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘And Diane, too?’ said Cooper.

Angie hesitated. ‘Has she said so?’

‘She says she can’t remember.’

‘Yeah, right.’ But then her tone changed. ‘Well, she was only a kid. Maybe she can’t. But you see why I know she won’t have changed now. The fear goes way back when.’

‘You were fostered together, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah. They kept moving us on to different places, though. So many different places that I can’t remember them. It was because of me that we didn’t stay anywhere long. I was big trouble wherever we went. But Di thought the sun shone, and she screamed the roof down at the idea of being split up from me. In the end, I couldn’t stick it any longer. I left our last foster home when I was sixteen, and never went back. I haven’t seen Diane since. And it’s much better that way, believe me.’

‘I know you were already using heroin,’ said Cooper.

‘So she told you all about that, too? She must really think a lot of you, Ben.’

‘I think it just slipped out.’

Angie raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, yeah? My little sister doesn’t let things slip out, unless it’s for a reason.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, you’re right. The thing is, I was stealing stuff from the house to pay for it. Stealing from our foster parents. That’s why there was so much trouble. They just couldn’t deal with it, with the idea that this was the way I showed my gratitude. So I had all this shit flying around my head all the time until I thought I was going to be sick on their Axminster carpet, and all I could think about was the next hit. You know, as long as you get your daily fix, you don’t care about anyone. You’ll use anybody, steal or rob, just for a hit. They always say it’s the needle that some people get addicted to, not the drug. They call it needle fever. So it was better for me to leave — better for Di, too. I couldn’t stand the thought that she would follow the same route.’

Angie was staring at the ceiling again, rather than look at Cooper. As he had expected, tears began to form in the corners of her eyes as she spoke. She made no attempt to wipe them away, and they streaked her face as they trickled across her cheekbones.

‘So it’s not quite true that you didn’t care about anyone,’ said Cooper.

Angie flushed. ‘Don’t try to trap me. I’m telling it like it was. You need to know that, no matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger. I’ve done cold turkey many times, and they’ve had me on a detox programme. Do you know how long you have to wait for help from the Drugs Service? Up to twenty-eight weeks for an appointment. Six months. Do you know what can happen to you in that time? Do you know how easy it is to die? It doesn’t take six months. I went through hell doing all that, but I always went back to the drugs. No matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger in the end. It’s always there in your brain, and it just calls you and calls you. I know Diane would try to make me stop, but I couldn’t deal with that. Neither of us could deal with that.’

Cooper was silent. Despite the deception and the performance he was watching now, the feeling was creeping over him that Angie Fry was essentially telling him the truth. He wasn’t entirely convinced, but there was sufficient doubt in his mind.

‘I’m still not sure that I shouldn’t phone Diane right now and tell her you’re here,’ he said.

‘They told me you were Di’s friend. If you care anything about her, you won’t let this happen to her. You won’t let me happen to her.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘The trouble is, I really don’t think there’s anything I can do.’

‘She has false hopes, don’t you realize that?’ said Angie, with a brief flash of anger that Cooper found familiar. ‘Diane has expectations that I can never live up to. Quite the opposite. When she found out the truth about my life, she would be so ashamed of her sis that it would knock the bottom out of her world. She always had a kind of fragile sense of security. She always needed something to hang onto to make her feel safe in the world.’ She paused, and gave him that challenging smile, even through the tears. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me that people change in fifteen years?’

Cooper wanted to tell her exactly that, but sensed that Angie was right. It fitted in with his own impressions of Diane. He had always thought there was an underlying fear that she barely kept suppressed by hanging on to the stable things in her life — her job, and her promotion ambitions. And her memories of her sister.

‘Are you on or off it right now?’ said Cooper.

Angie Fry smiled that slow, sad smile, but with the instant deviousness in her eyes, the expression that told him she was wondering what lie to use.

‘Maybe I’d better not tell you that,’ she said. ‘You being a policeman, and all. I wouldn’t want to compromise your principles.’

And Cooper knew she was right. If Angie was using heroin now, he would be in difficulties. If she had to get her fix while she was here, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to be forced into that position.

But he couldn’t help studying her eyes, an automatic reflex from his training. Of course, Angie saw him doing it, and met his stare with undisguised challenge.

‘Red eyes, it’s dope,’ she said. ‘Dilated means amphetamines. But “pinny” eyes — then, it’s heroin.’

Cooper kept on looking. But something must be wrong with his powers of observation. When he looked into Angie’s eyes, he couldn’t see any of the symptoms of drug abuse. All he could see were the pain and the loneliness. And beyond them, that brief flicker that turned his heart for a moment as he looked deep into the eyes of Angie’s younger sister.

He watched her pick up her rucksack from the floor. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’

She straightened up, pushed the hair from her forehead, gave him that smile. ‘I don’t know. Can you recommend a good shop doorway somewhere? I’ve got the sleeping bag.’

‘You’re living rough?’

‘I’m on the streets. What did you think? That I was staying in some smart little hotel with room service and an en-suite bathroom?’

‘Haven’t you got any money?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to get any today.’

‘How do you usually get money?’

‘How do you think?’

He hoped she meant by begging, but he decided not to press it. ‘You shouldn’t be sleeping on the streets, Angie.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It isn’t safe.’

‘So? If you’re so concerned about it, what are you going to do? Are you going to ask me to stay the night here?’

‘No.’

‘No, I thought not. It wouldn’t do, would it? What would people say? What would our Di say?’

She went out into the hallway and opened the front door. Cooper held it for her while she pulled her rucksack over her thin shoulders, and watched her step out on to the pavement. She looked around, weighing up which way to go, trying to remember where the shops were, or whether there was a park she might find, and a shelter with a vacant bench.

‘There are plenty of benches by the river walk, but it’ll be colder down there,’ said Cooper. ‘Water loses heat faster at night.’

‘Thanks for the tip,’ she said.

‘The market square is quiet, but only after about three o’clock in the morning, when the night-club crowds have gone home. And it’s market day tomorrow, so the market staff will arrive at 5 a.m. to start setting up the stalls. That can be a bit noisy.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘And if you slept on my sofa, you’d have to put up with the cats. They’re a complete pain. Diane hates cats, so I expect you do, too.’

She looked down the street again. Cooper could hear the sound of the cars on Meadow Road. There was a car stereo playing rap music far too loud, and somebody burning rubber off their tyres as they accelerated from the lights. A traffic patrol would be hanging around later to discourage the boy racers. There was a burst of raucous laughter and the rattle of a can on the pavement.

‘I’m not like Diane at all,’ said Angie. ‘I’m quite the opposite, in fact. I thought you would have realized that by now.’

Cooper looked at her slim hand brushing away the hair, the narrow shoulders, the wiry body, the challenging look in her eyes as she turned towards him. ‘You’re not entirely the opposite,’ he said.

‘Maybe not. But I’ll tell you something — I don’t mind cats. I quite like them, within reason.’

‘Reason has nothing to do with it.’

‘I know.’

‘And you’ll have to be out of here by 8 a.m.’

‘Do you have to be at work?’

‘Out by 8 a.m.,’ said Cooper.

‘OK, it’s a deal, then. Cats and all.’

He took her rucksack off her as she walked past him back into the house.

‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘It’s OK, there’s no need to say “you’re welcome”. Because I know I’m not. You just had a sudden vision of me being attacked by some pervert on a bench by the river during the night. And then it might have come out that the friendly local bobby, Constable Cooper, had told me that was the best place to sleep. Not good for your reputation, eh?’

‘I’ll get you some blankets,’ said Cooper.

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

For a moment, Cooper remembered the feeling he’d experienced just before he answered the door to Angie. That premonition of disaster.

But he pushed the feeling aside. She’d be out of his flat by 8 a.m. tomorrow — he’d make sure of it. And that would be the last he would ever see of Angie Fry. He’d make certain of that, too.

For the past three nights, Diane Fry had dreamed that she found Emma Renshaw’s body. Emma had been dead for two years, and the skin had shrunk to pale tatters on her skull, so that it had become a rubber mask that could be twisted and rearranged into any shape you wanted. For Fry, it transformed into the face of a sixteen-year-old girl — a face as familiar to her as her own, and yet alien. A face that left her sweating, and thrashing her limbs in tangled bedclothes.

Fry knew this fear. This kind of fear was insidious. You could go to bed at night feeling free of it. Yet when you woke in the morning, you found it had descended from the darkest corners of your room and clung to you like cobwebs.

So the smell, the sound or the movement that she knew ought to be innocent, suggesting safety, now brought with it not a specific fear, nor a memory of the event that had scarred her in the first place. Instead, it created a sort of general dread, a vague, shapeless terror of something she couldn’t picture or name. In everything now she saw something to fear. The blood in the poppies, the mould in the grass. The bones under the skin of the girl.

That morning, something finally occurred to Fry that she should have known for a long time. She might well be living in a fantasy world of her own making, just as much as the Renshaws were. Angie Fry was no more likely to come home now than Emma Renshaw was. After all, Angie had been gone for fifteen years. A decade and a half. Fry had to repeat it to herself, but it still didn’t mean what it should. Hardly any time at all had passed in her own mind — not in that corner where Angie was still a teenager full of life, setting off for a rave somewhere, leaving the house with a laugh and a brief kiss for her younger sister, vanishing into the night in a whiff of scent and the smell of dope.

Fry knew she wasn’t immune to the tricks that the mind played. Why should she be free of the need to cling to a desperate, mistaken belief in the face of reality? Was she, too, blind to the bones?

Angie had already been using heroin by the time she disappeared, and the life of an addict was brutish and short. Fry had seen enough of other people’s brothers and sisters to know what happened to them. Fifteen years was a long time in an addict’s life. And if Angie had still been alive, she would have found her by now.

Fry found herself facing a decision that had slipped through the gap in her curtains like the dawn replacing the yellow glare of the streetlights outside her window. She had to accept that Angie was dead. Otherwise there was nowhere for her to go, except into the dark alleyways of obsession.

For the first time in months, Fry spent some time doing her exercises, emptying her mind, searching for the energy that she needed to get her through. She positioned herself on the rug in her bedroom and went through the movements, gradually losing sight of the faded wallpaper and the floor as her eyes looked beyond them and into herself. Finally, she began to feel the first whispers of the physical intensity that would provide her with the strength that she had lost.

It was a start, but not enough. She needed to put all thoughts of Angie out of her mind, and let the knowledge of her sister’s death steal up on her quietly without her noticing. And, perhaps most of all, she needed support in dealing with the Renshaws — the kind of support the presence of Gavin Murfin couldn’t give her.

Fry introduced Cooper to Howard and Sarah Renshaw, and he was allowed to sit on the settee next to Edgar the teddy.

‘Can I ask you something that may not appear very relevant?’ said Fry.

Howard Renshaw smiled faintly. ‘We’ve been asked so many questions that we’re hardly in a position to know what’s relevant and what isn’t any more. So go ahead.’

‘You’ve told me about your house in Marple, and how much you liked living there...’

‘Yes.’

‘From what I’ve heard, it sounds a very pleasant area. Nice neighbours, good schools, close to the countryside but near enough to get into Manchester or Sheffield easily. And you said you made lots of friends in the neighbourhood.’

‘That’s right. So what did you want to ask?’

‘What on earth,’ said Fry, ‘made you move to Withens?’

Sarah laughed. ‘Well, first of all, you have to realize that it was over twenty years ago, when Emma was very small. We were different people then.’

‘We were twenty years younger ourselves,’ said Howard. ‘I think that had a lot to do with it.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

Howard perched on the arm of Sarah’s chair. Fry expected her to touch his arm or even hold his hand. Previously, it would have been the sort of gesture she would have noticed between them. But Sarah didn’t do that. Instead, she rearranged her skirt and held her hands in her lap.

‘The thing about Withens,’ she said, ‘is that it’s a kind of separate world on its own. When we saw it, we realized it was nothing like all those nice commuter villages we’d known before. It was much more real. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘There was something rather spiritual about it. To us, then, it seemed like the sort of place we wanted to bring up a child.’

Fry sneaked a glance at Cooper. His expression told her what she wanted to know. Maybe he was thinking of the Oxleys and having difficulty locating the spirituality.

‘We fell in love with Withens almost as soon as we saw it,’ said Howard.

‘Did you?’

‘It was summer when we first came,’ said Sarah.

‘Yes?’

‘It can be a little difficult in the winter.’

Sarah laughed at her husband. ‘We were so innocent, weren’t we? One of the first things we did was take down a big stone wall at the back of the house. It must have been ten feet high, and we couldn’t understand why anybody had built it there. It didn’t seem to have any purpose at all — not something of that height.’

‘We made jokes about how high those nineteenth-century sheep must have been able to jump.’

‘Well, you made jokes,’ said Sarah.

‘As far as we were concerned, a wall that height was just blocking the view up the valley from the house. So we took it down.’

‘We had a much better view,’ said Sarah. ‘For a while.’

‘What happened?’

‘Winter came. And it snowed.’

‘We realized why they had built a wall ten feet high,’ said Howard. ‘It was because that was the height of the snow drifts. The snow came down the valley on the north winds, and we were the first place to get snowed in that winter. And since we’d taken the wall down, it drifted against the side of the house instead of being stopped by the wall.’

‘The first morning, we had to dig our way out of the door.’

‘That was a particularly bad winter,’ said Howard. ‘But that’s one of the things about Withens — you get the feeling that something like that could happen at any time. It’s as if nature is waiting to give you a sharp little nudge whenever you seem likely to forget about her.’

‘And that’s what makes Withens seem real?’ asked Fry.

‘It’s one of the things,’ said Howard. ‘It seemed to us that a child should grow up knowing about nature and the seasons. And I think we were right. Emma is the sort of girl who belongs in the countryside. She has a special relationship with nature.’

‘You said one of the things. What else?’

‘There are the people, of course. They’re wonderful.’

Fry stared at him. ‘Sorry. Are we still talking about Withens?’

‘Don’t you think they’re wonderful?’

‘Detective Constable Cooper knows the people here better than I do.’

‘They’re interesting,’ said Cooper. ‘No doubt about it. And some of them I can’t imagine living anywhere else.’

Both the Renshaws looked at him as if he had said something very profound.

‘I’ve been trying to persuade Sergeant Fry to come to our Emma Day,’ Howard told him. ‘You’re going to come, aren’t you, Sergeant?’

Fry wanted to bolt for it, but she couldn’t. Sarah seized on her hesitation eagerly.

‘Yes, you must both come. We need all the support you can give us, so we know you’ll come.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ said her husband. ‘We’re so grateful. So grateful for everything you’re doing for us.’

Fry began to shake her head, but Sarah Renshaw had fastened her intense gaze on her.

‘Bring Constable Cooper with you,’ she said. ‘He’ll appreciate Emma’s work.’

‘There’ll be a little display in the garden, if the weather’s fine,’ said Howard. ‘Down in Emma’s Corner.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, we decided to plant a tree on Emma’s eighteenth birthday, and we wanted something significant. She always loved the buddleia, because of its scent and the way its flowers attract the butterflies in summer. They call it the Butterfly Bush, don’t they?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Fry, her gardening experience having been limited to dandelions growing in a window box.

‘We planted another one on the anniversary of the day she disappeared, as well as on her birthday. And the same again the following year. Now there’s a little grove of bushes at the bottom of the garden that holds another bit of Emma.’

‘Marking the days is important. The day she was due felt a bit like Easter.’

‘Easter? Not — resurrection?’

‘In a way. If we think about Emma hard enough on that day, it seems as though she will actually walk in through the door and say she’s sorry for taking so long to come home. It hasn’t happened yet, of course. But perhaps that’s because we haven’t wished hard enough. What do you think?’

‘I really don’t know.’

Then the Renshaws looked at each other, and flushed a bit pink. Both of them now had the beginnings of tears in their eyes.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Sarah to her husband.

‘It would be the ideal time to make contact,’ he said.

Fry thought they were still talking about support. It was a strange way of putting it, but lots of things were strange about the Renshaws.

‘Yes, that would help you a lot, wouldn’t it?’ said Sarah.

‘Sorry, what would?’

‘Making contact.’

‘I don’t really follow you. Contact with who?’

‘With the Other Side, of course.’

‘We thought that while you’re here,’ said Howard, ‘it would be the ideal opportunity to have a séance.’

‘We’ve been consulting a psychic, and using a pendulum to try to locate Emma,’ said Sarah. ‘It seemed very appropriate, because they’re things that Emma is interested in herself, anything mystical or supernatural. If we held a séance, you could ask all the things you want to.’

An uncomfortable silence followed. Fry wished that Cooper would say something. Why had she bothered going to the trouble of arranging for him to come with her, if he was just going to sit there and take it all in, saying nothing?

But then he did decide to speak. And Fry blessed him for changing the subject.

‘Mr and Mrs Renshaw, I wonder if you have any more photos of Emma? From around the time she went to university, I mean.’

‘Once she’d gone to university, we didn’t manage to take as many,’ said Sarah. ‘But there are a few.’

Howard fetched an album. ‘If we let you have this,’ he said, ‘we need it back for Monday.’

‘That’s all right.’

Cooper opened the album and turned over the pages rapidly. Towards the back, he seemed to find something that interested him. Fry leaned over his shoulder.

‘What on earth is that?’ she said. ‘Was your daughter going to a fancy-dress party or something?’

Fry began to laugh, but she met Cooper’s eye, and the laughter died in her throat.

‘Oh, that,’ said Sarah. ‘It was something Neil Granger got Emma into. I really don’t know what she saw in it.’

‘In what?’

‘It’s a group they have here in Withens. I don’t really understand it, but it seems to be a local tradition.’

Emma was dressed all in black, which wasn’t unusual for a girl of her age. In fact, Fry had a fondness for black, too. But the outfit Emma was wearing consisted of a black tail coat, black leggings, a black top hat, and Doc Martens boots. She looked tall and very slim — just not the right shape for the outfit. She was also wearing reflective sunglasses, and carrying a recorder.

‘This was something to do with Neil Granger?’

‘He’s one of the group. Or he was,’ said Sarah. ‘As you can see, Emma’s a musician. She’s a very talented girl in a lot of ways.’

‘I’m sure.’ Cooper held the page open, and Fry turned it slightly towards herself, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the photo.

‘But what I’m wondering, Mrs Renshaw,’ she said, ‘is why Emma has her face blacked up.’

Cooper took a last look at the yard as he turned to leave. He took particular note of the vehicles he could see parked in among the pallets and old tyres. There was a light blue Transit van and a small flat-bed lorry, but they were at the wrong angle for him to make out the registration numbers.

Tracy Udall made a helpless gesture at him as they walked back up the track past Waterloo Terrace.

‘Where does Lucas Oxley work, Tracy?’ said Cooper. ‘What’s his job?’

‘I think you’re asking the question wrong,’ said Udall. ‘I don’t think he has a job exactly.’

‘He isn’t registered for unemployment benefit. I checked.’

‘No. I suppose you might say he’s self-employed. And he works wherever work is to be had.’

‘Mmm. That sounds like a definition of “criminal” to me.’

‘Did you notice all the stuff round the back of the houses in Waterloo Terrace? Stacks of pallets? Roof tiles? Tyres? Fence posts? He’s trading, that’s what he’s doing. I imagine he’ll pick up anything that he can get cheap — maybe just for the cost of a bit of effort by his lads to collect the stuff and bring it back to Withens. Then, if anyone around here wants some fence posts or roof tiles, they know where to come. I’m betting he sells some of the stuff out of the back of a van at car boot sales and cattle markets, too.’

‘Legally?’

‘It’s mostly legal, I should think.’

‘Tell me about the bit that isn’t.’

‘Well, let me put it this way — I wouldn’t take the tiles off my roof and leave them by the roadside overnight. And I wouldn’t park a lorry with empty pallets on it anywhere accessible.’

‘But who’s going to know one pallet from another?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Some of the sons work, though, don’t they?’

‘You mean, do they have jobs?’

‘Yes. Jobs where they go off to work and earn an honest living, like you and me.’

‘They do bits of casual labouring, I think. There’s still some farm work to be had at certain times of the year, and beating for the shoots. But, mostly, they’ll be hiring themselves out as labour with the van or the flat-bed lorry.’

‘They don’t sound like they’re your antique thieves, anyway.’

‘No, I never really thought they were.’

‘Are we no nearer getting a lead on the thefts?’

‘The people we’ve interviewed so far are small-scale. We don’t think they’re responsible for the majority of thefts. It’s going to take a lot more work.’

Randy had spilled soil out of a plant pot in the conservatory. Ben Cooper brushed it up, rearranged the pots more neatly on their shelves, pushed the cat’s basket back into its corner and straightened the plaid blanket it was using as a bed.

He looked for other things to tidy, decided that the back door needed painting some time soon, brushed some cobwebs off a pane of glass. He stared through the glass, where he could make out the shapes of the trees against the lights of the houses in Meadow Road. The branches were just starting to come into leaf, and their outlines against the light were fuzzier and less stark than they had been all winter. Growth was progressing here, too.

He went back into the kitchen and shut out the sight of the garden. In the porch, there were some letters behind the front door. One advantage of living in town was that his mail came early in the morning, before he left for work if he was on a day shift. At Bridge End Farm, out there beyond even the smell of the town, the mail was delivered about lunchtime.

‘What have we got today then, Randy? Would you like a new credit card? A loan to help you pay for a foreign holiday, perhaps? Want to join a book club?’

Randy looked at him contemptuously and licked his lips.

‘Yes, I know what you want. I was only kidding. Hello, what’s this? A postcard.’

The postcard had a picture of Chatsworth House on it. He always liked to try to figure out who a postcard was from before he turned it over to look at the message, but he couldn’t think who would bother to send him a card from Chatsworth, when it was only a few miles away.

When he finally looked and saw who the card was from, his first uncharitable thought was that she must have stolen it from the souvenir shop. But that didn’t make sense, really. She would have had to pay to get into Chatsworth House in the first place.

The message said: ‘Sorry about the other day. You were great, so thanks. I know you’ll make the right decision.’ It was signed: ‘Love, A’.

‘It’s from Angie,’ said Cooper.

Randy made a noise like a bird chirruping, then began to cough, as though trying to clear a hair ball from his throat.

‘Give over,’ said Cooper. ‘You’re not dying of starvation just yet.’

The cat got up and stalked off towards the kitchen with its tail twitching.

‘Angie,’ said Cooper, reading the postcard again. ‘What does she mean by “I know you’ll make the right decision?” What right decision?’

This time, the cat didn’t answer. It was in the kitchen and pretending it couldn’t hear him. Cooper turned the postcard back over and frowned at the picture of Chatsworth House, as if it could have some hidden significance he was supposed to figure out. Chatsworth? Was there a connection? Was she trying to tell him something?

‘It’s too subtle for me,’ he said.

He dropped the mail on the table and headed towards the kitchen. ‘Randy,’ he said, ‘why the hell have I started talking to myself?’

After several fruitless phone calls trying to establish the ownership of a brass box that everyone agreed might or might not be Indian, Ben Cooper finally tracked down a dealer in Crookes who offered to take a closer look at the box. Crookes was on the western outskirts of Sheffield, and could be reached via the A628. It was too tempting to resist. He made an appointment that allowed him plenty of time to take another quick look at Withens on the way.

It was nearly four o’clock by the time Cooper reached the village. He saw straight away that the postman came late in Withens. It was probably the last place he reached on his delivery round from Sheffield, or wherever the nearest sorting office was. A distinctive red van was parked outside the Quiet Shepherd, and Cooper walked over to wait for the postman to come out. The postie was in his thirties, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and wearing a navy blue Royal Mail body-warmer. He agreed he was nearing the end of his round, and seemed quite happy to spend a couple of minutes talking about his customers in Withens.

‘They’re a mixed bunch here,’ he said. ‘Take the folk at Waterloo Terrace, the Oxleys. They don’t seem to want their letters at all. At number 1, they nailed the letter box up once. I had to report it, back at the office, and the manager spoke to them. But you’d be surprised at the attitude some people have. I mean, it’s not my fault if they don’t like the mail they get, is it?’

‘No.’

But there’s the lady at the opposite end. Mrs Wallwin, number 7. She hardly gets anything. Sometimes, I collect together a few bits of junk mail and stuff that’s been sent to other people, and I put it through her door, just so that she’s got something to open now and then.’

‘You do?’

Cooper remembered the envelopes he had seen on Mrs Wallwin’s table. ‘You’re a winner!’ ‘Open now for some wonderful news!’ He had assumed Mrs Wallwin used them for lighting her fire, like everybody else. But perhaps she kept them as a sign that somebody out there was thinking about her. Did she realize it was only the postman?

The postman seemed to misread Cooper’s expression as disapproval. ‘Of course, I know I shouldn’t do that, really. I’d probably get the sack if some busybody shopped me for it. But it’s doing no harm. It’s only stuff nobody else wants, isn’t it?’

‘You’re not kidding. I’d pay you not to deliver my junk mail,’ said Cooper.

Since he’d moved into his flat three months before, he’d been gathering mail addressed to every previous tenant. Some of them had been dead for years, according to Mrs Shelley. And some of them had strange tastes in mail-order items, too.

The postman was reassured. ‘The other lot who can be a bit of a nuisance are the Old Rectory folk. Name of Renshaw.’

‘Oh?’

‘They hang around at the gate waiting for me to get there. I think they must be at the upstairs window watching for me coming down the hill, because by the time I get to them they’re jumping up and down with impatience and snapping at me for being late. Which I never am, I might say. I get up here pretty much on time, no matter what the weather’s like in the winter. They don’t seem to appreciate that.’

‘So the Renshaws are eager for their mail?’

‘Aye.’ The postman sniffed. ‘Trouble is, by the way they react, I don’t think I’ve ever brought them what they’re hoping for. I suppose that’s my fault, too.’

‘The Oxleys,’ said Cooper, ‘do you ever have any problems with a dog there? A long-haired Alsatian?’

‘No, I never have a problem,’ said the postman. ‘I know it’s there, all right, but they keep it shut up in the yard. They never let the dog out at the front of the house. Well, not unless they really don’t like the look of you.’

Neil Granger had been rehearsing for something the night before he’d been killed. And Emma Renshaw had been a member of the same group two years ago, according to her parents. But what was it all about?

Cooper hesitated, remembering that Diane Fry was in the Black Country with Gavin Murfin. Then he rang her mobile number anyway.

‘Diane, what was the play that Neil Granger was supposed to be rehearsing for?’

‘Something called The Border Rats,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ve no idea. Why?’

‘I’m outside the pub in Withens now. The landlord’s a bit coy, but it sounds like they’re rehearsing again. And I’ve never heard anything so noisy in my life.’

‘What do you mean? Is it a musical?’

‘There seems to be music, but no singing. Just stamping and banging.’

‘Something modern and avant-garde, then.’

‘In Withens? Are you kidding?’

‘Call in and see what they’re doing.’

‘I’ve tried, but the door’s locked, and there’s a sign that says “private function”.’

‘Oh, well. I don’t see that it really matters.’

‘I’d like to hang on until they come out, and find out what it is. But I’m supposed to be at Fran Oxley’s in a few minutes. It could be my only chance ever to speak to an Oxley and get a reply.’

‘You can ask somebody another time.’

‘I suppose so. But won’t we be interviewing the other members of the cast and the stage crew? Maybe someone noticed something wrong, or Granger said something to them.’

‘We’ll get round to that, if necessary. But his brother was there, too, and he says Neil was fine when he left. I really don’t see that it matters.’

‘Maybe not. I’m just curious.’

‘Anyway, it isn’t a priority at the moment, if at all,’ said Fry. ‘We’re concentrating on the weapon, the forensic evidence at the scene, and the contents of the car. We’re working on a theory that Granger had an argument with one or more of his associates in the antiques gang. We think they had either had just done a job, or were making some arrangements for disposal of the stolen items.’

‘We?’ said Cooper. ‘This is DCI Kessen’s theory?’

‘He’s SIO. In Mr Kessen’s assessment, that’s likely to be the most fruitful line of enquiry and therefore the best uses of resources — which, as usual, are insufficient.’

‘Well, if he thinks he can justify his decision in the Murder Book,’ said Cooper, thinking of the log that the Senior Investigating Officer had to complete meticulously, in case he was ever challenged on a decision in court.

‘Well, your friends in the Rural Crime Team are sharing their leads on the antiques thefts, so no doubt we’ll be picking a few people up for questioning. With a bit of luck, they won’t have thought to dispose of the clothes they were wearing, and we’ll get a DNA match from Neil Granger’s blood. They’re bound to have got blood on them somewhere, if only their shoes. Those head wounds of his bled profusely.’

‘And there’s the bronze bust, of course.’

‘Absolutely. That has to have been their big mistake. Maybe they didn’t know Granger had it in his car. There are no fingerprints on it, but it’s distinctive, so we’ll almost certainly be able to trace it to an owner. If we locate other items from the same property in somebody’s possession, we’re laughing. Yes, this one could be over bar the shouting within forty-eight hours, just the way we like them. Then you can go back to rural crime, Ben.’

‘And you can go back to the Renshaws.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘I suppose the possibility of a link to Emma Renshaw isn’t a high priority either?’ said Cooper.

‘Lowest of the low, I’d say. We don’t even want to think about going down that route. Apart from the fact that they knew each other, where’s the link anyway?’

‘Apart from her mobile phone having turned up just now?’

‘Coincidence. The best bet there is that somebody found the bag and grabbed it, thinking it might be something worth nicking. When they realized it wasn’t, they dumped it again. Originally, it could have been anywhere. The laboratory might be able to give us something more specific, but we’ll be lucky. If some thieving little sod with a record has left his prints on the phone, he’s in for a rough time, sure enough. But the most we’re going to get is the original dump site for the phone.’

‘Emma’s body could be in the same area,’ said Cooper.

Fry was silent for a moment. He knew she hadn’t overlooked that fact, but was choosing not to consider it for now. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said. ‘Was there anything else, Ben? Only Gavin wants to get on with some interviews. You know what he’s like for dedication to the job.’

‘Diane, I have one more chance with the Oxleys tonight, when I’m seeing Fran. But if I’m still having difficulties tomorrow, would you help me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, if I go up there much more often, they’re going to start complaining about harassment. My options are getting increasingly limited. We have no grounds for bringing any of them in for questioning.’

‘Yes, I’ll help.’

‘You will?’

‘I said yes, didn’t I? Talk to me tomorrow. I’ll look forward to visiting the Oxleys.’

Diane Fry had brought Emma Renshaw’s diary with her, and found she couldn’t leave it alone.

‘What do you think these initials mean, Gavin?’ she said. ‘LDBAT.’

‘I’ve no idea. The Renshaws said they didn’t know. Debbie Stark didn’t know. And Khadi Whatsit didn’t know.’

‘So they said.’

‘You don’t believe anything that anybody says, do you?’ said Murfin.

Fry turned over a page, then turned over some more. ‘She’s repeated the same initials day after day.’

‘Perhaps they were something to do with the lectures she had to go to. Like a reminder.’

‘But why the same every day?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And another thing,’ said Fry. ‘Emma wrote in her diary all the time. So how come her parents found it in her room at Bearwood? Why didn’t Emma take it with her when she went home for the Easter holiday? Surely she didn’t just forget it?’

‘Well, from what I’ve seen of Withens,’ said Murfin, ‘it was probably because she knew nothing could happen there that would be worth writing down.’

‘Maybe.’

Fry stopped turning pages. A memory was coming back to her of another diary, one not unlike this. It had been a teenage girl’s diary, though the girl had been a few years younger than Emma Renshaw. That girl had been living with foster parents in a semi-detached house in Warley. She had been an unhappy girl.

Suddenly, the letters made sense. It was almost as if Emma had spoken the words to her. There was no room for doubt in Fry’s mind.

‘Life Didn’t Begin Again Today,’ she said.

Murfin stared at her. ‘What did you say?’

‘LDBAT. It means Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I just do, OK?’

‘But—’

‘Gavin, trust me for once, will you? She’s written it in her diary day after day. She didn’t need to spell it out, because she knew exactly what the letters stood for. It’s on page after page. It becomes a kind of mantra. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today.’

‘OK, OK. I hear what you’re saying. I suppose it’s as likely as anything.’

‘Yes, it is. A bit immature, perhaps. But that’s the impression I have of Emma — too immature to be safe when she was away from home for the first time. She was brought up in Withens. Living in the Black Country must have come as a shock.’

‘OK, so what did she mean by it?’

‘Something didn’t happen that she wanted to. A man, I’d guess.’

‘It usually is,’ said Murfin. ‘One of the boys? Neil Granger? Not Alex Dearden?’

‘Somebody she got a bit obsessed with, but who wasn’t interested in her. It could have been one of her lecturers at the art school.’

‘You could be on to something there, Diane. They’re a funny lot, artists.’

‘Emma might have found one of them rather more interesting than the people she knew back in Withens anyway.’

‘I’ll grant you that.’

‘Job for you tomorrow morning then, Gavin. Phone the art school again and get a list of all the staff who would have had contact with Emma. Some of them were spoken to at the time, but we’ll need a complete list. Their ages would be useful, too. Then you can contact Debbie Stark again and go through the list with her. She was on the same course.’

‘Waste of time, she is,’ said Murfin.

‘See if you can’t jog her memory a bit.’

‘I just hope there aren’t too many. It could take weeks.’

‘That’s the way it goes, Gavin. But a couple of weeks won’t make any difference now.’

‘It will to my ulcers.’

‘I didn’t know you had ulcers, Gavin.’

‘I haven’t. But I’m expecting them any day, like.’

They were on the A6, and only a few minutes from Edendale now. Fry gazed at the White Peak scenery going past the windows with mixed feelings. She didn’t know where home was any more. But maybe she never had.

She turned the pages of Emma’s diary again.

‘She ought to have used his initials,’ she said. ‘If she liked initials, she should have referred to him that way. Or at least the initial of his first name. That’s what I would have done.’

‘I never kept a diary,’ said Murfin. ‘It seems a bit sad to me.’

‘It would have helped a lot,’ said Fry. ‘But I can’t see anywhere she’s done that.’

‘Maybe she didn’t feel she had to. She knew who she was talking about, so why should she bother with initials?’

‘But when she first met him—’

Murfin made the final turn into the Eden Valley and began the long descent towards Edendale.

‘That diary,’ he said. ‘When does it start?’

‘January, of course.’

‘I just wondered. My lad has a diary for school, but it starts in September. They call it an academic year diary.’

Fry stared at him. ‘Gavin — you’re a genius.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘If this is a member of staff we’re looking for, Emma would have met him in her first term at the art school — the previous October. Even if it was a student, the same applies.’ She slapped the diary. ‘We’ve only got the last four months here. We need the diary before this one.’

‘If she had one.’

‘Oh, she’ll have had one all right.’

LDBAT. Life Didn’t Begin Again Today. The more she looked at it, the more Fry was sure. Emma Renshaw had written it day after day, a sure sign of an obsession.

But on a Thursday two years ago, Emma’s diary entries had stopped completely. Life didn’t begin again that day, either. But had life ended, instead?

‘That’s another thing you can do, Gavin. Get on to the Renshaws and ask for a previous diary.’

‘Great. The rewards of genius, eh?’

Fry opened her file and looked at the photographs of Emma Renshaw for a long time. In particular, she studied the ones in which Emma was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt or shorts, displaying bare limbs and healthy skin. In one picture, she was posing in a bikini top against a background of sand and sunlit water, with her arms and shoulders an uncomfortable shade of pink. In every photograph, Emma was smiling and happy, a healthy teenager with the rest of her life before her.

Fry found a sentence running through her head. It was something really stupid that she’d heard on a BBC Radio 4 programme a few months ago. It might even have been You and Yours. The discussion had been about direct marketing, the posh expression for junk mail, and how it could be stopped — or ‘suppressed’, as one of the studio guests had insisted on putting it. The presenter had expressed astonishment that every year hundreds of thousands of people who’d died were still being targeted by firms sending them junk mail. The guest had made a statement that had given Fry a little shudder of apprehension. She had said ominously: ‘There are ways of suppressing people who’ve died.’

Fry wondered whether there was a direct-marketing technique she could use in the case of the Renshaws. Was there really a way of suppressing someone who’d died? Was there a way of putting away the ghost of Emma Renshaw?

Now, when she looked at the photographs, Fry began to see something different. Something that the photographer hadn’t captured on film. She had seen the blood in the poppies and the mould in the grass. Now she saw the bones under the skin of the girl.

In the mist that followed a grey dawn, the Reverend Derek Alton unlocked the door of St Asaph’s church and let it swing slowly open in front of him. As usual, he looked for signs of intruders or vandalism, but could see none. The church had been given a wide berth ever since the news of Neil Granger’s death had spread. But perhaps it was just the frequent police presence in the village that was making the difference, rather than any sense of respect.

It was right here in the porch that Alton had last seen Neil on Friday night. He wasn’t sure whether he had really experienced a premonition as they had stood close together in the darkness and listened to the noises from the village. It felt that way now, but hindsight was deceptive. And, of course, feelings could be even more deceptive.

Alton heard a distinctive engine noise that grumbled to a halt beyond the churchyard wall. It was muffled by the trees and the dampness that hung in the air, but it was enough to make the vicar turn away from the door and steady himself with one hand against the oak frame of the porch entrance. The smooth wood was cold to the touch and running with moisture. Alton shivered as he caught the click of the latch on the gate hidden behind the yews.

It seemed to Alton that the figure approaching him through the mist in the churchyard was one that should not have been there at all. It appeared at first to be a shape returned from the grave. Or, if not actually yet in a grave, then escaped from its drawer in a mortuary freezer to haunt the church porch. And to haunt Derek Alton’s conscience.

He recognized the creak of a leather motorcycle jacket and saw something familiar about the darkness of his visitor’s eyes. Neil Granger had never owned a motorbike, of course. But his brother did.

‘Morning, Vicar.’

‘Philip?’ Alton stared at the young man. ‘This is a bit early in the morning for a call. You’ve only just caught me.’

‘Sorry. But I have to be at work in Glossop in an hour.’

‘Come into the church,’ said Alton. ‘It isn’t much warmer inside than out, I’m afraid. But at least it’s dry.’

‘No, it’s OK. This won’t take long.’

Alton frowned at the young man’s tone. Philip wouldn’t meet his eye, but fiddled with the strap of his motorcycle helmet and stroked the smooth surface. The movement of Philip’s hands drew Alton’s eyes to the helmet. It was bright red, and looked glaringly out of place in the church porch against the dark stone. There were several scratches on it, as if the helmet had already saved its owner from serious injury in an accident. Alton wanted to suggest to Philip that he should replace it with a new helmet, in case it had been damaged and weakened. It might not protect him next time.

But the vicar recognized that his mind was merely reacting to an impulse to change the subject whenever he sensed a difficult conversation approaching. It was one of his weaknesses. He had to learn to face the fire, and hope that he would be made stronger by the flames.

‘Well, out with it, then,’ said Alton. ‘Is it about Neil?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s such a difficult time for you, Philip. Especially without any immediate family around you to offer support. But I spoke to your uncle a couple of days ago. He explained that it would be a question of cremation, when the time comes. I mean, when the coroner releases... when the final arrangements can be made. And a humanist service, I gather. That’s perfectly understandable — though I did think your brother was becoming a little more interested in the church in recent months. I was quite hopeful, you know...’

Alton realized he was babbling, and ground to a halt. Philip appeared to be paying no attention to his words at all, but kept his eyes turned down, thinking about something else entirely. The vicar felt himself beginning to grow warm under his coat.

‘I went to see the police yesterday,’ said Philip.

‘Yes, of course. Are they any nearer...? Did they give you an idea...? It’s been nearly six days now. Surely—’

Philip shook his head in a gesture of impatience ‘Please, Vicar.’

‘Sorry.’

A little bit of sun appeared through a break in the mist that hung between the yew trees. It looked as if someone had switched a light on. For now, it was pale and yellow, and ringed with a faint halo. But soon, it would dissipate the mist and the day would be fine.

‘It was more a question of me giving them information,’ said Philip. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you.’

‘Information?’ said Alton.

‘Well, among other things, I thought I ought to tell them that Neil was gay.’

For some reason, Alton found himself latching on to the wrong phrase. ‘What other things?’

Philip looked at him then, with an enigmatic smile. ‘Nothing else that concerns you, Vicar.’

‘I see.’

‘But obviously, the police will be wanting to talk to people again now. People who were involved with Neil in some way.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘I thought you ought to know.’

Alton had promised himself that he’d make a determined attack on the overgrown churchyard today, provided the weather was fine. That was why he was early this morning, so that he could be outside and ready for action as soon as the mist had gone. He had neglected the job too long already, and no one was going to help him now. He was on his own.

Philip Granger was watching him, waiting for a reaction. ‘You get what I’m saying, Vicar? It’s something you ought to know.’

‘Yes, Philip. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

‘It’s a good thing to tell what you know, isn’t it?’ said Philip. ‘That is, unless there’s a very, very good reason not to.’

Derek Alton nodded. But all he could think of were the dock plants growing in his churchyard. He couldn’t quite explain why the leaves of the docks disturbed him so much more than the other plants. When he pulled at them, they stretched and wrinkled in his hands, like aged skin. They might be warm on the surface, where they had been touched by the sun. But underneath, they were always cold and damp, like the grave.

Derek Alton was sitting in one of the front pews of the church. As Cooper walked up the aisle, he could see only the back of the vicar’s bowed head, and he thought he must be praying. Alton looked up when he heard Cooper’s footsteps.

‘Has it gone yet?’ he said.

‘You mean the remains? No, sir. There are procedures to go through while they’re still in situ.’

‘Photographs, I suppose.’

‘That kind of thing, yes.’

‘I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want to come out until it’s gone.’

‘That’s not a problem, sir.’

‘I’m a Jonah, aren’t I?’ said Alton.

‘Jonah? I’m not as familiar with the Old Testament as you are, but wasn’t he the one who got involved with the wrong end of a whale?’

Alton smiled. ‘Jonah had bad luck. He became the symbol of somebody who brings disaster down on others. When sailors had bad luck at sea, they believed it was because they had a Jonah on board.’

‘That’s sounds rather superstitious of you, sir.’

‘I’m afraid superstition is difficult to avoid in these parts. It seeps into the bones.’

‘And why should you think yourself a Jonah?’

‘Why? Neil Granger dies a horrible death shortly after leaving me. And now I find there’s some other poor soul lying dead in my churchyard, and has been there for years. I disturbed their bones with my interfering. I must have walked over them many times. Neil must have almost walked over them when he left here that night. He walked over those bones on his way to his death, and he didn’t even see them.’

Alton shivered. Cooper wondered whether he should offer some reassuring words about the body being merely the vessel, and the spirit going on to better things. But he decided it wouldn’t be appropriate. A doctor to check the vicar over would be more the thing.

‘I have to ask you this... We’ve found human remains in your churchyard. Do you have any idea whose they might be?’

‘None at all,’ said Alton, raising shocked eyes to Cooper. ‘Surely they must have been in the ground long before I came here?’

‘We don’t know that yet. A body can be reduced to a skeleton quite quickly, depending on the conditions.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I want to know that,’ said Alton. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me.’

‘I’m sorry to distress you, sir. But, obviously, if there’s anything at all you can think of that would help us identify this person, it would be very helpful.’

‘Of course. But just at the moment, you know...’

‘I understand. We’ll need you to come in and make a statement some time. But in the meanwhile, someone has contacted your wife, and she’s on her way over.’

‘I’ll be all right in a little while. I’m not used to this kind of shock. Even in Withens. You want a statement from me? I don’t know what I can tell you, though.’

‘Was there anything that made you choose to clear that particular part of the churchyard today?’ said Cooper.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just wondered... It’s one the oldest parts, isn’t it? The gravestones there all date from the nineteenth century. There are no recent burials, so it’s not as if they’re graves that living relatives are likely to want to visit. If there were a priority for these things, I’d have guessed you’d go for the most recent graves first. It must be distressing for relatives to find their loved ones’ graves overgrown and untidy. But not in that area.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Alton. ‘That would make sense. But I wasn’t thinking logically. It was those old gravestones that made me curious. The small ones, with only initials and a year. Did you notice those?’

‘Yes, though you can hardly see them.’

‘Exactly,’ said Alton. ‘They’re already anonymous enough, and so small that I thought it was a shame to see them disappear altogether. I thought they were the ones that needed the light most of all.’

‘You wanted to bring light?’

‘Yes, that’s what I wanted.’

‘Whoever buried a body there wouldn’t have expected that,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m sure they thought that corner was the most neglected and forgotten. They gambled on the body not being found for quite a while, maybe never.’

‘If I’d managed to get help, though,’ said Alton, ‘I would have cleared the whole churchyard.’

‘But no one would help you.’

‘No. Well, no one except Neil.’

‘Neil? Neil Granger?’

‘He was going to give me a hand. He was a good lad.’

‘But he never got the chance.’

‘No.’

‘Mr Alton, did anybody know that Neil Granger was going to help you clear the churchyard?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Alton. ‘Think about it for a while.’

‘Well, my wife, Caroline. I mentioned it to her, because I was rather pleased that someone had volunteered.’

‘Neil did volunteer? You didn’t persuade him to do it? Or offer to pay him?’

‘Oh, no. If I could have afforded to pay someone, I would have done it. But Neil volunteered. He heard me complaining about it one day, and I told him how much I was struggling on my own. I think he took pity on me. But I was very grateful.’

‘Did you tell anyone else but your wife?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Of course, we don’t know who Neil himself might have mentioned it to,’ said Cooper.

‘I did tell the churchwardens,’ said Alton. ‘I’d been a bit cross with them for not supporting me more than they did, and I thought it might make them feel guilty. It was wrong of me, I suppose, to feel that way.’

‘Your churchwardens are Michael Dearden and Marion Oxley?’

‘Yes.’

‘So all the Oxleys might have known about Neil?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Alton. ‘Does that help?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Cooper. ‘But, knowing the Oxleys, perhaps not.’

‘Who is it out there?’ said Alton. ‘In the churchyard?’

‘We don’t know, sir. We might not know for some time.’ Cooper stood up. ‘Your wife will be here in a moment.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry that someone should have chosen the churchyard for this. It’s consecrated ground.’

‘Consecrated? Yes, but consecrated only means that something has been set apart for a purpose.’

‘Well, it’s sacred, then.’

‘Everywhere is sacred,’ said Alton. ‘I don’t believe that God is in some places and not in others.’

Ben Cooper had noticed Tracy Udall’s Astra in the car park at West Street, and guessed she must have been summoned to a divisional meeting that had been taking place upstairs. When he found her, she was in the locker room, cleaning her rigid handcuffs, oiling the boss and ratchet bar with WD40.

‘Cholera?’ said Cooper.

His dictionary defined cholera as an acute communicable bacterial infection of the small intestine by vibrio cholerae, derived from the ingestion of food or water contaminated by human sewage containing the micro-organism. It said the symptoms included the rapid onset of a profuse, white, watery diarrhoea, with muscle cramps, vomiting and progressive fluid loss, resulting in death within a few hours.

Cooper had very soon started feeling unwell.

‘I mean, cholera?’

‘It was a result of the conditions the navvies lived in,’ said Udall. ‘You know, the shanty town?’

‘Yes.’

‘They not only had poor food and no health-and-safety regulations, they also weren’t provided with any clean water or any toilet facilities. Their food and water got contaminated by human sewage, and men started dying of cholera by the dozen. Some are buried at Woodhead Chapel, above the A628.’

‘But others are buried in the churchyard at Withens.’

‘That’s right. It’s ironic, when you think about it. Well dressing is supposed to have started after the Black Death. The villages that escaped being affected by the plague credited the purity of their local water supply for protecting them. So they revived the tradition of blessing the wells as a way of saying thank you. I think Tissington was one of the first.’

‘Some of them probably still believed they were propitiating the water goddess in those days,’ said Cooper.

But Udall was right. Those Derbyshire villagers did have good reason to be thankful. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Black Death had killed a third of the population of England. Villages like Tissington were very lucky not to have been touched. Five hundred years later, though, it had been cholera that had taken the lives of the navvies building the Woodhead tunnels and living in their pitiful shanty towns.

‘So the other well in Withens is avoided because it’s on the wrong side of the churchyard — below it, where the cholera from the bodies buried there could get into the water supply?’

‘It’s nonsense, of course.’

‘But you understand how that fear might have arisen. Those men died from drinking contaminated water in the first place.’

Udall dried the handcuff grip and reset the handcuffs to preload.

‘You know, a lot of people use the tip of a ballpoint pen to double-lock their cuffs,’ she said. ‘I always think that looks a bit unprofessional — it gives the impression you’ve lost the key and you’re trying to pick the lock with a pen.’

‘Some people do lose the key,’ said Cooper. ‘Or forget to take one with them.’

Udall sniffed. ‘Some people seem to want trouble. They go in as if they want a suspect to turn violent. Not me. These handcuffs are the most important bit of equipment I have, and learning touch ’n’cuff has been a godsend. It’s saved me a lot of trouble from arrests over the last few years. I’ll be happy if I never have to draw a baton. A lot of my arrests don’t know what’s happening. The first time I touch them, they’re under my control. Then I tell them they’re under arrest. And they come like lambs, by and large.’

She eased the handcuffs back into their pouch and patted it, almost with affection.

‘Do you think it helps being female?’ said Cooper. He had seen plenty of male officers who had exactly the attitude that Udall had described. When they went in to a situation, it was as if they wanted trouble, either because it made them feel macho, or because they liked the adrenalin rush from the risk of injury, he wasn’t sure.

‘Oh yes,’ said Udall. ‘They take one look at me, and they’re lulled into a false sense of security. They don’t realize how dangerous I am.’

‘Want to come and give the Reverend Derek Alton a lift back to Withens?’

‘Why not?’

Cooper fed the cats, showered, changed and thought about having something to eat. His stomach told him he was starving. But he couldn’t face rummaging through the freezer compartment. Not another frozen Chinese meal for one. But he had time to nip down to the Hanging Gate for a bar meal before Peggy Check called.

During the first week or so after he had moved into his new flat in Welbeck Street he had checked out all the pubs within walking distance. There were several of them, some of which he had visited before, but one or two were new to him. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, not like some of his colleagues, who took to it to help them deal with the pressure and some of the depressing realities of the job. A drink or two did help him relax. But most of all, a decent pub provided company.

That was why he needed the right sort of place — not one that attracted only tourists, so that the same faces were never in the bar two nights running. And definitely not an Irish bar with singing waiters and ceilidh nights.

At night, some town-centre streets became drinking strips. An area around the front door of each pub became a bubble of noise and smells, loud music and scores of young people yelling to make themselves heard above it. Inside, it was like walking into a tropical micro-climate. Hot, sweating faces above yards of bare flesh moved around in the heat and humidity of an Amazon rainforest, exhuding a miasma of antiperspirant and alcohol fumes.

Occasionally there were fights at closing time. And of course, there were the drugs. On Friday and Saturday nights, there was a permanent police presence — a personnel carrier with caged accommodation in the back and a riot visor over its windscreen, multiple foot patrols of officers who had drawn the short straw and been rostered for the late shift.

Tourists learned to avoid those areas at night, when they saw the change that had come over a town that had looked so quaint during the day, with its cobbled alleys and tall stone buildings, its antiques shops and tea rooms. Even the pleasantest of England’s market towns could have a Jekyll and Hyde nature.

But to Cooper, Edendale still had character, a proper sense of place. It had its own smells and sounds and sights — that accumulation of sensations that gave it a unique identity, so that you always knew where you were. The same couldn’t be said of many towns, whose high streets looked indistinguishable.

On his way to the Hanging Gate, he passed through streets that had rows of terraced houses with names like Riversleigh and Rockside. In the window of a cottage, someone had let a yucca plant flourish, and it had filled the little bay window completely. A small tabby cat had squeezed into the tiny amount of space left on the window ledge, and it peered out at him through the plant’s spiky leaves. Antique bottles were lined up in another window next door. They were carefully arranged by size — the largest at either end and the smallest in the middle.

Cooper shook his head. The windows of these houses were so small that they allowed in little enough light already, without being cluttered up with dusty bottles and overgrown yucca plants. Windows like these always made him wonder what the people inside the houses had to hide. Or were they symbolically protecting themselves against the world outside by lining up their peculiar talismans on the edge of their property? Were glass bottles a kind of charm to ward off the evils of the outside world? Maybe there was some psychological reassurance from viewing the world through brown glass or the leaves of a yucca.

He was always curious about people’s minds, the bizarre mental processes that made them do the things they did. A part of him would love to be able to knock on a few of these doors to see who was behind them, and then to ask the questions. Why the bottles? What’s the yucca all about? Wouldn’t you prefer a bit of sunlight in your life?

Like many pubs in the area, the Hanging Gate had scenic Peak District views in framed prints on the walls. The same old CD of 60s and 70s pop classics seemed to be playing, too. But it also had Bank’s Bitter and Mansfield Cask Ale and Pedigree, not to mention a choice of lagers like Stella Artois and white wine on draft. On uneven stone flags, the cigarette machine, jukebox and slot machines had been pushed back against the wall, out of the way.

Cooper ordered a steak pie and chips and nodded to a few casual acquaintances as he found a table. He had a paperback novel in his pocket that he’d brought to read if there was no one to talk to.

Stained-glass panels were set into the ceiling and red roses in the pattern of the carpet. None of the colour schemes in the décor seemed to fit together when you took the pub as a whole. One corner might seem to make sense on its own, but when Cooper sat in the middle of the room, as he did now, he got quite a different perspective. Now, there were too many painful clashes, too many choices that made no sense, too many failures of taste and logic. It was chaos — a jumble of pieces that would never fit together as a whole.

Ben Cooper wasn’t really asleep when his alarm went off next morning. He hadn’t slept properly at all, but had spent the night turning restlessly in his bed, worried that he’d miss the alarm. When the high-pitched beeping came, it penetrated a foggy limbo he had been suspended in, a world halfway between waking and sleep. His mind had been groggily circling and circling around the same thoughts, hovering over a deep well of anxiety without being able to see clearly what the cause of his uneasiness was.

Cooper pressed the button to stop the noise, and opened his eyes to stare into the darkness. It was totally black in his room. Black, and silent. There was no traffic on the road outside and no birds singing, no one moving around the house, not even any water hissing through the old plumbing of 8 Welbeck Street. The silence made him feel cold. But perhaps that was only anticipation. He knew how cold it would be outside, once he had left the house. It was six o’clock in the morning, and it was April.

Cooper swung his feet from under the duvet, sat up and pulled back the curtain. It was also raining.

‘Oh, great.’

For a moment, he thought about lying down and pulling the bedclothes back over himself, and staying there until it got light, as normal people did. But then he sighed, switched on the bedside light, and headed for the bathroom. He had no time to waste — he was on an early shift today, and a briefing meeting had been scheduled for 8 a.m.

He skirted the pile of ironing that had been waiting for him to get to it for days, and stumbled in bare feet on the pine floorboards in the passage between his bedroom and the bathroom. It was warmer at this end of the flat, but that only made the thought of going out worse.

He had managed to have a shower and a shave and was trying to drink a coffee when his mobile phone rang on the kitchen table.

‘No, I haven’t set off yet,’ he said to his coffee mug, even before he picked up the phone.

A large black cat walked sleepily into the kitchen and looked at him in a puzzled manner. If Cooper was up and moving around, it must be breakfast time. But it knew something wasn’t quite right.

Cooper transferred his coffee to the other hand and picked up the phone.

‘Ben Cooper.’ He listened for a moment. ‘No, I haven’t set off yet, Diane. Yes, I know there’s work to do before the morning briefing. What makes you think I’ll be late? I’ll be there on time.’

He pushed the phone into the pocket of his leather jacket, where he had thrown it over a chair the night before. He picked up the shirt, sweater and jeans that he’d put ready. The sitting room was dark, and only a thin sliver of light entered through the curtains from the streetlamp across the road. It glinted off the framed picture over his mantelpiece, as if his father were winking at him from his seat on the second row of the Edendale police line-up. Then Cooper noticed the cat.

‘Here, Randy — do you want this coffee? I haven’t time to drink it.’

The cat fixed him with its yellow eyes, puzzlement turning to disdain.

‘No? Never mind.’

With the cat marching in front of him, its tail in the air, Cooper pulled his clothes on as he headed back to the kitchen. He put two bowls of cat food out and placed them on the floor in the conservatory, near the central-heating boiler. The noise of the rain was loud on the glass roof. Here in the centre of town there was always light, and he could make out the roofs of the houses that backed on to the Welbeck Street gardens from Meadow Road. The rest of the world out there was asleep. He would have to be careful that he was quiet as he left, so as not to disturb his new neighbour.

Cooper looked at his watch. If he didn’t hurry, he actually was going to be late.

Ben Cooper was remembering the man from the Sunday-morning crowd at Somerfield’s supermarket. Last Sunday, he had been trying to tell some story about distraction burglaries in the Southwoods area, and Cooper hadn’t been taking much notice. It had sounded pretty small-scale stuff, which someone else would be dealing with, thank goodness. But perhaps he should have listened more carefully. Hadn’t the old man mentioned an incident involving genuine antiques? ‘They must have driven right past my window to get to Southwoods Grange.’

And what else had he been saying? Cooper thought about Golden Delicious apples and pineapple chunks for a few seconds before he got it. Car registration numbers.

They were squatting uncomfortably on seats that had been ripped out of some derelict car. At least, Derek Alton hoped that it had been derelict before the seats were ripped out. The seats were tied to the struts of the van sides with their seat belts, which kept them fairly stable except when the van went round a bend, and then they tended to slide and crash into each other. Alton had been thrown against one of the seat-belt buckles, and now he had a pain in his shoulder, which he knew would be a nasty bruise by tomorrow morning. He bruised very easily. His mother had always told him that when he was a child.

‘Where are we going?’ said Alton.

‘Practice session, Vicar.’

Alton looked round at the rest of the Border Rats. Directly across from him was Scott Oxley, with his brother Ryan. On either side of him were Sean and Glen, and two Hey Bridge men he didn’t know were squashed together at the front, just behind the driver’s cab, where Eric rode alongside his son. All the team were in full kit, with their top hats and their black make-up and mirrored sunglasses, carrying their sticks and, in some cases, bottles of beer.

‘How old are you, Ryan?’ said Alton. ‘I can’t quite remember.’

‘Eighteen, Vicar.’

‘And how old is young Sean here?’

‘Eighteen, Vicar.’

‘I see.’

The interior of the van smelled strongly of theatrical paint and sweat, and leather boots, along with the beer that the younger ones occasionally spilled on their trousers or on the floor of the van, which was covered with an old carpet. Alton looked down at the carpet suspiciously. It seemed to be embedded with small pieces of coal and splinters of wood. He wondered what Lucas Oxley normally used the van for when it wasn’t serving as the team bus. For a moment, he also wondered whether it was legal — but he put the thought hastily out of his mind as unworthy. It was just that he had never known what Lucas did for a living. Or any of the Oxleys, come to that.

They bumped up a hill and round a few more bends before descending again. There was a steel grille between the body of the van and the driver’s cab, and Alton wouldn’t have been able to see where they were going, even if he had taken his sunglasses off, which he didn’t like to do, because all the others were wearing theirs. He very much wanted to be part of the side, to do whatever they did. Almost whatever. When Scott wiped the neck of his beer bottle and offered it to him, he managed to refuse.

‘Yes, it’s probably best not to, if you’re a bit nervous, Vicar,’ said Scott.

‘There’s nothing to be nervous about really,’ said Alton. ‘I know the dance perfectly.’

But he could hear the tremble in his own voice, so he didn’t expect Scott or any of the others to be in the least convinced. They all looked at him and smiled. He hoped they were sympathetic smiles, but their mirrored sunglasses made it impossible for him to see the look in their eyes, to tell whether they were mocking him.

‘Where did you say we’re going?’ asked Alton again.

‘To bring a bit of fertility to our neighbours.’

The others laughed and cheered. Scott Oxley stared steadily at the vicar.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘some of them actually believe this fertility stuff. There are women who come to watch us on May Day, then turn up again the following year clutching a baby and telling us we were responsible for her getting pregnant.’

‘Aye, but those are all the birds that Scott’s shagged,’ said Ryan. ‘Only they can’t tell which of us it was because of the black faces, see.’

Scott continued as if his brother hadn’t spoken. ‘Fertility ritual! I mean, can you credit some folk? It only ever started off as a joke, to keep people in the crowd amused. You hear Fools talking it up around some sides, but it’s only like having a comedian making a few rude jokes, isn’t it? Why has anyone ever taken that stuff seriously?’

‘Here we are!’ called Lucas from the cab at last. ‘Let the band get started first, then go for it on the signal. And remember — you go out dancing! What do you say?’

‘Rats!’ the boys shouted, so loudly that they almost deafened Derek Alton. He came in late, only managed to mouth the word a beat behind the others, and felt ashamed that he had missed the cue. He swore that he’d get everything else right from now on.

As soon as the van doors open and he clambered out after the others, Alton recognized the church, and realized they were in Tintwistle. Then it dawned on him why there was a crowd of spectators to greet them.

‘Oh my God. It’s the blessing of the wells. There’s the Rural Dean and the church choir, and the whole of the women’s institute, and... Oh Lord, what are they going to do?’

Tommy was killed by eleven-thirty on Saturday morning, which was a little later than planned. But on the Edendale Day of Dance, nothing ever got done on time.

Tommy died in the Market Square, just outside the Wheatsheaf Inn, with the sweet smell of Bank’s Best Bitter drifting from the doorway of the pub, and the setts underneath him still damp from the morning’s showers. He lay curled in a foetal position, with his arms clutched across his chest and his legs pulled up into his stomach.

The small crowd that had gathered on the pavement stood and stared at him for a while. They had been attracted by the noise, but had been expecting more excitement, perhaps a little more blood. When nothing else interesting happened, they gradually began to drift away, hoping to find something to look at in the shop windows in Nick i’ th’ Tor and Nimble John’s Gate.

As always when he was dead, Tommy went into his method-acting mode. You could practically see his limbs stiffening with rigor mortis and the blood draining into the parts of his body that were in contact with the ground. He was so convincing that a few flies were beginning to gather. Some of them landed on his sleeve, sniffing with interest at the beer stains and a lingering trace of chicken biryani. In a moment, they would be clustering in his available orifices, eager to lay their eggs while he was still warm.

‘Where’s the chuffin’ Doctor?’ he muttered through clenched teeth.

‘Get up,’ said one of his friends standing nearby.

‘I can’t. I’m dead.’

‘Get up.’

‘Not until the Doctor’s cured me.’

‘The Doctor isn’t here.’

‘He has to cure me with the virgin, and all that.’

‘He isn’t here. We think he’s in the pub.’

‘Is he looking for a virgin?’

‘No. Just getting pissed.’

‘Bastard.’

The morris dancer playing Tommy in the mummers’ play rolled over and sat up stiffly. The flies buzzed off him angrily.

‘It’s coming to something when you can’t trust the Doctor,’ he said.

‘That’s the NHS for you. Maybe you should go private.’

‘These cobbles get harder every time.’

A mummer helped him up off the street.

‘I could have died for real down there, and nobody would have noticed,’ he said.

‘We had quite a good crowd, but they’ve buggered off now.’

‘Did anybody get round with the hat for the money?’

‘No, we didn’t have a chance.’

‘Bastard.’

It had been a bad day for Chief Superintendent Colin Jepson, commander of Derbyshire Constabulary E Division. Edendale had attracted all kinds of people this weekend, and his officers were stretched to the limit dealing with all the crime and disorder that followed crowds of people around like horseflies.

DI Hitchens and the CID team were almost the only people Jepson could find in the station at West Street. They were still laboriously following up on calls from the public about missing persons who might possibly have turned up in a shallow grave in Withens churchyard, no matter how far from their homes it was, or how recently they had gone missing. Officers were explaining patiently to distraught mothers that it was impossible for somebody who had been missing for only twenty-four hours to have been reduced to a skeleton in that time, no matter how badly they’d been eating recently.

‘And then,’ said Chief Superintendent Jepson wearily. ‘And then, after everything else that’s happened to me today, I come back to my own police station, expecting to finally get a bit of peace and quiet in a civilized environment. And I find the reception area full of black and white minstrels.’

He looked around the room full of officers. Some were smirking, as usual. Others looked blank, having never heard of the Black and White Minstrels because they were born in the age of political correctness.

‘Who was responsible for that little idea, I wonder?’ said Jepson. ‘What genius turned the front desk into an audition room for The Al Jolson Story?’

‘They’re morris dancers, Chief,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘The town’s full of them.’

‘I don’t need telling,’ said the Chief Superintendent, ‘that the town is full of them. The reason I don’t need telling is that my car was stuck in a traffic jam for over an hour on the corner of Clappergate, while eighteen thousand of them paraded past me waving their bells and handkerchiefs. I know there were eighteen thousand, because I counted them. I had plenty of time.’

Jepson glared from one officer to another, daring somebody to contradict him.

‘What I do need telling, though, is why someone took a fancy to bringing a few of them back to the station. Surely the whole point of morris dancers having bells on their trousers is so that we can hear them coming and avoid them?’

‘The ones sitting in reception are waiting for their friends,’ said Hitchens.

‘Oh, of course. We’ve invited some in to give them a guided tour of the station. How silly of me not to have thought of that. Does this mean I’m going to find them jingling around in the comms room and combing their beards in the gents? I know we’re trying to increase our representation of ethnic minorities in E Division. But I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that I absolutely draw the line at recruiting morris dancers. Those blacked-up faces aren’t going to fool the Commission for Racial Equality, you know.’

‘Actually, they’re waiting for the ones we have in the cells,’ said Hitchens.

‘Ah. And they’re occupying our custody suite for what purpose exactly, Inspector?’

‘Identification and interview, following arrest on suspicion of affray.’

‘Affray? You do realize that when they beat each other with sticks, they’re doing it for fun. It turns some people on, or so I’m told.’

‘Yes, Chief.’

‘Anyway, don’t we have football supporters for that sort of thing? If we need to get the performance results up for violent crime, couldn’t we have pulled in a few more Stoke City fans? They might not be pretty, but at least they don’t jingle.’

At the lack of response, the Chief Superintendent started to go a bit red in the face, and his voice rose in volume.

‘And tell the rat to take his mask off. I won’t have giant rats sitting around in my police station.’

‘He says he gets out of character if he takes his head off,’ said Hitchens.

Jepson stared at Hitchens. The DI stared back unflinchingly, but it was impossible to tell whether he was serious, or whether he was taking the mickey.

‘If he gets an identity crisis, we’ll arrange for him to see a counsellor,’ said Jepson.

‘It’s very sad,’ said Ben Cooper later. He had hardly finished following up calls from the public about potential occupants of shallow graves before Fry had raised the subject of the Renshaws. ‘If there were just one of them, it might be different. But the Renshaws are encouraging each other in their fantasies.’

‘Somebody’s encouraging Sarah Renshaw, certainly.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You’re thinking of Howard?’

Fry nodded. ‘Yes, Howard.’

‘Do you think he’s deliberately encouraging his wife to believe Emma isn’t dead?’

‘I can see that she’s gone completely off the rails with this obsession. The poor bloody woman has had more than two years of it now. No wonder she doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. But as for Howard — don’t you think he lays it on a bit thick?’

‘He handles it differently,’ said Cooper cautiously.

Fry snorted. ‘Differently? At one time I just thought he was sad and pathetic, like his wife. But that business with the skull was altogether too gothic and stagy. It was like something out of one of those Jacobean tragedies we had to read at school. All overblown melodrama and dead bodies lying around.’

‘John Webster? The Duchess of Malfi?’

‘Yeah, that stuff.’

‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.”’

‘What?’

‘It’s a line from the play.’

‘Right.’

Fry let it pass her by, as if English Literature classes had been one more interruption in her progress towards whatever goal she’d had her eye on in those days.

‘But I’ll tell you what, Ben,’ she said. ‘If it turns out Howard Renshaw killed Emma himself, I’m going to tear him apart with my bare hands.’

‘I think he’d have to be a damn good actor,’ said Cooper.

‘OK. I’ll present him with an Oscar first — and then I’ll tear him apart with my bare hands.’

‘Fair enough. But what about Sarah?’

Fry leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling of the CID room as she thought about Sarah.

‘Sarah Renshaw isn’t acting,’ she said. ‘Sarah Renshaw is gone from the real world.’

‘Yes.’

But Cooper thought he probably had clearer recollections of reading The Duchess of Malfi than Fry had. The lines about covering her face had popped into his mind unbidden, thanks to an enthusiastic English teacher and a memorable reading in his sixth-form literature class.

‘But that was her brother,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.” In The Duchess of Malfi it’s not her father who kills the duchess. It’s her brother.’

But Fry just stared at Cooper as if he, too, were gone from the real world.

‘Diane, I think we should take a look at Trafalgar Terrace,’ he said after a moment.

‘Take a look where?’

‘The houses behind where the Oxleys live. There’s another terrace of houses there — the same as Waterloo Terrace, but derelict. No one has lived there for years, and the houses are in quite a state. But they’re not boarded up, and I’m sure the Oxleys must have access to them.’

‘A great place to hide something?’

‘Definitely.’

‘A great place to hide a body? Or what?’

‘Let’s see.’

‘What about a search warrant?’

‘We don’t need one. The property belongs to Peak Water. I’ve already got their permission.’

‘We need it in writing, Ben.’

‘No problem. I’ll call Mr Venables, and we can visit him on the way there.’

Cooper folded an Ordnance Survey map over several times until he had a small rectangle showing the area of upper Longdendale he wanted.

‘How do you do that?’ said Fry.

‘What?’

‘Never mind. I guess I’m just fated to fold creases the wrong way.’

Cooper shrugged. ‘If you look at the map, you’ll see that we can approach Trafalgar Terrace without going past the Oxleys’ houses. If we park down on this farm road here, there’ll be a couple of fields to cross, and then we might have to climb over a fence or a wall. But we should be out of sight all the way, because there’s a thick screen of trees.’

‘OK.’

‘Besides, it’s such an ideal time. All of the Oxley men are still here in Edendale, being interviewed for the affray outside the Wheatsheaf. They won’t be back in Withens for hours yet. We’ll never have a better opportunity to take a look round without being interrupted.’

‘Sounds good. But, Ben...’

‘Yeah?’

‘The least sign of anything interesting, and we pull out and organize a proper search by the specialists.’

‘Procedure,’ said Cooper.

‘It’s not a dirty word, you know.’

Ben Cooper and Diane Fry both crashed into their chairs at their desks in the CID room. Cooper could see that Fry looked as tired as he felt himself. Actually, more tired. She looked exhausted and dark-eyed.

There was more paperwork on Cooper’s desk, but he couldn’t be bothered to look at it. He stared at the ceiling for a while and found his thoughts wandering.

‘Diane,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘When you went to Wolverhampton with Gavin the other day, you were back in your old home town, weren’t you?’

Fry didn’t respond immediately. But Cooper knew she had heard the question. He could see the telltale stiffening of her shoulders, the almost visible defensive cloak that she began to throw around herself whenever her private life was mentioned.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I remember you telling me that Warley was where you grew up. You, and your sister.’

‘Your memory’s too good sometimes, Ben.’

‘But it was important to you,’ he said. ‘I mean, it seemed to be important to you at the time, when you told me about it, Diane.’

‘So?’

Her ability to make him feel uncomfortable was uncanny. And it came so easily to her — all it took was a very slight change in the tone of her voice to insert a little sliver of ice behind her words. She had a pretty unnerving stare, too. But this time, she hadn’t even needed to look at him to let him know that his intrusion was unwelcome. There were subtle messages in every part of her body.

‘I was just wondering what it meant to you now, your old home town. Did going back there make you regret leaving it? Did it still feel like home? Did it bring back memories?’

‘Ben, have I ever told you that you ask too many questions?’

‘I’m a detective,’ said Cooper lightly. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to do.’

‘Fine — if you were asking the right questions of the right people. But I’m not a suspect in any of your cases, of which you have plenty that you might usefully be thinking about. Perhaps we ought to talk about improving your focus some time.’

‘I’ll take that as a “yes”,’ said Cooper.

‘Ben, as far as you’re concerned, I’ve forgotten everything that I ever knew about my home town, and what happened to me there. OK?’

‘But you haven’t forgotten your sister,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Not that again.’

‘Well, you haven’t.’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Diane, I know you haven’t. Since you’ve been in Derbyshire, you’ve still been looking for her. You told me—’

‘I don’t care what I told you. Just because I told you something, it doesn’t mean it’s true.’

‘Yeah, but this was true, Diane. You can’t pretend it wasn’t.’

She turned her tired eyes to stare at him. ‘Ben, leave it alone.’

Cooper hesitated momentarily. He felt like a nervous horse lining up for the last, big fence at the Horse of the Year Show. Yet he had something riding his back that wouldn’t let him shy away from the fence, but spurred him on to go for it.

‘Diane,’ he said, ‘what would you say if I could help you find out what happened to Angie?’

Cooper wondered how much longer he could meet Diane Fry’s stare. It seemed to go on for a long time, as the temperature in the room dropped and the blood began to suffuse his cheeks. Fry opened her mouth once to speak, then closed it again. Cooper hoped the waiting wouldn’t last too long. It would be better to get it over with.

In the end, Fry broke the stare and stood up without speaking. She walked across the office and looked out of the window, with an expression that suggested she was seeing anything except the back of the main stand of Edendale Football Club across the road. She was trying to hold herself steady, but Cooper could see that her hands shook where they rested on the window ledge. When she did speak, there was none of the anger that he had expected. Her voice was almost a whisper.

‘You’re talking to me about my sister again. I told you not to.’

Cooper nodded, his throat too dry and constricted to speak. But he realized that Fry couldn’t see him. He swallowed, and tried again.

‘Yes, Diane.’

‘So what is this? You think you could do a better job than me, even at finding my own sister?’

‘No. I just thought... Well, if I could help you, I would.’

Fry’s forehead sank gently against the window pane, and her eyes closed for a moment.

‘I can’t believe this.’

The door of the CID room opened and Gavin Murfin stepped in, carrying a paper bag which was already showing grease stains. He smiled when he saw Fry and Cooper.

‘Hey, Diane,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some results on that phone enquiry. Guess who Neil Granger was making calls to the night before he was killed?’

Fry didn’t even look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on Cooper.

‘Gavin, take a tea break,’ she said.

Murfin’s eyebrows rose dramatically. ‘I’ve had a break already. I thought you’d want to know—’

‘Just get out of here and don’t come back for ten minutes. OK, Gavin?’

Murfin looked at Cooper. He screwed up his face into a snooty school-marm look and wagged his head from side to side before backing out of the room.

Fry waited until she heard the door close and Murfin’s footsteps in the corridor. Then she turned away from the window to face Cooper. Her forehead was damp from the condensation on the glass and her face was pale, but at least there was a flash of anger now in her eyes, rising beyond the tiredness. Her voice rose almost to a shout.

‘You have no right,’ she said. ‘You have no right to interfere in my life. What makes you think you can do this? You’re treading on my territory now, so back off.’

Cooper began backing straight away. His chair seemed to move of its own accord on its wheels, until it hit the desk behind him.

‘I was only trying to help,’ he said.

‘Well, don’t. OK?’

On Sunday, Ben Cooper was supposed to be off duty. Instead, he found himself that morning pulling his Toyota into the car park near the Yorkshire Traction bus stop at Withens. When he got out of the car, he could hear the rumble of heavy machinery somewhere — probably the sound of a tractor on the farm next to Waterloo Terrace.

Cooper cut through a path alongside the churchyard to reach the close where the Renshaws’ house was, the Old Rectory. There was some scaffolding against the side of the house, and the sound of hammering from the roof. Probably there were broken tiles to be replaced after the winter. By now, starlings and other birds would be looking for gaps in the roof so that they could get in to build their nests in a warm, insulated attic. The owners were sensible to get the repairs done.

Then Cooper realized the flat-bed lorry parked near the scaffolding looked familiar. Anonymous, but familiar.

He walked round the scaffolding until he could see one of the men working on the roof. He recognized the back of Scott Oxley’s head, but couldn’t see much else of him because he was hidden by some of the planks at the top of the scaffolding. He recognized Scott’s voice, too, when he shouted an instruction to his mate. Another figure came into view, and an arm reached out to pass Scott a hammer. A face peered over the scaffolding and looked down at Cooper. It was Ryan.

‘’Morning,’ said Cooper.

Ryan stared at him, still holding the hammer. Scott slithered down the roof a couple of feet and looked over his shoulder, but didn’t return the greeting. Above Scott, Cooper could see a gap in the roof about four feet across.

‘Replacing a few tiles?’ he said.

‘Is it illegal, then?’

‘Depends.’

Ryan looked vaguely worried. ‘What does it depend on?’

‘Shut up,’ said Scott. ‘He’s just trying to wind us up. Give me that hammer.’

‘Is the householder at home?’ said Cooper.

‘He’s gone out. And we don’t know when he’ll be back.’

‘Pity. I might have to talk to you two for a bit, then.’

Scott began to hit a roof nail with his hammer, muttering something that sounded like ‘nothing fuckin’ better to do’.

But Cooper wasn’t going to lose the opportunity of talking to a captive audience. The Oxleys couldn’t easily get off the roof and climb down the scaffolding to reach their van. There was no easy escape route today. And the home owner wasn’t even around to tell him to leave.

‘Much to do, is there?’ said Cooper. ‘How long are you going to be on this job?’

‘A day or two,’ said Scott.

Ryan was slowly moving back behind the scaffolding, so that Cooper couldn’t see him. How old was Ryan again? Was it fourteen or fifteen? But it was Sunday, of course, so there was no school for him to be attending.

‘Just a weekend job, then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Finished by Monday?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s good, because they’ve forecast rain.’

Scott swore under the sound of the hammer. ‘We’ve got a fuckin’ tarpaulin,’ he said.

‘But you’ll be finished by Monday anyway?’

‘Yes!’

‘Where do you get the tiles from?’ said Cooper.

‘Eh?’

‘Well, they’re old tiles on that roof, aren’t they? It isn’t easy to get a good match. Do you have a local supplier?’

‘Are you thinking of going into the roofing business, or what?’ said Scott.

‘I’m interested. Local enterprises need our support. I might have some roof repairs I need doing myself one day.’

A mobile phone started ringing somewhere. Cooper knew it wasn’t his by the sound of the ring, but he took it out of his pocket and looked at it anyway, just in case. Then he saw that Scott Oxley had taken a phone off the leather belt he wore round his jeans. Scott listened for a few minutes, grunted a couple of times, then thrust the phone back. He glowered down at Cooper.

‘Bastard,’ he said.

‘Sorry? I was just enquiring about some work.’

‘You came here to make sure we kept out of the way.’

Cooper frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

But Scott was clambering down the scaffolding as fast as he could, his boots rattling on the ladder on the final descent. Ryan swung down after him, like a natural scaffolder.

Cooper took a step backwards, concerned about the change in Scott’s manner. ‘What’s the problem?’ he said. ‘Why are you stopping work?’

Scott paused only for a second before he got into the cab of the lorry.

‘The rain came early,’ he said.

Puzzled, Cooper stood watching the Oxleys as they drove off. He looked up at the sky, then at the hole in the roof of the house. A starling flew down and landed on the tiles before hopping into the hole and disappearing. Cooper shook his head.

‘I think I’ll be taking my business elsewhere, after all,’ he said.

As Cooper walked back towards the car park, he looked at his mobile phone again. Was there something he ought to know about? But nobody had called him, and his radio was back in the car. Besides, it was his day off, and no one would know that he was in Withens.

‘Hold on, what’s happening now?’ said the South Yorkshire inspector, pacing the yard at Shepley Head Lodge.

‘He’s coming out, sir.’

‘Everybody move back.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be armed.’

‘Thank God.’

Michael Dearden walked across the yard with his hands in the air and tears running down his face. His wife appeared in the doorway behind him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the lights.

Four officers moved quickly in on Dearden from different directions, shouting instructions at him. Within a few seconds, he was handcuffed and had been searched for weapons. One of the officers gave a thumbs-up sign.

‘It’s all over,’ said the inspector with undisguised relief.

But it didn’t feel over to Fry. There was a smell in the air that was too strong to be the lingering reek of a discharged shotgun. It was a smell that carried a meaning and presence as powerfully as the scent of Rive Gauche from Emma Renshaw’s car. She turned away from the house and swung her binoculars upwards.

‘Smoke,’ she said.

‘What? Not another damn moorland fire!’ said the inspector. ‘If you ask me, those kids from Manchester should be shot and roasted over the flames.’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘This smoke isn’t coming from the moors. It’s coming from Withens.’

By the time Diane Fry reached Withens, the derelict houses of Trafalgar Terrace were well ablaze. Coming over the hill from Shepley Head Lodge, she could see the smoke billowing out of the upstairs windows, thick and black. There was an acrid stench in the air, as if the houses themselves had been full of old tyres that were now burning. The upper floor must already be smoke-logged. The windows had been shattered by the heat, and the smoke was pouring out of them in waves. The smoke was so thick that only the occasional tongue of flame could be seen in the midst of them.

Fry found PC Tracy Udall and a colleague parking their Vauxhall across the road to stop any traffic going further than the car park.

‘Where the hell’s the fire service?’ said Fry.

‘According to Control, some of the local crews are still up on Withens Moor damping down. The nearest appliance is coming from New Mills.’

‘Is there anyone inside?’

‘We don’t know. We’ve looked in the ground-floor rooms at this end of the row, as far as we could. But the fire seems to have started at the other end, and the smoke is too bad to get near. The fire crew might find anybody who’s in there, if they get here soon. But if there was anyone upstairs, then I reckon they’ve had it by now. No one could breathe in that smoke.’

‘And what about the people in the other terrace?’

‘Mrs Wallwin is over there, from number 7. She’s perfectly OK.’

‘And her neighbours? The Oxleys?’

‘She doesn’t know. She’s a bit stressed and confused.’

‘They all have to come out. There are hundreds of railway sleepers and wooden pallets stacked in the yard at the back. A couple of vehicles, too. If all that stuff catches fire, their homes will go up like a bomb.’

‘There are some demolition contractors down there in the field with a JCB and a bulldozer,’ said Udall. ‘They say they’ve been sent in by the landlords. They were due to start work on knocking down those empty houses, but someone has got to them first.’

‘So I see.’

‘The contractors have created an access through the fence at the bottom of the field. The trouble is, we can’t get to Waterloo Terrace.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’ve dropped a couple of trees across the entrance, using chainsaws.’

They jogged through the farmyard and down the field to where the contractors’ machinery stood uselessly by.

Now Fry could see the pigeons circling Trafalgar Terrace. Their pale grey shapes were passing in and out of the smoke like tiny ghosts. At the far end of the terrace, the roof slates were glowing red from the heat of the burning rafters beneath them. But the pigeons kept trying to land on the ridge of the roofs, despite the heat and the flames, which were now licking through the slates. After making repeated attempts to land on the roof, one of the birds was finally caught by a burst of flame that erupted from a gap in the tiles. Its pinion feathers flared and blackened immediately, and its feet curled and shrivelled as the tendons burned. The pigeon tumbled on to the roof, where it writhed and flopped desperately as it roasted in the intense heat from the slates. But finally it gave up the struggle, slid down the roof and disappeared into the smoke. Oblivious to its fate, the other birds continued to attempt to land.

‘We did see people moving around earlier on,’ said Udall. ‘One of them was carrying something. No — two of them were. Long, heavy objects. But we couldn’t quite see—’

‘Were they armed? We know they have air rifles, at least.’

‘I’m not sure. Not air rifles anyway. Maybe just chainsaws.’

Fry tried Cooper’s number again, but there was no answer.

‘Tracy, ask the contractors if I can borrow a hard hat and one of those yellow jackets.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got to go in. I’ll use the access they’ve made through the fence here, and see if I can work my way through the yard before the flames get to those pallets.’

‘Diane, you can’t.’

Fry pushed her phone back into her pocket. ‘Ben Cooper’s in there somewhere,’ she said.

Udall nodded. ‘I’ll come with you, then.’

By the bank holiday Monday, Withens didn’t feel quite so isolated. In fact, the entire world was rushing by only yards away, and it seemed to be coming nearer.

There were visitors in the village to see the well dressing, and the Quiet Shepherd was doing good trade. But Ben Cooper felt the world was intruding in other ways, too, perhaps more subtly. Walkers following Euroroute E8 all the way from Turkey were ending up in Longdendale. Lorries on trans-Pennine journeys often turned off the A628 to park overnight by the side of the road above Withens, gradually creating their own lay-by by churning up the grass and compacting the ground. Those lorries were from all over the world. Even the acid rain destroying the peat moors might be from anywhere, too — not just Manchester.

Sitting in his car with his mobile phone pressed to his ear, Cooper reflected that if he drew everything on to a map, it would show the village surrounded, though still isolated. It was cut off by the traffic roaring by to the south, and by the power cables of the National Grid and the proposed new trans-Pennine expresses in the tunnels to the west. Together, they formed a net that Withens would never escape. Perhaps the water company would want to clear the whole valley to preserve the purity of its water. The land might be needed for a lorry park or maintenance sheds for the new rail link. And when that happened what would become of people like the Oxleys?

‘I don’t believe it was Craig Oxley alone who killed Barry Cully,’ said Cooper into his phone. ‘Do you? It’s too convenient.’

Diane Fry’s voice sounded distant. Not only was she miles away in Edendale, but her mind would be on other things, preparing for an important interview. She was always meticulous about planning interviews, making notes on the areas she wanted to make sure she covered with her questions. Nothing was to be missed out.

‘There’s no evidence otherwise, Ben,’ she said. ‘The rest of the Oxleys are saying nothing at all.’

‘And they won’t, no matter how often they’re interviewed. I think Ryan only spoke up because he’s been terrified by the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. He knew that if anyone else got into trouble, the whole family would be out of Waterloo Terrace. So he decided it was safer to break ranks and blame Craig, who is safely dead and out of the way already. But I’m convinced the Oxleys do things together, not alone.’

‘And that’s your theory, Ben?’

‘And the story is right here, in the collective memory of the Oxleys, and it always will be. We just have no way of getting access to it. Not in a way that we could present to a judge and jury.’

Cooper watched a group of people passing along the road in their black rag coats and their hats and sunglasses. They were some of the dancers and musicians arriving from Hey Bridge for the May Day performance of the Border Rats.

‘You mean all that Border Rats nonsense?’ said Fry. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service would love us if we presented them with that lot as key witnesses.’

Because of the crowds and the displays in the village, Cooper had been obliged to park his car on the roadside below the village, on the other side of the church. Somebody driving too fast into Withens had hit a carrion crow that had been feeding on the squashed remains of a rabbit. Its tattered black shape lay half in a pothole on the verge.

Cooper stared at the remains of the crow, its pinions fluttering in the slipstream of a passing car.

‘Nature turned out not to be on their side, didn’t it?’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The Oxleys.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Ben,’ said Fry.

Cooper didn’t bother to defend himself. He was watching the movement of the loose scree on the opposite slope as it slid a little bit nearer to Withens. It might take time, but nature never did give up the war.

‘I was thinking about Craig Oxley on the way here,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what the point is of sending young people into custody. Not in the present system. They just come out worse at the end of it.’

‘I know.’

‘If there’s one group in the prison system who could actually be helped, surely it’s young people. If anybody really cared about them, their lives could be turned round at that age. They could be given education, at least. I mean proper education — not training for a future as a car thief or a mobile-phone bandit.’

‘There aren’t all that many cases like his, Ben.’

‘No. The system probably considers Craig Oxley to be one of its successes. He won’t be clogging up the courts again, will he? He won’t be taking up valuable police time any more.’

‘There’s no point in talking to you when you’re in this mood, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Go home and get some sleep, see if you can get a dose of reality. Or a sense of proportion at least. You’ll have got over it in the morning. And don’t forget, we’ve got a meeting to re-schedule. We still need to have that talk about your future.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Give me a break, Diane.’

‘We can’t keep putting it off.’

‘But you’ll be busy.’

‘Not too busy for you, Ben.’

There was a pause while Cooper tried to picture the expression on her face. Sometimes phones just weren’t good enough for communication.

‘You said you’d be in Withens later on?’ said Fry. ‘You want to see this Border Rats thing through to the end, don’t you?’

‘That’s right. You’re still coming, aren’t you?’

‘Unfortunately. I have to see the Renshaws one last time. I promised them I’d keep them informed personally about progress on the enquiry. I wish I didn’t have to come to Withens ever again. It isn’t going to be easy this afternoon.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not easy at all.’

Philip Granger had decided to ignore the advice of the duty solicitor and explain himself. He did it with the same smile, as if he were helping his interviewers to get their ideas straight.

‘You have this all wrong,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend to kill Neil. Why would I do that? He was my brother.’

‘We know that Neil was going to help the Reverend Alton dig up the graveyard. You knew he would find the remains of Barry Cully. All of your family knew that. And somebody had to stop him. We think the obvious person to do that was you, Mr Granger.’

Philip Granger looked paler than ever. He didn’t seem to have shaved for several days, and his clothes didn’t smell too clean either. He had deteriorated noticeably during the last week, and someone ought to have noticed.

‘Yes, yes. But I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said. ‘I meant to break Neil’s arm, that was all — not to kill him.’

‘But you did kill him, Mr Granger.’

He shook his head. ‘It was an accident. He moved at the wrong moment. He hit his head on the stones at the bottom of the air shaft. You know that’s what happened. It was an accident.’

‘A broken arm wouldn’t have kept him out of action for ever,’ said Hitchens. ‘Besides, you should have known Mr Alton would carry on clearing the graveyard on his own, which is what he did. Did you really hope that the remains of Barry Cully would never be found?’

‘We hoped Alton would leave. We hoped the church would be closed.’

‘We?’

‘The family were behind me,’ said Granger.

‘But the vicar put a spanner in the works.’

‘He was a bit obsessed about that graveyard. I don’t know why it was so important to him.’

‘The damage to the vestry?’ said Hitchens. ‘The theft? The vandalism to his car?’

‘We didn’t have anything against him, really. But nothing seemed to take his attention away from that bloody graveyard. He should have left things well alone.’

Fry consulted the notes she had made before starting the interview. One of the first things she’d noted was the record of Neil Granger’s calls from his mobile phone the night he was killed. They were calls to a number in Glossop — his brother’s number.

‘Well, there you go, then,’ said Philip, when she asked him about the calls. He glanced at his solicitor with a little triumphant smile, but the solicitor didn’t respond. ‘Would Neil have phoned me to arrange to meet, if he thought I would do anything to him?’

‘The fact that Neil didn’t expect you to attack him doesn’t cast any light on your intentions,’ said Fry.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, why would I?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Look, he pestered me to go up there. He had an idea about some ceremony at dawn on May Day, and he wanted to rehearse it. I think he’d had a row about it with Uncle Lucas and the others. So he had a point to prove. He was a bit like that, Neil — pig-headed. But it was no good to him doing it on his own, because he needed somebody to prove his point to. That’s why he thought of me. I had my uses, even for my little brother. Hell, do you think I wanted to go up the hill to that air shaft in the middle of the night? He pestered me until I said “yes”. I don’t know why I agreed to it.’

‘Perhaps you suddenly realized what a convenient opportunity you’d been presented with.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Philip, shaking his head.

Hitchens folded his hands together on the table as he took a turn to let Fry prepare her next question.

‘How did you actually get up to the air shaft to meet Neil?’ he said. ‘We’ve interviewed lorry drivers on the A628, and no one saw any cars parked in the lay-by, except your brother’s.’

‘I don’t have a car. I ride a motorbike. I parked it behind Neil’s car, where no one would see it from the road.’

‘And you walked up to the air shaft from the lay-by?’

‘It isn’t that far. If Neil could walk it, why shouldn’t I?’ Philip grimaced. ‘I was a bit shattered by the time I got there, to be honest. I’m not quite so clean living as good old Neil. That was another way he always made me feel second best.’

‘You could have ridden up on the bike,’ said Hitchens.

‘I’m not totally stupid. There would be tracks.’

‘You were worried about leaving tracks, yet you say you didn’t intend to kill your brother?’

Philip opened his mouth, then stopped and looked at his solicitor, who shook his head sadly.

‘That’s a “no comment”.’

Fry looked at Hitchens, who sat back, content. Time for a change of tack. If Granger thought he could get off lightly, he was going to be mistaken.

‘Mr Granger,’ said Fry, ‘according to the postmortem report on your brother, some of the cerebrospinal fluid from his head injury was transferred to his hand while he was dying. That could only have been done by you. Do you agree?’

Granger looked a little sick. If he could have gone any paler, he would have done. His voice was a little quieter when he spoke.

‘It was still quite dark, but I remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was a sort of thud and crunch, like somebody had dropped a packet of biscuits in the street. I could see that Neil wasn’t dead. He was still moving a bit, and making noises like an animal. But I couldn’t hit him again. I couldn’t hit someone who was injured, it’s not the same.’ He looked up at Fry for some understanding. She found she couldn’t look away.

‘I was always like that,’ he said. ‘I could never understand how uncle Lucas and some of my cousins could kill injured animals. Lucas always said it was putting them out of their misery, that it was a kindness. But I could never bring myself to do it like he could, not killing an injured thing in cold blood, no matter how badly hurt it was.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I held Neil’s hand and waited with him, until he died.’

‘Do you expect us to believe that?’ said Hitchens.

Granger dropped his head. ‘He took a long time to die. But time always passes, doesn’t it?’

Fry looked at Hitchens. They both knew that Philip Granger’s account didn’t quite tally with the postmortem report on his brother’s injuries.

They allowed Granger a moment to recover. But Fry had a lot of important questions she still wanted to ask him.

‘And now, Mr Granger, we come to the subject of Emma Renshaw.’

The tough black plastic that Ivan Matley’s silage bales were wrapped in was practically indestructible. No biodegradable rubbish. It could be pierced by the steel spike on his tractor, but not by much else. So Matley was puzzled by the holes in the bag he had just lifted from the stack that afternoon. Rats? Foxes? Vandals? But the bag didn’t really look as though it had been bitten or ripped. It looked more as if acid had eaten through the plastic, rotting it into small, ragged holes and causing discoloured streaks in the shiny black surface.

Matley climbed down from the cab of his tractor to take a closer look, in case the inner bag had been punctured and the silage inside had rotted. It had been standing here for years, and he wouldn’t ever have expected to use it if the weather hadn’t been so bad earlier on.

You could always tell good silage by the smell. But when he sniffed, he thought there was something about this bag that wasn’t right. Perhaps air had got in through the holes and ruined it. Ivan Matley had smelled silage that had gone off before, and this was certainly foul enough.

The rest of the bales were lined up against the drystone wall, stacked three high. From this side, they looked in perfectly good condition — their outer bags nice and shiny, and tight. That was why he had never noticed anything wrong, though he had driven past them in the field many times. But the damage on the bale he had lifted seemed to have been at the back.

‘Damn fly-tippers,’ he said.

Matley felt sure that people using the track on the other side of the wall must have thrown something into his field. And to have damaged the plastic like that, it would have to have been something pretty toxic. Battery acid was his guess. If he looked down the back of the silage stack, between the bales and the wall, he reckoned he would find at least one old car battery that somebody had dumped because they couldn’t be bothered to dispose of it properly. It wouldn’t have mattered a bit to them if there had been livestock in the field, either. Cows were inquisitive — they might have licked at an abandoned battery and burned themselves on the spilled acid.

Matley walked round the end of the stack and tried to see behind it, but found the gap between the bales and the wall was too narrow for him to squeeze into. Now that he had passed fifty, he wasn’t quite as slim as he used to be — as his wife kept reminding him.

But he could see more small, ragged holes in the black plastic near the centre of the bottom row. Yes, he was sure it was battery acid. What else would be corrosive enough to eat through his silage bags like that? And what else would smell quite so bad?

Puffing a bit, Matley climbed on to the top of the wall and balanced precariously on the toppings. It was the sort of trick he would have played hell about, if he had caught anyone else doing it. Once the toppings had been dislodged by people climbing over them, the rest of the wall would lose its stability and soon fall down. Then motorists would be complaining to the police because his cows were out on the lane again. He couldn’t win.

‘Why do I waste my bloody time?’ he said.

But there was no one on the track this morning to hear him. He could see wheel ruts on the verge the other side of the wall, where someone had backed a car or van in from the lane. He wondered what else they might have fly-tipped. But he couldn’t see anything in the grass or in the deep banks of whinberry between the wall and the track. Why should they bother dumping stuff on the track when they could chuck it over his wall? Out of sight, out of mind. And leave the poor old farmer to clear up the mess, as usual.

Matley edged gingerly along the wall, supporting himself on the stack of bales. The smooth surface of the bags felt cold and slightly damp to the touch. But beneath the plastic, the silage itself gave a little under the pressure of his hands and released a surge of warmth. His fingers left indentations in the plastic as he pushed himself along to a position where he could see what had been thrown over his wall. Rank grass was growing in the narrow space, but it didn’t get much sun behind the silage stack, and it looked pale and sickly.

‘And what the bloody hell’s that?’ he said.