STEPHEN BOOTH

The Kill Call

As with all my previous books, this story would never have seen the light of day without the hard work and support of a whole team of people. This novel is particularly dedicated to my agent, Teresa Chris, to my editor, Julia Wisdom at HarperCollins, and to long-suffering copy editor Anne O’Brien, all of whom have been involved with Cooper and Fry for almost a decade.

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

1

Journal of 1968

In those days, there were always just the three of us. Three bodies close together, down there in the cold, with the water seeping through the concrete floor, and a chill striking deep into flesh and bone. The three of us, crouching in the gloom, waiting for a signal that would never come.

And what a place to wait and watch in. Seven feet high and seven feet wide – it might as well have been a giant coffin. But slam down the lid and blot out the sun, and we’d survive. Oh, yes. For fourteen days, we’d survive. Thinking about all the things we’d hoped for, and the way our lives could be snuffed out, just like that.

One night, Jimmy looked up from his bunk at me and Les, and he said we were like the three little pigs, or the three billy goats gruff. Well, I don’t know about that. Three blind mice, maybe – it would be more fitting. If it all kicked off, the three of us would be as good as blind. Blinded by a million suns. Blind to the people dying.

A few of the details are a bit dim now. Age does that to you. But other things are as bright and stark in my mind as if they’d been burnt there by a lightning flash. Faces and eyes are what I remember most. Faces in the dark. Eyes turned up towards the light. That look in the eyes a second before death.

Yet all we had down there was a miserable six-watt bulb. I don’t think they even make bulbs that small any more, do they? No wonder your sight could get damaged. Then, every ninety minutes, the switch would pop and it went totally dark. Black as a cat in a coal hole. I always hated that. Even now, complete darkness is what frightens me most. You never know what might be coming up right next to you in the dark.

But it’s amazing how you can adapt to it, for a while. With that one little bulb, we could see pretty well in the murk, well enough to read and do what was necessary.

The place was shocking damp, too. I don’t know what they’d done wrong when they built it, but Les said it hadn’t been tanked. Les was our number one, and he might have been right, for once. The water seemed to soak right through the walls from the soil. It was particularly bad in the winter, or after a heavy rain, which happens a mite too often in Derbyshire. Some nights, if it were siling down, it would be all hands to the pump.

And that was the three of us. Me, Les, and poor old Jimmy. Always three, except for the time that we didn’t ever talk about.

A lot of things seem to come in threes, don’t they? The Holy Trinity, the Three Wise Men, the Third World War. There must be something magic about the number. Perhaps it’s to do with the Earth being the third planet from the Sun. Or the fact that we see the world in three dimensions – even if your world happens to be only seven feet wide and seven feet high.

Well, times change so much. The years pass and the world turns, and suddenly no one cares, and no one wants you any more. They take away your friends, your pride, your reason for living. But they can’t ever wipe out your memories. Sometimes, I wish they would. If only they could take away the nightmares, free me from the memory of those damp concrete walls and the icy darkness, and the memory of a face, staring up at the light.

And that’s another funny thing. They say bad luck comes in threes, don’t they? I think I always knew that.

But here’s something I didn’t know. It turns out that people die in threes, too.

2

March 2009, Tuesday

Old buildings drew Sean Crabbe like a bee to honey. The more neglected they were, the better he liked them. He couldn’t really explain the appeal. It might have been something to do with the history that clung to the walls, the lives of long-dead people written in the dust, their stories forever trapped in cobwebs hanging from broken ceilings.

That was why the old Nissen huts above Birchlow were one of his favourite places. He made his way there whenever he got the chance, bunking off from college or just disappearing on a weekend, when no one cared what he was up to. No one else ever went up to the huts any more – not since the homeless man had died there, wrapped up in a roll of plastic sheeting with empty cans scattered around him, a cold morning light glinting on the last drops of his beer as they dribbled across the floor.

Sean had been there on that morning, had found the old derelict lying in his pool of Special Brew, and had walked away to try somewhere else. Next day, he’d watched from the hillside as the police and paramedics made their way to the site. He wondered why they’d sent an ambulance when any fool could see that the man was long since dead.

Some folk said that the place was cursed now, haunted by the ghost of the drunken vagrant. So that was why Sean was always on his own at the old huts. And it was just the way he liked it.

There was one big building that was almost intact, with damp brick walls and corrugated-iron sheets banging in the wind. Its purpose was a mystery to him, but he didn’t really care. There were a few small rooms that might have been offices, a kitchen that still had a filthy sink in it, and a bigger space with a concrete floor and shelves along the walls, like a workshop. He liked the narrow corridors best, the floorboards that had warped from the damp and seemed to move with him as he crossed from room to room, and the peeling paint of the doorways where he could imagine anything waiting behind them to be found.

In a way, whenever he pushed open one of those doors, he was entering a different world, stepping through into the past. He wondered if the past had been a better world than the one he was in right now.

This morning, Sean’s need to escape had been urgent. His BTEC course at the further education college was turning out to be a waste of time, useless for his chances of finding the media career he’d dreamed of. The money he’d saved doing holiday jobs had long since run out. All those hours washing caravans and picking up rubbish hadn’t kept him in course fees for long, and now he owed his parents for a loan to see him through. His girlfriend had dumped him weeks ago, because she said he was mean. If he could call her a girlfriend. Most of the girls thought he was geeky. But, if he was a geek, why wasn’t he cleverer at passing exams and doing assignments?

And, to cap it all, a bunch of kids had mugged him last night outside the pub and nicked his phone. Lucky he didn’t have his iPod with him at the time, but losing the Nokia was a real pain. His parents had shelled out for it, and he couldn’t face telling them that he’d lost it.

It was pity there was no sun, though. A patch of thin, lattice-like wood had been exposed up there in the roof space, and when the sunlight shone through, it cast shadows across the floor. Then Sean could pretend he was a child, avoiding the cracks on the pavement. Here, he could step from light to light, avoiding the dark shadows as if they were traps, holes where evil lurked. Step from light to light, and avoid the shadows. If only life was so easy.

But there was no sun today. Just the rain clattering on the corrugated iron, blowing through the splintered windows, streaming down the walls. He was already wet when he arrived at the huts, and the chill made him shiver inside his parka.

Mouldy, fusty, stale and mildewed. Those were the familiar smells of the hut. If the weather was warm, he could scent an underlying odour of oil or grease, saturated into the concrete from whatever had gone on in here. That smell must have lasted decades. Fifty, sixty years? The buildings must be from about that time. They were so old-fashioned, so last century. It was hard for him to imagine what anyone might have done up here, stuck on an empty hillside in Derbyshire.

Now and then, he smoked a spliff up here at the huts, but he couldn’t afford that now. Instead, he plugged in the earphones of his iPod and selected some Coldplay. A feeling of peace settled over him as he listened to Chris Martin’s plaintive vocals coming in on ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’. He could forget everything else for a while once the music was playing.

Today, though, Sean knew something was different. He tugged out the earphones and stayed completely still, his eyes tightly closed, his ears straining for a sound. The scurrying of a mouse under the floorboards, maybe, or a bird scratching a nest in the roof. But there was no sound.

He squinted at the dust swirling slowly around him, disturbed only by the current of his own breath. The room looked the same as always. Nothing had been moved or disturbed since his last visit. It was always a worry that someone else would find the derelict buildings – another vagrant sleeping rough, a couple of kids finding a place to have sex or take drugs. Or, worst of all, the owner coming to check on his property, or a builder with a plan to demolish it.

Sean closed his eyes, trying to recapture the moment that had been lost. But he finally had to acknowledge that something really was different today. It wasn’t a sound, or anything that looked out of place. It was in the very quality of the mustiness, an underlying odour that was too sweet to be oil or grease. He couldn’t deny the message that was hitting his nostrils.

The difference was in the smell.

It had been raining for six hours by the time they found the body. Since the early hours of the morning, sheets of water had been swirling into the valley, soaking the corpse and the ground around it. Pools of water had gathered in the hollows of the fields below Longstone Moor, and a new stream had formed between two hawthorns, washing their roots bare of earth.

Detective Sergeant Diane Fry wiped the rain from her face and cursed under her breath as she watched the medical examiner and an assistant turn the body on to its side. Rivulets of blood-soaked water streamed off the sleeves of a green coat the victim was wearing. A crime-scene photographer crouched under the edge of the body tent to capture the moment. Big, fat drops bounced off his paper suit, ricocheting like bullets.

Shivering, Fry made a mental note to find out the manufacturer of the victim’s coat. Her own jacket was barely shower proof, and it would never have withstood the amount of rain that had fallen during the night. Her shoulders already felt damp, though she’d been standing in the field no more than ten minutes. If she didn’t get back to her car soon, her clothes would be sticking to her all day, with no chance of a hot shower for hours yet. She’d be unpopular back at the office, too. No one liked sharing their nice, warm working space with a drowned rat.

‘Haven’t we got any cover up here yet?’ she said. ‘Where’s the mobile control unit?’

‘On its way, Sarge. It’s a difficult spot to get to.’

‘Tell me about it.’

She’d left her Peugeot way back somewhere in a muddy gateway, two fields off at least. Her trek to reach the scene had been across hundreds of yards of damp, scrubby grass, dodging sheep droppings, hoping not to twist an ankle in the treacherous holes that opened up everywhere in this kind of area. The remains of old lead mines, she’d been told. The legacy of thousands of years of men burrowing into the hills like rabbits.

And then, when she arrived, she’d discovered a delay by the first officers attending the call to get a body tent up. The FOAs’ vehicle had been short of the required equipment. What a surprise.

An officer standing nearby in a yellow jacket looked at the sky to the west and said something about the rain easing off a bit. He said it with that tone of voice that a countryman used, pretending to be so wise about the ways of the weather. But that was one thing Fry had learned about the Peak District during her time in Derbyshire – there was nothing predictable about the weather.

‘Could you find something more useful to do than pretending to be Michael Fish?’ said Fry.

‘Yes, Sarge. I expect so.’

Fry watched him walk back towards the gateway to direct an arriving vehicle. Even if the officer was right, it was already too late. She felt sure about that. There was a limit to how much water even a limestone landscape could absorb, and this crime scene wouldn’t take much more of a soaking.

Continuous heavy rain did an effective job of destroying physical evidence at an exposed crime scene like this one. And exposed was the right word. She was standing in the middle of a field of rough, short-cropped grass, with no real shelter in sight except a distant dry-stone wall. Right now, she would be glad to huddle behind that wall, even if it meant sharing with the sheep she could see standing hunched and miserable at the far end of the field.

Crime-scene examiners put their faith in the theory that anyone present at a crime scene took traces away from it, and left traces behind. It was called Locard’s Principle. But, in this case, one half of Locard had been rendered practically worthless by the weather. During the past few hours, blood had been washed away, fingerprints soaked off, shoe marks obliterated. Whatever traces an attacker might have left behind were dissolving into the soil, his unique DNA absorbed into the landscape.

Fry took a step back and felt something soft and squishy slide under her heel. Damn it. If only traces of these bloody sheep disappeared from the landscape so quickly.

For a moment, she gazed across the valley towards Longstone Moor. According to the map, the nearest villages of any size were Birchlow and Eyam. But if they were ever visible from here, she’d chosen the wrong day to enjoy the view. Grey clouds hung so low over the hills that they seemed to be resting on the trees. A dense mist of rain swept across the part of the valley where Eyam was supposed to be.

Fry already hated the sound of Eyam. That was because she’d been corrected about its pronunciation. It was supposed to be said ‘Eem’, they told her – not ‘I-am’, which was the way only tourists pronounced it. Well, sod that. She felt inclined to say it the wrong way for the rest of the day, just to show that she was a tourist, at heart. Yes – deep down, she was just a visitor passing through, taking a break from civilization to study the ways of primitive hill folk.

A gust of wind blew a spatter of rain in her eyes. That was one thing you could say for a city. Any city, anywhere. There was always a building within reach where you could get out of the rain. In the Peak District, the weather would always catch you exposed and vulnerable. It could bake you one minute, and drown you the next. It was like some big conspiracy, nature combining with the remains of ancient lead mines that lurked under your feet to trip you up.

When Fry turned away from the view, she found the crime-scene manager, Wayne Abbott, standing in front of her, as if he’d materialized out of the rain. He was a damp ghost, glistening in his white scene suit as if he was formed of ectoplasm.

‘There doesn’t seem to be much physical evidence in the immediate area around the body,’ he said, when he’d got her attention.

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘And I can’t even see where the approach route might have been. We’ll probably have to do a fingertip search over the whole field.’

‘How many people on the ground would we need for that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a big field.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

Fry could imagine the arguments about overtime payments and the hours spent frowning over the duty rota. Luckily, she could pass that problem up to her DI, Paul Hitchens.

The information so far was too scanty for her liking. A sighting of the body had been called in by the air support unit at nine forty-five a.m., a sharp-eyed observer on board Oscar Hotel 88 spotting the motionless figure as the helicopter passed overhead en route to a surveillance task. The zoom facility on his video camera had confirmed the worst. Paramedics had attended, along with uniforms from Bakewell, the observer keeping up a running commentary to guide units to the location. With death confirmed, the duty DC had been called out, and gradually the incident had begun to move up the chain. Her DI, Paul Hitchens, would be on scene shortly, and he would become the officer in charge.

But Fry could see that this was already looking like a difficult one. According to the control room, there were no overnight mispers, not so much as a stressed teenager who’d stayed out all night to wind up Mum and Dad. Neighbouring forces weren’t any help, either. She’d held out hopes of Sheffield, who usually had a bunch of drunks gone AWOL, even on a wet Monday night in March. But no such luck.

So there was going to be a lot of work to do getting a story on the victim, even with a quick ID. If this did turn out to be a murder enquiry, the first forty-eight hours were absolutely crucial.

Fry shivered again as a trickle of water ran down her neck. And it didn’t help much when Mother Nature decided to spend the first six of those forty-eight hours re-enacting the Great Flood.

A miserable figure was making his way across the field, slithering on the grass and dodging strips of wet crime-scene tape flapping around him in the wind. Detective Constable Gavin Murfin wasn’t cut out for country treks, either. But, in his case, it was for a different reason. No matter how many memos did the rounds from management about the fitness of officers, Murfin had been unable to lose any weight. Recently, Fry had noticed that he’d compromised by taking his belt in a notch, which had succeeded only in producing an unsightly roll of spare flesh that hung over his waistband.

Murfin had a comfort-eating problem, and Fry could relate to that. If only he didn’t leave so many crumbs in her car.

‘Gavin. How are things back at the office?’

‘In chaos. Have you seen that Branagh woman? She’s empire-building already.’

Fry shrugged. ‘That’s the name of the game at senior management level.’

‘God save me from promotion, then.’

‘I don’t think you need God’s help, Gavin.’

Murfin shrugged. ‘I notice you’ve been doing your best to keep out of her way. So I don’t suppose you’re exactly her number one fan, either.’

Fry didn’t answer. She still had some instinct for diplomatic silence.

Murfin pulled a face as he took in the fields and the distant stone walls.

‘Witnesses are going to be a bit thin on the ground, Diane.’

‘Yes.’ Fry eyed the sheep suspiciously. ‘There are plenty of those things, though.’

Murfin nodded. ‘Sheep see a lot of things. You’d be surprised. One day, some clever bugger at Ripley will come up with a scheme for surveillance sheep. Imagine them wandering about with miniature video cameras strapped to their heads, like hundreds of little woolly PCSOs.’

She tried to picture some of E Division’s community support officers with the faces of sheep. But her imagination failed her.

‘The mind boggles,’ she said.

‘A bit of boggling now and then never did anyone any harm, in my opinion.’

Fry sighed. ‘Where is everyone, Gavin?’

‘Oh, am I not enough for you?’

‘What about Hurst, and Irvine? Where are they?’

‘Processing.’

‘Still?’

‘It’s the price of success.’

Fry didn’t need to ask any more. Sunday had been E Division’s strike day. Not a total withdrawal of labour in protest at their latest pay deal, as some officers would have liked, but a pre-planned operation targeting known criminals. Search warrants had been executed in various parts of the division. Arrests were made for assault, theft, burglary, going equipped, supplying Class-A drugs, and money laundering. Officers had recovered drugs, cigarettes, and a large amount of cash. Not a bad haul for the day, and the chiefs were happy. Intelligence-led, proactive policing at its best. But the consequent mountain of paperwork was horrendous. There were so many stages that followed from an arrest – prisoner handling, interviews, witness statements, case-file preparation …

‘And Ben Cooper –’ said Murfin.

‘Yes, I know. He’s got himself a cushy job.’

Murfin nodded casually at the body tent. Apart from the coat, about all that could be seen of the victim was a pair of muddy brown brogues that almost protruded from the tent into the rain.

‘We’ve got cars out trying to locate a vehicle,’ he said. ‘Reckon he must have got himself out here somehow, mustn’t he? He isn’t a hiker, not in those shoes.’

‘No luck so far?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘It’ll be parked up in a lay-by somewhere. Unless he was brought out here by someone else, of course.’

‘By his killer. Right.’

Fry didn’t answer. One of the other downsides of policing a rural area was the lack of CCTV cameras. One of the many downsides. If she’d still been working back in Birmingham, or any other city, they’d have caught the victim’s car on half a dozen cameras as it passed from A to B, registered his number plate at a car-park entry barrier, and probably got a nice, clear shot of him walking along the pavement to wherever he’d been going. And then they could have scanned the CCTV footage for possible suspects, grabbed images of a face from the screen for identification.

But out here? Unless their victim had been idiot enough to go more than ten miles an hour over the limit on a stretch of the A6 where the speed cameras were actually operating, his movements might as well have been invisible.

‘If someone else took his car,’ said Murfin, ‘they might have dumped it and torched it by now.’

‘If they have, it’ll turn up somewhere.’

Murfin was wrestling with a decrepit Ordnance Survey map. Normally, he swore by his sat-nav, and never took driving instructions from anyone but TomTom, or his wife. That wasn’t much use when you’d left your car two fields away, though Fry knew that Wayne Abbott had a GPS device to map the location of a crime scene precisely.

‘We’re somewhere about here,’ said Murfin, stabbing a finger at a square of damp plastic. ‘Longstone Moor that way, the nearest village is Birchlow, over there. A few more villages across the valley. And a load of quarries all around us, some of them still in use. There’s a big mill down in that dip. Not textiles, it processes stone from the quarries.’

‘A tricky area, then?’

Murfin shrugged. ‘The lads are checking any pull-ins on the A623 or this back road over here between the villages. But, as you can see, there are quite a few unmade lanes and farm tracks in this area. So it could take a while, unless some helpful punter phones in.’

‘The victim’s shoes are muddy, so he could have walked some distance, at least.’

‘Eyam at the furthest, I’d say,’ suggested Murfin, pronouncing the ‘Eem’ correctly. ‘There’s a car park that tourists use, near the museum. I’ve asked for a check on any that have outstayed their parking tickets. He’s been dead for an hour or two, right?’

‘Three hours, according to the ME.’

‘He might be due for a fine, then. Poor bugger. That’s the last thing he needs.’

‘That’s not really funny, Gavin.’

‘Oh, I thought those were tears of unrestrained hilarity running down your face. Maybe it’s just the rain, after all.’

The officer nearby was listening to a call on his radio, and became suddenly alert. Fry looked at him expectantly.

‘What’s the news?’

‘Not good, Sergeant. The control room says a 999 call was received about twenty minutes ago.’ The officer pointed towards a distant stone building. ‘A unit has been despatched to the old agricultural research centre, about half a mile away in that direction. They thought we’d like to know. There’s been a report of another corpse.’

Fry cursed quietly, squinting against the downpour.

‘I’ve heard about showers of frogs,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never heard of it raining bodies.’

3

Detective Constable Ben Cooper ran his hand down the glass of the passenger window, clearing a path through the condensation. But it was wetter outside than inside the car, and all he saw was a blurred reflection of himself – a pair of dark eyes, fragmented against the streets of Edendale. Automatically, he swept back the stray lock of hair that fell across his forehead, before focusing beyond his own image to the side door of the house across the street.

‘Someone home, I think.’

‘There’d better be. The boss won’t be happy if it’s all a wasted effort.’

Despite the rain, Cooper would always prefer to be outside, rather than shut up in the office with a mountain of paperwork. That was why he’d managed to talk himself into this assignment, though he hadn’t anticipated finding himself trapped inside a car instead, with the atmosphere growing stale and his breath steaming the windows.

‘We’ll get into the property, whatever,’ he said.

‘We need an arrest, though.’

‘Right.’

He could feel an itch developing under his stab-proof vest. Right underneath, where he had no chance of reaching it without taking the thing off completely. No amount of twisting his body and squeezing a hand into the gap would do the trick. That was the trouble with sitting doing nothing, waiting for the action to start. You began to develop unreachable itches. You began to think about things.

His colleagues were fidgeting and grumbling beside him in the car, trying to reach itches of their own, or ease the cramp in their legs. They might have been better waiting outside in the rain, except that Kevlar was said to disintegrate when it got wet. Cooper didn’t know whether that was true, or just a canteen-culture myth that had survived the death of the canteen. He had no urge to be the first one to try it out, though. An itch was better than a knife in the guts.

‘What are we waiting for now? Who’s running this show, anyway?’

‘Laurel and Hardy, by the look of that entry team.’

‘Jesus. They’ve got the Michelin Man on ram.’

Cooper watched four officers in overalls and riot helmets exiting their unmarked van and approaching the house. Well, no one looked good in a stab vest; Cooper had an uncomfortable feeling that he had put on a few pounds in the wrong places himself. Despite the muscle he’d been building up in the gym, too much good food had staged a kind of counterattack and his waist was now pushing uncomfortably against the inside of the vest. That would be Liz’s fault, he reckoned. She wasn’t a bad cook, and every time she made a meal for him, he felt obliged to return the favour with a visit to a decent restaurant. What a fatal spiral. At this rate, he’d be the Michelin Man himself before too long.

He watched the bulky figure of the entry team officer swing back the ram. The big red key, they called it. It opened any door, if you used it right.

A couple of liveried Traffic cars moved into position to close off the road. Cooper had done his five years in uniform before he joined CID, but he’d never been tempted by Traffic. Funny, when it was the job that got you out and about the most, instead of wearing out a chair in the CID room. Even without his twelve years in the force, he had more local knowledge than the rest of his shift put together. Well … one day, maybe, when the paperwork finally wore down his resistance.

‘Here we go, lads.’

And then suddenly everything was happening at once. Cooper threw open the door and jumped out of the car. Immediately, he was surrounded by noise – the thump of boots on the pavement, an Alsatian barking furiously, a radio crackling with messages, and the first shouts of ‘police’ as the entry team burst into the hallway of the house. As he ran, he could hear his own breathing, feel his heart pounding in his chest. This was the moment many police officers lived for – the sudden rush of adrenalin, the surge of excitement, the blood pumping through the veins at the scent of danger. It was like a high for some of them, a feeling they couldn’t get enough of. Dangerous, in its own way.

Almost before he was inside the door, he caught the distinctive odour. An officer at the top of the stairs signalled a find. So intelligence had been on the mark, after all. Upstairs, a bedroom would have been converted into a small-scale cannabis factory, with its windows boarded up, an air vent protruding from the attic, possibly hundreds of plants under cultivation, releasing that unmistakable smell. There was no way of disguising all the tell-tale signs in a suburban street like this one. How did they think they could fool anyone? Well, he supposed they relied on a code of silence, the closing of ranks against the authorities. No snitching.

And that was why more than sixty per cent of cannabis sold in the UK was home-grown now. Latest bulletins showed an average of three factories a day raided around the country. The owners of this house would appear at magistrates’ court tomorrow charged with cannabis cultivation, and would probably be remanded in custody.

Cooper entered the living room, where two male suspects were already being handcuffed by the entry team. Somewhere in another room, a female suspect was screaming – a hysterical, high-pitched noise that penetrated the walls and rattled the windows. He helped the sergeant in charge of the operation to search one of the men, removing keys and a mobile phone from a pocket. Vital seizures, these – the keys would lead to a vehicle containing more evidence, the phone would provide contacts for the enquiry teams to follow up.

‘Can you escort a prisoner, Ben?’ asked the sergeant.

‘No problem.’

Cooper looked around the room while he waited for the man to be read his rights. He could hear the woman sobbing now, in between outbursts. For him, this was the worst moment. After that surge of adrenalin at the start of a raid, there was this uncomfortable feeling that came over him when he found himself standing in someone’s home, an intruder into their lives, turning over the belongings and poking into the hidden corners. He always felt he had to avoid the accusing eyes, though he knew the feeling of guilt was irrational. He always prayed there would be no children in a house like this. Children were the worst. No amount of explanation would make it right for the children.

But this was something he couldn’t really share with his colleagues. He looked at them now, more of them entering the house, intent on their jobs, professional and calm. Did any of them experience the same feelings?

Long before his prisoner was in the car, the female suspect had stopped screaming. Yet the sound still seemed to echo in Cooper’s head long after the shouting had died down and the barking had stopped, and the adrenalin surge had drained from his body.

By the time the ME and the crime-scene manager allowed her to get near the body in the field, Diane Fry was glad to climb into a scene suit. She followed the line of stepping plates laid down by the SOCOs and examined the victim as closely as she could. There would be much more detail in the SOC and ME’s reports, and in the photographs. But personal impressions could still be vital, whatever the benefits of science.

The first thing she noticed was how much blood there was on the victim. His hair was matted with it, and it had run down his temple and into his ear. His shirt collar was stained, and the waxed cotton was darkened by more than rain.

‘The victim is in his mid-forties,’ said Murfin, rustling alongside her with his notebook. ‘He seems to have been in reasonably good health, though a little overweight. Well, that describes a perfect specimen of manhood, if you ask me.’

Fry glanced at him, noting the way his scene suit bulged and sagged unflatteringly around the middle.

‘Matter of opinion, Gavin.’

Murfin sniffed. ‘Approximately six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes; the blood is from a rather nasty head wound.’

‘I can see that.’

Scalp wounds always bled dramatically, even a surface cut. But in this case, Fry could see the damage to the skull, where it had been crushed a few inches above and behind the left ear.

‘No ID in his pockets,’ said Murfin. ‘That’s the bad news.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No wallet, no chequebook, no car keys. And no mobile phone.’

‘A robbery victim? Out here?’

‘Could be. Or it might have been an attempt to prevent us identifying him.’

‘The postmortem might find something for us. It would be useful if his fingerprints or DNA are on record, of course.’

The body had been moved by the ME during his examination, but now lay on its back, face turned upwards to the rain, which was being deflected by the roof of the body tent. The coat the man was wearing turned out to be one of those green waxed affairs, similar to one that Fry had seen Ben Cooper in sometimes, though this one looked a bit newer and probably more expensive. Underneath the coat, there was a blue body warmer and a cotton shirt with a thin green check. Dark blue corduroy trousers led down to that pair of nice brown brogues. Dark blue and brown never went well together in Fry’s opinion, but the shoes looked much too good for yomping across sheep-infested hills.

‘Logic would suggest that his car must be somewhere within easy reach,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t really dressed for hiking, was he?’

‘He was wearing a rainproof coat,’ pointed out Murfin. ‘So he must have expected to be outdoors for a while, at least.’

‘But no boots. Just the sort of shoes he might wear at the office. Of course, somebody else could have brought him here.’

‘And there’s no visible blood spatter on the ground,’ said Fry. ‘That could be thanks to the rain, or because he was killed somewhere else.’

‘So if he came here in someone else’s car, he might still have been alive when he accepted the lift.’

‘Do dead people accept lifts?’

‘Probably not,’ conceded Murfin.

‘And no ID on him at all? What was in his pockets?’

‘Some loose change,’ said Murfin. ‘Comb, tissues, a pair of reading glasses in a metal case. I suppose we might be able to trace him through the optician, if necessary.’

‘Which optician?’

‘SpecSavers, but no branch name on the case.’

‘Blast. They’re everywhere.’

‘Yes, I suppose he could be a tourist,’ said Murfin. ‘Even in March.’

‘Great.’

‘Oh, and there’s a receipt from somewhere called the Le Chien Noir. It’s a restaurant in Edendale. Quite upmarket, I believe. Expensive, anyway.’

‘Not the sort of place I’m likely to know, then.’

Murfin held up the evidence bag and squinted at the receipt. ‘The print is a bit faint, but it looks like dinner for two.’

‘What date?’

‘The ninth. That was last night.’

Fry nodded. ‘The condemned man’s last meal. I hope the chef was up to scratch.’

‘This restaurant is a long way from the crime scene,’ said Murfin. ‘Eight or nine miles, or more.’

‘So how did he get from dinner at Le Chien Noir to a field near Birchlow?’

Fry looked down at the victim again. Rain still glinted on his face from the lights set up inside the tent. Blood was darkening rapidly in his hair, smears drying on the sleeve of his nice waxed coat.

Despite the difficulties presented by the location and the weather conditions, the crime-scene examiners would have followed all the protocols for evidence collection. Trace hairs and fibres first, then bloodstains, any possible tool or weapon marks, visible fingerprints or footwear patterns. Finally, latent patterns that required powder or chemical enhancement. Not much chance of some of those in the monsoon season.

Although Fry had been given an estimate by the ME, she knew that time of death should be based on witness reports and not on physical evidence. Measuring body temperature was prone to error, and the degree of rigor mortis wasn’t as accurate as it was sometimes cracked up to be. But in this case, her stiff was, well … hardly stiff at all. The corpse had been pretty fresh when it was first spotted.

She looked across the moor. Somewhere over there were the remains of the agricultural research station. Although units had been despatched in response to the 999 call some time ago, the airwaves had been ominously quiet since then.

‘Let’s see what we’ve got across the way then,’ she said. ‘With luck, body number two might explain everything.’

* * *

It took Fry so long to find her way to the collection of derelict buildings on the hill above Birchlow, the site had already been searched by uniformed officers, and Wayne Abbott had moved on from the field to supervise the scene.

Most of the site consisted of little more than cracked foundations, weed-grown concrete yards and broken fencing. The surrounding bracken and gorse were gradually encroaching on to the site, and weeds had burst holes through the tarmac road.

She stepped through a door sagging from its hinges and gazed at the scene of dereliction inside. The buildings hadn’t been occupied for many years, of course, and the site had reverted to the landowner. Health and Safety might have something to say about the lack of security, though. No locks, no warning signs, no measures to prevent anyone from suffering injuries through collapsing roofs or broken shards of glass.

‘There’s no body here, Sergeant,’ said an officer who had been searching the building. ‘But we’ve found what look like bloodstains on the concrete in the largest hut.’

Fry turned to gaze back across the fields in the direction from which she’d come. The white body tent was clearly visible from here.

‘Well, unless we’ve got a dead man walking, this call wasn’t to a body at all. Our victim was still alive when he came in here – and then he made it across at least two fields before he gave up the ghost.’

‘Why would someone phone in and give this location for the body, then? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Fry, ‘whoever else was here believed the victim was already dead.’

Murfin came up alongside her, shaking himself like a dog. ‘It seems the 999 call was made from a mobile,’ he said. ‘The caller refused to give a name, but we’ve traced the number, and the phone is registered to a Mr Patrick Rawson, with an address in the West Midlands. Control have tried calling the number back, but it just goes to voicemail. The phone is switched off, probably.’

‘Has anyone checked the barn over there?’

At that moment, the sight of Wayne Abbott making his way towards her again through the rain came as a relief to Fry.

‘No drier up here, is it?’ he said.

‘Who’d live in England?’ said Fry.

‘It rains in other countries, you know. I went to Texas for a conference once, and it rained the whole week.’

‘Somehow, that doesn’t sound too bad.’

Fry was wondering how CSMs managed to get sent to conferences in Texas. Perhaps she’d been in the wrong job all this time. No one had ever suggested sending her to Swindon for a conference, let alone the USA.

‘Have you found something?’ she said.

Abbott pushed back the hood of his scene suit. The last time Fry had seen him at an incident, he’d had a shaved head. Now, his hair had begun to grow back in ragged patches, so that his skull looked like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.

‘Well, we’ve got a series of impressions in the soil within a two hundred-yard radius of the hut,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of impressions, actually.’

‘Shoe marks?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘I thought the rain would have obliterated them by now.’

‘In the usual way of things, yes – that’s what I would have expected, too. Light prints on soft soil like this would have deteriorated beyond use. But these prints are a bit different.’

‘Different how?’

‘The amount of weight behind the shoe marks has imprinted them deep enough into the ground to preserve them in the drier subsoil, where the rain hasn’t affected them so much.’

‘Weight? That makes such a difference?’

Abbott nodded, a knowing smile on his face. ‘This amount of weight does. That, and the fact the shoes in question were made of steel.’

Fry found herself starting to get irritated. She was too wet and uncomfortable to tolerate people playing games.

‘Steel? What on earth are you talking about, Wayne?’

‘Horses,’ said Abbott. ‘I’m talking about horses.’

4

There was still a lot of processing to do, of course. With his prisoner safely in the hands of the custody sergeant at E Division headquarters in West Street, Cooper made his way reluctantly from the custody suite, dodging the rain to reach the walkway that led into the main building.

In the CID room, the rest of the team were hard at work over their paperwork. DC Luke Irvine and DC Becky Hurst had been given the desks closest to his. They were the newest members of E Division CID, and they made him feel almost like a veteran now that he was in his thirties. They were eager to impress, too – anxious to get every last detail right in their reports and case files before their supervisor saw them. He had to give credit to Diane Fry for that. She had the new DCs with their noses to the grindstone. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of her.

‘Hi, Ben. How did it go?’ called Irvine.

‘Great. A good result.’

‘Wish I’d been there.’

Irvine was a bit too eager, his face still reflecting his excitement in the job, even when he was buried under paperwork. That wouldn’t last.

As he stripped off his stab vest, Cooper felt the last of the tension fall away. Suddenly, he felt bored again. He stared out of the window at the rooftops of Edendale, dark with continuous rain. His mind drifted back two days to the previous Sunday, and he realized the source of his restlessness.

There was a moment when he had been sitting in his brother Matt’s new Nissan 4x4 on the way back from Staffordshire. He recalled the sound of Phil Collins suddenly filling the car. ‘Another Day in Paradise’. The music had broken a painful silence that had lasted since he and Matt, and their sister Claire, had left the National Memorial Arboretum, near Lichfield.

As always, Matt had been gripping the steering wheel as if he was at the controls of a tractor, pushing the John Deere 6030 across a ploughed slope on a Derbyshire hillside, muscles tensed in his forearms as though power-assisted steering had never been invented. He was getting so big now that he could probably pull the plough himself, like a shire horse.

‘We’re not late,’ said Ben. ‘We don’t have an appointment to meet. Personally, I’d rather get home alive.’

‘Oh, am I driving too fast?’

‘Just a bit.’

‘Sorry. I forgot the KGB were in the car.’

Matt had insisted on driving them down from Edendale that morning, because he desperately wanted to show off the new 4x4. In the visitor centre at the arboretum, the first thing Ben had noticed was a huge, carved police officer standing just inside the entrance. It must have been about twelve feet high, like a giant totem pole. A bobby complete with tunic and helmet, but made out of some sort of copper-coloured wood.

After picking up a guide book, they had taken advantage of a break in the rain to cross Millennium Avenue to the plinth marking the start of The Beat, a long avenue of chestnuts. At the top of it was their destination, the Police Memorial Garden.

As they walked down The Beat, it had seemed to Ben that the entire history of Britain’s armed forces must be recorded here, in one way or another. There was a memorial to the Rats of Tobruk, the Iraq and Afghanistan willows, and trees planted for the First Army Veterans. Everyone from the Kenya Police to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was remembered.

The guide book said that chestnuts had been chosen for The Beat because the first police truncheons were made from their wood, chestnut being particularly durable – not to say hard, if you were cracked across the skull with it. Several of the trees had been grown from conkers taken from Drayton Manor, the home of Sir Robert Peel himself. Who knew that the founder of the police service had grown his own chestnut trees?

Ben saw that Matt and Claire had reached the Memorial Garden before him. He supposed he must have been dawdling, subconsciously delaying the moment. Yet he’d promised himself he’d face up to everything he had to deal with from now on. Nothing was to be gained from shutting his memories away and slamming the lid down tight.

Startled by a sound behind him in the office, Cooper looked around guiltily, remembering where he was. For the first time, he became aware of the atmosphere in the office, a little bit more relaxed than usual.

‘So where’s DS Fry?’ he asked Irvine.

‘Call-out to a body.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Have we got some details?’

‘Here somewhere,’ said Irvine.

Cooper read quickly through a copy of the incident log. The Eden Valley Hunt? What were they doing with the hunt? Saboteurs? That could be tricky. Fry would be totally out of her depth.

Without even bothering to sit down at his desk, he made a call to a familiar mobile number, but only got the recorded voicemail message. Irvine and Hurst watched him in amazement as he headed back out of the office.

‘Diane? I think you’ll need me. I’m on my way.’

‘Don’t forget,’ said the uniformed inspector, surveying the small group of officers he’d been allocated that morning, ‘it’s perfectly OK for them to be killed – as long as they’re shot.’

Standing on a roadside near Birchlow, Diane Fry watched the inspector at work. Like a practised mind reader, she could tell what he was thinking. With luck, they wouldn’t be called on to do very much today, except watch.

Officers nodded and shuffled their feet. They adjusted their high-vis jackets and tucked in the scarves they hoped would stop the rain from trickling down their necks. Fry thought some of them looked bored already. With luck, they’d be even more fed up before the morning was over. Their presence was supposed to be a deterrent, rather than anything else. It was policing as a spectator sport.

The inspector’s name was Redfearn, a grey-haired veteran approaching his thirty years’ service, twelve of which had been spent in the Met before he returned to Derbyshire. Fry always wondered how he’d managed to maintain an unruffled, pragmatic manner all that time. It was great for dealing with young bobbies, but there had been times when she’d wanted to prod him into some kind of response. Being in CID, she didn’t have too much contact with him, but today was going to be different.

‘They can even use dogs, provided it’s no more than two,’ said Redfearn. ‘But the actual killing has to be done by shooting. Or by a bird of prey, if there happens to be one present. That’s legal.’

The inspector paused, glancing at the vehicles already gathered in a field and along the grass verges as far as the eye could see. No doubt he was thinking that the rain might keep the numbers down. But it was late in the season, and intelligence had suggested a confrontation could be expected.

‘From past experience, it’s probably the sabs you’ll have to watch out for,’ he said. ‘But we don’t take sides, all right? We’re here to uphold the law, but mostly to prevent public order offences and ensure all parties can go about their lawful activities. So keep your eyes open, and your wits about you. Oh, and try to keep your feet dry.’

As the officers dispersed, Fry introduced herself to the inspector. She didn’t envy him his job. Keeping public order was often a thankless task, especially when you found yourself thrust between two groups who each had the right to go about their peaceful activities. Hunt duty wasn’t an assignment that many would want.

The Eden Valley Hunt met twice a week, and Fry felt it was surely no coincidence that today’s meet was so close to her potential murder scene. In fact, she realized now that the air support unit’s surveillance task was connected with the hunt. The helicopter was visible hovering over a copse a couple of fields away.

‘You think one of the hunt supporters might know something about your body?’ said Redfearn when she explained.

‘Someone left hoofprints all over my crime scene, Inspector. In fact, it looks like more than one horse to me. Your operation here is less than half a mile away – I could see you from the scene down there. It seems to me you might have some potential witnesses for me.’

‘There are quite a lot of them, you know. There are horse boxes and trailers parked all the way back from here to Birchlow.’

‘We’re going to have to talk to them, and find out who was here first this morning.’

‘What time?’

‘Around eight thirty a. m., the ME says.’

‘You want the huntsman, or one of the whippers-in, then. They’d be here with the hound van, early doors. Oh, and a couple of hunt followers would have been out laying the artificial scent.’

‘Where are they now?’

Redfearn looked around. ‘God knows, Sergeant. In one of these fields somewhere. They’ll turn up later on.’

‘I need to grab them as soon as poss.’

‘Understood.’

The inspector used his radio, asking for someone whose name she couldn’t catch to come to the control point and speak to Inspector Redfearn. Well, they would do for a start. Impatient though she was to get on with the job, Fry was well aware that she didn’t yet have the manpower to start interviewing dozens of hunt supporters. She glanced at the lines of horse boxes. Was it dozens, or scores? Or even hundreds?

‘And what about your saboteurs, Inspector?’ she said, when he’d finished with his radio.

‘What about them?’

‘I’m wondering if one of them might be missing. It would be useful to talk to them.’

He shook his head. ‘Well, the sabs aren’t very forthcoming, you know. It’s difficult enough getting their own names and addresses out of them. Understandably, because if their identities get known, they can be subject to repercussions. But we’ll try to rope in a couple for you, if you like.’

‘I’d appreciate it.’

Fry turned at a clatter of hooves and saw a bunch of riders rounding the corner. Red coats, black coats, mud-spattered boots, gleaming horses. They trotted towards her as if they’d just fallen out of a time warp. Because surely those scarlet coats charging across the landscape were a throwback to a world of pub prints and Victorian Christmas cards. Hard to believe that it still went on, so far into the twenty-first century, and after all that fuss about the legislation to ban it.

‘Are you expecting much trouble?’ she asked the inspector as the riders passed.

‘Hard to tell. There’s a cyclical pattern to these things, though. Tension builds up over the hunting season between September and March. Niggling resentments from the start of the season can lead up to minor assaults and scuffles around Christmas, then more serious incidents tend to happen at the end of the season. Both sides get a cooling-off period during the summer, you see.’

Seasons and cooling-off periods; it all sounded like one big game to Fry. She wondered what constituted a goal for either side. A fox killed, or a fox saved. A black eye or a successful prosecution. Then they all went home with their stories to tell, and met up again next September. Amazing.

They stepped to one side of the road to allow another a horse box to pass. A late-comer, since the rest of the hunt had already assembled and scattered across the fields.

‘Before the Hunting Act, we did have a lot of violent confrontations between sabs and hunt supporters,’ said Inspector Redfearn. ‘More than we do now. The Eden Valley Hunt was unpopular, and it attracted a lot of protests. Sabs travelled hundreds of miles to be here.’

‘Have you always been on hunt duty?’

‘No, but it comes round regularly. Ironically, the turn-out for the hunt has increased since the ban. Their support is booming. On the other hand, the anti-hunt groups lost a lot of members, people who thought the battle was over when the act came in. Now there’s just the hardcore left, and they have to try that much harder to make their presence felt.’

‘And are the saboteurs local?’ asked Fry.

‘We think we’ve got three different groups today. Our own local group we see quite regularly, and they’re generally peaceful. The trouble makers seem to come from other parts of the country, and they’re of a rather more aggressive nature. It generally starts with the foot followers being given grief, then someone gets spat at, a girl’s pony gets sprayed with an unidentified substance. It can take less aggro than that for incidents to kick off big time.’

‘The Eden Valley don’t hunt foxes now, though,’ said Fry.

‘Their official policy is to observe the law. But you know there are exemptions under the Act.’

‘Of course. I heard your briefing.’

‘Well, even if they don’t catch foxes any more, their opposition still turn out. Only now some of them call themselves “hunt monitors” and they’re armed with video cameras, aiming to catch infringements of the law. We never condone vigilante groups, no matter what their cause, so we watch the sabs carefully.’

Fry nodded. She didn’t know who her victim was, yet she already seemed to have an array of potential witnesses, suspects and associates, all milling around the landscape having what passed for fun in these parts. Well, as much fun as you could have in the rain.

A lone rider cantered down the road, a woman in a red coat who dug her knees into her horse’s flanks to turn it as she approached them. The mare trotted over the last few yards of wet grass, hooves thumping on the soft ground, steam spurting from its nostrils.

The rider’s boots and jodhpurs were splattered with mud and her face was red from exertion and the cold air.

‘What’s the problem, Inspector?’

‘This is Detective Sergeant Fry,’ said Redfearn. ‘She’s investigating a suspicious death in this area.’

‘I saw the activity across the way. Thought your people had just got lost.’

‘This is Mrs Forbes,’ Redfearn told Fry. ‘Joint master of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

Fry didn’t think she’d ever been quite so near to a horse before. She knew absolutely nothing about them, except that they bit at one end and kicked at the other.

She explained to Mrs Forbes what she wanted. As she spoke, the rider looked down at her with an expression she’d seen on the faces of the hunt supporters when the saboteurs got too close. An unmistakable hint of contempt, probably just the instinct of the mounted person looking down from a great height on the lowly pedestrian.

‘You think any of our members might know something about this?’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘What nonsense.’

‘If we could just speak to the people –’

‘I can’t allow you to speak to anyone. It’s just some mad story made up by those antis.’

Fry could feel the horse’s breath blowing from its nostrils in warm jets. She suspected that the animal regarded him with much more benevolence than its owner did.

‘One way or another, I’ll speak to your huntsman, and anyone else who was in this area at around eight thirty this morning,’ said Fry. ‘If you prefer, we can stop the hunt altogether while we do that.’

Beside her, Redfearn cleared his throat nervously, but said nothing. Mrs Forbes stared from one to the other, her hands gripping the reins tightly, as if it was her horse that was on the verge of getting out of control, rather than her own reactions.

‘Do what you like,’ she said finally. ‘Who is this person who got himself killed?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

Mrs Forbes snorted, and pulled at her reins. ‘I’ll give Widdowson instructions.’

Fry watched her go, the mare’s tail flicking from side to side as if bothered by invisible flies.

‘Widdowson?’ she said.

‘The huntsman,’ said Redfearn.

The inspector’s radio crackled, and he listened for a moment.

‘This body of yours, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Did I understand that he died some time this morning?’

‘About eight thirty. Why?’

‘Funny thing, that’s all. One of my officers is reporting that some of the sabs got a bit over-excited. They said they heard three long, wavering notes on a hunting horn. It sounded to them like the signal that calls in the hounds to kill the fox, or the terrier men to dig him out. That got them all worked up. But it was too early, the hunt hadn’t even moved off. So I think they must have been mistaken.’

Fry had lost interest, but tried to appear polite. ‘Well, thank you for your co-operation, Inspector.’

Redfearn looked offended. ‘Well, I just thought you should know. In case it was relevant that some of the sabs say they heard the kill call.’

Fry turned back. ‘The what?’

‘That’s the name of it,’ said the inspector. ‘Three long, wavering notes. It’s known as the kill call.’

5

A few minutes later, Diane Fry was sitting in her car and fuming. She had gone barely a few yards out of the gateway before she met the entire hunt coming back from the direction of Birchlow. Horses, dogs, people in Land Rovers and vans, others trailing behind on foot. It was a complete carnival.

Traffic was brought to a halt at a crossroads on the A623 while the hunt went by. As the horses passed, the sudden clattering of hooves on tarmac was uncomfortably loud inside the Peugeot. For a few minutes it completely drowned out the mutter of her idling engine and even the efforts of Annie Lennox, who was hurling Songs of Mass Destruction at her from the CD player. As the hunt pressed around the car, a powerful whiff of sweating horse crept in through the driver’s window, followed by a rich aroma of saddles, cotton jodhpurs and manure.

Many of the mounted hunt supporters seemed to be young girls, wearing their hard hats and pony-club complexions, bright-eyed and eager for a twenty-mile hack. What was really amazing, though, was that there were still so many middle-aged businessmen who sat comfortably on horseback. Surely most members of the business community had never been nearer to a horse than the grandstand at Uttoxeter race course, or the counter of the betting shop in Clappergate, depending on their degree of commercial success.

But the joint master, Mrs Forbes, looked confident and well in control of her mount as she led the main body of the hunt. A long tail of riders was still making its way across a field from the direction of Foolow, kicking up clods of dirt as they cantered towards the road.

One particularly large horse came a little too close to the Peugeot for comfort. Its rear end swung round and it began to prance sideways, edging nearer to the car until the muscles of its haunches were almost pressed against the window, twitching and glistening in the rain. The sweating hindquarters were level with Fry’s face, and she could see quite clearly that it was an ungelded stallion.

Fry closed her eyes, waiting for an impact, the crunch of hooves on metal. But no collision came. When she opened her eyes again, the horses were disappearing beyond the next bend, the clatter of hooves growing quieter.

So the motley bunch of people tagging along in a little group at the back must be the saboteurs. Some of them looked like students, glittering with piercings and tattoos, and one even had a red mohican, which was exactly how she would have pictured them, if asked. But a few of the protestors were middle-aged women, positively respectable looking, wearing walking boots with thick socks rolled over their ankles, and carrying little rucksacks. They reminded her of the Greenham Common women who had impressed her when she was a small child, because they always seemed to be on the TV news.

A couple of the sabs were carrying video cameras, others had mobile phones they were using to take photographs. Maybe they were also keeping in touch with another group somewhere, with a person in charge of co-ordination. Or perhaps they really were just a disorganized rabble letting off a bit of steam.

On the other hand, she could see now that video cameras and mobile phones weren’t the only equipment the protestors were carrying.

She saw Inspector Redfearn, and wound her window down.

‘Inspector, do you know some of those animal rights people are carrying whips?’

‘Yes, it’s usual. Its one of their tactics for confusing the hounds.’

‘Shouldn’t you seize them? Wouldn’t you consider them offensive weapons?’

‘Ah, but look at the huntsman, and half of the riders. They all have whips or riding crops. We can’t seize them from one side and not from the other.’

‘So it’s all in the cause of impartiality?’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

Fry shook her head. If the two sides had both been armed with baseball bats, knives, or AK-47s, there’d have been no question how the police would react. But nice, middle-class people couldn’t have their whips taken off them, could they?

The inspector’s radio burst into life, and he listened for a moment.

‘Uh-oh. It seems to be kicking off on the other side of that copse.’

‘So there is another group of sabs.’

‘Sounds like it. This lot are probably just the diversion.’

Fry got out of her car and waited to see what would happen. It was so difficult to tell what was going on. A confusion of shouting, horns blowing, car engines revving, hooves clattering on the tarmac. She smelled a chemical spray on the air, almost as if tear gas had been fired. Four police officers ran down the track from where she’d last seen the hounds. A radio crackled, someone uttered a short, sharp scream.

She walked a few yards further up the track, feeling completely out of her depth.

‘Do you need help?’ she called.

‘It’s usually all over and done with in a few minutes,’ said the inspector. ‘It’ll just be a question of who’s left with the most bruises.’

Four men in camouflage jackets trotted past her. They were all big men, bulky under their jackets, and one of them was carrying a pickaxe handle. He gave Fry a hard stare as he went by, and she felt sure she’d seen him before, possibly in court, or occupying a cell in the custody suite. If she’d seen those four sitting in a car within fifty yards of a bank, she would have been tempted to call in the response team to arrest them on suspicion of planning an armed robbery. Today, though, they all wore baseball caps that said HUNT STEWARD. The unmistakable scent of violence hung on the air.

‘I see the hunt have their own heavies, Inspector,’ said Fry.

‘The stewards, yes. They were stood down for quite a while, but they seem to have been re-formed for the occasion.’

‘Looking for a chance to teach the protestors a lesson, I suppose.’

‘We do try to keep an eye on them. But with an event like this, things can be spread over a wide area. The hounds are in one place, the riders another, and the car followers all over the shop. That’s why we tend to watch the sabs. The trouble happens where they are, one way or another.’

An officer came up and spoke to the inspector.

‘OK, thanks.’ He turned back to Fry. ‘It seems some hunt supporters blocked the sabs’ van in with their vehicles and let the tyres down. That’s pretty tame stuff, really.’

‘What about all the shouting and screaming?’

‘Oh, one of the joint masters got a bit aggravated and chased the sabs down the road.’

‘When he was on horseback?’

‘That’s “she”. Two of the Eden Valley joint masters are women. Yes, she was mounted at the time. A horse can be a bit terrifying when it’s coming towards you at a canter. That’s one reason we use them ourselves, of course.’

A moment later, two young women ran through the trees and on to the road towards the police. One of them had blood streaming down her face and into her hair from a cut above her eye, and the other was holding a hand to her mouth, wincing in pain.

‘That doesn’t look like tame stuff to me.’

‘I’ll get an ambulance here.’

‘Good luck getting it through, Inspector.’

But the two women were soon telling their story in the back of a police car while they waited for the ambulance.

‘It’s often the female sabs who get hurt,’ said the inspector, when he returned.

‘Funny, that.’

‘To be honest, I think they’re probably the most provocative. Though I suppose I shouldn’t say it.’

Fry made her way back to her Peugeot, carefully stepping over heaps of steaming horse muck on the road, and the muddy ruts left by the wheels of the transporters. She was just in time to see a stray foxhound, its tongue lolling, cocking a leg to urinate on her car.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Fry, to no one in particular. ‘Another slice of country life.’

Sean Crabbe was surprised to have made it home safely. He was still trembling and sweating by the time he arrived at the house, and he had to pretend that he’d been running. Then he had to make up some excuse to explain why he wasn’t at college, which he’d forgotten all about.

If only he could afford to get a place of his own, this would never be a problem. He was twenty years old, for Christ’s sake. He ought to be independent, earning his own living, free to come and go when he pleased, without making explanations.

But instead he had to mutter something vague about not feeling well, before disappearing to his room. His mother looked at him suspiciously, but she would probably decide that he must have ’flu coming on or something. What he needed most was to have a shower, and to check whether he had any traces of blood on him.

Sean couldn’t believe he’d done something so stupid. Maybe he could blame Coldplay; ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’. Damn right. That was exactly what had happened.

In that moment of anger at the intrusion into his territory, the invasion of his sanctuary among the derelict buildings, he’d acted without thinking things through. Just because no one else ever came up to the huts, because he was so confident that he wouldn’t be seen, he’d done something he would never have considered in the ordinary world. He wasn’t a criminal, in fact he hated the junkies and yobs and thieves he saw every night in the streets of Edendale. He never wanted to be part of their world. So why had he done it?

Sean stripped off his clothes, holding his parka and jeans up to the light from his bedroom window. No sign of blood. But what about his trainers? Soil and dust trapped in the pattern of his soles, a few small pieces of stone. If the police got hold of them, they would probably be able to piece together exactly where he’d been, the way they did on CSI.

He scrubbed the soles of his trainers in the sink, then showered and put his clothes into the wash basket. No telling when Mum might collect them, but there was nothing he could do about that, except hope she did it soon. If he mentioned it to her, she’d know something was wrong.

While he dried himself, he went through the sequence of events again. From the first scent of that sweet smell in the hut, the knowledge that someone else was present, to the panicky call he’d made to the emergency services. And then hurling the phone as far as he could into the first suitable place he came to.

Well, that was stupid. He should have thought more carefully about where he disposed of the phone. The call was probably a mistake, too. But they couldn’t trace him from that, could they? It wasn’t his phone, after all. He’d tried to wipe it clean before he got rid of it. Fingerprints were one thing he did know about.

It was just that momentary opportunity, the desire that had overtaken him when he’d seen the phone just lying there, and the bulging wallet with all that money in it. All that money. The temptation had been too much. Anyone else would have done the same.

But he hoped the man wasn’t really dead. After the incident with the vagrant, he’d assumed that he recognized death. Assumed, too, that he could clear out and watch the action, with no one any the wiser. No one to know that he’d been there.

Sean shuddered as he re-lived the moment the corpse had seemed to come back to life. Like a scene from a horror movie. A bloodied zombie with a hole in the head, but sitting back up and reaching out blindly, gripping his arm with fingers that dug deep into his skin.

That had been what made him run. He’d run from the old huts until his breath was ragged and a stitch jabbed unbearable pains into his side. He seemed to have run for a long, long time through the rain before he stopped. For a few minutes, he’d actually tried to think logically, wondered whether he ought to go back, so he could do the right thing and sort everything out. But he’d looked at his watch and realized how long he’d left it. Far too long for him to look innocent.

Then he’d finally made the call. As quick as he could – no name, no location, no return number.

And Sean had discovered that he was on the moor, in the middle of the dark heather and the capped mine shafts. And he’d known where he could dispose of the phone. He’d climbed the fence and watched it tumble out of sight, heard the smash as it hit the rocks on the bottom. No one would be calling that phone again.

It was a pity, though. It had been a nice new Sony Ericsson with video calling and everything. At least he still had the money.

Sean was feeling calmer now. He dressed in clean clothes, wished that he had a smoke available to steady his hand, then lay down on his bed to wait until he was called. He plugged in his iPod again. Not Coldplay this time, but the Kaiser Chiefs: ‘I Predict a Riot’.

And Sean finally allowed himself to dream about what he could do with the money he’d taken. The money that had belonged to the dead man.

6

When Fry finally got back to her body on Longstone Moor, she found her DI, Paul Hitchens, waiting for her. He hadn’t even bothered walking all the way to the scene, but was leaning against a car at the rendezvous point.

‘Death verified, Diane?’ he said.

‘The paramedics were here first. The ME has confirmed.’

‘Life pronounced extinct, as the old boys used to say.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Fry knew that police officers weren’t officially trusted to verify death. Not unless death was obvious. Since procedures failed to define ‘obviously dead’, it generally meant decapitation or an advanced stage of decomposition before any officer could exercise judgement.

‘Cause of death?’ asked Hitchens.

Fry shook her head. ‘There’s an obvious head injury. But we’ll have to wait for the preliminary PM report.’

‘It could have been a fall, though? Wet grass, plenty of stones lying around. Or a slippery cow pat – I’ve done it myself. What did he have on his feet? Appropriate footwear?’

‘No, sir,’ admitted Fry.

‘And the emergency call – that could have been some passerby not wanting to get involved. It happens all the time.’

‘In the town, maybe. But out here? It’s difficult to imagine a passer-by up at those old huts, anyway.’

‘The owner of the phone that the call was made on – he’s from out of the area, right?’

‘Yes. We’ll track him down, of course.’

‘So have we really got suspicious circumstances here, Diane?’

She hesitated. The expense of calling in a Home Office pathologist was only justified when there was substantial evidence of suspicious circumstances, the proverbial foul play. The DI wouldn’t want to get caught out trying to justify the expense in the face of an ‘accidental death’ verdict by the High Peak coroner.

‘This body has no ID. That’s a good indication of suspicious circumstances in itself, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe.’

Fry noted his reluctance. The decision was his at this stage, as the senior officer present. Personally, she had a strong feeling about the body in the field, but she was wary of talking about feelings. The notorious detective’s ‘hunch’ didn’t fit well with the pragmatic, evidence-based decision-making processes that came with the training. It sounded so old school.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So he could have left his wallet and car keys at home, if he went out for a walk. He could have worn his nice new brogues instead of bothering to change into something more appropriate. I can see that’s possible. But why wouldn’t he have taken a mobile phone?’

‘He could have walked out of the house in the middle of a row with his wife. Slammed the front door without picking up his keys or phone, and decided not to go back for them.’

Fry turned away. ‘Done that yourself, too, have you?’

‘What did you say, Diane?’

‘Nothing, sir. I was just saying that it was more likely horse droppings than a cow pat. We’ve got hoof marks all over the scene.’

‘There’s your first line on a potential witness, then.’

‘Yes, I’m on to it,’ said Fry. ‘But without more resources out here, it’s going to be totally impossible to interview all the hunt supporters. Anyway, I’m convinced they’re just going to close ranks.’

Fry thought of the SIOs’ mantra: What do I know now? What do I need to know? How am I going to find out? On the other hand, her most important question might be ‘How much are they going to let me find out?’

‘Think of another approach,’ said Hitchens.

She sighed. ‘We could round up the sabs. There aren’t anywhere near as many of them.’

‘There you go, then. Anyway, a confirmed ID is your first priority.’

‘Naturally.’

The DI studied her for a moment, and waited until a SOCO passed out of earshot.

‘Are you all right, Diane?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Fine.’

‘Good.’

It was well known that Hitchens had been asking everyone in CID if they were ‘all right’, ever since the arrival of the new detective superintendent. Probably it was a form of caring for staff morale.

‘An ID by tomorrow then,’ he said. ‘Top priority.’

‘It’s early days, sir.’

‘Of course. Early days.’

Fry watched Hitchens walk back to his car, his job done for now. He could go back to his paperwork at the office until another major operational decision was called for.

But he was right, of course. They couldn’t get a serious enquiry under way until there was an ID on the victim. An identification would come one way or another – possibly through a missing-person report, maybe through fingerprints or DNA, if the victim had a criminal record. If not, then a trawl around the available dental records, or more likely a tip-off from a member of the public when the media appeals went out.

That all took time, of course. It could be months, if not years, if they had to rely on appeals and bulletins to other forces around the country. And sometimes with an unidentified body, it was more than months and years – it was never. There were old cases lying on the files where no ID had been achieved after five or ten years, or more. Those were the victims with no family or friends to come forward and claim them, people who appeared to have no available lives to be pieced together.

Fry shook her head. The man in the field surely wasn’t one of those. This victim was no homeless vagrant, nor a runaway teenager or illegal immigrant. She was convinced he must be a man with a house somewhere, a job, a car, a bank account. There was probably a wife expecting him home, row or not. Or at least a pet waiting to be fed. Someone would have missed him when he didn’t come back last night, colleagues would notice that he wasn’t at work today. Even if he was a solitary tourist, his holiday would be due to finish some time. It was unfeasible that he could stay unidentified for long.

Fry’s phone rang. It was Hitchens on his way back to Edendale, safely in his car and out of the rain.

‘Diane, why haven’t you got Ben Cooper at the scene?’ he said. ‘Is he on a rest day, or processing?’

‘Processing,’ said Fry. ‘He’s back at the office.’

And it was only then that she noticed a missed call on her phone.

There was always a wind blowing, up here on the moors. Looking across the valley, Cooper could see acres of pale grass rippling on the plateau, clouded by swirls of rain. It was as if the whole moorland was moving, a vast tide rushing endlessly eastwards in the direction of Nottinghamshire.

Because of the number of police vehicles already present, he had been unable to get his Toyota near the crime scene, even with four-wheel drive. So Cooper had to walk the last few hundred yards on a lane that rose steeply from the village of Birchlow.

At the bottom, there had been plenty of evidence of the Eden Valley Hunt meet, and Matt had been tense with the expectation of encountering people he knew. But the main body of the hunt must have been away in the fields somewhere, following their artificial fox-scented trail.

Cooper stopped for a few moments to catch his breath, trying to orientate himself. Near the top of the lane, the views were spectacular, with several gritstone edges dominating the northern and eastern skylines – White Edge, Froggatt Edge, Curbar and Baslow. But, for the most part, Longstone Moor wasn’t one of the wild, barren moors characteristic of the Dark Peak further north. Its expanses were positively civilized, with farms, quarries, fields, and a criss-crossing of tracks formed by generations of people crossing the moor.

Ever since he was a child, Cooper had never stopped being fascinated by the layer upon layer of history that formed the landscape he’d grown up in. Thousands of years of history, visible right there in front of him, wherever he went – Neolithic stone circles and burial chambers, medieval guide stoops way out on the moors, the bumps and hollows of the lead mines, whose abandoned workings dated back to the arrival of the Romans. Cooper felt himself to be a part of that history, completely inseparable from it. Those people who’d built the stone circles, who’d worked in the lead mines, and carved the names on the guide stoops – they’d all been his ancestors.

Ahead of him, Longstone Edge itself was carved by the vast, white scars of opencast mining called rakes. Some were abandoned now, great gashes in the landscape as if a series of earthquakes had split the ground open. But open-cast mining was still active here, on a big scale. Longstone Edge had been the subject of a long-running campaign protesting against the extent of limestone extraction, thirteen million tons of Peak District hillside trucked away every year for roadworks and building projects.

He could see graded piles of chippings awaiting collection near the new haulage road to Cavendish Mill. Some abandoned workings had filled with water, forming the kind of small lake known locally as a flash, its surface seething with rain.

Putting his head down, Cooper carried on walking. If he remembered rightly, the mere names of the tracks in this area were redolent with history. At one time, Black Harry the highwayman had terrorized travellers crossing the moors around Longstone and Birchlow. His activities had gone on for years before they were cut short on the gibbet at Wardlow Mires. But his name still lived on in Black Harry Lane, Black Harry Gate, and Black Harry House. His memory was preserved forever on the White Peak sheets of the Ordnance Survey map.

In fact, with so many clues to Black Harry’s whereabouts, it was funny that the highwayman had taken so long to catch.

Fry found Wayne Abbott loading some equipment back into his vehicle. Abbott was lucky enough to have been given a 4x4 to drive and had managed to get near the scene without having to hike across the fields.

‘Those hoof marks,’ said Fry. ‘When were they left?’

‘Ah, I expect you mean pre-or post-mortem? It’s difficult to say.’

‘Still –?’

The crime-scene manager shrugged. ‘No, really – it’s too difficult to say. Unless we find a hoof mark underneath the body, or some other conflicting trace …’

‘Let me know soonest if you do.’

‘Of course.’

‘So we still don’t know how he got from dinner at the Le Chien Noir to a field near Birchlow,’ said Fry thoughtfully.

‘On horseback?’ suggested Murfin. ‘Since we have all these hoof marks.’

Fry shook her head. ‘It seems pretty unlikely to me, but forensics will be able to tell us when they get his clothes in the lab.’

‘Well, how else do the horses come into it?’

‘I don’t know. But there are an awful lot of the hunting fraternity hallooing about down there with their fancy jackets and strangled vowels.’

‘Ah. The fox-hunting re-enactment society, I call them.’

‘I prefer “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”,’ said Fry.

‘That’s not one of my quotes.’

‘No, it’s Oscar Wilde.’

Fry hated not knowing more about the victim. Was he a saboteur? Could his killers have been members of the hunt? But he didn’t look the type to be an animal rights protestor. No mohican, no sabbing equipment. And none of the genuine sabs had any knowledge of him. Or they weren’t willing to admit they had. But why were horses’ hoof marks found? There had to be a reason for their presence, and the hunt were the obvious suspects.

She turned at the sound of clumsy footsteps clattering on the rocks. She was met by a startled gaze and a snort of alarm from a black muzzle.

‘Those damn sheep.’

Then she looked up at the sky in surprise. Well, at least it had stopped raining at last.

Cooper had reached the outer cordon, where blue-and-white crime-scene tape was strung between two gate posts and across the path. He gave his name to the officer at the cordon as he passed through, and saw Fry and Murfin walking back across the field from the body tent. Fry looked cold and tired, her coat and hair filmed with rain.

‘Ben – I didn’t think you were serious,’ she said when he got nearer.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Nobody comes out of a nice dry office on a day like this, if they can possibly help it.’

‘But I said I’d come, didn’t I? Why would I say that, if I didn’t mean it?’

Fry shrugged. ‘To impress someone?’

Cooper turned away. Though Fry was wrong about his reason, he didn’t want her to probe any further.

‘So what’s the situation?’ he said. ‘Have you got an ID? Any initial lines of enquiry?’

‘Just a minute,’ said Fry. ‘Before you get carried away – I don’t really need you here. I don’t want to be responsible for wrecking the duty roster just because you got bored sitting around on your backside.’

‘Actually, I think you do need me, Diane.’

‘Oh? How do you make that out?’

‘You said members of the Eden Valley Hunt were involved?’

‘They might be. We haven’t established that yet.’

‘Horses, though.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what do you know about horses? What do you know about the hunt, or hunt supporters?’

‘I can ask.’

Cooper gazed steadily at her. ‘You know perfectly well that I can talk to them better than you, and get more information out of them. You’ll just get everyone’s backs up.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, do tell me. How do I get everyone’s backs up?’

‘Well, I bet you have your own fixed views on field sports already. Have you expressed any opinions yet while you’ve been here? Shall I ask Gavin?’

Fry bit her lip. She always seemed to hate admitting that he was right.

‘All right, I’ll compromise,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll fill you in with what we have so far, and I’ll let you look at the scene. If you can contribute anything useful, you can stay, and I’ll square it with the DI.’

‘Great.’

‘Wait. But if I think you’re just bullshitting and you’ve nothing new to contribute, you’re out of here and back to your paperwork, no matter how boring you’re finding it.’

Cooper smiled. ‘OK, Diane. It’s a deal.’

She looked at him, evidently wondering whether he was serious. She had never really understood him, and he didn’t suppose it was going to be any different today.

Cooper listened carefully while Fry filled him in.

‘These hoof marks,’ said Cooper when she’d finished. ‘You said something about the hunt?’

‘As I told you, the Eden Valley Hunt has been out this morning. There was a police presence for the meet. They were expecting trouble from saboteurs. Got it, too.’

‘Yes, I saw the hunt.’

‘There were so many dogs. Why do they need so many?’

‘Dogs?’ said Cooper. ‘You mean hounds.’

Fry shook her head. ‘I know a dog when I see one.’

Cooper sighed. He’d grown up with a different relationship to the Eden Valley Hunt. Not only did the hunt rely on the goodwill of local farmers, it was one of the great organizers of social events. A dinner dance at Hassop Hall, a hunt ball at the Palace Hotel in Buxton, Buck’s fizz and a horn-blowing competition, a charity auction in aid of the air ambulance … Not many weeks ago, the hunt had thrown their annual Christmas party for farmers’ children. Cooper could recollect being taken to it himself a few times, when he was very small. The parties actually took place just after Christmas – but nevertheless involved a visit by Santa, dropping in at Edendale on his way home to Lapland.

‘But apart from the hoof marks, you have no evidence anyone from the hunt was involved?’

‘Well – that, and all the people milling around on horseback a few hundred yards away from the scene. It’s pretty persuasive circumstantial evidence.’

‘Was it the hounds who found the body?’ asked Cooper.

‘Apparently, they came down this way, but the dog men were on hand – oh, what do you call them?’

‘The huntsman? The whipper-in?’

‘Yes, them. They called the hounds away, but didn’t realize what the pack had found. They assumed it must be a dead sheep or something. It was the helicopter crew who actually called it in.’

‘The hounds are supposed to follow a scent trail. I wonder why they would get distracted by a human smell?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he smelled a bit foxy.’

Cooper could see that Fry was getting exasperated. But the light was fading anyway, and there wasn’t much else that could be done here. There was just one thing more.

‘If he was killed at around eight thirty, it would have been daylight,’ said Cooper. ‘I wonder who would have been able to see the scene from the surrounding area.’

Fry gazed around. ‘Can’t tell in this light. There seems to be a farm way over there, past that barn. Maybe a lorry driver on one of the quarry roads. No one in Birchlow – the village is in a dip from here.’

‘You might see the lower part of the track, though.’

‘If his killers came that way. The SOCOs will try to establish an approach route in the morning when the light is better. And hopefully, the weather.’

Cooper peered through the dusk. ‘What about Eyam? Some of those houses are in a direct line of sight to the crime scene. And there aren’t even any trees in the way.’

‘It’s way across the valley,’ said Fry. ‘Too far away for anyone to have seen anything, surely?’

The southern side of Longstone Moor was occupied only by a few quiet, self-contained farmsteads sheltering behind their walls of silage bags. But on the north side of the moor, it was quite different. Lorries and giant dumper trucks ran backwards and forwards to the quarries on unmade roads, blowing clouds of white dust behind them, as if their wheels were on fire. The rain had carved channels down some of those roads, forcing lorries up on to eroded bank sides. Cooper could hear the booming of the empty wagons, the scream of reversing alarms on the dumpers. Nobody would be out walking in this area – the dust was too thick, too gritty on the wind.

‘It depends,’ said Cooper. ‘It depends on what there was for anyone to see.’

Seventy-five miles away, in the Great Barr area of Birmingham, Erin Lacey was watching her father pack. The Mercedes already stood in the drive, and his laptop was in its case, ready to go.

‘How long will you be away?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure, love.’

‘Will you phone?’

‘Of course.’

Michael Clay looked at his daughter. ‘I know how you feel about this, Erin. I realize you don’t approve.’

‘No. And I’m not going to pretend otherwise.’

Erin tried hard to control her feelings. She knew that getting angry wouldn’t do any good. Her father could be very stubborn when he got an idea into his head. For a middle-aged accountant, he was remarkably headstrong about some things. And this idea was the most ludicrous one he’d ever had, as far as Erin was concerned.

As he zipped up his bag, she thought about how much he’d changed, not just since her mother had died a few years ago, but after the death of her uncle Stuart. When pancreatic cancer took his older brother last year, Michael Clay had been hit very hard. It had taken him a long time to get round to sorting out Uncle Stuart’s possessions, to sift through the memories. She could understand that, of course.

But after that, everything had seemed to happen very quickly. Her father had developed this obsession with what had happened in the past – the very dim and distant past, so far as Erin was concerned. And then this woman had appeared.

Somehow, it was worse when a man of her father’s age started to act foolishly. He’d always had such a good reputation for being careful with money, and now he seemed to have lost his head. Unsuitable business associates, doubtful enterprises, a persuasive woman with an eye for the main chance. And this trip to Derbyshire was the last straw.

‘I wish you wouldn’t go. Haven’t you done more than enough for her? Why do you have to go yourself?’

‘I need to see her,’ said Michael simply.

‘Why?’

‘To sort a few things out.’

Her heart sank when he said that. ‘What things?’

Michael smiled. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’

But Erin didn’t feel like smiling. She was starting to get more and more upset as she watched her father put on his coat and pick up his car keys. He must have seen it in her face, and felt guilty.

‘If you don’t want to keep an eye on the house for me, love, I’ll understand. I’ll ask Mrs Fletcher next door.’

‘No, it’s all right. But, Dad … look after yourself, please.’

‘Of course I will.’

Erin kissed him as he went to the door. Her father was trying to sound bright and breezy, as if he was just popping down to the shop for a bottle of milk. But she knew it was much more than that.

Michael Clay got into his Mercedes and waved as he turned on the drive. As she watched him go, Erin Lacey felt a tear in the corner of her eye, as if she was saying goodbye to her father for ever.

7

By the end of the day, the body had been released for collection by the mortuary. Fry watched the anonymous black van crawl away from Longstone Moor in the fading light.

Now there was nothing more she could do at the scene. Inspector Redfearn’s men had rounded up as many of the anti-hunt protestors as they could and taken names and addresses, along with statements from any who had been in the area at eight thirty that morning. They had also seized video footage from several cameras, so that might help. The sabs seemed to have filmed anything that moved.

Fry felt uncomfortable about dealing with the protestors in a different way from the hunt supporters. But she supposed the hunt was organized in a more formal way, and there would be no trouble obtaining the identities of any individuals she might want to talk to.

The huntsman, John Widdowson, had finally appeared, looking very tired, and as damp as she felt herself. For a few seconds, Fry had found herself surrounded by the pack, dozens of panting brown-and-white dogs crowding around her legs, pink tongues lolling, the white tips of their tails flicking. Some of them had black patches around their eyes, like burglars’ masks, which gave them a peculiarly manic look. They sniffed at her knees and shook water from their coats.

Widdowson’s story was that the hound van had arrived outside Birchlow shortly after eight thirty. Although there had been a few horse boxes already at the scene, he had noticed no riders heading off on their own. It wouldn’t have been the custom, he said.

‘It’s a pity the air support unit weren’t on station a bit earlier,’ said Fry, as she left Inspector Redfearn. ‘They could have filmed the whole incident for us.’

‘They had a priority call,’ said Redfearn. ‘A pursuit on the A61.’

‘I know. It would just have been nice to get a bit of luck for once.’

Gavin Murfin called Fry before she could reach her car.

‘You’re on duty late, Gavin,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Thought you’d like to know straight away, boss. We’ve found a car. A Mitsubishi, 08 reg.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Way off the road, parked up by the old field barn on the edge of Longstone Moor. In fact, I think you might actually be able to see the barn from the crime scene.’

Fry called up a picture of the scene in her mind. ‘It’s about a mile away, I guess.’

‘That would be about right.’

‘So I presume we’ve done a check on the number. Who’s the registered owner?’

‘A Mr Patrick Rawson, from Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.’

‘The same man who made the 999 call.’

‘Well, the call was made on his phone, anyway.’

‘Yes, you’re right, Gavin. And …?’

‘Local police have just called at his address. His wife told them he drove up to Derbyshire yesterday, on business. But she hasn’t had a call from him since. And, Diane …’

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Rawson’s age and general description match the victim.’

‘I thought we might be coming to that conclusion. Whoever was at the huts with Mr Rawson took his phone and wallet, and then made the 999 call.’

‘A plain and simple robbery, then,’ said Murfin. ‘Mugger panicked when he realized he’d hit the victim too hard.’

‘Funny place for a mugging,’ said Fry. ‘Funny place to be doing anything, really.’

‘Well, if our suspect uses Mr Rawson’s phone again, we can trace him.’

‘He’ll have ditched it by now, Gavin. More likely he’ll try to use the plastic in Mr Rawson’s wallet.’

‘I’ll get on to that.’

‘Thanks, Gavin. Scenes of Crime on the car?’

‘Soon as they can get there. Wayne says they’re going to be a bit stretched, what with the field, the hut and the car.’

‘I know.’

Fry drove back to the West Street headquarters in her Peugeot, conscious of the water dripping from her clothes on to the seats and soaking into the mats in the floor well. She had the heater going full blast, but all the windows had steamed up immediately she got in, and she had to open the driver’s side a crack to clear the condensation. The result was that the lorries passing her on the A623 blew spray on to her face before she was even dry.

In the CID room, everyone had packed up and gone home. On a white-board, someone had scrawled their own bitter slogan:

Sergeant Wilson’s Law: lack of resources + shortage of staff = shit hitting the fan.

The paperwork waiting on her desk included a copy of the G28 sudden-death report form, completed by the first officers attending the incident this morning. By the simple act of filling in the paperwork, uniforms would feel they’d effectively passed on a problem to CID.

Fry sighed. It was one of the aspects of CID work that constantly baffled and frustrated her, this requirement for developing a love of paperwork and file preparation, a mania for detail that could border on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

True, there were a few moments of excitement, but they were usually in the court room, sitting behind a barrister when a jury brought in a guilty verdict that you’d been working towards for months. There were moments when you had to drop everything and rush off to a critical incident, but those were pretty rare. There were other occasions when you had to deal with families going through the trauma of losing a loved one.

The rest of the job consisted of making lists of exhibits, preparing Narey files, sitting in CPS case conferences, sweating over duty rosters. She spent most of her time worrying about interviews, memos, file upgrades and threshold tests. Being a detective no longer seemed to have any kudos.

Recently, a new Assistant Chief Constable had joined the force from West Midlands Police. He’d even been commander for the Aston and Central Birmingham operational command units, where Fry had once been based. He was now Derbyshire’s ACC Operations, responsible not only for territorial divisions, but also for level two cross-border crime, crime support, armed-response vehicles, the task force and dog section.

Fry might have expected to be noticed under the new ACC. But her immediate problem was here in Edendale, in the form of Detective Superintendent Hazel Branagh. Since she’d arrived in E Division, she seemed to have been casting some kind of dark spell, like a female Lord Voldemort.

This morning, Gavin Murfin had referred to Branagh’s ‘empire building’. Fry was beginning to suspect that she might have no place in Branagh’s empire.

She found DI Hitchens still in his office. Hitchens had recently taken to wearing black shirts and purple ties, like a jazz musician. Fry suspected he was letting his hair grow a bit longer, too. Tonight, he looked as though he ought to be sitting in the corner of a badly lit nightclub, nursing a double whisky and a clarinet case.

‘Tell me we’re on top of this case, Diane,’ he said.

‘This is no one-day event. Not like turning up at a domestic, lifting the boyfriend and getting an instant confession.’

‘Yes, those can get a bit boring,’ he agreed. ‘Mind you, there’s likely to be a mountain of paperwork.’

‘True. Well, we think we’ve got an ID, at least.’

‘That’s like having one ball in the National Lottery. What about the other five?’

‘Five?’

‘Cause of death, time of death, motive, means…’

‘… and a suspect?’

‘No, no. That’s the bonus ball.’ Hitchens stroked his tie impatiently. ‘There’s another one, but I just can’t think of it.’

‘Where did you get this lottery stuff from, sir?’

‘Management training,’ he sighed smugly. ‘It’s a focus aid.’

‘A what?’

‘A simple concept that helps focus your mind on the essential elements of a task. You break down each task into components and identify them by a mnemonic or a visual tag. It’s so that none of the elements gets forgotten or overlooked.’

Fry sighed. ‘Time of death is estimated at between nine and nine thirty this morning. We won’t get a confirmed cause of death until after the postmortem, of course, but it looked like blunt-force trauma to me. There were certainly serious head injuries.’

‘Good. But if you’re considering suspicious circumstances, do you have any suggestion of a motive?’

‘Not until we’ve gone into the victim’s background thoroughly. We don’t know yet what he was doing in Derbyshire, even. That should give us a line of enquiry.’

‘An arranged meeting?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping,’ said Fry. ‘The old agricultural research station is too unusual a place for a random encounter with a mugger. I’ll update you tomorrow.’

‘Yes, keep me in the loop.’

‘More management speak?’

Hitchens looked up. ‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

Fry made her way to the door, under the impression that her DI had drifted away into some strange seminar-like world of his own, all whiteboards and overhead projectors, with a spicing of motivational role-play.

‘Witnesses,’ said Hitchens suddenly.

‘What?’

‘The sixth lottery ball. Motive, means … and witnesses. That’s what you need, some potential witnesses.’

‘I’ve got a whole posse of them,’ said Fry. ‘But without enough bodies available, it’s impossible to question them all. By now, they could have got their stories straight, anyway.’

Fry turned the Peugeot off Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue and pulled up at the kerb outside number 12, a once prosperous, detached Victorian villa nestling behind mock porticos. Her flat was on the first floor – a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle, and a tiny kitchen area. Strangely, the first floor was regarded as the high-status part of the house, poised between the noisier ground-floor flats and the tiny bedsits in the old servants’ quarters on the top floor.

Directly beneath her was a flat full of students. She wasn’t quite sure how many of them shared together – three, perhaps four. The number probably changed from week to week, for all she knew.

When she’d first moved into number 12 Grosvenor Avenue, all the other occupants had been students, most of them studying at High Peak College on the west side of town. But in the past year or two, there had been a gradual population shift, with the students packing their rucksacks and heading for smart new accommodation in the halls of residence that had opened on the college campus. Their replacements seemed to be migrant workers of various nationalities. Many of them were as young as the students, but they were out all day, and often all night, working in hotels and restaurants around Edendale.

Fry took off her jacket and shoes and collapsed on her bed. She must have a shower, or she might never feel human again.

Cooper arrived at Welbeck Street gasping for a coffee. He felt as though he hadn’t taken a dose of caffeine all day; the briefing before the raid on the cannabis factory seemed so long ago now.

He knew he drank too much coffee when he was at home on his own. He never used to do that – it was a habit he’d developed when he moved out of Bridge End Farm into Welbeck Street. It had begun only gradually, just as something to occupy his attention for a few minutes, spooning the granules from a jar of Nescafé, fetching the milk, filling up the kettle. The routine seemed to take just enough time for the feeling of loneliness to pass. He was deflecting an undesirable emotion with a series of routine actions, switching the brain to a safe little rut.

Cooper went out into the conservatory to see where Randy had got to. The cats at Welbeck Street had been his landlady’s pets originally – or, at least, they’d been strays that Dorothy Shelley had taken under her wing and fed whenever they decided to turn up. He’d inherited one of them with the flat – a furry black object who still came and went whenever he felt like it. He didn’t know how old Randy was, but it was obvious that he was approaching his later years. He was very stiff when he moved, which wasn’t often, and he continued to lose weight, no matter how much he ate. Finally, Cooper noticed one day that the cat was becoming incontinent. Despite his nomadic habits, he had always been a very clean animal, and his condition clearly bothered him.

‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said. ‘It looks like another trip to the vet.’

Mrs Shelley hadn’t been well recently, either. It seemed unkind, but Cooper had begun to wonder who would inherit the two adjoining houses in Welbeck Street if and when she should die. She never talked about any children, and rarely had visits from family members, except once a nephew and his wife. The nephew had looked a bit shifty to Cooper, had given the properties too much of a proprietary examination from the street before he went in. But he was probably worrying unnecessarily, and far too early. Despite the casualness of the agreement when he’d moved in, he must have some security of tenancy.

Besides, Dorothy Shelley was the sort of woman who would go on forever – never too strong and always a bit vague, but tottering around long after younger people had given up the ghost. He hoped that was the case. He’d got quite fond of her, in a way. Apart from the question mark it might put over his own future, he’d be sorry to lose her. And he certainly didn’t want to see her being taken advantage of by some greedy nephew who didn’t care one jot about her.

But then, knowing Mrs Shelley, the problem would never arise. She had probably made a will leaving her entire estate to Cats Protection anyway.

In her sitting room, Mrs Shelley had a stuffed barn owl, so old and fossilized that Cooper could have used its beak as a bottle opener. He’d come to think of his landlady as a bit like that stuffed owl. Rather bedraggled and slightly moth-eaten around the pinions, but likely to last for ever, so long as it was valued.

Cooper looked around the conservatory. At the far end, there were so many cobwebs that the spiders would soon be complaining about overcrowding. He needed to make time for a spring clean. He needed to find time for Liz, too, or she’d be complaining he neglected her. He was supposed to have made time for a holiday.

But time was always a problem. For him, and for Randy, there was never enough of it.

Strange how complications seemed to mount up in your life as you got older. In his twenties, everything had seemed very simple. Now, within a few years, he felt as though the world was on his shoulders some days. Was it the creeping infection of responsibility? He had a steady relationship now. He’d been going out with Liz Petty, a civilian crime-scene examiner at E Division, for several months. He ought to be getting to know her fairly well by this time.

And then there was that old, vexed question of promotion. It had come up in conversation with Liz the other night. Over a glass of white wine and a Bondi Chicken in the Australian Bar at Bakewell, she’d gently quizzed him about his future. Cooper never found it difficult to listen to Liz. She didn’t take herself too seriously, and might burst out laughing at him at any moment. He treasured those moments, as a rule. But that evening, she’d been more serious.

And she had been right, he supposed. It was now or never, if he was ever going to go for promotion. Even if it meant some kind of horizontal development, a move to a different speciality – whatever it took to get noticed. You couldn’t stand still, or you moved backwards in this world. If he was going to settle down one day and have a family … Well that, after all, was what he would do, wasn’t it? If he was going to settle down, he couldn’t spend his life on a DC’s salary, growing cynical and grumpy, like Gavin Murfin. Putting on weight in all the wrong places, too, probably. Oh, damn.

His mother had always talked so much about her grandchildren – not only those who already existed, but those that were in the future, yet unborn. They had been the most important thing in her mind in those final years, even when the illness had taken most of her memories. Matt had done that for her, the older brother fulfilling the hopes and dreams. But Ben knew he had failed her. Maybe there was still time to make up for it, though. Still time to tell her that he had settled down, got the promotion, produced those grandchildren she’d talked about. He felt sure she would know, even now, wherever she was. If it mattered enough, you could make it happen.

8

Fry woke with a fuzzy head, and looked around her in confusion. She’d only lain down on her bed for a few minutes to rest, but she must have dropped off to sleep almost straight away. It had been a busy day, but not that bad. There had been many days when she’d put in much longer hours, when the time to go home never seemed to arrive. There could be a few of those days to come, depending on the course of this new enquiry. But not today. Today had been … well, average. There was no reason she should feel so tired and groggy, unless she was coming down with something. And that was the last thing she needed.

She sniffed. The smell of soy sauce was drifting up from the flat downstairs. It was one of those smells that seemed to be able to penetrate floors and carpets with surprising ease, as if its spicy aroma could wind its way through the cracks of the floorboards like wisps of smoke.

One day, it had dawned on her that she had plenty of money in her savings account. A police sergeant’s salary was perfectly adequate, and there were hardly any major expenses in her life, except for her car and the rent on this flat. Not exactly a lavish lifestyle, was it? Fat chance of that. She ought to be able to think of something she could do with her savings.

Fry made her way into the kitchen and looked at the washing up. There wasn’t much of it, not now that she was on her own again, her sister Angie having headed back to Birmingham and whatever sort of lifestyle she led there. So those few plates and pans shouldn’t look quite so daunting, sitting there in the sink in that squalid, disapproving way.

What to do with a few thousand pounds? She supposed she could put a deposit down on a house and take out a mortgage. It was the sort of thing that everyone else seemed to do. They’d all tied themselves up in property and debts by the time they got to her age.

Fry hissed between her teeth. A mortgage? She’d rather be chained in purgatory, with eagles pecking at her liver.

She showered, changed her clothes, then pulled on her coat and went out for a walk to wake herself up. The clouds had cleared now, and a crescent moon was shining on the wet street. Music played behind curtained windows as she passed. Tunes that were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite hear enough of to name.

She felt like the only person out in the streets tonight. The rest of Edendale was shut up behind its doors and windows, people enclosed in their own little worlds. Sometimes she wished she had a world of her own that she could enter that way, instead of always standing out in the cold, feeling so small and vulnerable under a vast, moonlit sky. At times like this, she craved the crowded intimacy of the city.

After a few months, Fry had finally brought herself to make an effort at getting acquainted with the students. So what if they had nothing in common? She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life with them. But then they had all left. They’d moved away to live in student halls, or had finished their courses and got on with their lives. It was strange how everyone she moved towards always seemed to move away from her. It was as if she was caught up in some old-fashioned dance where no one was supposed to get too close, everyone spinning constantly round the ballroom floor, touching briefly before whirling away to a distant corner where she never saw them again.

She thought of Ben Cooper. The one person, perhaps, who had never entirely drawn away. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing, or not. It had been so typical of him to turn up at the crime scene on Longstone Moor today. She remembered the moment she’d spotted Cooper approaching the outer cordon – an unmistakable figure striding effortlessly up the slope towards her, shrugging off the wind and rain as if he was a natural part of the landscape, a creature totally at home in its own environment. He always looked vaguely windswept, even in the office, with that infuriating lock of hair that fell across his forehead. Yet he also radiated a kind of intensity that Fry rarely saw in anyone, let alone the police officers and other professionals she worked with day in and day out, people trained to say exactly the right thing in all circumstances. You could rely on Ben Cooper not to do that, at least.

Fry sighed. Of course, Cooper had been right about her antipathy to hunting. She didn’t think it was just some kind of class thing, though. At least, she hoped it wasn’t. Though hunting was often associated with class privilege and social hierarchy, there had always been a lurking violence at the heart of the sport that turned it into a kind of blood ritual.

When she was a studying at UCE, there had been fellow students who had been deeply involved in animal rights protests, including the campaign against fox hunting. Some of them were the sort of people whose instinct was to be anti everything, but the propaganda had been pervasive, the leaflets handed out, the posters of mutilated animals pinned to the notice boards in the Students’ Union.

To Fry, it had been obvious that the demand for a ban on fox hunting in Britain had as much to do with class politics as a love of animals. As any eighteenth-century farm labourer transported for killing a hare could have told you, the hunt was always about the relative status of human beings.

The impression most people had of fox hunting came from its depiction in art. There, hunting had always been portrayed as the preserve of the few, a jealously guarded conspiracy.

There was a painting Fry had seen in the National Gallery once, on a visit to London. A portrait of Lord Somebody or Other, Master of the Hounds. He had been painted dressed in a black hunting outfit, his dark shadow accompanying him in the background, like the spectre of death. His boots had been polished to a high gloss, and he gripped the silver handle of a riding crop as though he was just about to thrash a servant rather than his horse. To the observer, his expression suggested that he was regarding an incompetent groom who’d just dropped a brush.

When Fry had studied the label, she realized that his lordship must have been perfectly happy to appear arrogant and potentially violent, since he had given the portrait to the National Gallery himself. Hunting art had always been frank about the cruelty of the sport. These days, everything was about presentation and image. Would there have been the same demand for a ban if hunting had a better image in art?

Yet every stately home and every country pub still had hunting prints rotting from their frames. That bloody symbolism survived.

Cooper stepped outside into the back yard at Welbeck Street, and turned his face up to the rain, wiping a spatter of water from his face. On Sunday, it had been raining at the National Memorial Arboretum, too. Trickles of water had formed on the memorial at the end of The Beat, streaking the surface of the stone. They looked so much like tears that even Matt Cooper had been silenced by the symbolism. Ben had pulled up his collar, hunched his shoulders inside his coat, and regretted ever agreeing to come.

‘They’ve done it nicely, though,’ Matt had said. ‘Good job.’

‘Yes, nice.’

Claire gave Ben an odd look then. What was that look supposed to mean? Ben could never really understand what his sister was thinking, the way he could with Matt. Did she share his own reaction? Did their brother’s hearty matter-of-factness have the same effect on her – that sinking feeling of grief and loss that was rammed home by the simple act of watching someone read an inscription on a plaque?

Yes, they’d done it nicely. Written their father’s final epitaph in a few strokes of engraving. Sergeant Joseph Cooper, Derbyshire Constabulary, killed on duty. Recorded for ever. Permanently set in stone.

‘There are so many,’ said Claire. ‘You don’t realize, do you?’

Ben had gazed around the site at all the memorials to hundreds of thousands of service personnel who’d died for their country. Surely one police sergeant who had been kicked to death by drunken yobs on the streets of Edendale was a unique individual, even among so many deaths?

A few months ago, Ben had been asked to join an organization called COPS, one of those convenient acronyms that police services across the country were so fond of. Its initials stood for Care of Police Survivors. Last July, he’d attended their annual service of remembrance, complete with a fly-past by a police helicopter and a cavalcade of motorcycles ridden by the Blue Angels.

He’d come away from that service with mixed feelings. Some parts of it had been moving, like the sight of so many other relatives of dead police officers. But he wasn’t so sure about the idea of turning the occasion into a spectacle, as if it was the Edinburgh Tattoo. People grieved in different ways, he supposed. Some preferred to remember their loved ones in a public way, rather than confine their feelings to private grief. Yes, emotions were sometimes easier to deal with in public, when people felt the necessity to behave properly, and not to be an embarrassment.

At the time of the remembrance service, The Beat had been under water and impossible to reach. Hundreds of trees in the arboretum had to be replaced because of the effects of repeated flooding. Not just in winter, either. Last summer, a temporary lake had formed, drowning The Beat. Fifteen inches of water had surged across the site, washing away stakes and flattening trees.

Ben had promised himself that he’d come back one day, and Matt and Claire had jumped on the idea with enthusiasm, much to his surprise. He shouldn’t think that they didn’t grieve too, just because they didn’t always show it. For heaven’s sake, he didn’t show it too much either, did he?

‘Perhaps we should go back to the visitor centre,’ Claire had said. ‘The rain is getting a bit heavy.’

‘In a minute,’ said Matt. ‘Give me a minute.’

Something in the tone of his voice had sounded wrong. Matt’s back was to them, and he hardly seemed aware of the rain falling on his shoulders.

Ben turned and walked a few yards away towards the RAF memorial. Alongside it, he saw a smaller grove – two rows of hawthorns supported by wooden posts. They looked to be young trees, seven or eight years old, maybe. They were probably intended to form an arch eventually. Each tree carried a label bearing a curious logo, with a name and number. He saw 7 Group Bedford, and 8 Group Coventry next to it. Before he could look more closely, Matt called to him from the other side of The Beat.

‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘but in Dad’s day, we all believed the police were on our side. They kept us safe, protected us from criminals, all that stuff. We respected them for it. Everyone I know would have done their best to help the bobbies because of that. But now it’s changed. And I don’t know where it went wrong.’ He looked up at his brother. ‘Maybe you know, Ben.’

Ben blinked. Where the heck had that suddenly come from? What switch had turned on the flow of his brother’s resentment so abruptly?

He looked at Claire, but of course she’d been nodding as Matt spoke.

‘Well, I know exactly what you mean,’ she said. ‘It’s because the police seem to spend most of their time persecuting law-abiding people for petty infringements of the rules instead of going after the real criminals. They’re pursuing government targets and political correctness instead of chasing the bad guys.’

‘They do it because it’s easier, and it gets their detection rates up,’ said Matt. ‘A motorist who goes a few miles an hour over the speed limit is a nice soft target. Not to mention all those cases where people tackle yobs causing trouble. If they don’t get beaten up by the yobs –’

‘Or killed,’ said Claire.

‘Yes, or killed,’ agreed Matt, ‘then they get arrested themselves. And yet at the same time you hear stories of police officers standing around doing risk assessments while someone is dying. It’s ludicrous. I can tell you, Dad would never have done that. He would never have hung back if he thought he might save someone’s life.’

‘No.’ Claire was quiet for a moment. ‘I suppose you hear this all the time, Ben.’

‘Pretty much.’

When it had come time to leave the arboretum, Claire insisted on taking a photograph of her two brothers on her digital camera. She posed them near the rain-streaked windows to get the best light, gesturing them to get closer together until their shoulders were touching. Ben tried to smile, but could sense that his brother was as stiff as he was. Not the best family portrait, probably. But Claire didn’t seem to notice, flashing off a few shots before pulling up her hood and leading them out into the rain.

‘All right,’ Matt said. ‘I suppose it’s just today, visiting this place. Thinking about Dad. About how much things have changed in those few years. He would never have been able to live with it.’

‘I know,’ said Ben. ‘I know.’

Ben found he could listen to their comments without even being tempted to argue. There was nothing in them that he hadn’t heard before. Yes, it was hurtful that his own family should have these views, but he wasn’t surprised by them. Matt read the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, after all. Stories like these were commonplace. There was some new incident in the media every week. A view of the police as the enemy was spreading rapidly among ordinary members of the public. Like a disease, it passed from one person to another by word of mouth.

And this wasn’t the way it had been meant to be. Not in this country, anyway. In Britain, there was supposed to be policing by consent, a partnership between the police and the public. It was never imagined that police officers would be attacked on the street by members of the public just because they happened to be there.

Though it upset him to hear what was said, it was difficult for Ben to summon the enthusiasm to put up any defence. He heard much the same concerns at work day after day, from the people caught in the middle of the trap.

And the worst thing of all was that Matt had been right. Sergeant Joe Cooper would never have stood by while someone was dying. He would have torn up the risk assessment forms and thrown them in the face of anyone who tried to stop him.

In the back yard of his flat in Welbeck Street, Ben Cooper let the rain run down his face freely, no longer caring whether he wiped it away or not.

9

Journal of 1968

I can’t remember who first started to call it ‘the pit’. Jimmy, probably. But my memories of him are so twisted now, so bent with emotion and blackened with anger, that I don’t know what I’m remembering and what I’ve put in from my own imagination. In my mind, Jimmy is a tiny figure, his pale face turned up to the sky, glasses catching the light, flashing like a signal, until a huge shadow falls across and obliterates him.

Les was a lot older than us, and such a big man. No, big isn’t the right word. He was fat, all right? He had double chins like a concertina, and rolls that spilled over the waistband of his trousers.

Well, I realize none of us exactly resembled Errol Flynn in those uniforms, but Les always seemed as though he’d burst out of his battledress tunic at any moment, as if he’d send those little silver buttons popping all over the place. In winter, when he wore his greatcoat, the belt would slip up over the top of his stomach and pin itself across his chest, until he looked like a badly wrapped parcel. It was a miracle he ever fit in the shaft.

We used to joke about it, Jimmy and me. We said that one day Les’s backside would get stuck in the hatch like a cork in a bottle. And that would be us well and truly trapped for the duration. Never mind what was going on outside, on the inside it would be hell.

Oh, and he had these little piggy eyes, too, I remember. If you did anything wrong, Les would stare at you for ages without saying anything. But you knew he was making a note of it, in case he could use it against you some time. He was like that, Les. He talked all the time about us being a team, but he’d stick a knife in your back at the first opportunity.

Jimmy was totally the opposite to look at. Such a scrawny lad; no kind of uniform was ever going to make him look good. He didn’t have the shoulders for it, if you know what I mean. His hair was best described as sandy, and he was growing it long at the sides, so it stuck out from under the elastic brim of his beret in ragged little clumps, which drove Les mad. It was the fashion of the time, of course. Jimmy was even trying for a little moustache, but it was patchy and so pale that you could hardly make it out in a bad light. He wore these wire-framed glasses that were probably supposed to make him look like John Lennon, but didn’t. He looked too studious, a proper skinny weed.

But he was clever, Jimmy. Really clever. He understood the technical stuff better than any of us. Better than Les, for all his air of superiority.

These days, I suppose people would have called Jimmy a geek. But I liked him, truly liked him. Jimmy was my best friend, you see. He was almost a brother.

And he was also the first one to die.

10

Wednesday

Next morning, when she walked out of her flat to the parking area behind the house, it struck Fry what she could spend some of her money on. Her old black Peugeot could be replaced.

It was obvious, really. The annual MoT and service was starting to get a bit expensive, even though she suspected the garage on Castleton Road gave her a surreptitious discount. Last time, there had been some parts to replace on the suspension system, and French parts weren’t cheap.

The Peugeot had served her well for several years now, and it didn’t show up the dirt too much when she forgot to wash it for weeks on end. But in the bright sunlight of this clear March morning, Fry could see that it was beginning to look a little scuffed around the edges. Its paintwork carried a few too many scratches from squeezing into odd places, like the field gateway near Birchlow yesterday. Each scratch was minor in itself, but the cumulative effect was of an old tomcat with unhealed claw marks from too many late-night punch-ups.

But, if she was going to trade it in, what would she replace it with? She hadn’t the faintest idea.

And she didn’t have any more time to think about it this morning. As she battled through roadworks still puddled with rain, and the cars and buses packed with school children that constituted morning rush-hour in Edendale, she started to prepare herself for the briefing that would start the day.

‘OK, our victim appears to be Patrick Thomas Rawson, date of birth twelfth of April 1964. Born in Digbeth, Birmingham, with a current address in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. His wife says Mr Rawson is a company director, type of business as yet unspecified.’

Copies of a photo were passed around the CID room, and DI Hitchens placed one on the board next to a shot taken by the Scenes of Crime photographer the day before, and an enlarged map of the scene at Longstone Moor.

‘The description fits for height, age, and so forth. West Midlands Police have scanned this photo and emailed it to us. You’ve got to admire their efficiency.’

The new photo showed a smiling man in his mid-forties, dark-haired and dark-eyed, almost Italian-looking. Then Fry mentally corrected herself. No, not Italian. He was probably of Irish ancestry, one of those dark Celtic types from the west coast. She could practically see the charm oozing from his smile, and hear the lilting brogue. But that couldn’t be right, either. Patrick Rawson had been born in the Irish quarter of Birmingham, his Celtic roots overlaid by Brummie. In reality, his accent had probably been not unlike her own.

‘It looks pretty conclusive to me,’ said Fry, remembering clearly the dead man lying under the body tent in a spreading pool of blood. It was difficult to be sure, but he might even have been wearing the same coat in the photograph sent from West Midlands.

Hitchens nodded. ‘Yes, I agree. But the wife will confirm identity. Local police have visited Mrs Rawson, and she’s coming up to Edendale today to do the identification.’

‘Who’s bringing her?’

‘A brother, I think they said.’

‘So what was a forty-five-year-old company director doing in a field outside Birchlow?’ asked someone.

‘His wife told the West Midlands bobbies she has no idea. Hopefully, we should be able to get more out of her when she arrives.’

Fry and Hitchens looked at each other. If the death of Patrick Rawson did turn out to be murder, then nine times out of ten the spouse or partner was the obvious suspect. A lot would depend on Mrs Rawson’s demeanour, the consistency of her story, and whether she had a compelling motive.

‘Over to you then, DS Fry,’ said Hitchens cheerfully. ‘You were senior officer at the scene most of yesterday. Let’s have your assessment.’

Fry stepped up and took centre stage. The faces watching her expectantly were only her CID team, plus a few uniforms they’d been allocated. It wasn’t exactly a major spotlight, but it would do for now.

She drew their attention to the map. ‘Right now, we’re working on the theory that the victim drove up towards Longstone Moor early on Tuesday morning and parked his car, a black Mitsubishi 4x4, close to this field barn, here. It seems likely that he went there to meet with someone. Who that was, we don’t yet know. You can probably come up with some ideas.’

‘A woman?’ suggested DC Irvine.

Well, there was a chip off the old block. But DC Hurst, sitting next to him, raised her hand. ‘The person who made the 999 call was male,’ she said.

‘Yes, Becky. It was a young male voice, local accent. We can hear the recording in a minute.’

Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst were the two youngest DCs, who had been in the department a matter of months. Beat and response officers for a few years, then rushed into CID. That was an indication of the shortage of experienced staff. Fry was conscious of an entire generation coming into the police service behind her, with quite a different attitude to the older officers like Gavin Murfin. All of that new generation were born between 1979 and 1991. They were Thatcher’s children.

Despite that, she’d noticed a few signs that Irvine and Hurst were tending to look to the wrong people for role models. Ben Cooper, for a start. Murfin, even.

‘The victim made his way from his car to this derelict hut at the agricultural research centre, about two hundred yards away. He sustained a head injury at some point here, because blood was found inside the hut. His mobile phone and wallet were also taken. It seems likely that the person who made the 999 call on the victim’s phone was also at the huts, since he told the control room operator that’s where the body was to be found. But, in fact, the victim was still alive. Despite his injuries, he managed to get across these fields before he collapsed and died.’

‘I wonder why he didn’t just head back to his car,’ said Hurst. ‘That would be the logical thing to do.’

Fry looked at Hurst. ‘Yes, but if you see the severity of the head injury, you can imagine that he wouldn’t have been thinking logically. In fact, he was probably dazed and disorientated. He would have been suffering from concussion as well as blood loss, I guess. Hopefully, the pathologist will give us a clearer picture after the postmortem.’

Fry saw Superintendent Branagh settling into a chair at the back of the room, trying unsuccessfully not to be noticed.

‘SOCOs have been assigned to the car,’ said Fry. ‘We’ll bring it in when they’ve processed the scene where it was parked.’

‘A barn, was it?’

‘A field barn. The track to the location is still usable, but the Mitsubishi was parked out of sight of any walkers. We’ll be trying to trace Mr Rawson’s route from the car to the scene where he met his death, and of course establishing his movements prior to arriving at the barn in the first place.’

‘We have two scenes to cover, then.’

‘Three, including the hut. And two of them are totally open to the elements. Just our luck to get the sort of weather we had yesterday morning. We also have separate lines of enquiry on this mysterious 999 caller, and on the hoofprints found all over the scene. Some potential witnesses there, I hope.’

‘Appeals?’

‘Yes, we need to get public appeals out as soon as possible, to encourage these people to come forward with information. Particularly the man who made the call.’

They listened to the recording of the call logged by the control room. It was very brief, just a description of the location in an unsteady voice, as if the caller had been running. An insistence on ‘There’s a body,’ said twice. Repeated requests from the operator for the caller’s name were simply ignored. Listening to the recording for the second time, Fry thought the man might actually still have been running when he dialled the emergency number.

‘We won’t have the initial postmortem report on cause of death for a while yet,’ said Hitchens, sensing the end of the briefing approaching. ‘But, given the severity of the head injury, this could be classified as a murder enquiry at any time. So follow procedures, no slip-ups at this early stage, please.’

‘The killer seems to have taken his wallet and mobile phone,’ said Irvine. ‘Could this have been a robbery gone wrong?’

Fry shook her head. ‘I can’t see it. No, it’s more likely they did it to conceal the victim’s identity for as long as possible. We were lucky to find the car so soon and get his identity. Our only other lead is this –’ She held up the evidence bag. ‘A restaurant receipt in the victim’s pocket. Le Chien Noir, in Clappergate. If Mr Rawson used a credit card to pay for his meal, it should provide additional confirmation of his identity, even without the assistance of the wife.’

‘Diane, are you going to follow that up yourself?’ asked Hitchens.

‘As soon as we’ve finished here, sir.’

The DI smiled. ‘By the way, I hear you had a bit of trouble at the hunt yesterday?’

‘It was nothing. One of those situations where everyone claims to be an injured party.’

Superintendent Branagh waited while the meeting broke up. She was wearing a dress this morning. It was dark blue, with a pattern of enormous white flowers, and it was cut so badly that it made her shoulders look even broader than usual. Watching her stand up and come towards them made Fry think of a window ledge that the plant pots had fallen off.

‘I wonder what her vital statistics are,’ whispered Murfin. ‘She’d look good in the front row of the scrum.’

‘Women don’t have vital statistics any more, Gavin.’

‘Ah. Political correctness. Maybe I should get myself sent back in for re-education again. I obviously need my ten thousand mile service.’

As everyone went back to work, Fry noticed that Ben Cooper had sneaked into the back of the room, too. He looked as if he wasn’t sure how welcome he would be, or whether his presence could be regarded as official, even.

It turned out that Branagh had noticed Cooper, too. She turned to Hitchens and Fry.

‘DC Cooper is supposed to be on leave, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Fry regarded her with a certain respect. A woman who could memorize the duty rosters must have a ruthlessly efficient administrative brain. Most senior officers wouldn’t even have bothered looking.

‘He heard we were short-handed and came in to see if he could help,’ explained Fry. ‘But I can send him home, if –’

‘No, why would you do that? We should be encouraging such enthusiasm, DS Fry.’

‘Of course.’

A few minutes later, Fry found Mr Enthusiasm himself standing at her desk.

‘You didn’t mention any trouble with the hunt,’ he said.

‘It was all a storm in a teacup.’

‘Sabs, I suppose?’

‘Yes, but there were hunt stewards involved. I didn’t like the look of them too much, Ben. There were one or two familiar faces, I’m sure.’

‘Customers of ours?’

‘Almost certainly. When I get hold of their names, I think there’ll be a few counts of affray and GBH on record. Some potential suspects there, well capable of cracking a person’s skull. If we could link one of them to Patrick Rawson, then tie it up with the forensics …’

‘You’re focusing on the hunt stewards rather than the saboteurs?’ said Cooper.

‘The protestors were a motley bunch. But some of them looked as though they wouldn’t say “boo” to a goose. They’d probably be too afraid of violating its rights.’

Cooper perched on an adjacent desk. ‘The sabs are pretty clever and sophisticated now. They’ve had a lot of experience over the years. In fact, some people say successful hunt sabotage needs as much knowledge of hunting techniques as hunting itself. You have to understand the direction a scent travels, possible lines a fox might take. And good communication is vital.’

‘According to Inspector Redfearn, there are mainly hard-core activists left since the ban. They seem to be convinced that hunts are trying to break the law every time they go out.’

‘Not all hunts,’ said Cooper. ‘The Eden Valley have developed a bad reputation with the sabs. Some of the neighbouring hunts, like the High Peak, are considered pretty clean and law abiding. But, yes, there are definitely some extreme groups. A while ago, there were a bunch called the Hunt Retribution Squad, who were alleged to have been responsible for a series of fire bombings. That was after the deaths of two young saboteurs in incidents involving hunt vehicles.’

‘Deaths? Really?’

‘It was a few years ago.’

Cooper had got Fry’s interest now, and he could see it. He sat down at his PC and did a quick search, soon coming up with the details.

‘Yes, they were both in 1993. One in Cheshire, and one in Cambridgeshire. The sabs who died were aged eighteen and fifteen. The fifteen-year-old was crushed under the wheels of a horse box.’

‘That’s just a child,’ said Fry.

Cooper nodded. ‘Funny thing is, the angle of the media reports at the time damaged the reputation of the saboteurs rather than the hunt supporters. There were allegations of children being recruited directly from schools and sacrificed for the “anti” cause, with a few hints at Nazi sympathies thrown in.’

‘Which suggests the hunt lobby might have had better PR than the opposition.’

‘Maybe.’

Fry tapped a pen on her desk. ‘This has been going on for years, then. There could be some old scores to be settled, couldn’t there? A young sab in the early nineties might be in his mid-forties now.’

‘You’re thinking of your victim – Patrick Rawson?’

‘It’s a theory. There were too many horses at the scene for the hunt not to be involved in some way. And I got a bad feeling from that woman, Mrs Forbes, and the huntsman. I was convinced they were concealing something.’

‘They learn to be defensive,’ said Cooper.

‘Even so …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, let’s be fair,’ said Fry. ‘There are some fairly aggressive hunt supporters, too. What was that slogan some of them had during the campaign for a ban? “Born to Hunt, Prepared to Fight”.’

‘Something like that,’ said Cooper. ‘You didn’t enjoy seeing the hunt, did you?’

‘I’m not a fan of horses, as it happens. They’re too big for my liking – I wouldn’t want one of those things to bite me. And there were so many dogs. Why do they need all those dogs?’

‘Hounds.’

‘Oh, yes – hounds, then.’

Cooper laughed, then tried to look more serious.

‘So what can I do, Diane?’

‘Are you sure you’re free?’

‘I’ve got an appointment to keep at about five o’clock – but otherwise, yes.’

‘Got a date?’

‘No, I’m taking the cat to the vet’s. Have you got some jobs for me?’

‘Well, there are a few addresses that need visiting in Eyam and Birchlow. Potential witnesses to speak to.’

‘Sure. Give them to me.’

Fry handed him the call logs. ‘They’re probably nothing, but best to check.’

‘OK. Where are you off to yourself?’

‘A nice restaurant,’ said Fry. ‘One of the perks of the job.’

Wednesday was market day in Edendale, and Fry had to go all the way up to the top of the multi-storey car park in Clappergate to find a space for the Peugeot.

Le Chien Noir was in a row of retail premises near the corner of the market place, distinguished from the building societies and mobile phone shops around it by the subdued colours of its décor, the deep gloom visible through the windows, the discreet menu under its own little awning on the wall outside.

Though the restaurant wasn’t open for business yet, a frantic bustle of activity was going on. Every time a door from the kitchen opened, a burst of noise filled the empty restaurant: shouting and clanging, voices singing or screaming in several different accents. It occurred to Fry too late that very few workers in the service industry had English as their first language these days. Even if she found the right waitress or barman, she might need to call on the services of an interpreter to get detailed information out of them. And, whatever languages the staff at Le Chien Noir spoke, she was certain French wouldn’t be among them. She prayed that she wouldn’t have to start racking up additional costs on use of the Interpretation Line.

But, for once, she was in luck. Patrick Rawson had been served by the manager himself, who turned out to be a Scot called Connelly, a slim man in his thirties with close-cropped hair disguising incipient male-pattern baldness. He was wearing a brightly patterned waistcoat and a white apron, with his order pad protruding from a pocket.

She showed him a printout of the photo faxed from Sutton Coldfield.

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure I saw that gentleman,’ said Connelly. ‘It was only … what? Monday night?’

‘That would be correct, Mr Connelly.’

‘Most people I don’t remember for very long. If you’d asked me next week, it would probably have gone clean out of my head. I have that sort of mind, you know. I always need something new.’

Within a few minutes, Fry had obtained the credit-card record which would confirm Rawson’s identity, and established that there had been no reservation made. At least, none that had been entered in the book. A walk-in, then. Around eight or eight thirty, the manager thought.

‘What do you remember about him?’ she asked.

‘Well, he was rather loud. Not drunk or anything awful like that, you understand. He was just one of those terribly over-confident men. Ridiculously masculine, wanting to be dominant all the time – and wanting everyone else to see it, too. It turns me right off.’

‘Interesting.’

Fry smiled at him, feeling a growing surge of relief that she wasn’t going to have to dig for details. Connelly’s impressions of Patrick Rawson would be as valuable as gold.

The manager warmed to her approval. ‘Oh, I suppose he was quite good looking in a rugged kind of way. Knew it, too.’ He studied the photograph again. ‘Mmm. Has to be the centre of attention all the time. You can see it in his eyes.’

‘Was he having dinner with a woman?’

‘Oh no, love. His companion was an older man.’

‘Can you describe him for me?’

Connelly shook his head. ‘We see so many middle-aged businessmen in here. There was nothing about him that would have made him stand out from the rest. Greying hair, clean shaven. A suit and tie. What else can I say? He was a diner. We don’t exactly look at the colour of their eyes.’

‘Just the colour of their money.’

‘The colour of their plastic. Our customers rarely use cash.’

‘Had either of these two men been in the restaurant before?’

‘I couldn’t say.’ The manager hesitated. ‘I suppose I could go back through the book and see if your chap made a reservation some time, or check the credit-card records –’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fry. ‘We can get hold of his credit-card statements ourselves.’

‘That must be fun. I’d love to be able to do that.’

Powerful smells of cooking were starting to drift from the kitchen. They made Fry think of garlic bread, which she daren’t eat during the day, even if it was offered to her. That didn’t stop her salivating, though.

‘I’m interested in this second man,’ she said. ‘Did you hear him speak at all, Mr Connelly?’

‘Yes – when he ordered, of course. And at the end of the meal there was a bit of an argument about who should pay the bill.’

‘Oh? Mr Rawson didn’t want to pay?’

‘No, no, it was the other way around. Both gentlemen wanted to pay, and they had one of those terribly polite little argie-bargies over who had got their credit card out first. We see it so often in here. It’s a sort of ritual they go through. My opinion is, there’s a question of status involved. They all want to be the one who paid for the dinner.’

‘Did you gain an impression of the relative status between these two, Mr Connelly?’

‘Well, I’ve been doing this job for a long time, love. You’d be surprised how good I’ve become at judging that.’

‘That’s why I’m asking you,’ said Fry.

Connelly smoothed down his waistcoat in an unconscious preening gesture. ‘And, in this case, I’d say the two gentlemen were pretty much equals. They knew each other quite well, I’m sure. It wasn’t as if they were meeting for the first time. No ice to be broken, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I understand. So they were friendly?’

‘Mmm. I didn’t say that, did I? On the contrary, I felt there was a little bit of tension. Nothing was said while I was at the table. I’m afraid they were rather too discreet for that. But, watching from a distance, I could see their conversation was getting a bit heated at times.’

Fry looked around the restaurant. Despite its reputation, the tables were pushed fairly close together. Or perhaps that was because of its reputation. Restaurants went in and out of fashion all the time. Right now, Le Chien Noir might be the place to eat, but next month the people with the money could be going elsewhere and reservations would dry up. Managements liked to cash in on a spell of popularity. More covers meant more profits.

‘Was the restaurant full?’ she asked.

‘On Monday night? No way. The good people of Edendale like to stay at home in front of the telly most of the week. We get a nice visiting clientele during the summer, but not in early March. Besides, the weather was bad, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Connelly followed her glance around the room. ‘Ah, you’re wondering whether any other diners might have overheard their conversation. Unfortunately, I gave the two gentlemen a nice, quiet table in a corner, with no one too near them. I thought they might be discussing business, you see.’

‘And hoped they would be good tippers?’

The manager inclined his head. ‘As indeed they were.’

The kitchen door banged, and someone shouted what sounded like a complicated curse. What was the language? Russian? Polish? Something East European, anyway.

‘You were telling me about the other man,’ she said. ‘Did you notice what kind of accent he had when he spoke?’

Connelly shrugged. ‘He didn’t speak all that much. Local, I would have said. But don’t make me swear to it in court.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

Fry looked at the credit-card receipt. She noticed for the first time that Patrick Rawson had, indeed, been a good tipper. He’d added a hefty gratuity to the bill, rather than leave cash in hand.

‘It seems Mr Rawson paid the bill at five minutes past ten. I imagine he and his companion left together shortly afterwards?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Can you remember whether they arrived together?’

Connelly tapped the photograph dramatically with a long, pale finger. ‘I believe this gentleman arrived first, by a few minutes. But not much.’

‘Did you see a car outside? Or did they ask you to send for a taxi when they left?’

‘No. Neither. Their clothes weren’t wet, but I don’t think it was actually raining at the time. Just a moment now …’

‘Yes?’

The manager pointed towards the exit, a smoky glass door looking out on to the market place. For a second, Fry felt disorientated. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dim lighting of the restaurant, her concentration had been on Connelly and what he was saying. This sudden glimpse of blue-and-white market-stall awnings, crowds of people passing by, the brake lights of cars queuing at the traffic lights – they all seemed like an intrusion.

‘I do recall them looking out to see what the weather was doing before they left,’ said Connelly. ‘Customers often do that, spend a few moments deciding whether to wait, or to make a dash for their cars. People who dine here don’t like to get wet.’

Fry felt a bit disappointed that Connelly hadn’t come up with anything more. He had seemed so promising in the beginning. But perhaps she just wasn’t asking the right questions.

‘I know your memory is good, sir,’ she said. ‘So if you do recall anything else about either man, anything at all, please give me a call, won’t you?’

She handed him her card, which he glanced at and slipped into his apron pocket.

‘Detective Sergeant, it would be a pleasure. And do make a reservation for dinner some time. Would you like to take a menu with you?’

‘Not just now, thank you.’

‘Well, don’t forget. I’ll make sure you’re given a special table.’

11

They called it the Plague Village. Nice name, thought Cooper. Not the sort of thing you’d expect to be used as a selling point for your house in an estate agent’s brochure. Who would want their home to be remembered for an intimate connection with an outbreak of Black Death?

But the name for Eyam must have well and truly stuck by now, since it was still in use more than three and a half centuries after the event. Five-sixths of the village’s population had been wiped out, most of them during one deadly summer in 1666. Along the main street, picturesque little stone cottages displayed plaques in their front gardens, listing the names of people who’d died there, killed by the bubonic plague.

Yes, like all the best disasters, Eyam’s outbreak of Black Death had been turned into a tourist attraction.

Along with thousands of other children, Cooper had visited this village with a school party. It had been a sort of living history lesson, collecting the work sheets from the museum, gawping at the plague tableaux, looking eagerly for the stocks where miscreants had once been pelted with rotten food. Those were his favourite sort of lessons.

Two hundred and sixty people had died when the plague hit Eyam. Yet the rector, William Mompesson, had rallied the villagers to a famously selfless act of isolation. He’d told them that it was impossible for them to escape by running away, that many of them were already infected and carried the seeds of death in their clothes. He told them that the fate of the surrounding country was in their hands. They broke off all contact with the outside world for five months, as the plague cut down the population of Eyam, one by one.

For that, Mompesson had been rewarded with the death of his own wife. Now, hers was the only grave of a plague victim to be found in the Eyam churchyard.

Despite its role as a macabre tourist attraction, Cooper could tell Eyam remained a thriving community. It was good to see a village that still had a butcher’s shop, for example. A high-class butcher’s too, according to the sign. In many villages, the shops had long since gone, the parish church had been converted into a holiday home, and the vicarage was providing bed and breakfast. And, of course, every village post office was now the Old Post Office, selling teas and ice cream instead of stamps and tax discs.

The first address on his list was in Laurel Close, on the outskirts of the village. Cooper could see straight away that Laurel Close was an old people’s housing estate. Quiet and well tended, with stone-faced bungalows standing in neat rows behind well-mown grass, like gravestones in a cemetery. The image was appropriate, really. This could be a place where the main topics of conversation were illness and death, and the latest funeral was the highlight of the week.

Ah, well. No more time to be lost. Cooper got out of his car and knocked on the first door.

Deborah Rawson took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Let’s get this straight. Are you saying that Patrick was murdered?’

‘We don’t know that for sure, Mrs Rawson.’

‘It’s a bit much to take in.’

‘Yes, of course.’

When Fry arrived at the mortuary in Edendale, she’d been met by a woman in her late thirties. Short hair, a pale, sharp face. Suspicious eyes. Her brother was somewhere around, having made an excuse to get out into the fresh air. Fry couldn’t blame him.

‘I’m sorry to have to ask you questions at a time like this,’ said Fry. ‘But you’re quite sure this is your husband?’

‘Absolutely.’

Fry watched Mrs Rawson carefully, noting the unnatural paleness that indicated shock. The hand holding the cigarette trembled slightly, and the ash was tapped off a little too often. This was a woman trying to pretend to be calmer than she really was.

‘You understand that we need to establish how Mr Rawson died. It would help us a lot if you can give us some information. The sooner we know where to start –’

‘Yes, it’s all right. What do you want to know?’

‘Mrs Rawson, can you tell us why your husband came up to Derbyshire?’

‘He visits horse sales. There’s one in Derby, isn’t there?’

‘Is there?’

‘I think it’s on a Saturday.’

‘Today is only Wednesday.’

Mrs Rawson shrugged. ‘He came up a bit early, then. He must have had some other business to do.’

The woman was well dressed. Expensively dressed, at least. Fry could recognize designer labels, even when they were worn with more aggression than style.

‘And what is your husband’s business, exactly?’ she asked.

‘Patrick has lots of business interests. I could never quite follow all the ins and outs. He owns a share of several companies. You can probably get the names from his papers. Mostly, he buys and sells, then invests the profits in new enterprises. He’s been quite successful over the years. But he’s the kind of man who’s always looking for new things, new ideas to make a profit from.’

Fry had heard lots of people being vague about their ‘business interests’. Usually, it meant they were drug dealers, or running a protection racket, or handling stolen property. Buying and selling? Investing the profits? It sounded as though Patrick Rawson’s business dealings would take a bit of looking into. And was his wife really so innocent, so ignorant? Or was she being deliberately coy about the fact she’d been turning a blind eye to where the money had come from that bought her those nice clothes?

‘We’re going to have to go through Mr Rawson’s papers,’ Fry said. ‘Who keeps his appointments diary?’

‘Well, I suppose he does.’

‘You suppose?’

‘I never got involved in the business, Sergeant. Do you think I work as his secretary, or PA? Did you think I married the boss? Well, I didn’t. Whatever Patrick does in his business is his own affair.’

There was a shrill edge to her voice now that she couldn’t conceal. Fry knew she would have to be careful. People who tried so hard to hide their feelings were often the most likely to crack completely. That made them useless as witnesses.

‘Did he not mention anything about who he was planning to meet up here?’

‘No.’

‘And where were you on Tuesday morning yourself, Mrs Rawson?’ asked Fry.

‘At home, of course. In Sutton Coldfield.’

Fry noted that Deborah didn’t seem to understand the implication of the question. Another sign that she wasn’t thinking quite so clearly as she might?

‘We need to know where your husband stayed when he was up here. Can you tell us that, at least?’

‘Now, I thought you would ask that. Patrick always stays at the same place when he’s in Derbyshire. He says it has a nice golf course.’ She produced a card from her bag. ‘This is it.’

Fry took the card. The Birch House Country Hotel. She wasn’t familiar with the hotel, but judging from the address in Birchlow it must be practically within a golf swing of her crime scene.

‘Did you ever phone Mr Rawson while he was there?’

‘Yes, once or twice.’

‘Actually on the hotel number?’

‘No, I always call his mobile. Why go through a hotel receptionist?’

Why, indeed? Except that it would have established whether Patrick Rawson really was staying where he told his wife he’d be. A jealous or suspicious partner would have thought of that. But not Deborah Rawson, apparently. Fry wasn’t sure she believed it.

‘And the number you called would be this one, which you gave to the local police yesterday?’

‘Yes. That’s the one Patrick used for personal calls, the Sony Ericsson. He had another number for business calls, though.’

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