STEPHEN BOOTH

Scared to Live

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Stephen Booth 2006

Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Set in Meridien by Palimpsest Book Production Limited Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007172078

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007279692

Version: 2016-10-27

This book is dedicated to my parents, James and Edna Booth

Contents

Title Page Copyright 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 Keep Reading About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

1

Sunday, 23 October

Even on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn’t sleep. By the early hours of the morning, her bed was like a battleground – hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding. Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.

But sleeplessness was familiar to Miss Shepherd. She’d started to think of it as an old friend, because it was always with her. She often spent the hours of darkness waiting for the first bird to sing, watching for the greyness of dawn, when she knew there’d be people moving about in the village. There might be the sound of a van in the street as someone headed off for an early shift at the quarry, or the rumble of a farmer’s tractor in the field behind the house. She didn’t feel so completely alone then, as she did in the night.

For Rose Shepherd, this was the world. A distant noise, a half-heard voice, a snatched moment of indirect contact. Her life had become so confined that she seemed to be living in a small, dark box. The tiniest crack of light was like a glimpse of God.

By two o’clock, Rose had been out of bed twice already, moving aimlessly around the room to reassure herself that she was still alive and capable of movement. The third time, she got up to fetch herself a glass of water. She stood in the middle of the bedroom while she drank it, allowing her toes to curl deep into the sheepskin rug, clutching at the comfort of its softness, an undemanding gentleness that almost made her weep.

As always, her mind had been running over the events of the day. There was no way she could stop it. It was as if she had a video player in her head, but it was stuck in a loop, showing the same scenes over and over again. If they weren’t from the day just past, then they were snapshots from previous days – some of them years before, in a different part of her life. The scenes played themselves out, and paused to allow her to fret whether she could have done things differently. Then they began over again, taunting her with the fact that past events were unalterable. What was done, was done.

It was one of the reasons she couldn’t sleep, of course. Her brain was too active, her memories too vivid. Nothing seemed to slow down the thoughts that stalked backwards and forwards in her consciousness, like feral animals roaming the edge of the forest, restless and apprehensive.

But Rose was glad that she’d been out the previous day. She’d been doubtful about it beforehand. No journey was without its risks, even if it was only three miles over the hill and down into the village of Matlock Bath. Despite a diversion to the shopping village, she’d arrived in the village too early, and had time to kill once she’d parked the Volvo.

Standing in her bedroom, Rose smiled at the recollection of her own weakness. Matlock Bath had been busy, as she ought to have known it would be. At first, she’d been disturbed by the number of people on North Parade, and nervous of the motorcyclists in their leathers, clustered by their bikes eating fish and chips out of paper wrappings. When she passed too close to them, the smell had been so overpowering that she thought she would faint. And that would never do.

She turned slowly on the rug, fighting the muzziness and disorientation of being awake when her body wanted to sleep. There were only two points of light in her bedroom – the face of her alarm clock, showing two thirty-three, and the echo of its green luminescence in the mirror on the opposite wall. She found it difficult to focus on the light, because she couldn’t judge its distance from the reflection.

She could smell those fish and chips, even now. The odour was so powerful that for a moment she had no idea where she was. Time and place began to blur, a street in a Derbyshire tourist village merging into an image of a deserted roadside with the smell of gunfire in the air, then whirling back to her bedroom, with those two green points of light rushing towards her out of the darkness. Feeling giddy, Rose steadied herself with a hand on the wall and sat down in a chair by the window.

No, no, she was wrong. It was a bad mistake she’d made yesterday. The sort of mistake she’d taught herself to avoid, that she had made such careful plans against. But she hadn’t been able to avoid it. There was no other way out.

Rose breathed deeply, trying to control the dizziness. For a moment, it had been just as if those motorcyclists had entered her bedroom. She could hear the creak of their black leathers, the thud of their heavy boots against the doorframe. There was the rustle of their paper wrappings, the acrid tang of the vinegar. Somewhere, perhaps, the rumble of an engine, coming closer.

The bikers had been irrelevant, though. Waiting in Matlock Bath, Rose’s first impressions had been the steepness of the hills above her, the denseness of the trees, the roofs of houses perched among them in apparently impossible places. Soon a sense of her vulnerability had become too strong, and she had to get off the street, to find somewhere she could feel safer.

So Rose had paid her money to enter the aquarium, and for a while she’d watched children feeding carp in the thermal pool. Even now she could remember feeling the shape of the item she carried in its plastic bag, and knowing she was making a fool of herself in the most dangerous way. But perhaps no one had noticed her nervousness, because people were too wrapped up in their own interests.

She thought about taking some more of her herbal tablets. But that would mean walking as far as the bathroom for another glass of water, and it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Not now.

Her doctor knew about her anxiety and insomnia problems. She’d gone to him out of desperation, breaking her own rules and knowing it was a mistake. But he hadn’t been able to help her. For a start, he’d never understood why she wouldn’t continue taking the sleeping pills he gave her. Rose had felt quite sorry for him when she saw his perplexed frown, his fingers hovering over the keyboard to tap out an automatic prescription for Nitrazepam. In the end, she’d told him the pills gave her heartburn, and he’d accepted that as a reason.

Of course, he was a rural GP, and he hadn’t met anyone like Rose Shepherd before. He didn’t understand that she wasn’t just another neurotic, middle-aged woman. He couldn’t possibly have known that she was even more frightened of never waking up than of not being able to sleep.

Rose had always known she’d be killed. Well, it felt like always. She could barely remember a time before she’d known. She expected to meet her death because of the way she’d led her life. It was a question of when it would happen, and how. All she could hope for was that it would be sudden, and painless.

Two forty-five. The house was very quiet, wasn’t it? Even her bedside clock had a tick so faint that she had to listen hard to be sure it was working. There was an Edwardian longcase in the sitting room downstairs, but it would be another fifteen minutes before it was due to strike. Its chimes had counted away many of her nights.

In some ways, knowing her fate only made things worse. It meant that she lived every day in fear of a phone call, a knock on the door, the smashing of glass in the middle of the night. Every time she went out of the house, she expected not to return. Whenever she looked through the window, she was surprised not to see dark figures in the garden, watching her house. For a long time now, she’d considered it more difficult to live than to die.

She tried to imagine what the neighbours would say about her when they were asked. No doubt they’d all agree that Rose Shepherd was a very private person, who never called round to say ‘hello’ and didn’t mix much in the village. They knew she’d lived alone for the past ten months at Bain House in Foxlow, deep among the Derbyshire Dales. Some would put her age at nearly seventy; others would frown and say she could only be in her fifties, surely? But they hadn’t really got a close look at her. The postman might recall she had an accent that wasn’t local, but she’d never spoken more than a few words to him.

And that was pretty much all anyone would know of her. The details of her life were shrouded by trees and protected by electronic gates. And that was the way it had to be. It was what had kept her alive until now.

Rose smoothed out her sheets, turned over her pillows and went back to bed. Ten minutes later, she was hovering fearfully on the edge of consciousness when a black Mitsubishi Shogun with tinted windows drove into Foxlow and stopped outside her gate.

Leaving through the back door of a cottage on the corner of Pinfold Lane, Darren Turnbull saw the black car as it drew away from Bain House. He stepped back into the shadows, wishing that Stella wouldn’t insist on having that security light. He had to walk right through its glare to reach the lane by the church, and it didn’t do much for his anonymity. In this place, he felt sure that some nosy neighbour would see him and find out all about him before he got his car keys out of his pocket. Stella sometimes talked about him leaving her house like a thief in the night. With that bloody security light, he was more like an actor stepping out on to a stage. He prayed there was no audience tonight.

Darren watched the vehicle coming back towards him from the corner. He was slightly puzzled by its speed. There was no other traffic anywhere on the road at this time, and most drivers would whizz through a place like Foxlow in seconds. But maybe this was some old fogey who thought you had to obey speed limits, even when there was no one around.

He wasn’t as good at recognizing makes of car as some of his mates were, but Darren could see this was some kind of four-wheel-drive job. A big one, probably Japanese. He liked black cars – there were too many grey and silver models around these days, and they all looked the same. Tinted windows, too. That was cool. He could barely distinguish the outline of a driver as the car passed under a streetlamp near the phone box.

Finally, the car had gone, and Darren began to move again, keeping close to the wall of the cottage to avoid the light as he made his way to the back gate. His blue Astra was parked under the trees on Church Walk. No streetlamps here, not even any houses where he could be overlooked. There was just the old church somewhere in the darkness. If he looked up, and through the trees, he could see the top of its square tower against the sky, with its little stone ramparts like broken teeth.

Darren shuddered when he thought about the church and its graveyard. He’d been scared silly of these places when he was a kid, and even now he preferred to stay away from them. They made him think of bats and vampires, and dead people coming up out of their graves. He’d rather not even go to funerals, if he could avoid it. All those folks dressed in black with their long faces gave him the creeps. He always tried to make an excuse that he was too busy working, and then he’d go along for the sausage rolls afterwards, if he could get away with it.

Why Stella had decided to move here when she got divorced, he had no idea. It wouldn’t suit him at all – it was too far out in the sticks, miles from anywhere and full of old noises who wanted to know every detail of your life. The city was a lot better. You could move around there without anyone knowing who you were or where you’d been. But at least he didn’t have to live in Foxlow himself.

He grinned to himself as he got into his Astra and reversed it in front of the lych gate. A visit to Stella was always worthwhile, he had to admit. As long as no one found out, of course – especially Fiona. That would be a disaster. She’d murder him for sure.

Darren shivered again as he drove out on to the street. But this time it was nothing to do with his superstitions. The village of Foxlow suddenly felt very cold.

A few minutes later, the Shogun had turned at the top of High Street and was being driven too fast down Butcher’s Hill. Its headlights were on full beam, sweeping across the hedgerows, reflecting off gateposts. Anyone coming in the opposite direction would be momentarily blinded, too dazzled to see the vehicle’s model or colour, let alone its driver. In a burst of sodium light, it would be gone as soon as it appeared.

When it reached the bottom of the hill, the Shogun slowed to a halt. It idled for a moment in the road, with its front windows half-open and its engine ticking over. Then the driver swung the wheel to the right. He rammed his foot on the accelerator, and the car surged off the road through an open gateway. Its headlights dipped and swayed as it bumped along the field boundary and followed an uncultivated strip of land close to the hedge. With its four-wheel drive engaged, the vehicle growled towards the top corner of the field, where it turned and coasted along the back gardens of the houses in Pinfold Lane.

Finally, the headlights died and the Shogun rolled the last few yards in darkness. After it stopped, there was silence for a moment, then the whirr of a window lowering, the creak of seat leather as a body shifted position, and the slow, careful scrape of metal. With a final click and a grunt, the movement stopped. From a position near the driver’s seat came a green glow and a faint electronic beeping.

A hundred yards away, in Rose Shepherd’s house, the clock was softly chiming three as the bedside phone began to ring.

2

Monday, 24 October

Detective Sergeant Diane Fry pushed at the half-open door and stepped carefully past the tape. In the hallway, she had to squeeze past a child’s bike propped against the wall, one wheel off and a spanner on the saddle. She almost tripped over two bulging bin liners full of clothes, ready to go to the charity shop, or maybe the launderette. The smell in the house was overpowering, despite a cold draught blowing through the rooms from the broken windows.

‘Home, sweet home,’ said a voice behind her.

DC Gavin Murfin leaned on the front door, forcing it back against the bin liners with an ominous creak of hinges and a popping of plastic.

‘I hope you remembered to wipe your feet, Diane,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin the décor.’

Fry felt her shoulders stiffen inside her jacket. From the moment she’d entered the house, the fabric of her clothes had begun to feel prickly and uncomfortable, as if the sensitivity of her skin was suddenly heightened, her nerve endings screaming in sympathy with the dead.

‘Shut up for a bit, Gavin, will you?’

Murfin sniffed, and rattled the empty sweet wrappers in his pocket. Fry did her best to ignore him. Everyone dealt with these things in their own way, of course. Gavin’s instinct was to retreat behind a flippant façade. For Fry, the urge was to focus on small details, the trivialities that could so easily be missed if you saw only the big picture.

The first thing she needed to know was how much evidence had been preserved from the original scene, and what had been interfered with. Here, in this house in Darwin Street, she could see at a glance there had been far too much interference. For a start, someone had disturbed the opened post that lay on the hall table, where it lay in a pool of dirty water. She poked at the envelopes with a finger. One of them seemed to be a packet of photographs back from the printers, and another was a BT phone bill. On the bottom were a couple of polling cards for next month’s county council by-election. Some local politician had just lost a voter.

Surrounded by the remains of a family’s day-to-day existence, Fry paused for a moment, listening to the slow drip of water from a ceiling, the crack of a splintered window frame. Her eyes drifted across the muddy carpet to the walls, scratched and gouged by passing equipment – hose reels, breathing apparatus, stretchers. Her attention settled on the incongruous chrome gleam of the spanner, still waiting for someone to pick it up and replace the wheel of the bike.

‘Ugh. The Marie Celeste, with extra charcoal.’

Fry lacked the energy to answer Gavin this time, let alone to shut him up. It was too early in the morning, and she was too depressed at having been on call when something like this came in. Derbyshire’s E Division didn’t catch an incident like this more than once every ten years or so. Of course, Edendale had house fires like anywhere else, but it was bad luck when someone died in one. Today was unlucky all round.

At least the structure of the building was intact. From the street, it had been hard to tell that anything serious had happened, except for the broken windows and the scorch marks where flames had licked the walls. It might just have been a rowdy party that had got out of hand. Inside, it was a different story. Whether the story was anything to do with her, Fry had yet to find out.

Fry tried to tune down her senses as she followed the approach path towards the tape that marked the inner cordon. She realized that the hallway smelled a bit like her kitchen – charred bacon and evaporated steam. When it was her turn to kick the bucket, this was the way she imagined it would be. She’d be a kitchen accident statistic, one more victim of a faulty toaster, killed by an exploding microwave. Death in the throes of breakfast.

At the foot of the stairs, she turned right into the sitting room, keeping carefully to the stepping plates. Judging by what the neighbours reported, the occupants of 32 Darwin Street had been taken by surprise. Six weeks ago, Lindsay Mullen had ordered a new carpet for her lounge. It had a deep, thick pile, and it was a shade of cream Lindsay had always wanted, but her husband insisted wasn’t practical. It would show up the dirt, he’d said. It was a shameful waste of money.

Royal Wilton in chamomile, that was it. According to the uniforms who’d taken initial statements, the lady in the house to the left had heard the entire argument as Brian Mullen left for work one morning.

Fry looked around the wrecked lounge. Mr Mullen had been right. The carpet was black now, and trampled with charred debris. Dozens of boot prints had sunk into two inches of filthy sludge.

The problem was, the bottom edge of the door into the kitchen had sealed so tightly against the new Wilton that there was no gap for air to get through. When the sofa ignited, thick smoke would have filled this room in minutes, choking fumes that seared the lungs and stung the eyes. If only a few wisps of it had seeped under the door into the kitchen, they might have reached the smoke alarm, and the outcome could have been different. Unlike so many others, the Mullens’ alarm had been working, the batteries recently replaced. It just hadn’t detected any smoke until it was too late. Far too late.

‘They never stood a bloody chance, did they?’ said Murfin.

Fry glanced at him. His flippancy was gone, and he was sweating a little despite the draught stirring the curtains behind him. Of course, Gavin was a family man, with children of his own. There were some things that got to you, no matter how hard you tried to keep up the exterior.

‘They say it’s better to die of smoke inhalation than burn to death, anyway,’ she said, though she didn’t expect it to help. Her own flesh still crawled at the thought of the flames.

She looked away from Murfin before he could distract her concentration. This room had been packed with plastics, too – TV, video recorder, racks of CDs and DVDs, boxes full of children’s toys under a shelf in the corner. Most of the toys were just a molten mess now, multi-coloured pools of lava that had run on to the carpet and congealed in the spray from the firemen’s hoses. There were recognizable shapes here and there – the twisted controls of a PlayStation console, the burned edge of a Monopoly game. The head and one arm of a Barbie doll waved from a skin-toned puddle, like someone drowning in a sea of their own flesh. Something scorched and wooden gazed accusingly at her from blackened eyes.

Then a tiny flash of colour caught her attention. A glint of bright yellow, like a drop of sunlight in the blackness. She crouched towards the floor and gently blew away the ash. A broken section of Monopoly board lay at her feet: Piccadilly and the Water Works.

Of course, the untreated polyurethane foam in the furniture had been the real problem. Brian Mullen had definitely had a point. Lindsay could have spent her money more wisely if she’d replaced the cheap sofa instead of the carpet. The outcome really could have been different. For a start, her children might still be alive.

When she walked through into the kitchen, Fry found it almost pristine and untouched, apart from a few muddy footprints on the vinyl flooring. From the condition of the teak-effect units and the white painted walls, she would never have guessed there had been a fire at all. She felt as though she’d stepped out of one film set and into another, where an entirely different story was taking place. This one suggested a harmless domestic comedy – a family eating breakfast together in their spotless kitchen, Mum and Dad and the kids, all chattering and laughing, hurrying to get ready for work or school. Behind her, the other room might have been the scene of a cheap horror film, except the credits had already rolled and the crew had packed up and gone home.

‘Diane, do you want to have a look upstairs?’ called Murfin, without enthusiasm.

‘Yes, in a minute.’

Fry took a last look at the kitchen, with its silent smoke alarm. She noticed that the cooker was new, too. A Smeg dual-fuel with air-cooling system. A thousand pounds or so, she guessed. Money wasn’t all that short in the Mullen household, after all.

She went back through the sitting room and joined Gavin at the foot of the stairs. She wasn’t sure that she needed to visit the bedrooms. They might have been where the victims died, but they weren’t where the fire had started. If there had been a crime committed, it was here on the ground floor that the evidence would be found, surely?

As she was debating with herself, Murfin settled the question by hauling himself slowly up the stairs, sighing at every step. Fry had no choice but to follow him.

And, in a way, the bedrooms weren’t quite so bad. It was clear that the flames hadn’t reached here. The furniture was almost untouched, though covered by a layer of soot. The covers of the beds had been pulled back, revealing clean, unmarked sheets. The first room she saw might simply have been waiting for Lindsay Mullen to come home and clean up the mess. Apart from the markers where her body had lain when she collapsed from smoke inhalation, of course.

‘Have you got the photos there, Gavin?’

Murfin grunted and passed her the file. Fry had seen the photographs before she came out, and remembered the condition of Lindsay’s body, the cotton pyjamas she’d been wearing, with the left leg rucked up to expose a thin, white calf. Her face was only visible in the close-ups, turned to the right, her left cheek pressed tightly to the floor.

It wasn’t Lindsay Mullen’s face that Fry was interested in, but the position of her body, the angle of her limbs. She turned one of the photos to align it with the room, and checked the direction of the door. Lindsay had almost certainly been going the wrong way. It wasn’t too difficult to picture her, blinded and disorientated by darkness and dense smoke, feeling her way frantically round the walls in an effort to find the door, while her children screamed in the next room. It wasn’t difficult at all. In fact, it was too easy for comfort.

‘Next room, Gavin,’ she said.

‘That’s the kids’ bedroom.’

‘I know that.’

Jack and Liam Mullen had died without leaving their beds, according to the incident reports. They woke up choking, and died from the effects of smoke inhalation. Died calling for their mum, probably.

The house must have been so full of smoke by then that the boys would never have made it to the stairs, let alone through the flames in the hall. Still, their bedroom wasn’t a pleasant place to be. Gavin wouldn’t even come inside the door. He knew the bodies had lain here for some time, since the boys had obviously been dead and beyond rescue. Coroners’ rules required the bodies to be left in situ until forensic evidence had been gathered to establish the cause of death.

Of course, the vast majority of house fires were tragic accidents. Faulty wiring, a fag down the back of the sofa, clothes left too near an electric heater. If sudden deaths didn’t go automatically to CID, she wouldn’t even be here. Fire service codes on this incident were ambiguous – but then, the firefighters on the scene would have had other priorities than looking for a cause.

Fry heard a rustle and a cough, and turned to find a uniformed PC standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was wearing a yellow reflective jacket, and he held his helmet in one hand as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the other.

‘DS Fry?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘They said you’d be here. I thought you ought to know straightaway –’

‘What is it?’

‘Well, we’ve been talking to the neighbours again. We ought to have found out earlier, I suppose, but we never thought to ask. You know what it’s like, everyone is in shock when a thing like this happens, and with the husband being taken off to hospital –’

‘Out with it, for heaven’s sake.’

He coughed again and turned the brim of his helmet in his fingers. ‘I’ve been speaking to the lady next door. She says it’s only just occurred to her to mention it … Well, it seems there were three children living at this address. Mrs Mullen had a daughter, as well as the two boys.’

Fry stared at the charred wreckage and thought about the bedrooms. There was a closed door at the end of the landing, a third room she hadn’t entered. But the firefighters must have been through the whole house, surely? They wouldn’t have left a bedroom unchecked for victims, would they?

‘The daughter could be away from home,’ she said. ‘Staying over with friends for the night or something. What age is she?’

The officer swallowed. ‘According to the neighbour, the third child is about eighteen months old.’

Fry bit her lip. She hated incidents that involved children. Someone else ought to have taken this job. She ought to have sent one of her DCs. Not Gavin Murfin, though – well, not on his own. But Ben Cooper would have been a good choice. Cooper understood children. He knew all about families. Fry thought he’d probably read far more into the circumstances of this house than she could herself. But Cooper hadn’t been on early call this morning. You couldn’t always get the right officer for a job.

Her eyes were drawn past the PC and back to the two bin liners standing near the front door. It was only then that she realized the bags weren’t bulging because of the amount of clothes stuffed inside them, but because the plastic had melted and sagged into obscene lumps and swellings. One of the bags had split completely when Gavin pushed the door against it, and the skirt of a blue Baby Gap denim dress protruded from the rip.

‘Where’s the husband now?’ she asked.

‘Edendale General,’ said the PC. ‘He suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation trying to get into the house.’

‘Did you say “trying to get in”?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t at home when the fire started. I thought they would have told you.’

‘There seem to be a lot of things that no one’s telling me,’ said Fry. ‘Has everyone around here taken a vow of silence, or what?’

Postman Bernie Wilding was already late with his deliveries in Foxlow that morning, when he remembered the package for Rose Shepherd. That was unusual in itself – Miss Shepherd rarely got more than bank statements and junk mail. Most days, there was nothing in his van for her at all.

Bernie did a three-point turn at the end of Pinfold Lane and drew up to the wrought-iron gates of Bain House. He was listening to Ken Bruce on Radio Two, and he turned the volume down a bit before he lowered the window. He reached out to press the button on the intercom, but got no answering voice. That was a bit odd, too. Folk in the village said Miss Shepherd never went anywhere. She was supposed to be a bit of a hermit, shut up alone here in this big house. And sure enough, she’d never been out before when he’d called with a package.

But he supposed even a hermit must do her shopping some time. A visit to the doctor, the dentist, the optician. Well, it was nothing to do with him, anyway.

Bernie scribbled a message on one of his cards, and was about to push it into the letter box mounted on one of the gates. But when he opened the flap, he saw that a furniture store leaflet was still in there, along with a free newspaper that was delivered by local kids over the weekend. And that definitely wasn’t like Miss Shepherd. Even if he didn’t see her for weeks on end, he knew she was around, because she emptied the letter box. It was a sensible thing to do, otherwise it gave the impression there was no one at home. There were criminals who drove around these villages every night, looking for signs of empty properties.

Uncertain what to do now, Bernie peered through the gates at the house standing among the trees. The curtains were drawn at the front, even on the ground floor. He didn’t know the internal layout of the house, but that must be a lounge or something. You wouldn’t leave the curtains drawn during the day, unless you were sick.

Bernie liked to think of himself as an old-fashioned rural postman, who knew his patch and the people he delivered to. He’d heard so many stories about a postman being the first to raise the alarm when someone was ill or dead and even the neighbours hadn’t noticed. It had never happened to him yet, not in fifteen years with the Royal Mail. But he was always on the lookout for elderly people on his round, the ones who lived alone and didn’t get many visitors. Not that Rose Shepherd was all that elderly – but you never knew, did you?

Ken Bruce was announcing the ten o’clock news bulletin. Was it so late already? Bernie knew he ought to get on – he’d already lost enough time this morning, with having so many special deliveries to make and getting stuck behind the tractor that overtook him every time he stopped. Miss Shepherd was probably out doing her shopping in Matlock, wasn’t she? Monday morning was a good time to go to the supermarket. Nice and quiet. She’d just forgotten to empty the post from her box for once. She’d do it when she got back from the shops.

Bernie pushed his card through the flap, put the package back behind the van seat, then reversed into the road and drove on. He’d missed the news headlines, but Bruce was playing a song he remembered from the sixties – the New Seekers, ‘Now the Carnival is Over’. Bernie was singing quietly to himself as he headed back through Foxlow.

3

Detective Constable Ben Cooper opened his fridge door, then closed it again quickly when he caught the smell. Another thirty seconds of breathing that in, and he’d lose his appetite for breakfast. He had a brief after-image of something nasty wrapped in plastic, caught by the interior light like an exhibit at a crime scene, sordid and decomposing, its DNA degrading beyond use.

‘Well, do you want me to call in and see the solicitor again tomorrow morning?’ he said into his mobile phone. ‘I can manage that, if you like, Matt. But I’m not sure it’ll do any good.’

‘He wants a kick up the pants, that’s what’ll do him some good. Maybe I ought to go in and see him myself. What do you reckon? I’ll go straight into his office when I’ve finished the muck spreading tomorrow.’

Cooper smiled at the thought of his brother bursting into the offices of Ballard and Price, his overalls covered in slurry. Matt could be a bit intimidating at the best of times, especially in an enclosed space. In his present mood, the solicitors’ receptionist would probably call the police to have him removed.

‘It wouldn’t help, you know.’

Matt sighed in frustration. ‘Bloody pen pushers and bureaucrats. They seem to spend their time making life difficult for everyone else.’

‘I suppose Mr Ballard has a job to do, like the rest of us.’

‘Oh, yeah. He takes a lot longer about it, that’s all.’

Cooper ran a finger round the fridge door, checking the rubber seal for gaps. It hadn’t occurred to him things could get as bad as that so quickly, just because he hadn’t bothered checking inside for a few days. It wasn’t as if the weather was particularly warm or anything. It was nearly the end of October, and summer was over in the Peak District. But the fridge had come with the flat, so he wasn’t sure how old it might be.

‘I don’t know what else I can do,’ he said. ‘You’re the executor, Matt.’

‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

Of course, he knew what was bothering his brother and making him so impatient. Probate on their mother’s will was taking so long that he was starting to get worried about the future of Bridge End Farm. If money had to be found from the estate, the only way it could happen would be if assets were sold off.

‘I thought you’d know a bit more about the law than I do,’ said Matt.

‘Well, not this part of the law.’

He didn’t bother to tell Matt that his knowledge of criminal law was also a bit sketchy. There were eight thousand criminal offences on the statute books – and more than a thousand of them had been invented since Cooper became a police officer. Without the manuals, he’d be lost, like everyone else.

Cooper left the fridge alone and crossed the kitchen, dodging the cat that was sitting looking at him expectantly, having heard a rumour there might be food. On the days he was at home, meal times seemed to come round every hour.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘don’t forget how much Mr Ballard charges for his time.’

‘You’re right, Ben. Just a phone call then, I suppose.’

‘At least it’ll keep the subject fresh in his mind.’

There was silence for a few moments. The Cooper brothers had always been comfortable with silence. They’d grown up together on the farm hardly needing to speak, because each understood what the other was thinking. But that was when they were physically together. You could read a person’s thoughts in their face, in the way they moved or breathed, or what they did with their hands. It was different on the phone, though. Silence felt awkward and wrong. Not to mention a waste of money. With his mobile pressed to his ear, Ben started to wonder whether he could get a reduced tariff from Vodaphone for the amount of non-talk time he used.

But in this case, he sensed that there was more to his brother’s silence than awkwardness.

‘Is there something else, Matt?’

‘Yeah …’

Ben felt his stomach tighten. For a second, he thought he was going to be sick, and he looked to see if the fridge door had fallen open again and released the nauseous smell into the room. After the death of their mother, there surely couldn’t be more bad news already. But he could read a lot into one word from his brother.

‘What is it? Something wrong with one of the girls?’

‘No, they’re fine,’ said Matt. ‘Well, I think so.’

‘You’re not making much sense, Matt.’

‘Look, Ben, I’ve made an appointment to go into the surgery on Friday. I want to talk to Dr Joyce. And if necessary, I’ll ask to see the specialist who treated Mum.’

‘Why? We know what happened to her – it was a series of strokes. It happens all the time in people of her age.’

‘I don’t mean the strokes. I mean the other problem.’

The family had rarely referred to Isabel Cooper’s condition by name. For a long time, it had been ‘Mum’s problem’. Towards the end, before she died in Edendale District General from a brain haemorrhage, it had become ‘the other problem’. Now, it seemed to Ben there was no point in trying to avoid spelling it out. Mum wasn’t around any more to be upset if it inadvertently slipped out in her presence.

‘Oh, the schizophrenia.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand, Matt. What do you want to find out that we don’t already know?’

‘I can’t talk to you about it on the phone – it’s too complicated. Can you come over some time? I’ve got a lot of stuff to show you.’

‘Well, I’m going to be a bit busy this week –’

‘So what’s new?’

‘All right, what if I call at the farm tonight when I come off duty?’

‘That’ll do.’

‘See you, then.’

Cooper put out a bowl of cat food and placed it on the floor in the conservatory, near the central-heating boiler. Randy was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas about his territory.

Then he went back to the fridge, took a deep breath and eased open the door. He scooped out some rotten tomatoes, half a carton of sour milk, and a wedge of Stilton with its blue veins blossoming into a furry carpet. They all went into a plastic bin liner. He wasn’t sure any of the items accounted for the smell, though. Poking in the salad tray at the bottom of the main compartment, he found a liquefied lettuce, which probably did.

When he’d got rid of the worst, he tied up the bin liner and put it to one side. Now he ought to remove everything else from the fridge and give it a good clean. Probably it could do with defrosting, too.

But then Cooper hesitated. It would do later on, wouldn’t it? Tomorrow, even. He closed the fridge, put the bag near the back door, and returned to the sitting room. He put on his shoes and jacket, and checked how much money he had in his wallet. Then he made sure his phone was fully charged. Allowing your phone battery to go flat was as bad as letting your car run out of petrol. Both things happened now and then, but it was better if they happened to someone else.

Finally, he left the flat. For once, even the smell of the morning traffic was like a breath of fresh air.

He was unsettled by his conversation with Matt. He hoped his brother wasn’t having to cope with too many worries at once. There were certainly some decisions to be made about the future of Bridge End, though. The new farming support payments favoured the more productive farms in the valleys, and an upland farmer’s income could be halved, unless he changed his ways. The suckler herd might have to go, for a start – no matter how environmentally friendly and picturesque they were, grazing cattle were becoming as economically unviable as sheep.

Matt could intensify the dairy herd, or leave part of the land unfarmed, in return for environmental grants. On the other hand, he could abandon the idea of running a profitable farm altogether and get himself a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

On his way through the market square, Cooper pulled out his mobile and chose a number from his phone book. His call was answered almost straightaway.

‘Hi, it’s me. How are you this morning?’

She sounded pleased to hear from him, and the sound of her voice alone made him feel better. He didn’t know how she did it; perhaps it came of being a civilian.

‘Oh, I’m fine, too,’ he said. ‘No, really. There’s nothing wrong at all. I just wanted to find out how you were.’

He listened to her talk for a while, neither of them saying much, but enough to put a smile on his face as he crossed Hollowgate towards the Raj Mahal and the pedestrianized area.

He had to end the call when a couple of acquaintances stopped to say hello. Cooper couldn’t place their names at first. But he knew so many people around Edendale that it wasn’t surprising. Faces from his childhood haunted him constantly. He’d see an old schoolfriend passing in the street, then immediately another and another. It was like the way a phrase he’d heard for the first time suddenly seemed to be repeated everywhere, as if someone was trying to send him a message. What sort of message could these familiar faces be trying to convey? This is where you belong, perhaps.

Later that morning, Cooper found himself watching a man in a grey sports jacket approaching a cash machine outside Somerfield’s supermarket. Running his finger along the edge of the card slot, the man glanced over his shoulder with an apologetic smile. He wasn’t sure whether he liked being watched or not.

There were two ATMs at Somerfield’s, both set into the outside wall near the trolley park, about fifteen yards from the main entrance. A small queue of shoppers had formed at the other machine, fidgeting with their carrier bags and purses.

‘If you feel an obstruction of any kind, don’t use it. That’s the best advice. Usually there are a couple of tiny prongs. Here, see?’

With a flick of the finger, the man pulled out a thin, clear sleeve of rigid plastic. He held it up to reveal a loop at the back.

‘This is the old Lebanese Loop trick. The loop retains a card when it’s inserted. Since the machine can’t read the magnetic strip, it keeps asking you to re-enter your PIN. Someone standing behind you watches you tap your number in. When you walk away, the suspect removes the card and empties your account. Bingo.’

‘Surely that type of device is easy to detect?’ said someone in the watching group. ‘We just saw you do it.’

‘But I know what to look for.’

PC Steve Judson had greying hair, a little longer than favoured by most police officers. He worked with the Plastic Crime Unit, a team struggling to deal with a mounting wave of cash and credit card fraud. According to the latest figures, it was big business – worth at least forty million pounds a year across the country.

Judson looked at the queue for the adjacent cash machine. ‘This is a typical location. The ATMs would be more secure inside, but the store isn’t open twenty-four hours. Some customers want to use them late at night, when this car park is probably deserted.’

‘Is that when the biggest risk is, rather than when the cash machines are busy?’ asked a female DC, one of two who’d driven over the hills from B Division for the plastic crime session.

‘The risk is different. If you look at the people in the queue there – they’re close enough to each other to make shoulder surfing easy. But at night, when the place is empty, you’d be pretty damn suspicious of somebody who came and peered over your shoulder, wouldn’t you?’

There were other officers present in the car park who’d come from Nottinghamshire and even from Leicestershire. Strangers, but probably future colleagues. No one was talking about their future this morning, but it must have been in everyone’s minds when they greeted each other.

‘It isn’t so long ago that the NCIS bulletins were warning of cash machine gangs spreading out of London down the M4 to the West Country. Did they get it wrong?’

‘No, not at all. Those gangs did good business in the West Country, so they decided to go nationwide. Now they operate in any place they can recruit enough illegals.’

‘Illegals?’

Cooper could hear a few sets of antennae going up, alert for derogatory remarks. It was always a tough call, knowing when to report a colleague for political incorrectness. If you tolerated it, your own career could be on the line.

But PC Judson seemed not to have noticed the reactions from the group.

‘Some illegals are being trained for cash machine work within twenty-four hours of coming off the boat. That way, they can pay back the traffickers. It’s better than slogging your guts out in a carrot field in East Anglia for two quid an hour, I suppose.’

Nobody laughed, or even dared to nod in agreement. A Nottinghamshire detective next to Cooper shuffled his feet in the shredded tree bark around the roots of an ornamental birch.

Somebody at the front asked a question about identity theft, which set Judson off on a new tangent. The Nottinghamshire officer leaned towards Cooper.

‘Are you Derbyshire?’ he said quietly.

‘Yes, I’m based right here in Edendale. DC Cooper.’

‘Ross Matthews. Hi. What’s it like working here?’

‘It’s OK,’ said Cooper defensively.

Matthews nodded. ‘I’m at St Ann’s, and it’s a nightmare. I might put in for a transfer when we go global.’

He didn’t need to explain what he was talking about. Everyone knew that the number of regional police forces would soon be reduced dramatically. A government commission had concluded that any force with fewer than four thousand officers was too small to deal with serious crime. So Derbyshire was certain to disappear. Even its bigger neighbour, Nottinghamshire, had suffered highly publicized problems that had led its chief constable to admit his detectives couldn’t cope. Within a few months, all the officers here this morning might be working for one huge East Midlands Constabulary.

‘Why not?’ said Cooper. ‘We can always do with some help here.’

He realized that Judson had finished speaking and was looking at him over the heads of the group, waiting for his attention.

It was then that Cooper’s mobile rang. Probably he should have switched it off. He bet everybody else had put theirs on to silent vibrate, but he’d forgotten this morning.

He looked at the number on the display, and saw it was Diane Fry. His DS shouldn’t be calling him, not when she knew he was on the plastic crime exercise. Cooper looked at Judson and shrugged apologetically, then walked a few paces away from the group.

‘Yes, Diane?’

‘Where are you right now, Ben?’

‘Somerfield’s supermarket.’

‘I suppose that makes sense, does it?’

‘They have ATMs,’ said Cooper. ‘You know – cash machines.’

‘Yes, I know what an ATM is. Wait – you’re on the plastic crime initiative.’

‘Did you forget?’

‘No, I’ve been a bit busy this morning, that’s all.’

‘Something on?’

He heard Fry hesitate. ‘Don’t get excited. Just something I’d like you to take a look at when you’re finished. Get away as soon as you can, will you?’

‘Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’

‘A house fire last night. Multiple fatalities.’

‘Where?’

‘One of the Edendale estates. The Shrubs, I think they call it.’

‘I know where you mean.’

For all the time she’d served in E Division, Fry still didn’t seem to know the area all that well. Perhaps she didn’t think it was worth the effort because she wasn’t intending to stay long enough. Yes, that was the impression she gave. A visitor caught in a depressing stop-over while she waited for a connection to somewhere better.

Cooper remembered a few of the initial reactions to Fry when she’d first transferred from West Midlands. ‘A bit of a hard-faced cow’; ‘Could be a looker, but she doesn’t bother’; ‘Too tall, too skinny, no make-up’; ‘Stroppy bitch’. None of them had been fair, of course. But Fry hadn’t done much to make herself popular with her colleagues. In fact she seemed to relish her image.

In the background, he could hear Judson answering a question. ‘A blank piece of plastic, embossed and encoded with a stolen account number. Some of these plastic crime merchants practically steal your identity.’

‘Can you hear me, Ben?’

‘Yes, you mentioned a fire on the Shrubs.’

‘Great. Well, three deaths. A mother and two children.’

‘Evidence of suspicious circumstances?’

‘Not yet. But …’

‘You’re expecting some?’

‘We haven’t had the forensics yet. But I want to know if you’ll be around.’

‘OK,’ said Cooper, trying not to sound surprised. ‘I’ll see you back at the office after the session with Steve Judson. Is that OK?’

‘Yes, that’s absolutely fine.’

When he ended the call, Cooper frowned. Somehow, Fry hadn’t sounded her usual self.

Judson caught his eye across the group and raised an eyebrow. ‘They get your PIN by focusing a camera on the keypad,’ he was saying. ‘At the end of the day, they retrieve discarded receipts. They match up the time of your withdrawal with the tape from the camera, and they’ve got both your PIN and your account number. They can produce a duplicate card and make fraudulent withdrawals as easily as if they’d stolen the genuine card. And you won’t even know anything’s happened until you see your next bank statement. That’s more than bingo – it’s the jackpot.’

Edendale District General was on the northern edge of town, occupying a greenfield site where new wards could be added as funding became available. Fry had never seen the old hospital on Fargate. It had closed years ago, its Victorian buildings so primitive and crumbling that nobody had bothered saving them from demolition. But its location must have been very handy. Even at this time of the morning, it would take her fifteen minutes to get across town to the new site, once she got away from Darwin Street.

‘Tell me again, who made the emergency call?’ she asked Murfin when he came off the radio to the control room.

‘One of the neighbours dialled 999 when he saw the smoke. Bloke by the name of Wade. A bit of a know-it-all, by the sound of him. FOAs took a statement earlier.’

‘You know, we should have made sure we had complete information before we came out.’

Murfin looked aggrieved. ‘You said you wanted to get the job out of the way as soon as possible. In and out, and turn it over to the coroner, that’s what you said.’

‘OK, Gavin, thanks.’ Fry didn’t like her words being quoted back to her, especially when she’d been wrong. ‘It’s a bit irritating, that’s all.’

‘Is that why you made me look in that last bedroom?’

She sighed. ‘It had to be done, Gavin. You aren’t here just to wreck the place and make stupid jokes. There was nothing in the bedroom, anyway.’

‘You didn’t know that at the time.’

‘Right. How come the hospital staff have more information than we do, eh? So the youngest child wasn’t even at home, but with the grandparents? It shouldn’t have needed a call to the ward sister to find that out.’

Murfin was silent as he watched her get into her car. ‘You know I’ve got kids of my own, don’t you?’ he said quietly, before she closed the door.

Fry bit her lip, caught out by a moment of tricky human emotion when she hadn’t expected it. ‘Sorry, Gavin.’

But he didn’t seem to have heard her as he walked away. And by the time she caught up with him later, he was back to his old self, so she didn’t mention it again.

* * *

Brian Mullen was in a side room off one of the newer wards, with a PC on duty outside the door. Mullen was in his early thirties, sandy-haired, with a faintly pink complexion, as if his skin had been freshly scrubbed. His hands were bandaged, but otherwise he looked quite fit and healthy.

He was also sedated and deeply asleep, as motionless as the dead. There was no point in asking questions of a comatose body.

‘Naturally, he was in a very distressed condition when he was admitted,’ said the ward sister. ‘Apart from his physical injuries.’

‘But otherwise he’ll be well enough to be interviewed later?’ asked Fry.

‘You’ll have to get permission from the doctor.’

Fry didn’t like hospital doctors much. They seemed inseparable from a smell of disinfectant and a tendency to interfere. White coats and professional obstinacy; both unwelcome obstacles when she was intent on finding the truth.

‘Were you on duty when Mr Mullen’s parents-in-law came in this morning, Sister?’

‘Mr and Mrs Lowther? Yes, I spoke to them myself. It was helpful they came, because we’ll be able to reassure Mr Mullen his daughter is safe, at least. She was with them last night, apparently. Oh, but you’ll know that – someone called earlier.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Fry. ‘So when will Mr Mullen come out of sedation?’

‘Some time this afternoon.’

‘I need to know as soon as he’s awake and fit to answer questions, Sister.’

‘I’ll inform the officer over there, shall I? I presume he’s going to carry on hanging around here making a nuisance of himself?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Well, I hope we have less trouble with the patient when he wakes up. He almost injured one of my nurses when we had to sedate him earlier.’

Fry had been about to leave the ward, but she stopped halfway through the swing doors. ‘What do you mean, you had to sedate him?’

‘He was completely wild, shouting that he couldn’t stay here, he had to get out. You know, we see some troubled cases in this hospital, but Mr Mullen was in a dreadful state.’

‘He must have wanted to go back to his house. He knew his family were trapped in the fire.’

‘Probably you’re right …’ The sister hesitated, sounding doubtful. ‘I suppose it’s not my place to say this, but that wasn’t the way it seemed. If you’d asked me at the time, I would have said he was frightened.’

‘Frightened?’ Fry glanced back at Brian Mullen, lying motionless in his bed. ‘Well, whatever it was, I expect he’ll have forgotten it when he wakes up, won’t he?’

‘Not necessarily. It’s his brain and body that are sedated. Deep-rooted fears are in the subconscious. And the subconscious never sleeps.’

* * *

After a wasted trip across town and back, Fry was feeling even more irritable. When she pulled up near the Mullens’ house, she found just one miserable-looking uniformed officer standing outside the gate. He had his hands folded behind his back, and he was bouncing slightly on his toes, as if auditioning for a part in The Pirates of Penzance. At any moment, he might burst into ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one …’

‘Where’s the fire officer?’ she asked, when Murfin emerged from the house.

‘He’s nipped off to get a bit of something for a late breakfast, lucky bugger. He said to tell you he wouldn’t be long.’

‘SOCOs here yet?’

‘There’s someone on the way, I’m told.’

Fry looked around at her available resources. One Gilbert and Sullivan extra, and Gavin Murfin. There was nothing like trying to do things on your own, was there?

Coming up behind the same tractor one more time, Bernie Wilding had to slow down on the road between Foxlow and Bonsall. But the tractor driver pulled over into a lay-by to let him pass, and the postman saw that it was Neville Cross, who owned Yew Tree Farm. His land ran right up to the garden of Rose Shepherd’s property.

Bernie slowed to a halt alongside the tractor and tapped his horn to get the farmer’s attention.

‘Morning,’ said Cross.

‘Just thought I’d mention – I couldn’t get any answer at Bain House earlier on. You know, Miss Shepherd’s place? I wondered if you’ve seen her about at all?’

‘Can’t say I have. We don’t see her in the village much.’

‘No, I know. I thought it was a bit funny, though. Her post was still in the box from yesterday, too.’

The farmer nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

Bernie waved and drove off, watching the tractor pull into the road again as soon as he’d passed. He’d probably get behind it again when he reached Bonsall. Sometimes he thought these farmers drove around the lanes all day just for the sake of it. They loved being a bloody nuisance with their tractors, and their trailers full of slurry. Now and then, Bernie wished he could put a bomb under one of them.

4

Lindsay Mullen’s parents lived on the hillside above Darley Dale, a couple of miles north of Matlock. Following the directions she’d been given, Fry watched out for the Shalimar Restaurant, then turned left into Northwood Lane and climbed the hill. The Lowthers’ address was near the top, a large bungalow with its rear windows looking down on the A6 from Bakewell.

She and Murfin had to walk a long way up a garden path to reach the front door. This was a garden that seemed to be mostly gravel and stone flags, apart from the obligatory water feature, and dozens of terracotta pots that didn’t contain very much.

‘I like this sort of garden. No plants.’

And Gavin was right. There was a birdbath, a sundial, a statue of an angel in ornamental stone. And so much furniture, too – a patio set on the terrace under a green parasol, a wooden bench in the shade of an arbour, and a garden barbecue on timber decking at a lower level. In the last few yards, they found themselves walking on cast-iron stepping stones in the shape of flattened tortoises, between solar lights like Edwardian gas lamps. Near the door stood a cast-iron chiminea with a mesh door, its surface just starting to rust.

A few minutes later, they were sitting with Henry Lowther in a conservatory, on either side of an oak coffee table that matched the flooring.

‘Sorry to bring you in here,’ he said, ‘but Luanne is asleep, and we don’t want to disturb her. It’s going to be stressful enough for the child in the next few weeks, poor thing.’

‘Luanne is your youngest grandchild, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did she come to be here with you last night?’

‘We’ve been looking after her for a few days. Luanne hasn’t been sleeping through the night, you see. Poor Lindsay wasn’t getting much rest, so we offered to give her a break for a bit.’

‘I see. And are you coping all right yourselves? Talk to your family liaison officer if you need any help, won’t you?’

‘No, we’re fine,’ said Lowther. ‘Luanne needs us, and it’s best to have something to concentrate on. You know what I mean …’

Lindsay Mullen’s parents seemed to be quiet people – no sign of hysterics, or outbursts of anger. But Fry hardly caught a glimpse of Mrs Lowther before she disappeared, clearly on the verge of tears, her eyes already red from previous bouts of weeping.

‘My wife isn’t up to talking about it yet,’ said her husband. ‘I hope you understand.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry to have to bother you with questions, sir.’

‘It’s something you have to do.’

It was much too warm for Fry in the conservatory. Looking around, she saw that the central heating radiator had an individual thermostat control. She wondered whether Mr Lowther would notice if she surreptitiously turned it down. But he was watching her too expectantly, the way people did sometimes after a sudden death, as if they thought she might be able to bring their loved ones magically back to life.

‘Could you tell me when you first heard about the fire, sir?’

‘Yes. Brian phoned to tell us. That’s our son-in-law.’

‘Brian did? What time was that?’

‘Good heavens, I’m not sure. It was in the early hours of the morning. I was too shocked to check the time. Well, I might have looked at the clock, but I didn’t take it in. Brian said he was phoning from the hospital – I remember that. At first, I thought it was him that had been in an accident, and I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose I was still half asleep.’

The conservatory was probably so warm because it was full of plants – fuchsia, tree ferns, bougainvillea. In the kitchen, Fry had noticed cacti and tradescantia, and a wooden herb wheel on the window sill. She might be ignorant of what grew in the countryside, but she was familiar with house plants. During a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, her job had been to write out the labels for the pots – and God help her if she got one wrong through not recognizing a species.

There would be spiders and small insects crawling among these plants, too. She’d tried to sit in the middle of the two-seater cane settee to keep away from the jungle, forcing Murfin to take one of the chairs.

‘How did Brian describe what had happened?’

‘Describe it? Well, he said he’d arrived home and found the house on fire. I gather he’d been out for the evening. Brian was very distressed, you know – understandably. And he’d suffered some injuries trying to get into the house. In the circumstances I’m surprised he had the presence of mind to call us at all. But I’m glad he did. I don’t know how we’d have heard about the fire otherwise.’

‘Well, we’d have found your details somehow, and a police officer would have called on you.’

‘That would have been worse, I think,’ said Lowther. ‘If anything could be worse than this.’

Mr Lowther was officially described in the forms as a managing director. In Fry’s experience, most managing directors looked as though they’d eaten too many corporate lunches and Rotary Club dinners. But Lowther didn’t. He was a big man, but had kept his leanness. Regular squash, or business not so good?

For a moment, Mr Lowther was distracted by the fronds of a tree fern that hung near his chair. He reached out to tear a bit off the plant, with the air of someone who had no idea what he was doing. When he leaned over, Fry noticed that Mr Lowther’s shirt buttons weren’t fastened properly. One hole was empty, and its button had been fastened too low, so that part of his shirt hung untidily over his waistband.

‘That was all Brian could tell me, really. He said that the house was on fire. And that he thought Lindsay and the children were still in there.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We went up there, of course – to Darwin Street. But the fire was all over by the time we arrived. They wouldn’t let us go into the house. So then we went to the hospital, but Brian was sedated. We sat around for hours before someone came and told us that Lindsay and the boys hadn’t survived. It was horrible. It seemed as though we were almost the last to know.’

‘It can feel like that sometimes. But people have their jobs to do.’

‘Yes, I know. But it doesn’t really make it any better. Can I ask you something now?’

‘Go ahead, sir.’

‘Do you have any idea how the fire started?’

‘Not yet. We think the seat of the fire was downstairs in the sitting room, but we need to examine the house more closely before we can be sure about anything.’

Mr Lowther’s gaze drifted away again, and Fry’s attention was caught by the traffic on the A6. It had slowed suddenly as an unexpected type of vehicle mingled with the cars and vans, displaying an entirely different pattern of movement. Even through the double glazing, Fry thought she could hear the creak and rattle. For a moment, she wondered if Pride and Prejudice was being filmed again somewhere nearby.

‘A stagecoach has just gone past on the road down there,’ she said. ‘It was being pulled by four big grey horses.’

‘Yes, they’re Dutch Gelderlanders.’

Fry turned, surprised to see Mrs Lowther standing in the doorway, her eyes dried, her voice almost steady, as if she’d made a great effort to bring herself under control.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘Right. You’ve seen them before, then?’

‘Sometimes there are two of them drawing a landau.’

Henry Lowther glanced at the window, but didn’t seem interested. ‘The fire must have been caused by faulty wiring or something, I suppose. They’ll find out what went wrong, won’t they?’

‘We don’t know yet whether it was an accident,’ said Fry.

But Lowther shook his head. ‘No, no. It can’t have been started deliberately. I might just about imagine one of the boys playing with matches. But not arson.’

‘We should know soon enough, Mr Lowther.’

‘You don’t understand. There’s no one who could have had any reason to start that fire deliberately,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t possible. Lindsay would never upset anybody. And as for Jack and Liam –’

He stopped, as if finding himself unable to express the impossibility in the case of his grandsons. His anguished expression suggested that the idea of harming them was physically beyond comprehension. His wife caught a surge of his emotion and began to cry all over again.

‘What about Brian?’

‘He wasn’t even at home,’ said Lowther.

Fry watched him, trying to detect an accusatory note in his voice. But perhaps it hadn’t occurred to the Lowthers yet that their son-in-law ought to have been at home with his family, should have been there to protect them, even if it meant he’d have died in the fire too. It would come later, that anger, the readiness to find someone to blame, if only for not being there.

‘Nevertheless, do you think there might be anybody he could have got on the wrong side of? Someone who might want to take revenge on him?’

‘You’ve met him, haven’t you?’ said Mrs Lowther, between sniffs. ‘You can see he’s harmless. What could he have done to anybody to make them commit an evil act like that, just to get back at him? It doesn’t make sense.’

Her husband nodded. ‘Besides, Brian doesn’t mix with people who’d do that sort of thing. He’s a despatch manager in a distribution centre.’

On the corner table was a set of photographs in silver frames. Smiling faces, boyish grins, a baby balanced on someone’s knee – the Lowthers’ grandchildren. Fry could see that Jack and Liam were fair-haired, with the pale look of their father. But the baby, Luanne, was much darker. The biggest frame contained an entire family group – Brian and Lindsay with all three children, their youngest child held proudly out front, taking centre stage as if it was her birthday or something.

Fry felt an urge to pick the photos up and look at them more closely, but she was afraid it would distract the Lowthers’ attention. Pictures of the fire victims had already been obtained for the case files and the media. She could look at them back at the office, more safely.

Instead, she looked down at her notebook. ‘Could we talk about the house for a few minutes? I mean, your daughter’s address in Darwin Street. I presume you know it quite well?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Lowther. ‘We go there often. We were with them when they moved in. I helped Lindsay choose some of the furniture.’

Hearing that, Fry knew she’d have to pick her words carefully when she asked the next few questions, or she was likely to lose Moira Lowther altogether. The untreated polyurethane foam wasn’t her fault, but guilt knew no logic.

‘First of all, the smoke alarm. They had one installed in the kitchen.’

‘Yes, it was installed as soon as they moved into the house. Brian insisted on it.’

‘Who advised him where to put it?’

‘Advised him? I don’t think anyone did. The kitchen was the obvious place. It’s where accidents are most likely to happen.’

‘I see.’

Of course, in one way the kitchen was the obvious place for a smoke alarm. Every day, the fire service could be guaranteed a tea-time call-out to an overheated chip pan somewhere. But if Brian Mullen had bothered to read the manufacturer’s instructions he would have seen a different recommendation. If he’d taken any notice of it, he might have kept his family alive. But there were too many ‘ifs’ in that equation.

Nevertheless, Fry filed away the impression of Brian Mullen as the sort of man who’d toss the instructions disdainfully aside as he whipped out a screwdriver and relied on his masculine instincts to get the job done.

‘Lindsay was proud of her kitchen,’ said Mrs Lowther. ‘It’s not six months since she had new units put in, and a canopy cooker hood with a double extractor. It was immaculate.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen it,’ said Fry. ‘I wonder, during the past few weeks, did Lindsay or Brian mention anyone hanging around near their house, or someone suspicious coming to the door?’

‘No, not at all.’

Before much longer, Fry had exhausted her questions. To be honest, she was glad to get out of the conservatory and away from the plants.

‘What sort of business do you run, sir?’ she asked.

‘I own a very successful export company. We deal mostly in machine tools, which we sell all around the world. We’ve been planning a shift towards computer technology, but that’s not our core business right now.’

Not a wholesale florist’s, then. She’d just wondered. As they went back through the house, she saw begonias and chrysanthemums in the living room. And there were foliage plants everywhere: monstera, yucca, palms. It was like the hothouse at Kew in here.

‘Oh, you have a visitor,’ she said when they reached the door.

A man was coming up the path towards the Lowthers’ door. He was taking his time, pausing to smile sadly at the stone angel, stepping carefully on the flattened tortoises. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, smooth faced and wearing an overcoat of a kind that you didn’t see very often these days. Fry wondered if he was a journalist.

‘Oh, it’s John,’ said Mr Lowther. ‘Our son.’

‘Does he live here?’

‘No, he has his own apartment, in Matlock. Poor John, he’s very upset – he and Lindsay were so close.’

‘Is he older than your daughter?’

‘No, two years younger.’

John Lowther looked at Fry and Murfin curiously as they met on the porch step.

‘These people are the police, John,’ said his father. ‘They’re here about Lindsay and the boys.’

‘We were close. Did they tell you?’

‘Your parents? Yes, they did.’

‘I’m shut up completely.’

‘I’m sorry?’

But Lowther was looking at Gavin Murfin. ‘I like your tie.’

Murfin looked aghast at getting a compliment. ‘Er, thanks.’

‘Are you all right, Mr Lowther? I know it must be a very difficult time for you.’

His eyes travelled back towards her, but failed to focus. ‘Pardon? What did you say?’

‘Have you thought of seeing your doctor?’

Lowther laughed. ‘I don’t see my doctor, because he’s not here.’

He went into the house, where his mother greeted him with a sob and a hug. Fry and Murfin walked back to the car. For a few moments, neither of them spoke. Then Fry started the engine and drove slowly back down the road.

‘A bit of a teacake,’ said Murfin.

‘What?’ said Fry, thinking he was talking about food, as usual.

‘That Lowther bloke. He’s a bit of a teacake.’

‘You mean John? Come on, Gavin, you just didn’t like him because you thought he was gay.’

‘What if he was?’ protested Murfin. ‘I don’t judge people like that. Well, not any more. I’ve done the course.’

‘Yeah, right. You’ve learned not to say out loud what you’re thinking, that’s all.’

Murfin sniffed, but didn’t deny it.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be gay to admire my tie.’

‘No, just colour blind.’

‘Well, did you like him?’ asked Murfin.

‘He was a bit odd, I suppose.’

‘Two sandwiches short of a picnic, more like.’

Fry sighed. ‘Is it getting near lunchtime by any chance?’

‘Well, now you mention it –’

‘All right, all right.’

Fry knew when to give in to necessity. She couldn’t understand the way Gavin lived to eat, instead of the other way round.

Sometimes she thought that most of the people around her had life upside down, or back to front. Take the Lowthers, for instance – they had a garden full of furniture, and a house full of plants. Something wrong there, surely?

In Foxlow, a police patrol arrived outside the gates of Bain House at about a quarter past one that afternoon. Thirteen sixteen hours, according to the incident log. PC Andy Myers pressed the intercom button on the gatepost a few times, but got no response.

‘Maybe it’s not working,’ said his partner.

‘I can hear it buzzing.’

‘Well, Control can’t give us a phone number for her.’

‘She must be ex-directory.’

‘So what do we do, then?’

Myers looked at the wrought-iron gates and the stone pillars on either side. ‘One of us has to get his arse over these gates. There should be a release on the other side. Mind the spikes when you get on top, Phil. They look lethal.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot. Don’t strain yourself, will you?’

‘I’m the driver. I have to stay with the car.’

Myers watched his partner struggle over the gates, grumbling all the way as he tried to avoid ripping his uniform or impaling his hand on a spike. Finally, his boots crunched down on to gravel at the other side and he found the release button to open the gates.

‘The bloke who phoned in was a farmer name of Cross,’ said Myers from the window of the car. ‘He says there’s a bedroom window open round the back somewhere, and a light on.’

‘Why didn’t he climb over the bloody gate, then?’

‘Him? He’ll be long gone, ploughing his sheep or something.’

‘You don’t get out into the country much, do you, Andy?’

The two officers went up to the front door and knocked. They still got no reply. Myers began to walk round the side of the house.

‘Yes, I can see the open window,’ he called. ‘I’m trying the back door.’

‘Anything?’

‘No.’

‘Nor here, either. Think we ought to go in?’

‘I don’t like this open window,’ said Myers. ‘There’s a burglar alarm – you can see the box up there on the wall. And security lights, too. She’s not some careless householder who’d leave her property insecure.’

‘I’ll call in and let Control know what we’re doing.’

‘OK, Phil. Then you’ll have to find a window to get through on the ground floor. I wouldn’t give much for your chances of reaching that open one.’

‘Hey, wait a minute –’

When Fry and Murfin arrived in Darwin Street, a man was standing in the garden of number 34. He seemed to have appointed himself some kind of supervisor, checking that everyone attending the fire scene did their job properly. He was holding a small digital camera and squinting through the viewfinder at a SOCO in a scene suit carrying two bulging plastic bags towards a van.

‘Hoping to sell some photos to the press, sir?’ asked Fry.

He glowered at her. ‘No such luck. They’ve all been here and done their own pictures, TV cameras and all. These are for my records.’

‘Records?’

‘I’m in Neighbourhood Watch. This’ll come up at the next meeting, you can bet. I was right here from the start, you know. In fact, it was me that rang 999.’

‘Would you be Mr Wade?’

‘That’s me: Keith Wade.’

He was either overweight or so bundled up in sweaters that it was impossible to judge his shape. He was sweating a little, but whether that was from excitement or exertion, she couldn’t tell. Keith Wade looked like a man who’d spent all his life in the driver’s seat of a lorry, eating egg and chips at truck stops and gradually turning pear-shaped.

‘Did you happen to take any photographs during the fire, sir?’ she asked.

‘’Course I did. Look –’

He turned the camera round and held it up as he fingered the controls. A picture appeared on the LED screen. It was very dark – almost black, but for a dull, reddish glow. Only the faint outline of a roof and chimney stack could be made out at the top of the picture.

‘Are they all like that?’

‘I followed the progress of the fire, and recorded how quickly the emergency services arrived. I took some with the flash when the firemen were here, but all I got was a lot of glare off the reflective strips on their jackets.’

‘We’d like copies of any shots you took during the fire.’

Wade looked pleased, then his face fell. ‘I haven’t got a colour printer.’

‘That’s all right. Have you got internet access? You can email them to us.’

‘Yes, I can do that.’

Fry gave him her card, and he fingered it happily.

‘Detective, are you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘What?’ said Fry, ready to react to some sexist remark.

‘Sending a detective to a fire.’

‘When there are fatalities, yes.’

‘Fatalities, right. The two kids were killed, weren’t they? Never stood a chance, they reckon.’

‘And their mother, of course.’

He nodded. ‘Tragic. I knew Lindsay and Brian pretty well. We’ve been neighbours for six years.’

Wade’s house was so close to the Mullens’ that the smoke had stained his walls, too. Pools of water lay in his garden, and someone had trampled a flower bed on their way to the fire.

‘Mr Wade, has anyone been around in the last few weeks asking questions about the Mullens?’

‘Asking questions? Other than you lot, you mean?’

‘It’s a serious enquiry, sir.’

‘Sorry. No, there hasn’t been anyone.’

‘Think carefully, please. It might have been someone who appeared perfectly innocent at the time. A market researcher calling at the door, then dropping in a casual question about your next-door neighbours?’

‘No, I’d remember that.’

‘What about your wife? She might remember someone being around while you were out.’ Seeing Wade hesitate, she probed further. ‘I’m sorry. Are you married, sir?’

‘I’m divorced,’ he said.

‘OK. Tell me again what made you first notice the fire.’

‘Well, I think I smelled the smoke. I suppose the smell of it must have been strong enough to wake me up. At first, I reckoned it must be someone’s bonfire that had been set alight. Kids do that around here, you know – they think it’s fun to see the fire engines arrive. But when I got out of bed, I saw a funny light on the bedroom curtains. It was sort of flickering, like someone was watching a huge TV screen outside. Do you know what I mean?’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I put some clothes on, went outside to have a look, then made the emergency call.’

Yes, and that sweater was probably the first thing he’d put on. It looked as though he’d been wearing it for months. The thing was brown and shaggy, with little threads of wool springing out everywhere.

‘Did you see anyone outside at that time, Mr Wade?’

‘No, not a soul. But I wasn’t looking up and down the street, just at the fire. It had broken the sitting-room window by then, and there were flames going up the wall. Come to think of it, I suppose it might have been the sound of the window breaking that woke me up, not the smell of the smoke.’

‘Why do you think that, sir?’

‘Well, like I said, I’m in Neighbourhood Watch. I’ve sort of trained myself to hear the sound of breaking glass at night. We’ve had some burglaries round here, as I suppose you know. So I have to be on the alert.’

‘I see. But you don’t actually remember hearing glass breaking last night?’

Wade looked disappointed. ‘No, not really.’

He was so transparent. Fry imagined he was a bit of a nuisance at Neighbourhood Watch meetings, always claiming to have seen something that he hadn’t, to make himself more interesting. She wondered whether Wade was a member of other organizations, too. The Police Liaison Committee, the Keep Edendale Tidy Group – anything that would let him stick his nose into other people’s lives.

‘What about traffic, Mr Wade? Were there any cars going by when you first saw the fire?’

‘Not that I noticed,’ he said. ‘Just a minute.’

He raised his camera to his face and focused on something past Fry. She turned to see a liveried police car pull up outside number 32, and the driver spoke to a uniformed officer on duty outside.

‘Would it be all right if I took your photograph as well?’ asked Wade. ‘I don’t think I’ve got a detective.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be all right.’

He sighed. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Mr Wade, did you make any attempt to get into your neighbour’s house when you saw the fire? Or were you too busy taking photographs?’

He looked hurt. ‘Of course I tried to get in. After I’d made the call, I ran back out and went over the fence to their house. But there were already flames coming out of the windows, and I couldn’t see a thing for the smoke.’

‘You must have seen Brian Mullen arrive home later.’

He shoved the camera away in a pocket and wiped the palms of his hands on his sweater.

‘Yes, poor bugger. He was going out of his mind. Is Brian all right, do you know?’

‘His injuries are only minor.’

‘That’s something, anyway.’

Even out here, the smell of smoke and charring was very strong. Mr Wade himself seemed to reek of burning, like a smoked kipper. If he’d stood in his garden wearing that same sweater while the fire was burning, it was probably impregnated with the smell: smouldering wood and singed flesh.

‘Are you normally at home during the day, Mr Wade?’

‘Sometimes I work late shifts,’ he said. ‘I make deliveries for the supermarkets.’

‘I see.’

‘I ought to be in bed now. But I couldn’t sleep with all this excitement going on.’

Fry looked across the fence at number 32. The SOCOs had erected a crime-scene tent over the doorway, so it was impossible to see inside the house now, except for a vague shape moving past a blackened window now and then. The bodies of the victims had long since been removed, and the firefighters had finished damping down, leaving nothing but a few streams of muddy water running into the gutter.

‘Yes. Riveting, isn’t it?’

By the time she got back to E Division headquarters in West Street, Fry had a headache. She looked in her desk for some Paracetamol, but found only an empty box, not even a broken foil strip. She glared angrily around the CID room. Light-fingered bastards. She never let herself run out of Paracetamol, so someone in the office had been nicking them from her drawer without asking. In this place, they’d steal your fillings if you left your mouth open too long.

She took a few deep breaths instead and drank a cup of water. She had to be fit and on the ball. This wasn’t a time to screw up; it was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate her ability. Had she done everything that needed to be done right now?

She’d left Gavin Murfin at Darwin Street to liaise with the fire investigator and chase up the SOCOs. She’d also asked for a search team to examine the vicinity of the house. What she needed was some indication of malicious intent, so she could go to the DI with a view on the case. That would show she could deal with a challenge.

The pain tightened across her forehead. She ought to have asked Cooper to bring her a new supply of Paracetamol from the supermarket. The day was about to begin in earnest, and there were bound to be more problems coming her way before long. It was going to be one of those weeks, all right.

The dead body lay at an awkward angle, half on a rug by the bed. It had been a nice sheepskin rug once, soft and white – until it soaked up most of Rose Shepherd’s blood. Now it was stained dark red and caked into stiff clumps. When Miss Shepherd died, she’d been wearing her nightdress, a cotton one designed for comfort rather than style, with enough folds to conceal the source of the blood.

PC Myers raised a hand to the light switch, but remembered the light was already on. His partner stood in the doorway, tugging at his radio.

‘What do you think she’s done to herself?’

‘Can’t tell,’ said Myers. ‘She’s dead, though.’

‘Back off, then. Don’t touch her.’

But Myers was crouching closer to the body, and he could see the circular hole punched neatly through the cotton near Rose Shepherd’s heart.

‘Bloody hell, Phil,’ he said. ‘The old bird’s been shot.’

5

Ben Cooper drove out of the Somerfield’s car park before the plastic crime session was over. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He didn’t think Steve Judson would be sorry to lose him, either. Two calls on his mobile were two too many.

As he accelerated his Toyota into Fargate and crossed the junction towards Chesterfield Road, Cooper considered phoning Diane Fry to let her know where he was heading. But if she hadn’t heard about the Foxlow incident already, she’d find out soon enough.

But, wait … a triple death, she’d said, in a house fire. If that turned out to be malicious intent, E Division would have its work cut out. Caseloads were always a headache when a major enquiry cropped up. There were only eighteen DCs on the division, most of them scattered across the sections. Every officer in Derbyshire Constabulary had an average of three crimes on his desk at any one time – well, except in Glossop section, where they claimed to have five. But then, Glossop always had been a world of its own.

Oh well, it looked as though his social life might be put on hold again. And just when it was getting more interesting.

He crossed the bridge over the River Eden and hit the A623 into Calver. To the west, beyond Abney Moor, was his old home, Bridge End Farm. The town of Bakewell was a little further on, and then it was a straight run down the A6 to Matlock.

This was one of his favourite parts of the Peak District, because it seemed to have the best of both worlds. The high gritstone edges rose to the east – Curbar Edge and Baslow Edge. Dark, bare and ancient. But down here in the valleys, the dense woodland gave the landscape an entirely different character. At this time of year, he could start to think of it as his own world again, almost free of tourists, settling under its blanket of fallen leaves.

And beneath the trees, among the fields and the drystone walls, were the small farms. Each one, like Bridge End, trying to face up to its future.

Finally, he reached Foxlow. It was one of those villages that looked as though nothing ever happened, but where the worst things often did. Not much traffic during the day, and no one out on the street. The residents were all at work, or in their gardens, or shut away in their front rooms, wondering what all the activity was outside.

The scene at Bain House was already swarming with personnel and vehicles. When Cooper reported to the RV point, he was amazed to see officers from the Firearms Support Unit patrolling the outer cordon with their automatic weapons cradled across their bullet-proof vests. That could only mean one thing.

His DI, Paul Hitchens, was coming across the garden with the crime-scene manager, Wayne Abbott. Hitchens was dressed in a dark suit and tie, keeping up his image as one of the smartest detectives in E Division. Abbott was wearing his pale blue crime-scene coverall, and neither the colour nor the shapeless outfit suited his muscular build and stubbled jaw.

Waiting patiently for them at the incident control unit was the divisional head of CID, Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen. Until potential forensic evidence had been preserved and recorded, the scene was Wayne Abbott’s domain, and crime-scene managers were jealous gods. Everyone had to wait for his permission to enter.

It was somehow reassuring to see Kessen at a crime scene, though it indicated the seriousness of the incident. Although he wasn’t a big man, the DCI had the ability to become a focal point for activity wherever he happened to be. He was the still centre at the heart of events that might otherwise descend into chaos. Today he looked as calm as ever, using his mobile phone to deal with some administrative problem at the office as he waited for Hitchens and Abbott to reach him.

Cooper admired that. Better to be calm and unhurried than to rush around doing all the wrong things in the early stages. It was the way he’d like to be himself, if he ever made it to a senior level. But he wasn’t sure he had the right temperament. Maybe that was why he was still a DC.

He joined the fringes of the group, hoping for more information. The details he had so far were scanty. A woman found dead in her home, possible signs of an intruder.

The DCI took his time ending his call. ‘Definitely a shooting?’ he said finally, turning his gaze on Abbott.

Abbott pulled the hood and collar of his scene suit away from his neck and peeled off his gloves. ‘Absolutely. At least three shots were fired, I’d say.’

‘Why would you say that, Wayne?’

‘You can see for yourself. We’ve got the video, of course. But I can let you do a walkthrough on this one, if you like.’

The DI was signalling. Cooper fell in step alongside him as they headed towards the house.

‘The victim’s name is Rose Ann Shepherd. Unmarried, so far as we can tell. It appears she lived completely alone – no other family members, and no staff. She’s been resident in the village for about ten months.’

‘Who found her?’ asked Cooper, pulling out his notebook.

‘Well, a neighbouring farmer raised the alarm, but it was actually the postman who first noticed something wrong – his name’s Bernie Wilding. Mr Wilding could see that the victim hadn’t emptied her letter box.’

‘So she’s been dead since yesterday?’

‘At least.’

They followed the path marked out for them to climb the stairs and reach the master bedroom. The victim’s body still lay where PC Myers had found it, half on and half off the rug, twisted at an unnatural angle. She looked as though she’d been turning towards the door, one arm outstretched, but bent awkwardly by the fall. The red stains on the sheepskin ran on to the carpet and soaked the victim’s nightdress. Cooper noticed that the nightdress was blue, only a shade or two darker than Abbott’s crime-scene suit.

The bedroom was noticeably cooler than the rest of the house. And there was an obvious reason for that – the casement window stood open. A cool breeze blew through the back garden of Bain House, and a few dead leaves had drifted on to the window ledge.

‘So,’ said Kessen. ‘Three shots, you said?’

Abbott stood over the body. ‘Well, two shots hit the victim. The medical examiner says either one of them might have been enough to kill her. Certainly enough to put her on the floor.’

‘So where did the third shot go?’

‘That was a miss. The bullet embedded itself in the bedroom wall there, high up near the ceiling. See it?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll be able to give you an idea of the weapon once the bullets have been recovered.’

‘Time of death?’ said Kessen, without much sign of optimism.

‘Between thirty and forty hours ago, according to the ME. Rigor mortis was almost gone when he examined the victim, but for a bit of residual stiffness in the abdomen.’

‘My God, forty hours?’

‘At the maximum.’

Hitchens looked at his watch. ‘That would put the earliest time of the incident at nine p.m. Saturday. And the latest at seven a.m. Sunday.’

Kessen shook his head. ‘For heaven’s sake, how does a woman get herself shot and then lie dead for nearly two days without anyone noticing? Why didn’t someone somewhere miss her? Why didn’t they get worried when she wasn’t out and about doing all the things she usually did?’

‘The time is just a temperature-based estimate, of course,’ said Abbott. ‘You’ll need some other evidence to pin it down more closely.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Well, temperature-based methods of calculating time of death are the most prone to error, you know. Newton’s Law of Cooling isn’t the most modern approach.’

Ah, Newton’s Law of Cooling. It was a familiar phrase, one that had stuck in Cooper’s mind from his training. When he first heard of it, he’d pictured some seventeenth-century eccentric sitting under a tree with an apple bouncing off his head. He didn’t know the mathematics behind Isaac Newton’s theory, but he knew it was almost always inaccurate – hence the medical examiners hedging their bets and stretching out time scales like Play-Doh.

Like everyone else, he’d been taught that rigor mortis in a dead body was complete by twelve hours and gone by thirty-six. But later he’d discovered that there were as many differences of opinion as there were experts, and too many factors involved. Time of death should be based on witness reports, not physical evidence. But he hadn’t heard a hint of any witnesses yet.

‘Surely we can send FSU home?’ said Hitchens. ‘Whoever did the shooting will be long gone.’

‘Not until we’ve completed a sweep of the area and done door-to-door in the village,’ said Kessen. ‘For all we know, he might be holed up somewhere nearby.’

‘Yes, understood. It just seems to be making the residents a bit jittery, seeing armed police officers on the street. They’re not used to it around here.’

Kessen shrugged. ‘Point of entry, Wayne?’ he said. ‘On the face of it, this open window looks like the way the assailant came into the house.’

‘Perhaps. But it wasn’t forced – there are no tool marks on the frame. We lifted several latents, though. I should get results on those within the hour.’

‘The first officers to arrive came in through a side window,’ said Hitchens. ‘But they had to smash it themselves, which set off the intruder alarms – Control got a call from a monitoring room somewhere, but we were already on the scene by then. The alarms were still going like crazy when I got here.’

‘Our officers set off the alarms? They weren’t activated by the assailant?’

‘No, sir.’

Kessen walked out on to the landing and looked down the stairs. A SOCO was crouched over something in the hallway.

‘What have you got there?’

‘A video intercom system. It must be connected to the unit on the front gate.’

Hitchens came over to look. ‘I don’t even have a gate at my house, let alone an intercom. I live on one of those open-plan estates. Any bugger can run across my front lawn, or up my drive.’

‘They call that community living,’ said Abbott.

‘I know what I’d call it. So how does that thing work?’

The SOCO picked up the handset. ‘When someone presses the button at the gate, there’s a tiny camera in the unit on the gatepost that shows their image on the screen here.’

‘So the householder can see the postman in the flesh, and know he’s not an impostor.’

‘That’s it.’

Cooper looked down at the body again as the exchange went backwards and forwards around him. Voices echoed strangely in the house, as if it wasn’t fully furnished. Actually, the furniture was fairly sparse. Nothing unnecessary or frivolous cluttered the rooms that he’d seen. It made him think of his flat in Welbeck Street when he’d first viewed it. Furnished, but empty. Empty because no one lived there.

He felt uncomfortable for the victim, lying there on the floor. He knew nothing about Rose Shepherd, but he was sure she’d have hated anyone to see her like this. Her grey hair was dishevelled and fell in loose strands across her face. Her mouth had fallen open, and a trail of saliva had dried on her lips. Crime-scene photographs would show up a small rip in the victim’s nightdress and the white, crinkled flesh on the back of her thighs. The flash would cruelly expose the crow’s feet around her eyes, the loose skin at her neck, the beginning of liver spots on the back of her hand where it clutched the rug. Death did nothing for the appearance. But this was the way Miss Shepherd would be immortalized.

Kessen walked back to the bedroom and looked out on to the garden. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, ‘but there’s quite a bit of money tied up here, isn’t there?’

Abbott nodded. ‘A few hundred pounds for that intercom unit alone, I’d say. Probably double that for the installation of the gates.’

‘So it looks as though the victim really needed to know who was calling on her, doesn’t it?’

‘We’ve got house-to-house under way. But so far, everyone we’ve talked to is in agreement on one thing: Miss Shepherd never got any visitors. Apart from the postman – and even he didn’t get past the gates.’

‘No visitors at all?’

‘So they say.’

‘No. We just haven’t talked to the right people, yet,’ said Kessen.

‘Why?’

‘Well, that can’t be true, can it, Paul? You’re a property owner. What about all those folk who come to your address? The refuse men to collect your wheelie bin, the tanker driver to deliver your central heating fuel, the man who reads your electricity meter? No one can build a moat around their property and keep everyone out. It isn’t possible these days. Life has a way of intruding in all sorts of ways.’

‘Rose Shepherd does seem to have been a very solitary person, though. She lived on her own, and she didn’t mix with the neighbours, by all accounts. No one in Pinfold Lane knows who Miss Shepherd’s next of kin could be, or whether she had a family at all. We found an address book near the phone downstairs, but we can’t see any obvious relatives listed. In fact, the entries seem to be all routine stuff – doctor, dentist, a local garage.’

‘There must be something in the house to give us names. A diary, letters …?’

‘Well, we’re still looking. But it seems odd. There ought to be somewhere obvious for her to keep information like that. Why make us hunt for it?’

‘Try a phone bill. See what numbers she called most often, who was on her Family and Friends list.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How long had she lived here? Do we know that?’

‘The neighbours say about a year. Miss Shepherd moved in on her own, with no sign of a husband or anything. No secret lover sneaking in through the back door either.’

‘If the lover was secret, no one would know about him, surely?’

‘This is a village,’ said Hitchens, as if that explained everything.

‘You know, this is a large house for one woman living on her own.’

‘She doesn’t seem to have employed anyone, not even a gardener or cleaner. The lady at the next property down the lane says Miss Shepherd did some gardening herself now and then. She used to see her from her bedroom window, pottering about on the other side of the hedge.’ He looked up at Kessen. ‘See what I mean about a village? Who needs surveillance?’

‘But the house?’ Kessen brushed at a cobweb. ‘It looks as though it could have done with the attention of a cleaner now and then, to be honest.’

‘Presumably Miss Shepherd was less keen on housework than gardening.’

Kessen turned back to Abbott. ‘What about security? We know she had an intruder alarm.’

‘A top-of-the-range monitored system, too. She wanted to be sure that there would be a police response if she had an intruder. Motion sensors – so possibly an audio connection or a CCTV camera somewhere. We can check with the monitoring centre whether she ever had any alerts. This is more than a DIY job, or a bells-only system.’

‘Doors and windows?’

‘Five-lever mortice deadlocks, and hinge bolts.’ Abbott tapped the fanlight. ‘Laminated glass – almost impossible to break in the normal way. Oh, and there’s a restrictor on the inside of the letter box to stop anyone reaching through to release locks and bolts. She didn’t use the letter box on the door, though. There’s one on the gates.’

‘Probably the gates came later.’

Abbott moved around the room. ‘We’ve got double glazing, key-operated window locks. Venetian blinds, so she could stop people looking in without blocking the light. Outside, I noticed there were bulkhead lights as well as the floodlights fitted with motion detectors.’

‘She seems to have had good advice on security.’

‘There’s even a shredder next to the desk here. She wasn’t taking any chances.’

‘She knew about bin raiding, then. Not everyone has that sort of nous. I wonder where she learned about the risk of identity theft.’

‘What about that Notts exercise a while ago? Wasn’t that in the local papers?’

‘Could have been.’

Cooper remembered that, too. Nottinghamshire Police had decided to take the contents of hundreds of household bins and analyse them to see what people were throwing away. A messy job, but interesting results. They found nearly ninety per cent of domestic rubbish contained information that would be helpful to fraudsters. Most of the bins had the full name and address of someone in the household, and many had details of bank account numbers and sort codes. Some had the full set. Helpful? That was more like making someone a Christmas present of your bank account. PC Judson would be horrified.

‘The one thing we’ve found is her passport,’ said Hitchens.

‘A UK passport?’

‘Yes. Rose Ann Shepherd, British citizen, born 1944 in London …’ He flicked through the pages. ‘No stamps.’

‘What about an address?’

‘Your address doesn’t appear in your passport.’

‘No, but most people give a next of kin. A friend or relative, anyway – maybe two.’

‘You’re right.’ Hitchens turned to the back page again. ‘Nope, not in Miss Shepherd’s case.’

‘No one she wanted informed in the event of an accident?’

‘I guess not. You know, this passport looks almost unused to me. Mine has got a bit creased at the spine and started to turn up at one corner.’

‘Well, that would explain why there are no stamps.’

‘Not necessarily. It just means she hasn’t been outside Europe with it. Or rather, outside the Schengen area. You don’t get stamped moving between Schengen countries.’

In her passport photograph, Miss Shepherd was smartly turned out. Her hair was a darker shade of grey, swept back in a business-like manner to match a white blouse, discreet ear studs and a hint of make-up. She had sharp blue eyes and a direct gaze, with the faintest of smiles at the camera.

Hitchens took a call on his mobile. ‘OK, that’s great. Thanks.’ He turned to Kessen. ‘There was a Vauxhall Astra seen in the village in the early hours of Sunday morning. It doesn’t belong to any of the residents, so far as we can tell. One witness is almost sure she’s seen it in the village before – and the previous occasion was late at night, too.’

‘Any details?’

‘Blue.’

‘Dark blue? Could have been black in the dark?’

‘Nope. Light blue, seen under the streetlight near the phone box. No reg, but it probably started with an X, so it wasn’t a new model.’

‘You know, we need the media to come on board early in this one, Paul. There are no obvious leads from the house. We’ve got to get appeals out to locate the driver of that Astra, and anyone who had contact with Rose Shepherd in the last forty-eight hours. No – the last two weeks. God, I don’t know – any contact with her, full stop.’

Cooper looked up, surprised to hear the DCI getting even a little bit rattled in public.

But he could see what was bothering Kessen. The first twenty-four hours were the vital period after any murder. If you didn’t have a strong lead within that time, you were destined for a long drawn-out enquiry – and the odds were against bringing the case to a successful conclusion. This murder might be forty hours old already, according to the ME, and there wasn’t a single lead in sight.

But why didn’t someone miss Rose Shepherd? That was the question the DCI had asked earlier. And it was a good question.

‘You know, there’s absolutely no sign of an intruder being in the house,’ said Kessen. ‘Apart from this open window, which shows no traces of having been forced. No tool marks, no damage. Right, Wayne?’

Abbott had his phone to his ear. ‘And no fingerprints either,’ he said. ‘I just got an update. The only prints we found on the window are a match for the victim’s – and they were on the inside.’

‘And every other window in the house is locked down tight. Why wouldn’t this one be locked, too? Can anyone suggest an answer to that?’

‘Yes,’ said Hitchens, looking anxious. ‘Because someone used this window to get out of the house. I don’t know how he got in – I can only guess the victim let him in through the front door. But he must have gone out this way.’

‘We’re on the first floor. Did he clamber down the drainpipe?’

‘Probably.’ Hitchens looked out of the window. ‘Actually, there isn’t a drainpipe. Not within reach.’

‘A nice dense ivy, then? Russian vine?’

‘Nothing. It’s a blank wall …’ Hitchens hesitated. ‘He must have jumped.’

‘From this height?’

‘Er, yeah.’

‘In that case, Paul, I expect you’ll find the intruder’s prints on the window frame, perhaps some fibres from his clothes on the stone ledge. There’ll be some pretty deep footwear impressions in the ground down below, where he landed. Oh, and you’ll be looking for a suspect who ran away with two broken legs and a cracked spine.’

Hitchens sighed. ‘So what’s the alternative?’

Kessen joined him at the window. ‘There’s only one other possibility. That there never was an intruder in this house. The victim was shot from outside.’

Hitchens stared. ‘From the garden?’

‘No, look – the angle is completely wrong. The shots must have come from the field.’

‘But the window – why was it open?’

‘Wayne said there were no prints on the outside. What about the inside?’

‘Just the victim’s.’

‘So that’s pretty clear, isn’t it?’ said Kessen. ‘The victim opened the bedroom window herself. And someone waiting in the field shot her.’

‘Jesus,’ said Hitchens.

Kessen turned back and addressed the room in general. ‘Close off that road up there, seal the gateway, and get the SOCOs and the search teams into the field. That’s where our gunman was.’

Before the action moved outside, Cooper took a chance to study the interior of the house. One of the first things that had struck him was the amount of dust. Of course, there had been no cleaner. And Miss Shepherd had only done the minimum amount of housework herself, by the looks of it. A bit of attention to the sitting room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and her bedroom.

But there were other rooms that seemed to have lain untouched. Opening the door into a guest bedroom set balls of dust rolling across the carpet, spiders scurrying away from the movement. The curtains were closed in here, so Cooper switched on the light. Fine particles of dust hung in the air, swirling in the draught from the landing.

Most people had no idea where the dust in their homes came from. As far as the average householder was concerned, it might as well come from the Moon, floating down from the sky every night and settling on available surfaces like drifting snow. An inconvenience, perhaps, but something natural and inert that was just part of the atmosphere, like oxygen.

But Cooper knew different. It was one of those facts that he’d learned as a teenager and never forgot. He knew that all human beings in the world shed thousands of dead skin cells every hour, an entire layer of skin over three days. That was what hung in the air and danced in a shaft of sunlight from the window. That was what lay on the shelves and gathered in restless clumps under the bed, or shrouded the junk in the attic. Ninety per cent of the dust in any house consisted of dead human skin.

Also, the décor in the sitting room struck him as odd. Off-white and charcoal grey, almost no colour. It seemed a bit modern for a house of this age, let alone for the sort of woman that Rose Shepherd seemed to have been. As far as anyone could tell, anyway.

Hitchens stuck his head round the door. ‘Ben, we’ve brought the postman back to the scene. Go and get a statement from him, will you? He’s fretting about getting back on his rounds.’

‘Right, sir.’

Cooper took a last look at the charcoal grey wallpaper around the fireplace. It showed up the dust badly, and it was undisturbed by finger marks. And then he remembered another fact he’d learned about house dust. Each speck of it carried tens of thousands of dust mites. Right at this moment, they were busy feeding on those dead skin cells.

6

‘Years ago, I used to work on a delivery round out Leek way,’ said Bernie Wilding when Cooper found him sitting in his red mail van. ‘I saw those wallabies out there about as often as I saw Miss Shepherd in Foxlow.’

‘The wallabies?’

Cooper laughed. Most rumours of exotic animals surviving in unlikely parts of the country were rubbish. But sometimes the creatures turned out to be real, like the scorpions on the London Underground – or the wallabies of the Roaches.

‘Did you really see the wallabies?’ he asked.

‘Only as an odd shape in the distance once or twice. I was never quite sure whether I was looking at a wallaby or a hare, really. But I always told everybody I’d seen the wallabies. Well, you do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I would too.’

It was one of Cooper’s genuine regrets that he’d never seen a wallaby, despite his thirty years in the Peak District. No one who lived or worked on the western fringes of the national park doubted they existed. Plenty of drivers had seen them, and a few had run one over at night on some remote road. The original animals had escaped from a private zoo during the Second World War, and bred on the moors. According to the stories, a yak escaped at the same time. But the last yak sighting was back in the fifties. Pity, really.

‘Too late now, I reckon,’ said Wilding.

‘So they say. Too many people and dogs invading their habitat.’

‘Oh, aye. And too much traffic. People have killed them off, when the bad winters couldn’t.’

Cooper thought he’d probably passed the test. Some of his colleagues would have had no idea what Bernie was talking about. But he’d proved his credentials as a local.

‘What about Miss Shepherd? You saw her often enough and at close enough range to recognize her, didn’t you?’

Wilding screwed his face up thoughtfully. ‘You know, the few times I did catch a glimpse of her, she always seemed to be wearing a headscarf, or something that hid her face. I could never be entirely sure it was her. Not so that I could absolutely swear to it, you understand?’

‘So you don’t think you’d be able to identify her, Mr Wilding?’

‘Not for certain. Sorry.’

‘You spoke to her, though, didn’t you? What did she sound like?’

‘Well, I reckon she had a bit of an accent,’ said Wilding. ‘But I couldn’t really place it. I didn’t speak to her that often, and even then it wasn’t to hold a conversation. Most often, it was through that intercom thing on the gate. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t recognize my own mother speaking through one of those.’

‘Did you ever see anyone else coming or going from Bain House?’

‘No, never.’

‘Any cars parked there?’

‘Just Miss Shepherd’s. It’s a Volvo, I think.’

‘And these gates were always closed, as far as you know?’

‘Always. She kept everyone out, including me.’

‘One last thing,’ said Cooper. ‘What was it you brought for her this morning?’

‘Oh, there was a package. It was a bit too big to get in the letter box. Can I give it to you?’

‘Yes, please. I’ll let you have a receipt.’

Wilding handed him a small parcel about nine inches long. ‘Miss Shepherd never got much mail. I hope it was nothing to do with what happened to her.’

‘Well, it was the reason she was found today, instead of in a week’s time.’

By the time Diane Fry arrived in Foxlow, there was no room for anyone to park anywhere near Bain House. She had to leave her Peugeot on the roadside close to a stone wall and walk to the RV point. Cooper met her near the gates as he was clearing the way for Bernie Wilding to get his van out.

‘Can you bring me up to speed, Ben?’ she asked.

‘Sure. I’ve made notes.’

‘I thought you would have.’

Cooper ran through the details. Fry listened carefully, finding nothing to fault him on. He thought he’d done pretty well, considering he hadn’t been at the scene much longer than she had herself.

‘She sounds like a bit of a recluse,’ said Fry when he’d finished.

He wondered if Fry felt the same slight shiver of recognition that he did at some of the details. There were times in many people’s lives when they went to great lengths to avoid contact with anyone else. It wasn’t so unusual. Just a bit extreme, perhaps, in Rose Shepherd’s case.

‘Actually, I used to know a lady who was a real recluse,’ he said. ‘Old Annie, we called her. When I was a child, she lived in an old cottage near the farm. She must have been there for donkey’s years, because the place was getting very run down. But she didn’t seem to have any relatives – or if she did, they never bothered to visit her. Annie stayed in her house watching TV and listening to the radio, much like Miss Shepherd must have done.’

They began to walk towards the house. The front door stood open, officers still coming and going with bagged items for examination.

‘No one visited Annie at all?’ asked Fry.

‘Well, Mum used to call on her occasionally to see if she was all right. A few times a year, she was invited to our house. Boxing Day, that was a time when we always had to have her round. As kids, we used to dread her coming.’

‘Why?’

‘Annie was one of those lonely people who didn’t speak to anyone for weeks on end, then couldn’t help talking far too much when she finally got into company. It was as if she had to prove to herself that she could still hold a conversation, that somebody would listen to her when she was speaking. I suppose she needed to be sure that she still existed in other people’s eyes.’

‘Were you psychoanalysing people even then?’ said Fry. ‘Yes, I bet you were. I can just see you as an eight-year-old Sigmund Freud.’

But Cooper took no notice. He knew her well enough by now. She made those remarks out of a sort of defensive instinct sometimes. In fact, whenever he talked about vulnerable and lonely people, it seemed.

‘Of course, the result was that everyone tried to steer clear of Old Annie,’ he said. ‘It was probably why her relatives never visited her, and why even the postman kept his van door open and the engine running. Mum always said she had trouble getting away from the cottage once she was inside.’

‘No one likes being trapped by an old bore.’

‘Yes, I suppose Annie was a terrible old bore, but it was more than that. When I was a small child I found her quite frightening. She had that slightly hysterical tone to her voice that always makes people nervous. So people went out of their way to avoid her.’

‘God help me, but I hope I die before I get like that.’

They found Hitchens and Kessen at the edge of the field backing on to the garden of Bain House. The DCI seemed to be sniffing the air, trying to detect the scent of his suspect, like a dog. Wayne Abbott was walking across the field towards them, his boots crunching through the ridges of ploughed soil.

‘I was always taught to go around the edge of a field so as not to damage the crop,’ he said. ‘But I’m making an exception today, because the edge of the field is exactly where your tyre marks are.’

‘The tyre marks of what?’

‘A black car possibly, but a dark colour certainly.’

Kessen looked surprised, and perhaps a bit irritated. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, I’m betting if they drove openly across this field they were hoping that residents living nearby would think they were out lamping.’

‘Lamping?’

‘That’s when people go out into the countryside to shoot animals at night. Lampers use a bright light to dazzle their quarry.’

‘Yes, I know about that – rabbits and such like.’

‘Well, not just rabbits. Badgers, deer, sheep – you name it. Anything that’ll stand up and be shot at.’ Abbott’s eyes flickered around the group. ‘DC Cooper will tell you about it. I’m sure he must have done a bit of lamping himself.’

‘Well …’ began Cooper. But no one was listening to him.

‘But the thing is,’ said Abbott, ‘if local people thought somebody was out lamping that night, they probably wouldn’t have bothered to dial 999, even when they heard shots.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s different in the country – you get used to hearing gunshots. In the city, someone might call the police, but out here you wonder how many brace they’ve potted.’

‘I understand that. But the colour of the vehicle …?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t go lamping in a white car, would you? You want your target to focus on the light, not on the paintwork of your bonnet.’

‘Nothing else, apart from the tyre marks?’

‘Nope. I was hoping for some shell casings. A brass casing could give us some prints, or there might be marks left by the weapon’s extractor or firing pin. But there’s nothing here that we can see.’

‘All right. Thanks.’

‘So it looks as though the suspect didn’t bother going into the house. Clever.’

‘Clever?’

‘Well, it makes it more difficult for us. We always have a better chance of coming up with something from a closed scene. Like the bedroom, for instance. But a ploughed field? And two days after the incident? Better start praying for a miracle.’

Kessen stared at the house. ‘All right, it was clever. But I wonder what the shooter did to get Rose Shepherd’s attention.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Well, if he made the hit from the field, he must have found some way to get his victim to the window. I can’t believe he was prepared to sit out here all night on the off-chance that she’d decide to get out of bed and take a look at the stars.’

‘A phone call, I reckon,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’d be easy enough to phone her on a mobile from the car.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s starting to look like a professional job, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Kessen nodded. ‘Yes, he could easily have phoned Miss Shepherd and woken her up. But what did he say to get her to come to the window? What could he have said that would make her walk straight into his sights?’

While Abbott organized a detailed search of the field, Cooper took the chance to report what the postman Bernie Wilding had told him about never seeing Miss Shepherd’s face clearly.

‘I could understand it if she was physically disfigured,’ said Hitchens. ‘If she was a burns victim, or something. That would explain why she never went out, and didn’t want people to see her.’

‘But she wasn’t disfigured, either in real life or in her passport photo. How old is that passport? When was it issued?’

‘Issued May 2000. Expires 2010.’

‘What about motive?’ asked Fry. ‘Do you think someone in the village might have had a grudge against her?’

‘If she didn’t have contact with anyone in the village, how could someone have a grudge against her?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why she didn’t have contact with anyone. We don’t know anything about her history, so we can’t guess. Where do we start?’

‘There’s one place we can start,’ said Kessen. ‘We need a list of individuals in the locality with firearms certificates. What about this farmer, what’s his name?’

‘Neville Cross?’

‘He’s a neighbour, isn’t he?’

‘He owns the land at the back of Bain House. But I think his farmhouse is way down there, two fields away.’

‘He’ll have a firearms certificate. Most farmers do – for a shotgun, at least. But maybe he has a serious rabbit problem and needs a rifle.’

‘Yes, and maybe he’s a retired SAS sniper,’ said Hitchens sceptically.

Kessen spun sharply on his heel. ‘Well, maybe he is. We don’t know that he isn’t, do we, Paul? This is a man who had the opportunity – the shots were fired from his property. No one would question Mr Cross driving over his own land, even at night. Perhaps no one would question him taking his rifle with him either.’

‘We don’t know that he has a rifle,’ persisted the DI.

‘He’s also the man who reported the open window at the back of the house,’ said Kessen, as if Hitchens hadn’t spoken. ‘Thereby ensuring that he was involved in the investigation as a witness. You know the typical behaviour, Paul.’

‘He was alerted by the postman that something might be wrong. That’s why he took a look.’

‘That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it anyway, sooner or later. We don’t know, do we?’

‘We don’t know anything,’ said Hitchens.

‘That’s why we have to start by eliminating whoever we can get hold of locally. And we’ll see what that leads us to.’

‘What if he doesn’t admit to having a gun? We don’t have any justification for a search.’

‘We could ask him to co-operate with a gunshot residue test. At least we’d know if he’d fired a gun recently.’

Listening to the discussion between the detectives, Wayne Abbott shook his head. ‘Sorry, it’s too long since the shots were fired. A GSR test has to be done within the first few hours to get meaningful results. After forty-eight hours, any suspect will have washed and wiped his hands enough to have removed all detectable traces.’

‘A trace metal test to determine whether he’s held a firearm?’

‘Has to be within twenty-four hours.’

Kessen cursed quietly. ‘Twenty-four hours is useless to us. Useless.’

The DI pointed at his two detectives. ‘We’ve done the initial house-to-house, but the immediate neighbours will have to be interviewed properly. They must know something about Rose Shepherd. Take one of them each, will you? Someone will give you the names.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘A woman with no family and no friends,’ said Hitchens bitterly. ‘How can we reconstruct the life of someone like that?’

‘She must have had at least one enemy,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a start.’

‘It’s some kind of relationship, anyway.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Kessen. ‘It means she had a close enough relationship with someone for that person to hate her. To hate her enough to kill her. That’s not some casual passer-by that she once said hello to in the street. There’s a history between them.’

‘But as far as this house is concerned, the victim seems to be a woman without a history. Without a life almost.’

‘Look, if there’s no evidence of Rose Shepherd’s past in this house, it means only one thing – that she had a past she was trying very hard to hide.’

Fry touched Cooper’s arm.

‘Ben, have you got your car here?’

‘Sure.’

‘Give me a lift down the road, then. I had to leave mine miles away.’

‘No problem.’

Fry brushed some cobwebs off her jacket. ‘This house is dirty, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I noticed that. Have you seen the décor in the sitting room, though?’

‘That charcoal grey? Yes, very minimalist.’

Cooper stopped in the doorway to take a last look at Bain House before he left. Was the house dusty because Miss Shepherd couldn’t be bothered with housework, or because she’d never been used to doing her own cleaning? Or might there be another reason?

On an impulse, he crouched towards the floor and looked into the sunlight flooding the pine boards. A layer of dust showed up clearly, glittering in the light from the windows. It would be possible to tell immediately if anyone had walked across this patch of floor. Their footprints would be visible in the dust. Perhaps that was why it had been left undisturbed.

Abbott’s lamping theory was an interesting one. When a rabbit was caught in the lamper’s beam, it was mesmerized by the light and seemed to forget to run away. Yes, Cooper had seen it happen. He could picture the unnatural stillness of the animal, its eyes reflecting light like two glass beads, stunned by the sudden glare when it thought it was safe in the darkness.

Fry was waiting outside for him, no doubt getting impatient. But for a moment, Cooper thought about Rose Shepherd, shot down at her bedroom window as she stood in her nightdress and slippers. She must have been an easy target in a sniper’s sights, silhouetted against the light. It was impossible not to picture her frozen to the spot, waiting for the bullet to strike.

7

‘Nice barn conversion,’ said Cooper. ‘Somebody’s done a good job of it. Probably worth a bit of money, wouldn’t you say?’

‘More than I’ll ever see.’

Fry got out of the car and walked across the gravel as Cooper drove away. Actually, it was more than a barn conversion. She could see an entire range of farm buildings here. They formed three and a half sides of a square, facing on to a central courtyard. A two-storey stone barn, cleaned up and fitted with patio doors and casement windows. A tractor shed converted into twin garages and workshops. The door of one garage stood open, and the nose of a blue BMW was visible.

According to information from the control room, the neighbours on this side were called Ridgeway, Martin and April. Fry took a small detour before crossing the courtyard to their house, and looked in through the windows of one of the outbuildings. Games room. A gym. And a sauna. Very nice.

The Ridgeways themselves could have stepped straight out of Derbyshire Life. They had perfected the country look: corduroys and cashmere, tweed and waxed cotton. Fry wasn’t at all surprised when she heard their accents and discovered they both came from Luton.

‘We noticed all the activity, of course,’ said Martin Ridgeway, who wore the corduroy and waxed cotton over an Antartex shirt. ‘And a young constable called about an hour ago to ask us if we noticed anything suspicious in the early hours of Sunday morning.’

‘And did you notice anything, sir?’

‘No.’

He invited Fry into the house, which she thought was probably further than the young constable had got. She was taken into a dining room, with six spindle chairs around a polished table. A spiral staircase with cast-iron balustrades led to a first-floor gallery, what must have been a hayloft or something at one time.

‘We’re members of Neighbourhood Watch, you know,’ said Ridgeway. ‘But our co-ordinator says the police won’t give him any information. Has there been another robbery?’

‘Another?’

His eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You don’t even know about them?’

‘No, I’m sorry. Right now, we’re conducting enquiries into a suspicious death.’

‘Good heavens! We didn’t know that. But I suppose we ought to have guessed it was something more high profile, to justify all this activity. Who is it that’s died?’

‘Miss Rose Shepherd, at Bain House.’

‘Oh,’ said Ridgeway.

He sounded distinctly non-committal, as if he didn’t want to appear either too upset or too pleased at the news.

Fry thought of Keith Wade, the Mullens’ neighbour back at Darwin Street. It was odd that both Ridgeway and Wade were members of their respective Neighbourhood Watch schemes, one in a well- off rural community and the other on an Edendale housing estate. There were no superficial similarities between them, but theoretically Martin Ridgeway ought to be equally well informed about his neighbours.

‘What do you know about Rose Shepherd, sir?’ she asked.

Ridgeway turned his head. Fry could see a room through a doorway that appeared to be a home office, a desk loaded with computer equipment.

‘Was she foreign?’ he said vaguely. ‘We heard a rumour in the village that she was foreign.’

‘Not so far as we’re aware. Did you never speak to her yourself, Mr Ridgeway?’

‘No. Why would I?’

‘Well, she lived right next door.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not as if these are semidetached properties. I don’t know anything about her.’

Fry found herself staring at a mahogany barometer on the dining-room wall. She’d never understood those things. If the mercury was up or down, what did it mean? She preferred those weather houses, or whatever the things were called, with two little Jack and Jill figures. At least it was always clear what they were telling you. Sun or rain, and no ambiguity.

‘Didn’t you say you were in Neighbourhood Watch?’

‘We keep an eye on the security of property, we don’t spy on our neighbours.’

Fry could see a woman doing something in the garden. ‘Is that your wife? Could I ask her?’

‘If you like.’

Sliding doors stood open to the garden, because it was still warm enough for that, even in late October. At least it was preferable to the Lowthers’ overheated conservatory.

April Ridgeway was wearing the cashmere, with a waxed body warmer and gardening gloves. When asked, she gave a similar story to her husband’s. She had never spoken to the occupant of Bain House. There might have been some talk about Miss Shepherd in the village, but she made a point of not listening to gossip.

‘Have long have you lived in Foxlow?’

‘Nine months.’

‘So Miss Shepherd was already living at Bain House when you moved in.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’re interested in wildlife, Mrs Ridgeway?’ asked Fry, watching her tighten some wire netting on a bird table.

‘Very much so. We both are, aren’t we, Martin?’

‘It’s one of the reasons we came to live here, in the national park,’ agreed her husband. He stood back from the bird table and inspected his wife’s handiwork.

‘That netting is to stop the grey squirrels,’ he said.

Fry frowned, struggling to understand why wildlife enthusiasts would put food out in their garden and then try to stop wild animals eating it. But during her time in Derbyshire, she’d learned that there were things about the country she would never understand.

‘Our only regret was that we couldn’t go somewhere that still has red squirrels. We’re members of a conservation society that supports work to protect them. Reds have been wiped out in Derbyshire, you know. In fact, the whole of the Midlands.’

Fry didn’t know, and didn’t really care. Perhaps she should have sent Ben Cooper here and taken the neighbours on the other side of Bain House instead.

‘You know, it was once possible for a red squirrel to cross from one side of Britain to the other without touching the ground,’ said Ridgeway, taking advantage of her silence. ‘That was when we had the true wild wood, the ancient pine forests that had grown here since the Ice Age. But those trees died, or were cut down. And then the grey squirrels came.’

‘If you have an interest in wildlife, I wonder if you’ve been aware of anybody lamping in this area?’ asked Fry.

‘Lamping?’

‘You know what that is, sir?’

‘Oh, we know what that is, all right. If we knew about anything like that going on around here, we’d report it straightaway. But what has that got to do with this suspicious death you’re investigating? Was the lady killed by poachers?’

‘I’m afraid we just don’t know.’

He took her ignorance as confirmation of his own fears. ‘That’s another problem our native wildlife is facing, you know. Animals are the first victims when society starts to fall apart. Look at all those stories of illegal immigrants stealing swans and butchering sheep in the fields.’

‘You read the Daily Mail, then?’ said Fry impatiently.

‘You’re not from this area yourself, by the sound of your accent.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘A city person? Birmingham, at a guess?’

‘Very close.’

‘Ah, I can understand why you came here, then. Seeking to get back to the real England, like we did.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘I know it’s not politically correct to say it, but many of your colleagues agree with our views.’

‘Not me.’

Ridgeway smiled and gestured at the bird table. ‘We sometimes think of grey squirrels as the immigrants of the animal world. They’re nothing but vermin, after all – rats with furry tails.’

Fry felt the anger rising, but she’d promised herself she was going to be more tolerant of people she had to deal with. Even those who infuriated her as much as Martin Ridgeway.

She consulted her notebook, partly to cover her irritation, and partly to remind herself of the questions she would otherwise fail to ask.

‘Have either of you noticed a blue Vauxhall Astra in the village recently? No? A vehicle of any kind acting suspiciously?’

‘No.’

‘Any vehicles at all visiting Bain House?’

‘We can’t see the entrance to Bain House from here, so we wouldn’t know.’

‘And did you hear anything unusual on Saturday night, or in the early hours of Sunday morning?’

‘Our double glazing is very good. We don’t hear much noise at night.’

‘One final question, sir – do you possess a firearm of any description?’

Ridgeway hesitated. ‘I do have an air rifle.’

‘Oh? What power?’

‘No more than twelve foot pounds, so I don’t need a licence for it. I’m a law-abiding citizen, you see.’

‘What do you use an air rifle for? No, don’t tell me – let me guess. You use it for shooting squirrels.’

‘Also crows, rooks and magpies, which steal the eggs of song birds. They’re all classed as pests, so it’s lawful to shoot them on private property.’

‘I can understand that. But what’s the problem with squirrels?’

‘The invasion of grey squirrels has driven our native reds into remote sanctuaries, protected forests in Wales or Scotland. Now all they can do is cling on in dwindling numbers, powerless against an alien species.’ Ridgeway took a step towards her and lowered his voice. ‘Our kind of people are just like those red squirrels. We’re being driven out by the vermin.’

‘I think I’m finished here,’ said Fry.

As she was shown out, she wondered why the Ridgeways had bothered joining Neighbourhood Watch if they knew nothing about their neighbours and couldn’t even see the adjoining properties. But she supposed there was only one reason, from their point of view – they thought it would provide protection for themselves.

In the dining room, Martin Ridgeway tapped the barometer, as if out of habit. It appeared to be some kind of ritual before he opened the door of his barn conversion.

Fry looked over his shoulder. One hand pointed at ‘Stormy’ and the other at ‘Change’.

‘Is that good or bad?’ she said.

Ridgeway scowled. ‘The same as bloody usual.’

Rose Shepherd’s other neighbours were called Birtland. Cooper found their address to be a bungalow, with a long curving drive leading off Pinfold Lane. The property was only a few decades old, but built after the introduction of national park planning regulations. There were no red brick terraces and plaster porticos here, no incongruities like those allowed in some of the forties and fifties developments. This place was stone clad and mullioned, designed to blend in with its surroundings.

Even so, Cooper thought he would never get used to some of these new properties. They gave the impression that someone had sliced off a piece of landscape with a bulldozer and flattened an area big enough to plonk down a bungalow. There seemed to be no regard for the natural contours of the land.

‘Mrs Birtland?’

‘Yes?’ The grey-haired woman who answered his knock peered cautiously past a security chain.

He showed his ID. ‘DC Cooper, Edendale CID.’

‘Is it about the murder?’

‘Oh, I see someone’s been talking. Was it the officer who called earlier?’

‘No, but word gets around.’

Cooper smiled. He was pleased to hear that, for once. ‘May I come in? You can check my ID, if you want.’

‘No, that’s all right.’

She took the chain off and let him into the bungalow.

‘Edward and Frances, is that right?’

‘I’m Frances, Edward is my husband.’

‘And is Mr Birtland in?’

‘Yes, Ted’s in the back. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Cooper?’

‘No, thank you, Mrs Birtland. I won’t be keeping you long.’

Being called ‘Mr Cooper’ made him smile even more. That really was a rarity in this job.

‘Ted,’ called Mrs Birtland, ‘we’ve got a visitor.’

Edward Birtland didn’t get up when Cooper entered. He was seated in a well-used armchair by a random stone fireplace, a fragile man of about seventy. He held out a hand politely, and Cooper couldn’t do anything else but shake it. The grip of Mr Birtland’s fingers hardly registered.

‘So,’ he said, ‘how did you hear someone had been killed?’

‘The murder?’

‘Well …’

Frances Birtland chuckled. ‘It was Bernie. Our postman knows everybody.’

‘Of course he does.’

‘You brought him back to Foxlow when he’d nearly finished his round. He stopped and told a few people about it on the way home.’

‘I understand how Bernie Wilding knows everybody. The question I’ve come to ask you is how well you knew Rose Shepherd.’

‘We didn’t know her at all. She hadn’t been in the village long.’

‘About ten months,’ said Cooper. But it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that sort of period dismissed as if it was yesterday. Your family had to have lived in some of these villages for generations before you belonged.

‘Are you Foxlow people yourselves?’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Birtland. ‘We’ve lived here all our lives. We had a house on the High Street when we were married. We bought this little bit of land when Ted retired, and had the bungalow built. It took all the money we’d ever have – though we didn’t know it at the time.’

Cooper glanced at Mr Birtland, who smiled sadly and patted his wife’s hand.

‘I thought I had a good pension put away,’ he said, ‘with the company I worked for. But it didn’t turn out the way we planned. Once we’d paid for the bungalow, suddenly there was nothing left. So we just have our old age pensions to live on.’

‘The only way we could live any better is by selling the bungalow,’ said his wife.

‘And moving away from Foxlow, I suppose?’

She nodded. ‘And we could never do that.’

‘Can you think of anyone in the village who would have known Miss Shepherd better?’

Mrs Birtland shook her head. ‘No, not really.’

‘Have you tried the Ridgeways on the other side?’ said her husband. ‘They live in the barn conversion. Well, I say barn conversion – that was Church Farm until a few years ago. My grandfather was a cowman there. He worked for the Beeley family all his life. It’s gone now, and so have the Beeleys.’

‘One of my colleagues is talking to Mr and Mrs Ridgeway. Do you think they might have known Miss Shepherd well, then?’

‘We couldn’t say.’

‘Don’t you talk to the Ridgeways either?’

The Birtlands glanced at each other, exchanging some thought that they decided not to share with their visitor.

‘They moved into the village about the same time as Miss Shepherd,’ said Birtland finally. ‘So I suppose we tended to associate them together in our own minds. We didn’t know where any of them came from. Being located where we are, at this end of Pinfold Lane, we’ve started to feel as though we’ve been cut off from the rest of the village by incomers.’

‘I see.’

Birtland looked at him expectantly. ‘You haven’t asked us yet whether we heard anything,’ he said.

‘It was the next question, sir.’

‘Ah, good. Well, we’ve been thinking about it since we heard that Miss Shepherd had been killed. Was she shot?’

Cooper leaned forward. ‘Did you hear shots on Saturday night?’

‘Well, that answers my question,’ said Birtland with a chuckle. ‘We think maybe we did.’

‘What time would that have been?’

Birtland reached out to pat his wife’s hand again. ‘We disagree on that, I’m afraid.’

‘Ted thinks it was about two o’clock in the morning, but I think it was more like three,’ she said. ‘I don’t sleep too well sometimes, and I’m often starting to come awake by then.’

‘But you didn’t look at the clock to make sure?’

‘No, we didn’t. We didn’t take much notice, you see. We often hear people shooting around here. We always have, all our lives. As long as the shooting isn’t too near our house, we don’t bother. I don’t think Ted even woke up. If he did hear the shooting, he must have gone straight back to sleep, that’s all I can say.’

Birtland laughed. ‘I don’t suppose that’s much use to you.’

‘Could you say how many shots you heard?’ asked Cooper, afraid to go back to the DCI with anything so vague.

‘Two or three,’ said Mrs Birtland.

‘Or four,’ said her husband.

Cooper sighed. ‘Thank you.’

‘We would have come forward anyway when we heard somebody had been killed, you know. But we were told you’d be calling today.’

‘That’s all right.’

Mrs Birtland accompanied Cooper to his car. ‘I’m sorry if we don’t appear very hospitable,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry. But if you do happen to remember anything more about Miss Shepherd, or about any visitors she had –’

‘Yes, of course, we’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you.’

Frances Birtland looked up the street towards the village. ‘You know, we always thought we’d be comfortably off when we got old,’ she said. ‘But look at us now. There are young kids around here who get more pocket money to spend than we get in pension. The world’s gone crazy, don’t you think? And it was just our luck to be at the wrong end of our lives when it happened.’

Cooper knew what Fry would have said if she’d been at the Birtlands’ with him. ‘So much for neighbourliness. What happened to that famous community spirit you’re always telling me about, Ben?’

When he picked her up, Fry was about a hundred yards further down the road from the Ridgeways’ barn conversion, on the corner of the High Street. She seemed to be looking at the square tower of the church rising above yew trees in the graveyard, and at a cottage next to it, with honeysuckle hanging from the roof of the porch.

‘Any luck?’ he said when she got into the car.

‘They didn’t hear anything. Their double glazing is too good. You?’

‘The Birtlands might have noticed the shots. But they’ve been here all their lives, and they’re used to hearing people shooting rabbits.’

They pulled in through the gates of Bain House and parked behind a dog handler’s van.

‘By the way, the Ridgeways think Rose Shepherd was a foreigner,’ said Fry.

‘That’s funny. The Birtlands think the Ridgeways are foreigners.’

Fry snorted. ‘They’re from Luton.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Oh, I see. So the Ridgeways are the awful incomers. What happened to that famous –’

‘I know, I know.’

‘Also, Mr Ridgeway kept banging on about grey squirrels. He seems to have a bit of an obsession with them.’

‘They’re a big problem,’ said Cooper. ‘The government ought to do something to eradicate them.’

Fry just groaned. And Cooper wondered what he’d said wrong this time.

8

Moira Lowther gave her son another hug. ‘Take care, John. Give us a call if you need to talk. You know we’re here, don’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s all right.’

She looked suddenly anxious and tried to hold him back. ‘And you’re taking – You’re doing everything you should, dear?’

‘It’s fine. Everything’s under control.’

He walked back down the path, no longer seeming to care whether he stepped on the tortoises, or whether the angel was close enough to speak to. His green Hyundai stood at the kerb, just out of sight below the wall.

Moira watched him until he vanished from view, and listened for his car driving away. Then she turned back to her husband. ‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘Just Tony.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, he used to work for the company. He went off a few months ago to set up on his own account.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember. He was the one I didn’t like.’

Lowther laughed. ‘You and your likes and dislikes. Tony was always loyal to the company. Unlike some of these others, deserting a sinking ship.’

‘Is it that bad, Henry?’

‘Oh, we’ll survive.’

‘I don’t want to have to think about it right now.’

‘None of us do.’

She gazed down the road, though the Hyundai was long since gone.

‘Do you think John will be all right?’ she said.

‘We’d better keep an eye on him. He’s very upset.’ Lowther put an arm round his wife. ‘And how are you coping?’

The question seemed to start her tears all over again, and tears turned to deep, racking sobs. It was a few moments before she could get her breath back.

‘How did it happen?’ she said. ‘How on earth did it happen?’

‘Hell, I don’t know.’

Mrs Lowther pulled out a tissue to dry her eyes. They both stood in their garden in silence for a while, listening to the trickle of water, the chatter of a blackbird. No one watching them could have told what they were thinking, or whether the Lowthers were even thinking the same thoughts.

‘Well, we have to make sure we look after the living now, don’t we?’ said Moira. ‘That’s the most important thing.’

Henry Lowther patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted,’ he said.

‘Between two and four a. m.?’ said Hitchens when Cooper and Fry returned to Bain House. ‘Is that the best they could do?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, it falls bang in the middle of our time scale, anyway. So it helps a bit, I suppose.’

‘We’re no closer to filling in details of Miss Shepherd’s background, though,’ said Fry.

Hitchens shook his head. ‘Not much nearer. Although the owners of the village shop think Rose Shepherd’s accent might have been Irish.’

‘Do they? But her passport says she was British. Born in London.’ Fry laughed. ‘It’s possible, though. Irish is foreign enough for folk round here.’

‘Why don’t we put it to Bernie Wilding?’ suggested Cooper.

But Hitchens shook his head. ‘It would be leading him too much. At the moment, he can’t identify Miss Shepherd’s accent, but if we suggest a particular nationality, he might try to make all his recollections fit in with the suggestion. I bet we could get him to agree that Rose Shepherd was an Iraqi or an Australian – anything we like the sound of.’

‘The name Shepherd sounds more Australian than Iraqi,’ pointed out Cooper.

‘I meant those as examples,’ said Hitchens. ‘Wake up, Ben.’

‘I was joking.’

‘Right. Well, it hasn’t been a laugh a minute round here, I can tell you – not with Mr Kessen in the mood he’s in. We have found a laptop, though. It was in the bottom drawer of the victim’s wardrobe.’

‘Well, that’s good news,’ said Fry. ‘Has it been checked out yet?’

‘We haven’t had time to go through the files, but Miss Shepherd definitely had internet access. It looks as though she used an ordinary modem dial-up connection, so she could have used the laptop right there in the bedroom, plugged into the socket for the bedside phone.’

‘Any interesting email correspondence?’

‘Nothing obvious, apart from some junk mail. God knows why she kept that. But it looks as though she might have joined some online groups, because there were different aliases and screen names. It seems Rose Shepherd did have a social life, of a kind. But it was all online.’

‘By the way, I’ve got the package that the postman was trying to deliver,’ said Cooper. ‘It isn’t all that big, but it’s heavy for its size.’

‘Open it up. But be careful.’

When the cardboard packaging came off, they were looking at three books from an internet bookseller. Maeve Binchy, Danielle Steele, Josephine Cox.

‘Does that give us any clues?’ asked Hitchens.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper. ‘I once saw a Muslim woman in full chador buying a Danielle Steele novel in a supermarket, so I don’t think we can make any assumptions.’

‘The only surprise to me is that she ordered three books at once, since it meant they wouldn’t go into her letter box,’ said Fry.

‘Maybe they were on special offer,’ said the DI, moving away to answer his phone.

Fry waited for a quiet moment, then approached him between calls.

‘Sir, I’m going to need to review the house fire enquiry. You know, the triple death?’

‘Not now, Diane.’

‘But –’

‘Well, not unless you have firm evidence of malicious intent. Do you?’

‘No, sir. Not yet.’

‘Come back to me when you do, then.’

Fry bit her lip. She obviously wasn’t going to get a look-in on the Rose Shepherd enquiry. She was too junior in this company. But she had an enquiry of her own that she could make a mark with – if she could find the time to work it properly. The Darwin Street fire was low priority until malicious intent was proved. But there were ways around that problem.

She went outside and found Gavin Murfin. Ben Cooper would have been more useful, but his absence was likely to be noticed, so Murfin would have to do.

‘Ah, Gavin, you’re not doing very much,’ she said, taking hold of his arm and steering him towards her car.

‘Well, actually –’

‘Good. You’re with me.’

Somehow, Murfin had obtained a pork pie, which he was eating out of a paper bag. He’d got into the habit of bringing food with him if he thought he was going to be away from civilization for a few hours.

‘But if you drop bits of that pie in my car, Gavin, you know what’ll happen. And it won’t be pretty.’

Fry had to negotiate the lines of vehicles in Pinfold Lane to find somewhere to turn round. The only space was the entrance to the Birtlands’ driveway.

As she reversed to do her three-point turn, she saw Ben Cooper standing in the gateway of Bain House. He’d stopped to speak to one of the SOCOs, Liz Petty. It wasn’t clear whether she was working the scene, because she was still wearing her navy blue sweater with the Derbyshire Constabulary logo rather than a protective scene suit. Fry watched them for a moment as she changed gear. She saw Petty push back her dark hair and confine it in a clip behind her head. Her cheeks looked slightly pink as she laughed at something Cooper was saying.

‘They make a grand couple, don’t they?’ said Murfin, picking crumbs off the seat. ‘Ben and Liz, I mean,’ he added, as if it needed explaining.

‘Are they sleeping together?’ asked Fry, as casually as she could manage.

Murfin stopped hunting for crumbs. She could feel his eyes on her, wary and suspicious.

‘I dunno,’ he said.

‘You’re his friend, aren’t you, Gavin?’

‘Me and Ben? We go back years.’

‘You must know, then.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘It would only be gossip.’

He lowered his head between his knees, as if searching the floor for more debris.

‘I just wondered,’ said Fry.

In reply, all she got was a mumble from somewhere under the seat.

‘What did you say, Gavin?’

‘I said I can’t hear you.’

Fry let out the clutch suddenly. As the car jerked forward, Murfin’s head shot up from the footwell. His face was beetroot red from the blood rushing into it.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to kill me.’

Cooper went into the back garden of Bain House to look at the field where the SOCOs were still working under a white tent. Liz Petty had confirmed what he’d already guessed – the Foxlow shooting had put a lot of extra pressure on Scientific Support.

One of the complications was obvious. In effect, there were four separate crime scenes to be examined. For a start, there was Rose Shepherd’s bedroom, and the other rooms of her house. Officers conducting the search might hope to learn something about the victim’s life that would lead to her killers, or at least suggest a motive for her murder. But if, as they suspected, the attacker hadn’t entered the victim’s home, or even made direct contact with her, there would be no traces of him in the house. No DNA or fingerprints; no fibres or evidence of any kind.

Then there was the field. That at least had yielded some tyre marks. How clear they were would depend on how soft the ground had been, whether it had rained before the incident, and what the weather had been like since. Cooper looked at his watch, and pictured DCI Kessen doing the same thing, cursing the delay in the body being found. There wouldn’t be much else in the field, of course. If there were no shell casings or footwear impressions, then there wouldn’t be any dropped matches or cigarette ends either. But the suspect’s car had been driven close to the edge of the field. A tiny flake of paintwork left on a branch of the hawthorn hedge, maybe? A bumper scraped on the corner of a stone wall? But in a fifty-acre field? From dark paintwork? Needles and haystacks came to mind.

The most useful scene might be the third one: the suspect’s vehicle. If they ever found it, of course. There should be fibres on the seats, fingerprints on the door handles, sweat stains on the gear stick.

Cooper turned at a sound in the garden. A squirrel ran across the lawn and scuffled among the dead leaves on the flower beds. It was burying nuts before hibernation time came. Across the garden, another squirrel chattered with that strange cry they had, somewhere between the call of a bird and the mew of a cat.

From what Diane Fry had said, Mr and Mrs Ridgeway would hate this, if they saw it. If they were breeding here, there’d be a continuous supply of them to raid her neighbours’ gardens.

Cooper was approaching the end of his shift. His DI seemed to have forgotten him, Fry had already left Foxlow, and no one had mentioned overtime. Tomorrow would be hectic, though. By then some lines of enquiry would have emerged. Suddenly, there would be an insatiable demand for resources, and everyone would be rushed off their feet. He might as well take advantage of the lull.

He walked back into the house. Downstairs, the rooms were full of people. He could hear them opening drawers, taking photographs, rustling papers, talking and laughing among themselves. There were probably more people inside Bain House at this moment than had been over the doorstep in the whole of the last year. If Rose Shepherd walked in now, she wouldn’t recognize the place. She’d be like a shocked parent who’d come home unexpectedly to find the teenage children had moved the furniture, rolled up the carpets, and thrown a party that got out of hand.

The image of her bewildered reaction brought Cooper to a halt as he remembered the fourth crime scene. At this moment it was lying in the mortuary, waiting to be examined for whatever information it could yield. It was Rose Shepherd’s body.

After Fry had dropped Gavin Murfin off at West Street with his instructions, she drove straight back to Darwin Street. Things were happening here, at least. All the appropriate people were gathering, including the fire service’s divisional officer and his investigation team. Their brief was to work with the appointed investigating police officer – which was her, for now.

Her next job would be to decide whether the attendance of a forensic scientist was needed. Of course, she’d be mad to try to manage without an expert when three deaths were involved. It would be too late to change her mind once the scene had been compromised. But there was a procedure to be followed before she could commit resources.

Right now, the fire service had taken possession of the scene. They’d brought in their own dog team from Alfreton, and a chocolate brown Labrador bitch wearing blue protective boots and a reflective harness was being deployed by her handler in the ground-floor rooms of the Mullen house. A firefighter told her the dog was called Fudge, though her official title was ‘post-fire search tool’.

Never mind the fancy names. The important fact was that the dog could search the scene faster than any conventional equipment. It had been trained to locate the presence of flammable liquids that could have been used to start the fire, and then give a passive alert to the handler, so that evidence wasn’t disturbed.

To the dog, it was all a game. There’d be a reward when it found what it was looking for. More than Fry would get, probably. No one would be waiting to pat her on the head and give her a chicken-flavoured Schmacko.

Well, she didn’t like animals much, but she had to admit the Labrador’s expertise was a good example of focus, considering all the other smells that must have bombarded the dog when it entered the house. Lucky animal, not to have to worry about what these humans had been up to inside 32 Darwin Street.

Fry’s mobile rang. It was Murfin, his voice sounding slightly muffled as usual. If he wasn’t actually eating, he was salivating at the thought of his next snack.

‘Hi, Gavin.’

‘I called the hospital, like you told me. They say Brian Mullen is awake. He’ll be fit to be interviewed in the morning.’

‘Great.’

‘I suppose you’ll want to do that after the morning briefing?’

‘Yes, I want to get to him as soon as I can.’

‘Want me to come along?’

‘Er … no thanks, Gavin. There’ll be plenty for you to do on the Shepherd enquiry.’

‘OK. I don’t like hospitals anyway.’

As she ended the call, Fry saw the fire service dog padding across the debris in its blue boots. The animal was wagging its tail, happy to have done its bit. Was it Schmacko time already?

‘So what’s the result? Did the dog find anything?’

‘Yes. She identified accelerant in two locations in the sitting room,’ said the handler. ‘I’ve marked the locations for further investigation by the DO – or the forensic scientists, if you’re calling them in.’

‘Great job. Thanks.’

Fry was already reaching for her phone again. Traces of accelerant were evidence of malicious intent. A chocolate Lab called Fudge had just upped the stakes in this enquiry.

9

Below the hill, most of the fields at Bridge End Farm were still good grazing land. But much use that was to anybody now.

According to Matt, he would soon be a glorified park keeper instead of a farmer. Without headage payments, there was no way he could raise sheep, for a start. In future, British lamb would cease to exist, and everything the consumer bought would be flown in from New Zealand. It would happen the same way it did with Brazilian beef and Danish pig meat, he said. Countryside Stewardship schemes were all very well. Maintaining the landscape and conserving biodiversity? Fair enough. But Matt was baffled that the country didn’t see any value in an ability to feed itself.

Ben drew his car into the yard in front of the farmhouse, trying to imagine the place empty and deserted, cleared of its animals. Not just a silent spring, but silent all year round.

Bridge End had been one of those traditional mixed farms that had once characterized British agriculture. Animals were fed with crops grown on the farm, and in turn they fertilized the fields with manure for the next crop. For Ben and Matt, growing up on the farm, it had seemed such a logical and natural cycle that they assumed it would go on for ever. But even by the 1990s mixed farms had already become a quaint eccentricity.

Perhaps his father wouldn’t have cared too much. Joe Cooper had never really been interested in the farm. True, he had occasionally rolled up his sleeves to help. With his shirt open at the neck, he would reveal a rare, vulnerable flash of white skin and a proud smile at working alongside his two sons. It was one of the abiding images that Ben still carried – though, at the time, he hadn’t thought of his father as remotely vulnerable. Like the farm, it had seemed that Sergeant Joe Cooper would go on for ever.

He’d been trying to train himself to remember those happier images, instead of the one that had tormented him for years: the bloodied body on the paving stones that he’d never actually seen. Some of the youths responsible for Joe Cooper’s death were already back out in the world at the end of their sentences. Two years for manslaughter, that was all. First-time offenders, of course. Ben knew he was bound to run into one of them some day soon. It was probably futile to hope that he wouldn’t recognize them.

‘Bad do about that family in Edendale,’ said Matt when he greeted his brother in front of the house. ‘The fire, I mean.’

‘Yes, really bad.’

‘Are you working on that?’

‘We don’t know if it was malicious or not yet.’

‘It’s not good when kids are involved, whatever it was.’

Matt removed his boots and stripped off his overalls in the porch. A tabby cat immediately jumped up and inspected the overalls to see if they’d make a decent bed.

‘Actually, I was down at Foxlow earlier,’ said Ben. ‘We had a shooting.’

‘Oh, I heard,’ said Matt.

‘Did you?’

‘It was Neville Cross who found the body, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, not quite. But he made the call.’

‘Neville’s the NFU rep, you know.’

‘So the farmers’ grapevine has been busy, has it?’

‘Something like that.’

Matt stroked the cat absent-mindedly. His hand was huge, so it covered the animal’s head completely. Only its ears protruded, trembling with the vibration of a deep purr.

‘Come into the office, Ben. There’s something I want to show you.’

‘Is there room for two people?’

‘As long as you don’t mind sharing your breathing space with a smelly old dog.’

The farm office was cramped and untidy. It was the aspect of the farm that Matt paid least attention to, because it meant being indoors. Occasionally, Kate came in to help out with the paperwork and sort the mess into some kind of order, so they muddled through year by year, driving their accountants up the wall. ‘I’m a stockman, not a filing clerk,’ Matt would say. But deep down, he probably knew that this failing was the reason he was doomed. These days, farmers had to be business managers and entrepreneurs above anything else, if they wanted to survive.

Matt eased himself on to the office chair in front of the computer. He was filling out so much as he got older that he looked too big for the desk, like an adult sitting in an infants classroom.

‘I’ve been looking at the internet,’ he said.

‘Blimey, we’re going to have to watch you. At this rate you’ll be catching up with the twenty-first century.’

Matt scowled. ‘Most of it is a load of crap.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘In fact, I’ve never seen such crap.’

‘You have to learn how to filter out the rubbish to find the useful stuff.’

‘I’m a livestock farmer, so I know what crap is.’

‘Yes, Matt.’

Ben perched on the arm of a deep armchair. The chair itself was already occupied by an aged Border collie called Meg, who didn’t even bother opening an eye. She was there by right, and wasn’t moving for anybody. Ben wouldn’t have dreamed of booting her off.

Matt booted up and frowned at the screen as he waited to enter his password. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been looking at ideas for diversification again? What is it this time – rock festivals? You’ve got the fields, and the mud.’

‘That’ll be the day, when I let thousands of hippies camp on my land.’

‘It worked for Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.’

‘No, it didn’t. He had riots between gangs of rival jazz fans.’

Ben laughed. ‘What is it, then?’

‘It isn’t about the farm at all,’ said Matt gloomily, still staring at the screen.

Realizing that he wasn’t even denting his brother’s morose mood, Ben leaned forward to see what he was looking at. He’d brought up a website that must have been bookmarked in his favourites, because he hadn’t used the keyboard to type out a URL. Ben was surprised that Matt even knew how to do that.

‘It’s an article I found about schizophrenia,’ said Matt. ‘Well, to be more exact, about its inheritability.’

For a moment, Ben was thrown by the word ‘inheritability’. It was an expression he was accustomed to hearing from Matt, but strictly in relation to livestock breeding. Was a high-yielding cow likely to produce offspring that were also good milk producers? What percentage of lambs sired by a Texel ram would have the same muscle ratio? That was inheritability. Genetics played a big part in breeding animals for desirable characteristics. But schizophrenia? It didn’t make sense.

‘What on earth are you trying to tell me, Matt?’

‘It was something I heard one of the nursing home staff say, before Mum died. It hadn’t occurred to me before, and nobody ever mentioned the possibility. Not to me, anyway. I don’t know if they mentioned it to you, but you never said anything.’

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

‘It occurred to me that it might be like other conditions. Do you remember that family of Jerseys that were prone to laminitis? It was passed on from one generation to the next, and we never could breed it out. We had to get rid of them all in the end.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well, according to this, schizophrenia is hereditary, too.’

‘What?’

‘Ben, it’s for the sake of the girls as much as anything. I need to know what the odds are – the chances of schizophrenia being hereditary. Will you read it?’

Almost against his will, Ben ran his eyes over the text on the screen. It has been verified that schizophrenia runs in a family. People with a close relative suffering from schizophrenia have an increased chance of developing the disease. Parents with schizophrenia also increase the chances of passing the disease to their child.

He straightened up again. ‘I don’t want to know this, Matt.’

‘There’s more. Read the rest of it.’

‘No. This is ridiculous.’

‘I’ll print it out for you. You can read it later.’

‘I don’t want to read it later, thanks. I can’t understand why you’re doing this, Matt. What’s the point?’

‘What’s the point? It says that members of families vulnerable to schizophrenia can carry the genes for it, while not being schizophrenic themselves. They’re called “Presumed Obligate Carriers”.’

‘Matt, you don’t know anything about this stuff.’

‘I’m trying to find out. Look, there’s a bit of research here that talks about anticipation.’

‘What?’

‘The progress of an illness across several generations. They studied families affected by schizophrenia and found that, in each generation, more family members were hospitalized with the condition at an earlier age, and with increasing severity.’

‘And your conclusion, Doctor …?’

Matt pressed a couple of keys, and the laser printer whirred into life. He turned to face his brother.

‘My conclusion is, I reckon my kids could be eight times more likely than average to have schizophrenia.’

Ben shook his head. ‘It’s still a small chance, Matt. We were told that one in every hundred people suffers from schizophrenia. So even taking heredity into account, that’s only a maximum risk of, what … eight per cent?’

‘It’s a bit less than our risk, admittedly.’

‘Ours?’

‘Yours and mine, little brother. The children or siblings of schizophrenics can have as high as a thirteen per cent chance of developing the disease.’

Matt took a couple of sheets off the printer, stapled them together and held them out to his brother. Ben didn’t take them.

‘You actually believe all this stuff?’

‘Look at it, won’t you?’

But Ben shook his head and sat back down on the arm of the chair. Meg groaned and looked up at him accusingly with one tired eye. She was a dog who liked peace. Raising your voice in her sleeping area just wasn’t on.

Matt held up the pages again. ‘They think some families might lack a genetic code that counteracts the disease. You know, I’m wondering now if Grandma had schizophrenic tendencies. She had some strange habits – do you remember? But everyone in the family used to talk about her as if she was only a bit eccentric.’

‘I do remember her being rather odd, but that doesn’t mean a thing. It certainly doesn’t mean you’ll pass something on to the girls.’

‘You know, I’m trying to picture it,’ said Matt. ‘I can see myself, forever on the lookout for early-warning signs in Amy and Josie. It would be sensible, in a way – early intervention and treatment would result in the best prognosis. But what kind of effect would it have on the girls if we were watching all the time for telltale signs?’

Ben wasn’t sure who his brother was talking to now. He might as well be alone in the office with the dog.

‘Sometimes, I’m stopped cold by the thought that one of the girls could grow up to be like Mum. I might end up being afraid of my own child. At other times, I imagine what a relief it would be if my children turned out to have any other problem at all but schizophrenia. I feel as though I might be able to make some kind of deal with God.’

‘You don’t believe in God,’ said Ben.

‘No, I don’t. But it doesn’t stop me. It’s the idea of a bargain, playing with the percentages. I go over and over the figures in my head. Chances are, I say to myself, both the girls will be fine. And genes aren’t the only factor. Schizophrenia is only about seventy per cent inherited – which means thirty per cent is due to environmental factors, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So if we knew what other factors could influence people … If we knew, we might be able to create a different environment, so the genetic switch wouldn’t be flipped.’

‘Matt, you’re making far too much of this. You said yourself most of what you find on the internet is rubbish.’

‘“Crap”, I said. A steaming pile of cow flop, if you like. But not this. You know this isn’t rubbish, Ben.’

‘You’re worrying about nothing. Your children are perfectly OK.’

Ben’s attention was caught by a movement outside. The window looked out on to the narrow front garden and the farmyard beyond. His youngest niece, Josie, was sitting on the dividing wall.

‘That’s what I’m worrying about,’ said Matt.

Ben tapped on the window so that Josie looked up, and he waved. She giggled, waved back, then blew him a kiss.

‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with Josie,’ he said. ‘Or Amy, for that matter.’

‘Do you remember before she started school, Josie had an imaginary friend? She used to say her friend was with her, and talked to her all the time.’

‘For God’s sake, every child has an imaginary friend at that age, Matt.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘That’s because you had no imagination.’

‘Thanks.’

Turning back to the window, Ben saw Josie poke her tongue out at him, perhaps because she’d lost his attention for a moment.

‘Does she still have that imaginary friend?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Matt. ‘Josie doesn’t mention her any more, not since she started school. But that might be because she realized other people found it odd, so she stopped talking about it.’

‘Or it might be because she has real friends now and doesn’t need the imaginary one.’

‘Do you think so, Ben?’

‘With the best will in the world, it was a bit lonely up here for Josie when Amy was already at school and she wasn’t.’

‘Time will tell, I suppose,’ said Matt. ‘But I have to find out the facts. It was me who made the decision to have children. Well, me and Kate.’

‘Have you talked to Kate about it?’

Matt ran a hand across his face. ‘I need to know what to tell her first.’

‘When you were looking up all this information on the internet, did you come across any advice? What do they say you should do?’

‘Talk to a psychiatrist.’

‘And that’s what you’re going to do, right?’

Matt sighed. ‘According to some of these websites, the genetics of mental illness will be much better understood in twenty years’ time. But there isn’t much chance of research having practical applications within five years – when it would be useful to me. Or useful to you, Ben.’

‘I’m not planning on having kids any time soon.’

‘You’re past thirty. You won’t want to wait that much longer. Men have a body clock, too.’

‘If you say so.’

‘What about that girlfriend of yours?’

‘Liz? We’re just … Well, we’re just going out together, that’s all.’

Matt raised his eyebrows and gave him a sceptical glance.

‘What?’ said Ben.

‘Nothing. I just think you’ve been different since you got together with her.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

His brother snorted. ‘Be that as it may. In the end, Ben, you’ll have to face the fact that no one can tell you whether a child of yours will be healthy, or vulnerable to schizophrenia.’

‘That’s one thing I’m not going to worry about,’ said Ben firmly.

A few minutes later, he left his brother in the office and went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house. When he was a child, the passage and stairs had been gloomy places. He remembered dark brown varnish, and floorboards painted black alongside narrow strips of carpet that had lost its colour under layers of dirt.

Things were very different now. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor, and the walls were painted white. Or maybe it was some shade of off-white. Kate would know the exact name from the catalogue. The wood had been stripped back to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch the light.

Reluctantly, Ben turned and looked up the stairs. At the top, he could see the first door on the landing, the one that had been his mother’s bedroom. After the death of his father, she had gradually deteriorated until the family could no longer hide from each other the fact that she was mentally ill.

Isabel Cooper had been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia, and finally the distressing incidents had become untenable, especially with the children in the house. Ben shuddered at the memory. He never wanted to witness anything like that, ever again.

On a Monday night in October, Matlock Bath’s Derwent Gardens were deserted. There was no one to be seen on the paths between the flower beds and the fountain, no one near the bandstand or the tufa grotto. The sycamores along the riverside were turning golden yellow. Their leaves drifted across the paths, undisturbed by passing feet.

At the far end of the gardens, past a row of stalls under striped awnings, was a temporary fairground. An old-fashioned waltzer and a ferris wheel, a train ride, a set of dodgem cars, all silent and still.

A figure approached from the direction of the Pavilion, a man in an overcoat, walking along the river bank, past the jetty where boats were tied up ready to take part in Saturday’s parade. He wandered apparently aimlessly, kicking at tree roots, making the fresh, dry leaves crackle under his feet.

He passed the waltzer and ferris wheel and found himself near a small hut that served as a ticket booth for the rides.

By the door of the hut, he stopped. There was no one visible in the darkness inside. But still he kept his eyes turned away, gazing up at the tower on the Heights of Abraham, high above the village. That was the place he’d rather be, surrounded by rushing air, with the wind loud in his ears. But the hilltop amusement parks had closed for the day.

‘It’s done, then? All over with.’

He froze. The whisper might have come from the hut, or from the river bank behind him. Or it might have been inside his head.

‘Yes, all over,’ he said.

Beyond the hut, he could see the dodgems lurking in the gloom of their wooden circuit, like a cluster of coloured beetles. There was a Rams windscreen sticker on a Leyland truck, backed up on the other side of the circuit. One of the operators of the fairground must be a Derby County fan. He wondered if the truck contained the generator that ran the cars, bringing life to the beetles, making them crackle and spark.

‘You’re evil, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’ he said.

‘Really evil.’

He was distracted by the sound of the fountain splashing. A spray of water caught by the breeze spattered on to the rose bushes. Tip-tap, like tiny footsteps.

‘I’m not listening any more.’

Laughter swirled in his mind, making him shiver. ‘Too late.’

John Lowther pulled his overcoat closer around his shoulders as he walked away, scuffing his feet in the leaves. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do next. And he wasn’t at all sure about the voice, that awful disembodied whisper. It had sounded like the voice of a child.

10

Tuesday, 25 October

An incident room had been opened up in Edendale for the Rose Shepherd enquiry. A fatal shooting was still rare enough in Derbyshire to make Miss Shepherd’s murder a high-profile case, even if she hadn’t been a respectable middle-class woman gunned down in her own home.

Watching the staff arriving at E Division headquarters, Cooper deduced that the HOLMES system was being activated. He recognized an allocator he’d worked with on a previous enquiry. The others would be data inputters, a receiver, an analyst.

With no obvious lines of enquiry that might lead to a quick conclusion, the HOLMES computer indexes would be vital in sniffing out correlations as information came in. One tiny detail could send the investigation in a new direction.

Before the morning briefing started, Cooper joined a small crowd examining the display of crime-scene photographs from Bain House and the field behind it. Some of the interior shots showed the victim from different angles before her body was removed to the mortuary. On the lower part of her torso, where it was in contact with the floor, there was a large, bruise-like discoloration that he hadn’t noticed before. That was dependent lividity – the effect of gravity on blood that was no longer being pumped through the veins. At least it showed that no one had moved the victim after she was killed.

‘The victim was killed with a semi-automatic weapon, at least three shots fired in rapid succession,’ said DI Hitchens, opening the briefing. ‘We know it wasn’t a bolt-action rifle. Since even one of the shots would have put her down on the floor, the second shot has to have followed rapidly to strike the victim before she fell. Otherwise, she’d have been out of sight below the window sill, with no chance of a second shot hitting its target.’

Officers around the room began to call out questions, their voices difficult to distinguish.

‘What about the third shot?’ asked someone.

‘If we follow a rough trajectory from the impact to a point in the field where the suspect’s vehicle was positioned, we see that the third shot passed through the window at about the same height and the same angle as the others. Exactly where the victim had been standing, in other words. So the third shot was probably fired after she’d already started to fall. That’s why it missed.’

‘Could that have been the first shot, rather than the third? I mean a miss, followed by two hits when the shooter got the range?’

‘Possibly. But the other two shots were very accurate. A head shot, and one near the heart. Besides, if you heard a shot and felt a high-velocity bullet whizz past your head, your first instinct would be to dive for cover.’

They all looked at the photographs of Rose Shepherd with a dark hole in her chest and another near her left eye. Her right eye remained open, staring in amazement at the ceiling.

‘This lady did none of those things, so far as we can judge,’ said Hitchens. ‘It appears the bullets struck her before she could react. But we’ll get the opinion of the pathologist, of course.’

The DI paused, but there were no questions, so he continued: ‘We’ve got preliminary reports from the teams on house-to-house. We’re looking for a blue Vauxhall Astra that was seen in Foxlow in the early hours of Sunday morning, about the time of the shooting.’

‘Just one sighting?’

‘No, two. The Astra was seen driving into the village about eleven thirty, and leaving at about three a.m. It’s possible some of the neighbours heard shots between two a.m. and four, but we can’t narrow down the time of the shooting any further than that right now. So I’ve asked for input from the intel unit. We need a list of pos sibles who fit the MO.’

‘What about prison releases?’

‘Yes. Any suggestions?’

‘You know our intelligence feed from HQ is never up to date, sir.’

‘We’ll have to use the informal mechanisms, then,’ said Hitchens.

‘You mean “phone a friend”?’

‘That’s right.’

There were a few ironic laughs around the room. Yes, sometimes the old ways were still the best, they seemed to say.

Another hand went up. ‘What about the gun, sir?’

‘Well, we don’t have the weapon yet,’ said Hitchens. ‘But we do have some bullets. Unfortunately, the heat generated by firing a gun destroys any DNA on the bullets. It’s sometimes worth having a look at the casings, though.’

‘But there aren’t any casings.’

‘Yes, there are. We just don’t know where.’

At one time, Cooper would have tried to stay at the back of the room during these briefings. If you sat at the front, you might be expected to contribute, and he’d never really had the confidence to do it in front of a crowd of people, most of them more experienced than he was. When he did have ideas, he usually preferred to share them discreetly with his DS or the DI, in case he was scoffed at.

But today, he found himself near the front, propped against the wall where Hitchens could see him. Cooper suspected the DI would pick him out at some point. He’d been a member of the force’s competition shooting team for several years, and he knew a bit about guns. Just as he did about lamping – though he’d only ever taken part in the legal kind. Well, probably. Even better, he knew a few people who were obsessed with guns, including some Territorial Army members, the weekend soldiers who trained in their spare time for reserve duty in Bosnia or Iraq.

Hitchens cocked an eye towards him. ‘Anything you want to contribute at this stage, DC Cooper?’

He straightened up, trying not to notice all the eyes suddenly turned towards him.

‘If we’re looking at the possibility of a professional hit, I can tell you that snipers are trained to pick up their brass,’ he said. ‘That would explain why there are no casings. They’re also told not to leave other clues to their identity or their shooting location. A trained person reconnoitres the site and selects a place that gives him cover and an escape route. Then he takes his shot. But normally only one – the sniper’s motto is “one shot, one kill”.’

‘But this suspect took three shots.’

‘To me, that doesn’t sound like a real professional.’ ‘There was no sign of any casings in the field, so we presume our suspect stayed long enough to pick them up.’

‘Well …’ began Cooper.

‘Yes?’

‘At night, in a ploughed field, that would be quite tricky. You’d be lucky to find one, let alone all three.’

‘True,’ agreed Hitchens, looking at him with interest.

Cooper leaned back for a moment and pictured the scene. He imagined himself sitting at the wheel of a car at night, in a ploughed field, with the driver’s window open and three bullet casings lying on the ground somewhere outside the vehicle.

‘Not just tricky,’ he said. ‘It would mean the suspect getting out of the car and leaving his footprints in the soil. He would pick up earth on his shoes and trail it back into the vehicle. That’s three possibilities for trace evidence. But the scenario doesn’t fit, does it? It’s not consistent with the planning before and after the hit.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.