For one second, she was floating. Sailing out into grey nothingness like a bird released from its cage. Cold, damp air wrapped round her body as she flung out her arms and kicked her feet in a desperate attempt to find solid rock.

She tried to scream, but the breath was torn from her throat as she fell. All she could hear was a faint, distant cry, the mewl of a terrified animal, bouncing back from the muffling curtain, drowned by the crashing of water. Her waterproof rattled against her shoulders like battered wings; her hair blew free and smothered her face. She could see nothing, feel nothing, taste only the bitter tang of fear in her mouth.

It happened so fast that her brain wasn’t quick enough to work out what was going on. The fall was too quick, too short and too sudden. The impact killed her instantly.

As she lay on the rock, with her blood dripping between the gritstone slabs, a bird called from the plateau. It was a long, mournful shriek like the voice of a spirit, a phantom that haunted Kinder Downfall.

Almost before she’d stopped breathing, a swirl of mist snaked across her legs and settled in her hair, clutching her in its chilly embrace, hiding her body from view. It would be hours before she was found, a day before they carried her down.

But hers wasn’t the first death on the mountain. Another woman had lain here, decades before. She’d left the memory of herself on this rock, though not her name. The Downfall had seen more than its share of blood.

And that was why they called this place Dead Woman’s Drop.

Detective Inspector Ben Cooper knew he was in the right place when he saw the tape. The way some officers strung it up at a crime scene made it look so untidy, as if a puppy had run amok with a roll of toilet paper and trailed it all over the street.

At the far end of Haddon Close, he found blue-and-white coils tied in unsightly knots round lamp posts, fluttering in strands from a fence and lying in sodden heaps on the pavement. Someone had managed to get every horizontal length of it upside down too — quite an achievement considering how often it had been twisted. The message POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS was illegible to anyone not standing on their head.

But it seemed to have worked its magic. That or the bored scene guard staring into the distance with his arms folded across his chest had special powers of some kind. Inquisitive members of the public were noticeably absent for such an open and vulnerable crime scene.

‘No, Strictly Come Dancing is on the telly,’ said the guard when Cooper stopped to ask him. ‘It’s the start of a new season.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘There were plenty of folk around earlier on, though. And there’ll be a few drunks later, when the pubs shut. I’m due to be relieved by then.’

‘Anyone else on scene?’

‘DC Hurst and the CSIs. And DS Fry is still here from the Major Crime Unit.’

‘OK, thanks.’

The guard noted Cooper’s identity and the time of his arrival on a clipboard and lifted a strand of the tape for him to duck under.

The house was a fairly unremarkable semi-detached property sitting in a quiet corner of an Edendale housing estate. It looked as though it had been built sometime in the last twenty years, with stone cladding to blend in with the traditional building style of the Peak District.

Cooper stopped at the Forensic Investigation van and struggled into a scene suit before he entered the inner cordon. Stepping plates had been laid on the drive, and he could see a trail of splattered blood leading from the open front door.

He already knew some of the story. For once, this murder inquiry was almost cleared up before he arrived. Some cases had no mystery about them at all. The killing of Danielle Atherton required hardly any investigation or the identification of a suspect, just the collection and analysis of evidence, and the building of a watertight case for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Because there hardly seemed any doubt, did there? Not only had Danielle’s husband still been standing over her body when the first response officers arrived, but he was also the person who made the 999 call. Most people who committed murder had no idea what to do next. For many, their first instinct was to phone the police, or call for an ambulance.

So that was what Gary Atherton had done. On the recording of the emergency call Cooper had listened to, Atherton could be heard saying, ‘You’d better come. I think I’ve just killed my wife.’

Case closed? Well, almost.

Unfortunately, people had been known to make false confessions, to pick up a knife and say they’d done it, perhaps to protect someone else. Or they might even convince themselves they had done it. A confession wasn’t enough on its own. The evidence had to support it, and be convincing.

Diane Fry had barely exchanged a word with Ben Cooper since the last time they’d met. Now, he saw her standing in the Athertons’ kitchen. Even in the unflattering scene suit and hood, he recognised the angle of her head and stiffness of her shoulders.

Cooper watched her for a moment from the doorway. He was expecting an announcement at any time about her promotion to DI in Major Crime at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, but it hadn’t come yet. They would be back at the same rank again, the way they were when they first met as DCs in Edendale after Fry transferred from the West Midlands.

He wanted to ask someone about the promotion, but there was no one he felt able to approach. It didn’t seem appropriate, though curiosity was consuming him.

But something was going to happen. Cooper could feel it in the air, sense it in that unacknowledged network of signals that constantly flowed through a large organisation like the police force. You grew attuned to their sound after a while in the job. The change in tone of emails on a particular subject, the sudden absence of someone’s name on the list of recipients or the warnings to watch out for some kind of professional misconduct that he’d never even thought of but that someone, somewhere in the organisation must have committed.

And then there were the ominous mutterings about spending reviews, which always led to doom-laden speculation about whose budget would be cut next. Sometimes the tone could be unintentionally disturbing. A flow of vague information created a hotbed for rumour.

Of course, it was possible that Fry wouldn’t get the DI vacancy at EMSOU even if she was promoted. Like Cooper himself, she was still employed by Derbyshire Constabulary and was only on assignment to the regional unit. She could be redeployed to anywhere in the county, even back into uniform or to a desk job at Ripley.

That thought made Cooper laugh. The image of Diane Fry sitting at a desk in an office at headquarters sending out memos and chairing meetings was just too incongruous.

Just at that moment, Fry turned and saw him. Her eyes narrowed.

‘What are you smiling at?’ she said.

‘Good to see you too.’

Her expression didn’t change. ‘I’m busy here, as you can see.’

‘I know. I came to ask if you needed any assistance. Your colleagues from EMSOU seem to have left you on your own.’

‘I can manage, thank you.’

She made it sound as if he’d insulted her. Cooper shrugged inside his scene suit. Fry had always been stubborn and independent. But a refusal to accept help when it was offered seemed to Cooper like a weakness, not a strength.

‘I don’t doubt it, Diane.’

Fry suddenly softened under his gaze.

‘So how are you?’ she said.

Well, that was almost human. She’d apparently remembered how to greet people she knew.

‘I’m fine, thanks. Busy, as always. What about you? Anything new?’

‘Not really.’

Cooper moved closer to where she was standing. The sleeves of their scene suits rustled against each other, a papery whisper in the silence of the Athertons’ kitchen.

He looked down to see what Fry had been examining so closely when he came in. A book lay open on the kitchen table, a bloody thumbprint left clear and distinct on the edge of a page.

‘A recipe book?’ he said.

‘Mary Berry’s Fast Cakes,’ said Fry.

‘Is this what the argument was over?’

Fry nodded. ‘Maybe they just weren’t fast enough,’ she said.

Cooper leaned a little nearer to peer at the book. Pineapple upside-down cake. It sounded good. But it would never be made now.

A crime scene examiner entered the kitchen and they backed away to allow him to dust for more fingerprints.

‘This should be an easy one anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘Maybe. Most of them are hard going.’

Hard going. That was exactly how he thought of making conversation with Diane Fry. She gave so little, though he knew she had a lot more she could give if she wanted to. But that was the way she was, and she would probably never change. Fry would always be hard work.

‘Your colleagues from St Ann’s have abandoned you, then?’ said Cooper.

‘They aren’t in St Ann’s any more. They’ve moved somewhere else.’

‘Oh yes. Their secret base. The one everybody knows about.’

‘They have other priorities,’ said Fry.

‘Anything I should be aware of?’

Fry didn’t bother to answer this time, and Cooper wasn’t surprised.

The noise going on around them hardly mattered. They had nothing else to say to each other, and it might as well have been silence.

Outside, Cooper looked up and saw the first signs of mist slowly rolling down from the hills above Edendale.

Patiently Diane Fry waited until long after Ben Cooper had left the crime scene and driven out of Haddon Close. She watched from the window of the Athertons’ sitting room as Cooper’s red Toyota disappeared round the corner on its way back to the local police station in Edendale’s West Street.

Then Fry got out of the town as quickly as she could. She found it hard to believe that she’d once lived in this backwater. Yes, Edendale was changing, but very slowly. In a few decades’ time, it might reach the twenty-first century. There were still villages around the Eden Valley where you couldn’t get a mobile-phone signal, where the erratic broadband connection was slower than one megabit per second at best. There were Third World countries with better facilities than that.

Yet each year a large proportion of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale. Even today, in late October, the market square was choked by the volume of traffic, either passing through or looking for parking spaces. Most of them clustered by the bridge over the River Eden or strolled along steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick I’th Tor. Pubs and tearooms and craft shops jostled for space in the alleys, attracted by the influx of tourists. Fry had seen enough of them during her time in Edendale.

Beyond the town centre, the road climbed steadily out of the valley. Residential streets spiralled up the hillsides, with houses lining narrow, winding lanes that twisted and turned to follow the undulating landscape.

And that was another problem. The older houses hadn’t been built for people who owned cars and as a result vehicles were parked nose to tail along the kerb, making driving on those lanes like tackling an obstacle course.

On the edge of Edendale, she passed a series of small council estates, which petered out into farmland. In some places, it was difficult to see where the town became country, with fields full of sheep lying side by side with unused farm buildings converted into designer homes. For now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of the surrounding hills. But eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of land and the town would continue to spread. Fry hoped she wouldn’t be around to see it.

After half an hour, she left the gathering mist behind her as the hills began to level out. She was on the Flying Mile, a flat, straight stretch of the A632 between Chesterfield and Matlock, when Fry took a call from her boss at the Major Crime Unit, DCI Alistair Mackenzie.

‘DS Fry?’ he said. ‘Are you on your way back from Derbyshire?’

‘I’m en route now. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’

He grunted, and she pictured Mackenzie checking his watch. It was an automatic reaction, something he always did when anybody mentioned an interval of time, as if he had to confirm for himself that thirty minutes was a genuine measurement on the clock. Some of the staff at EMSOU called him the Time Lord, though only ever behind his back, of course.

‘We’ll wait for you,’ he said.

‘Wait for me why?’ said Fry. ‘What’s happening, sir?’

‘We’ve got an operation on this afternoon. We’re all ready to go, but I want you to be part of it.’

Fry felt her foot press down on the accelerator instinctively.

‘I’ll be there in twenty.’

‘Great stuff.’

He didn’t even pause to look at his watch this time, just ended the call. There would probably be a room full of officers somewhere kicking their heels and waiting for him to give the word.

Feeling the catch of excitement in her chest, Fry swung the Audi out of Matlock and up the hill through Tansley towards the motorway. The Major Crime Unit had moved from its offices at St Ann’s Police Station in Nottingham, and now she had to drive to the northern outskirts of the city every morning to reach the new EMSOU base just off junction 27 of the M1.

It was actually twenty-five minutes before she drew into the car park and keyed in the security code. She could feel the buzz as soon as she entered the building. Detective Constable Jamie Callaghan greeted her as she walked into the office.

‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘I think the boss is starting to get itchy.’

‘What’s up?’

‘We’re raiding an illegal firearms dealer.’

‘A dealer? Or the customers?’

‘West Midlands are rounding up the gangs. But the dealer is on our patch.’

Callaghan led her straight to the briefing room, where a photo of a man in his fifties with a short grey beard was being projected onto a screen.

‘This is Mark Brentnall,’ DCI Mackenzie was saying. ‘He’s a registered firearms dealer with a legitimate business, but he has a much more lucrative illegitimate trade on the side. We believe Mr Brentnall is a crucial link in an underground network supplying sawn-off shotguns to organised crime groups. His particular expertise is in shortening barrels and removing serial numbers.’

He turned and nodded at Fry and Callaghan as they entered the room.

‘Today we’ll be carrying out simultaneous raids on his business premises and his home address. Our colleagues in Birmingham are targeting the individuals believed to be sourcing the weapons and distributing them to criminal associates across the West Midlands. This is the culmination of a complex investigation that we hope will lead to significant prison sentences and to illegally held guns and drugs being removed from the streets. OK, let’s get ready.’

Fry collected a bulletproof vest and joined the rest of the team as they piled into a convoy of vehicles and headed back onto the M1.

She found herself sitting with two other EMSOU officers, a DS and a DC seconded from Nottinghamshire Police. She said hello but got barely a murmur in return from either of them. The DS turned away as if he didn’t even want to acknowledge her presence. Fry frowned. That seemed rude. Perhaps he was just that sort of person, though. She looked at the DC, who was staring at her as if she were an alien visitor. She stared back until he blinked and lowered his head in embarrassment.

What was the matter with these people? They made her feel like an unwanted interloper. She wondered for a moment what had been said in the briefing before she arrived. She didn’t enjoy the feeling that people had been talking about her behind her back.

Mark Brentnall’s home was deep in the countryside south of Nottingham, verging on the border with Leicestershire near the River Soar. When they got close to the address, many of the road signs pointed towards Loughborough or Melton Mowbray.

A vanload of officers from the task force went in first, smashing open the front door with the ram. Then they crowded into the house with shouts of ‘Police!’

But Mr Brentnall wasn’t there. In the sitting room, they found a woman standing open-mouthed at the sight of the police officers in her home. For a moment, Fry and the woman stared at each other as the team moved on to clear the rest of the rooms.

‘Mrs Brentnall?’ she said.

‘Yes. What...?’

‘Where is your husband?’

‘He’s out in his car.’

‘Where is he going?’

‘I don’t know. Business.’

The woman began to reach for something hidden behind a chair. Fry lunged forward and grabbed her hand.

‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Let me see what you’re reaching for.’

But it was only a mobile phone. Mrs Brentnall’s instinct had been like anyone else’s — to phone her husband to tell him what was happening.

‘Please don’t do that,’ said Fry. ‘Just sit down quietly or we’ll have to arrest you.’

She left a uniformed officer to watch over the woman and joined the search. In an extension to the rear of the house, they found a workshop full of equipment used for shortening shotgun barrels and stocks. Scores of well-worn hand tools hung in racks on a breezeblock wall over a cluttered workbench fitted with a vice and a bright lamp. The air was thick with the smell of dust and metal filings. A number of freshly cut barrels lay on a table, and a locked cabinet contained several handguns and boxes of ammunition.

Fry reflected on the moment Mrs Brentnall had reached for her phone. This was a house full of guns. It could have ended much worse.

She turned to make a comment to the Nottinghamshire DS, who was also in the workshop examining a handgun. But he turned away again and wouldn’t meet her eye as he replaced the handgun in the cabinet.

Something was going on. Fry was sure about it now.

And then the walking group had reached the Downfall. Sophie Pullen shuddered as the air began to grow chill on Kinder Scout, the atmosphere even colder, the sense of foreboding stronger and stronger.

The Downfall was the tallest waterfall in the Peak District, with a hundred-foot drop where the River Kinder tumbled off the edge of the plateau. The rocks below looked like the debris of a massive explosion, hurled across a cleft in the hillside. The path had become a long streak of exposed ground scoured by rainfall. Pools of water lay stained red by the peat.

Yet this was part of the Pennine Way, the national walking trail that ran two hundred and sixty-seven miles all the way to the Scottish border, rerouted from its original path across the plateau because of the erosion from thousands of hiking boots.

On a clear day, the outline of Madwoman’s Stones would stand out clear on the horizon at the eastern edge of the plateau. But it wasn’t clear today. There were no landmarks, no points of reference on the plateau and no way of navigating a route across the featureless moor without a compass.

The track they’d been following seemed to have disappeared, too, and was no more than a flattened trail of soggy ground, barely a sheep track. Everyone’s feet would be wet now.

Sophie broke into a trot and overtook Liam, who grumbled in protest. She was determined to catch up with Nick and the others before she lost contact completely. The burly shoulders of the Goulds came into view, but there was no sign of Faith or Jonathan. Faith was sensible, though. She wouldn’t stray too far. She’d probably only veered away to shepherd her younger brother back to the route. He had a tendency to wander off, as if following a route and destination of his own.

She could hear Darius again now. He was laughing at the fog and calling to Elsa as if he couldn’t see her. The poor woman would be distraught. She stuck to Darius like glue and hated to be parted from him. His joke wouldn’t go down well.

Then she saw Darius and Nick. They’d stopped and were looking vaguely around them.

‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘Completely,’ agreed Nick.

‘Well, that’s just great.’

‘If we keep walking, we’ll find our way eventually,’ said Darius.

‘Eventually?’ said Sophie. ‘I’d like to get off this mountain today, if you don’t mind.’

Faith Matthew’s red hat and jacket appeared again through the fog. Nick peered over his shoulder towards Sophie and waited for her to reach him. Faith stopped too, and they were both watching her as she stumbled over a rock and splashed into a patch of boggy ground, the peaty water leaking instantly into her boots and soaking her socks.

‘Damn,’ she said.

Sophie felt her cheeks burn, even as her feet became cold and wet. Nick said nothing about her stumble as she shook a clump of mud off her boot.

‘What do you think?’ said Faith, gesturing at the surrounding plateau.

She was speaking to Nick, but he turned away as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘I think there could be anything out there in this fog,’ said Sophie. ‘Or anyone.’

‘I know. It’s a bit scary, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to be up here on my own.’

‘Sometimes there are worse things than being on your own,’ said Sophie.

They were silent for a moment, listening. The only sound Sophie could hear was the distant crash of water at Kinder Downfall.

Faith had heard it too.

‘If we follow the sound and make our way to the waterfall, surely we’ll know where we are,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Sophie.

‘Have you seen those rocks?’ broke in Nick. ‘Did you notice the drop? Do you want to risk wandering off the edge? You’d only need to get a couple of feet too close and you’d be gone.’

Sophie looked at him in surprise. He seemed to be genuinely worried.

‘It’s hard to tell the direction of sound in these conditions anyway,’ he said more calmly. ‘You get an echo. We could be completely misled.’

‘I suppose we could just keep going, then,’ said Faith, and walked away with a glance back over her shoulder.

A few moments later, Sophie heard a distant, echoing yelp and pictured a fox somewhere out there on the desolate moor. Or perhaps it was a pheasant, calling to its mate.

She’d stopped again for a minute to try to get her bearings and suddenly she found herself alone. She looked around, straining her eyes to see through the mist. It swirled around her, forming unrecognisable shapes from the rocks, suggesting movements that didn’t exist, breaking to allow the occasional shaft of sunlight through, then closing into an impenetrable wall again.

Sophie made out a tall figure. Was that Jonathan Matthew? Jonathan was unsuitably dressed for the moors. He was wearing black jeans and a grey jacket with a hood pulled close around his face, almost concealing his blue slouch beanie. They were the wrong colours for these conditions. When he was only a few yards away from her, he merged into the fog and became invisible. But she could see a red jacket standing out brightly in the fog. Who was wearing red? Faith Matthew, of course.

The silence was eerie now, every sound deadened by the blanketing mist. But it wasn’t peaceful. It was a threatening silence.

When Darius appeared from the fog ahead, he was followed closely by Elsa and the two students, Millie and Karina, gleaming ghosts in their white Eco jackets.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Where are the others? Liam Sharpe and the Warburtons. And Jonathan too.’

‘Jonathan went that way.’ Sophie pointed, but Jonathan had vanished from sight. ‘And the rest were just behind us.’

‘No, they weren’t. They dropped back.’

‘They’ll catch up in a minute.’

The group of walkers clustered together now for the first time. Nick and Faith and the Goulds stood around Sophie, while Millie and Karina fidgeted anxiously in the background as they waited behind Darius and Elsa. Even Jonathan had emerged from the mist, watching with a wry smile. But there were still three members missing.

‘They must have got separated. Go back and look for them,’ said Darius finally, looking at Nick.

‘Oh yeah. Then I’ll get lost too. Is that what you want?’

‘Shout for them, then.’

‘We should all shout,’ said Nick. ‘Then they can follow our voices.’

‘Right.’

For a long moment, no one shouted. Sophie could see that none of them wanted to be the first person to break that eerie quietness. It felt like a sacrilege, a violation of the silence that nature had imposed on them.

Sophie took a deep breath and felt a draught of cold, moist air enter her lungs as if she was drowning in a raincloud. Some of the others turned to look at her, Darius with a smile, Nick with an expression of shock or perhaps admiration.

‘Liam!’ she called, her voice cracking on the second syllable. ‘Pat! Sam! This way! We’re over here!’

And then the others began to shout too. The taboo had been broken, the inviolable stillness already shattered by her nervous, wavering cry.

Was that an answering call from deep in the mist? A male voice, she felt sure. Then a second shout, getting nearer. The group redoubled their efforts.

‘This way! Over here!’

The group around Sophie shifted uneasily as a muffled, rhythmic thudding penetrated the silence. Something was coming towards them and getting closer. A curious rustling and a deep panting, like a mysterious beast that existed only in the fog.

At last a figure erupted from the mist, a burst of vibrant orange like a warning signal. Sam Warburton, hobbling up the path as fast as he could go, his rucksack bouncing awkwardly on his shoulders. Sophie could hear his breath rasping in his chest before he got within fifty yards.

‘Sam, what’s wrong? Where’s Pat?’ said Sophie.

Warburton couldn’t get his breath. He staggered as he reached them, and Sophie stretched out a hand to support him. His eyes were panicky, and his chest rose and fell under his waterproof jacket. He was sweating despite the chill in the air, a sheen of perspiration on his forehead and trickling in glittering beads from his temples. His waterproof gleamed with water too. It was as if the mist had settled on him, soaking him with its insidious dankness.

Sophie glanced at the rest of the group. All of them were wet. She’d underestimated the degree of moisture in the atmosphere. This wasn’t just a light mist. They were actually walking through a raincloud.

‘He fell,’ gasped Sam. ‘Liam — he had an accident. He slipped on a wet rock. He’s sprained his ankle, I think, or maybe it’s broken. I can’t tell. He’s in a lot of pain, though.’

Sophie realised that the yelp she’d heard a few minutes ago must have been human. She’d pictured an animal, but instead she’d heard a man’s cry of pain as he became a victim of the moor.

‘Can you lead us back to where he is?’ asked Darius.

Sam looked over his shoulder, an expression of doubt crossing his face.

‘Of course,’ he said, trying to sound confident. ‘We just have to go downhill, don’t we?’

‘What are we going to do when we get there if he’s injured?’ said Nick.

‘Well, I don’t think he’ll be able to walk,’ said Sam.

‘We need to call for help, then.’

‘I’ve tried my phone. I’ve got no signal.’

‘Me neither,’ said Faith, tapping at her phone. ‘We must be in a dead spot.’

After a few minutes of almost aimless stumbling among the rocks, they found an anxious-looking Pat Warburton standing over Liam Sharpe. He lay between two boulders, clutching his leg, his face twisted in pain.

Sophie gazed around the faces of the group, seeking some sign of initiative but seeing only uncertainty. They stood helplessly, their clothes glistening with moisture from the fog, as useless as just one more rock formation frozen in the landscape.

‘Someone should go for help,’ said Darius. He turned to Nick. ‘Find a place on the moor where there’s a signal and call 999 for an ambulance.’

‘How the hell is an ambulance going to get all the way up here?’ said Nick.

‘I don’t know. There must be ways of getting casualties off the moors. A helicopter or something. Go and call.’

‘A helicopter won’t land in these conditions. They won’t be able to see anything. The visibility is too bad.’

‘Why are you still talking about it?’ demanded Darius, glaring at Nick. ‘Just go.’

Nick looked around for support. His eyes met Sophie’s. For a moment, she felt the old closeness between them, which had been drifting away in the chilly air.

‘I’ll come with you, Nick,’ said Sophie. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own out there, in case something else happens.’

Nick nodded and smiled, and held out his hand to support her as she moved towards him over the muddy ground.

Then Theo Gould stepped forward. ‘And we’ll come too. Strength in numbers and all that.’

‘Good,’ said Nick. ‘Besides, we might have different networks on our phones. I’m EE.’

‘My brother and I are both on Vodafone,’ said Gould.

‘I think—’ began Faith doubtfully.

‘Never mind,’ interrupted Sophie. ‘The sooner we get going the better.’

‘Should we go downhill, then? Towards the valley?’

‘Since we’re lost, we won’t know whether we’re going down into the valley or just into another clough with an even bigger hill on the other side.’

‘We’ll just have to try.’

The four of them stood up to leave.

‘And we’ll go another way,’ said Darius.

Nick stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Well, if we’re splitting it up anyway, it would give us a better chance of getting help if we try both directions.’

‘What do you mean, “both directions”? We’re in the middle of the plateau. There are dozens of directions to take.’

Darius looked unfazed. ‘We could try that way.’

He pointed into the fog as if he knew what lay out there, beyond the few feet of visibility.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, Darius,’ said Faith.

‘There haven’t been any good ideas from anyone so far, except me.’

Duncan Gould turned towards him.

‘If you find yourself heading onto the plateau, watch out for the lighter-green patches of vegetation,’ he said. ‘That’s wet bog.’

‘We’ll bear it in mind. Elsa will come with me, of course. And Millie and Karina?’

The two girls moved to stand with Darius. The Warburtons hesitated for a moment, then looked at each other and joined Sophie’s party, physically splitting the group into two factions.

‘I’m staying with Liam anyway,’ said Faith.

‘Of course.’ Darius sounded unreasonably relieved, as if that solved everything. ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’

‘It just makes sense for me to be the one who stays.’

In the background, Jonathan had been leaning idly against a rock, as if he’d just paused for a rest or to admire the scenery. He began to sing quietly to himself.

‘Will you shut up, idiot?’ snapped Nick.

Sophie stared at him in surprise. He was in such a bad mood today. It was becoming more and more common. What was making him so tetchy?

‘Whoa,’ said Darius, raising a hand like an Old Testament prophet. ‘Let’s not get agitated, folks. We’re in this together, and we’ll sort it out together. One big family, right?’

He laughed, and Nick scowled at him.

‘You know, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for us to split up,’ said Sam Warburton.

Darius snorted. ‘We’re a bit past that now. You should have thought of it before you trailed behind and lost contact with the group.’

‘It wasn’t our fault,’ said Sam. ‘You left us behind.’

‘I said we should wait for you,’ muttered Nick.

Darius threw back his head and stamped on a lump of peat, which splatted with a loud squelch. ‘Will you all stop arguing about it? Are we going to go for help or not?’

A groan of pain from Liam seemed to settle the discussion. The Goulds and Warburtons began to move away, heading for small tracks that seemed to lead down through the groughs. To Sophie’s amazement, Nick didn’t move.

‘What is it?’ she said.

He didn’t meet her eye. ‘I think I’d better go with Darius’s group.’

She stared at him. What had happened during the last few minutes to change his mind? She couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t the time to argue, though.

‘Whatever you think best.’

Pat Warburton was calling back to her.

‘I’m coming,’ she said.

With a sense of despair, Sophie turned and watched Nick and the rest of the party disappear into the mist behind Darius as he strode in the opposite direction. It seemed to her that instead of going for help they were walking towards trouble.

For a moment, a break in the fog let through a burst of sunlight. And it was then she saw it. Below her on the hillside, a huge grey figure was silhouetted, far bigger than anything human. A rainbow of coloured light seemed to hover round its head like a halo.

Its appearance made Sophie’s breath catch in her throat.

‘What the...?’

But no one else seemed to have noticed it. And the figure was there only for a few seconds before it disappeared in a blur of motion and was gone.

Ben Cooper called back at his office in Edendale Police Station on West Street. He checked the latest bulletins and noticed a report of a group of walkers lost on Kinder Scout.

Everyone’s heart sank when there was news of people missing on the wildest moors of the Dark Peak. There had already been too many deaths. Only a couple of years previously, a leading Mountain Rescue volunteer had died on a call-out to help a teenage girl in distress on Kinder, and a mountain biker had been killed after falling eighty feet at Laddow Rocks.

So another incident was no great surprise. Even from Edendale, Cooper could see the weather deteriorating over the moors, the cloud layer getting lower and heavier.

Kinder was the highest point in the Peak District at more than two thousand feet, a windswept gritstone plateau rising steeply from the surrounding landscape, its edges punctuated with crags and rocky outcrops. The visibility would be poor up there, the conditions cold and damp.

It was an easy place to get lost at the best of times. The surface had been suffering serious erosion from overgrazing by sheep and the boots of so many walkers, particularly along the Pennine Way. Many people had no idea about the lethal bogs they might be facing, where they could find themselves stuck in mud up to the knees.

Stranded walkers having to be rescued was a familiar story. One of the Peak District Mountain Rescue Organisation teams would be dealing with it, probably more than one if the location of the party was unclear. The reports said that the walkers had set off from the direction of Hayfield. Kinder MRT was the Mountain Rescue team based on that side of the moor.

Cooper reached for his phone. One of his DCs, Carol Villiers, had recently volunteered as a member of Kinder MRT. Surely Carol had mentioned that she was on exercise with them this weekend? She might be out there right now. It was always good to have someone on the ground.

‘Carol?’ he said when he got through. ‘Where are you right now?’

‘On the edge of Kinder, near the reservoir.’

‘You’re with the MRT?’

‘Right.’

‘Do we know any more about the missing walkers?’

‘Not at the moment, Ben. The team are on the job, though. They were already in the area when the call-out came and deployed straight away. The first report was of an injured walker. His party had walked up towards the Downfall but got lost in the fog after straying from the path on the plateau. Visibility is really poor up there. Too bad for a helicopter to operate.’

‘What about SARLOC?’ asked Cooper.

‘No luck so far,’ said Villiers. ‘A SARLOC text was sent but failed to reach them. The phone signal is very poor. The controller has just said they’re going to activate the Kinder Plan.’

‘OK. Can you keep me informed?’

‘It’s not a CID job, Ben. It’s a bunch of lost walkers. I just happened to be here.’

‘I know. But Kinder... well, it’s a special case.’

‘Will do, then. As soon as I know anything.’

Cooper ended the call. He knew the MRT would do a good job. They did it week after week. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and entirely on a voluntary basis. It was a task that called for skill and dedication. But Kinder — that mountain carried its own legends.

The formation of the Peak District Mountain Rescue Organisation itself had happened after a tragedy in the 1960s when three young Rover Scouts had lost their lives on Kinder Scout during the gruelling Four Inns Walk. Their forty-mile hike had started in West Yorkshire, hitting checkpoints at the Snake Pass Inn, the Nag’s Head and the Cat and Fiddle — a route that could take more than twenty hours to complete. The weather had deteriorated rapidly during the day, and eventually volunteers had gone out in blizzard conditions armed only with torches and whistles to search for the missing youngsters. But by then the mountain and treacherous weather had already claimed their lives.

That incident came only a short time after the deaths of two children from Glossop who went missing on the hills, and two climbers’ deaths in an avalanche in Wilderness Gully.

Cooper gazed out of his office window at the distant hills. It seemed wrong to him that lives should be left in the hands of volunteers, no matter how skilled and dedicated they were. This morning, he and his officers had arrived at the Athertons’ home in Edendale too late to prevent a death. All he seemed to do was clean up the consequences. It was the most frustrating part of his job.

Right now, he didn’t want to hear about another death. He envied Carol Villiers for being involved in the rescue operation. She was part of a team out there on Kinder doing their best to save someone’s life.

Ben Cooper’s house in Foolow was in the heart of White Peak country, surrounded by fields and a tracery of white limestone walls so complex and intricate that it seemed to hold the landscape together. He sometimes thought that if you followed the right lines in that imaginary web, you could discover any story, find the clues to any mystery hiding in the Derbyshire countryside. All the answers he sought might be contained within that gleaming web.

It was one of the main differences between the White Peak and the Dark Peak areas to the north. There was no such form and structure on the vast bogs of Kinder Scout. Like so much of the Dark Peak, it kept its secrets to itself. It sucked them in and refused to let them go.

Cooper knew he was arriving in Foolow when he saw a rusty bowser standing in a field, feeding water into an old bath. One day, he’d come across an offering on a field gate near the village — a ball carefully formed from stalks of straw. In the White Peak, offerings could often be found hanging from trees, placed on stones, hidden in walls. The surviving connections with a pagan past existed more strongly here than in many other parts of the country.

Strangely, St Hugh’s Mission Church in the village was named after some French saint, depicted with a swan. There were no swans in Foolow, but visitors passed a duck warning sign before they caught sight of the village pond.

After years spent in Edendale, this was home for Cooper now. Once he was behind the centuries-old walls of his cottage, he was insulated from the rest of the world. It was a house intended to last several lifetimes, and it already had. It was built of solid stone, not timber and plasterboard. With the doors and windows closed, he could hear nothing from outside.

Tollhouse Cottage sat on the hillside as if it had grown there organically. Beneath the house was a keeping cellar, a damp and chilly reminder of the earth the house was built on, a place where he could experience a connection with the landscape without even going outside.

Mobile-phone reception in Foolow was unpredictable, though, especially behind the thick stone walls of his cottage. So Cooper stopped for a few minutes by the pond on the village green to phone Chloe Young.

‘Hi. What are you up to?’ she said.

‘Just arriving home. What about you?’

‘Working late again.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘That’s the life of a pathologist. People will keep on dying.’

‘So I won’t get chance to see you, then?’

‘Not tonight.’

Cooper sighed. He looked forward to speaking to her every evening, but it was so much better to actually see her face to face. There was something missing from his life when he couldn’t be with her. But he was in no position to question Chloe Young’s workload. He’d been forced to skip dates himself when he was called out to a crime scene. Some weeks they were in danger of becoming strangers.

Chloe heard his sigh.

‘I know, Ben,’ she said. ‘But it will get better. I’m free later in the week.’

‘That will have to do, I suppose.’

‘Come on, look on the bright side,’ she said cheerily.

He knew she was probably in her office, but he always pictured Chloe in the mortuary, with a dead body on the stainless-steel table and a scalpel in her hand as she smiled at him from behind a surgical mask. That was the way she’d looked when they’d first met. It was a difficult image to get out of his mind, even now.

‘Oh yes, the bright side,’ he said. ‘I guess there must be one.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I mean, you are the man who owns a cat called Hope.’

Cooper laughed. ‘It was probably a bad choice,’ he said. ‘It’s just, when I picked her up from the rescue centre...’ He trailed off.

‘Yes, she must have been given a name at the centre. You could have kept that if you really weren’t able to think of anything else.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t.’

Then he heard someone speaking to Chloe in the background, a colleague calling her away from the phone.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said hastily.

‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow, then?’

‘Of course.’

Cooper stood for a moment on the village green. He saw that some of the notices behind the glass in the village noticeboard had faded completely. What might they have been announcing? He could see a date for a parish meeting at Burdekin Hall, a planning application for a caravan park, an advert for the Silence heritage site on the old lead workings at Hucklow Edge. The rest were... well, a mystery.

He unlocked the front door of his house and waited for the familiar bang of the cat flap as Hope came home. He didn’t know where her vantage point was, but she always spotted his car returning.

She fussed around his legs while he opened a tin and changed her water. Then he watched her eating for a while. It was strangely calming and reassuring after a day at work. It was nice to stand in a kitchen where the floor wasn’t splattered with blood.

‘Hi, Hopes. We were talking about you just now.’

The cat didn’t look impressed. But then, she never did. His life outside the house was totally irrelevant to her. As far as she was concerned, he ceased to exist once he walked out of the front door. And yet he always found her waiting patiently for him to reappear each evening. Was it just the prospect of food that kept her interested, or did she feel more affection than she was able to show, because she was a cat?

Cooper glanced out of the window and saw all his neighbours had their wheelie bins out for collection next day. That was how he remembered to do it. He wondered if it was how everyone else remembered too. Perhaps there was someone in the village who was frighteningly efficient and always put their bin out first, with everyone else following their example. It only needed one person to get it wrong and the system would fall apart.

He wasn’t going to cook anything for himself tonight, and he had nowhere else he needed to go. The Bull’s Head in Foolow was often full of dogs at lunchtime, but in the early evening he could nip in for a Peak Ales Bakewell Bitter and a bully burger with Stilton and sweet potato fries on the side.

In Foolow, the pub was also the place to buy fresh eggs, bacon, milk and postage stamps. The first time he went into the Bull’s Head, Cooper remembered noticing a lethal-looking carving knife set that had been hung in a leather scabbard over the log fire as decoration. Probably no one else thought of it as a dangerous weapon. His job gave him a perspective that he couldn’t always put aside. And that was especially true today, after standing in the Athertons’ bloodstained kitchen in Edendale, examining the consequences of a handily placed knife.

The image of that log fire made Cooper think about the woman still out alone on Kinder Scout. The last news he’d heard from Carol Villiers was that one walker was still missing and unaccounted for. The Mountain Rescue teams and the SARDA dogs would have been stood down for the night by now. Tired team members would eventually manage to get to bed in the early hours of the morning after returning the MRT vehicles to their bases.

Cooper could think of very few places that were worse to spend a night alone than on Kinder Scout.

That decided him to make one last call to Carol Villiers.

‘Sorry, Ben,’ she said. ‘They’ve had the search dogs out on Kinder for hours now.’

‘And there’s no sign of the missing woman?’

‘No. And it’s getting dark. They’ll be calling off the search for tonight.’

‘Let’s hope she was properly equipped and had the sense to take shelter.’

‘It’s odd, though,’ said Villiers.

‘What is?’

‘The casualty, Mr Sharpe, was on his own when the dog found him.’

‘You mean the others left him there injured and alone?’

‘That’s just it. They say they didn’t. The missing woman was supposed to have stayed with him. Her name is Faith Matthew.’

Cooper could picture Villiers looking up at the bulk of Kinder in the failing light. There was very little shelter up on the plateau. A night spent on Kinder in the cold could be fatal, and everyone knew it.

Ben Cooper had heard talk of replacing the old E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale, with a new building. In fact, people had been talking about it for the past thirty years or so.

Too many decades of mouldering paperwork, half-smoked cigarettes and junk food had left their mark, and the 1950s building was considered unfit for purpose now. Whenever he entered the CID room, the rows of computer screens looked strangely anachronistic. Downstairs, the custody suite was due to close soon. Conditions at West Street were unsuitable for prisoners, though officers and staff would have to continue tolerating them for a while longer.

Every day the same kind of reports crossed Cooper’s desk. Details of some of those thousands of dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts.

So what was new this morning? A scattering of overnight burglaries and assaults outside pubs and nightclubs. An early morning raid had been conducted on an address in Edendale, resulting in two arrests and the seizure of a quantity of Class-II drugs. And there had been several complaints from tourists over the last few days about youths throwing stones at their cars on the descent into Hartington, the latest incident resulting in a smashed windscreen and bad publicity for the tourism business.

A memo was on his desk from a team that had been set up to review recent rape convictions, in case significant evidence had been ignored or not disclosed to the defence. They were asking for files from cases his department had dealt with during the last five years. That would take time.

An operation was still ongoing to target the use of Peak District holiday homes as pop-up brothels by slave gangs. A gang master would rent a secluded property, install a group of trafficked women, then move on somewhere else after a month or so, before anyone became suspicious about what was going on. A difficult one to deal with without an early notification when a new brothel popped up.

What else was there? An email in his inbox informed him that an officer serving in Edendale Local Policing Unit had been shortlisted in the Police Twitter Awards for Best Tweeting Individual Police Officer. Apparently, there were sixteen categories, including Best Tweeting Police Horse and Best Tweeting Police Dog. Old-fashioned bobbies like his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, would be turning in their graves at the thought of community policing by smartphone.

Cooper leaned back in his chair and fingered the lanyard with his identity badge, staring at a shelf of box files with the Derbyshire Constabulary starburst logo on them. His office was in a flat-roofed 1970s extension, with the inevitable damp stains on the polystyrene ceiling tiles.

Down in Scenes of Crime, Gary Atherton’s bloodied clothes were hanging in a locker to air-dry before being packaged in paper bags. Recovery of DNA evidence was vital. The CSIs would have gathered everything from the scene, though. A flake of paint, a plant seed, a trickle of soil, a fragment of broken glass, a tiny scrap of paper. Any of them could play a crucial role in confirming the identity of a suspect.

Meanwhile, on Kinder Scout, the search for Faith Matthew had resumed at first light. Cooper expected news soon. The SARDA dogs were bound to find her.

In the CID room, Ben Cooper’s team were sitting in front of their computers under diffused lighting from panels set into the ceiling. In one corner were a series of blue screens where no one was working. Half hidden by a pillar in the middle was Gavin Murfin, his civilian investigator, once a fixture in the department as an old-school DC.

Cooper’s sergeant, Dev Sharma, had proved more than capable of taking responsibility and running the team of DCs. Since his arrival in Edendale from Derby, Sharma had taken on a lot of the workload and Cooper had come to rely on him heavily.

It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever did in this job. DS Sharma was here in North Division to gain experience and add a few paragraphs to his CV. Cooper didn’t have any illusions that he’d be keeping Dev for long. His DS was destined for better things.

Cooper moved quietly into the middle of the room and was rewarded with the familiar sight of Murfin dipping his fingers into a paper bag for an Eccles cake he’d bought on the way into work. He was speaking to DC Luke Irvine, seated at the opposite desk.

‘Apparently she ran a dominatrix dungeon in a disused building at the back of the old post office,’ Murfin was saying between bites. ‘No one knew about it until Open Gardens weekend, when people heard the screaming.’

‘The dominatrix was squatting?’ asked Irvine.

‘I think she usually stands up,’ said Murfin.

Across the room, Carol Villiers was telling Becky Hurst and Dev Sharma about a new vicar who’d arrived in her village.

‘Well, when I say “arrived”, you know what it’s like these days — she’s in charge of about seven parishes, and she’s based ten miles away,’ said Villiers. ‘She has a team ministry, with three curates or assistant vicars scattered around. But when she did come to St Mark’s, the locals didn’t like her.’

‘Why not?’ said Hurst. ‘Because she’s female, I suppose?’

‘No, because she’s an evangelical. They’re old-fashioned in our village. They want to do things the same as they always have, like they did under the old vicar before he retired. The new one wants to modernise everything. Readings aren’t from the King James version any more, and she got rid of the organist and brought somebody in to play CDs through a sound system. And there was a wedding... One of the oldest families in the village. They had the church booked for months, all traditional style. And then the new vicar put the mockers on everything.’

‘What are mockers?’ asked Sharma with a puzzled frown, listening to their conversation.

‘Well—’

Cooper cleared his throat. ‘Morning, everyone.’

‘Boss.’

‘Dev, do want to bring me up to date on the Atherton murder inquiry?’

Sharma stood up and gathered some papers together. Then a call came through and was answered by Villiers. She looked across at Cooper.

‘They’ve found her, Ben.’

Cooper didn’t need to ask who. He could tell from the tone of her voice.

‘Faith Matthew? Dead?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘It took too long to find her. Where was she?’

‘Near Kinder Downfall,’ said Villiers.

He could picture the place. A narrow track between high rocks was called Kinder Gates, a landmark for walkers coming off the moors to the steep descent towards the Mermaid’s Pool. The Downfall lay a few hundred yards away. There, water streamed off the gritstone edge and sprayed horizontally as the incessantly buffeting winds battled against gravity. Sometimes the wind won and the water flowed upwards, back over the edge. It was a spectacular place, but dangerous.

‘She was found at the foot of one of the highest rocks,’ said Villiers. ‘It has its own name on the OS map.’

‘A lot of them do.’

All across Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, rock formations had been given imaginative names, often due to their shape, or their connection to an old story from Derbyshire history and legend. The Woolpacks, the Seal Stones, Pym Chair, the Druid’s Stone.

‘Which rock?’ he said.

Villiers hesitated. ‘They call this one Dead Woman’s Drop.’

A damp road, damp grass, damp sheep, a stone wall dripping with moisture. As Ben Cooper headed out of Edendale towards Hayfield, he could already see the mist hanging low over the moors and drifting into the valleys. Dark copses stood out against the grey background, a series of hills getting fainter and fainter into the distance.

As he left the outskirts of the town behind, the stone slates of the roofs gradually petered out along the River Eden, the deep green of the Eden Forest swarming along the opposite hillside. Beyond the limestone hills and a patchwork of fields divided by drystone walls lay the brooding, desolate moors of the Dark Peak, rising to the plateau of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District.

The route took him westwards through a series of White Peak villages. Abney, Bradwell, Hucklow, Tideswell. To Cooper, they were all places steeped in history and crime.

Turning onto the A623, he hit the A6 near Chapel-en-le-Frith and headed north over Chinley Head. He could have driven to Castleton and crossed the Winnats Pass to reach the same point, but even in October the area was likely to be busy with tourists visiting the show caves and Blue John mines.

Only ten miles north of Buxton, Hayfield was an old village, once a staging post on the packhorse route across the Pennines from Cheshire to Yorkshire. The settlement had grown with the arrival of cotton and the railways until it straggled down the valley into the basin of the River Sett.

North-east of the village lay a reservoir that controlled the flow of the River Kinder, avoiding the risk of flooding that had previously once been a serious problem in Hayfield, necessitating raising the height of the main street. The church had famously been flooded, causing corpses to rise up from their graves.

These days, it was the gateway to the west side of Kinder. An increasing number of residents were people who’d moved from Manchester and Stockport seeking a better quality of life. Hayfield was undergoing gentrification.

There was a big car park on the western side of the village, next to a now deserted visitor centre at the start of the Sett Valley Trail. But that side was mostly residential. The shops and pubs were on the eastern side, where the streets were choked with parked cars. At every corner, he found vehicles coming at him on the wrong side of the road.

A narrow road leading off to the side of the Royal Hotel passed another pub, the Sportsman, before arriving at Bowden Bridge quarry, the starting point for the famous Mass Trespass. From here, the view extended over the valley of the Sett to the high plateau of Kinder Scout, stretching across the eastern horizon like an enormous beached whale. What looked like a weeping wound in the whale’s flank was Kinder Downfall.

National Trust rangers had opened an access onto the moor for the police. Cooper met up with Carol Villiers and they got a ride up the hill in a Land Rover. They would have to walk the rest of the way when they came within reach of Kinder Gates and the Sandy Heys cliffs.

Villiers looked at him as they clambered into the back of the Land Rover.

‘It is an unexplained death,’ she said. ‘But probably an accident.’

‘We can’t say that yet.’

Cooper stared out of the window at the landscape, wondering if it was Kinder itself that was raising the hackles of his suspicion.

‘What do we know about the victim so far?’ he said.

‘Faith Matthew,’ said Villiers. ‘She was a nurse. Contracted to an agency, so she worked in different locations, both NHS and private hospitals. She has an address in Market Street, Hayfield. Aged thirty, unmarried, but there’s a boyfriend in the picture, by the name of Greg Barrett. He’s an electrician, runs his own business in the Hayfield and New Mills area.’

‘Any family?’

‘Not locally. Her parents live in Manchester. They’re due in Hayfield today, though. And there’s a younger brother, Jonathan, who was also on the walk yesterday. Luke is working on getting some information on the rest of the group. The only other thing we know is that Miss Matthew drove a silver Honda Jazz, which has been recovered from the car park at Bowden Bridge quarry.’

‘Good.’

When they got out of the Land Rover, Cooper could see the fog was still lingering at this height. In places it was dense enough to reduce visibility. It also changed the sound of the voices he could hear, their tones distorted as if the upper range of human vocal chords had been suppressed.

‘High-pitched sounds are muffled by fog,’ said Villiers when he mentioned it. ‘That’s why foghorns have such a low pitch, to carry a long distance.’

‘Something to do with the vibration of air on water molecules, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’

Beyond the covering of fog, Kinder was basically a massive bog. No one with any sense would come walking here after a period of heavy rain. Well... Cooper mentally corrected himself. No one with the smallest bit of local knowledge.

In places, the peat layer was fifteen feet thick. But erosion had already set in five millennia ago. Higher rainfall had worn deep gulleys into a pattern of meandering groughs, cutting right through to the bedrock. The process had been accelerated by acid rain from the nearby industrial cities. Now a trig point on Kinder stood a couple of metres clear of the eroded surface around it.

Cooper could almost feel the connection with the past through the soles of his boots on the muddy track. Fifteen feet represented a lot of the world’s history. You could walk along the groughs and pass between walls of peat representing ten thousand years of the Earth’s formation. It was like walking in a channel dug directly through time.

These moors had been laid down after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Within that black, sodden mass lay the remains of dead trees, grass, fungi, insects and animal carcasses, all preserved by the acidic conditions and a lack of oxygen. Occasionally, human remains were unearthed from a bog, shrivelled but intact, dried like a pickled walnut.

On the surface lurked dark gritstone outcrops, weather-beaten rocks sculpted into shapes the human eye struggled to make sense of. They’d been formed by exposure to ice, rain and wind over lengths of time he couldn’t even imagine. They stood here on Kinder like reminders of the prehistoric past. Nothing that happened in the last few centuries had even touched them.

Ahead, Cooper could see uniformed officers and crime scene examiners.

‘That’s the top of the Downfall,’ said Villiers.

Kinder Downfall flowed west over the gritstone cliffs at the edge of the plateau, barely a trickle in summer but impressive when it was in full spate. With a strong westerly wind, the water was blown back on itself, and the resulting cloud of spray could be seen from as far away as Stockport. If you were close to the Downfall, you could get wet from above and below at the same time. In cold winters the water could freeze against the rock, creating vertical sheets of ice that hung in the air like organ pipes, providing a challenge for climbers with their axes, ropes and crampons.

No wonder this was regarded as a magical place. Even on the sunniest day, that cliff of shattered rock looked like the edge of the world. He’d stood at the top many times and looked down over the valley, his eye attracted by the glint of light off a pool of water below — the legendary Mermaid’s Pool.

The village of Kinder once lay on the side of the mountain. Now there was only a mythical nymph who came to bathe in the Mermaid’s Pool. If you met her, she would either make you immortal or drag you to the bottom of the pool and drown you. The water was said to be so deep that it connected to the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinder was an awfully long way from the sea. But a fact like that didn’t get in a storyteller’s way. Inconvenient reality was never a barrier to the creation of a legend.

Detective Constable Luke Irvine looked as though he felt out of place in the Bowden Bridge car park, surrounded by the cars of walkers getting ready for an afternoon in the hills. He joined Ben Cooper and Carol Villiers in Cooper’s car, leaned over from the back seat and flipped open his notebook.

‘So,’ said Irvine. ‘This is what I’ve got so far. They were a party of thirteen hikers in total. They call themselves the New Trespassers Walking Club. I have no idea why.’

Cooper looked up at the looming mass of Kinder Scout. ‘Well, I think I might have a good idea. You don’t know the history of Kinder, Luke?’

Irvine shrugged. ‘It’s just a hill, isn’t it? And not a very interesting one, if you ask me. It’s too flat. We have better-looking hills in Yorkshire.’

‘It’s over two thousand feet, so strictly speaking it qualifies as a mountain.’

‘It’s still kind of dull.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not dull at all.’

Cooper had been on Kinder Scout many times over the years. He’d struggled up and down its slopes and walked across the plateau at all seasons of the year, in all kinds of weather. There had been times when he could hardly move because of the heavy peat clinging to his boots, when every step he took was an enormous effort against the grip of the sticky morass, as if Kinder was the surface of an alien planet with twice the mass of Earth.

And there had been walks in the summer, when the top few inches were dry and bouncy like a trampoline, turning his steps into an exhilarating leap as the pull of gravity suddenly halved.

At any time, stepping out onto Kinder was leaving the real world behind. And yes, there had been times when the weather changed while he was on the mountain. The cloud level came down, a mist or fog rolled in, snow began to fall, or the light began to fail. Then you weren’t just in an alien landscape. You were in great danger.

‘It’s obvious,’ said Cooper. ‘They named themselves after the Kinder Mass Trespass.’

‘The what?’

Cooper tapped his steering wheel impatiently.

‘The Mass Trespass. It was in 1932.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Irvine. ‘Before my time.’

‘Mine too,’ said Cooper. ‘But still...’

The Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout had been a famous act of civil disobedience that had given impetus to the campaign for access to the moors and eventually led to the Peak District becoming Britain’s first national park.

That day, a large party of ramblers had clashed violently with gamekeepers and bailiffs employed by local landowners. Several had been arrested and sent to prison. They’d become martyrs in a symbolic battle between the working classes and wealthy landowners, and Kinder Scout had been their battleground. It was a story that was taught to schoolchildren in Derbyshire, celebrated in books and TV programmes, marked by commemorative plaques.

Cooper had seen photographs of the Mass Trespass, showing troops of laughing young men with Brylcreemed hair, wearing tweed jackets and shorts, like a bunch of 1930s schoolboys on an outing.

‘The trespass was eighty-six years ago,’ said Villiers.

‘But it never lost its symbolism, did it? It was all about the exercise of freedom, and resistance to the status quo.’

‘It sounds like something I ought to know about,’ said Irvine.

‘Yes, you should.’ Cooper looked at him, surprised at Irvine’s ignorance on the subject. ‘Some time. So who are the leaders of this walking group?’

‘One leader,’ said Irvine. ‘Well, leader or founder, I don’t know which — the other members of the group refer to him in both ways. A gentleman by the name of Darius Roth.’

‘Gentleman?’

‘That’s the impression he gives,’ said Irvine with a wry smile. ‘He describes himself as a property developer.’

‘I’ll look forward to meeting him.’

‘Mr Roth is aged thirty-five. I gather he’s pretty well-off. Apparently he inherited a business empire built up by his father in Manchester.’ Irvine checked his notebook. ‘Mr Roth was accompanied by his wife, Mrs Elsa Roth. They live here in Hayfield, where the walk started from. They call their house Trespass Lodge. I guess that’s also because of—’

‘The Mass Trespass, yes. And the rest of them?’

‘Also in the group were Sam and Pat Warburton, a retired couple from Manchester, and two brothers who run a garden centre near Chinley, Theo and Duncan Gould. The casualty is a Mr Liam Sharpe. He’s a check-in supervisor at Manchester Airport. There are two students from Manchester Metropolitan University, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott, both aged nineteen. There’s a Nick Haslam, an IT consultant who lives near New Mills, and his girlfriend, Sophie Pullen, a teacher in Buxton. She lives at Chapel-en-le-Frith. And that just leaves Jonathan Matthew, the dead woman’s brother.’

‘And Faith Matthew herself, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s a very disparate group,’ said Villiers. ‘What do you imagine members of this club have in common?’

‘Maybe the clue is in their name,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, as you know, they managed to get totally lost in the fog,’ said Irvine. ‘Then when Mr Sharpe was injured, they split up into three groups. They said they couldn’t get a phone signal to call for help, so that’s why they set off in different directions. Miss Matthew stayed with the casualty.’

Cooper frowned again. ‘Did she? Just her, on her own?’

‘It seems so.’

‘But if the injured walker was immobilised, how did she end up at Dead Woman’s Drop? She must have left him at some point.’

‘True.’

‘A couple of the walkers were suffering from a degree of shock after their experience,’ said Irvine. ‘The two youngest ones, Miss Taylor and Miss Scott.’

‘What about the injured man?’ asked Cooper.

‘Mr Sharpe is still in hospital for X-rays,’ said Irvine. ‘He has a suspected broken ankle, along with exhaustion and hypothermia.’

‘We need to talk to him as soon as possible. I don’t like a delay in being able to ask someone questions. It gives them too much time to make up a story. Carol, can you liaise with the hospital and get access to him as soon as possible?’

‘No problem.’

‘If his story is different from everyone else’s, we’ll know there’s something wrong,’ suggested Irvine.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Cooper. ‘They’ll already have talked about it between themselves. They had plenty of opportunity.’

‘You think there was some kind of conspiracy?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘They may be a very close-knit group,’ said Villiers, ‘no matter how disparate they appear on the surface.’

Cooper looked back towards Hayfield. The weather was completely different down in the valley, with small puffs of cloud drifting across a blue sky. As he gazed over the patchwork of fields, the sun broke through the clouds sporadically, highlighting one hillside and then another, changing the colours in the landscape as it went. It caught a white-painted farmhouse here, casting shadows from a copse of trees over there.

‘What next, Ben?’ asked Villiers.

‘I need to start by visiting the family,’ he said.

He didn’t need to specify whose family. Villiers would know perfectly well. A case like this always started with the victim.

Where the narrow River Sett flowed under the bridge at the Royal Hotel, empty beer kegs stood in front of the war memorial, painted blue and yellow. Cooper passed Millie’s tearooms and chocolatier on Church Street, and an old Co-op store on the corner of Fishers Bridge.

The Mass Trespass was quite a theme here. On New Mills Road, notices outside the Kinder Lodge Hotel said, HIKERS WELCOME, and even the pub sign had an illustration of ramblers setting off towards the mountain.

‘You were very interested in the brother, Jonathan,’ said Villiers as they moved to the next address on their list.

‘Of all the group, he seems to be the odd one out,’ said Cooper. ‘Or the oddest, at least. His presence looks incongruous.’

‘And he needed money badly.’

‘That might explain why he went on the Kinder Scout walk.’

‘Do you think he asked Faith for money yesterday and she refused him too? Would that have made him so angry that he would have reacted violently?’

‘I couldn’t hazard a guess until I’ve talked to him,’ said Cooper. ‘But in my experience, if someone is under enough pressure, it may only take a very trivial thing to make them cross that line. We’re going to have to talk to them all further and see if we can get a coherent account.’

Villiers sighed. ‘I wouldn’t hold out much hope,’ she said.

The room at Ripley was much more pleasant than any interview room in a custody suite that Diane Fry had ever seen. It was as if she was sitting down for a budget meeting or a staff appraisal. She must be wary not to be lulled into any false sense of security by her surroundings.

Her interviewer introduced himself as Martin Jackson, an investigator with the Professional Standards Department. He was aged around forty, with sleek brown hair, a well-fitting suit and a pair of black-rimmed glasses.

He smiled at Fry as he sat down, trying to establish a friendly relationship perhaps, the way salesmen did. She was determined it wasn’t going to work.

‘DS Fry,’ he said, ‘you’re aware that you’re entitled to be accompanied at these interviews by a representative of your staff association or a colleague to act as your “friend”?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And you’ve decided not to take up that opportunity today.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘So is it all right with you if we make a start, then?’

‘I can’t wait.’

His smile was slightly crooked, she noticed, the left side of his mouth barely moving as if he might have suffered a mild stroke at some time. It undermined his demeanour, made his affability look like a disguise, a persona adopted by an actor. But then, all good interviewers were actors in one way or another.

‘I take it you’re familiar with the College of Policing’s Code of Ethics, dated July 2014,’ said Jackson. ‘I have a spare copy here for you, if you’re not.’

He tossed a booklet down on the table between them. The natural instinct would be to pick it up, or at least to pull it towards her side of the table. But Fry resisted the impulse. She didn’t touch it, or even look at it, deliberately ignoring his gesture.

Jackson met her stare with that slightly crooked smile.

‘The Code of Ethics sets out the Principles and Standards of Professional Behaviour for the Policing Profession of England and Wales,’ he said.

‘I’m familiar with it, of course.’

‘Excellent. Well, might I draw your attention first of all to Section Three — the ten Standards of Professional Behaviour.’

‘Do you want to know what they are?’ said Fry. She began to count on her fingers. ‘Number one, “Honesty and Integrity”. Number two, “Authority, Respect and Courtesy”. Number three, “Equality and Diversity”. Number four—’

He held up a hand. ‘We’ll get to number four in due course,’ he said. ‘But let’s take things a little more slowly. We have other matters to deal with first.’

Fry clenched her jaw to control her expression as a surge of unease ran up her spine. Number four in the Standards of Professional Behaviour was ‘Use of Force’. He was deliberately making her think back over all the possible incidents in her career that might fall under that heading.

Jackson was watching her carefully. ‘For your reference, DS Fry, we’ll be dealing with issues under standards one, two, four, seven and nine.’

‘Very well.’

She’d been thinking so hard about number four that now she couldn’t remember what seven and nine were. The copy of the Code of Ethics still lay on the table between them. But having ignored it when he tossed it there, she couldn’t pick it up now to check.

‘Remind us of number one again,’ he said.

‘“Honesty and Integrity,”’ she repeated. ‘And you shouldn’t need reminding.’

‘Indeed.’ Jackson looked down at his notes. ‘The code offers several examples under this section for assessing your honesty and integrity. Shall we just run through a few, with regard to your personal choices?’

‘If you like.’

‘Would you agree with these statements, then, DS Fry? Please answer as directly as you can. Do you ensure your decisions are not influenced by improper considerations of personal gain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you knowingly made false, misleading or inaccurate statements in any professional context?’

‘No.’

‘Have you either solicited or accepted the offer of any gift, gratuity or hospitality that could compromise your impartiality?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And finally, have you ever used your position to inappropriately coerce any person or to settle personal grievances?’

Fry opened her mouth but found she couldn’t answer. Jackson didn’t look at her but kept his eyes directed down at his notes, as if he was simply waiting for a cue to read the next question. He waited what felt like an uncomfortably long time before he glanced up. He twitched an eyebrow and made a mark with his pen.

‘Would you like some water, DS Fry?’ he said. ‘I have a feeling we might be in for quite a long session.’

Sophie Pullen wore a set of gold bangles that glittered whenever she raised her hand. If she’d been his teacher, Cooper would have found that distracting. But when he was at school, any flicker of light was appealing.

‘We were all so cold and exhausted,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s hard to remember exactly what happened or who said what.’

‘I understand.’

Cooper had always had a soft spot for redheads. Sophie Pullen had that pale, translucent skin that often went with her hair colour. She had blue eyes too, intense and penetrating, the sort of eyes that didn’t miss very much. He imagined she might have let her hair grow long when she was younger, but now it was cropped short and businesslike. A plain grey skirt with a white blouse and black cardigan only seemed to emphasise her looks.

‘I’d been walking near Liam Sharpe,’ she said. ‘Liam is a bit slower than everyone else on a steep uphill stretch, but he always catches up eventually. He never gives in.’

Cooper considered that for a moment. Whenever he went out walking with a group himself, the fittest members always slowed down to stay together with the slowest. They never left people behind and forced them to catch up. The Trespassers sounded more and more as if they were out to compete with each other and humiliate the weakest.

‘But later on?’ he said.

‘There was a cry,’ said Sophie. ‘I thought it was from an animal of some kind. A fox, perhaps.’

‘Not during the day.’

Cooper was listening intently to Sophie as she described her experience on Kinder Scout. He always tried very hard to listen to what people were saying and absorb small details. A detail was often what came back to him later, a memory of something apparently trivial that a witness had mentioned.

Sophie shrugged. ‘Well, a bird, then. I don’t know. It seemed to come from a long way off. Some distance across the moors.’

‘All right.’

‘And there were lights,’ she said. ‘Lights on the moor. I could see them through the mist, moving around.’

‘How far away were they?’

‘I couldn’t tell. You know what it’s like in those conditions.’

‘Very difficult to judge.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did they look like torches?’ asked Cooper. ‘Another party of walkers, perhaps?’

She shrugged. ‘I really couldn’t be sure. I didn’t hear any voices. Besides, if that’s what they were, why didn’t they come over to us? Our group was making enough noise, with the argument—’ She stopped suddenly and stared defiantly at Cooper as if he’d deliberately interrupted her.

‘What argument?’ he said.

Sophie shook her head. ‘It was nothing.’

‘I need to know about it.’

She sighed. ‘It was Darius and Nick, as usual. They were often at each other’s throats. But it’s not relevant.’

‘Why don’t you let me decide what’s relevant?’ said Cooper impatiently.

She looked abashed at his tone. ‘Sorry. I suppose we all seem pretty stupid to you. Getting lost on Kinder Scout, going onto the moors without being properly prepared, and then being so hopeless when things went wrong.’

Cooper opened his mouth, but she waved a hand dismissively.

‘Oh, I overheard some of the Mountain Rescue team talking about us,’ she said. ‘I suppose they have to do that sort of thing all the time. Rescue useless people like us.’

‘Perhaps not useless,’ said Cooper. ‘But certainly misguided.’

She sighed. ‘I think it was all part of the thrill originally. A bit of an adventure, getting away from our humdrum lives. We all enjoyed the thrill of the risk. Though we never really believed, deep down, that there was much actual danger. It was more the thought of it. The concept. Do you know what I mean? We even used to laugh about what a reckless and foolhardy bunch we were. We thought we were taking on a challenge, flouting the rules in our own way. Just like the original mass trespassers, I suppose.’

Cooper nodded, though her explanation sounded unconvincing. If it had come from one of the others — Darius Roth, perhaps — it might have made sense. Had she just taken on someone else’s beliefs, accepted the views of a more forceful personality as her own? In Cooper’s mind, the New Trespassers Walking Club was beginning to sound more like a cult, with a leader being followed unquestioningly.

But that wasn’t right. One of them at least had questioned the leader.

‘Tell me about this argument,’ he said. ‘What were Darius and Nick arguing about?’

‘Everything. Whether we were lost, who should do what, which of us should go in what direction...’

‘And that was normal?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there was Faith,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Well, I think Faith was going to point out that it doesn’t matter what network your phone is on — you can make an emergency 999 call through any available network.’

‘Was she the only one of the group who knew that?’

‘I can’t say. I must admit I didn’t know it myself. I’ve never had the occasion to dial 999 in my entire life.’

‘What, never?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You’ve lived a sheltered existence, Miss Pullen.’

Sophie smiled. ‘I think there was always someone else there to make the call before me. People tend to fall into two groups in an emergency, don’t they? There are those who know exactly what to do and get on with it, and others who stand around helplessly waiting for someone else to make a decision. I’m afraid I’m in the second group.’

‘So did Darius make the decisions for the group?’

‘Usually.’

‘Did he, for example, make the decision about who should stay with the casualty and who should go to get help?’

‘No, we all volunteered to go.’ She paused. ‘At least, I did and the Goulds.’

‘But Nick didn’t volunteer?’

‘It just seemed to be understood that he would go. Darius was speaking directly to Nick when he suggested it. There was no argument from him. Not about that, anyway. Darius assumed he would go and he went. He was never given the choice.’

‘But Nick didn’t always jump to do what Darius wanted.’

‘Nick’s different,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t see Darius in the same way as some of the others. Nick is a sceptic, you see. He scoffs at the story of the Kinder Mass Trespass, makes references to Darius’s ancestor being a Communist. I don’t know if you saw the hat he was wearing...’

‘I remember one of my officers mentioning it. The Russian Army hat with the red star on it.’

‘That’s right. He got it purely as a joke, as a dig at Darius. It wasn’t very subtle.’

‘So if Mr Haslam doesn’t respect the history of the Mass Trespass the way the rest of you do, why did he join the walking club?’

‘He came because I asked him,’ said Sophie. ‘The first time, anyway. After that, I think he enjoyed it in his own way.’

‘What was your view of Faith Matthew?’ asked Cooper.

‘Faith? I didn’t know her that well. Like the others, she was brought into the group by Darius.’

‘You must have spoken to her sometimes.’

‘A bit.’

Cooper pictured the group. They were very diverse. But Faith Matthew and Sophie Pullen were the two who seemed to have most in common. A similar age and background at least.

‘Didn’t you like her?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

That seemed to answer his question. Sophie hadn’t liked Faith, but she didn’t want to say so. Perhaps it was just a reluctance to speak ill of the dead.

‘And what is your relationship with Darius Roth?’ said Cooper.

That got quite a different response: Sophie’s expression became more much animated than when he’d asked about Faith Matthew.

‘I’ve never known anyone like him,’ she said. ‘He seems to have the ability to get people to do whatever he wants. It’s not as if he really tries very hard. There’s not much in the way of smooth talking about him, like you might imagine a used-car salesman, or an estate agent.’

Cooper hadn’t been imagining Darius Roth as a used-car salesman. More as a Charles Manson or a Jim Jones, with this corner of Hayfield the equivalent of Jonestown. But perhaps his imagination was leading him too far astray.

‘Is there anything else you can recall?’ he asked.

She hesitated, and again his interest was piqued.

‘I’m not sure about this,’ she said. ‘But Darius once told us he knew how to commit the perfect murder and get away with it.’

‘Really?’

‘He said he’d been told by a Home Office pathologist he once met that if you can get someone up onto a high place like a cliff, or to the edge of a steep drop, then as long you don’t have any eyewitnesses who see you do it, it’s practically impossible to prove whether a person fell or was pushed.’ She gazed at Cooper. ‘Is that true?’

‘If it was, it wouldn’t be wise for me to tell you,’ said Cooper.

She nodded as if he’d confirmed the theory. ‘I think it’s probably true. No forensic evidence. You might have suspicions, but you can’t prove it.’

‘Who else was there when he told you that, Miss Pullen?’

‘Just Elsa, of course. She’s always there.’

‘Elsa doesn’t say much, does she?’

‘No, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.’

‘What do you mean, Sophie?’

‘Well, all I can say is, she’s not what she seems. She’s acting a role. Perhaps some people haven’t seen it, but I have. Elsa has never bothered hiding it from me. I suppose I’m not important enough in the scheme of things. There’s someone else behind that façade. You need to watch her eyes and you’ll see it.’

‘Thank you for the observation,’ he said.

‘I don’t suppose it’s of any use.’

He didn’t want her to realise how useful it might be, so he changed the subject.

‘Just to go back a bit,’ he said. ‘That cry you heard while you were on Kinder — you said it seemed a long way off.’

She shook her hand to move the bangles back on her wrist, an oddly elegant gesture.

‘Yes. Is that important?’

‘It might be.’

Cooper was remembering what Carol Villiers had said about high-pitched sounds being muffled by fog. The cry of a fox or bird wouldn’t have carried any distance. It must have been much closer to the group for Sophie Pullen to have heard it.

On her way home from Ripley, Diane Fry called again at the service station on Clifton Lane. She didn’t really need anything, but it was always a good idea to keep her car topped up with fuel, just in case.

Besides, tonight she felt an overwhelming need for some routine activity, a bit of real-world contact with ordinary people who had no idea who she was. Paying for her petrol at the kiosk wasn’t much, but the young woman who worked there did at least smile when she gave her pump number. Fry felt as though no one had smiled at her for months. It was her own fault, she supposed. No one could accuse her of being sociable and outgoing. She hardly went out of her way to make friends.

When she checked her phone in the store, she noticed an email message was waiting for her from InPost to alert her to a delivery, with a code to access her locker. The collection terminal was here at the service station, right next to the air pump.

She used the lockers because they were accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Much more convenient for her than having to find a helpful neighbour to take in parcel deliveries if she’d made purchases from Amazon or eBay sellers. She wasn’t even sure that she had any helpful neighbours in Wilford. Not during the day at least.

A security camera pointed down at her from its position over the locker terminal as she scanned the QR code on her email to open the locker and retrieve her item. She drew out a yellow box, tucked it under her arm and returned to her car.

When she got into her flat, she shrugged off her jacket, kicked off her shoes and relaxed with a deep sigh. It was only later that she realised that the wine was finished. The empty bottle stood like a tragic reminder on the kitchen counter, along with its useless cork. She should have remembered to buy some more when she was at the service station, but her mind had been on other things. She couldn’t be bothered to go out of the flat again now.

Then she remembered there was half a bottle of gin left in the kitchen cupboard. These days, she tried to keep it for emergencies. But tonight? Tonight definitely felt like an emergency.

Next morning, DS Dev Sharma was waiting to brief Ben Cooper on the Danielle Atherton murder case as soon as he arrived in the office.

‘There are still a few loose ends to tie up, Dev,’ said Cooper when he’d reviewed Sharma’s file.

‘Of course. We’ve got a result, though.’

Cooper looked at his DS, saw the satisfaction on his face.

‘It still gives you a buzz when you know you’ve got the right person in custody, doesn’t it?’

Sharma nodded. ‘And there’s no doubt about this one.’

‘No doubt at all.’

As soon as he uttered the words, Cooper experienced a frisson of uncertainty. It always felt wrong to say that at such an early stage in an investigation. In his experience, fate had a habit of throwing a spanner in the works, even in the most watertight of inquiries.

But Sharma was looking confident, and Cooper didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm.

‘Have you spoken to DS Fry at EMSOU?’ he asked. ‘She’s liaison with the Major Crime Unit, isn’t she?’

‘I tried,’ said Sharma. ‘But they told me to report directly to the senior investigating officer, DCI Mackenzie.’

Sharma’s expression was impassive now. Cooper wondered if his DS knew something he didn’t. He probably still had contacts in Derby, or even at headquarters in Ripley. He could ask, but he didn’t want to push the issue. It would only cause speculation.

‘OK, that’s fine,’ he said instead. ‘Carry on, Dev. You’re doing a great job.’

‘Thank you.’

Cooper watched him leave, torn between envy at Sharma’s confidence in what appeared to be a simple case he could help the MCU tie up and his own irresistible curiosity about what had happened to Faith Matthew on Kinder Scout. He needed to find out some answers for her. It might be hard, but somebody had to try. Nothing ever seemed to come easily.

Martin Jackson took a drink of tea and leaned back in his chair; Diane Fry had refused anything but water. She felt like a spy being interrogated by her captors, afraid that anything they gave her might be spiked with a truth drug. A ludicrous image, but that was how her mind was working.

‘We’ll take standards four and nine together, shall we?’ said Jackson after a while. ‘“Use of Force” and “Discreditable Conduct”.’

‘I will behave in a manner, whether on or off duty, which does not bring discredit on the police service or undermine public confidence in policing,’ she responded.

She could see he was surprised now. Fry was quite surprised too that the exact sentence had come into her mind without having to look at the booklet.

‘Very good,’ he said.

‘Are we going to go all the way through the Code of Ethics, or do you have anything specific to put to me?’

He looked at his papers.

‘Well, DS Fry, there is a complaint of assault on file. What do you know about that?’

‘Geoff Pollitt?’ said Fry in shock. ‘I didn’t think—’ Then she saw the puzzled expression cross his face and she stopped speaking.

‘Who is Geoff Pollitt?’ he said.

Fry shook her head. ‘Sorry. It was nothing. What were you asking me?’

‘Are you feeling all right, DS Fry? Would you like to take a break? I’m happy to finish my tea while you compose yourself.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. You were saying...’

‘A complaint of assault. From a fellow police officer.’

‘Oh.’

She ran her mind back over the interactions with her colleagues. Some of them hadn’t been friendly, it was true. But assault?

‘Perhaps I could refresh your memory. An inspector with the Leicestershire force?’

‘Leicestershire? But I’ve never...’

And then it came back to her. A memory of a course she’d attended at Sherwood Lodge, the Nottinghamshire Police headquarters, attended by officers from throughout the East Midlands. A session in a nearby pub afterwards. The Seven Mile Inn. She could remember the pub, but the officer’s name escaped her. Mick something? Or was it Dick?

‘Inspector Rick Shepherd,’ said Jackson. ‘Do you remember now? His nose was broken in a pub car park.’

‘I’d forgotten he was an inspector,’ admitted Fry.

‘Yes, a senior officer. But it doesn’t seem to matter to you, does it?’

‘It was self-defence,’ said Fry. ‘A sexual assault.’

‘Really? There’s no complaint of that nature on file.’

‘I didn’t report it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Sometimes you just have to deal with these things yourself and move on,’ said Fry.

Jackson grunted. ‘That’s not what we encourage, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

She shrugged. How could she explain to this man? How could she tell him that she detested the thought of all the fuss and the questions and the paperwork, and the stares and whispers of other officers? She would have done anything to avoid that. But her feeling was hard to put into words. At least, not the kind of words that would make sense in this room.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t follow procedure,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it happens.’

‘Noted.’

At Slackhall, a small village green lay at a crossroads near the entrance to the Chestnut Centre. The remnants of an ancient chestnut tree looked as though they had been blasted by lightning, three bare, stumpy trunks stripped of bark like broken torsos. Only one side of the tree was still alive, its leaves starting to turn golden in the autumn sun.

At busy times for the wildlife park, there would be cars parked along the roadside all around this junction. But the Chestnut Centre closed at dusk during the winter months, so visitors tended to come early.

Cooper walked past the restaurant and gift shop, and crossed a deer meadow towards the aviaries, with a herd of fallow deer watching him from the hillside. There was a good view of Kinder Scout from here. He wondered if that was why Elsa had chosen it.

Signposts pointed towards polecats, pine martens and Scottish wildcats, or to the badger rehabilitation pen. There were a lot of owls here too. Barn owls, spectacled owls, snowy owls, burrowing owls and a great grey owl. He walked past the pine martens and polecats on the lower trail, sniffing the musky smell of foxes and catching the high-pitched yowl of a wildcat, until he reached the otter pools.

And there she was. He saw Elsa Roth waiting for him by a pen full of European otters, a splash of glistening bodies and inquisitive whiskery faces behind the glass as he approached. Elsa looked as out of place as he’d imagined in her Gucci windbreaker, like a model from a mail-order catalogue.

When she saw him, she pointed away from the otters towards a large cage across the pathway.

‘Look, a Eurasian eagle owl,’ she said. ‘Bubo bubo.’

‘I know.’

Cooper recalled his first sight of an eagle owl. He’d been a child, visiting an agricultural show with his family somewhere — probably Bakewell. He wasn’t sure how old he would have been at the time, but the owl had stood as tall as him on its perch, and was so striking with its barred wings and ear tufts. Its amazing orange eyes had been staring directly into his, totally unblinking. The young Ben had been mesmerised by the bird, and eventually he had to be dragged away by his mother to look at the exhibits in the produce tent. The way this one gazed back at him so knowingly, it could almost be the same one.

‘It says here the females can have a wingspan of more than six feet,’ said Elsa. ‘That’s impressive.’

‘Very.’

By unspoken agreement, they began to walk along the bottom path past a series of animal enclosures. Cooper turned to look at Elsa a bit more closely.

‘You weren’t always a waitress, were you?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I was doing the waitressing to earn a bit of money. I wanted to study veterinary science. But it’s a five-year course, and it’s far too expensive. I was never going to achieve that, no matter how many tips I got from customers.’

‘So you married Darius instead.’

‘It seemed the best option. I put that ambition behind me.’

Cooper could tell from the distant look in her eyes that she hadn’t put it all that far behind her. What a pity that it was an ambition Darius hadn’t been willing to finance. He could certainly have afforded it, even if Elsa couldn’t.

‘Darius and I got married eight years ago,’ she said. ‘It was funny, actually. We had to postpone the wedding for six months because Darius suffered a burst appendix and was admitted for surgery.’

‘Six months? That seems a long time. What hospital was he in?’

‘Hospital? Oh, not on the NHS. He has private medical insurance. He went to Meadow Park in Manchester. It was his choice to go there. Treatment at a private hospital was covered by his insurance, and it’s the nearest private hospital to where we live.’

Cooper waited for Elsa to get round to the subject of their meeting, but she seemed content to be quiet, a role she’d probably practised during her time with Darius Roth.

‘What exactly did you want to talk to me about, Mrs Roth?’ he asked eventually.

‘Well, I’m not sure if it’s important,’ she said. ‘But I know Darius was concerned about the make-up of the group on this last walk.’

‘Oh? Was there something in particular he was concerned about?’

‘Well, he hates the idea of illegal drugs.’

Cooper stopped in mid-stride near an aviary containing barn owls. ‘Drugs? What do you mean?’

‘Faith’s brother, Jonathan, is an addict of some kind.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘The signs are all there. And Faith was a nurse.’

‘What does that have to do with it?’

‘She’s worked as a staff nurse in a surgical ward. She knows how to treat wounds, to deal with infections, to control pain. That means she must have had access to prescription medications. Strong painkillers like morphine. Even in the best regulated of hospitals there can be opportunities.’

Cooper was astonished. It was an accusation completely out of the blue. What had prompted Elsa Roth to come forward with this? The quiet woman who preferred to stay in the background and hardly spoke — yet she’d called him here to blurt this out.

‘Do you have any evidence for what you’re saying?’

‘No, none at all.’

‘Then it’s baseless speculation.’

Elsa brushed back a strand of hair. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ She turned to walk away from the aviary. ‘It’s just something that’s been bothering Darius. He’s very sensitive, you know.’

‘Really?’

She smiled. ‘I know it doesn’t always show, but I understand him very well.’

‘I’m sure you do, Mrs Roth. You seem extremely close.’

‘Oh, we are. So I’m very aware that Darius has a horror of blood and disease. You know, Faith Matthew once told us that among all the patients with gallstones and appendixes and bladder infections on her surgical ward there was one man suffering from necrotising fasciitis. Darius was almost ill when she described it.’

‘The so-called flesh-eating disease. It causes the death of the body’s soft tissues. Horrible.’

They crossed a series of wooden bridges over a stream. A keeper in a green sweater passed them, riding a vehicle like a converted golf buggy.

‘And now Mr Roth seems to be obsessed with the Kinder Mass Trespass,’ said Cooper.

‘It might seem odd to an outsider,’ she said. ‘But there are worse things to have as an obsession. It was a significant historical event.’

‘Nick Haslam says that the ramblers who took part in the Mass Trespass were all Communists.’

‘Oh yes. He never stops telling us that. He knows it infuriates Darius.’

‘I don’t understand why it would anger your husband.’

‘Darius is quite conservative on the quiet. He worships tradition, you know. His grandfather and all those other men who took part in the Mass Trespass have become heroes in his mind. The embodiment of British-bulldog spirit, like the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Welsh Guards at Rorke’s Drift.’

Cooper smiled, faintly puzzled. Both of those episodes from British history had been disastrous defeats, surely? Brave perhaps, but ultimately a lost cause.

He wondered if Elsa was mocking her husband’s beliefs. If so, did she do that to his face? Was it only Nick Haslam who’d infuriated Darius Roth with his contemptuous references to the original trespassers?

With a sigh, Cooper turned back towards the exit. Supposedly, Elsa Roth had called him because she wanted to talk. But she hadn’t told him anything so far, had she? Nothing useful anyway. Apart from the wild allegation against the Matthews, all she’d talked about was her husband. It seemed nothing else mattered to her except Darius.

‘I talked to Faith on the Saturday, you know,’ said Elsa suddenly. ‘The day before the walk.’

‘How was she then?’

‘She was upset by the note.’

‘Note?’

‘Didn’t you know? She’d had a note a few days before the walk. Some crank letter.’

Again she’d taken him by surprise, made him look at her differently. Was she doing this deliberately? It was as if she was playing a game, toying with him like an otter with a fish.

‘What did the note say?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember exactly,’ she said. ‘Some kind of threat, I think.’

Cooper bit his lip. A threat? Why was he only finding out about it now? Hadn’t Faith’s mother known about this, or her brother? It was bizarre that it had been left to Elsa Roth to volunteer information that could be vital to his inquiry.

‘Did Faith tell you anything else?’

‘That’s all I can remember. I hope I’ve helped.’

He sighed. ‘It could be very important.’

‘I’m glad.’

Was she really? Cooper couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t been able to figure out her motive yet. It might be a deliberate distraction, not an effort to help at all.

Cooper said goodbye to Elsa Roth in the car park. She’d arrived in a Mini convertible in metallic electric blue. Cooper felt sure there was probably a whole selection of other vehicles available for her to use in the range of garages at Trespass Lodge.

When Elsa had gone, he called Carol Villiers and asked her to collect the key for Faith Matthew’s house from her mother and meet him there.

‘What are we looking for?’ she said.

‘A threatening note of some kind.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I think so.’

Cooper could smell hot soup and jacket potatoes from the Chestnut Centre café. He peered through the window of the gift shop at the books and cuddly-toy otters.

As he was about to leave the centre, he heard a noise. A wild creature calling to him from a distance. Cooper turned and looked back but saw only the orange eyes of the eagle owl in the distance. It was staring back at him, totally unblinking.

Diane Fry stared across the table at her interviewer. The smile had gone from his face now. His eyes were sharp as he waited for her answer. He thought he’d caught her off guard.

‘I don’t know what you mean by my “relationship”,’ said Fry. ‘Angie is my sister. That seems a pretty straightforward relationship to me.’

Martin Jackson remained impassive, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.

‘DS Fry, you do know the rules about the business activities of a police officer’s immediate family members?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘And you must surely be aware of what “business” your sister has been involved in for a number of years now?’

Fry swallowed. Martin Jackson was an expert in the use of verbal quotation marks. ‘Relationship’ and now ‘business’. His change of tone when he said those words made them sound like accusations of depravity.

‘No, I know nothing about that,’ she said.

Jackson raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I find that hard to believe. This is your sister we’re talking about.’

‘We lost touch for a long time,’ said Fry.

‘Ah yes.’ Jackson shuffled papers in his file. ‘That would be when you were both living with foster parents in... Where was it?’

‘Warley, in the West Midlands.’

‘But you were only teenagers then.’

‘Angie ran away from our foster home. It was years before we met again.’

‘Would you like to tell us how that came about?’

She frowned at Jackson. ‘It involved another police officer,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you know that already.’

‘Detective Inspector Cooper.’

‘Ben was only a DC then,’ said Fry.

Jackson was alert again, and she realised she’d given something away in her tone.

‘It sounds as though it might be a difficult memory,’ he said.

‘It was a surprise.’

‘And not a pleasant one?’

‘It was hard, as it turned out. We were very close when we were kids. As I’m sure you know, we were both taken into care as children. I was nine, and Angie was eleven.’

‘For your own protection?’

‘Social Services said my parents had been abusing my sister. They said it was both of them.’

‘So your childhood was spent in foster homes?’

‘Yes.’

At first, they’d kept moving on to different places. So many different places that Fry couldn’t remember them. It was a few years before she realised that they didn’t stay anywhere long because of her sister. Angie was trouble wherever they went. Even the most well-intentioned foster families couldn’t cope with her. But Diane had worshipped her sister and refused to be split up from her.

‘But you were separated from your sister at some point?’

‘When she was sixteen, Angie disappeared from our foster home and never came back.’

The small details were impressed on Fry’s mind. The last memory that she had of her sister, Angie unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. There was a boy who was picking her up. She was off to a rave somewhere. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out that night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then and was getting out of hand.

Looking back, Fry knew she had been unable to believe anything bad of Angie then. Every time they’d been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents’ fault, not Angie’s.

And when Angie had finally disappeared from her life, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealised image of her, like a final, faded photograph. The memory still brought the same feelings of anger and unresolved pain. Feelings that revolved around Angie.

‘But it all fell apart,’ said Diane, ‘when—’ She stopped, wondering exactly how much Jackson knew. He was giving very little back so far. Would he complete her sentence?

‘When your sister started using heroin?’ he said.

‘I was going to say when she ran away from our foster home.’

But that was what Fry had been wondering. Jackson knew about the drugs. It suggested he probably knew an awful lot more too.

Diane Fry waited patiently, watching her interviewer take his time. She had no problem with awkward silences. She used them herself, and had never felt any compulsion to fill the void by blurting out information. If Martin Jackson hoped that was going to work, he was wrong.

‘So, your sister,’ said Jackson at last. ‘She travelled to Sheffield from the West Midlands, didn’t she?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And formed associations that were... shall we say... undesirable?’

‘I don’t know anything about those years Angie spent in Sheffield.’

‘And you might say that those sorts of associates were inevitable, given her drug habit.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘It’s very relevant, though, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? Relevant to what?’

He didn’t give her an answer. ‘And how much do you know about what your sister has been doing in the meantime?’

Now it was Fry’s turn to interpret her interviewer’s tone of voice. There was no doubt from his manner and the sudden tension in his posture that this was a crucial question.

‘Not very much,’ she said warily.

‘Do please share what you can,’ he said.

‘She turned her life around,’ said Fry. ‘In fact, my sister was recruited by the National Crime Agency as an informant.’

‘We know that. It was why she didn’t want to be contacted by you in Sheffield. Your interference might have damaged a major operation by the NCA.’

‘I wasn’t aware of it at the time,’ said Fry. ‘I only discovered her involvement with the NCA later.’

‘Your sister told you, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘She shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Did she share any confidential information with you?’ asked Jackson.

‘No, not at all.’

‘Are you sure of that, DS Fry?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘So did you ever meet a man named Craig Reynolds?’

‘I don’t know the name.’

‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

‘If I don’t recognise the name, I can’t tell you whether I’ve met him,’ said Fry.

‘As it happens, Craig Reynolds is the father of your nephew, Zack.’

‘Oh, him. My sister mentioned him a few times, but I don’t believe I ever heard his surname. And no, I never met him.’

Fry waited to be asked whether she’d had suspicions about Craig, but the question didn’t come. There would have been only one thing she could say. There were times when it was better not to know.

Over the past months, she’d formed an image in her mind of Angie’s boyfriend, Craig, the father of her child. She knew he drove a Renault hatchback and was involved in some kind of business that brought him to Nottingham occasionally. She was sure it was dodgy, probably illegal. But she deliberately hadn’t asked.

Then Craig had disappeared suddenly from Angie’s life. The next time she arrived at Diane’s home in Wilford, Angie was in a new relationship. His name is Sunil Kumar. Everyone calls him Sonny. And there was a kind of mother-in-law in the background too, referred to as Manjusha, who didn’t mind looking after the baby. Free childcare was a useful extra.

Craig? Angie had said. I couldn’t have left Zack with him for the day, let alone his mother. She’s a drunken old slag.

Fry still didn’t know what else was coming from Martin Jackson. But she was aware that not long ago an officer had faced allegations of breaching the Standards of Professional Behaviour in respect of ‘honesty and integrity’ and ‘discreditable conduct’ after he was found guilty of three charges of fraud.

So she decided to take the initiative.

‘What exactly is it we’re here for?’ she said. ‘Are you looking for a reason to suspend me?’

Jackson sat back in his chair and observed her like an interesting specimen in a zoo.

‘As you may know, very few police officers or members of staff are suspended from duty,’ he said. ‘The force policy is to seek to redeploy officers to low-risk roles instead. Any decision to suspend is made by the DCC and is reviewed monthly.’

‘And the tendency is for officers to resign while they’re suspended.’

‘That’s sometimes the case. You should also be aware that if an officer is allowed to resign while suspended, the constabulary provides a reference with the words “Resigned while under investigation”. All cases are taken to conclusion, even if an officer has resigned, so that the individual’s details can, where appropriate, be included on the College of Policing’s Disapproved Officer Register.’

‘I understand all that.’

‘Interesting. Very few officers have occasion in their careers to even think about the possibility of suspension, let alone look into the consequences.’

‘I remember all this from my training,’ said Fry.

‘So it hasn’t been on your mind?’

‘Is there a reason why it should have been?’

Again he didn’t answer, but turned a page of his notes. Fry began to feel frustrated, as she did in an interview room when a suspect deflected every question with a ‘No comment’.

‘So let’s turn our attention back to your sister,’ said Jackson, and her heart sank. ‘When exactly did she tell you what she’d been involved in?’

Cooper brought Carol Villiers, Luke Irvine and Gavin Murfin into his office. There wasn’t really enough room for the four of them, and Luke had to bring in an extra chair from the CID room. The room would soon get stuffy. But it was one of those times when Cooper needed to escape all the other distractions and get a clear focus.

‘All right, let’s examine who we’ve got in this group,’ he said when everyone was settled.

‘Well, there are twelve of them,’ said Irvine. ‘All potential suspects.’

‘It’s too many. Let’s try to whittle them down. Who had the opportunity? What were their movements at the time Faith was killed? And what motives can we dig up?’

‘There’s the threatening note someone sent to her house,’ said Villiers.

‘It’s gone to the lab to be examined for fingerprints. Not much chance of getting any results back yet.’

‘A note, though,’ said Irvine. ‘Who sends handwritten notes these days? You’re much more likely to get trolled on Twitter.’

‘It’s low-tech,’ said Cooper. ‘There’s a lot to be said for that. There’s no email address, no ISP, no phone number to trace a text back to. Just someone with a black marker pen and a sheet of printer paper. Much harder to trace.’

‘A suspect, then?’ said Villiers.

‘A partner or boyfriend is always the most obvious suspect,’ said Irvine.

‘But Faith’s boyfriend wasn’t even there on the walk. Do any of the group know him?’ There were blank looks from the team. ‘Well, let’s find out, then.’

Villiers made a note. ‘He’s told us he has no interest in the Mass Trespass,’ she said. ‘Or in Kinder Scout, or even in walking as an activity. That’s why he didn’t join in with the group. Faith went with her brother instead.’

‘We can count the brother out, surely?’ said Irvine. ‘What motive could Jonathan Matthew have for killing his sister?’

‘He’d promised Robert Farnley he could find the money to promote the band. But his parents had turned him down, and when he asked Faith for it, she said no too. That was disastrous for him, likely to destroy all his dreams. Though she might not have realised it at the time. He could have been angry enough.’

‘There are always other possibilities too. Things go on in families that we can’t imagine from the outside.’

‘Jonathan Matthew’s statement is with the others,’ said Villiers. ‘He’s no more helpful as a witness than any of the others. As far as we can tell, he seems to have wandered about aimlessly on the moor. It isn’t clear that he attached himself to either group when the party split up. No one else’s statement refers to him being there after the point when they decided to get help. They all seem to have assumed he was with the other group. But he was brought down by the MRT at the same time, so he must have been in the area.’

Villiers shook her head. ‘Not quite. I spoke to Dolly’s handler.’

‘Dolly?’

‘The search and rescue dog. She’s a German Shepherd. You’d love her.’

‘What did the handler say?’

‘That his dog located one walker separately and brought him to the rest of the group. From his description, that was Jonathan Matthew.’

‘So Jonathan was alone, and he had the opportunity?’

‘It seems so.’

‘Bring him in and go over his statement again, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘See if you can pin him down on his whereabouts.’

‘Okay.’

‘Well, even if Jonathan did decide to kill his sister, why would he choose to do it so publicly when he must have had plenty of other opportunities?’ argued Irvine.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t what you’d call a choice. It might have been in the heat of the moment.’

But that didn’t sound right to Cooper, even as he was saying it. It wasn’t a heat-of-the-moment crime, an impulsive lashing-out by someone blinded with anger. It wasn’t like the Danielle Atherton case. Someone had seen an opportunity in the fog and had taken it. They’d planned on having no witnesses.

Cooper turned to Murfin. ‘You talked to Jonathan Matthew, Gavin. I expect you’ve formed your own impressions.’

‘He looks like a student to me,’ said Murfin. ‘Acts like one too.’

‘You’ve never had much time for students, have you, Gavin?’

‘I never saw the need to go to university myself. And look how well I did.’

Cooper smiled. It was one thing he had in common with Murfin. Sometimes he thought he might be the last of the non-graduates in the police service. But in Gavin Murfin’s day it was the norm. A couple of A levels was all you needed back then. In his years with Derbyshire Constabulary, Gavin had seen dozens of younger recruits arrive, waving their degree certificates as they overtook him on the promotion ladder.

‘Why would you say Jonathan Matthew was on that Kinder Scout walk? What was his interest? Why was he a member of the New Trespassers Walking Club?’

‘He’s definitely not the type,’ said Murfin. ‘According to the reports from the Mountain Rescue guys, he wasn’t even dressed right for a hike on the moors. They said he was in the early stages of hypothermia. If Jonathan had been forced to spend the night on Kinder, it’s possible he would have been dead too. I don’t think he has any interest in the Mass Trespass stuff.’

‘So why was he there?’

‘Because of his sister,’ said Murfin simply. ‘He worshipped her. Jonathan didn’t talk much about his parents. But Big Sis was really important to him.’

‘So he went to please her?’

‘Or because he just wanted to spend time with her. Or...’

When he hesitated, Cooper looked at him more closely. He’d known Murfin a long time. Despite the flippant exterior, Gavin was always capable of surprising him. His experience could produce insights he might never get from anyone else.

‘Yes? Or what, Gavin?’

‘Or perhaps because he wanted to protect her,’ said Murfin.

‘Interesting.’

Murfin shrugged apologetically. ‘I don’t know why I said that really. It’s just an impression, like.’

‘No, that’s great. Thanks, Gavin. Is there any point in me asking the obvious question, though?’

‘Who he wanted to protect his sister from? No. Sorry, Ben, that I couldn’t tell you.’

‘We can’t discount him,’ said Cooper. ‘So we keep him on the list for now.’

‘We can count out the boyfriend,’ said Murfin. He glanced at Villiers. ‘Sorry.’

‘I know. He wasn’t with the walking group,’ she said.

‘Nowhere even near Kinder. He was doing a job.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘He had an emergency call-out at a care home in New Mills. A broken circuit. He couldn’t leave them without lighting, could he? Not a reputable tradesman like Mr Barrett. And I checked with the care home. He was there for nearly three hours. They gave him a cup of tea and a piece of cake when he’d done the job.’

‘When did he find out about what happened to Faith?’ asked Cooper.

‘Monday morning. He couldn’t get any answer from her phone, so he called at her house and found her brother there.’

‘Jonathan was at Faith’s house in Hayfield?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Greg Barrett and Jonathan Matthew,’ said Cooper. ‘Do those two get on, Gavin?’

‘Now that,’ said Murfin, ‘is something I’m quite sure about. The answer is no.’

Impatiently, Villiers tapped a form on the pile on Cooper’s desk.

‘It’s hard to see what Darius Roth would gain from this either,’ she said. ‘He’s very possessive of the walking group, talks about them as if they’re his family and he’s responsible for all of them.’

‘I thought you didn’t like him, Carol,’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t. He’s creepy. But Faith Matthew’s death is entirely against his interests, as far as I can see. It’s likely to break up the group, and therefore frustrate his obsession with recreating this walk every year.’

‘True. So who else is there?’

‘Nick Haslam, Sophie Pullen’s partner,’ she said. ‘He’s the disruptive one in the group. He has no interest in the history of it, and he tries to turn everything into a joke. That gets up people’s noses.’

‘But what was his relationship with Faith?’

‘We don’t know that.’

Cooper sighed. There was going to be a lot of ‘Don’t know.’ There were still a great many questions to ask.

‘Dead Woman’s Drop,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Do you think one of this crowd has a really warped sense of humour?’

‘Well, some of them know the area well enough,’ said Villiers. ‘I bet at least one or two are familiar with the names of the rock formations.’

‘Which of them was it who had an OS map in his pocket?’

‘Actually two of them. Nick Haslam and Liam Sharpe. But they don’t seem to have used them much.’

‘And Mr Sharpe was already incapacitated after his fall,’ said Villiers.

‘There’s the older couple, the Warburtons. They’re keen walkers.’

‘Sam Warburton has a history of heart problems,’ said Irvine. ‘At the scene, he was diagnosed with low blood sugar. Once glucose was administered, he recovered well. One of the Mountain Rescue team’s mobile units took him to hospital later as a precaution, because there were no more ambulances available. But they didn’t keep him in. He’s back in Hayfield now.’

‘In Hayfield? Don’t the Warburtons live in Manchester?’

‘Yes, but their caravan is still on the campsite outside Hayfield.’

‘On the walk, they seem to have been trailing at the back,’ pointed out Villiers. ‘Besides, they were always together. Practically inseparable. It’s hard to imagine one of them creeping up on Faith Matthew from behind.’

‘I agree.’

‘So that just leaves us with the women.’

Cooper nodded. ‘So it does.’

‘Elsa Roth and the two students, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott.’ She glanced up at Cooper. ‘And not forgetting Sophie Pullen.’

‘Miss Pullen has been by far our best witness to date,’ said Cooper. ‘She’s very observant. She noticed what everyone was doing — as much as she could, in the circumstances. All the other witness statements look vague and confused compared to hers.’

Villiers looked stubborn. ‘But she still can’t tell us who killed Faith Matthew,’ she said. ‘Her statement is useful, but there’s no evidence in it that helps us to identify a specific suspect.’

‘All right, all right. She stays on the list too.’

‘Millie Taylor and Karina Scott seem harmless,’ said Irvine. ‘They were the most distressed by their experience, and in a state of exhaustion when they were rescued. They don’t look capable of planning something like this, let alone carrying it out and covering up their guilt.’

‘So if we put the students aside, who’s top of our list?’ he asked.

He could already work out the answer. It was a process of elimination, as someone else had once said. There seemed to be just one name left.

‘Elsa Roth,’ said Villiers. ‘The quiet ones are often the most dangerous.’

‘But wasn’t it Elsa who wanted to call the walk off when she saw the fog coming down?’ asked Irvine.

‘Yes, but she didn’t tell us that detail, did she?’ pointed out Villiers. ‘It’s in the statements from a couple of the others. I bet she knew no one would take any notice of her but would carry on with the walk. And she also figured that some of the others would mention it when they were questioned. She had her fellow walkers summed up accurately.’

Villiers turned to Cooper. ‘And us too, perhaps,’ she said.

Cooper smiled. It was always good to see Carol Villiers thinking in the same direction, even if it was for different reasons. Elsa Roth was the only one on the list who hadn’t connected through the walk but had already been with Darius when the others came along one by one. What had she thought as she watched those relationships fostered by her husband, apparent evidence of his need for more approbation, and more loyalty? More love, perhaps.

And Villiers was right. That buttoned-up individual standing in the background was often the one you needed to watch out for.

Ben Cooper had asked both the Roths and Sophie Pullen to come into Edendale to make their formal statements. He was particularly interested in talking to Darius and Elsa Roth out of their normal environment. Being in a police station often made people think differently, or decide to tell an alternative story. It was as if the mere suggestion of being a suspect persuaded them to play a different role.

‘Elsa Roth’s background checks out,’ said Carol Villiers as they waited to speak to the Roths.

‘So why did she try to cast suspicion on Jonathan? I wonder,’ said Cooper.

‘And implicate Faith too.’

‘Yes. I don’t like that, Carol. It smells of victim-blaming.’

The Roths were shown into Cooper’s office. Darius perched uncomfortably on a chair as if he found it too small. He gazed around the room, and his eyes seemed to focus on the damp patch in a corner of the ceiling that Cooper had reported weeks ago. Villiers hovered by the door, paying most of her attention to Elsa.

‘No, I know nothing about a note,’ said Roth when Cooper asked him. ‘A threatening note sent to Faith? It’s bizarre.’

Cooper didn’t find him convincing. Everything about Roth was bizarre, yet when he said the word himself, it seemed to mean nothing.

‘We found it at her house,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea who might have sent it?’

‘None.’

‘Or who might have had a reason to threaten her?’

‘No again.’

Cooper thought about asking him if he’d met Faith Matthew during his stay at Meadow Park Hospital, but he changed his mind. It would be revealing that Elsa had spoken to him privately.

‘How dare anyone do this to one of my group?’ said Roth.

‘Your group?’ said Cooper. ‘You know, I still don’t quite grasp what unites you as a group.’

‘What unites us? We’re united by an attraction to the moors, specifically to Kinder Scout. It has a magic that gets into people’s souls.’

Cooper could understand that. He’d felt the magic himself. Kinder was a place like no other, a different universe, a world away from life in the city. But that didn’t explain what kept the group together, when there was so much to be gained by experiencing the moors alone.

‘It’s so much safer in a group,’ said Roth as if anticipating his question. ‘You can easily come to grief on your own, or even with just two of you. Safety in numbers, that’s what we always say. Enjoying the experience as a family.’

Cooper nodded. But it hadn’t been safe, had it? And the New Trespassers Walking Club were one of the most dysfunctional families he’d ever encountered.

‘What you don’t understand is that we’re not just recreating the Mass Trespass of 1932. We’re perpetuating it, moving the principles behind the trespass forward into the future. It’s about the rights of the people against the will of a small, powerful minority who rule our lives. That’s still happening now, as much as it was in my grandfather’s time.’

Roth took a deep breath.

‘And it’s no longer just landed aristocracy like the Duke of Devonshire,’ he said. ‘Some of them are large corporations who decide where we can go, and when. Our group is small, but we’re here and we’re persistent. And we get attention — I make sure of that. It’s a warning to all those who like to go back to the 1930s and keep the masses in their place.’

‘Forgive me, but you’re an odd choice for a working-class hero,’ said Cooper.

Roth laughed. ‘You know nothing about me. I came up the hard way. As I told you, my great-grandfather Adam worked in a railway yard in Gorton — the Beyer Peacock locomotive factory, which closed in the 1960s. My grandfather, Daniel, took all the overtime he could get in a boiler works until he’d saved enough money to open a small corner shop. My father helped him in the shop until it went bust, forced out of business by the supermarkets. He had to get a job at the Slack & Cox mineral-water factory and put his effort into supporting me, because he wanted us to do all the things he never could.’

Darius had a smooth, persuasive voice. Cooper felt he could listen to that voice all day. But he wouldn’t believe a word it said.

‘Didn’t your family run a textiles business?’ he asked.

‘The business was a huge gamble, but it paid off because of the way my father slaved day and night to make it a success. I might look affluent to you, Detective Inspector Cooper, but I’m a working-class boy. I live in Hayfield, but the back streets of Manchester are in my blood. I understand what those boys were trying to achieve when they came here to walk onto Kinder. I live the spirit of the Mass Trespass every day.’

By the time he’d finished, there was a flush in Darius’s cheeks and his eyes were alight. Cooper couldn’t doubt his passion. In a way, he had sympathy with it. But he was still unsure whether Darius Roth was using that passion in the right way.

Elsa was sitting quietly at his side, letting Darius do all the talking, nodding occasionally.

Her quietness reminded Cooper of Nick Haslam’s statement that Elsa had wanted to call the walk off when the fog came in. It was just that nobody took any notice of her. Perhaps Elsa was one suspect he could count out. Someone had taken advantage of the conditions on the Kinder plateau to kill Faith Matthew. If Elsa Roth had wanted to turn back, it suggested she had no such intentions.

But perhaps Villiers had been right. Maybe Elsa knew perfectly well that no one would take any notice of her, because no one ever did. So she’d been safe making the suggestion, in the knowledge that it would be ignored. Was she clever enough to have planned that bluff in advance? Cooper wasn’t sure. Elsa had been one of the least forthcoming — or the least talkative, anyway.

And she would have to be very clever, wouldn’t she? Because Elsa hadn’t volunteered that nugget of information herself when she was interviewed. It would have been the obvious thing to do, if she wanted to make herself appear innocent. But she’d left it up to one of the others to mention it. That made her look like someone who had no doubts about her own innocence and didn’t feel she had to justify herself.

Cooper took a deep breath. He looked at Elsa again, remembering what Villiers had said about her earlier. The quiet ones were often the most dangerous. It was harder to tell what they were thinking. He much preferred the suspects who found themselves in the interview room and couldn’t wait to spill their guts and tell their whole story. Sometimes they talked and talked and talked, and the difficulty was stopping them. It was as if they felt compelled to fill the silence of the room with all the stuff that was burning and seething inside their heads, waiting to get out.

A person who could keep secrets was rare. But it seemed there was at least one of them among the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club.

When Diane Fry finally called Cooper back, it was to ask him for his help. She wanted him to do her a favour.

‘What?’ he said in astonishment.

‘A favour,’ she repeated slowly, as if she was talking to an idiot.

Cooper recalled the last occasion Diane Fry had asked him for a favour. The time she’d gone back to Birmingham to confront an incident from her past. For some reason, she hadn’t felt able to trust her former colleagues from West Midlands Police. Had that all come round again? Had something she’d done in Birmingham rebounded on her? If so, it was hard to see how he could help her.

But he’d agreed to meet her, and she’d volunteered to come to Edendale instead of making him travel to Nottingham. That made him even more suspicious. She was obviously trying to soften him up. She’d be offering to pay for the drinks next.

They arranged to meet at the Wheatsheaf pub off Market Square. Across the road was Stone Bottom, the yard where the Way of the Eagle Martial Arts Centre had once occupied the basement of an old warehouse at the end of Bargate, the other three floors being filled with craft workshops, software developers, a small-scale publisher of countryside books and an employment agency. The steps down to the dojo were always bathed in the smell of freshly baked bread from the ventilators in the back wall of the baker’s in Hollowgate.

It seemed a century ago that he and Diane Fry had gone there together. He’d tried to be friends with her then, when she first came to E Division. Something had gone wrong along the way, and he still wasn’t quite sure what.

Cooper had a flash of recollection, back to the conversation he was having with Fry as they arrived at the dojo that day and parked their cars in the middle of an area of mud-filled potholes, with the sound of dull thumps and hoarse screams filtering through the steel grilles of the warehouse windows and that scent of baking bread.

The buildings were clustered so close together in Stone Bottom that they seemed grotesquely out of proportion from ground level as they leaned towards each other, dark and shadowy against the sky, set with long, blank rows of tiny windows. The slamming of car doors had echoed loudly against the walls and reverberated down the stone setts to the narrow bridge over the River Eden.

He and Fry had been talking about the possible motives for murder in an inquiry they were involved in, the case of a teenage girl found dead in woods outside Edendale.

‘You make people sound really complicated,’ she’d said. ‘In my experience, their motivations are usually very simple and boring.’

‘Motivations like ambition and greed?’ he’d replied. ‘The old favourites? They can certainly make people ruthless and selfish, can’t they?’

‘And sex, of course,’ she said.

‘But sex isn’t so simple either, is it?’

‘For some of us, it’s very simple, I can assure you.’

The craft workshops and software developers were still there on the upper floors of the warehouse, along with an interior designer and a photographic studio. But the martial arts centre had gone now, and so had the employment agency and the publisher.

For a moment, Cooper wondered what had happened to his old flat in Welbeck Street. He hadn’t driven past it for a while. The house had passed to his landlady’s nephew when she died, and he’d been planning to sell both of the houses she owned. Property didn’t stay on the market for long in Edendale, especially the smaller terraced houses. He was pretty sure both of them would have been snapped up and converted into family homes.

But he was happy about that. He felt no nostalgia about that first-floor flat, though it had been the first home of his own when he moved out of Bridge End Farm. Number 8 Welbeck Street had been an important part of his life for a while, but it was gone now.

Diane Fry arrived quietly. Cooper didn’t notice her until she was standing over his table and putting an arm on his shoulder to make him jump. She’d never lost the ability to creep up on him like that. He wondered if she found it funny. It was hard to tell when she so rarely smiled.

‘Ben,’ she said simply.

‘You’d better sit down. Do you want a drink?’

She held up a glass. ‘I’ve got one.’

‘So you have.’

He wondered how long she’d actually been in the pub, whether she’d been watching him from some corner while he reminisced about the past, probably baffled at his ability to be content with own company.

‘Sit down, then. Tell me what it’s all about.’

Fry explained what was happening to her, and he listened in silence, studying the way her demeanour changed. Behind the façade, she was genuinely worried.

‘I haven’t had much experience with Professional Standards,’ said Cooper, when she’d finished.

‘No, of course you haven’t,’ began Fry. ‘You—’ Then she stopped. Whatever she’d been about to say, she’d had second thoughts.

Cooper watched her curiously. She had never before been so reticent about saying exactly what she thought, even if it was rude or ill-mannered. Now something was different. It was as if she was worried about rubbing him up the wrong way. That made him feel more concerned about her than if she’d come here for another argument.

‘So that’s why I haven’t been able to get hold of you,’ he said.

‘You’ve been trying to get hold of me? Why?’

‘Oh, nothing important.’

‘Good, because I’ve been a bit busy, as I just said.’

‘It can’t be anything too serious,’ said Cooper. ‘I know people make misjudgements now and then. They have unfortunate incidents. Remember when a drunk’s finger was severed while he was being transferred into a caged van?’

‘Officers were observing standard procedure with a non-compliant prisoner,’ said Fry.

‘Of course they were. But the guy still lost a finger.’

She took another drink and eyed the rest of the customers in the pub. It was still early in the evening, but it would get busy later. The empty tables would soon fill up.

Fry put her glass down with a thump.

‘People talk,’ she said enigmatically.

‘Surely they can’t believe everything they hear.’

‘In my case, they probably do.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘They want me to go for a psychological evaluation,’ said Fry.

‘A what?’

‘You heard me. They want an assessment of my emotional and mental stability.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Cooper.

‘Is it? I’m not so sure.’

For the first time since he’d known her, Cooper saw self-doubt in Diane Fry’s eyes. Had she doubted her own stability all this time? He could sympathise with that. He’d gone through periods in his life when he felt he was out of control, or only just holding things together on the surface. Had the Diane he’d known only been on the surface all along? Was there so much more underneath that he’d never suspected?

But the moment passed. Fry took a ragged breath, and her posture changed as the old veneer of confidence returned.

‘It’s rubbish, of course,’ she said.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘But there are, you know... some incidents in my past.’

Cooper frowned. ‘Nothing that they could make a case out of for gross misconduct. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?’

‘Losing my job? Yes, that scares me stiff.’

‘So why have you come to me?’ asked Cooper.

‘I need help,’ said Fry simply. ‘And I didn’t know who else I could trust.’

‘Trust hasn’t always been what we had between us, Diane.’

‘No, you’re right. But still... when it comes down to it, you’re the only one.’

Cooper fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair, while she watched him expectantly. She wanted an answer, but he didn’t know what to say. When it involved Diane Fry, he’d rarely known what the right thing was to say.

‘What exactly is it you want me to do?’ he said.

‘You know people,’ she said. ‘You’ve been in Derbyshire, like... for ever. I’ve always been an outsider, I know that. I bet people tell you things they would never share with me.’

‘You’re talking about internal organisational stuff.’

‘Obviously. I need to know what’s going on, who’s been telling tales about me.’

‘It must be someone you’ve worked with,’ said Cooper. ‘What about DC Callaghan?’

‘I’ve thought about him. But there was one incident just recently...’

‘What was that?’

‘I shouldn’t tell you. But internally, only Jamie Callaghan was aware of it.’

‘So?’

‘The PSD haven’t mentioned it,’ she said.

‘So you don’t think they know about it?’ said Cooper. ‘Whatever it was.’

‘Not so far.’

Cooper stared at Fry.

‘I’m still puzzled,’ he said. ‘What do they really want from you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fry. ‘I don’t even know where this is all coming from, so it’s hard to tell.’

‘Could it be somebody in the West Midlands?’

‘Setting me up, you mean?’

‘I just wondered if you had information that might, well... compromise someone.’

Fry gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Undoubtedly. How could I not have, during the course of my career here and in Birmingham? But where do I start?’

‘Birmingham,’ said Cooper, ‘sounds like the ideal place to start.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, go on, then. I know nothing about your time in the West Midlands.’

‘There was a DI in Birmingham. Gareth Blake. We worked together in Aston years ago. He was supposed to be investigating my assault case.’

‘Your case?’ said Cooper. He hesitated. ‘Oh, you mean your case. The...’ He dried up, too uncomfortable to say it out loud.

‘Yes, the rape,’ said Fry. ‘Blake was assigned to cold-case rape inquiries.’ She jerked her head dismissively. ‘Cold case? It didn’t seem so cold to me.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Cooper. ‘Though it was a long time ago.’

He knew he’d said the wrong thing. But what was there he could say that would sound right? Probably nothing. Fry had told him about her rape years ago, when she’d first transferred to Derbyshire and they found themselves working closely together. It had been an act of unusual openness on her part, which he’d never known how to respond to.

Fry gazed at him stonily, as if his reaction was no more than she expected. She would probably have given him a withering put-down. But for once she couldn’t. She’d come to ask him for a favour.

Cooper remembered Fry being called back to Birmingham when the investigation into her rape was reopened. A DNA hit had presented new evidence, and she’d become the subject of a cold-case inquiry, referred to constantly as ‘the victim’. How she must have hated that.

And he recalled that Fry had asked him for help then too. Was that connection what had made her come to him again?

‘OK, so DI Blake was in charge of investigating your cold case. But didn’t it fall through in the end?’ he said.

‘They lost a vital witness,’ said Fry.

‘And you did some investigating of your own.’

‘Thank you for calling it investigating. Sometimes it seems more like digging through dirt. The whole thing was fishy from the start — a DNA hit they didn’t tell me the real meaning of, a witness who changed her mind about testifying. And you do know who was at the centre of it all?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘Your—’

‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘Just a corrupt lawyer.’

‘William Leeson. Of course I remember.’

Cooper didn’t know what else she’d done on that visit to Birmingham, apart from enlisting his assistance to get access to the dodgy solicitor, who turned out to be a major part of her past. He hadn’t asked her too many questions, and he wasn’t about to do so now.

‘In reality, Blake and his partner were keeping tabs on me,’ said Fry. ‘It must have been them. They knew that I’d met with my colleague Andy Kewley before he died. Kewley was going to give me some information I needed, something that would have helped me find out what went wrong.’

‘The PSD can’t possibly think that you had anything to do with his death,’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t really know what they think,’ said Fry. ‘They might just be throwing it all out in a fishing expedition, hoping one item will stick or I’ll give something away inadvertently.’

‘You mean they want you to incriminate yourself.’

‘It looks that way.’

‘That’s not acceptable, Diane. You really should have someone with you in these interviews.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t want that.’

‘Well, be careful.’

She took a long drink, and Cooper waited. Sometimes, he felt it was what he did best.

‘It’s Angie,’ said Fry finally. ‘She seems to be the main problem.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’ve never really asked you,’ said Fry. ‘I mean, going back to that time when you first made contact with her.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘To be accurate, she made contact with me. I didn’t want anything to do with it. It was your business. But Angie turned up at my flat one day. She told me she wanted you to stop trying to find her.’

‘But you did the opposite,’ said Fry. ‘You fixed up a meeting. You put us back in touch with each other.’

Cooper shrugged. ‘It seemed simpler than trying to stop you looking. I don’t know she expected me to do that. I never had so much influence over you.’

‘What did you know about what she was doing in Sheffield?’

‘Not much. I do know she was picked up by someone in a BMW with a blocked registration.’

‘So you suspected.’

‘It wasn’t my business,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, but you made it your business, didn’t you?’

Cooper held out his hands. ‘I was just trying to help, Diane.’

‘Well, help me now.’

‘What is it you want from me?’

‘Just for you to be there if I need you. Someone to back me up, and give me a bit of support. And if you can use any contacts... well, I’d be grateful.’

He could see it was hard for her to ask. Forget that she’d made things difficult for him so often over the years. It wasn’t relevant now. And it wasn’t in his nature to refuse to help.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank you.’

They walked back out into Market Square. Fry’s black Audi stood just a couple of spaces away from Cooper’s Toyota, its deep red paintwork standing out among all the greys and silvers of the other vehicles.

Cooper looked at the empty spaces between their two cars. Had they been empty when Fry arrived? Did she deliberately leave that space, rather than park right next to him? It was such a small thing, yet it seemed to symbolise something about their relationship.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘Just one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not taking anything, are you?’

She stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Well, it happens,’ he said. ‘A lot of police officers... they can’t cope with the stress day by day without a little bit of artificial support.’

‘You think I’m on drugs? What, cocaine? You’re suggesting I might snort a few lines of coke before I go to work in the morning?’

‘No. But... well, there is the matter of your sister.’

Fry took a deep breath and seemed to calm herself down with an effort.

‘You’re right, Ben. Yes, you’re right. Absolutely spot on. I bet that’s exactly what the PSD are thinking. That’s why you said it, isn’t it? To make me think of the worst-case scenario. They’ve latched on to Angie connections and they think I will have been contaminated. That’s why they’re putting me through this process. They want me to reveal myself to be a junkie. A cokehead. A cocaine-sniffing cop. Jesus wept.’

‘Your behaviour can be a bit... unpredictable.’

‘I see we’re going for the full-frontal honesty tonight,’ she said.

‘Well, if you want my help, it’s best to have these things out in the open.’

She breathed quietly for a moment, and he was reassured when she refused to turn away but continued to meet his eyes.

‘I’m not taking anything,’ she said. ‘Does that satisfy you?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper.

‘You believe me?’

‘Absolutely.’

The tension dropped away. Fry even managed a smile.

‘Have you been wondering about it all this time?’

‘Not really,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, it’s not something you can go ahead and ask.’

‘But you just did.’

‘This is different.’

A group of young men passed them, talking loudly as they headed for the pubs around Market Square. Fry unlocked her car and paused with her hand on the door.

‘Ben,’ she said.

He turned. ‘Yes?’

‘You know this could get you into trouble, don’t you?’

Cooper looked at her for a moment, saw in that one second everything he’d gone through with her, the times she’d been a thorn in his side and the occasions when she’d saved his life, or saved him from himself.

‘You’ve always caused me trouble, Diane,’ he said. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’

Detective Superintendent Branagh was based at North Division headquarters in Chesterfield now. Since Edendale was relegated to a Local Policing Unit, most of Ben Cooper’s direct access to his boss was limited to phone calls.

It took a couple of attempts before he could get through to her that morning. Meetings, he supposed. One of the penalties of rank.

‘This death on Kinder Scout,’ she said when he was able to get through. ‘Is it a murder inquiry, DI Cooper, or a suspicious death?’

Cooper hesitated. ‘We’re not entirely sure, ma’am. The post-mortem results are inconclusive.’

‘Well, if and when you are sure, it’ll have to be passed to the Major Crime Unit to lead the inquiry.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary.’

‘We’ll make sure you’re involved. But there has to be a qualified SIO in a murder case — you know that.’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll keep everyone informed. But there’s something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know what’s happening with regard to DS Fry? I understand there’s an internal investigation under way.’

‘There isn’t much I can say about it, I’m afraid. The Professional Standards Department are handling it. They do things in their own fashion. Why does it concern you, Ben? I know you’ve worked with her, but—’

‘I was wondering how serious it is, that’s all.’

‘I’m not privy to the details at this stage. In fact, I’m not sure they’ll include me, even if it comes to a case conference. I’m not currently DS Fry’s divisional commander.’

‘No, I understand.’

‘I’m sorry I can’t help any more than that,’ said Branagh. ‘I shouldn’t say this, Ben, but you could probably find out more by unofficial means.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Cooper. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

When Cooper had finished the call, he reflected for a moment that he was glad Detective Superintendent Branagh hadn’t asked more about Faith Matthew’s death. He was reluctant to let it go, and it was an advantage to have an inconclusive post-mortem result. Branagh had probably realised that. She’d covered herself but allowed him some rope. He hoped he wasn’t about to hang himself with it.

Then Dev Sharma knocked on his office door. He didn’t look happy.

‘Ben, we’ve got a problem with the Atherton inquiry,’ said Sharma. ‘The files have been flagged up with a query.’

Cooper looked at him in surprise. ‘A query from the CPS or from EMSOU?’

‘Major Crime Unit have kicked some of the statements back to us. They say they’re contradictory.’

‘What’s wrong? I thought it was an open-and-shut case.’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Show me what you’ve got again, Dev.’

‘Well, the statement that causes the problem is from the next-door neighbour. She says she saw Gary Atherton arriving home at ten thirty-eight a.m. She was sure of the time because she was waiting for a taxi to take her for a hospital appointment and it was due at ten thirty-five. She heard Mr Atherton’s car pull up and thought it was the taxi, so she looked at her watch. It was ten thirty-eight.’

‘And?’

‘The 999 call was recorded at ten thirty-two.’

‘From a mobile phone.’

‘Yes. But its location was shown as the Athertons’ address. The call was made from that house. And it was Mrs Atherton’s phone, not her husband’s. His own phone was still in his pocket when he was detained.’

‘You’re telling me someone else made the call, claiming to be Gary Atherton?’

‘That appears to be what the evidence suggests. The CPS would say it’s enough to weaken the prosecution case.’

‘Who took the statement from the neighbour?’ asked Cooper.

‘Luke Irvine.’

‘Send Becky Hurst to talk to her again. No pressure. Just let her explain it all again. She must have got something wrong.’

Sharma looked dubious. ‘We could extend our door-to-door inquiries. Talk to more neighbours. They might have a different account.’

‘Yes, you’re right, Dev. Do that too.’

‘All right.’

‘And can you send DC Villiers in, please?’

Sharma disappeared, and Carol Villiers came in a few moments later.

‘Dev is panicking a bit,’ she said.

‘He’ll be OK. He just needs to get through this. He thought he had it all tied up, but something always catches you out. DS Sharma will be able to deal with it.’

‘Isn’t it a bit of a risk giving him so much responsibility?’ said Villiers.

Cooper shook his head. ‘It’s what he’s here for. Trust me.’

‘So what have you got for me?’

‘Here’s a nugget from Darius Roth’s past history,’ said Cooper. ‘According to his wife, he suffered appendicitis eight years ago. He was admitted to a private hospital, presumably for an appendectomy.’

‘Was he in Meadow Park Hospital, by any chance?’

‘Right. Can you find out if Faith Matthew was employed there at the time? And whether she worked on the same ward? I’m looking for alternative connections between these people.’

‘I’ll try, Ben, but you know—’

‘Yes. Medical practitioners are notoriously difficult to get information out of, and not just about their patients.’

Villiers placed an interview report on his desk.

‘What’s this?’

‘I talked to Jonathan Matthew again first thing this morning and went over his statement in detail,’ she said. ‘He’s no clearer about where he was on Kinder Scout — except lost. He’s insistent that he never saw his sister after the party split up. He says he kept his distance from both groups because he thought they were being foolhardy.’

‘He had a point,’ said Cooper. ‘But he’s managed to draw suspicion on himself nevertheless.’

Diane Fry was sitting in the same room at Derbyshire Constabulary headquarters, at the same table, with the same stack of files on its freshly polished surface.

Martin Jackson looked as though he enjoyed his job. He’d entered the room full of energy, fresh and pink-cheeked like someone who’d just been for a run around the grounds. And perhaps he had.

Jackson put his glasses on and spread his files out in front of him as if ready for a party game. Hangman or snakes and ladders maybe. One where someone slipped up and met an unfortunate end.

‘DS Fry, do you remember a colleague of yours from West Midlands Police, Andrew Kewley?’ he asked.

‘Of course I remember him,’ said Fry.

‘He died rather suddenly.’

‘I know that.’

‘Naturally. You were there, weren’t you?’

‘To be more accurate, I found his body,’ she said. ‘It was very distressing for me.’

‘I’m sure it was. Kewley was a friend of yours, as well as a close colleague.’

‘He’d retired by then,’ said Fry. ‘And I hadn’t seen him for some time, since I transferred to Derbyshire.’

‘Really? Didn’t you meet with him earlier that same week, a day or two before his death?’

Fry clenched her fists under the table, hoping he couldn’t see her reaction. How did Jackson know that? Only she and Andy Kewley had been present at that meeting. Warstone Lane Cemetery, with its catacombs and broken angels, right in the heart of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. It had been Kewley’s choice of location. Had he mentioned their meeting to someone else? Someone currently on the West Midlands force? Or had Gareth Blake already been watching Kewley by then?

‘I meant I hadn’t seen him before that week,’ she said.

‘Mmm.’ Jackson made another note on his pad. ‘As I understand it, you’d asked Mr Kewley for some information.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Fry. ‘It was in connection with an old case.’

‘Your case, in fact.’

‘Yes, my case,’ said Fry, momentarily irritated at hearing the same phrase Ben Cooper had used.

Jackson pursed his lips at her change of tone.

‘A violent assault you suffered during the course of your duties when you were stationed in Birmingham, serving with Aston CID. I gather you were separated from your colleagues during an operation and assaulted by gang members when they discovered you were a police officer.’

‘You can call it a rape,’ said Fry. ‘That’s what it was. And of course it was obviously of concern to me.’

‘As the victim, yes. We fully appreciate that. Very understandable. But as a serving police officer, you should have known better than to be conducting inquiries of your own, making unofficial contact with witnesses. Possibly even suspects?’

He made the last phrase sound like a question, which Fry avoided answering.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But should police officers be held to much higher standards than members of the public even when they’re victims themselves?’

‘Ah, a much-debated question of principle. But beyond my remit, I’m afraid. We only attempt to apply the existing rules here.’

‘Then perhaps you should be investigating what happened to Andy Kewley that day,’ said Fry. ‘It seems to me that’s a more serious question to be asking.’

He looked at her over his glasses. ‘You think his death was suspicious?’

‘I don’t have the evidence, but...’

Jackson switched smoothly to another file from the bottom of his pile. ‘The inquest recorded a verdict of natural causes. The results of the post-mortem were fairly clear. Mr Kewley was suffering from heart disease. No doubt the result of too much alcohol, too many cigarettes and not enough exercise. Things were different in those days, I suppose.’

‘I think someone was watching him,’ said Fry. ‘How would anyone know that we met earlier that week otherwise? Where does your information come from?’

‘From our colleagues in the West Midlands,’ said Jackson.

‘Exactly.’

‘I can’t tell you more than that.’

‘Because it might constitute evidence, I suppose.’

Fry felt herself growing angry. She’d been trying to fight it ever since she first entered this room and sat across the table from this man. She’d tried to keep the flood of rage and frustration under control, but now she was afraid she might lose the battle. The worst thing was, she knew that was exactly what Martin Jackson wanted.

He took off his glasses and laid them carefully on the table. ‘DS Fry, if you have allegations to make of improper behaviour by your former colleagues, you should make them through the proper channels. This inquiry only covers your own conduct.’

‘I know,’ said Fry, biting her lip. ‘And of course I deeply regret what happened to Andy Kewley.’

Jackson smiled.

‘And so,’ he asked quietly, ‘do you blame yourself for his death?’

Fry was silent. There were some questions she wasn’t obliged to answer. Not even to herself.

Ben Cooper stood in a small clearing in the woods with Carol Villiers. The trees had encroached onto the site of the old Primitive Methodist chapel since it was abandoned, but the area immediately around it had been kept reasonably clear of weeds. Perhaps another job for the Roths’ gardener?

Cooper realised he had no idea who that was. He made a mental note to find out the man’s name and speak to him. Like servants, gardeners were often the people who observed small details and knew most about their employers. There was just a chance he might have noticed something useful.

In front of him stood a plain stone building. It had no fancy carvings or stained-glass windows. And certainly no spire or steeple. There was no reaching up towards God with ambitious building projects for these worshippers. At this church, each man must have had to find God within himself.

The main door of the chapel had been secured with deadbolts, and Cooper could see that some work had been done on the roof to make it watertight. Missing lead was still one of the biggest threats for old churches in rural areas, even those that were still in use. Thieves could strip a roof in a single night, leaving the interior awash with rain by the next day.

Villiers was walking round the walls of the building.

‘Can you see anything through those windows?’ called Cooper.

‘No, they’re too high.’

‘Same on this side.’

The windows were small too. Not much light had penetrated this church.

‘It’s handy, isn’t it?’ said Villiers. ‘Anything could be going on in there. Unless there was some reason for an official inspection, no one would know about it.’

‘Can you see a water supply, or electricity?’

‘No.’

‘Then the last official visit might have been by a planning officer when the approval for conversion was given. It’s clear there’s been no attempt to convert it to residential use, anyway. The building inspectors probably lost interest after a while. They have better things to do with their time.’

‘Lucky for Darius Roth, do you think?’

‘I don’t think anything comes to Mr Roth by luck, Carol.’

Cooper decided to call Darius Roth’s mobile number.

‘Mr Roth,’ he said, ‘we’re here at the old chapel next to your property. I’d like to take a look inside, with your permission.’

‘Why?’

‘As part of our inquiries.’

‘I don’t see what relevance the old chapel can have.’

‘Is there some reason you don’t want us to see inside, sir?’

‘Don’t you need a warrant?’

‘Not if we have your permission.’

Roth had sounded anxious, his voice a few notches higher than normal. But he paused, seemed to gather himself together, and his voice was back to its usual smoothness when he spoke again.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll send Will up with the key.’

‘Will?’

‘Will Sankey. My gardener.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

On the way back to Edendale, Ben Cooper tried to put out of his mind the recurring image he had of Darius Roth as a kind of charismatic cult leader, gathering loyal followers around him. It was probably unfair, though it was an image Roth himself did nothing to dispel. He might even cultivate it. Everyone had a role they tried to play, didn’t they?

As he steered the Toyota across the divide between the Dark Peak and White Peak, Cooper thought of all the criminals who’d lived and died in these villages. Abney, Bradwell, Hucklow. Their histories were full of individuals who’d played their roles to the end. Murderers, thieves, conmen. They’d all thought they’d get away with their crimes. And some of them had, of course. Those were the names that didn’t make it into the history books.

He turned to Carol Villiers as they were passing her home village of Tideswell.

‘You know that Saturday night,’ he said. ‘The night before the walk. Millie Taylor and Karina Scott stayed in the Roths’ guest accommodation at Trespass Lodge, didn’t they?’

‘Yes. Mr Roth said he didn’t want them having to pay for a hotel.’

Cooper nodded. But Jonathan Matthew had been there too. The potential black sheep. Perhaps Roth had wanted Jonathan right under his roof.

‘Mr Roth presents himself as a benefactor, doesn’t he?’ said Villiers. ‘I think that’s the role he aspires to. Despite his talk of working-class roots, his dream is to be a wealthy patron surrounded by grateful recipients of his generosity.’

‘That’s interesting too,’ said Cooper.

‘Is it? Why?’

‘Well, if that’s true — and I think you’re right, Carol — then Millie Taylor and Karina Scott wouldn’t be enough for him. He’d want to spread his patronage around, gain more grateful recipients who owe him a debt.’

‘I see. So...?’

‘So who else was he a benefactor to?’ said Cooper. ‘Which of the walking group owed Darius Roth so much that they might kill for him?’

‘Or resent their benefactor.’

‘Ah, you’re thinking of the crucified teddy bear. That does suggest someone who felt very bitter against Darius Roth, to say the least.’

‘Whoever it was, perhaps he had something on them.’

‘A kind of hold over them?’ said Cooper. ‘Yes. Take the Gould brothers, for example. They’re the longest-standing members of the group. Why are they so loyal to Darius? What kind of hold does he have over those two?’

Villiers looked at him wide-eyed.

‘You asked earlier what bound such a disparate group together,’ she said, ‘when it clearly isn’t an interest in the Mass Trespass. Could this be it, Ben?’

‘Every one of them is indebted to Darius in some way? If so, that opens up a whole new can of worms. We’ll have to go back and ask them a lot more questions. The right ones this time.’

Villiers shuddered. ‘Darius Roth,’ she said. ‘What an egotistical monster he’s starting to seem.’

Cooper had to agree. He felt no satisfaction that his first instinct about Roth might have been the correct one.

When Diane Fry had finished her interviews for the afternoon, she jumped into her car to drive to Birmingham.

She’d finally bitten the bullet and called her sister. Angie’s phone was busy, so she left a brief message. Half an hour later, Angie called her back. It was always an odd sensation whenever they reconnected. It felt as though she was meeting a new person every time.

‘Sis?’ said Angie cautiously. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Yes, I think there is.’

‘And?’

‘I’m coming down. I need to talk to you about it.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Don’t try to sound so innocent.’

‘It’s a long while since you were so keen to talk to me about anything.’

It was true. Diane had worshipped her sister at one time. But the scales had fallen from her eyes that time in Birmingham when Angie had revealed unexpected contacts and abilities.

Diane remembered the sensation of leafing through case files, the astonishment to find herself fighting a feeling of guilt at the knowledge she was handling confidential information that she should never have had access to.

The case summary, witness statements, records of interview. And on all of the pages was the familiar black bar — RESTRICTED WHEN COMPLETE. It went against the grain even to handle something like that, when she knew it had been obtained illegitimately.

And she recalled her sister’s response: ‘Oh, you have got to be kidding. What — you’re suddenly going to go all upright and honourable again? You don’t want to put a foot wrong in case you upset your bosses? That’s the old Diane. Things have changed, sis. Haven’t you noticed? We’re not playing this game by the rules any more. And that was your decision. Don’t forget that.’

And Angie had walked out of the door, leaving her to make her own decision.

The one thing it told her was that Angie knew someone who worked at West Midlands Police headquarters in Lloyd House. She knew them pretty well, too — well enough to persuade them to break the rules.

When someone was on your side, you were supposed to feel grateful that they were willing to buck the system and help you achieve justice. Diane had never been able to figure out why that feeling of gratitude didn’t come.

She’d always tried to go by the book, to follow procedures and not put a foot wrong. Yet she saw officers breaking the rules all the time. And not just back in the 1990s when she first joined up. Even now there were people willing to bend the rules, play the system or totally cross the line.

Was there some honourable justification she could claim for implicating herself in a breach of the rules? Did it really make any difference? The outcome would be the same, if she was found out.

And who had done this to her? Who was it who’d placed temptation in front of her? Her own sister.

If she couldn’t trust her own sister, who could she trust?

Diane Fry had been doing her best to rerun that meeting with Andy Kewley in her mind. She was sure there was some detail that she ought to recall that would mean more to her now than it did at the time.

That day, she’d parked her Audi on the roof level of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter car park in Vyse Street, where she had a clear view up the street towards the exit from the Metro station.

A small trickle of people were spilling out of the station and heading off in different directions. Kewley was the last to come out, emerging onto the pavement near the old cast-iron street urinal. She recognised him even from that distance, even with the cap pulled over his eyes and a padded jacket to disguise his shape. There was something about the way people moved that made them recognisable whatever they wore.

Kewley had paused in the station entrance, looked all around him carefully, pretending to check his pockets for something. Andy was an old street cop. He’d learned to scan every doorway and corner before he made his move. It just never occurred to him to look up.

Fry looked at her watch. Kewley was bang on time for their meeting, of course. She, on the other hand, was going to be a bit late. And that was the way she liked it.

Finally, she walked down to street level and stepped through the entrance to Warstone Lane Cemetery. She remembered some kind of white blossom on the bushes filling the air with its aroma. When she breathed it in, she felt as though she’d been punched in the nose. A certain trigger for her hay fever.

‘Diane?’

Kewley had taken off the cap, revealing thinning hair streaked with grey. A warm breeze wandered through the plane trees, stirring a lock of his hair. When he raised a hand to push it back, she noticed that it wasn’t as steady a hand as it once had been. The cumulative effects of thirty years in the job? Or was Andy Kewley drinking too much, like so many others?

In the middle of the cemetery, they were standing at the top of a terrace of curved brick walls. Two of the walls had rows of small, sealed-up entrances built into them, like arched doorways. Catacombs. She was surrounded by the Victorian dead.

Fry imagined Kewley using this cemetery for years to meet his informants. But it wouldn’t be wise to keep coming here after he’d left the job. Too many people might remember. Too many of them might have a grievance to settle. Maybe it was just one of those eccentric fancies that overcame old coppers when they retired. Some had a hankering to run pubs, or to look for a quiet life in Northern Ireland. Others chose to hang around in Victorian graveyards.

‘I thought I might be able to help you,’ he’d said.

‘How?’

‘Did you know there was an arrest after your assault? I was responsible for that.’

‘You produced a suspect?’

‘Let’s say I provided intelligence. It was good intelligence too, as it turned out. This wasn’t one of the primary suspects, but he knew who was involved all right, and he helped to cover it up. A real piece of work. He was as guilty as anyone I’ve ever met.’

‘So what did you do?’

Kewley shrugged. ‘We needed information, and we didn’t want to spend days dragging it out of him bit by bit, with a brief at his elbow telling him to do the “no comment” stuff. So we fast-tracked the interview.’

‘Fast-tracked...?’

Kewley looked at her, gave her no more than a conspiratorial glance. But she understood.

‘I don’t want to know any more,’ she said.

‘No, of course you don’t. You wouldn’t want to be contaminated.’

Andy Kewley’s career could best be described as chequered. In his early days in CID, before she’d teamed up with him at Aston, Kewley had spent some time in the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad. The squad had been disbanded, more than two decades ago now, following accusations that its members had fabricated evidence, tortured suspects and written false confessions.

For years, lawyers had been demanding fresh inquiries into the scale of corruption, claiming that dozens of innocent people had served time in jail. One had been quoted as saying that the Serious Crime Squad had operated as if they were in the Wild West: They were out of control.

‘But you got what you wanted to know?’ she said.

‘Not entirely. We never got the names out of him.’ Kewley smiled. ‘But if we had... what do you reckon, Diane? Would the ends have justified the means or not?’

‘What was he charged with?’

‘Attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

‘And what happened?’

‘He got a “get out of jail free” card and a few quid in his pocket and off he went.’

‘It’s hardly the first time, Andy.’

‘And now you’re here in Birmingham again because they told you they’d opened a cold-case rape inquiry,’ said Kewley. ‘But they’ve lost a crucial witness, right?’

‘You’re well informed. How do you manage that?’

He ignored the question. ‘The witness pulled out of the case, decided she didn’t want to testify after all. The old story, eh? Someone got to her, Diane.’

‘One of the suspects?’

‘Or maybe their friends.’ Kewley shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘She was supposed to be on witness protection,’ said Fry. ‘How would they have found her?’

‘Information. It’s easy to get hold of, if you know the right people.’

‘Who?’

Again Kewley seemed to ignore the question. Fry remembered this habit of his, recalled how it had often infuriated her. He always wanted to go around the houses before he responded. But later he would drop the answer in casually, as if he’d never been asked.

She looked at the Victorian graves all around her. According to their memorials, many of them hadn’t actually died but had merely ‘fallen asleep’. If they woke up now, they’d get a shock. And over there was another one. Not lost but gone before.

‘Euphemisms,’ said Fry. ‘Don’t you hate them?’

Kewley looked as though he didn’t agree.

And then he mentioned a name that would come to haunt Fry. It was a name she’d never heard until that moment, but a connection that was to become much too personal.

‘Have you heard of William Leeson?’ he said.

Fry’s ears had pricked up. This was the way it worked with Kewley. He distracted you with something irrelevant. Then the important information was dropped into the conversation like an afterthought. You had to be paying attention or you missed it.

‘Leeson? No. Who is he?’

‘A dodgy lawyer from Smethwick who used to practise here in the city. I thought you might have come across him.’

‘I could have done,’ said Fry. ‘But hundreds of defence briefs come and go through interview rooms. I don’t remember all their names.’

‘You might want to remember this one,’ said Kewley.

‘Why?’

Kewley seemed to be getting more nervous now and jumped when a motorcycle with an unsilenced exhaust roared by on the Middleway.

Recalling that moment, Fry could have laughed at her own naivety. The idea that she wouldn’t remember William Leeson’s name for ever afterwards seemed ludicrous now.

‘Leeson first came onto the scene in a big way during all that bother with the Serious Crime Squad,’ said Kewley. ‘He loved getting the attention, calling for public inquiries and Appeal Court hearings. “Miscarriage of justice” was practically tattooed on his forehead, he said it so often.’

‘Was he the one who said you were operating like the Wild West?’ asked Fry.

‘No. But he would have said it, if he’d thought of it. He was always small-scale, though — and he got pushed out by the smarter, more expensive briefs who elbowed their way in when they saw a lucrative bandwagon rolling. Leeson got really pissed off about it. That was why he turned.’

‘Turned?’

‘He got involved in criminal activities himself. Other than as a legal representative, I mean. His money doesn’t all come from legal fees.’

‘I see.’

Kewley pulled his cap lower over his eyes and wiped the palms of his hands on his jacket.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’

‘Who says? You’re retired, out of the force. You’re a civilian now, Andy — as free as a bird. Get used to it.’

‘I could still get myself into deep shit. You don’t understand.’

Fry noticed that the memorials nearest to her had names like John Eachus and Walter Peyton Chance. Strange how names like that seemed to have died along with the Victorians themselves. She saw defaced angels, tombs blackened with soot. A statue lay broken and beheaded, an empty vodka bottle on the ground at its feet.

And there was that sickly smell again. She knew she would have to get away from the cemetery soon. It was starting to smell like the scent of death.

‘I’m just telling you, Diane. There are things you need to know. You could ask someone else, but whether you’ll get the truth or not...’

‘OK, OK.’

‘I just want you to know there are political considerations at play right now. Much bigger issues than a successful conviction in any cold case — and I mean any case, no matter who the victim is. You understand me?’

‘I’m not sure I do, Andy.’

‘Damn it, I can’t make it any clearer,’ he said irritably. ‘Look — anybody can get tossed aside, if it suits them. Justice is a slippery concept these days.’

Fry stared at him, wondering whether he’d gone completely off the rails since he retired. Leaving the job took people in different ways. It seemed as though Kewley might have developed a conspiracy obsession, or paranoid delusion. Probably he couldn’t cope with the fact that he was no longer on the inside, not a member of the tribe any more. It was that primal instinct again. A desperation to belong. A craving to be part of the game.

Kewley took a breath, looked anxious at his own outburst.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who’s dealing with your case now?’

‘Gareth Blake.’

‘Blake? I remember him when he was a young DC, fresh behind the ears. Pain in the neck he was then. I don’t suppose he’s changed much?’

‘I couldn’t say. We worked together for a while, but that was years ago.’

‘Gareth Blake... A DI now, isn’t he? In fact, I hear he’s well on his way to making DCI in the not-too-distant future. Yes, he’s definitely got his foot on the ladder, that one. He wouldn’t want anything to muck up his pristine record at this point, would he?’

Fry looked at him. ‘What are you saying? Has Blake got something to hide?’

Kewley touched the side of his nose — a conspiratorial gesture that he somehow managed to make look obscene.

‘You know what they say — the higher a monkey climbs up the tree, the more you see of his arse.’

He laughed and turned away. It was a signal that she wouldn’t get any more out of him on that subject. Not right now, anyway. She might need some kind of pressure she could bring to bear. But that was for another day.

Chloe Young had pitched it just right for the evening. Jeans and a white silk top that set off her dark hair, now tied up in what she described as a double-knotted pony. She looked smart, but not overdressed. Ben had emphasised that they were visiting a farm, after all. They’d be lucky if they found Matt Cooper wearing a clean pair of jeans and a shirt that wasn’t ripped.

When he and Chloe entered Bridge End Farm, Ben felt ridiculously nervous, as if he were a teenager bringing his first girlfriend home to meet his parents. There was no reason to feel like that, of course. He wasn’t a kid any more. He’d passed that stage a long time ago. He’d been engaged, for heaven’s sake — and almost married too. If his marriage with Liz had gone ahead, he might have been a father himself by now. So his nervousness was ridiculous.

No, it was the house that made him feel like this. He couldn’t escape the suspicion that the ghosts of his parents were still lurking in the dark corners of the hallway, peering out from behind the door of the snug, looking down from the banisters on the landing. Wherever he looked, his father and mother were almost there, but just out of sight. In a way, he still needed their approval, to know what they would have thought of the new woman in his life.

Chloe had raised an eyebrow in surprise when Ben led her to the back door of the farmhouse and entered without knocking. He paused for a moment, realising how odd it might look to some people. He’d never stopped thinking of Bridge End as his home, even though he’d lived in Edendale for years and now had his own house in Foolow. It would never have occurred to him to use the front door, or to knock and wait for someone to answer, the way visitors did. And he was certain Matt and Kate would have thought it very strange if he started to do that. They would take it as an insult. He’d be treating them as strangers instead of family.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘This is what we do here.’

‘Good job we’re not burglars, then.’

‘Oh, Matt would have his shotgun pointed at us by now.’

A look of concern crossed her face.

‘I’m joking,’ said Ben.

‘Right.’

He hoped he sounded convincing. The trouble was, Chloe knew perfectly well that Matt Cooper had been involved in an incident a few years ago when a would-be burglar had been shot and wounded right here in the farmyard. Matt had faced the prospect of prosecution for a while until the CPS had taken the view that it wasn’t in the public interest. There had been too many cases of that kind already, particularly in rural areas, and everyone knew what kind of outcry could be expected.

They stepped into the back hall, and Ben closed the door behind them.

‘Hello!’ he called. ‘We’re here.’

‘Come on in,’ answered Kate’s voice from the kitchen.

Ben put his head round the door. ‘Something smells good.’

Kate laughed, wiping her hands on a towel. ‘That’s what Matt always says.’

‘This is Chloe.’

‘Well, I thought it must be.’

The two women shook hands and appraised each other with that quick wordless assessment Ben had seen so often. It always made him wonder what passed between two women at a moment like this. It was as if they were communicating through some extra sense that he didn’t possess, like two dogs sniffing the air and reading everything in a scent.

The test seemed to be passed on both sides. Kate and Chloe smiled at each other.

‘We’re so glad to meet you at last,’ said Kate.

‘I hope you’re not going to say you’ve heard so much about me. I know none of it would be good.’

Ben heard an overly dramatic cough at his elbow and turned to find his niece Josie.

‘Oh, and this is—’ began Kate.

‘I’m Josie. Are you the one who cuts up dead bodies?’

‘Well, I suppose I am,’ said Chloe.

‘Brilliant.’

Over dinner, Josie couldn’t be restrained from bombarding Chloe Young with questions about death, body parts and mortuary instruments. Matt began to look increasingly unhappy as he ate. But he’d never had much control over the females in his family.

‘I blame you for this, Ben,’ said Matt afterwards, when they found themselves alone in a quiet moment.

‘For what?’

‘First Josie said she was going to join the police, and now apparently she wants to be a pathologist.’

‘She’ll grow out of it. She just gets enthusiasms.’

Matt grunted. ‘Always the wrong kind, though.’

‘She doesn’t want to come into farming, then?’

His brother’s expression turned sour again.

‘Nobody wants to come into farming,’ he said. ‘All everybody wants to do is get out.’

‘But you’ll never get out,’ said Ben. ‘Never.’

His brother scowled. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘they’ll carry out me out feet first. And what will become of Bridge End then?’

Ben couldn’t answer that. There was no vision of a rosy prospect he could offer Matt. He knew what his brother said was true. Bridge End Farm would have no future without Matt Cooper.

Ben Cooper was out and about early next morning, just after dawn. It was his official rest day, and he had a few hours to kill before an appointment at four o’clock that afternoon. The weather was fine, and there was only one place in Derbyshire he thought of going.

The roads were quiet on the way into Hayfield. The white streams lying in the hollows like trails of smoke were only an early morning mist, not a sign of returning fog. It would soon burn off when the sun reached the valley.

In Hayfield, Cooper parked at Bowden Bridge and changed into his walking boots. He set off to climb onto White Brow, having decided to avoid the path to the south, where part of the River Kinder had found its own route down the hill from the dam and was flowing over the footbridge.

Even in summer Kinder Scout was no place for a solitary rambler. Pools formed deep enough to drown in. As the New Trespassers had found to their cost, a strong walker might leap from hag to hag before finally twisting an ankle or becoming exhausted. It could be days before another rambler passed that way.

Of course, it helped to be able to read a compass. You could get so disorientated traversing the bogs that you had no idea which direction you were heading, or where you were on the map. It was a truly unsettling feeling, especially if you were aware of the precipitous cliffs and steep drops onto shattered rocks. These days, people relied on mobile phones to get them out of trouble. But there were no phone masts on Kinder.

He passed the sheep wash at the hamlet of Booth, which would still have been in use when the mass trespassers came by in 1932, with hundreds of sheep collected from the western slopes of Kinder. Washing the sheep was regarded as a great social occasion in those decades, with shepherds standing waist-deep in the water as sheep were tossed in one by one for their fleeces to be scrubbed clean of peat before shearing, and farmers mixing their own sheep dip from soap and creosote to kill lice and ticks in the dense wool.

Cooper soon realised that he should have brought a stick or a hiking pole like the Warburtons. As soon as he stepped on the steepest stretch of cobbles beyond the entrance to the old water-treatment works, his feet slipped from underneath him. He hit the wet stones with a painful crash. For a moment, he was dazed. He sat up and rubbed his elbow where he’d scraped it on the ground. Then he got back to his feet and carried on upwards.

He passed along the edge of Kinder Reservoir, with the abandoned water-treatment works below him. The rows of arched windows on the filter house had been blocked up, and many of the skylights were smashed. The path here was scattered with dead leaves and the empty husks of acorns. A jay darted between a stand of oak trees growing along the brow.

Then the peace was shattered as an Emirates 747 roared low overhead, coming in to land at Manchester Airport, a white shape skimming in and out of the cloud. Flights passed constantly over the Kinder plateau. Where Manchester people had once fought for the right to ramble across these moors, now they flew over every week, ignoring Kinder on their way to holidays in Ibiza or Magaluf.

Above him, Cooper could see the Downfall ravine, the rocks around it like bastions and towers, broken and shattered. Water was spraying off the edge today. After heavy rain, it foamed and steamed as it cascaded off the plateau.

It was because Kinder held so much water that it was impossible to find a dry route across it. He’d heard that those streams of water removed ten thousand tons of the mountain’s bulk every year. Eventually, the plateau would be flattened to the level of the surrounding river valleys. But not in his lifetime.

The whole fourteen square miles of Kinder Scout were criss-crossed with deep groughs, carved by water between the hags. Their sides were steep, spongy slopes, their bottoms filled with water that fed the Downfall. It was only by continually crossing them that it was possible to maintain a steady direction.

Some people thought this place was pretty grim, especially in the winter. The unrelenting blackness of the peat could be a bit overwhelming. It wasn’t a place to wander alone if you were already depressed, or feeling despair about the futility of life. Nature could reflect your mood and exaggerate it. Half an hour of floundering through grough and bog would drain your energy and sap your will to live. And in fog? Damp, close air and reduced visibility could soon evoke sensations of isolation and fear.

So what made Kinder Scout so attractive to walkers? Well, the views were certainly extensive — Yorkshire to the north and Cheshire in the west, with the mountains of Wales visible in the distance on a clear day. This vista might not have been so clear at the time of the Mass Trespass, thanks to the smoke from mill chimneys and the coal fires of inner-city workers’ homes.

For centuries the sphagnum moss binding the surface had been steadily killed off by industrial pollution, all that acid rain falling from factories in Manchester. The sphagnum was being reintroduced now, thanks to the Moors for the Future project.

After seeing its fourteen square miles of bare peat steaming with moisture, someone had once called the Kinder plateau ‘land at the end of its tether, entirely covered in the droppings of dinosaurs’. It had certainly been an uncompromising landscape for generations. But now Kinder was in the throes of change. Out here on the edge of the world, two thousand feet above sea level, life was returning to this once bleak moonscape.

A grouse jumped up from the heather with a harsh cry — Go back! Go back, back, back, back! But Cooper continued to move onwards.

On a flattened edge of the slope below, he glimpsed the Mermaid’s Pool. On the plateau itself, the rock formations were the best-known landmarks. Pym Chair, the Druid Stone, the Boxing Gloves, Madwoman’s Stones, Punch’s Nose, Ringing Roger.

The Woolpacks and the Mushroom Garden were names describing the appearance of many of the gritstone rocks. The Pagoda was a collection of huge flat stones laid on top of each other. The Moat Stone was named because of the shallow pool surrounding it. Some rocks resembled a frog, a fossilised giant snail or an upturned tooth.

For a moment, Cooper wondered what it was like to live in a part of the country where individual rocks weren’t named on the Ordnance Survey map. Were people still as conscious of their own history, the presence of those ancestors with their dark, superstitious imaginations?

All these legends brought his thoughts back to the New Trespassers Walking Club. Their entire existence was based on a legend. Yet as a group, they seemed to have been stitched together like a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.

The more Cooper thought about it, the more the Kinder Mass Trespass seemed a tenuous connection between these people. And some of them cared nothing for the significance of the 1932 trespass. One believed it was a Communist plot. So what had brought them together in the first place? Could these people be linked by something completely different?

The Mass Trespass had taken place in April. The 24th to be exact. Why was that a ‘bad time’ for members of the group, as Darius Roth had described it a few days ago? Cooper had assumed it was something to do with work, or school holidays: 24 April could sometimes fall during the Easter break, but not always. So was there some other significance to the choice of October? Who had chosen the date for the walk? Darius, of course.

Cooper stopped walking suddenly. He felt as though his feet had hit hidden obstacles in the wet peat; those familiar tentacles had reached out and grabbed his ankles. He was recalling his conversation with Elsa Roth about the fate of Darius’s brother, Magnus, the rock climber. Didn’t she say that he died six years ago? Surely that was just about the time the date of the New Trespassers’ annual walk was changed. Did Darius move the date to October to mark his brother’s death? Could there be some significance to that? Were they all connected through that fatal incident?

Ahead, the Swine’s Back led along the southern edge of the plateau towards Grindsbrook, and Kinder itself stretched before him.

Ironically, the original trespassers had got lost on Kinder. In fact, they’d never reached the top of the hill at all but had turned left and descended to Ashop Head instead of right towards the Downfall and onto the plateau. A Sheffield group who ascended Jacob’s Ladder on the other side of the moor to meet them must have been baffled to see the main party turning away and heading in the opposite direction. Like so many ramblers since, the Kinder mass trespassers had no idea where they were.

Where the restoration work was taking place, some areas of the plateau had been transformed from dark menace to a bright benevolence as the black, eroded morass was seeded over and turned green.

But here was the Kinder that he’d always known. Desolate and dangerous. A place where unwary walkers wandered lost for hours and could sink up to their waists in the bog. A path of stone slabs had been laid across a stretch of badly eroded moorland, like a causeway across a black, peaty ocean.

Cooper reached Crowden Head and for a while he sat out of the wind behind a rock, watching the clouds roll in from the south-west and taking in the silence at the summit.

To the north across the Snake Pass lay the high moors of Bleaklow and Black Hill. Along the eastern edge of the plateau, a soggy line across high ground from the Madwoman’s Stones to the cairn of Ringing Roger. The plateau today looked bleak, and dangerous.

If you were lost on Kinder, there was no safe way down unless you managed to hit one of the two main paths. Without a compass and the ability to use it, you might walk round in circles for hours. The best advice was to stay where you were until help arrived.

But the New Trespassers Walking Club hadn’t done that. Why not? What had caused that division within the group and made them head off in separate directions?

Well, perhaps because they had no clear leadership. Without firm direction from Darius, there was no one able to make a decision that would be accepted by the others. That was why the group had split up. No unity, no solidarity, no commitment to each other. They’d put their trust in Darius Roth, and he’d failed them when it came to a crisis.

Derbyshire Constabulary’s headquarters were tucked out of the way in the Butterley area of Ripley, accessed from an anonymous roundabout on the A610 near a McDonald’s drive-through and a Sainsbury’s supermarket.

It was a long while since Ben Cooper had been here, and then it was for a meeting at Operational Support in their base off Wyatt’s Way. Since his last visit, the administrative departments had moved into a gleaming new building they shared with the fire service, and which seemed to be made mostly of glass.

As he drove in through the security barriers, Cooper saw the NPAS helicopter sitting on its pad behind the dog kennels at the rear of the site. He found a place in the visitors’ car park backing onto the sports fields and collected an identity badge from reception. Then there was a wait before his appointment.

He took a seat in the reception area, clutching the manila folder he’d brought with him. He spent the time running back over his conversation late last night, after he’d left Bridge End Farm and parted with Chloe Young. Even now, he could hardly believe what he’d done. But if he was going to help Diane Fry, it was inevitable. He’d called Angie, without telling Diane what he was going to do. He could just hear what she would have to say about that. She’d always hated any contact between her professional and personal lives, particularly between him and her sister. They had a history, and Diane never forgot.

‘I don’t think there’s anyone who can be trusted,’ Angie had said to him.

‘Do you not trust me?’

She’d been silent for a while. Cooper had been able to hear a baby in the background, making that annoying grizzling sound babies did. He thought of suggesting to Angie that Zack was teething, but decided she wouldn’t appreciate the advice. Not coming from him.

‘I don’t know you very well,’ she’d said, ‘but...’

‘But...?’

‘OK. Give me your email address.’

‘Great.’

Cooper jerked upright when his name was called. He was taken upstairs and ushered into a room. The Professional Standards Department investigator introduced himself as Martin Jackson. He was accompanied by a colleague, who took notes.

‘Detective Inspector Cooper,’ said Jackson. ‘You feel you have something to contribute to this hearing?’

‘Yes, sir, I do.’

‘Mmm. How long have you known Detective Sergeant Fry?’

‘Since she first transferred to Derbyshire from West Midlands. She was assigned to E Division, where I was based.’

‘E Division.’

‘Now Edendale LPU,’ said Cooper. ‘North Division.’

‘Ah yes.’

‘We were both DCs then, part of the same shift in Divisional CID. We’ve worked closely together a number of times since those days.’

‘When Fry was promoted to detective sergeant...?’

‘I was still a DC, yes. So I became part of her team.’

‘And now you’re a DI and you’re senior to her,’ said Jackson. ‘So you’ve observed her from several perspectives, serving in different roles. You’ve had experience of her as a colleague, a supervisor and now as a more junior officer working in a different unit.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And as a friend, would you say?’

Cooper could see he was suddenly being studied more closely for his reaction. He hesitated, though only for a second.

‘She isn’t an easy person to make friends with,’ he said.

His interviewers exchanged glances.

‘No, we’ve already gained that impression. So would you maintain that your opinion of Detective Sergeant Fry is purely a professional one, unbiased by personal feelings?’

‘I would,’ said Cooper.

That was the first lie he’d told. But exactly what feelings were involved? He’d be hard pressed to explain them to himself. Any attempt at explaining them to these two people would only muddy the waters and make his statement seem unreliable. Sometimes there was a necessity for reticence.

The chief inspector was nodding, as if satisfied by his replies.

‘So then, Detective Inspector Cooper, would you say that DS Fry’s conduct has always been entirely professional, in your experience?’

Cooper paused again.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Certainly not.’

It took Ben Cooper far longer than he would have liked to get from Ripley to Hayfield. The last thing he needed was to be pulled over for speeding by his Derbyshire road policing colleagues on his way back from a disciplinary hearing.

So a full team was already at the scene in the grounds of Trespass Lodge by the time he arrived. Cooper crossed the stretch of grass to the old Methodist chapel. Tape had been rolled out, lights were set up, and CSIs were busy in the interior of the chapel.

Carol Villiers met him at the outer cordon.

‘We’ve found him,’ she said, as he climbed into a scene suit. ‘It didn’t take long.’

‘What exactly happened, Carol?’

‘It seems Mr Roth fell from the gallery.’

‘Fell?’

‘I’m using the term loosely. Unlike our woman on Kinder Scout, there’s no doubt about this one from the word go.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

Inside, Cooper could see that Darius Roth’s body had landed on the flags of the chapel floor with slightly less of an impact than Faith Matthew’s body had hit the rocks below Kinder Downfall. The distance of the fall wasn’t so great, though the stone flags were just as hard and unyielding for a human body.

It was clear that the impact had fractured Roth’s skull. A splatter of blood and cranial matter had been thrown in a bright halo round his head.

‘He has cuts and abrasions on his face,’ said Cooper.

‘And on his hands too.’

‘Defensive wounds? So there was a fight.’

‘It certainly looks as though he tried to defend himself against someone. The balustrade up there is broken. Admittedly, the wood isn’t in perfect condition, but he didn’t just fall over it — he went through it with some force. We’ve found splinters of wood embedded in some of his wounds, and there are plenty of shoe marks in the dust on the floorboards of the gallery.’

‘It was somebody he knew,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, I don’t know if we can go that far. Not on the basis of the forensic evidence.’

‘Think about it. Would Darius Roth go up into the gallery with a complete stranger?’

‘He might already have been up there.’

Cooper nodded. Yes, he could picture that. It made a good vantage point, a balcony from where Darius Roth could look down like a king on — what? His followers, Cooper imagined.

‘He would have been able to see anyone who came into the chapel from there,’ said Cooper. ‘Why would he let them come in and climb the steps to where he stood if it was someone he didn’t know?’

‘OK, so perhaps he knew his attacker.’

‘And more than that — it was someone he trusted.’

‘Trusted?’

Cooper thought about it. ‘Or someone he felt he had a secure hold over.’

‘So he was overconfident, you mean,’ said Villiers. ‘That fits his personality, I suppose.’

‘Yes. I imagine in this case his hold on one individual wasn’t secure enough. His power over them failed disastrously.’

‘Do you think it was revenge for Faith Matthew’s death?’

‘What do you think, Carol?’

‘Well, it would only make sense if Darius Roth was the one who killed her. But we have no evidence to suggest it. The accounts from our witnesses are consistent on one point at least — they show Darius to be with one of the groups who split away to try to get help.’

‘With Elsa and the two students, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott. Not forgetting Nick Haslam. They were best placed to know his movements. They would have known whether he had the opportunity to kill Faith Matthew or not.’

‘Could they all be lying?’

Cooper laughed. ‘You and I know perfectly well that everybody could be lying.’

‘So what then?’

‘Revenge as a motive would make sense in two scenarios — if Darius Roth was the one who killed Faith or if someone had good reason to believe he did.’

‘That would mean they had knowledge of the incident that we don’t.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Belief doesn’t always need evidence.’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘The rest of our witnesses don’t have first-hand evidence of where Darius was, because they were in a different group and didn’t see him after they split up.’

‘Does that narrow it down at all?’ said Villiers.

‘I hope so. At least if we can get prints or DNA, we’ll have some suspects for comparison. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can focus our attention even more. Who actually found the body?’

‘The gardener.’

‘Will Sankey? You talk to him, then, Carol, and I’ll deal with Mrs Roth.’

‘Good luck,’ said Villiers.

Fog returned to the Peak District that evening. As dusk began to fall, it rolled down from the hills and filled the valleys, swallowing villages and turning the roads into treacherous grey funnels where headlights bounced back against a dense wall of murk.

But Ben Cooper and his team were in Manchester, conducting a search of Jonathan Matthew’s flat in Whalley Range. He and Luke Irvine were examining Jonathan’s computer and CD collection.

‘He’s really into horror films,’ said Cooper. ‘Look at all these DVDs: Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead.’

‘And some more recent stuff. Jigsaw. That’s very nasty.’

‘How nasty?’

‘Very. Torture, dismemberment, that sort of thing.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Do you ever think there’s a connection between people watching these things and going on to commit violent crime?’ said Irvine.

‘I think the latest theories are against it.’

‘They do tend to stay in the mind, though. Some of the images...’

Cooper wasn’t convinced by Irvine’s generalisation. But then, he wasn’t au fait with the horror-film genre the way Luke was. The titles Irvine had mentioned were familiar, of course. He might have watched many of them himself. But they’d blurred in his mind, become one long sequence of crazed killers and screaming victims, accompanied by dramatic music. He couldn’t recall the plot of any of them — if they had a plot.

Cooper looked at Irvine’s expression and realised he was afraid of being made fun of. Well, other members of the team would have scoffed. Gavin Murfin certainly. Becky Hurst too, if she was having a bad day.

‘So what are you suggesting, Luke?’ he said. ‘Do you think Jonathan Matthew had some obsession with graphic violence and finally acted it out in real life?’

Irvine looked relieved. ‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Everything’s possible when it comes to the reasons people commit murder.’

Then Irvine gave a low whistle.

‘There’s an envelope here with a cheque in it,’ he said. ‘A pretty large cheque too. More than my monthly salary, anyway.’

‘Jonathan doesn’t have any money,’ said Cooper. ‘So who was he sending a cheque to?’

‘No, he was receiving the money, not sending it. And take a look who it came from.’

Irvine passed him the cheque. Cooper took it carefully between his gloved fingers. The flamboyant signature might have been enough to give him a clue. But the sender’s name was printed clearly on the bottom of the cheque.

‘Darius A. Roth,’ said Cooper. ‘So that was where Jonathan was getting the money from for his band.’

They met up with Carol Villiers and Gavin Murfin in the hallway of the flat.

‘What are we going to do next, Ben?’ asked Villiers.

‘We’ll wait. Jonathan will come back when he thinks it’s gone quiet.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Look, he’s left his guitar here. But we won’t all wait here. We’ll leave Gavin on surveillance.’

‘You think I’ll look inconspicuous around here,’ said Murfin. ‘As though I might be a devotee of Krishna Consciousness.’

‘No,’ said Cooper, ‘because you’ll recognise Jonathan Matthew when you see him.’

Diane Fry walked into the police station at West Street. She’d almost forgotten what a dump it was. It was hard to think that she’d worked here for years and had put up with these conditions. She hoped she never had to come here again.

She went straight to Ben Cooper’s office and walked in with a perfunctory tap on the door.

Cooper looked up.

‘Diane?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘DCI Mackenzie wants to know what’s happening with the Darius Roth murder inquiry. He thinks you might be taking matters into your own hands.’

‘Tell Mr Mackenzie it’s all under control. We already have a suspect in custody.’

‘I know that. Have you interviewed him yet?’

‘We’re just about to. Do you want to sit in?’

Fry hesitated. ‘No. But keep us informed.’

‘Of course.’

Without waiting for an invitation, she sat down on a chair in front of his desk, suddenly feeling weary.

‘And have you sorted out the problem with the Atherton case?’ she asked.

Cooper raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you know about that?’

‘A conflict in a witness statement from the neighbour, isn’t there? The timing of a phone call.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘It’s probably quite simple,’ she said.

‘It may look simple to you, Diane, but it isn’t so easy when you’ve got a witness to interview who might be mistaken about what happened.’

‘I don’t think she’s mistaken,’ said Fry. ‘I think you are.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve been trusting Gary Atherton to tell the truth.’

‘He’s confessed to killing his wife. He was still there holding the murder weapon when the FOSAs arrived. He says he made the call when he realised what he’d done.’

‘According to the files, there’s a teenage son,’ said Fry.

‘So?’

‘Why don’t you ask him if he made the call?’

‘And his father is covering for him? It’s a hell of a risk for Gary Atherton. He’ll get a life sentence if he’s convicted.’

‘But he won’t if there’s a flaw in your evidence,’ said Fry. ‘The timing of that 999 call. I spotted it myself.’

‘It was you who kicked the file back?’

‘I took it to Mr Mackenzie anyway. I’m sorry if it reflected badly on you.’

Cooper thought of poor old Dev Sharma’s disappointment that a hole had been poked in his case so easily. But of course he could never mention Sharma’s role. Cooper was the DI in this department. It was his team. It was part of the job to take the responsibility when things went wrong.

‘Sometimes it just needs a fresh pair of eyes to see where someone has made an assumption or accepted a statement on trust,’ said Fry. ‘That’s often where it all goes off the rails, isn’t it? Trusting the wrong person.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘You’re right again.’

Next morning, Ben Cooper had a copy of the post-mortem report on his desk. Chloe Young and her colleagues at the mortuary had worked overnight to conduct the examination so that he had the results in his hands first thing. And he was grateful for it. He must remember to tell her that. He suspected DCI Mackenzie wouldn’t.

Cooper looked through the report. It was pretty much as he’d expected. Roth had died from head injuries sustained in the fall. Much like Faith Matthew, in fact.

Then one apparently irrelevant detail caught his eye.

He picked up the phone. ‘Carol? Are you free? Can you pop in?’

Villiers pushed open the door a moment later. ‘What is it? I’m just on my way to Meadow Park Hospital.’

‘Do you remember what Elsa said was wrong with him?’ asked Cooper.

‘Sorry?’

‘Darius Roth. Why he was being treated at Meadow Park?’

‘She said he had appendicitis.’

‘Right. An appendectomy, then? That’s what they would have done, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. Why?’

Cooper tapped the post-mortem report on Roth.

‘This body in the mortuary. Dr Young says the dead man had an enlarged appendix.’

‘Interesting.’

‘It’s more than interesting. It makes all the difference. If this body was Darius Roth’s, he shouldn’t have an appendix at all.’

Sometimes a solution was all about knowing where you were, and where everyone else was too. Ben Cooper realised he had never known that in this case.

He went back to study the satellite view of the Kinder Scout plateau on Google Maps. The peat groughs feeding into the River Kinder showed as meandering reddish-brown streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Eroded tracks were visible in a way they wouldn’t have been for walkers on the ground, and the Mermaid’s Pool was no more than a dark blob on the greenish-brown of the western slopes.

But the Downfall stood out as an eruption of broken rock, twisted and spattered on the hillside, the abandoned shell of a reptile skin. It was shadowed by a darker outline, the deeper chasm where water blew over the edge, where Faith Matthew had fallen from Dead Woman’s Drop.

Cooper printed out a new copy of the image and laid it on his desk. Thoughtfully, he took a yellow marker and tried again to locate the position of each of the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club at the time Faith had died.

Several times he had to refer back to the statements made by the group. He marked some of the positions with queries, crossed them out and started again from scratch, trying to get all the conflicting accounts to make coherent sense. After a lot of trial and error, he ended up with eleven markers identifying specific walkers, and one he placed roughly in the area where the search dog Dolly had located Jonathan Matthew. Finally, he took a red pen and drew a cross on the location of Dead Woman’s Drop.

As he stared at his map, Cooper became aware of Carol Villiers looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there watching him at work. He could see from her face that she had something to tell him.

‘I’m just back from Meadow Park Hospital,’ she said.

‘Success?’

‘I knew there was no point in trying the official channels, so I sniffed around and found some staff who’ve worked there for a while and remember her. One or two of them were willing to talk. Hospitals are a hotbed of gossip.’

‘And?’

‘Well, the talk is that Faith had an affair with one of the junior hospital doctors. He was working there as part of his training — they get assigned to different hospitals and various specialties. The trouble was, this junior doctor was married, and when it all came out, it wrecked his marriage. Faith was asked to leave, and that was when she took up agency nursing work.’

‘Did you get the doctor’s name?’

‘Yes. Dr Jake Gooding.’

Cooper wrote the name down and looked at it for a long moment. It meant something, didn’t it? There was a connection, he was sure of it.

‘Is this accurate?’ asked Villiers, looking at the map.

‘As near as I can make it, given the contradictions in the witness statements.’

‘If that’s where everyone was at the time, it only leaves one possibility,’ she said.

‘Yes, when you look at it this way, it seems obvious,’ said Cooper.

Yes, it was obvious. But perhaps too obvious? If you were planning to commit a murder, surely you would take more effort not to be the obvious suspect. Everything else had been planned. So why not this detail? It didn’t make sense. It was like presenting yourself on a plate as a prime suspect.

And yet he had rejected that obvious suspect.

And then he remembered. He heard Darius Roth’s smooth voice in his head, as clear as a bell. He was talking about Sophie Pullen bringing Nick Haslam to the walking group. She used to come with Jake. So who was Jake? Not just a previous boyfriend, as he’d assumed, but—

‘Sophie Pullen was married, wasn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘It was in your summary, Carol.’

‘Yes, she divorced and reverted to her maiden name.’ Villiers looked at him with her mouth open. ‘So—’

Cooper held up his hand. ‘Let’s not be too hasty. We need to find out her ex-husband’s name first.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Villiers. ‘Just in case it’s a coincidence.’

But this wasn’t a coincidence, and he knew it.

The perfect murder. Cooper recalled Sophie Pullen telling him that story about Darius Roth. The idea had been in Darius’s mind for some time, and the opportunity had arisen on Kinder. He thought the fog would mean no witnesses. Had he really believed he could get away with it? It seemed such a risk for a man like Darius Roth to take.

But what actual evidence had there ever been that Darius killed Faith Matthew? It all came down to one confused witness account. One that Cooper himself had insisted must be mistaken. But one that he’d believed nevertheless.

He remembered what Diane Fry had said to him. That’s often where it all goes off the rails, isn’t it? Trusting the wrong person.

‘Faith,’ he said. ‘It’s an interesting name. Faith. That’s what it’s been about all along.’

Villiers looked up. ‘What do you mean, Ben?’

‘I mean I can’t believe I had faith in the wrong person.’

A meeting at West Street had just finished. Three murder cases concluded and the files finalised for the CPS. DCI Alistair Mackenzie from the Major Crime Unit made a quick exit with the excuse that he had another meeting to get to back at EMSOU.

But Ben Cooper noticed that Diane Fry seemed in no rush to leave.

‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ he asked. ‘We can drink it in my office.’

‘Oh, your office,’ said Fry. ‘One of the privileges of being an inspector.’

‘Pretty much the only one.’

Fry sat hunched in a chair on the other side of his desk, clutching a plastic cup as if she needed its warmth to thaw out her frozen hands.

‘Diane, have you heard the news?’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t watch the news,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Another politician kicked out on his arse?’

‘No, I mean the news from Birmingham.’

Fry looked up at him suddenly.

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘It’s William Leeson,’ said Cooper. ‘He’s dead.’

‘How did you hear that?’

‘Angie told me. She sent me a text. I checked, though. He’s definitely dead, Diane.’

She seemed to slip into a trance as she gazed into the distance. Cooper wondered what was going through her head. Memories from her childhood? If so, he knew from her face that none of the memories were good ones.

‘Well, I’m glad,’ she said.

‘Was he ill?’ asked Cooper.

‘I think he had cancer. Is that what he died from?’

‘Angie didn’t know. Apparently, he was found collapsed at home. There will have to be a post-mortem, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘You don’t seem too bothered.’

‘I’m not. In fact, I don’t even want to think about him. Talk to me about something else.’

‘Right.’

Cooper wondered what it was she wanted him to say. Should he mention the weather, the latest office gossip? Fry had never enjoyed small talk. She despised it, in fact. But there was that one question he’d been burning to ask all week.

‘So what about the promotion?’ he said. ‘There’s a vacancy for a DI at EMSOU, isn’t there?’

Fry shook her head. ‘Not for me. It was never going to be my job.’

‘Really? I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not a problem. I didn’t expect it. They already had someone lined up.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Actually, yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t suppose I should tell you. You’ll be officially informed in due course.’

There was no need for her to say any more. Cooper didn’t know why it should come as a surprise to him. He had had the feeling it would happen for a long time, almost as soon as Dev Sharma came to Edendale as his sergeant.

‘Will you be working with him?’ he asked, deliberately not mentioning a name.

‘I have no idea. Who knows what will happen in the future? There hardly seems any point in planning anything.’

‘I know what you mean.’

A silence settled between them as they drank their coffee. Cooper looked at his phone, expecting it to ring and break the silence. But, for once, it didn’t. He raised his head and met Fry’s eyes. She blinked, apparently embarrassed.

‘I owe you, by the way,’ she said, looking away. ‘For the favour you did me.’

‘That’s OK. I’m glad it helped.’

‘I’m sure it did.’

‘I owe you quite a lot too, in a sense,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh?’

She didn’t ask for an explanation, and Cooper was glad of it. He wasn’t sure he could have explained it himself.

‘That’s funny,’ she said.

It was odd how so much could be left unspoken between them. He’d only ever experienced that with his brother. As far as Fry was concerned, the silence had always seemed more like a lack of communication rather than any level of understanding. What had changed? Could it possibly be Diane herself?

‘I’m not sure I did much for you anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘No, really. You helped a lot,’ she said.

‘Me and your biological father, apparently. The man you hate most in the world.’

‘No, not him,’ she said bitterly. ‘He did nothing.’

‘Actually, he did,’ said Cooper. ‘He sent the information to me, and I gave it to Professional Standards.’

‘Sent it to you how?’

Cooper shrugged. ‘It was delivered anonymously to my house.’

‘When did you get it?’

‘Wednesday night.’

‘That was while I was talking to him in Solihull. He must already have given it to someone.’

‘Yes, he must have.’

Fry stared at him. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Leeson do it that way? Why wouldn’t he send it directly to me, when I’d taken the trouble to go there and ask him?’

Cooper thought he knew the explanation for that. He wasn’t sure whether Fry would want to hear it, though. But what else could he tell her? He certainly couldn’t mention the message that Leeson had included with the package, because he’d been asked not to. He couldn’t say that it was her own sister who’d delivered it. People were on her side, taking risks and working on her behalf. But it hurt him not to be able to tell her. He had to give her something.

‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘he didn’t want you to feel indebted to him. He wasn’t going to put that onto you right at the end of his life. After your visit, he decided to do what he could, but not to shake your antipathy. He knew how much you hated him, Diane. He didn’t want you to feel guilt or obligation as well.’

‘What? You’re saying he was thinking of me?’

‘In the last few months and weeks before he died, yes. The approach of death makes people think about everything differently.’

Fry took a moment to digest this, her mouth twisting in disgust as if she was tasting something particularly bitter.

‘So why did you tell me?’ she said. ‘Why have you stuck your oar into my life again, Ben?’

‘I just had to tell you the truth.’

‘Truth?’ said Fry. ‘Truth is vastly overrated.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have got anywhere with a disciplinary hearing,’ said Cooper. ‘They didn’t have a proper case. They were just fishing, you know. You weren’t guilty of anything, so you could tell the truth. That’s always the best thing.’

Fry didn’t reply. Cooper studied her face.

‘You weren’t guilty of anything,’ he repeated. ‘Were you, Diane?’

‘The truth?’ she said.

He hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘Yes, please.’

‘You say that’s always for the best?’

‘If you want people to trust you.’

Fry was silent for much longer.

‘I don’t agree,’ she said. ‘The truth can destroy everything.’

She drained her cup and dropped it into his waste-paper bin. She nodded to him as she walked to the door. Cooper watched her go, a sour taste bubbling in the back of his throat. So that was the way it ended here too. With no more than a whimper.

Fry had been right when she said to him, years ago, The people who you think are on your side always turn round and betray you.

And that was the real truth.

Many thanks to my editor Ed Wood, all the team at Little, Brown, and everyone who helped to bring Fall Down Dead to fruition. A special mention must go to a wonderful surgeon, Mr Keshev Nigam, who got me back in action so quickly when the book was delayed by my illness last year (you can hardly see the scars!). Thanks particularly to my agent Teresa Chris, who has been such a champion of the Cooper and Fry series from the start.

In 2017, following the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which claimed seventy-one lives, a group called Authors for Grenfell ran an online auction to raise money for bereaved and homeless families. Canadian reader (and former Manchester musician) Robert Farnley was the winning bidder to appear as a character in Fall Down Dead. I hope he enjoys his appearance! Many thanks to Robert for his generosity, and to everyone else who made bids in the auction.

A big ‘thank you’ also to everyone whose donations helped to fund the vet bills for Dolly, the Kinder Mountain Rescue Team’s search and rescue dog, who should now be back in action saving lives in the Peak District.