and then never did anyone any harm, in my opinion.’
Fry sighed. ‘Where is everyone, Gavin?’
‘Oh, am I not enough for you?’
‘What about Hurst, and Irvine? Where are they?’
‘Processing.’
‘Still?’
‘It’s the price of success.’
Fry didn’t need to ask any more. Sunday had been E Division’s strike day. Not a total withdrawal of labour in protest at their latest pay deal, as some officers would have liked, but a pre-planned operation targeting known criminals. Search warrants had been executed in various parts of the division. Arrests were made for assault, theft, burglary, going equipped, supplying Class-A drugs, and money laundering. Officers had recovered drugs, cigarettes, and a large amount of cash. Not a bad haul for the day, and the chiefs were happy. Intelligence-led, proactive policing at its best. But the consequent mountain of paperwork was horrendous. There were so many stages that followed from an arrest – prisoner handling, interviews, witness statements, case-file preparation …
‘And Ben Cooper –’ said Murfin.
‘Yes, I know. He’s got himself a cushy job.’
Murfin nodded casually at the body tent. Apart from the coat, about all that could be seen of the victim was a pair of muddy brown brogues that almost protruded from the tent into the rain.
‘We’ve got cars out trying to locate a vehicle,’ he said. ‘Reckon he must have got himself out here somehow, mustn’t he? He isn’t a hiker, not in those shoes.’
‘No luck so far?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘It’ll be parked up in a lay-by somewhere. Unless he was brought out here by someone else, of course.’
‘By his killer. Right.’
Fry didn’t answer. One of the other downsides of policing a rural area was the lack of CCTV cameras. One of the many downsides. If she’d still been working back in Birmingham, or any other city, they’d have caught the victim’s car on half a dozen cameras as it passed from A to B, registered his number plate at a car-park entry barrier, and probably got a nice, clear shot of him walking along the pavement to wherever he’d been going. And then they could have scanned the CCTV footage for possible suspects, grabbed images of a face from the screen for identification.
But out here? Unless their victim had been idiot enough to go more than ten miles an hour over the limit on a stretch of the A6 where the speed cameras were actually operating, his movements might as well have been invisible.
‘If someone else took his car,’ said Murfin, ‘they might have dumped it and torched it by now.’
‘If they have, it’ll turn up somewhere.’
Murfin was wrestling with a decrepit Ordnance Survey map. Normally, he swore by his sat-nav, and never took driving instructions from anyone but TomTom, or his wife. That wasn’t much use when you’d left your car two fields away, though Fry knew that Wayne Abbott had a GPS device to map the location of a crime scene precisely.
‘We’re somewhere about here,’ said Murfin, stabbing a finger at a square of damp plastic. ‘Longstone Moor that way, the nearest village is Birchlow, over there. A few more villages across the valley. And a load of quarries all around us, some of them still in use. There’s a big mill down in that dip. Not textiles, it processes stone from the quarries.’
‘A tricky area, then?’
Murfin shrugged. ‘The lads are checking any pull-ins on the A623 or this back road over here between the villages. But, as you can see, there are quite a few unmade lanes and farm tracks in this area. So it could take a while, unless some helpful punter phones in.’
‘The victim’s shoes are muddy, so he could have walked some distance, at least.’
‘Eyam at the furthest, I’d say,’ suggested Murfin, pronouncing the ‘Eem’ correctly. ‘There’s a car park that tourists use, near the museum. I’ve asked for a check on any that have outstayed their parking tickets. He’s been dead for an hour or two, right?’
‘Three hours, according to the ME.’
‘He might be due for a fine, then. Poor bugger. That’s the last thing he needs.’
‘That’s not really funny, Gavin.’
‘Oh, I thought those were tears of unrestrained hilarity running down your face. Maybe it’s just the rain, after all.’
The officer nearby was listening to a call on his radio, and became suddenly alert. Fry looked at him expectantly.
‘What’s the news?’
‘Not good, Sergeant. The control room says a 999 call was received about twenty minutes ago.’ The officer pointed towards a distant stone building. ‘A unit has been despatched to the old agricultural research centre, about half a mile away in that direction. They thought we’d like to know. There’s been a report of another corpse.’
Fry cursed quietly, squinting against the downpour.
‘I’ve heard about showers of frogs,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never heard of it raining bodies.’
Detective Constable Ben Cooper ran his hand down the glass of the passenger window, clearing a path through the condensation. But it was wetter outside than inside the car, and all he saw was a blurred reflection of himself – a pair of dark eyes, fragmented against the streets of Edendale. Automatically, he swept back the stray lock of hair that fell across his forehead, before focusing beyond his own image to the side door of the house across the street.
‘Someone home, I think.’
‘There’d better be. The boss won’t be happy if it’s all a wasted effort.’
Despite the rain, Cooper would always prefer to be outside, rather than shut up in the office with a mountain of paperwork. That was why he’d managed to talk himself into this assignment, though he hadn’t anticipated finding himself trapped inside a car instead, with the atmosphere growing stale and his breath steaming the windows.
‘We’ll get into the property, whatever,’ he said.
‘We need an arrest, though.’
‘Right.’
He could feel an itch developing under his stab-proof vest. Right underneath, where he had no chance of reaching it without taking the thing off completely. No amount of twisting his body and squeezing a hand into the gap would do the trick. That was the trouble with sitting doing nothing, waiting for the action to start. You began to develop unreachable itches. You began to think about things.
His colleagues were fidgeting and grumbling beside him in the car, trying to reach itches of their own, or ease the cramp in their legs. They might
