‘Can you think who the victim might be, Mr Farnham?’
‘Victim?’
‘The body we found at Pity Wood. The body of a woman.’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Please think carefully. Anything you can remember might help us with an identification. A woman who disappeared around twelve months ago?’
Farnham didn’t even look up from his task. ‘No, sorry.’
‘I understand there were a number of itinerant workers employed at Pity Wood Farm. Would
This was a fact that could be checked, so a lie would soon be caught. Cooper saw Farnham working that out for himself before answering. He took a little too long fitting parts of the motor back together.
‘Yes, it would. Like I said, we tried out quite a few diversification schemes. Horticulture, poultry … Some of them needed labour at certain times of the year. Often casual labour. So, yes — we had itinerant workers, if you want to call them that.’
‘Well, we’ll need records. Details of the workers employed at Pity Wood during the last couple of years. You were a sort of farm manager, so …?’
‘Ah, well. Records.’ Farnham straightened up, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘Those will be at the farm, such as they are. I left the farm accounts with Raymond. They weren’t the best at record keeping, you know. They didn’t believe all the bureaucracy and paperwork was necessary. But anything there is, you’ll find it at Pity Wood.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Oh, if the builders haven’t thrown them out already,’ said Farnham, as if the possibility had just occurred to him. But his air of innocence wasn’t convincing Cooper.
It was cold in the workshop. And where it wasn’t wet, it was oily. Farnham had a battered white Subaru pick-up with mud-caked hub caps, but it stood outside on the drive to provide more room in the garage.
‘Do you spend much time out here?’ asked Cooper.
‘As much time as I like,’ said Farnham. ‘I’m a widower, you see.’
As he drove away from Farnham’s house, Cooper looked afresh at the landscape. An ideal reservoir site should have a ring of hills to reduce the amount of dam building required. Rakedale had that. It also had the necessary clay soil, which stopped the water seeping through and provided material for dam construction. That was why the limestone areas had avoided reservoir building. Much too porous, limestone. If they’d built the reservoirs a few miles further north, Manchester would be suffering a permanent drought.
Inside the mobile incident unit, a cluster of bodies was building up a warm fug. Every time someone opened the door, they were met with a barrage of complaints about letting the draught in. The inner step was a mass of muddy footprints, and more mud had been tracked through the compartments.
‘Any progress towards an ID yet?’ called Hitchens from the office.
‘We’re hoping for some results from the forensics search team, sir.’
‘Oh, the forensics search team. That would be the blokes scavenging through the skip.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Hitchens saw Fry, and shook his head. ‘As you can see, Diane, it’s organized chaos here, as usual. I’ve just had word on the pathologist’s preliminary examination of the body. No signs of major trauma.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes, until Mrs van Doon gets a closer look. She’s doing the full PM this afternoon. You can chase her up on that, if you like.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘We’ve managed to pull in some more diggers, though,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’re on site now.’
‘That’s good news. Can they …?’
‘Yes, I’ve told them to make a start on the disturbed ground your young builder was bothered about.’
‘Excellent.’
Official-issue packed lunches had been delivered for the team at the scene, one of the few perks of an otherwise tedious and unrewarding job. But even that was causing grumbles inside the trailer.
‘Somebody’s had all the chocolate bars out of our packed lunches,’ said someone.
‘OK, where’s Gavin Murfin?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fry as she opened the door. ‘But he’s probably got several alibis lined up.’
Outside the trailer, Fry looked at the mud. Her shoes hadn’t recovered from the day before. The clay had caked dry by the time she got round to cleaning them. It was an unforgiving sort of dirt, and practically unmoveable, too.
‘Diane.’
‘Yes?’
One of the SOCOs, Liz Petty, was standing at her elbow, holding a pair of rubber boots.
‘I brought these from the van. Thought you might be able to use them.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
She took them automatically, and Petty walked away. Fry was left holding the boots uncertainly, looking at the mud and wondering how silly she looked.
As soon as Cooper arrived back at the farm, he searched out Fry to report the outcome of his interview.
‘So what was your assessment of Mr Farnham?’ she asked.
‘I think he’d sell his own grandmother, organ by organ.’
Fry laughed. ‘You didn’t believe what he was telling you?’
‘It sounded much too pat, too moulded to show himself in the best light. He’d done his best, put his own money into the farm, but it had gone wrong through no fault of his own, and regretfully he’d had to pull out. If you were inclined to believe him, he’s practically a saint. But he came across more like a used car salesman to me.’
‘An awkward customer?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘Stay on him,’ said Fry. ‘And let me know if you want to try a different approach.’
There were accepted strategies for dealing with awkward customers. They didn’t have to speak to the police, but different officers and different approaches could be tried. In some circumstances, they might decide to take an interest in another issue, such as whether his car was legally taxed and licensed. No undue pressure, obviously.
As a last resort, there was always the option of arresting someone so they could be questioned and searched. Without justification, they were open to the subject deciding to sue, and might have to pay a couple of grand out of court. But financially it was preferable to deploying expensive resources on long, fruitless enquiries when a line of investigation was blocked.
‘We should try to find these farm records,’ said Cooper. ‘I think Farnham was right about that, at least. If the records are anywhere, they’ll be inside the house.’
‘Well, I’ll help you later. At least it’s dry inside the house, if none too clean.’
But Cooper wasn’t paying attention now. He was looking at his feet.
‘You know, I don’t remember ever seeing mud this red before — not in this area. The real clay soils are further south.’
Murfin came trudging through the mud to hand Fry a list of the items that the forensics team had recovered from the skip. It was a very long list, but most of the material she could discount. She was only interested in what had come out of the hole, and the SOCOs had helpfully grouped some items together. These had been tipped on top of the skip in one corner, where a couple of planks had been laid as a runway to get a wheelbarrow up to the right height. There were stones here, some unidentifiable bits of rusty metal, a broken bucket, a packet of coffee filters, and some brown mason jars.
She read through the list again, more carefully, then turned to the rest of the material that had been felt less significant. The SOCOs had been right — they’d picked out the relevant items. They couldn’t list what wasn’t there.
Fry stared across the site at the body tent, where a forensic botanist was using a teaspoon to tease out plant fragments. She had a clear picture of Jamie Ward, squatting in the wet mud, staring in shock at the object he’d
