killers. There’s absolutely no justification. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Hitchens relaxed a little. ‘We don’t want our new detective superintendent arriving in Edendale and finding us panicking unnecessarily. Now, do we?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Fry.
She looked at Cooper, who had been silent so far. But he lowered his head, refusing to respond. No doubt he had his own theories. She’d get them out of him later.
‘Actually, we’re calling our second victim “she”, but we won’t get confirmation of gender for a while yet,’ said Hitchens. ‘So no assumptions, OK?’
‘No assumptions,’ said Fry.
That taste was in her mouth again. She didn’t know where it came from, or why. It was like a pregnancy craving, but she wasn’t pregnant, thank God. No chance of that.
‘Are you all right, Diane?’
She became aware of Cooper standing nearby, watching her with concern written all over his face, as if he had stumbled across someone who was ill.
‘Of course I’m all right. What are you staring at?’
‘I just thought — ’
‘Ben, were you thinking of hanging around here until the rain stops? We both have work to do back at the office.’
Cooper shuffled his feet in the mud. ‘They’ve found a shoe, about ten feet from the second body, just under the surface of the soil.’
‘A woman’s shoe?’
‘Yes, size four.’
‘Can they get a shoe size from a skeleton?’ asked Fry.
‘I don’t know, Diane.’
Fry paced back towards the house, skirting the crime scene tape. But then her feet slowed as if the weight of the mud was drawing her to a halt, and she stopped.
‘If Raymond Sutton knew those two bodies were buried in the yard, would he have been willing to sell the farm? He must have known there was a good chance a new owner would start digging the place up, if it was going to be developed.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know it was going to be developed,’ said Cooper.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m thinking about all the vehicles and equipment that were left behind. Apart from the livestock, nothing seems to have been sold off at all — not even the furniture in the house. I wonder if Raymond Sutton was under the impression that the farm was being sold as a going concern.’
‘Sold to another farmer, you mean?’
Cooper nodded. ‘If Mr Sutton thought Pity Wood was going to continue as a dairy farm, he might not have worried about the bodies. Farmers have more to keep them occupied than building patios, especially if they’re starting a new herd from scratch.’
‘Did you ever speak to the auctioneers?’
‘No, I never got round to it. It didn’t seem all that important.’
‘Perhaps you’d better do it now,’ said Fry.
‘OK, I will.’ Cooper turned. ‘You talked to the new owner, didn’t you? Goodwin, is that the name?’
‘Yes, I spoke to him on the phone. Why?’
‘Did he seem like someone who’d make a convincing dairy farmer?’
Fry thought for a moment. ‘Not to me, he didn’t. I’d say he sounded more like a moderately successful provincial solicitor. You know — divorces and boundary disputes, that sort of lawyer. Steady business, but nothing that demands too much in the way of brains.’
‘And he lives in Manchester somewhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mmm. Dropping out of the rat race, maybe?’
‘Downshifting, they call it.’
‘I suppose that’s pretty much what you did, Diane. Moving from the big city into the country. It was a bit of a leap, wasn’t it?’
Mrs van Doon had the first body on the table in the mortuary. When Fry entered, suited and masked, the pathologist was trying to separate the skin from the mummified hand, easing it off the desiccated fingers like a glove. She would be hoping that someone could get usable fingerprints from it once it was clear of the corpse.
‘Can you estimate a time of death yet?’ asked Fry.
‘Ooh, time of death. That’s a favourite question, isn’t it? Well, by far the best indications of time of death are rigor mortis and body temperature. Anybody want to guess why those aren’t helpful in this case?’
Fry looked at the remains on the table, was about to speak, then realized the pathologist was probably making a joke.
‘That’s right. Because they’re both useless once you get past about thirty-six hours. Here, we’re well past that by a factor, of … oh, I’d say about three hundred or so. The only possibility you’re left with in this case is finding some evidence of the last time your victim was seen, or the last time anyone had contact with her.’
‘A factor of three hundred would make it about a year,’ pointed out Fry.
‘Oops, did I let slip an opinion? It was unintentional, I assure you.’
‘But appreciated, all the same. We need anything we can get.’
‘Well, there’s one thing I’ve never seen before,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘There seems to be an extraordinary amount of tooth decay for an individual of this age. Quite excessive. I propose to consult the forensic odontologist for a specialist opinion.’
‘If the victim had some unusual medical condition, that might help us tremendously.’
‘Yes …’ The pathologist hesitated, as if about to say something else. ‘Well, we’ll see. No point in speculating
Cooper settled himself back at his desk in Edendale and opened the records book carefully. The bound ledger only went back to the 1980s, presumably to the time when the brothers had first taken over the farm from their father. Their names were inscribed inside the front cover, with the date the book had been started.
He was pleased to see that whoever was responsible for the neat, copperplate handwriting had taken the trouble to record the stocking rates and cropping rotas on the farm, as well as adding up the accounts. DEFRA would have been proud of them.
At the time the ledger was started, the main enterprise on the farm had been a flock of Swaledale ewes — four hundred head of them, either bred pure or crossed to a Bluefaced Leicester ram to give mule lambs for sale. It seemed that all the purebred Swale ewe lambs were retained as flock replacements, and sent into Lincolnshire for their first winter, while the males were sold as stores through Bakewell market. It was still standard practice on many sheep farms in the Peak District.
A few years later, a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle had been tried. Cooper nodded approval. That was a good idea of someone’s. Galloways were hardy cattle, and that was important because there was little space for in-wintering cattle at Pity Wood Farm, and the breed would have been capable of making use of the coarser grasses.
Flicking through the records, Cooper began to see the evidence of falling prices and rising costs as the years went by and Pity Wood entered the 1990s. The thriving enterprise that Raymond and Derek had inherited from their father was gradually, inexorably, getting into trouble. He tried to imagine the brothers discussing their financial problems by the fireside in the evenings, but he couldn’t manage it. An anxious silence filled his head, both brothers reluctant to talk about what was worrying them, perhaps even more reluctant to admit there was anything wrong. Optimism in the future, that was the keyword in those days.
And then, in 1999, he saw the first attempts at diversification. That was already too late. The writing had been on the wall for a decade by then. After the arrival of Tom Farnham, there had been other failed enterprises — a farm shop, a campsite, holiday lets, rare breeds of sheep.
There was diversification, and there was diversification. If you had half a million pounds to spare, you could
