buy into the buffalo meat business with your own hundred-strong breeding herd, including butchery and storage equipment and stalls at farmers’ markets. Cooper had seen it advertised quite recently. A water buffalo enterprise over at Chatsworth, and thriving by all accounts.
But sheep? There were already half a million sheep in the national park alone. They were a feature of the landscape, those white, woolly blobs scattered across the hillsides like snow. They were a driving hazard on the unfenced roads, especially on the high passes of the Dark Peak at night, when they were drawn to the tarmac for warmth and their eyes gleamed suddenly in a driver’s headlights as he rounded a bend.
Yes, many people would say there were already too many sheep in the Peak District.
When Fry returned from the mortuary, Cooper was unfolding a map attached to some legal documents.
‘You know, Tom Farnham said they used to park farm trailers on that bit of ground where the first grave was found.’
‘Yes?’ said Fry.
‘Well, I’ve been going through the deeds, and there was a copy of a map drawn up for the conveyance between the Suttons and the previous owners. It clearly shows a building on that part of the property.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, and it’s a pretty big building. It looks as though it ran from the corner of the paddock almost to the first gate, right along that wall.’
‘Does it specify what the building was?’
‘No, it just says “outbuildings”.’
Fry looked at the map. ‘It might just have been re-drawn from an old document. They don’t bother to come out and re-map a property every time it’s sold, do they? So this map probably shows the way the farm looked at the time of an earlier purchase.’
‘Possibly,’ said Cooper.
‘Farms change appearance all the time, don’t they? Farmers knock old buildings down and put up new ones, willy-nilly. They’re not subject to the same planning regulations as the rest of us.’
‘That’s true. But a building this size … well, it wasn’t just some old pigsty they didn’t need any more.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘It’s a shame there aren’t any photos of Pity Wood from that time.’
‘We should be so lucky.’
He put the map back into the document wallet where he’d found it.
‘You know that area should never have been disturbed?’ said Fry. ‘Not by the building contractors, anyway. Jamie Ward was digging a completely unnecessary trench when he came across the first body.’
‘The new owner might have been planning on calling in some landscape gardeners later on, or he might have wanted to tackle the garden himself.’
‘This is the Manchester solicitor, Goodwin?’
‘Right.’
‘Is he a keen gardener?’
‘I have no idea, Diane.’
‘I do wonder why he bought that farm,’ said Fry.
‘Didn’t he say he wanted to move out into the country for some peace and quiet? You called it downshifting, didn’t you?’
‘I meant, why
‘Of course. But probably it was a question of price. This property would have been a lot cheaper than most. You just need deep pockets for the modernization work.’
‘What if he had another reason for choosing that particular property? A more pressing reason?’
Cooper thought about it for a moment. ‘You mean he might have known there were two bodies buried on the farm and couldn’t risk anyone else buying it, in case they discovered the graves?’
‘Well?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Cooper. ‘It might explain the hurry.’
‘Was there a hurry?’
‘They didn’t take the time for an equipment sale.’
‘Oh, that. Well, all that stuff is starting to make a bit of sense now. I think I’ll give Mr Goodwin a call and ask him why he chose Pity Wood.’
‘You’ve no evidence for this theory, Diane.’
‘Somebody has to use a bit of initiative.’
Cooper raised an eyebrow. He thought he could see Fry already starting to respond to the imminent arrival of the new superintendent. No doubt she believed she’d do better under a female boss. He didn’t think that DCI Kessen or DI Hitchens had ever shown any bias for or against her, and had never avoided giving Diane responsibility because she was a woman. But perhaps he wasn’t in the right place to notice. From Diane’s point of view, the situation might look completely different. It was possible that she observed lots of little things, small signs of favour or disfavour that no one else saw or would know how to interpret.
‘By the way, was there anything interesting from the postmortem?’ asked Cooper.
‘A vague stab at twelve months since time of death, and an excessive amount of tooth decay.’
‘Was Mrs van Doon in an unhelpful mood?’
Fry sighed. ‘No, not really. She just has an impossible job, like everyone else.’
Watching Fry walk back to her own desk to phone Mr Goodwin, Cooper remembered how ambitious she was, how often she talked about moving up or moving on. At one time, he’d thought that Fry’s sister, Angie, would be enough to keep her in the area, but now he wasn’t so sure.
The relationship between the two sisters had always baffled him, and still did. The odd thing was that Diane had seemed to feel closer to Angie when she was missing than she did now that her sister was very much around. It didn’t fit with Cooper’s own ideas about family at all. But was his experience necessarily the way things ought to be?
Cooper rubbed the tiredness from his eyes and returned to the farm records. In seconds, he was back in the past, living a mouth-to-mouth existence at Pity Wood Farm.
13
Aaron Goodwin was between clients. Nevertheless, he gave Fry the impression that he’d charge her by the hour if she took more than five minutes of his time.
‘Why did we buy the farm?’ he said. ‘I can answer that in one word. Horses.’
Fry didn’t know what Mr Goodwin looked like, but she was enjoying a mental image of him arriving at Pity Wood Farm in its present condition. She pictured him wincing at the mud, the abandoned builders’ equipment, the police tape protecting the grave sites.
‘My wife and my daughters are mad about horses,’ he explained. ‘They’ve plagued me for years to find a house in the country where we could have our own stables and paddocks, a menage, somewhere to park a couple of horse boxes. As soon as we had enough money, it was just a question of locating the right property.’
‘And Pity Wood was it?’ asked Fry, barely able to keep the incredulity out of her voice.
Goodwin paused, as if checking his watch. ‘It was a bit of a stretch, admittedly, considering all the work that needs doing to the place. The cost of the alterations and renovation is almost as much as the purchase price, to be honest. I really hope it’s going to be worth it.’
‘Well, you’re certainly going to be in the country,’ said Fry. ‘Have you any experience of rural life?’
‘Not at all. We’re strictly city people.’
‘Then I’m afraid some things might come as a bit of a shock, sir.’
As a city girl herself, Fry might have felt a degree of kinship with the solicitor, if it weren’t for the fact that he was moving to the countryside voluntarily. He was bringing it all on himself, and it diluted her sympathy. But perhaps she ought to enlighten him a bit.
‘Country people can seem like an alien race, you know. They’re very, er … conservative, in some ways. In
