turn out to be a murder enquiry, the first forty-eight hours were absolutely crucial.
Fry shivered again as a trickle of water ran down her neck. And it didn’t help much when Mother Nature decided to spend the first six of those forty-eight hours re-enacting the Great Flood.
A miserable figure was making his way across the field, slithering on the grass and dodging strips of wet crime-scene tape flapping around him in the wind. Detective Constable Gavin Murfin wasn’t cut out for country treks, either. But, in his case, it was for a different reason. No matter how many memos did the rounds from management about the fitness of officers, Murfin had been unable to lose any weight. Recently, Fry had noticed that he’d compromised by taking his belt in a notch, which had succeeded only in producing an unsightly roll of spare flesh that hung over his waistband.
Murfin had a comfort-eating problem, and Fry could relate to that. If only he didn’t leave so many crumbs in her car.
‘Gavin. How are things back at the office?’
‘In chaos. Have you seen that Branagh woman? She’s empire-building already.’
Fry shrugged. ‘That’s the name of the game at senior management level.’
‘God save me from promotion, then.’
‘I don’t think you need God’s help, Gavin.’
Murfin shrugged. ‘I notice you’ve been doing your best to keep out of her way. So I don’t suppose you’re exactly her number one fan, either.’
Fry didn’t answer. She still had some instinct for diplomatic silence.
Murfin pulled a face as he took in the fields and the distant stone walls.
‘Witnesses are going to be a bit thin on the ground, Diane.’
‘Yes.’ Fry eyed the sheep suspiciously. ‘There are plenty of those things, though.’
Murfin nodded. ‘Sheep see a lot of things. You’d be surprised. One day, some clever bugger at Ripley will come up with a scheme for surveillance sheep. Imagine them wandering about with miniature video cameras strapped to their heads, like hundreds of little woolly PCSOs.’
She tried to picture some of E Division’s community support officers with the faces of sheep. But her imagination failed her.
‘The mind boggles,’ she said.
‘A bit of boggling now 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.’
3
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
