‘Terrible. I’ve got no energy. Nothing seems to matter any more. I really don’t want to go into the office on Monday.’
‘I suppose you could phone in sick.’
‘I’ve used up all my sick days. I’d have to phone in dead.’
Cooper dialled Fry’s number. ‘They’re still not here, Diane,’ he said. ‘We’ve been all round the cattle market. No sign of them. How long do you want us to wait?’
‘I think the mother has pulled a fast one on us,’ said Fry. ‘Head back and meet me at Long Acres Farm, soon as you can.’
If this had been Watersaw House, there would have been stable girls around to give Fry information, instead of just one bad-tempered old woman glaring at her from a side window of the house. And there might not have been quite so many muddy puddles for her to negotiate as she crossed the yard towards the stables, avoiding the drainage channel where dirty water swirled among little dams of straw.
She recalled thinking that Naomi Widdowson spent too much time outdoors, that her skin was weathered, her fingernails black. Fry had to remind herself sometimes that the people she dealt with often did things she would never consider doing herself. She’d met more than a few of them already in the present enquiry. Eating those huge, purple steaks of horse meat, dressing up to pursue the artificial scent of a fox — it took all sorts.
Fry looked around the yard, with the stone house to one side and the stables on the other, the horses peering out at her from around their hay racks. Bonny and Baby, but no sign of Monty. She could picture the three of them practically mugging Gavin Murfin for some kind of tidbit. It was obviously what they had come to expect from visitors. So what could be of more interest to a horse than a stranger walking up to their stables?
Stepping carefully, Fry came nearer to the end loose box and edged along the wall. The top half of the door stood open, like all the others. If it hadn’t, she would have noticed something out of place sooner. She could hear faint stirrings from inside now, the sounds of an animal breathing noisily and pawing at the straw.
That was when Fry made her mistake. She flicked up the latch and flung the door open, bursting into the stable, her mouth open to start shouting the commands. For a second, she heard the two uniformed officers running towards her. But then the whole of her world was suddenly taken up by the huge, rearing animal in front of her, its eyes rolling in alarm, its nostrils flaring, its steel-shod hooves lashing out at the intruder. How could she have forgotten how big these animals were, how easily the impact of a steel shoe could crush a man’s skull?
Frantically, Fry tried to dive clear of the flying hooves. The last two things she remembered for a while were the thud of those hooves hitting the concrete wall, and the overpowering smell of wet horse.
Cooper and Murfin were on the A6 approaching Bakewell. As they passed Haddon Hall, still closed to visitors for the winter, they were held up at the turning to the huge car park for the agricultural business centre. Bakewell was always busy on a Saturday, no matter what the time of year.
Cooper tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as a coach manoeuvred off Haddon Road, splashing through the water that sometimes closed the access to the car park completely in bad weather.
‘It’s frustrating not knowing what’s going on,’ he said.
‘Me, I never know what’s going on,’ said Murfin. ‘It’s the best way to be.’
They were already in the centre of the small town, waiting for traffic to clear on the roundabout in front of the Rutland Arms, when they got the first indication of what was happening at Long Acres Farm.
‘We’ve got Naomi Widdowson in custody,’ Fry told Cooper when she called.
‘Great. What about — ’
‘Her brother Rick? No, he got away.’
She sounded so disgusted that Cooper didn’t ask her how it had happened. If it was her own fault somehow, she would be blaming herself enough by now.
‘He made it to his Land Rover while we were dealing with his sister,’ said Fry. ‘There was a horse that proved a bit of a distraction.’
‘Didn’t you have the entrance sealed off?’ asked Cooper, though he knew it was too obvious.
Fry sighed. ‘Yes, of course. But there was another way out: a track across the fields. His Land Rover made it, but there was no way we could follow.’
‘Which way is he heading?’
‘He should come out near the stone mill. Who knows which direction he’ll take when he gets back on the road, though. Too many tracks and unmade roads in this area.’
Cooper mentally pictured the map. ‘We’re not far away. We’ll take a chance and head up through Great Longstone on to the Longstone Edge road.’
‘Thanks, Ben. I’ll catch up with you somewhere.’
Her voice sounded a little shaky. No way to conceal that, except by not saying very much. Cooper wondered what had frightened her.
‘Diane, are you — ?’
‘Just don’t,’ said Fry. ‘Just don’t ask me if I’m all right.’
With his foot down on the Toyota’s accelerator, Cooper left Bakewell behind on the A6 and turned up the hill in Ashford in the Water. He slowed through Great Longstone, watching for Rick Widdowson’s blue Land Rover as they passed the two pubs, the White Lion and the Crispin, but in Great Longstone, you were more likely to see a well-known former cabinet minister walking his equally well-known dog.
Moor Lane took them up to the Edge. It was quiet up here today. Saturday was the day for shopping in Bakewell, and tomorrow would be the time for enjoying the view. A sharp left-hand bend marked the point where the haulage road from High Rake and Black Harry Lane both met the public road.
Cooper stopped the car for a moment, surveying the landscape for a cloud of dust, or a flock of sheep scattering across a field. The Toyota had four-wheel drive, but he was reluctant to find himself drawn in to a pursuit across open country.
‘What’s that up ahead in the road?’ said Murfin, pointing straight on.
Cooper let in the clutch again, and drove on slowly.
‘It’s a dead sheep.’
‘And look, in the ditch — a blue Land Rover.’
They were on the edge of the last surviving stretch of genuine moorland on Longstone Moor. To the east, Cooper could see the glint of the flash, the water-filled quarry workings, edged by a screen of trees. To the west, the moor itself was a sea of heather, black in the rain, a dark ocean stirred fitfully by the wind.
He drew the car into the side of the road, and parked on the rough grass verge. They peered into the Land Rover to make sure Rick Widdowson wasn’t lying injured inside it. But the driver’s door stood open, and it was clear what had happened.
As Cooper straightened up, he saw Fry’s black Peugeot coming the other way. She pulled a face at the sight of the dead sheep lying bloodied in the middle of the carriageway.
‘Better help me drag this out of the way, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s a bit of a hazard.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Murfin. ‘What a great day this is turning into.’
Fry got out of her car and pulled up the collar of her coat as the wind across the moor caught her hair.
‘He’s abandoned his vehicle and legged it, then,’ she said.
‘Yes. But we can only have been a few minutes behind him. So where is he?’
In this landscape, there was only one answer. Widdowson must have gone to ground somewhere on the moor, and was lying flat to the earth in the heather. As long as he remained still, they would need an awful lot of time and luck to stumble across him.
Cooper walked as far as the first turn in a track that snaked across the moor towards the distant opencast rakes. Nothing moved anywhere, not even a rabbit.
‘We’ll need to get the helicopter unit to guide us in with their infra-red camera,’ he said.
‘I’ll put in the request.’
Then a noise broke the silence of the moor. A tuneless warble, no skylark or curlew. Cooper turned his head to listen and focused in on the noise before it stopped. He fixed his eye on a patch of heather close to one of the capped mine shafts.
