his way through the lines of crawling cars.

‘That’s clover,’ said Kemp. ‘Sending tor the ambulance first, before you beat me up.’

j 1

‘Shut up,’ said Cooper.

‘If you took the cuffs off lor a bit, I could use my mobile to phone the missus. She could get the sledge out and hitch up the dogs. They’re only corgis, but it’d be quicker than this performance.’

Behind them, somebody laughed. Cooper looked over his shoulder. Three men were standing in front of the window of the cafe, leaning on the plate glass, with their hands in the pockets of their anoraks and combat jackets. They wore heavv boots, a couple of them with steel toecaps, like the safety boots worn by builders in case they dropped bricks or scaffolding on their

,11 O

feet. Three pairs of eyes met Cooper’s, with challenging stares. Four white males, aged between twenty-jive and forty-jive. Could be in possession of baseball bats or similar weapons. Approach with caution.

Finally, Cooper’s radio crackled.

‘Sorry, DC Cooper,’ said the voice of the controller. ‘Your response unit has been delayed by a gridlock situation on Hulley Road. They’ll be with you as soon as possible, but they say it could be five minutes yet.’

One of the men leaning against the window began to form a snowball between his gloved fists, squeezing it into the shape of a hand grenade vith short, hard slaps.

‘Damn,’ said Cooper.

Kemp turned his head and smiled. ‘Do you reckon we could go back inside and have another cup of tea?’ he said. ‘Only I think it’s starting to snow again. We could freex.e to death out here.’

By morning, Marie Tcnnent’s body had stiffened into a Ibetal position and was covered in Irost, like a supermarket chicken. Ice crystals had formed in the valves of her heart and in her blood vessels; her finders and toes and the exposed parts of her lace had turned white and brittle from frostbite.

Nothing had disturbed Marie’s body during the night not even the mountain hare that had pattered across her legs and squatted on her shoulder to scratch at patches of its fur. The hare was still brown and ragged, instead of in its winter camouflage white. It defecated on Marie’s neck and left a scattering of fur, dead skin cells and clving fleas for the pathologist to find. For

y O 1 O

a long while afterwards, Marie lav waiting, just as she had waited in life.

Later in the morning, a patrolling Peak Park Ranger almost found Marie, but he stopped short of the summit when he saw more snow coming towards him in the blue-grey clouds rolling across Blcaklow Moor. lie turned back to the shelter of the briefing centre in the valley, retracing his own footsteps, tailing to notice the smaller tracks that ended suddenly a few vards up the hill.

When the fresh snowfall came, it quickly covered Marie’s bodv, gently smoothing her out and softening her outline. By the end of the afternoon, she was no more than a minor bump in the miles of unending whiteness that lav on the moors above the Helen Valley.

I hat night, the temperature dropped to minus sixteen on the exposed sno fields. Now there was no hurry for Marie to be found. She would keep.

10

.Detective Sergeant Diane itv knew she was going to die

O . O O

buried under an avalanche one day an avalanche of pointless paperwork. It would be a tragic accident, resulting from the collapse of a single unstable box Hie under the weight of witness statements piled on top of it. The landslide would carrv away her desk and swivel chair and smash them against the wall of the CID room like matchsticks. It would take days for the rescue teams to locate her body. When they did, she would be crushed bevond recognition, her bones flattened in the same way that the reports on her desk were even now pressing down on her brain.

The piles of paper reminded her of something. She turned her head and looked out of the window, squinting to see past the condensation that had streaked the panes. Oh ves. Snow. Outside, the stuff was piled as high and as white as the paperwork. She couldn’t decide which was worse.

Then she felt the touch of warm air. It came from the noisv fan heater that she had stolen from the scenes of crime department that morning before the SOCOs arrived tor work. The paperwork was just about preferable. At least it meant she could stay in the warmth for a while. Only masochists and obsessivcs chose to wander the streets of Edendale on a morning like this. Ben Cooper, tor example. No doubt Cooper was somewhere out there even now, conducting a one-man crusade to clean up crime, despite the icicles hanging off his ears.

Soon, scenes of crime officers would be scouring the building lor their missing heater. Eventually, she would have to give it up, unless she could find somewhere to hide it when she heard them coming. You could always tell when the SOCOs were coming by the sound of their grumbling. Rut the heater was the only source of warmth in the room, fry put a hand to the radiator on the wall. It was warm, but only faintly. It felt like a body that hadn’t quite cooled but had already gone into rigor mortis. No need to call

in the pathologist for a verdict on that one. Dead (or two hours, at least.

She sniffed. A whiff of sausages and tomato sauce trickled

o

down the room and settled on a burglary hie that lay open on her desk. It was the sort of smell that was responsible for turning the walls that strange shade of green and for killing the Hies whose bodies had lain grilling lor months inside the covers of the fluorescent lights.

‘Gavin,’ she said.

‘Mmm?’

‘Where are you?’

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