‘See for yourself,' she said. 'I can't bear it any more, Ben.’

He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.

‘Leave it to me,' he said. 'You look after the girls.’

He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.

Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.

The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.

Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.

Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.

8

‘Found by a man walking a dog.’

There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.

‘Found by a man walking a dog,' repeated the superintendent dangerously.

Some of the officers in the room looked at the ceiling; others tilted their plastic coffee cups to their faces, hoping to hide their expressions from the superintendent's eye. Fry wondered why bluebottles always chose to ignore open windows in favour of the determined futility of bashing themselves incessantly against the closed ones.

‘It was some old bloke called Dickinson, sir,' said DS Rennie. 'Apparently he has his own regular route across the Baulk every night.’

Rennie had not been involved in the search operation. But, like everyone else in the room, he recognized the time for covering your back, for limiting the damage, for claiming any shreds of credit where it could be found. Those responsible for the search were keeping sensibly silent. So it followed that if you spoke up, the super would register you as blameless. Rennie watched for the brief flicker of the blue eyes towards him that said he had been heard and acknowledged.

‘So. A man walking a dog. Some old bloke called Dickinson, in fact. Thank you for that, Rennie.' The superintendent nodded and smiled like a sewage worker gifted with an exceptionally keen sense of smell. 'And here we are, Her Majesty's finest. We had a helicopter up in the air at God knows how much a minute, and forty officers on the ground searching those woods for five hours, without turning up so much as a decent used condom. The police, like the papers used to say, are baffled. And then — and then what happens?’

Nobody answered him this time, not even Rennie. Fry found she had drawn an entire swarm of small blue flies flitting across her page, their flimsy wings beating fast, but going nowhere.

‘The body,' said Jepson, 'is found by a man walking a dog.'

‘Given another day or two —' began DI Hitchens. But it was unwise — as duty inspector, Hitchens had been technically responsible for the search, though he had not been present. The superintendent cut straight across him.

‘Just tell me why,' he said. 'Why is there always a man walking a dog? You might start to suspect they were put there specifically to expose the shortcomings of the police force, eh? Lost a body somewhere in the woods? Don't worry, chief, some old bloke walking his dog will find it for us. Got no description of the getaway car used in that armed robbery last night? No problem - some insomniac dragging poor old Rover round the streets is bound to have made a note of the registration number. Got no positive ID of your suspect to place him at the scene of the offence? Albert and Fido are sure to have clocked him stashing the loot while they were wetting a lamppost somewhere. Yes. Men walking dogs. If only they advertised their services in the Eden Valley Times, we'd save a fortune.'

‘Chief, I don't think -' said Hitchens.

And then,' said Jepson, 'we could disband the entire Derbyshire Constabulary and replace it with a few dozen blokes walking their dogs. They'd have the detection rate up in no time.’

Diane Fry relegated Hitchens a few rungs in her mental hierarchy. She had to make the best impression she could among all these new faces and stay alert, try to pick up the names and ranks and figure out who was the most likely to be influential. Hitchens had started off near the top of the scale as her DI, but was gradually fading on the rails.

A detective Fry didn't recognize had put his hand up, like the bright boy in class wanting to get himself noticed. He had already drawn unwelcome attention to himself by arriving very late for the briefing, which had always been considered a disciplinary offence in stations Fry had worked at. He had looked hot and flustered and dishevelled when he came in, as if he had only just got out of bed, and he had suffered a prolonged glower from Jepson. Now all eyes turned to him, welcoming a sacrificial victim, amazed that he was going to throw himself into the pit voluntarily. He looked to be in his late twenties, but carried an air of innocence lacking in those around him. He was tall and slim, and he had messy, light-brown hair that fell untidily across his forehead.

‘Excuse me, sir, but I don't understand.'

‘Oh aye? What don't you understand, lad?'

‘Well, we got the dog section out from Ripley to go over the ground, didn't we? So why didn't the Ripley lot find what the old bloke's dog found?’

Jepson looked at him sharply, a scathing put-down hovering on his lips. But he saw the expression on the detective's face, noticed his cheeks already starting to go a shade of pink. The superintendent sighed, his irritation suddenly spent.

‘I think you'll find the key to that, Cooper,' he said, 'is not the dog. It's the old bloke.’

Finally, Jepson handed over to DCI Tailby as senior investigating officer. Amid muffled sighs of relief and a flood of comforting conference room jargon, the discussion moved on into safer areas - the prioritization of lines of enquiry, the division of staff into enquiry teams, the allocation of action sheets. But several days later, Diane Fry was amazed to find that, in among the detailed anatomical drawings of common winged insects, she had recorded the superintendent's last words exactly.