Alistair Mackenzie was also on a transfer from Derbyshire’s D Division. He was the reason she’d landed the job with EMSOU – MC. She’d worked with him on a case last year – a case she probably shouldn’t mention to Ben Cooper. Well, not unless he started to annoy her, anyway. It had involved Cooper’s brother, and they were all lucky that the outcome hadn’t been much worse.

She looked at the people around her at the scene. Dusk was starting to fall. That was good, too.

‘Okay, I think we can call it a day,’ she said. ‘We’ll pick it up again tomorrow morning. Full daylight, a complete team, a proper scene examination.’

‘All right.’

She could see Cooper was reluctant, but he didn’t argue. In fact he didn’t say anything as the others began to drift slowly away. Perversely, Fry felt the need to provoke some kind of response from him, even if it was a negative one.

‘Can I leave you to organise a scene guard for tonight?’ she said.

Cooper met her eye calmly. ‘Yes, of course. Whatever you want.’

And for some reason, when Fry gazed at him, the thought that came into her head was: And that was your first mistake.

5

An hour or so later, Ben Cooper was standing uncomfortably in the middle of a room. He was used to entering people’s homes, studying their furniture and bookshelves, getting an idea of the way they lived from an observation of small details. But this was different. He was being asked to examine things he wasn’t really interested in, and which seemed to have no significance. The size of the windows, the height of the ceilings, the decorative stonework on the exposed lintels. It was making him feel uneasy – especially when he was aware that he was being closely observed himself.

‘And look at this. We installed this ourselves.’

He found he’d been ushered into a bathroom. There was something very odd about four people crowding into a bathroom all at once, the whole lot of them gazing at a free-standing claw-footed bath with whirlpool effect, as if it was the prime exhibit at a crime scene.

The thought sent Cooper’s imagination spinning out of control. He began to picture a dead body lying in that bath, a head sprawled against the taps, blood pooling around a claw foot on the laminate flooring as it dripped from a slashed wrist. The wrist would be his if he didn’t escape soon. This house was making him feel suicidal.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Oh … yes.’

Actually, it wasn’t this house, but all the other houses that had come before it. Number fifteen Meadow Drive was just the latest in a long series of properties he’d looked at this week, not to mention all the others last week and the week before. If he’d been asked, he would have suggested there were far too many homes for sale in the Edendale area right now. If it was a difficult time for the housing market, then surely some of these vendors should be holding off putting their properties on the market for a while. That would make the list shorter, at least.

Not that anybody was likely to ask him, of course. But he’d obediently turned up for the viewing appointment. He’d even taken the opportunity presented to him by Diane Fry to escape from the scene on Oxlow Moor. Normally he’d never have done that. Deep down, Cooper felt as though he’d abandoned a job half done. He hoped Liz appreciated the compromises he made for her.

‘Perhaps you’d like to talk about it.’

That was the estate agent. She was one of a long line of anonymous salespeople with a folder full of glossy brochures and a mouthful of misleading terminology. He’d learned that ‘easy to manage’ meant ‘not enough room to swing a cat’ and ‘full of period features’ meant ‘needs knocking down and completely rebuilding’.

Cooper nodded, and stepped outside. As soon as they were out of earshot, Liz leaned closer.

‘What do you think, Ben? I love it.’

‘We can’t afford it.’

‘But look at the size of the kitchen, and those fireplaces. Look at the garden, and the view. We won’t find anything better than this.’

‘But we can’t afford it.’

The estate agent looked round the edge of the door with a bright, artificial smile.

‘How are you getting on?’ she asked.

Liz smiled at her. ‘We need to talk about it a bit more.’

But as they walked back through Edendale town centre towards his flat in Welbeck Street, the one thing they didn’t do was talk about it.

Liz was good at this. She could detect his mood with great accuracy, and know exactly how to respond to it. She instinctively saw that it wasn’t the right time to discuss the subject most on her mind. He supposed this was how couples were when they knew each other very well. It had been a new experience for him over the last year or two, one which he would gladly get used to.

Instead, they chatted away about inconsequential things – the weather, their families, the gossip in the office, and of course the wedding arrangements. Well, perhaps not all so inconsequential.

‘This new evidence in the Pearson case,’ said Liz. ‘I suppose DS Fry is hoping to make it into a murder inquiry.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it helps to justify her existence, doesn’t it? There’s no point in having a Major Crime Unit without major crime.’

‘You’re so cynical sometimes,’ said Cooper.

‘Come on, Ben. We all have to justify our existence these days.’

He had to admit that was true. They were all looking over their shoulders, wondering whether their job would be the next to be declared surplus to requirements in this time of austerity. When police stations were being closed and the most experienced officers forced into retirement, the concept of front-line policing was becoming less and less clear. No role or department was really safe from the cuts. There was no such thing as job security, not any more. If you couldn’t make a good case for the importance of your role, then you shouldn’t expect anybody else to be doing it on your behalf during all those meetings going on at headquarters in Ripley. Even for Liz, there was no immunity from cuts in her job as a civilian crime scene examiner.

They passed the little baker’s shop in Clappergate, which during the day had wicker baskets standing outside on the pavement and an ancient delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions. A few doors down, the New Age shop was still there, though it wasn’t so new any more. Its rich smells of aromatherapy oils and scented candles and the glint of crystals in its window were strangely redolent of the 1970s.

On the corner of Hulley Road, near the market square, they stopped automatically in front of one of the estate agents and gazed at its darkened display of properties.

Most of their searching for a home was done online, just like everyone else. Liz had set up email alerts on all the main property sites. Rightmove, Primelocation, Findaproperty. Her search parameters were way out, in Cooper’s opinion. She’d set the maximum price too high, the minimum number of bedrooms too many, the requirements for a garden and double garage too ambitious. But it meant that suggestions were flooding in, without any effort on their part. Everything was found on the internet now. And yet there was something irresistible about an estate agent’s window when you were house-hunting.

Properties in the more desirable parts of old Edendale were well out of their league. The picturesque lanes of Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, where the River Eden ran past front gardens filled with lobelias and lichen-covered millstones. Those were just a dream. The properties they were looking at were smaller, newer, less full of period features. But still too expensive.

‘Why would anyone visit an estate agent’s at night?’ said Liz. ‘Who would do that?’

‘We would,’ said Cooper.