Cooper walked up from the car park on to the front terrace, which looked out over the valley. It had been a favourite spot to sit in the summer, when the weather was good. He’d sat there many times himself, gazing towards the horizon where the hills disappeared in a warm haze.

But his eye was still drawn towards the pub itself – blank, windowless and dead. The facade had looked Georgian in style, with big sash windows placed in perfect symmetry. Now, those windows had vanished underneath the boarding. He wondered if they would ever re-emerge and light up the way they once had, re-creating that familiar landmark. He didn’t feel optimistic about the prospect. Once things had gone, they tended to stay that way. The past didn’t come back.

‘I thought they would be here already,’ said Villiers, leaning against the bonnet of Cooper’s car. ‘I wonder where they are.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘They don’t intend to share everything they do with us, that’s obvious.’

‘Is that the way it is these days?’

‘I think we just got unlucky,’ said Cooper.

‘DS Fry is a good officer, I think.’

Cooper glanced at Villiers, wondering why she felt the need to defend Diane Fry.

‘Yes, of course she is.’

He couldn’t make his mind up about Carol Villiers any more. He’d thought he knew her well, but the woman who’d transferred into Derbyshire Constabulary wasn’t the same person who’d left the area for service with the RAF Police.

He recalled the day not long after Villiers had arrived when he’d see her driving away from the car park at E Division headquarters with Diane Fry. He’d thought about the moment many times in the weeks afterwards, trying to imagine what they might have in common, what they might have had to talk about. But he’d never come to any logical conclusion, not one that made any sense to him anyway. Not one that he wanted to think about too deeply.

And it was a sign of how his trust in Villiers had begun to ebb away that he’d never felt able to ask her the question. It was too late now, of course.

Villiers looked at her watch. ‘Maybe we should get on.’

‘We’ll be okay for a few minutes.’

‘If you say so.’

Cooper had wanted to get a look at the pub one way or another. It wasn’t right that he’d let Fry find a body when he should have been here himself. This building seemed to stand like a rebuke, a symbol of his failure. He needed to find out what its secret was, if it had one.

Close up, the story of the Light House was even sadder. Weeds sprouted in the tarmac of the car park, along the edges of the walls and even in the guttering. Green stains ran down the stone where the gutters were blocked. Bird droppings streaked every surface. Foxes had left their spraints in the long grass growing rank and untidy where the beer garden had once been. From the looks of it, the only visitors to the pub in recent months had been a string of vandals, who’d scrawled casual graffiti on the boards over the windows.

It was disturbing how quickly a building began to deteriorate when it was left unoccupied. The pub was like a grand old lady down on her luck, left alone and unloved, with her elegant clothes frayed at the edges, her hair unwashed and her fingernails dirty. She looked lost and ashamed, with her eyes closed against the light.

At the rear stood a range of outbuildings that had been used for storage, including two garages. Rubbish had been burned in an open space. A huge pile of old furniture was stacked against the back wall of the pub. Heavy tables with metal bases, wrought-iron chairs, a heap of torn parasols on steel posts.

On the south side, even the conservatory had been boarded over. Since it consisted mostly of glass, the result was a monstrosity of hardboard, like some giant armoured beetle or an above-ground nuclear bunker. In its time it had been a pleasant place to sit, even on a cold day, its bright and airy space a contrast to the dark interior of the pub.

This was the place where he’d once sat with Diane Fry. But that was in a whole different universe.

He turned and looked up the hill. The smoke was drifting closer again. Cooper screwed his eyes up against the light, unsure of what he was seeing. Shadows. Yes, shadows in the smoke. Dark and insubstantial, moving in and out of the murk, their movements flickering and unnatural. He tried to follow their direction, but quickly lost them. It was as if they had simply slipped out of the world around them and stepped into another dimension.

He strained his eyes to probe the billowing clouds, and thought he saw something once again. But it resolved into the corner of a stone wall, which dropped teasingly into sight for a moment, then vanished again. Perhaps they had been just shadows after all, an effect of the sun still shining down through the smoke. Or maybe it had been a couple of stray sheep, lost and bewildered on the moor.

‘Really,’ said Villiers. ‘We should probably get moving.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Although Fry and Mackenzie weren’t here, the pub was far from deserted. It was a suspected murder scene, and that changed everything. The scenes-of-crime team were at full stretch now, with scene examiners drafted in from other divisions. He couldn’t see Liz, but he knew she was on duty, so she’d be working somewhere. They tried not to see too much of each other on duty, in case there was talk.

The forced door and loose panel had been examined for tool marks and dusted for fingerprints, and the position of the suspect white pickup had been established from evidence of flattened weeds in the car park. It was lucky that the road had been closed for the fire on the moors. It meant that no one had been here between the departure of the pickup and the arrival of Fry’s Audi, which she’d left in the entrance.

Inside the pub, lights had been set up and a series of stepping plates and yellow evidence markers surrounded the position of the body, as well as the route the victim and his assailants had taken from the door. Two SOCOs in scene suits were still combing the adjacent floor and walls for traces, tracking the direction of blood spatter and photographing shoe marks in the dust.

‘DS Cooper, isn’t it? You’re on my crime scene.’

Cooper backed away from the door and found DCI Mackenzie behind him, with Fry at his elbow. Mackenzie’s voice was mild, but there was a cool undertone to his words, and a penetrating gaze in the eyes below the quizzically raised eyebrows.

‘I thought DC Villiers ought just to see the location,’ Cooper said.

He gestured towards Carol Villiers, who was waiting at a safe distance. Trust Carol – she had more sense than he did at a crime scene.

Mackenzie nodded. ‘Okay. Well while you’re here, Cooper, you might see if you can deal with the natives for us.’

‘Who’

Cooper looked towards the road, and saw a silver Volvo estate that had been stopped at the outer cordon. An elderly man in a suit was standing talking to a uniformed officer just outside the tape.

‘Fine,’ said Cooper. ‘I know who that is.’

Thomas Pilkington was the old man of the auctioneers Pilkington and Son. He’d been around the Eden Valley for years – a member of the Rotary Club, a former town councillor, a drinking companion of the golf club captain and the editor of the Eden Valley Times. The son of the firm was Jeremy Pilkington, quite a different proposition, more often to be seen in a red MG on his way to the sailing club at Carsington. Cooper felt sure Jeremy must now be the driving force behind the company.

Old Thomas had been the auctioneer at the cattle market in Edendale for decades. His voice was familiar to generations of farmers and livestock dealers. In fact it had been hard to escape for anyone passing within two hundred yards of the sale ring near the town’s railway station. Cooper remembered the sound as an integral feature of shopping trips to Edendale on cattle market days. Thomas Pilkington’s voice still played as part of the soundtrack to his childhood memories, along with the pop music he’d grown up listening to during all those long, hot summers.