‘Yeah, right. They tell those stories because they think it’ll bring gullible American tourists in.’

‘No,’ said Murfin solemnly. ‘I saw her once.’

‘Come off it.’

‘I did. I was about to leave here one night, and had to go to the gents. They’re down a corridor round the back of the bar there, you know. And that was when I saw her, all glowing. Gave me the shock of my life, it did.’

‘Glowing?’

‘Yeah, glowing. Like she was on fire.

‘You were drunk, Gavin.’

‘Believe what you want, I don’t care.’

Fry looked at Murfin closely, sure that he must be joking. She’d known him for a long time, and he wasn’t the kind to believe in ghosts and all that stuff. But his face never slipped. He appeared to be serious.

She looked out across the moor, where the smoke and flames seemed to be getting ever nearer to the pub.

‘If that wind changes direction,’ she said, ‘your flaming kitchen maid could be in danger of burning to death all over again.’

The pub was accessed directly from the car park, and was essentially a one-room open-plan layout, although in visually distinct sections. A games room featured a pool table, darts board and plasma-screen TV. At one end, a dark-panelled snug with pew benches had been left as a reminder of days gone by. It had been heated by a small wood-burning stove.

In this part of the pub, some of the old pictures had been left on the walls. A few portraits, hunting groups, dukes and squires posing with their dogs and horses. In the dim light, there were too many eyes in the room for Fry’s comfort, squinting at her beneath their layers of dust.

And what was that smell? She made her way along a short passage and found herself in a galley-style catering kitchen with tiled walls and overhead stainless-steel extractor hoods. Yes, this was where the smell was coming from. The odour of scampi and chips seemed to have been absorbed into the walls and ventilation ducts, and was now being released back into the air.

Fry was reminded of the theory that ghosts were the lingering echoes of people whose lives and deaths were imprinted indelibly in the stone. This smell seemed to bring a sense of life back to the stale air, peopling the abandoned kitchens with the shadowy spirits of those who’d worked there over the years.

But that was Gavin Murfin who’d put the idea of ghosts into her head. She ought to know better than to listen to him, even for a moment.

‘Owner’s accommodation?’ she said.

Murfin jerked his head. ‘Upstairs.’

She found the access to the stairs just past a series of doors marked as ladies, gents and disabled toilet facilities, and another door giving access to the rear yard area.

Upstairs, a room had been turned into a small function suite, with its own corner bar for private parties. It was the brightest room in the pub, thanks to four large sash and case windows looking out over the moor. It was laid with a dark blue carpet, leaving a tiny wooden dance floor area in the middle. It would never have hosted any major events. Thirty or forty people would have filled it to capacity. A small wedding, perhaps. An office party. Groups of laughing workers deposited by minibus. No chance of walking home from here.

The guest rooms were also on the first floor. Just three of them. According to the name plaques on their doors, they were called the Bakewell, Buxton and Bradwell rooms.

There was another, narrower set of stairs leading to the top floor, where the pub’s owner had lived. But the owner’s accommodation was completely bare. In every room, the furniture had been removed, the carpets stripped from the floor, the curtains pulled down from the windows. There were clear marks against the walls where a picture had hung or a chest of drawers had stood. The former occupants had removed themselves completely.

A few minutes later, Fry found herself looking down two flights of stairs into the rear corridor, the gloom in the doorways barely relieved by the light from the huge sash window on the landing. For a moment she was puzzled and disturbed by the way the shadows seemed to move below her, as if the darkness was writhing around itself, invisible snakes stirring the dust on the floor.

It was only when her eyes adjusted to the light that she realised what she was seeing. Smoke and flames from the hillside, casting their distant outlines through the window, thrusting their ominous presence right into the heart of the building.

‘If you want to know about the pub, you could start with Mad Maurice, I suppose,’ said Murfin.

‘Who?’ asked Fry.

‘Maurice Wharton, the last landlord. He ran the pub right up until the day it closed.’

‘He lived on the premises too, of course?’

‘Yes, with his wife and children. I can’t remember their names, but we can soon find that out.’

‘No live-in staff?’

‘Not that I remember. The bar staff usually came up from town for their shift. A lot of them were students earning a bit of money during the evenings or at weekends.’

Fry sniffed the air, detecting again that faint whiff of chips.

‘Who did the cooking here? There must have been some kitchen staff.’

Murfin didn’t answer, and Fry glanced at him, ready to ask the question again.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Fry turned to Hurst, softening her instinctive response a little.

‘Find out, will you?’

‘Sure.’

She looked at Murfin again. ‘Gavin, did I hear that you were liaising with the firefighters?’

‘Yes,’ said Murfin. ‘Trumpton reported seeing a white pickup. They can’t be specific about the make or model, or how many people were in it. Or how long it was here before it left. They were a bit vague about the colour, come to think of it – white being so easily confused with blue or red, like. I suppose it’s true what they say in the song. Smoke does get in your eyes.’

‘Trumpton?’ said Fry again.

Murfin ignored her with a complacent smile.

‘So two people were here, at least,’ he said.

‘Well that didn’t take much figuring out, Sherlock, since one of them got left behind, and he happens to be dead.’

‘And someone drove the pickup away,’ added Murfin helpfully.

‘Thanks, Gavin.’

‘Just saying.’

‘What were they doing here? It doesn’t make sense.’

Hurst shrugged. ‘People break into empty buildings all the time. They could have been looking for somewhere to smoke dope, have sex, find a squat for a few weeks.’

‘In the middle of burning moorland? They’d have to be particularly desperate, or stupid.’

‘Fair point.’

Fry looked around the empty rooms. ‘I’d say they might have taken the opportunity to find something worth stealing, but it seems a bit unlikely.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hurst. ‘That could be the most likely explanation. Okay, there’s no cash here, or the sort of small electrical items that opportunist thieves usually go for. But scrap metal is worth a fair bit these days. Ask the vicars whose church roofs keep getting stripped of lead.’

Fry shook her head. ‘I still can’t see any signs that anything has been taken.’

‘There was definitely a vehicle here, though. The fire crews saw it. A white pickup. Just the sort of vehicle you’d use for scrap.’

‘Probably a white pickup.’

‘There were too many people up here. Too many for it to be just a coincidence. Too many for there to be a logical explanation. Not an innocent logical explanation anyway.’

From Fry’s research when she first transferred here from the West Midlands, she knew about the ten unsolved murders in Derbyshire Constabulary’s history. The oldest went back to 1966, the case of a Chesterfield teenager found beaten to death in a disused factory. It was senseless killings like that that tended to be the most difficult to detect and the most unlikely to result in a successful prosecution.