‘Did anything come of that last tip-off, Gavin?’ asked Cooper.

‘No, it was a LOB.’

‘A load of …?’

‘Yeah. That. There’s been another theft, though. One more down for Postman Pat.’

‘Where?’ asked Cooper.

‘Luke has the details.’

Murfin aside, one of the reasons for the tension was that Cooper’s team had been working on an inquiry into the theft of postboxes. All over Britain, the famous red Victorian boxes were being stolen by criminals who sold them for thousands of pounds on internet auction sites. In rural areas, they were ripped from lamp posts and telegraph poles, or chiselled out of walls. In some cases, entire pillar boxes had been uprooted from the ground, with vehicles used to drag them from their foundations. Many antique boxes were being sold as souvenirs to collectors abroad, especially in the USA. It wasn’t an opportunist thing people did on the way home from the pub. You needed heavy cutting equipment to take some of those boxes away.

Postbox prices had risen since the Royal Mail stopped auctioning off old stock nearly ten years ago. It was said that boxes dating back to Queen Victoria’s reign and bearing the VR mark could fetch up to five thousand pounds in America. George V boxes were worth around a thousand quid, while even the more modern ones could go for hundreds.

Originally the theory had been that thieves wanted the scrap metal, but any legitimate scrapyard wasn’t going to want those postboxes – they were far too distinctive. One of the difficulties, though, was distinguishing them from genuinely sourced items and Chinese replicas.

So it was the boxes themselves that appeared to be the target, rather than the mail they contained. The number of thefts had been accelerating, with around thirteen boxes removed in the last two months alone. In one incident in a village near Edendale, thieves had posed as workmen to be inconspicuous, and waited until the mail had been collected.

It forced Cooper to picture a gang of thieves lurking behind a wall with a JCB until the postman had left. But more bizarre things than that happened in the Peak District every week.

Irvine waved across the room, while taking a phone call at the same time.

‘I’ll bring you up to date in a minute,’ he said.

‘Okay. Other than that, anything happening?’

‘There’s been a cow rampage,’ said Murfin. ‘But uniforms are dealing with that.’

‘Could you try to communicate a bit more clearly, Gavin?’ said Cooper.

Murfin eyed him cautiously.

‘Oh yeah. Walker with a dog, chased by cows when he tried to cross their field. Walker escaped with a scare, but dog got badly knocked about by cows. It happens every year.’

‘With relentless regularity.’

And so it did. People thought it was only bulls that were dangerous, but cows were more likely to attack you, especially if you had a dog, and particularly in the spring. It was the animal they were going for, of course. They associated dogs with the loss of their calves.

Some things came round every year, as regularly as Christmas. Other types of crime, like the postbox thefts, were steadily increasing – and therefore figuring more prominently in Cooper’s preoccupations. The number of farms being targeted had gone up by sixty per cent in the last twelve months, as his brother Matt would readily testify from his recent experiences at Bridge End.

Poaching was a good example, too. It wasn’t unexpected, when jobs were being lost and everyone was feeling the effects of the downturn and financial cutbacks.

At least there had been no riots and outbreaks of looting in Edendale. That was a phenomenon that was generally confined to the cities and larger towns. Derbyshire Constabulary had sent officers to help out in London at the height of the troubles the previous summer.

‘Oh yes,’ said Murfin. ‘And the control room took a call from one of the fire crews up on the moors. The white-hat guy, you know.’

‘The incident commander.’

‘Yeah. Well he’s called in to report a break-in at an old pub. His firefighters passed it on their way to the fires. They saw a white pickup driving away, and they say some boards have been pulled off one of the doors at the back.’

‘He must mean the Light House. It’s been empty for months, ever since the last owners went bust.’

‘Oh, I know that place,’ said Murfin. ‘And you’re right – it was all boarded up last time I went past. Would they have left anything inside worth nicking?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I think it’s due to come up for auction in a few weeks’ time,’ said Hurst. ‘They must be hoping someone will take it on as a going concern.’

‘Rather them than me,’ put in Irvine. ‘Only a fool would pay out good money to start running a pub these days. Especially when the last owners couldn’t make a go of it. It’s madness.’

‘There might be equipment inside,’ said Cooper. ‘Scrap metal is still going up in value.’

‘I bet there’s no beer, anyway. Some of the lads went up there to help drink it dry on the day it closed.’

‘So what action have we taken?’

‘None yet.’

‘Inform the owners, and suggest they make the place secure.’

‘If we can find out who the owners are exactly. Right now, it might be the bank.’

‘I don’t suppose they’ll be in much of a hurry. I can’t imagine anything will be done today anyway.’

From the first-floor windows of the CID room, there was an even clearer view of the drifting smoke.

‘Has anyone been reported in connection with the fires?’ asked Cooper, knowing that he was being unduly optimistic.

‘No. We’ve only had vague sightings of quad bikes coming down from the moors. You know what it’s like, Ben.’

‘Only too well.’

Cooper thought of all the fires there had been over the years. He’d seen in a report that 345 moorland fires had been recorded in the national park since that disastrous year in 1976, affecting sixteen square miles of moor. In the Dark Peak, more than two square miles of peat still lay bare, having never recovered from the devastation.

And all of those fires had been caused by people – there were no recorded natural fires in the Peak District. The damage had often been caused by carelessness, with people dropping cigarettes or building camp fires, or as a result of controlled burns by landowners that got out of hand. But many of these fires were undoubtedly deliberate. They were the result of arson.

The sight of the moors being destroyed day by day was breaking his heart. The loss of habitats, the blackened wreckage of the hills, they tore at his heart in a way that he couldn’t fully explain. Those hills had always been his home, and he’d never wanted to live anywhere else. He recalled the lines of a song by the folk singer Ewan MacColl, written about the Peak District after the celebrated Kinder Trespass back in 1932.

Sooner than part from the mountains,

I think I would rather be dead.

Watching the fires from a distance was making him feel helpless, and the necessity of being in the office was even more irksome than usual. He had to admit that he was itchy and restless, bothered by the nagging sensation that his past was being obliterated, even as his future was being planned out, fixed down and tied up in a neat bow with a bit of wedding ribbon.

‘They’ve asked for a police investigation, though,’ said Murfin. ‘The cost of the damage is rising astronomically. There’s a request in for attendance by scenes of crime, too.’

Cooper nodded.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go myself.’

3

St Luke’s Hospice had been built in a quiet location just behind Edendale General Hospital. Patio doors from the ground-floor rooms opened on to the hospice gardens, where patients could look out at a fish pond and mature trees alive with birds and squirrels.