‘We’ll try. There’s just nowhere to park. The town centre bobby is here, too, by the way. They expect to see him on market day, so he’s no problem.’

Cooper and Weenink wound their way through the parked vehicles. They passed a fifty-foot-long transporter that already had two decks of calves loaded. A lorry that had been washed and scrubbed inside drove off with dirty water pouring out under the hinges of the tailgate. A farmer was trying to negotiate a cattle trailer into a space that was obviously too small.

When they found the Transit van, it was blocked in at the back of the parking area, with its bonnet against the wall and no way of reversing out past the trailer behind it.

‘I suppose it was white once,’ said Cooper, drawing his finger through the grime on the back doors.

Weenink had walked round the front, squeezing his bulk between the van and the wing mirror of a Daihatsu Fourtrak next to it.

‘Has it got a rusty wheel arch?’ asked Cooper.

‘Two of them. Also a rusty passenger door and rusty sills all the way along this side. And look at all this crap hanging out of the side door.’

Cooper peered along the van. Strands of yellow straw stuck out from under the bottom of the side-loading door like a badly trimmed fringe of hair.

‘It reminds me of a particularly hairy blonde I knew once,’ said Weenink. ‘She was a real goer. But stripped down to her knickers, she looked like Wurzel Gummidge.’

‘Let’s go and find Mr Keith Teasdale,’ said Cooper.

A police constable and an RSPCA inspector stood chatting by the door, their uniforms almost identical but for the policeman’s helmet. The RSPCA man looked like a farmer himself and nodded amicably at the customers walking past. Above their heads were posters advertising fertilizers and animal feeds.

Inside the building, market workers were channelling cattle through a complicated network of steel pens towards the sale ring. As Cooper and Weenink entered, a group of bullocks turned on each other and engaged in a shoving match in the passageway. Side by side, two of the animals completely filled the passage, and their flanks were squeezed against the five-foot high steel bars of the pens on either side. Yipping and shouting, the attendants flicked their backs with sticks until they went in the right direction. Then steel gates were shut along the passageways with a series of loud clangs.

At the back was the sale ring itself, surrounded by tiers of wooden benches like a miniature amphitheatre. Rows of farmers lined the benches, while others pressed against the steel tubular sides of the ring, their boots resting on a wooden platform like men propping up the bar at their local pub. Above them, the low girders supporting the roof of the mart were covered with roosting starlings.