‘Her you never see. Well, maybe just a passing glimpse now and then. But she never speaks, never wants to say hello. She’s unsociable. But then, she is married to Warren, so you can’t blame her, I reckon.’

Teasdale seemed to get bored with the conversation suddenly and tossed his clump of leaves into a wheelbarrow, where they landed with a wet thud.

‘Did they tell you in there what they call me?’ he said, watching the leaves shift and settle in the barrow.

‘Yes, they did,’ said Cooper.

Teasdale nodded. ‘They love it. They think it’s a great laugh here, and at the mart. They usually tell people to ask me to demonstrate. Did they tell you that?’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘But don’t bother.’

On the way to Ringham Edge, they had to slow down as they came up behind a tractor towing a trailer stacked high with bales of straw. Golden flakes spiralled off the load and drifted across the windscreen of the car.

‘When we get to the farm, I think we should make a point of trying to see all the Leach family,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s the purpose of that?’

‘There’s something wrong there.’

‘We’ve had no reports of anything wrong.’

Cooper glanced at her face, thinking again how thin she was becoming. It made her look gaunt and haunted rather than tough and angular, as she had been when she arrived a few months ago from West Midlands. Fry’s hair was shorter, too, as if she had taken scissors to it and hacked off a couple of inches in a bored moment.

There was one other thing that Cooper noticed about Diane Fry, though. She never mentioned his father now, not since that first time they had met. Sergeant Joe Cooper meant nothing to her.

He wondered what Fry did these days when she went off duty. He wondered what she would be doing tonight, after work. But, for once, Cooper found that his imagination failed him completely.

He had already agreed to go out for a drink with Todd Weenink that night. Weenink called it ‘a session’, which meant he intended to drink a lot of beer. Cooper wasn’t really looking forward to it. He would miss a rehearsal for the police male voice choir, and it was getting to their busiest time of year, when they performed at community halls and old people’s homes in the area. Besides, he had seen how morose and aggressive his colleague could become under the influence of alcohol.

But they were partners, and Cooper understood that these occasions were necessary, a kind of bonding. He thought Weenink had no one else to talk to since his marriage had ended. His relationships with women were probably not noted for their conversation. ‘A session’, he sensed, was code for Weenink needing someone to talk to, an admission that he was feeling lonely. That was why Cooper couldn’t refuse.