‘A bit of a hero to you, is he, Mark? It might be advisable to choose your heroes more carefully in future.’

‘Look at that one,’ said Mark. He pointed at a front page from an old Eden Valley Times. One story took up the whole of the page, with several photographs of the scene of the incident and some of the people involved. There were head-and-shoulders pictures of three young men, and one of a team of exhausted Rangers with rescue equipment. The three young men had died when they had climbed a fence on Castle Hill, Cargreave, to chase their ball towards a slope. It was a steep, convex slope, but you couldn’t tell until it was too late, when you couldn’t go back and could no longer stand upright on the grass. The three boys had plunged into the rocky gorge below Castle Hill in front of tourists queuing for admission to the show cave.

‘We know Owen Fox was one of the Rangers who recovered the bodies from the gorge,’ said Hitchens.

‘Yes. But you see those lads that were killed,’ said Mark. ‘One of them was my brother.’

When Owen Fox frowned, his eyebrows looked worn and ragged. They tended to spread across his forehead like well-used brushes. He took his hands away from his face and studied them. He had fingers that were thick and shabby, and his palms were creased like an antiquarian map of the Peak, all narrow valleys and hills.

‘I thought you brought me here to ask about the photographs,’ he said.

‘Not really,’ said Tailby. ‘Is that what you’d rather talk about?’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

Owen seemed to rally for a moment. ‘In my case,’ he said, ‘it’s true.’

He told them that he had bought the computer after his mother had died, using the money she left him. He needed a distraction to take his mind off his memories of her. For so many years, she had been all that he had, apart from his job. Other memories had begun to come back to him, too – more memories of death.

At first, Owen said, his only idea was to learn about computers because they were coming into the Ranger Service and he didn’t want to be left behind by the young ones. He was terrified of having to retire early. What would he retire to? So he bought the computer to teach himself at home, where no one would see his ignorance.

He had heard of the internet, he said, but had never thought of using it. It had come as a surprise that the PC he ordered came complete with an internal modem and pre-loaded with software to get free internet access. Naturally, he had tried it out.