Several faces turned to stare at him. Hitchens raised an eyebrow, but Tailby nodded.

‘Well, the ground was fine for lifting the sugar beet that morning,’ explained Cooper. He drew a finger through a hollow on the top of one of the stones. ‘On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough sun since then to dry the moisture out where it’s sheltered from the wind.’

He became suddenly aware of the nature of the looks he was being given. ‘It’s what you asked me,’ he said.

Hitchens shrugged. He was wearing an old rugby jersey over his jeans, and might once have played for the divisional XV until he became senior enough to be more at risk of injury from his own side than from the opposition.

‘Could Stride be a name?’ he asked.

‘What kind of man would leave his name written in the dirt when he had committed a murder, anyway?’ said Tailby. ‘And these stones . . .’

‘The Nine Virgins,’ said Cooper.

‘What are they all about?’

‘They’re the remains of a Bronze Age burial chamber. But local people call them the Virgins because of the legends . . .’

‘How old?’

‘Three and a half thousand years, give or take.’

‘The last virgins in Derbyshire, then,’ said Hitchens.

Cooper kept his mouth shut. He watched a SOCO scoop up a tiny patch of bloodstained earth where the body had lain, while he listened to the faint laughter drop hollowly into the wind and disappear with a scatter of dead leaves.

In a short while, no doubt, a detective superintendent would arrive from another division to take over as senior investigating officer. He would be grumbling about the continuing vacancy in E Division that meant he had to be dragged away from his own patch, where there would be several other major incidents to be dealt with as well.

But this was the second attack on a woman in a small area, and this victim was dead. Panic would be setting in at higher levels, and those being kicked by the chiefs would soon be kicking the dog.

Though he knew Ringham Moor well, Ben Cooper found the area around the Nine Virgins disturbed him in a way it had never done before. The atmosphere was all wrong. There was nothing dark and claustrophobic about this murder scene, unlike so many others he had come across. Very often a killing occurred within a close relationship, usually within the confines of a family, where emotions ran high and someone was finally driven to extremes. Here, though, the feeling he got was of space and timelessness, a place where everything ran to its natural sequence, just as it had done for thousands of years. Here, the slow dance of the seasons repeated itself endlessly on an almost empty stage as nature rolled from life to death and back to life again.