Cooper looked at Diane Fry. She was too thin, and the wound on her cheek had turned red and did nothing for her looks. She was arrogant and infuriating, too. But sometimes she seemed to know what was right.

‘Maggie Crew left her cigarette ends there,’ he said. ‘But Mark Roper cleared them away.’

‘Another obsessive.’

‘All the time you spent with Maggie Crew, Diane. Did you not realize she smoked Marlboro?’

‘No.’

They began to walk towards the stone circle. Their feet crunched through the leaves as if they were walking through three inches of fresh snow. Cooper walked slowly, to let Fry keep up. But at the edge of the clearing around the Virgins, he stopped.

‘Diane –’

‘Yes?’

‘The transfer. It’s all fallen through, has it?’

‘Looks like it. But another job will come up.’

‘Sure. Welcome back, anyway.’

‘What?’

‘I always thought you were one of the team, that’s all.’

Fry shook her head in total disbelief. ‘Ben, you are such a prat.’

That’s what Helen Milner had said to him too, though in different words. There was an awful lot of work for him to do if he was to stand a chance of rescuing any of his relationships.

Cooper pulled a lump of fungus from the trunk of a birch. It was one of the white, obscenely shaped ones, but now it was starting to darken and decay, releasing tiny, soft spores into the air.

‘Who was it you were looking for, Diane? In Sheffield?’

Fry jerked as if he had kicked her injured leg. ‘How the hell do you know about that? Is my private life public knowledge now? Why do you have to pry into things that don’t concern you?’

‘It’s my nature, I guess. I’m sorry.’

Fry sighed. ‘If you must know, it was my sister,’ she said.

‘Your sister? The heroin addict? But I thought you hadn’t seen her for years.’

‘Sheffield was where her friends said she’d gone when she disappeared.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Why the hell do you think I came here? Did you think I wanted to live in sheep-shagger country? This was the closest posting I could get to Sheffield.’

Cooper nodded, not wanting to argue just now. ‘And have you found her?’

Fry grimaced. ‘I don’t think Angie is there. I’m looking in the wrong places. Angie would never let herself get to the same state as those people I saw. She is my sister, after all.’