At present, there were no cattle in the fields at Ringham Edge Farm. The implement sheds had been emptied, the barns cleared, the milking parlour dismantled. Three days ago, the last traces of the work of generations had been laid out in the paddock behind the house and sold off at knock-down prices to the highest bidder. Farmers had come to pick over the pieces – not to buy anything, necessarily, but to see what fragments of a life were left when a man went the way that Warren Leach had gone, and to wonder whose turn it might be next. The two boys, Will and Dougie, had gone back to their mother, and Social Services had found them a new home in the suburbs of Derby. They might never live in the countryside again.

Ben Cooper sensed Fry’s change of mood with some apprehension. He crouched to examine the flowers, which were covered in cellophane and had been tied to one of the stones with string. The writing on the card was faint, but he could see it was from Jenny Weston’s parents. Fry stood outside the circle and watched him.

‘So, Ben,’ she said, ‘if someone came along here after Maggie Crew and before Simon Bevington, who was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘We always thought it must have been someone Jenny trusted, didn’t we?’

‘Another woman seemed a possibility.’

‘Or a Ranger.’

‘Yes, Diane. But it wasn’t a Ranger.’

‘Are we quite sure? Jenny let somebody get too close to her. She would recognize the Ranger’s jacket and feel secure. She would trust a Ranger.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘No.’

Fry seemed to have something squeezed up inside her that was causing her discomfort and had to be released.

‘You know when I was here,’ she said, ‘that night in the quarry with Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington? We’ll never be able to prove who all of those people were.’

‘Not a hope.’

‘But one of them was familiar. The one who attacked me. For a moment, I thought I knew who that was. But unlike you, Ben, I don’t believe in relying on feelings, only on hard evidence. It makes life a lot simpler, sometimes.’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ said Cooper.

Fry hesitated. Then, uncharacteristically, she seemed to wander off at a tangent again ‘The person who approached Jenny Weston might have been a Ranger, because she would trust him . . .’

‘But it wasn’t a Ranger,’ repeated Cooper.

‘. . . and she would trust a police officer too,’ said Fry.

Cooper stared at her. ‘If the police officer was in uniform, of course,’ he said. But as he said it, he knew it sounded more like a question than a statement.