The car that splashed through the puddles and pulled up in front of the hire centre was a black Peugeot. When it stopped, the headlights were turned down to sidelights, but its doors remained closed and no one got out. It sat there with traces of steam rising from its bonnet and mingling with the mist. And with each tick of its cooling engine, Cooper felt his heart chill a little more.

9

It was only an hour or so after the morning news that the first visitors started to arrive on Ringham Moor. They parked up on all the roadside verges, filling the lay-bys and blocking the field gates. Within a few minutes, the first of them began to wander up the tracks that led on to the moor. They came in ones and twos mostly, but some had brought their children for a day out.

‘Look at them,’ said the uniformed sergeant in charge of containing the crime scene. ‘Can’t you hear the conversations over the cornflakes? “Nothing much on the telly today – why don’t we all go and see where the lady got herself murdered?”’

These people had come wrapped up well, in their sweaters and anoraks and boots and hats. They brought their cameras, too, and their binoculars. They took photos of any policemen they saw, and of the crime scene tape rattling in the wind; they were excited by the sight of the small tent that the SOCOs had erected in the middle of the Nine Virgins, over the spot where Jenny Weston had lain.

Officers had been posted to block the main paths. But they were too easily visible across the moor, and soon they found that people were simply cutting across the vast expanses of heather to avoid them. They shouted themselves hoarse and got the bottoms of their trouser legs soaking wet trying to intercept the stragglers. The sergeant called in for reinforcements, but found there were no more officers available. As always, the division was short of resources.

‘“Just do the best you can,”’ he reported. ‘That’s what they always say. “Just do the best you can.”’

One young PC found himself being followed around by two old ladies who bombarded him with questions. They pulled at his sleeve and patted his arm and demanded to know whether there was a lot of blood, and how big the murderer’s knife had been, and whether the body was still inside the tent. The constable appealed to his sergeant to help him. But the sergeant was busy threatening to arrest a small, fat man in a fluorescent green bubble jacket who refused to move as he stared at the tent with feverish eyes and asked one question over and over again: ‘She was naked, wasn’t she? It said on the news she was naked.’