Cooper walked round the van carefully. As well as the back doors, there was a side loading door on the nearside. But the windows at the back had been painted over, in the way that market traders did to screen their goods from prying eyes. Cooper reached the driver’s door and peered into the cab. The seats were worn and split, and a large cobweb glistened across the corner between the sidelight and the dashboard. An old curtain hung behind the seats, concealing the interior.

‘They’re going to call back in a minute,’ said Fry. ‘Is it unlocked?’

‘I haven’t tried yet.’

Cooper took a tissue from his pocket and tried the handle of the driver’s door. The metal was tarnished and beginning to rust through the chrome. The button depressed, but there was no click of the catch, and the door didn’t move. He edged round the bonnet. The manufacturer’s VW badge had gone from the grille. No surprise there – at one time, the badges had been prized by local kids as trophies, as the initials were said to stand for their favourite catch phrase ‘Very Wicked’.

The passenger door was also locked. So was the side door. And so were the rear doors.

‘If this van was abandoned here by a car thief, it was a very security-conscious thief,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’s not stolen at all, then. Maybe it was somebody who couldn’t be bothered taking it to the scrapyard.’

Fry’s radio crackled. While she listened, Cooper crouched to look underneath the van, noting a missing section of exhaust pipe and a dark patch on the ground that might have been oil. A cover was missing from one of the rear lights, and there were holes in the wheel arches caused by serious corrosion.

‘It’s registered to a Mr Calvin Lawrence of Stockport,’ said Fry. ‘But there’s no report of it being stolen.’

‘Well, it hasn’t been on the road legally since October 1999,’ said Cooper, peering at the licence disc just visible behind the windscreen. ‘Not that it means anything necessarily.’ Discs were colour coded so that the month of expiry could be detected from a distance. But this one was so faded its original colour could have been any selection from the rainbow.

‘So the owner has abandoned it, then. This Calvin Lawrence presumably. Just another MoT failure, that’s all. We’ll get someone to remove it and report the owner for illegal tipping.’

‘It’s odd, though. Why come all the way from Stockport to leave it here? There must be any number of out-of-the-way places on the way between here and Stockport that you could abandon an old van, if you wanted to.’

‘Not to mention scrapyards,’ said Fry.

‘Funny that people never seem to think of that, isn’t it? As if the countryside is here just for them to use as a huge dump-it site.’