He turned on to the A515 towards Newhaven. Not far away from here was Arbor Low – a sort of flattened version of Stonehenge, a circle of megaliths laid out like a clock face. When he’d walked up there on a school trip once, Cooper had thought the stones looked as though they’d been blown down by the wind. But their teacher said it was more likely they’d been deliberately knocked over by Christian zealots who disapproved of the stones’ religious significance.

Religious significance? Arbor Low was built more than four thousand years ago, wasn’t it? Now, that was the real Old Religion.

‘Do you think Raymond Sutton knew about the bodies buried on his farm?’ asked Fry. ‘You’ve talked to him, Ben, what do you think?’

‘I think he might have had a suspicion,’ said Cooper. ‘But no more than that – just a suspicion that something bad had happened.’

‘Involving his brother?’

‘I don’t know. He talks about Hell a lot. Somebody is going to be damned.’

‘So here’s a scenario,’ said Fry. ‘One or both of the Sutton brothers killed these women, either during some barking mad pagan rituals in Derek’s case, or out of religious mania in Raymond’s case, because they were damned and needed to be punished and sent to Hell.’

‘Well …’

‘Whatever. I’m vague on the details yet. But word got out in the area – as it was bound to do round here. Rumour, rumour. Gossip, gossip.’

‘And then people just kept quiet?’

‘Well, in my scenario, Dixon of Dock Green turns up at the farm to see what’s what.’

‘PC Palfreyman?’

‘Yes, PC Bloody Palfreyman. “Evening, all,” he says. “What’s this I hear about you two lads committing a couple of nasty murders? We can’t be having that, you know. I might have to give you a clip round the ear for being naughty boys.”’

‘It could only have been one murder,’ said Cooper reasonably. ‘The second victim died three years after Mr Palfreyman retired.’

‘True. But the principle is the same.’

‘You really think he might have known all about what went on at Pity Wood Farm, and covered up for the Suttons?’

‘Why not? “I called and had a few words. It never happened again.”’

Cooper shook his head. ‘I can’t see it. Granted, Palfreyman has his own ideas about justice, like so many of the old coppers did. But he wouldn’t cover up a murder, let alone two. That couldn’t be considered justice, not in anyone’s book. Could it?’

‘Well, actually, it might depend,’ said Fry, ‘on who those women were.’

‘Might it?’

Cooper considered that idea, and gradually realized what she was hinting at. There was one category of women who were considered not only dispensable, but sometimes undesirable.

‘Do you mean street girls?’ he said.