As usual, he’d left the door of the garage open to disperse the petrol fumes. The lawnmower was pretty much finished, and he just wanted to see how the newly sprayed paint was drying. Those detectives had interrupted him, and he wasn’t sure whether he’d made as good a job of it as he’d have liked.

In a way, it was a relief to have rid of that skull from his property. He’d never liked the thing, and anything that couldn’t make him money was a waste of space, in the end. All the stuff about it bringing luck and protecting you was nonsense, of course. Ridiculous superstition that only the likes of Derek Sutton believed in.

While he was bending over the lawnmower, Farnham sensed that the quality of the light had changed, and realized that his security light had come on outside. That wasn’t unusual. Wild animals strayed out of the woods sometimes and got into his garden. Foxes, badgers, even a small deer occasionally. It was surprising what lurked in Pity Wood.

It was only when he heard the crash of his garage door thrown back and the thump of boots on concrete that Farnham began to rise. He had barely straightened up when the first of the dark figures burst into the light, meeting the turn of his shoulder with the impact of a baseball bat.

Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But she spent most of the drive home distracted from the road. She was trying to avoid Christmas songs on the radio, flicking from station to station until she found something unseasonal. She ended up listening to ‘Crosstown Traffic’ from Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland – the only rock song she could think of that featured a kazoo. Nothing Christmassy about that.

For the past few hours, Fry had been trying to keep the conversation with DI Hitchens out of her mind. But that was only possible during the day, when she was working. The Pity Wood Farm enquiry provided enough to occupy her mind and take her full concentration. It wasn’t the case when she left the station in West Street and headed out towards her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. The concentration started to slip, despite her best efforts.

Fry knew that she ought to have gone south, to London. They always needed officers in the Met, and it would have suited her much better in a big city where nobody cared who you were or what you did with your life. By now, she would have been well established, fast-tracking to promotion, instead of dickering about in this rural force.