‘You see all sorts of things in the job.’

‘I suppose you do. And of course, you don’t always talk about it, do you, Ben? Especially these days. Whenever you come to the farm now, you seem to have changed a little bit more.’

Ben watched Amy coming across the field, walking with exaggerated care, instead of running in an uninhibited way, as she once would have done.

‘Perhaps some of us are maturing faster than others,’ he said.

Ben couldn’t deny that he was losing his sense of connection to Bridge End Farm. The ties were no longer quite so binding since he’d moved out and rented his own flat in Edendale. Memories of his childhood at the farm were objects in the far distance, unless he stopped to think about them. And then the details could spring at him with unexpected ferocity, like wild animals that hated to be stared at.

‘Nothing much happening, then?’ asked Matt. ‘No urgent crime on the streets of Edendale to take you away from us? If you’re at a loose end, you could help me batten down for the weather. It’s not looking too good.’

Ben turned and looked at the hills in the east, where the bad weather came from. A bank of cloud was building up, dark and ominous. Those easterly winds had been a feature of his early years. At Bridge End, when the wind blew from the east it made all the shutters bang and the doors of the loose boxes rattle against their latches. The trees on the eastern ridge would be bent over at unnatural angles, their bare branches flailing helplessly against the power of the gale. At night, animals would stir uneasily in the barns as the young Ben lay listening to the banging and the moaning of the wind, jumping at the crash of a bucket hurled across the yard or a tile dislodged from the roof.

Just when Cooper was thinking that nothing would ever make him jump with alarm like that any more, the phone in his pocket began to ring.

Jamie Ward was shivering miserably in the front seat of the crew bus that had brought the builders to Pity Wood Farm. It was a converted Transit, smelling powerfully of cigarettes and muddy clothes. The seats were worn thin, the floor scuffed by dozens of work boots. Fry moved a hard hat aside, slid in next to him, and wound the window down to prevent the interior steaming up. Rain covered the windscreen, blocking out the view of the farm.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’ll be OK.’

He didn’t sound very sure, but Fry let it pass. The sooner she finished with him, the better it would be. If he went into shock, he’d be useless.