‘Ben, I’m fully aware that you don’t take a blind bit of notice of any advice I give you. But I’m warning you that if you go off and do your own thing regardless one more time, you mustn’t be surprised if I say “I told you so” in no uncertain terms. And if I record it on your Personal Development Review next April.’

‘OK, OK. I get the message.’

He could feel Fry staring at him until he started to flush, but he wasn’t going to rise to her baiting.

‘Have you noticed,’ he said, ‘how quickly Pity Wood Farm went on the market after Derek Sutton died? Raymond must have phoned the estate agents at the same time he called in the funeral directors.’

‘He wanted to be busy,’ suggested Fry. ‘One of the main reasons we have funerals is to give bereaved people something to do. The way it was explained to me, you have to continue doing things that are in the present tense, otherwise your life would just stop when a loved one dies.’

‘We were told that, too, when Mum went. But it’s funny that Raymond didn’t really do that when Derek died. Well, not for long. He seems to have had the farm up for sale pretty quick, doesn’t he? That was certainly a “past tense” action, if you like. It brought everything to a stop. The whole of the life that he and his brother had been living at Pity Wood for decades – it was just ripped up and thrown in a skip by a Polish builder.’

‘Yes, it does sound very final, when you put it like that. But he might have had reasons.’

Cooper finally remembered what else was near Godfrey’s Rough when they were still more than half a mile away. He could see it, standing gaunt and eerie on the skyline, framed by skeletal trees. Stone ruins like the keep of a medieval castle. Steel winding gear like a rusted scaffold. Deep shafts that drove eight hundred feet into the ice-cold water below the limestone.

‘Magpie Mine,’ he said. ‘Beware of the widows’ curse.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Five

Minerals had been a key element in the wealth of the Peak District for centuries. The remnants of the lead-mining industry were widespread, their impact on the landscape had been so dramatic that it would be many centuries yet before their traces disappeared.

Magpie Mine was the best preserved of the hundreds of lead mines that had once been visible everywhere, rumpling the surface into bumps and hollows, piercing it with hidden shafts, scattering it with centuries of miners’ spoil. Its heyday was in the nineteenth century, but it had finally closed in the 1950s, and it was heritage now, one of the youngest protected sites in the national park.

‘I don’t think it was the picnic site that interested Farnham and Elder,’ said Cooper. ‘I think it was this.’