It might be unfair, but ‘I don’t know what you mean’ was another of those phrases that he’d heard so often during interviews. Every police officer had heard it, many times. It was a diversionary phrase, a way of avoiding answering a difficult question that had just been put.

As he watched Sutton being wheeled towards the house, Cooper was distracted by the noises around him. Everyone seemed to be sneezing and coughing at Pity Wood that morning. It sounded like the ward of an isolation hospital.

‘Have you been passing your cold on, Diane?’ he said.

‘It’s this bloody weather. The only wonder is that we haven’t all got pneumonia.’

Cooper didn’t suffer much from winter colds himself. He put it down to his upbringing. Being brought up in a house where there was no heating in the bedrooms or in the bathroom, and the snow sometimes lay on the inside of the window ledges. Bad weather had never kept Matt and himself indoors when they were growing up. Rain, wind, snow, fog – they had been outside in everything, and it made you hardy.

But he had to admit that he was starting to feel a bit wheezy himself. There was an irritation at the back of his throat, and a tendency for his eyes to water in the cold wind.

A police photographer hovered a few yards away, video recording Raymond Sutton’s visit. It wasn’t clear what DI Hitchens hoped to glean from Sutton’s reactions, but they would be recorded for detailed evaluation later.

First they steered his wheelchair gingerly over the duckboards towards the tent covering the area where Jamie Ward had discovered the first body. Sutton looked around with bemused eyes. Cooper could see that he barely recognized the place. And why would he? Even before the police arrived with their vehicles and tents and began to dig up the farmyard, Nikolai Dudzik’s builders had already made a start on transforming Pity Wood into that gentleman’s residence.

‘Yes, we had a shed that stood here,’ he said, after the first question had been repeated to him. ‘But it’s long gone, twenty years or more. We broke up the foundations for hardcore. Is that what you want to know? No, I know nowt of any woman.’

Fry nodded, and one of the care assistants released the brake and pushed Sutton towards the back of the house. He physically flinched at the sight of the yellow skip and the trenches dug across his former property. He began to tremble and become agitated.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all wrong. There’s no point in asking me these questions. You should be asking Farnham.’

‘If only we could, sir,’ said Fry.

‘Those people who worked here, they were brought by Farnham and the other bloke, the Irishman.’

‘Mr Rourke?’