From conversations he overheard, Cooper gathered that at least one of the nine-millimetre pistols had been fired. He didn’t recall hearing the shot, but maybe it had been drowned out by the simultaneous discharge of Palfreyman’s shotgun. Cooper knew that someone was bound to ask him later which had come first. He was going to make a bad witness.

Within an hour or so, news came in that David Palfreyman had been picked up, and he was claiming self-defence. He wouldn’t say where he’d obtained the shotgun – but then, he didn’t know that Fry and Cooper had been following Jack Elder.

‘They’ve got Elder in custody, too,’ said Fry. ‘I said he should never have been released in the first place.’

‘He wouldn’t have led us here then, would he?’ said Cooper.

‘Is that a bad thing?’

The second gunman with Alex Brindley was unfamiliar to Cooper. But he felt sure that he’d turn out to be on record, a bit of hired muscle available for the dirty work. There was plenty to be had, if you knew where to ask and you’d got the money. And Alex Brindley had the money, all right. It just didn’t come from the kind of source you might have expected from his nice house and nice family. Dealing in Class A drugs was a lucrative business.

‘No doubt they’ll match the nine millimetres with the Farnham shooting,’ said Cooper.

‘I’d give odds on it. Brindley took Tom Farnham out before he gave away too much information, and he came here to meet Palfreyman, intending to do the same with him.’

Cooper nodded. But David Palfreyman had called in his favours and dealt out his own form of justice for the last time. The manufacture of Class A drugs on his patch had been an insult. The fact that he hadn’t known about it, unforgivable.

They’d been told to sit in a car and wait until they were interviewed. But Cooper got bored and slipped out to watch the activity around Magpie Mine. The floodlights that were going up had turned the scene into a strange underwater world, figures moving around in a yellow murk as if they were swimming. Voices boomed and echoed between the stone walls.

As he stood in the fog, Cooper heard another sound drifting on the night air. It came from way over in the direction of Monyash, or one of the villages to the north. The air was so still that the sound might have been travelling for miles before it reached him. It could have been a message crossing the light years from another planet, for all the sense he made of it.