Cooper stared at her. ‘Two? You mean …?’

A couple of officers entered the pub wearing blue boiler suits and carrying a set of tools – chisels, hammers, wrecking bars. They spread plastic sheets on the floor in front of the central fireplace.

‘It’s a good job the fire is out,’ said Fry. ‘But then, I left instructions beforehand.’

It didn’t take long for the officers to remove enough bricks from the chimney breast to uncover a cavity. One of them reached in a hand and carefully eased out a package.

The skull was black and sooty. Empty eye sockets stared from between the hands of the police officer, a few fragments of teeth grinned crookedly in the jaw. Two or three years of smoke had turned the white bone to an object that was almost unrecognizable.

Fry took the skull in a gloved hand, then she held it up to the twinkling red and green lights of the Dog Inn’s Christmas tree.

‘Meet Orla Doyle.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Eight

That afternoon, Pity Wood Farm looked more desolate than ever, surrounded by abandoned excavations and the partially dismantled buildings, tape fluttering at a safe distance from the contaminated areas.

Cooper made his way round the back of the house, through the overgrown garden. The stone steps that led up to the garden were worn away, depressions in each step full of muddy water.

Worn away. It was an apt phrase. Not just for the steps, but for the farm itself. Pity Wood was worn down, exhausted from centuries of desperately clinging to existence. If it had been an animal, someone would have called a vet to put it out of its misery.

And what of the Sutton brothers? Well, Raymond Sutton hardly seemed to have any purpose left in life, now that his brother had gone. Even if their roles had been to torment and annoy each other, at least that had been a role. But their relationship had been ground down by decades of mutual chafing, the long, weary scouring of continuous friction.

It was possible to read in the newspapers every day about immigration, illegal workers, drugs, murder, bankruptcy, mental illness, the shift of the economy away from traditional industries. It was quite a different thing to see it all summed up in the crumbling walls of Pity Wood Farm. Raymond and Derek Sutton weren’t exactly the stereotypes he had in mind when he read the Daily Mail.