Cooper stopped to peer through a dusty window into the farmhouse. He’d come to think of the rooms at Pity Wood in terms of colours, almost like the apartments of a stately home – the Blue Room, the Yellow Room, the Brown Striped Room. Whatever their colours, it had seemed that some of those rooms contained more light than others. And it had nothing to do with the number of cracks in the boarded-up windows, or the depth of the shadows thrown by that giant shed on the walls of the house. The play of light had been an internal one, a flickering kaleidoscope of ignorance and radiance. No amount of cement and breeze block would counteract that spiritual darkness.

And he remembered another thing – it had been impossible to tell from the bedrooms at Pity Wood which had been Raymond’s room, and which had belonged to Derek. There had been too much clutter to see the truth.

The words of the baptism service still echoed in his head. God calls us out of darkness into his marvellous light. To follow Christ means dying to sin. Had there been an equal contrast of darkness and light in the church that day – a clash of beliefs, an uneasy pact between rationality and blind faith? Cooper couldn’t be sure. He would never be sure. He lacked the ability to make that leap of faith.

Now the characters walking into the darkness were acting out parts in a private DVD that was showing in his head. He couldn’t prevent them moving out of the safety of the light, no matter how hard he tried. If only he knew how to find the rewind button.

It reminded him of a line from a book, something about the nature of time. If time was all one, past and present indistinguishable, then perhaps even Derek Sutton was still here somewhere. Still here, burning in an everlasting fire.

Diane Fry watched Cooper circling the farmhouse, like a dog hunting for a scent. She was trying to suppress the feeling of dissatisfaction that still niggled at the back of her mind.

Word had come in that human remains had been discovered at Magpie Mine, scooped into a depression among the spoil heaps, close to where Cooper had stumbled that night. An identity had yet to be confirmed, but who doubted that it was Alan Sutton? The clinching detail was the fact that the remains were missing a skull. Of course they were. That had been in a cupboard in Tom Farnham’s workshop, waiting to find a buyer on eBay.

So the case was solved, in a way. But it was hardly a triumph of investigative skills, not one to highlight on her PDR when the time came in a few weeks. Who knew how long the bodies at Pity Wood would have lain undiscovered, if it weren’t for the fact that Raymond Sutton had given up the farm and sold it for re-development?