There were so many things about Cooper that bothered her. She was aggravated by his tendency to look hot and flustered, as if he’d only just got out of bed. These days, he’d probably been in bed with that SOCO, Liz Petty. Or maybe it was just the stress of running from one obsession to another. At least he didn’t look quite so dishevelled as he used to, so maybe he’d learned to wash and iron for himself since he moved out of the family farm into his little flat at Welbeck Street.

When she first met him, Fry had mostly been struck by that disarray and by his air of innocence, which was lacking in those around him. He looked as though he’d hardly left the sixth form at High Peak College. Now, she wasn’t so sure whether what she saw was innocence any more. For a start, his hair wasn’t quite so untidy. It no longer fell over his forehead, but had been styled. His tie still needed straightening, though, and that scuff mark had been on his leather jacket for months.

She looked up as Cooper’s car passed, catching his profile as he drove by. In retrospect, it was amazing that he’d ever seemed innocent at all.

Fry recalled the day he’d told her about his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, and his death on the streets of Edendale at the hands of a gang of thugs. ‘Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too.’ And then there had been his mother, the psychiatric illness and the complications that had taken her life only a few months ago, with Ben at her bedside in the nursing home.

Fry wanted to be fair to him, she really did. In the circumstances, she supposed it was surprising that Cooper still retained a positive outlook on life at all, let alone the concern he so often showed for the problems of other people. He ought to be cynical. He ought to have grown as cynical as she was herself. She wondered how he managed to avoid it.

Before she left Pity Wood, Fry took another look inside the inner cordon to see how work on the remains was progressing. Under the floodlights, the shadows of the diggers against the sides of the PVC tent. The body was emerging bit by bit, but it was a painstaking job.

Something dark and fibrous in the soil caught Fry’s attention. She couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was a hank of black hair that had become detached from the head.