Cooper recalled when he’d first met Diane Fry on her transfer to Derbyshire from West Midlands Police. She’d been scornful of everything in those days, so prickly that he soon developed the habit of letting her comments go by unnoticed. When he’d told her about singing in the choir, she had been predictably derisive. ‘Do you sing soprano?’ she’d asked. ‘No. Tenor.’ And he hadn’t even seen the barb until much later.

Oh, well. Fry had mellowed a bit since then, hadn’t she? Surely she had. Cooper frowned slightly. There was always the possibility that he’d just become very good at letting everything pass him by.

When he lifted his hand off the gear stick, Liz took his fingers for a moment and held them gently.

‘Thanks for coming to the panto with me, Ben.’

On the road out of town that night, taking Liz home to Bakewell, Cooper felt content. Below him, the sprawling outline of Edendale was marked by a network of lights, but most of the Peak District lay in darkness. After all that had happened in his life, things seemed to be coming right at last. He’d found someone he cared about. And, above all, he was in the only place he’d ever wanted to live in the world.

With a surge of blind rage, Diane Fry grabbed her sister’s arm and dragged her back, pulling her off balance and throwing her on to the bed.

‘Hey!’ gasped Angie, shocked by the sudden violence.

‘Angie, what the hell are you up to?’

Diane could hear her voice coming out in a spiteful hiss. It sounded awful, but she couldn’t have changed it. Her throat was too tightly constricted by the flood of emotions overwhelming her. Anger, bitterness, a sense of betrayal. And other emotions she’d never experienced before, too fleeting to be pinned down and named.

‘Me?’ Angie tried to laugh it off, sitting up on the bed and straightening her sleeve as if it were just a family game, a bit of rough and tumble between siblings. ‘Sis, you know I’m always up to something. The original problem kid, that’s me.’

‘I’m not joking here. I want to know what you think you’re doing.’

‘Come on, Di. Lighten up.’

Diane felt herself flushing angrily. She’d told herself she wouldn’t get angry with her sister. But here it was, all that rage, bubbling just below the surface. Anything could release it, a wrong word or an unguarded expression.

‘Don’t try to get round me, Angie,’ she said. ‘Just don’t try it. It might have worked once, but it doesn’t work on me now. Things have changed between us. I’m not your kid sister any more.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, really. You’ve got to start understanding that, or there’s no future between us.’