Cooper dropped Fry and Murfin off at Pity Wood Farm and consulted the Ordnance Survey map again for his next call. To the south of Rakedale were the remains of Pity Wood itself, and a mound shown on the map as Soldier’s Knoll. Some of the fields and hillsides had evocative names, too – Godfrey’s Rough, Limbersitch, Biggin Hey, Callow Gore. They included a lot of leas, royds and haggs, all names for clearings in the woods. There must have been many more trees here at one time.

Tom Farnham lived near to the village of Newhaven, on the other side of the wood. There was no direct route, so Cooper turned the Toyota towards the A515.

He passed a farm called Organ Ground, where there was an even larger mountain of silage bags than at Pity Wood, though these were mostly white. Was there some significance to the different colours? Cooper searched his memory of farming practices, as he’d picked them up piecemeal during the last thirty years, but found he hadn’t the faintest idea. If he’d ever known, it was gone now. He’d have to ask Matt some time.

A little red Bowers bus turned the corner ahead of him. On the way towards Newhaven, he remembered that there was no mobile phone signal in this area. The display on his phone read ‘SOS calls only’. What a joke.

The transition between limestone and clay was obvious in the houses that you passed on this road. In the south of the county, the main building material was red brick, with clay tile roofs instead of stone. Many of the farms had converted their old buildings into holiday cottages. No farmworkers lived on the premises any more, and at some times of the year, temporary visitors would far outnumber the resident population.

Near the Newhaven brickworks, a small herd of black-and-white cattle bunched together round their water trough, standing in a sea of mud. Where a tractor had entered the field, the ground was completely liquefied. When one of the cows moved, its hooves splashed with a noise like a fish leaping in a river, and the legs and bellies of the animals were thick with semi-dried mud. The ubiquitous mire made Cooper long for the clean swell of the scree-scattered hills further north.

Here, the air was full of the hot smell of kilns. The clay and sand for the brickworks had all been quarried locally at one time. Even the ganister for making silica bricks had come from a quarry fifteen miles across the county at Wessington. But now all the materials used at Newhaven were imported.

Farnham’s house was sheltered from the road by a belt of trees, and Cooper might have driven past without seeing it, but for a curl of smoke from the chimney and a glint of rain on a steel cattle grid protecting Mr Farnham’s gateway from marauding livestock.