She was confronted by a collection of ancient outbuildings leaning at various angles, their roofs sagging, doors hanging loosely on their hinges. By some curious law of physics, the doors all seemed to tilt at the opposite angle to the walls, as if they were leaning to compensate for a bend. Some doorways had been blocked up, windows were filled in, steps had been left going nowhere. Mud ran right up to the walls of the outbuildings, and right up to the door of the farmhouse itself. From the evidence, Fry thought it probably continued inside the house, too. The exterior was grimy and flecked with dirt, a bird’s nest trailed from a broken gutter. Piles of rubbish were strewn across the dead grass of what might once have been garden. Was this really a farm?

‘Who else is here, Gavin?’ she asked, in despair.

‘The DI’s on his way,’ said Murfin. ‘But in the meantime, it’s you and me, boss.’

‘DC Cooper?’

‘Ben? He’s on a rest day. We don’t know where he is.’

‘Strange,’ said Fry. ‘This is exactly his sort of place.’

Crouching uncomfortably, Detective Constable Ben Cooper studied the withered object carefully. In all his years with Derbyshire Constabulary, including seven in CID, he’d never seen anything quite like this. There had been plenty of dead bodies – some of them long dead, others nice and fresh. And some of them perhaps not quite dead, after all. But this?

The flesh had shrivelled away from the fingers, leaving them thin but not quite skeletal. The fact that there was still a layer of leathery skin shrunk tight to the fingers somehow made it worse than if he was just looking at bones. The result was that the hand appeared to have been shrinkwrapped in a film of wrinkled, yellow plastic. The thumb was bent strangely out of shape, too, as though it had been broken and never re-set. The severed wrist was ragged, and the tattered skin looked as though it had been sealed with some kind of sticky substance.

He straightened up, easing the painful muscles in his back. He’d been playing squash this morning, and his opponent had smashed the ball into his kidneys when he was out of position recovering a drop-shot. You could never trust police officers not to get you in the back.

‘The hand of glory,’ he said. ‘They’re very rare these days.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Very rare. Not rare like steak, but rare as in very unusual. There aren’t many of them about.’

Cooper had the suspicion that he was babbling, spouting nonsense. He did it just because there was a silence that had to be filled. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. Not even the first time today.

He looked at his companion, unsure of her reaction because of the silence. ‘What do you think of it, then?’

‘It’s gross.’

‘Gross?’

‘Like, totally yucky.’