Feeling weary, Cooper got up to fetch himself a coffee. It had been a long day already, and he wasn’t finished yet. When Fry returned, she’d want hard facts, not some gloomy reflection on the state of the countryside.

He gazed out of the window while he drank his coffee and rubbed his weary eyes. The past fifteen years had dispelled that myth of the countryside idyll. People in rural areas lived shorter lives, had fewer medical facilities, and were more likely to get depressed and kill themselves. One in four people in the countryside lived below the poverty line, just as in urban areas. Their children were injured on the roads more often, it took a lot longer to get to a hospital if you suffered a heart attack, and if you used a mobile phone you were more likely to suffer from brain tumours than someone in a city. There wasn’t quite such a rush into the country any more.

Cooper went back to the records. The only big surprise was that Pity Wood had survived into the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. It had already been an anachronism by then, dead on its feet, sinking into debt.

He knew, from the articles in Farmers Weekly that Matt showed him, what the situation was. Farm incomes in the national park had fallen by seventy-five per cent over ten years. The potential return from livestock farming had ceased to match the investment of time and capital. Without subsidies, only a few dairy farms in the Peak District would be making any money now – a ludicrous average of four or five thousand pounds a year, as long as there was no allowance made for paying the farmer and his family. For beef and sheep farms, it was even worse. Their bottom line would be a minus figure.

So what had the Suttons done to try to escape this looming disaster? All the wrong things, it seemed to Cooper. A poultry enterprise had been the major decision in recent years. He remembered the old poultry sheds, empty of birds but still smelling powerfully of ammonia. No battery cages, but deep bedding, so there had been some attempt at humane treatment of the chickens, at least.

Cooper searched the records in vain for purchases of any major equipment, such as a straw spreader. It looked as though the Suttons hadn’t been able to find six thousand pounds or so to spend on such a luxury item, so presumably the straw in the poultry houses had been spread by hand.