“Ah,” she said, “sorry. I didn’t take my phone out. I needed to clear my head.” She found herself slightly irritated by Amy’s presence, by the way she was acting hurt that Harper had ignored her, when really it was nothing to do with Amy at all. She’d just needed to ride. Her mind had been spinning with the events of the last day and a half, and the Peak District always cured her of that. Two hours out there on her bike, and she knew she would sleep. It was her medicine. This, she thought, is why these things never work out. No one ever seems to get that I need to be alone sometimes.

Amy said, “Was my witness of any use?”

“Um, kind of.”

“Oh,” said Amy, “you sound like you didn’t find it that helpful.”

“No, it’s not your fault. What he said didn’t really give us much to go on, that’s all.”

“What did he say?”

“That the woman was wearing dark clothing. Which could have been the mother, or the suspect, as they were both in black.”

“I see. Didn’t you show him a line-up?”

Harper nodded. “He couldn’t make a positive ID.”

“Huh. That’s a shame. I hope I haven’t complicated things. I didn’t mean to.”

“Not a bit. I’m really grateful for your help. My own people didn’t manage to find any witnesses at all. But I had to let my only suspect walk today. Not enough evidence.”

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.”

“There’ll be other evidence. We’ll get her eventually.” As she spoke, Harper rolled and stretched a stiff shoulder. She was starting to get itchy in her sweat-soaked Lycra.

Amy took a large white envelope from her bag. “I found something else you might be interested in.”

“What is it?”

“A newspaper article. From 1976. I was doing some research for a comparison piece about the heatwave, and this caught my eye.”

Inside the envelope were several photocopied pages from the Sheffield Mail, dated July 3rd, 1976. Harper could see why a comparison piece would be of interest; every time they talked about the current temperature on the news they would say it was the “hottest summer since 1976”. Harper hadn’t been born then, but from what she could gather, 1976 held the record for the longest, hottest summer in living memory—until this year. The copied pages from the newspaper she held contained mainly different angles on reports about the weather; the unprecedented numbers of heat-exhaustion cases in the hospitals, the devastating effect that the water shortage was having on crops. There was an article that described how four of the rivers in Sheffield had dried up completely, and the level of the reservoir had dropped low enough to reveal parts of the ruined village for the first time since it was filled in the 1890s.