Joe got his phone and searched the Yorkshire Post website. There were two articles on Jason Beverage. He’d already seen the victim’s record, but the public account was more dramatic, more colourful. Date rape in both headlines. The first time he’d been found not guilty, the second time only with robbery. On both occasions his victim was a divorcee in her thirties.

He watched the sun for a couple of minutes. Breakfast with Rita? Perhaps not.

25

A fine mist hung on the air, like cigar smoke in an empty room, as if it was in no hurry to disperse. Yet Joe could see right across the valley, and onto the next, then the next. Each ridge was a deep emerald-green, criss-crossed with old walls, the odd farm building here and there. In the valleys there were modest mill towns, little more than dark smudges, hidden between the great pleats of land that rose steadily towards the Pennines. God’s Own County? That might be pushing it a bit, but on a crisp, bright morning, Yorkshire could be pretty inspiring.

He leant on a stone wall that ran along the side of the road in a line just cockeyed enough to seem wilful. Both his hands were wrapped around a large paper cup of coffee that he’d got at a Starbucks in Cleckheaton, next to the junction for the M62. The wind was cold enough to make the coffee a welcome companion, although it tasted of nothing much.

He was only a handful of miles from the motorway, yet it felt like another world. He’d grown up in Leeds, close to the city centre, and he’d never got used to West Yorkshire’s quick-fire transitions from the urban to the absolutely rural. The nearest his parents had come to showing their sons the glories of the Broadacres was when they’d occasionally driven up through the Dales on their way to a gig in Darlington or Middlesbrough. Whenever they saw a field full of sheep they’d all cry, ‘Mint sauce!’

His phone buzzed.

‘Joe? It’s Gwyn. Where are you?’

‘Just going to interview someone. Did you get my message?’

‘Yeah. Pencil man strikes again. Rita got me up to speed. I just had brekkie with her, as it happens.’

A pause.

‘Right, right,’ Joe said. ‘So, we’re waiting for a decision on joint operations. See you in Leeds in an hour or two?’

He ended the call, wondered what he’d missed at the breakfast meeting. He looked directly to his right. Gabriel Farm was just up ahead, standing a little way back from the road. No longer a farm, only the main house now remained, an eighteenth-century building, attractive in its way, with narrow windows along the upper floor where hand-loom weavers would have worked, taking advantage of every last bit of daylight.