‘Well, I’ve just seen something really. That woman I saw on Saturday – it’s the one who’s in the papers. The one who was killed.’

Fry was disappointed. ‘Yes, Rose Shepherd. We know that, Tina. It’s the other two people we’re trying to identify.’

‘No, no. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She’s right here in the paper. I mean the woman she was meeting, the younger one.’

‘Who’s in the paper, Tina? I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Listen, I’m telling you. The woman that Miss Shepherd met at the tea rooms, the one you wanted me to give you a description of – I’ve seen a photograph of her in the paper. It’s her, it’s definitely her.’

Tina took a deep breath, as if realizing that she wasn’t going to make herself understood unless she spoke more slowly.

‘I’m looking at her photograph right now, Sergeant. She’s the woman who was killed in the house fire in Edendale. It says here her name is Lindsay Mullen.’

Almost all the houses in the Bonsall area were built in the local style – limestone walls with contrasting sandstone quoins and door and window surrounds. Derbyshire limestone was notoriously hard to work, so in some places the builders had laid rough stone without any attempt to form courses. Cooper could see small stone buildings scattered across the landscape here. Most of these were field barns, used for storing feed and equipment, or sheltering animals. But some of them were probably disused coes, the huts built by lead miners near their mine shafts.

With a clatter of wings, a flock of racing pigeons took off from a loft and circled Cooper’s car. Pigeon lofts seemed to be a feature of Bonsall, too. And that phone box outside the Barley Mow pub – wasn’t that supposed to have been designed by the same architect who built Liverpool Cathedral and Waterloo Bridge?

Through Bonsall, the road became single track, with a few passing places tucked into the stone walls. The farm where Simon Nichols worked lay on the plateau to the west of Masson Hill. Cooper had to pass through Uppertown, then follow a couple of B roads before abandoning tarmac altogether for a route the maps would call ‘unclassified’. There were no helpful signs, and many of the tracks were old miners’ roads that led past the remains of disused lead workings and took you back to where you’d started from. You had to know where you were going in an area like this.