‘Only a few months left now, aren’t there?’ she said.

‘Could be.’

‘Back to core policing for a while, is it?’

‘Unless I get promoted,’ said Murfin bitterly.

‘Let’s hope for the best, then.’

Fry was aware of the look that Murfin gave her. Of course, they might have different ideas as to what the best might be.

Ben Cooper was still smiling as he cleared the outskirts of Sheffield and dropped a gear to start the climb towards Houndkirk Moor. At the top of this road was the Fox House Inn, where he crossed back into Derbyshire and entered the national park. As soon as he passed the boundary marker at the side of the road, Sheffield seemed to fall away behind him quite suddenly. And when he saw the moors opening out ahead of him, burning with purple heather, it always filled his heart with the pleasure of coming home.

Cooper looked again at the file on the passenger seat. In all likelihood, the area he was entering had been home for Jane Raven Lee, too. Somewhere in the valleys and small towns of the White Peak would be the place she’d lived, a house full of her possessions, perhaps a family who still missed her and wondered what had become of her. But a family who loved and missed someone reported them missing, didn’t they?

The previous weekend, Cooper had spent a couple of days walking in the Black Mountains with his friends Oscar and Rakesh. There had been plenty of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs, and a chance to forget the job for a while. But there had been an undercurrent of unease that he hadn’t been able to identify until they were on their way home, driving back up the M5 from South Wales.

It had been Rakki who dropped the first bombshell. He was due to get married next April, and he’d started to talk about moving back to Kenya. His reasons had seemed impractical, even to Cooper – something to do with the smell of lemon chilli powder, tiny green frogs in the grass, and the moonlight on the beach at Mombasa. But Rakki had been five years old when his family emigrated to Britain in the late seventies, and those were the only memories he had. Later, when they stopped off at Tamworth Services, he’d mentioned Gujarat, the Indian province his grandparents came from. Rakki had never even seen it, but his brother Paresh had visited last year. There were endless opportunities for the educated Gujarati, apparently.

And then it had occurred to Cooper that Oscar had been in a serious relationship for almost a year. He could sense his old High Peak College friendships slipping away, a process that had started when they went their separate ways and took up different professions – Oscar to become a solicitor and Rakki to go into IT. Points of contact were becoming difficult to maintain. And one day soon, as they stood on top of a hill somewhere in the country, they would quietly agree. It would be their last weekend together.