‘Maurice Goodwin, yes.’

‘The thing is,’ said Cooper, ‘I reckon it was probably lampers who shot Tom Jarvis’s dog. They could have mistaken it for a fox, or a small deer. But Jarvis doesn’t seem to want to believe that. He’s assuming someone did it deliberately. In fact, I suspect he might even have a name or two in mind, but he’s not saying who they are.’

‘You’ll have to find a way of getting him to open up, Ben.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘By the way,’ said Fry, ‘David Mead called. You remember the rambling fireman?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, Mr Mead has done a good job for us. He’s tracked down the people who left items in the Petrus Two cache – all except one. There’s just a single item on the list that no one is owning up to.’

Cooper studied her face, detecting the frustration she was trying to restrain.

‘Just one?’ he said. ‘Let me guess – the glow-in-the-dark skeleton key-ring? The classic symbol of death, a clever reminder from our caller.’

‘Actually,’ said Fry, ‘the key-ring was left by a twelve-year-old girl from Hathersage who goes out walking with her grandmother every Sunday. She bought the thing as a souvenir in Whitby.’

‘The Dracula Experience?’

‘Probably.’ Fry sighed. ‘As a matter of fact, the one unidentified item from the Petrus Two cache is the bloody Beatrix Potter book.’

Cooper sat watching his windscreen wipers as he waited for the funeral cortege to pass. Then he turned the Toyota round. He eased out into the road, cutting in front of a delivery van and raising his hand in a conciliatory gesture when the driver glared at him. He soon caught up with the last mourners’ car and stayed close behind it as the cortege wound its way through the wet streets. The limousines were so distinctive that he’d spotted them coming towards him before he got within three hundred yards of Hudson and Slack. There wasn’t much chance around here of staying unnoticed in a Daimler with personalized number plates, even without the oak veneer coffin in the back.

When Cooper arrived at the crematorium, Melvyn Hudson was already standing in the porte-cochere talking to Christopher Lloyd. Hudson seemed to recognize the Toyota. He lost interest in what Lloyd was saying to him as he watched Cooper park behind the mourners’ cars.

But Cooper didn’t approach Hudson directly. Let him worry for a few minutes. It was a good tactic, and he intended to exploit it. So he walked through the car park, past the floral tributes and the metal stakes with the day’s name cards on them. Many of the people cremated here were commemorated by rose bushes in the garden of remembrance. There were long, circular beds of them, separated by neatly mown grass. Cooper recalled Madeleine Chadwick’s enthusiasm for roses. The triumph of good over evil. The scented bloom and the eternal thorns.

The garden wasn’t as peaceful as he’d expected. Traffic on the ring road created a constant background to the sound of birdsong. The traces of mercury emitted from the crematorium chimney would be battling against exhaust fumes in the pollution stakes.