‘And what happened?’

Lucy Somerville sighed, and her head drooped. Fry saw now what had brought her into the station. She was feeling guilty. ‘I didn’t go, in the end. I had to do some shopping this afternoon, and when I got home there was a message from Dad on my answering machine. He said I was not to bother coming to see him, because he’d be out.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes. That’s what worried me most of all. It was such an odd thing to say.’

‘What, Mrs Somerville?’

‘He said he was going to find “the dead place”.’

Cooper had to drive back through Litton to reach the road in Tideswell Dale. A sculpture trail had been created in the woods here. Thinking about it, he realized it must be barely more than a mile across the hill from Ravensdale, with only a farm and the grounds of Alder Hall lying between the dales.

On an impulse, Cooper pulled into the parking area. There were a couple of visitors’ cars under the trees, but no one in sight. The rain was keeping people at home. He collected his waterproof from the back seat and locked the Toyota.

At intervals along the trail were big, deeply-carved figures made from some reddish-brown wood – a sinister-looking owl, a reclining sheep. At the top of the slope, where an abandoned quarry had been converted into a picnic area, he came across a larger-than-life carving of a sleeping lead miner in his boots, muffler and flat cap. The miner’s eyes were closed, his right arm rested on his hammer, and his hand clutched a beer mug.

The carving overlooked the road. But when he moved a little higher up the slope, Cooper could see across the fields to the east – a vista of enclosed pasture land with sheep scattered across the landscape like snow. Some of the stone walls looked much too close together. Like the land at Wardlow, these fields retained their medieval shapes, the long narrow strips that were so impractical for modern farming methods. Beyond the Litton road, Alder Hall itself wasn’t visible. But its boundaries were clearly marked by the woods, those plantations created by generations of Saxtons.

Cooper remembered one chore he hadn’t done yet, and he looked up Madeleine Chadwick’s number on his mobile.

‘Detective Constable Cooper, Mrs Chadwick. I visited you on Saturday to talk about –’

‘Yes, I remember you.’

‘Oh, you do? Thank you. Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s just one thing I wanted to ask you, about the bones in the crypt …’

‘Yes?’

‘I realize it was before your time, but I wonder if you know where exactly on the estate the bones were found?’

‘Oh, it was some distance from the hall, beyond the parkland. I believe one of the tenant farms had become vacant, and it was decided to plant trees on the land. One of my ancestors wanted to take advantage of the demand for timber, I suppose.’