On this side, Cooper could see that all the windows had been filled in with stone and sealed. He gave one stone an experimental shove, and it didn’t budge. Maybe there was a double thickness of stone, with mortar on the inside. Or perhaps someone had used breeze block to make a proper job of it.

He moved back a few yards and looked up at the roof. Surely that couldn’t have survived in one piece? The weather would have got in and collapsed some of the timbers. But the stone tiles he could see were sound. Sound, like Tom Jarvis had been sound.

But not quite. Where the building was divided by a wall, making a sort of lean-to extension at the back, the middle section of the roof was missing, exposing the interior to the air.

Cooper approached the wall again, found a foothold on the stones and pulled himself up with the help of a branch. He teetered precariously before managing to get high enough to pull himself on to the edge of the roof with one foot where the guttering should have been. He leaned forward but couldn’t see down into the building. He shifted his weight a bit further on to the tiles to peer in.

He’d been right about the weather getting in. A rotten timber cracked as soon as it took his weight, and part of the remaining roof tilted inwards. Tiles slithered and cascaded on to the ground, taking Cooper with them. He managed to cling to the branch just long enough to gain some control of his fall, then he landed in a crash of broken stone.

He sat up, patted his pockets to find his torch and shone it around the interior of the building as he brushed the dust off his clothes. Cooper ran the beam along one wall, then the next. He stopped near the opening into the larger room and moved the torch back a few inches, not quite sure of what he’d seen the first time.

‘Oh God, how do I get out of here again?’

Inside the abandoned building, the roots of an oak tree had burst through the broken floor like a tangle of snakes. Brambles lay thick on the stones. And blades of grass grew sick and pale through the eyes of the skull.

‘McGowan is saying nothing, except he’s blaming Richard Slack,’ said Fry when she broke off the interview to brief the DI. ‘Crucially, he won’t reveal where Audrey Steele’s body was delivered to. His evidence will be critical in that respect.’

Hitchens had rolled back his shirt cuffs to wipe the condensation off his window. The outside was just as wet, as the rain had been falling again for the past three hours.

‘On the basis of the toxicology report, it looks as though the body had been partially embalmed,’ he said.

‘That might have been done to keep the body fresh. On the other hand, I understand it’s becoming more and more common for funeral directors to carry out some cosmetic embalming as routine.’