‘Factory closures, then. Any major employers gone under?’

‘Not since the pits closed in the east of the county. Lots of communities almost died out there. But not here.’

‘Toxic waste dumps?’

‘OK, wait … yes, there’s one near Matlock.’

Hitchens shook his head. ‘Too far. It’s way outside of the six-mile zone.’

‘What about a place for the dead, then?’ said Fry. ‘A cemetery. What better place to hide a dead body than among hundreds of others?’

‘He’d still have to bury it, or conceal it in some way,’ said Cooper. ‘People visit cemeteries all the time. I’m sure they wouldn’t be used to seeing a fresh body left lying around.’

‘There must be some abandoned cemeteries,’ said Fry.

‘Well, plenty of closed churchyards. Most of the older ones are full now and don’t have room to expand. In a lot of villages they have to send you to the municipal cemetery, or to the crematorium.’

‘Mostly the crem these days, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever been to a burial in my life. Everyone I’ve known who died has been cremated.’

‘But the churchyards are still there.’

‘OK. Anywhere else you can think of, Ben?’

‘It depends what you mean by a cemetery. There are plenty of burial places, some of them thousands of years old – Neolithic sites, remains of chambered cairns. A lot of them are in fairly remote locations, but hikers like to visit the more historic sites. You couldn’t leave a body in full view for long without it being discovered.’

‘Like the Nine Virgins,’ said Fry.

‘Exactly.’

Cooper remembered the Nine Virgins well. The body of a murdered mountain biker left inside the stone circle had been found within minutes of her death. No such luck in this case, though.

‘Some sites aren’t so well known, of course,’ he said. ‘There’s the Infidels’ Cemetery, for example.’

‘The what?’

‘The Infidels’ Cemetery. Oh, it’s really a tiny, neglected nineteenth-century graveyard on the road between Ashford in the Water and Monsal Head. Last time I saw the place, it was waist high with nettles and weeds. And it’s in the middle of nowhere – you’d drive right by without knowing it was there.’

‘And why is it there?’

‘I think it was actually the graveyard for a community of Baptists. They weren’t regarded very highly by their neighbours, I suppose.’

‘Why “infidels”?’

‘Well, the story is that the inscriptions were recorded by a local historian, who noticed that none of the epitaphs contained references to the Bible, God or Jesus. That was so unusual at the time that it was considered very suspicious.’

‘Between Ashford in the Water and Monsal Head?’ Fry remembered the DI mentioning Monsal Head. ‘It’s not far from Wardlow, then.’

‘Very close.’

‘Let’s go take a look. I’d like to get the lie of the land around Wardlow anyway.’

She looked at Hitchens, who nodded. ‘I can handle everything here. It’s going to be a question of waiting at the moment.’