Worst of all, the originating farm entered on official documents did not exist. No one would ever know where that outbreak of trichinosis had come from.

Fry looked up at Cooper when he’d finished reading. He looked just about as sick as she felt.

‘Will you take the abattoir, Ben?’ she said.

‘Oh, how did I guess? What about you?’

‘I’ll go where the meat is.’

THE THREE MEN were on their weekly hike. They were three retired police officers, puffing a little as they reached the top of the track on the remaining unspoiled stretch of Longstone Moor.

Inquisitively, one of them diverted away from the path towards the deep gash of Watersaw Rake, the abandoned opencast quarry workings. There was a fence around the hole, but it was low enough to step over.

‘Careful, Jack,’ called one of his friends. ‘We’re not carrying you home if you break your leg.’

‘You’d think they’d do something with this,’ he said. ‘Fill it in, or whatever.’

‘They’ve certainly wrecked the hillside with their quarrying.’

‘It employs local people, though. That’s the important thing.’

His friends came to join him at the fence, pushing their way through the heather to find a rabbit track wide enough for their boots.

‘Come on, Jack. What are you doing?’

‘He still thinks he’s on the job. Always wants to know what’s going on.’

But the first man wasn’t listening to them. He was over the fence and looking down into the rake. The sides were steep and lined with shattered rock. The bottom was fifty feet below, littered with debris from the quarrying.

‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘Right on the bottom of the rake.’

‘Just rocks. Or a dead sheep.’

‘No. That’s not what it is.’

Chapter Twenty

THE SNAKE PASS had been closed between Glossop and Ladybower for several weeks after another landslip. The floods in January had also burst an old mining adit, the build-up of water cracking a hole the size of a railway tunnel in the side of Drake Hill.

It was proof, if anyone still needed it, that too much rain could change the landscape dramatically. If you watched the hills after a heavy downpour, you could see the smallest streams gushing into brown cascades as they tumbled into the valleys, washing down peat from the moors and loose stones from the hillsides.

But Cooper was driving eastwards from Ladybower, heading in towards Sheffield on the A57, now clear of the previous night’s fog. From Sheffield, he had to find his way north, skirting Howden Moors, to enter the tangle of former mill towns on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines.

DC Luke Irvine had declared himself free enough of the backlog of file preparation work to accompany Cooper on the trip to Yorkshire. Fry had looked a bit sceptical at first, but had given him the nod. Cooper was glad to have Luke with him. It made such a difference being in the car with the younger DC instead of travelling with Diane Fry and having to watch every word he said.