‘Oh, God,’ said Fry, recalling her interview with Superintendent Branagh. ‘You’re right.’

‘And did you notice her fingernails?’

That was something Fry had noticed. Black, every one of them. That was due to too much mucking out, or too much time spent running her fingers lovingly through the coats of horses.

‘Gavin, did we ever get results from forensics on the prints from that gate on Longstone Moor?’

‘No, we didn’t. I’ll give the lab a nudge.’

‘Yes, with a cattle prod.’

Chapter Twenty-six

MEANWHILE, COOPER HAD found himself working backwards and forwards between calls to the horse owners on his list, and the conversation going on around him in the office. They were two worlds, existing alongside each other in the same place. The voices of strangers in his ear, speaking of their anger and loss. And the background sound of his colleagues in the CID team, familiar and somehow prosaic, just doing their day-to-day job.

‘. . . I thought those wretched horse passports we all had to buy at great expense were supposed to stop this sort of thing. Mind you, have you seen some of those passports? Mine looks like an A4 school project. It would only take a photocopier and a cheap binding machine, and a small child could forge one.’

‘Did you know the penalty for not having a horse passport is a maximum five thousand pounds fine, or imprisonment for up to three months, or both?’ said Becky Hurst.

‘Prison? For not having the right bit of paperwork for your horse?’

‘You offend the bureaucrats at your peril.’

‘God, I’m beginning to think Matt and Claire were right about easy targets,’ said Cooper, dialling his next call.

‘What, Ben?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘. . . I guarantee, if the gypsies have your horse and you don’t have a passport for it, the police will not take it off the gypsies. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. So off to Appleby they go. I tell people to get the feet post-coded if they breed their own.’

‘What’s a flesh mark?’ asked Luke Irvine, in between calls of his own.

‘A patch of pink skin on the horse’s face. It’s hairless in summer, so it shows up as a distinctive mark.’

‘Thanks.’

‘. . . I suppose she’s gone for pet food, or glue.’

‘And what the heck’s a Prophet’s Thumb?’

‘A small indentation on the neck. Like a thumb mark in putty.’

‘Really?’

‘If you ask me, that wasn’t really the purpose of horse passports. They were actually for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry, and the vets. To make sure medicines like Bute don’t have to be withdrawn from market.’

‘Why?’