IF THIS HAD been Watersaw House, there would have been stable girls around to give Fry information, instead of just one bad-tempered old woman glaring at her from a side window of the house. And there might not have been quite so many muddy puddles for her to negotiate as she crossed the yard towards the stables, avoiding the drainage channel where dirty water swirled among little dams of straw.

She recalled thinking that Naomi Widdowson spent too much time outdoors, that her skin was weathered, her fingernails black. Fry had to remind herself sometimes that the people she dealt with often did things she would never consider doing herself. She’d met more than a few of them already in the present enquiry. Eating those huge, purple steaks of horse meat, dressing up to pursue the artificial scent of a fox – it took all sorts.

Fry looked around the yard, with the stone house to one side and the stables on the other, the horses peering out at her from around their hay racks. Bonny and Baby, but no sign of Monty. She could picture the three of them practically mugging Gavin Murfin for some kind of tidbit. It was obviously what they had come to expect from visitors. So what could be of more interest to a horse than a stranger walking up to their stables?

Stepping carefully, Fry came nearer to the end loose box and edged along the wall. The top half of the door stood open, like all the others. If it hadn’t, she would have noticed something out of place sooner. She could hear faint stirrings from inside now, the sounds of an animal breathing noisily and pawing at the straw.

That was when Fry made her mistake. She flicked up the latch and flung the door open, bursting into the stable, her mouth open to start shouting the commands. For a second, she heard the two uniformed officers running towards her. But then the whole of her world was suddenly taken up by the huge, rearing animal in front of her, its eyes rolling in alarm, its nostrils flaring, its steel-shod hooves lashing out at the intruder. How could she have forgotten how big these animals were, how easily the impact of a steel shoe could crush a man’s skull?

Frantically, Fry tried to dive clear of the flying hooves. The last two things she remembered for a while were the thud of those hooves hitting the concrete wall, and the overpowering smell of wet horse.

COOPER AND MURFIN were on the A6 approaching Bakewell. As they passed Haddon Hall, still closed to visitors for the winter, they were held up at the turning to the huge car park for the agricultural business centre. Bakewell was always busy on a Saturday, no matter what the time of year.

Cooper tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as a coach manoeuvred off Haddon Road, splashing through the water that sometimes closed the access to the car park completely in bad weather.