‘No, you’re being ludicrous. There’s a difference.’

‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Because I wanted to ask you something.’

Just then, Gavin Murfin came into the office with a report in his hand.

‘Fingerprint section have got their, er . . . fingers out at last,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They’ve got us a result on the prints lifted from the gate in that field where Patrick Rawson died.’

‘And . . . ?’ said Fry, completely forgetting Cooper.

Murfin scanned the report. ‘Adrian Tarrant, aged thirty-two. HGV driver, with an address in Eyam.’

‘He has a record? If his prints were on file, they should have made the match long before now. Days ago.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘They weren’t on file until today,’ he said. ‘He was arrested this morning, during a meeting of the Eden Valley Hunt.’

‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘We were there.’

‘Well, you must have missed it. It seems Mr Tarrant was identified by a female hunt saboteur as the person who assaulted her during an incident on Tuesday. He was arrested and brought here for processing. DNA sample and fingerprints taken, as per routine.’

‘And when they put his prints into the system, they got a match.’

‘Bingo,’ smiled Murfin.

‘Adrian Tarrant,’ said Fry. ‘I knew it was him.’

ADRIAN TARRANT HAD been employed by one of the haulage companies whose lorries rumbled constantly backwards and forwards to the opencast quarries on Longstone Edge. Fry reflected that he might well have seen her as he passed along the haulage road in a cloud of dust. But she wondered whether his job might not give an alibi for eight thirty on Tuesday morning, when Patrick Rawson was killed.

That was, until she discovered Tarrant had been sacked by his employers the previous week, for turning up over the alcohol limit once too often.

THE HOUSE IN Eyam was already guarded by uniformed officers standing at the gate. It was a small, stone-faced council house, not much more than a two-up, two-down, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom. According to the neighbours, Adrian Tarrant shared the house with another man, possibly a cousin, who worked as a long-distance lorry driver and was currently away on a job.

Fry could see from the state of the house that this was likely to be true. A couple of days’ washing-up stood on the kitchen drainer, newspapers and empty beer cans decorated the carpet in the sitting room. The TV remote looked much better used than the vacuum cleaner.

The team moved through the house systematically, not entirely sure what they were looking for, so looking that bit more carefully.

‘Apparently, it was Tarrant’s fellow hunt stewards who pointed the finger initially,’ said Cooper. ‘Then, when he was pulled in, the girl he injured made a positive identification. So it just shows –’

‘Not all hunting people are bad, I know,’ said Fry.

‘They can’t risk someone like him giving them a bad reputation. Not any more.’