They were on the edge of the last surviving stretch of genuine moorland on Longstone Moor. To the east, Cooper could see the glint of the flash, the water-filled quarry workings, edged by a screen of trees. To the west, the moor itself was a sea of heather, black in the rain, a dark ocean stirred fitfully by the wind.

He drew the car into the side of the road, and parked on the rough grass verge. They peered into the Land Rover to make sure Rick Widdowson wasn’t lying injured inside it. But the driver’s door stood open, and it was clear what had happened.

As Cooper straightened up, he saw Fry’s black Peugeot coming the other way. She pulled a face at the sight of the dead sheep lying bloodied in the middle of the carriageway.

‘Better help me drag this out of the way, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s a bit of a hazard.’

‘Oh, shit,’ said Murfin. ‘What a great day this is turning into.’

Fry got out of her car and pulled up the collar of her coat as the wind across the moor caught her hair.

‘He’s abandoned his vehicle and legged it, then,’ she said.

‘Yes. But we can only have been a few minutes behind him. So where is he?’

In this landscape, there was only one answer. Widdowson must have gone to ground somewhere on the moor, and was lying flat to the earth in the heather. As long as he remained still, they would need an awful lot of time and luck to stumble across him.

Cooper walked as far as the first turn in a track that snaked across the moor towards the distant opencast rakes. Nothing moved anywhere, not even a rabbit.

‘We’ll need to get the helicopter unit to guide us in with their infra-red camera,’ he said.

‘I’ll put in the request.’

Then a noise broke the silence of the moor. A tuneless warble, no skylark or curlew. Cooper turned his head to listen and focused in on the noise before it stopped. He fixed his eye on a patch of heather close to one of the capped mine shafts.

‘No need for the helicopter, after all,’ said Fry.

‘What was that?’

‘The Star Wars theme, I believe. Mobile phones are a great way of locating people, even out there.’

Rick Widdowson heard them coming, and stood up from the heather, clutching his phone in his hand as if about to hurl it from him in a fit of anger. But it was far too late for that.

‘You should remember to switch it to vibrate next time,’ said Fry, as she read him his rights.

Chapter Thirty-three