‘Diane, why haven’t you got Ben Cooper at the scene?’ he said. ‘Is he on a rest day, or processing?’

‘Processing,’ said Fry. ‘He’s back at the office.’

And it was only then that she noticed a missed call on her phone.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a wind blowing, up here on the moors. Looking across the valley, Cooper could see acres of pale grass rippling on the plateau, clouded by swirls of rain. It was as if the whole moorland was moving, a vast tide rushing endlessly eastwards in the direction of Nottinghamshire.

Because of the number of police vehicles already present, he had been unable to get his Toyota near the crime scene, even with four-wheel drive. So Cooper had to walk the last few hundred yards on a lane that rose steeply from the village of Birchlow.

At the bottom, there had been plenty of evidence of the Eden Valley Hunt meet, and Matt had been tense with the expectation of encountering people he knew. But the main body of the hunt must have been away in the fields somewhere, following their artificial fox-scented trail.

Cooper stopped for a few moments to catch his breath, trying to orientate himself. Near the top of the lane, the views were spectacular, with several gritstone edges dominating the northern and eastern skylines – White Edge, Froggatt Edge, Curbar and Baslow. But, for the most part, Longstone Moor wasn’t one of the wild, barren moors characteristic of the Dark Peak further north. Its expanses were positively civilized, with farms, quarries, fields, and a criss-crossing of tracks formed by generations of people crossing the moor.

Ever since he was a child, Cooper had never stopped being fascinated by the layer upon layer of history that formed the landscape he’d grown up in. Thousands of years of history, visible right there in front of him, wherever he went – Neolithic stone circles and burial chambers, medieval guide stoops way out on the moors, the bumps and hollows of the lead mines, whose abandoned workings dated back to the arrival of the Romans. Cooper felt himself to be a part of that history, completely inseparable from it. Those people who’d built the stone circles, who’d worked in the lead mines, and carved the names on the guide stoops – they’d all been his ancestors.

Ahead of him, Longstone Edge itself was carved by the vast, white scars of opencast mining called rakes. Some were abandoned now, great gashes in the landscape as if a series of earthquakes had split the ground open. But open-cast mining was still active here, on a big scale. Longstone Edge had been the subject of a long-running campaign protesting against the extent of limestone extraction, thirteen million tons of Peak District hillside trucked away every year for roadworks and building projects.

He could see graded piles of chippings awaiting collection near the new haulage road to Cavendish Mill. Some abandoned workings had filled with water, forming the kind of small lake known locally as a flash, its surface seething with rain.