Cooper hesitated for a moment. 'Yes, you should.’

She straightened herself up and scrambled over the rocks towards the car park that lay a few hundred yards below them at the Old Mill. 'See you in a few minutes, then.'

‘Yeah.’

*

Damn, thought Cooper. And just as he was getting round to asking her about Hitchens.

He swung up the binoculars again. He had to peer hard now to make out the figures by the white pick-up. They seemed to have been gathered over a piece of paper, consulting together, nodding their heads, as if they were doing a crossword or something.

A few minutes after Diane Fry had left, he saw two of the dim shapes begin to move away from the house. He realized they were heading back down the track leading from the smallholding. The third stayed behind, leaning against the pick-up.

Cooper followed the two figures as they passed through the first gate on foot and continued along the track towards the road. When they turned and crossed the road towards the squeeze stile that led to the path on to the Baulk, he knew he would have to follow them.

He looked at his watch. Nearly eight o'clock. Who else had mentioned eight o'clock? He flicked through his mental notes, and remembered Fry's account of her interview with Charlotte Vernon. It was this time, every night, that Charlotte visited the spot on the Baulk where her daughter's body was found.

*

'So let's just go back over it again, Mr Edwards, shall we?' said Fry. 'You were standing near the cairn on Raven's Side when you saw an old man with a black dog walk past the end of the footpath below.'

‘No.'

‘What do you mean "no"? That's what you said in your statement.'

‘No, I didn't. Where've you got that from?’

Fry stared through the windscreen at the car park and the lighted windows on the front of the Old Mill. She was still unsure what it was she hoped to establish by speaking to the bird-watcher. Gary Edwards had already insisted that he would stick by his estimate of the time he had seen the old man. His watch was accurate, and he was sure of the time. He always recorded the exact time of a sighting, he said.

Now, though, she did seem to have touched on something. She consulted her notes, taken from his earlier statement.

‘I've got it right here, Mr Edwards — the statement that you signed. Let me read part of it to you. Your statement reads: "I saw the head of a dog through my binoculars. It appeared through some undergrowth. It was close to the ground, sniffing at a fallen branch. It was black." '

‘Right.'

‘You go on: "Then I saw there was a man with the dog. He was an old man, wearing a cap. He passed out of my vision to the left, walking, not running. I took the binoculars away from my eyes and I saw the man and the dog move away into the trees. This was near the stream that runs by the footpath called the Eden Valley Trail."'

‘Well —'

‘So the dog was a black dog.'

‘No, that's not what I said.'

‘It's here. You've signed it. "It was black", you said.’

‘You're not listening. Like the other bloke — he didn't listen either.’

'Detective Sergeant Rennie?'

‘Yes, him. He just wrote what he wanted to, didn't he? But listen. I only saw the dog's head through the binoculars. The head was black.'

‘So?'

‘So maybe the rest of the dog wasn't. Get it? I couldn't tell when I took the binoculars away, see? I could only make out the rest of the thing then, when it came out into the open. But the light was funny by that time. It was late on, and the sun was so low. You lose the definition of the colours.'

‘OK, I know what you mean. But as far as you could tell, the dog was black, yes?'

‘No. Well . . . I reckon it was probably black and white.'

‘Why? You've just said —'

‘Well, they usually are, that type of dog. When you see them on the telly — they're mostly black, with some white. They reckon it's good camouflage, so the sheep can't see them on the hillside.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘One Man and His Dog. It was a sheepdog type of thing, with a shaggy coat. A Border collie, they call it.’

A Labrador, surely. A black Labrador you saw.'

‘I'm telling you, I'm telling you. Will you write it down properly, for God's sake? I know a Labrador from a collie, see? And this was a Border collie. A black and white collie. Definite.’

Fry sighed. 'We'd better see you and take another statement in the morning, hadn't we, Mr Edwards?'

‘Whatever you like. But we'll have to make it quick. There's been a pair of snipe sighted on Stanton Moor.’

As she finished the call to Edwards, a memory came back to Diane Fry, and she almost dropped the phone. The memory was of a photograph of Laura Vernon. It was the original photograph, the one from which her face had been enlarged for use in the murder enquiry. Fry had seen it only once. She had sneaked a look in the file when the girl was still officially just a missing person. It had been a photo of Laura taken in the garden at the Mount, at a time when she was laughing and happy in the sunshine. And at her feet in the picture had been a dog. A black and white Border collie.

*

Stewart Tailby called DI Hitchens into his office. It was late, but they were both too senior to qualify for overtime payments.

The two men were tired and tense. They were awaiting the results of fingerprint examination on a find made earlier in the evening. They hardly dared to say it to each other, but they knew the results could be crucial.

Tailby had openly pinned his hopes on forensics so often during this enquiry that it seemed like tempting fate even to voice the hope that a set of prints other than Laura Vernon's would be found on the second trainer. That second trainer they had spent so many expensive man-hours looking for. The trainer which had now been found by searchers, where it lay in the roots of a hedge inside the back wall of the garden at the Mount.

Meanwhile, a tearful Andrew Milner had been sent home for the night, with the warning that they might want to talk to him again tomorrow — and the friendly advice that he should talk to his wife.

‘So Margaret Milner was right that he hadn't been Charlotte Vernon's lover,' said Tailby.

‘But she didn't know about the secretary.'

‘Mmm. Has it occurred to you, though, that Graham Vernon might well have known about the affair?' Hitchens snapped his fingers. 'Of course. The hold he had over Milner wasn't just to do with his fear of losing his job. He knew Milner's dirty secret.’

And he certainly made the most of it. The result was that Andrew Milner felt unable to act even when Vernon made a move on his own daughter.’

Are we discounting Milner, then?'

‘No. There's enough hate there. Hate for Graham Vernon, but self-disgust too. It has to be directed somewhere.’

Tailby leaned wearily on his desk, his shoulders stooped. The air conditioning was still running, and his office was turning cold as the evening temperature dropped. 'No, I'd like to eliminate Milner, but we can't.

Not without confirmation of his movements that night. Poor sod. He couldn't even switch his story and claim he was with the mistress.’

Tailby glowered at Hitchens's raised eyebrow, real- izing the DI was amused either at his use of the old-fashioned term or his sympathy for the suspect. Perhaps both. Maybe he was getting too old for the job if his junior officers were laughing at him, thought Tailby. Maybe he ought to take that job in the Corporate Development Department at County Headquarters in Ripley. They needed a chief inspector to take charge of Process Development. Whatever that was.

‘We have no case against Andrew Milner,' said Hitchens. 'I know that, damn it.'

‘Of the other names on the list, Simeon Holmes is in the clear. He was nearly twenty miles away at the time, and his story is well supported.'