But Fry shook her head. ‘Not according to the PNC. He doesn’t have any previous.’

‘No previous convictions, yes. But he might have been questioned and not charged. Should I follow it up?’

‘Yes. And don’t forget Lowther was on West Yorkshire’s patch for three years.’

‘OK. Have you done a PNC check on Brian Mullen, by the way?’

‘He has no record, not even any driving offences. There’s no local intelligence on him either, so he has no known criminal associates.’

‘No one he could call on for a competent arson job, then?’

‘I don’t think he needed to. This was a personal affair.’

‘Right.’

Fry watched Cooper put on his jacket and check his mobile phone, ready to leave.

‘Are you in Matlock Bath later this afternoon, Ben?’

‘Yes. I’ve got to go back to the shopping village.’

‘Do me a favour – keep an eye out for somewhere you might buy a wooden dinosaur.’

Cooper stopped. ‘What? Oh, the photo that you showed Lowther.’

‘I want to find out where this came from. It must be fairly unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it myself, and Brian Mullen tells me he’s never seen it before either. If it was a gift for one of the Mullen children, it might have been from a recent visitor to the house.’

Cooper studied the wooden toy closely. ‘Hang on – I think I did see something like this in Matlock Bath on Tuesday. Not exactly the same, perhaps – but similar.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Diane, I should have taken more notice.’

‘That’s OK, Ben. But check it out for me, will you?’

Cooper handed the photos back. ‘The Rose Shepherd enquiry isn’t getting anywhere, is it? It’s too unfocused.’

‘I agree. What we need is someone to point us in the right direction.’

‘Oh, I nearly forgot – there was a message from Sergeant Kotsev,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh? What does he say?’

‘He says his flight from Sofia will land at Manchester Airport at twenty minutes to five.’

‘What? He’s coming here? For God’s sake, why weren’t we told about this?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe there was another message that we missed.’

‘And maybe not,’ said Fry bitterly. ‘Twenty to five? Does he mean today?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Damn it, he must have been phoning me from the check-in desk. He must have been practically on board the plane already.’

‘Do you want to hear the rest of the message?’

‘No, but you’d better give it me anyway.’

‘Well, he sends his respects to Sergeant Fry. And he wonders if you’d be free to pick him up from the airport.’

22

Cooper decided to drive down through Cromford to reach Matlock Bath. It was a relief to get out into the countryside again. This was his natural environment, not the stuffy meetings to discuss assassinations and organized crime, where he felt uneasy and out of his depth. Let Diane Fry have that side of the job, if she wanted it.

Emerging from the canopy of trees on the Via Gellia, he passed a little tufa cottage. This was one of the area’s most photographed buildings, and it looked just the way he remembered it – a house made of grey, spongy stone, with wisteria growing up the wall and geraniums in the window boxes, like something out of a fairy tale.

A few yards further on, the road swung to the right by the old Pig of Lead pub and the mills nestling in Bonsall Hollow, below Ball Eye Quarry. There was a quirky little bookshop opposite the pond in Cromford – the type of place that had vanished from most high streets, but still lurked in corners of the Peak District. Cooper could see it across the water as he entered the village. On a day like this, he’d have liked to be free to spend an hour or so browsing the shelves, making discoveries, drinking a cup of freshly ground coffee. Maybe there’d be home-made homity pie on the menu.

But he had to drive on, filtering left at the crossroads on to the A6. After the tightly clustered cottages of Cromford, Masson Mill looked enormous in its position between the road and the river. This stretch of the Derwent Valley had been classified as a world heritage site a few years ago. When the centre of the cotton industry moved to Manchester, the mills and millworkers’ villages of Derbyshire had been left almost intact in their rural backwater.

Some of the old millworkers said that the ghost of Arkwright himself still trod the creaking floorboards at Masson Mill. It was easy to believe that he wasn’t long gone when you saw the dusty boxes stacked on the shelves in the spinning room. ‘Return to Sir Richard Arkwright’. Of course, everyone knew he was buried down the road at Cromford. The mansion he’d built, but never lived in, stood directly across the river from the mill, among trees that he’d planted but never seen grown to maturity.

The back wall of the mill overlooked the river. Its five storeys were full of windows – long ranks of them separated into pairs by stone mullions. They were spaced with Victorian precision, but so small and dark that nothing was visible behind the glass. Those windows stared out across the rushing water like blank eyes. There were scores of them, a hundred pairs of eyes – a high, brick wall full of dead faces.

Upstream, a fallen tree trunk was caught on the edge of the weir. It jerked from side to side as the flow of water hit it, dead boughs thrashing like a man drowning in the foam. It must have been drawn into the current from the opposite bank, or it would have been carried away into the water channel that fed the mill wheel.

Inside the shopping village, Frances Birtland had just arrived and was taking off her coat.

‘My neighbour?’ she said. ‘Rose Shepherd?’

‘You don’t remember your neighbour coming in on Saturday?’

‘No. Did she come in? How embarrassing. But I saw so little of her, that I suppose I didn’t recognize her.’

‘Your colleague Mrs Hooper recognized her from her photograph in the papers.’

Mrs Birtland shook her head. ‘I don’t read the papers very much. They’re always so depressing, aren’t they?’

‘But you were definitely here all that afternoon?’

‘Of course. Did Eva say different?’

‘No.’

A customer was hovering behind him, and Cooper stood back for a moment. He took the opportunity to check out the stock on the central display units. He prided himself on his observation, but he’d completely missed the wooden toys last time he was here.

Cooper picked one up. It wasn’t a dinosaur, but the wood looked the same as the toy that Fry had shown him, and the style of carving was identical.

He looked at Frances Birtland, who was smiling at him, hoping for a sale.

‘Where are these from?’ he said.

‘Eva has them imported direct from Bulgaria. Traditionally crafted and ecologically friendly. I think they’re lovely, don’t you?’

‘Is there a dinosaur in the range?’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid we sold the last one.’

Darren Turnbull pulled his Astra on to the grass verge, waited until a tractor went past, then nipped into the phone box. He never liked using his mobile to ring Magpie Cottage, in case Fiona got hold of the phone and checked his calls.

‘You’ve got to come and meet me outside the village,’ he said when Stella answered.

‘So you know it’s you they’re looking for, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re scared, Darren.’

‘I just don’t think it’s sensible to make a free gift of some gossip to those nosy buggers that live near you.’

‘You know what I think – you’ve got to go to the police.’

‘I can’t, Stell.’

‘They’re trying to catch someone who committed a murder.’

‘I know, but –’

‘So you don’t care? You don’t care that there’s a murderer walking about right in my village, murdering women who live on their own?’

‘Oh, Stella, you’ll be all right.’