‘On her hands? Defensive injuries, possibly?’

‘Only if someone was attempting to beat her with a bunch of twigs.’

Cooper nodded reluctantly. ‘Scratches from the undergrowth, I suppose.’

‘That’s more likely.’

Mrs van Doon pushed back a stray hair from her face. She was still wearing a green apron and a medical mask, but she’d peeled off her gloves. The skin of her hands looked dry, with the faint suggestion of incipient liver spots.

‘So,’ she said, ‘otherwise we have a well-nourished Caucasian female. From her physical condition, I would estimate her age to be in the late thirties.’

‘She was thirty-five,’ said Fry.

The pathologist raised an eyebrow. ‘Some people do lie about that sort of thing, I believe. Though perhaps she just had a difficult life.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I’ve recorded a height of one hundred and sixty-eight centimetres and a weight of seventy-eight kilos. Rather overweight, according to the standard body mass index. But then, aren’t we all?’

Cooper thought Mrs van Doon wasn’t an ounce overweight – quite the opposite, in fact. And Diane Fry had never been a woman who looked as though she had a good appetite. But he knew better than to comment, or even move a muscle in his face.

‘This individual has never given birth to a child,’ said the pathologist. ‘Apart from the signs of coronary heart disease, which she ought really to have been aware of, she was in reasonable physical condition. She probably had a poor diet and an unhealthy lifestyle. It’s an old story. And that’s all I can tell you really, apart from…’

‘What?’

She looked from Cooper to Fry and back again, perhaps trying to work out which of them she ought to be reporting the information to. She compromised by looking away, her eyes resting instead on the still, sheeted form of Sandra Blair.

‘Well, when we did the toxicology tests,’ said the pathologist, ‘it transpired that this female had substantial amounts of cannabis and alcohol in her blood. It’s impossible to say for certain, of course – but in my opinion they might have contributed to her death.’

Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst looked as though they might have been having one of their disagreements. They knew better than to argue when their DS was in the office, but they got on each other’s nerves too much to hide it sometimes. Gavin Murfin was lurking in the background, pretending to hear nothing, wrapped up in his world, probably thinking about the next meal break.

‘That’s a shock. You don’t think of women in their thirties having heart attacks, do you?’ said Irvine, when Cooper delivered the post-mortem results on Sandra Blair.

‘It depends on what she had to put up with during her life,’ said Hurst with a sharp look.

Irvine shrugged. ‘Well, she didn’t have any children or anything.’

‘It wasn’t children I was thinking of.’

Cooper intervened. ‘If she had heart disease, it was probably hereditary,’ he said. ‘It seems academic now anyway.’

He looked round for Murfin, who seemed to have been spending a lot of time on the phone in the last couple of days. Cooper wasn’t even sure it was anything to do with his job. And it wasn’t like Gavin to be so shy and reticent.

‘Anything from you, Gavin?’ said Cooper.

Murfin reluctantly heaved himself out of his chair and came forward with his notebook.

‘Yes, house to house enquiries have picked up some sightings of Sandra Blair on the day she died,’ he said.

‘Really? Share them with us, then.’

Murfin flipped back a page or two. ‘After she left work at the Hartdale tea rooms, she was seen near the cheese factory in Hartington, though we can’t confirm whether she called in any of the shops in the village. Later that afternoon she was seen again, this time a few miles away in Longnor General Stores buying a copy of the Leek Post and Times.’ He looked up, with a ghost of a smile. ‘That snippet is thanks to our friends across the border in Staffordshire.’

‘Cross-border cooperation working then, Gavin?’

‘Up to a point.’

‘Longnor?’ said Irvine. ‘How would she get there?’

‘It isn’t far from her home in Crowdecote,’ said Cooper. ‘Less than a mile, I should think. She could easily have walked there and been picked up in Longnor.’

‘But by who?’

‘That’s something I’d like to know.’

Maureen Mackinnon had arrived from Dunfermline and confirmed the identity of her sister. Though she’d been interviewed, Mrs Mackinnon had been unable to offer any particularly useful information. She could only describe Sandra’s interest in a wide range of activities since the death of her husband Gary five years ago.

‘We all thought it was a good thing for her to have so many interests,’ she said. ‘Especially when she was on her own. It stops you brooding, doesn’t it? Sandra was into handicrafts and nature. She took a lot of walks. And, well … there were more esoteric things that personally I didn’t understand. She was a very spiritual girl.’

According to her sister, Sandra had occasionally complained of pains, but was under the impression she suffered from heartburn. She sometimes mentioned sweating excessively and feeling dizzy. But Sandra simply treated herself with a variety of herbal remedies. She never worried that they might be signs of heart problems, said Maureen. And then, a little guiltily, she remembered that their grandfather had died of a heart attack, and perhaps a cousin too. So there was a family history, after all.

When pressed, Mrs Mackinnon admitted that her sister might have used cannabis occasionally. So she knew about that. But she had no idea of the existence of a boyfriend, if there was one. And sisters normally told each other these things, didn’t they?

Diane Fry walked into the CID room. She seemed to have appropriated a spare desk as her own for a while. But it hardly mattered. There were always spare desks in every department at West Street these days. Cooper wondered where she’d been since they left the mortuary together.

‘So what about our second victim, Mr Redfearn?’ said Fry, when she’d brought herself up to date with the latest developments. ‘Mrs van Doon says we won’t have her post-mortem report until tomorrow. But there must be something to go on. Time of death, for a start.’

She looked expectantly around the room.

‘The FME says three days,’ said Becky Hurst at last.

‘What? Since he died?’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes it Thursday night,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s only an estimate, of course…’

‘I know.’

‘There hasn’t been a missing person report,’ added Irvine. ‘We’ve contacted Mr Redfearn’s company here in Edendale and they say they weren’t expecting him in the office today, so they weren’t concerned about his absence.’

‘What about his family?’

‘He has a wife, Molly, but she’s been away on a shopping trip with some friends in Paris. According to Mr Redfearn’s secretary, it was a regular pre-Christmas trip that Mrs Redfearn took every year. It seems the husband regarded it as a bit of a break for himself too.’

‘How long has she been away?’ asked Fry.

‘Since last Thursday. She’s due back in the country tomorrow.’

‘She must have tried to call him during that time, surely?’

‘Well…’

Fry stared at Irvine. ‘Don’t you think so, Luke?’

Irvine glanced at Cooper. ‘Well, perhaps not. It depends what sort of marriage they had, doesn’t it? If they’ve been together for a long time, I mean…’

‘What are you saying, Luke?’ put in Hurst in a challenging tone.

Immediately, Irvine became defensive. ‘You know – absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, it can be essential to keep a relationship going.’

‘So they were happier when they were apart?’

‘I’m just suggesting that some people are. A break from each other for a few days. She goes shopping with the girlfriends. He can go off and play golf, or whatever. It suits both parties. You must have heard about that sort of arrangement.’