‘Damn,’ he said to himself as he parked. ‘Is there no escaping her?’

He hurried into the mortuary. Fortunately, Fry had only just walked through the doors. He caught her up as she walked down the corridor. She turned without surprise at the sound of his footsteps.

‘Ben,’ she said.

‘We must stop meeting like this.’

She didn’t smile. ‘We might as well hear the results together.’

‘Well, since we’re both here…’

Cooper hadn’t seen the pathologist for a while. It struck him that she, too, might be getting close to retirement age. For years she’d hardly seemed to change in appearance, but suddenly she was looking older and more tired. The creases had deepened around her eyes and she’d allowed her hair to turn a natural grey. And of course Mrs van Doon barely took the trouble to hide her impatience with irritating police officers who infested her post-mortem room.

The room itself was all polished stainless steel and gleaming tiles, the smell of disinfectant hardly masking the odour of dead flesh and internal organs. The walls echoed strangely whenever someone spoke, as if the faint voices of the dead were answering them.

The pathologist tapped a scalpel thoughtfully against a stainless-steel dish, a familiar habit that seemed to help her focus her thoughts, or perhaps restrain her irritation. The metallic tone reverberated in the room, stilling the ghostly voices for a moment.

‘This individual died of natural causes,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘She suffered a myocardial infarction, causing cardiac arrest. In other words she had a heart attack.’

‘She’s not a murder victim, then?’ said Fry.

Cooper couldn’t tell from her face whether she was disappointed or relieved. He would have given a lot to know which of the two reactions lay behind that controlled expression of hers.

‘It’s not for me to say. Well, it’s theoretically possible for someone to deliberately cause a heart attack in their victim. But personally I’ve never heard of such a case. And there’s certainly no evidence of it from my examination of this female. Perhaps at the crime scene?’

‘Unfortunately not,’ said Cooper.

‘Ah.’

‘The head injury?’

‘Well, it could have been due to an assault. But on the other hand it’s also consistent with a fall on to rocks, say.’

‘She was found lying on stones in the river, beneath the bridge.’

The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes, the level of impact would be about the same. There would have been quite a lot of blood. The scalp bleeds heavily, even from a minor laceration. But if she was in the river, I expect the water washed the blood away.’

‘And there was no blood on the bridge itself.’

‘We thought she might have been killed on the bank and pushed into the river,’ said Fry. ‘But this would explain why we never found a blood trail.’

‘There are some small lacerations on the hands,’ said the pathologist, ‘and one on the left temple. But they wouldn’t have bled very much.’

‘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.’