‘But if it was a deliberate distraction,’ he said slowly, ‘that would mean…’

‘Yes, Ben. That whoever was responsible expected to be dealing with a local person, who knew the history of the Corpse Bridge. They anticipated it would be someone like you, in fact.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘Surely anyone would have made the connection eventually, once they started asking a few questions.’

‘Eventually, perhaps. But we’d have picked up more useful lines of inquiry by then. And we’d have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort. And perhaps some lives.’

‘So you’re fixing your mind on the quarry protests.’

‘And you’re still fixated with the Corpse Bridge and the Bowden protest group.’

‘Someone planned all this,’ said Cooper. ‘An individual who knows all about lying and when to tell the truth – or, at least, a partial truth. They all followed the same strategy. They gave us the truth when there was no point in trying to conceal it. Rob Beresford admitted straight away that he knew Sandra Blair. Both the Nadens and Jason Shaw came forward to admit they were in the area at the time she died. It made them look innocent and willing to cooperate. And Brendan Kilner pointed me in the direction of the burial ground at Bowden when I enquired about a connection between the names. Once I’d asked him that question, he knew I’d find out the answer some other way. So he told me. But even Kilner only gave me as little as he needed to and no more.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I think there was a policy at work here. Rules of engagement, if you like. It’s a bit too neat for each of them to have thought of doing that separately. People just don’t react in that way without some advance preparation. The instinct of the guilty is to tell a lie.’

‘There’s still a big question for you to think about, though, isn’t there? Who was with Sandra Blair at the bridge that night?’

Cooper couldn’t answer that question, no matter how much he would have liked to. He had to let it pass. Instead, he considered the crime scene, with its tents and arc lights and figures in white scene suits going backwards and forwards to the forensic vans.

‘So the earl was attacked at the Grandfather Oak?’ he said.

‘His attacker was standing under the tree,’ said Fry. ‘The earl was shot at close range the first time. He probably saw his attacker and turned away to escape. The first blast caught him in the back of the right shoulder.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Then the earl had run. He almost reached the back of the abbey, the west wing where the family apartments were located. The killer must have pursued him before firing the second and fatal shot.

Cooper walked past the crime-scene tent to look at the abbey. While he was alive the earl himself had come and gone from this side of the house, probably to avoid meeting the public. This section of parkland was fenced off and gated to prevent access. He could see a stable block and a building with a glass roof like a conservatory. An orangery? Was that what they called it?

Cooper hadn’t seen the back of the abbey buildings on his previous visits. From here the place looked totally different. He was no longer seeing the over-elaborate façade that made Knowle Abbey look like a tourist postcard from the east. On the west side the buildings were random and grimy, almost ramshackle. Weeds were growing in the orangery, but no oranges. The stables were abandoned and derelict. They might have housed a few rats, but no horses.

The woodland was neglected too. Trees were diseased and damaged. Brambles and bracken had infested the woodland floor where once there might have been swathes of bluebells. There were no visible trails. A bridlepath from the stables had become choked by birch saplings and blocked by fallen branches.

Closer to hand, he could see that the wilderness was encroaching on to the gravel drive. In fact, it had probably crept closer to the abbey than it should have done by several yards. The gravel itself sprouted weeds, and heaps of rubbish had built up against the rear walls – rusting metal, broken plastic, a crumbling mess of wet plasterboard. The windows here were dirty and cobwebbed, some of them actually broken. Cooper thought back to the discussion with Meredith Burns about security measures. Did the insurance company know about this part of the abbey?

One of the opening lines from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca came into his mind. The woods crowded dark and uncontrolled to the drive. Well,Knowle Abbey was no Manderley, butRebecca would have noticed the same phenomenon here. All the estate work seemed to have been concentrated on the front of the abbey, the façade that visitors saw. Here the trees had been left unmanaged for years, by the look of them. It was a criminal neglect of valuable woodland. Not to mention the damage it must have done to the view from the west wing.

It seemed that all the time and effort the earl had talked about had been put into those parts of the estate that were on show to the public. He’d created a façade of elegance, with a ramshackle dereliction behind it, like a Hollywood film set. All appearance and no substance. A hollow charade.

Cooper turned to look at the house. He pictured Lord Manby at his desk in the library. The window was right there, on the first floor. The earl would have glanced up now and then from his paperwork and seen the evidence of neglect for himself. Had this untamed undergrowth seemed like the portents of inevitable ruin, creeping ever closer to his walls?

Meredith Burns looked a bit lost, like a woman who no longer knew what her purpose was. She’d been standing watching Cooper as he examined the abbey. She said nothing, until he turned and found her there.

‘We took your advice and called in the security company,’ she said.

‘But too late, it seems.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Burns flapped her arms helplessly. ‘We’ve found something else,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant or not.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll show you.’

An intruder had tried to force open a Manby family tomb in the Lady Chapel. It was a marble sarcophagus with a cut-glass lid, but coated in grey mould from the damp of generations. Now a corner was broken off, as if someone had prised at it with a crowbar.

‘Could this have been what brought the earl out into the grounds last night?’ asked Cooper.

‘That’s what I wondered. If Walter heard a noise or saw someone near the chapel.’

‘It’s a possibility. I’ll get a crime-scene examiner to check it for fingerprints.’

Burns gazed round the crumbling walls and eroded statues of the chapel. ‘What do you think anyone would be looking for in here?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘I think they were probably intending to cause some damage.’

‘Like the graffiti?’

‘Yes, but a step further.’

‘It’s awful to think they would come here with the intention of causing damage to a tomb.’

‘Or to the occupant.’

Cooper saw the shocked expression on Burns’s face. But what Brendan Kilner had said still held good. It was all about family.

‘Your superintendent has arrived, by the way,’ said Burns as they left the chapel.

‘Detective Superintendent Branagh is here?’

‘Yes. She’s meeting with the earl.’

‘The earl? Lord Manby?’

‘I mean Peter Manby,’ said Burns. ‘He’s the new earl, of course. With the death of his father, he’s just inherited the Knowle estate.’

‘Of course he has.’

Cooper looked out over the parkland towards the front of the abbey. What would the arrival of a new owner mean to the master plan for the development of Knowle? Would the latest Lord Manby steer the estate in a different direction or would he be too much under the influence of the Dowager Countess? Would the quarrying plan still go ahead? And might the bulldozers still move into the old graveyard, despite everything? Time would tell. But now at least there was a chance that someone could make a difference.