Fry drank her coffee and bit into a piece of toast as she sat looking out of her window on to Grosvenor Avenue. She barely noticed the flat itself now. It already felt like a part of her past. She merely drifted in and out, boiled a kettle, ran a shower, lay down to sleep. It was no more her home than any hotel room in any dull town in some far-flung part of the country. She had no more roots in Edendale than the pot plant dying on her window ledge.

For a moment Fry stopped chewing and looked at the plant. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d watered it, so there was no wonder it was dying. She peered a bit more closely and poked at a brown leaf, which crumbled at her touch. More dead than dying, then. Somebody had given her the plant, but she couldn’t remember who. It hardly mattered now, did it?

She finally had a new place to move into, in a smart apartment building on the outskirts of Nottingham. Fry was looking forward to seeing traffic, theatres, a bit of nightlife. Proper street lights. And no sheep anywhere.

Proper crimes too. The Major Crime Unit investigated all the serious stuff in the region. There would be no dealing with vast amounts of low-level volume crime, the way they did on division.

Fry checked her phone. Reports were coming through this morning of a suspicious death in Derbyshire. Somewhere near Buxton, a few miles to the west of Edendale. If it was in Derbyshire, it was just within the remit of EMSOU.

She called her DCI, Alistair Mackenzie, to see what he wanted her to do.

‘We do need you back here, Diane.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re not still hankering after the country life, are you?’

‘You are joking. Sir.’

Mackenzie laughed. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Can we let Divisional CID run with it for now, then?’

‘Yes, unless they encounter any problems. We’ll keep a watching brief.’

Fry ended the call, finished her coffee and got ready to leave. She studied the people moving in Grosvenor Avenue. There weren’t many – just a few students from the multi-occupancy Victorian houses like the one her flat was part of, and a Royal Mail van stopped a few doors up, the postman chatting to someone over a wall.

She turned away. That was enough watching for now. Perhaps for ever.

Yes, that would be the best thing. Very soon she would never have to think about Edendale again. Or any of the people in it.

Ben Cooper stood back and let the recovery team do their work. The victim had finally been removed from the water and placed on the Derbyshire bank of the river. Her hands had been bagged, in case evidence from her attacker was trapped under her fingernails. But the rest of her body was bundled up in heavy clothing, which was completely waterlogged, creating a limp, misshapen mound that hardly looked human. Dark hair spread in sodden strands around her face.

And the victim’s injuries were obvious now too, with blood still leaking from a head wound. Though the bleeding had seemed so little while she was in the river, now the red stain quickly began to spread across the sheeting and on to the ground. The water had kept the head wound open, while washing away the blood downstream.

As he watched officers manoeuvre the body and crime-scene examiners record every detail with their digital cameras, Cooper began to wonder whether the victim’s blood had reached both banks of the river or had drifted into Staffordshire on the current.

But it didn’t matter. The body was here, on the Derbyshire side. It was his responsibility for now. The chief constable had said recently that there was no greater privilege than this – the job of investigating the death of another human being.

Sandra Blair was the victim’s name, according to Rob Beresford. She lived nearby in the village of Crowdecote and worked in tea rooms in Hartington. As far as Beresford knew, she was unmarried. She was a friend of his mother’s, he said. They were in some organisation together. The Women’s Institute or the Mothers’ Union, or a local historical society. Perhaps all of them. He was vague on the details beyond that point.

‘Any confirmation of ID on the victim?’ asked Cooper as the crime-scene manager, Wayne Abbott, broke away from the activity round the body.

‘There are some house keys,’ said Abbott. ‘And a phone, but it’s been immersed in water, so—’

‘Forensics might be able to get something off it, do you think?’

‘Possibly. Other than that, she had nothing much on her. There’s no purse, just the odd bit of small change in the pockets. She was wearing a blue waterproof jacket, which must have weighed her down in the water. Walking boots too.’

‘But the water is so shallow. It wouldn’t have stopped her getting out, if she was still alive and conscious.’

Abbott shrugged. His scene suit was wet and streaked with mud. He looked cold too, and must have been very uncomfortable. But this was all part of the job. No one chose a crime scene with the comfort of the investigators in mind.

‘That’s not for me to comment on,’ he said.

The divers in their wetsuits were still in the water, carefully exploring the riverbed, feeling under rocks, sifting through mud. They were gradually making their way downstream from the location of the body, in case evidence had drifted away in the current and disappeared, following the streams of the victim’s blood.

‘No torch among her possessions?’ asked Cooper.

Abbott shook his head. ‘Not that we’ve found.’

‘There must have been one. She wouldn’t have come out in the pitch dark without a torch of some kind.’

‘Well, someone else must have been here, I suppose. Maybe they had it.’

‘Perhaps. But she seems to be dressed for the outing, at least.’

He was thinking about Rob Beresford, dressed in his unsuitable muddy trainers and sodden denims. The victim had come out here much better prepared, and presumably for quite a different purpose. What that purpose was, he had no idea. Not yet anyway. But Sandra Blair’s life was about to become the focus of a lot of attention.

‘And a hat,’ said Cooper, thinking of the head wound and the dark strands of wet hair.

‘Sorry?’

‘She was probably wearing a hat. What happened to it?’

‘No idea.’

Gradually, the entire team was gathering at the Corpse Bridge. The same old circus that any suspicious death attracted. Present at the scene now was Detective Inspector Dean Walker. Cooper knew him, but hadn’t worked directly with him until now. His old DI, Paul Hitchens, had moved on – and probably wouldn’t be back in E Division for any nostalgic reunions with his ex-colleagues, judging by his comments in the pub on his last day. Walker was only a temporary replacement, though. He was earmarked for better things, a job at headquarters in Ripley. There would still be a vacancy in E Division.

Walker was talking on the phone to a detective chief inspector, the only DCI they still had knocking around in this part of Derbyshire.

In the present circumstances everyone was expected to pick up the slack. The DCI and the DI were each doing two people’s jobs. Further down the ladder many of the senior DCs were taking on a sergeant’s role, while frontline uniformed PCs were acting as social workers, not to mention standing in for paramedics. Everyone had a story of taking an injured person to hospital in the back of a police car rather than wait for an ambulance that might never come because it was already waiting outside A&E with a previous patient.

Sometimes Cooper wondered who was actually doing the real police work. Community support officers, he supposed. The PCSOs – dressed up to look like police officers, but without any of the powers.

As a DS, he was right in the middle of this mess. He could probably use the freedom to show a bit of initiative, unless this became a major inquiry, in which case they would all lose control to EMSOU’s Major Crime Unit.