Another murmur ran round the room. Walker waited for it to subside.

‘Although it also seems a possibility from the evidence at Sandra Blair’s house that the victim may have made the effigy herself,’ he said. ‘We’re waiting for confirmation of that.’

‘Why would she do that?’ asked someone.

‘We don’t know. In fact, a better question might be “Who did she make it for?”’

It was a good point, of course. Cooper had to admit that. He decided to sit back and listen to the rest of the briefing in dignified silence.

‘We’re still working our way through the diary and address book belonging to the victim, but the good news is that we’ve located Mrs Blair’s sister. Her name is Maureen Mackinnon and she’ll be arriving from Scotland in the morning.’

Cooper frowned. Why hadn’t he been able to locate a Dundee phone number in Sandra’s address book?

DI Walker might have seen his expression. He hesitated, looked down at his notes and said, ‘Mrs Mackinnon lives in Dunfermline, I believe.’

Oh, well. Dundee, Dunfermline. It was probably too easy to confuse them. It must have taken Luke Irvine a while to sort that one out.

‘There was the note in the diary about meeting “Grandfather”,’ said Cooper, forgetting his resolution to keep quiet.

‘According to Mrs Mackinnon, the victim doesn’t have a grandfather,’ said Walker with an air of finality. ‘Not a living one she could have been meeting.’

And Cooper wasn’t surprised to hear that.

‘Okay, thank you,’ said Superintendent Branagh. ‘Let me say at this point that we won’t be releasing any details to the public of what we found at the scene. Specifically, there will be no mention of the effigy or the noose. Understood? All right. What about forensics?’

The crime-scene manager, Wayne Abbott, took over the floor. He was a marked contrast to the DI, heavily built and shaven-headed like a football hooligan but totally on the ball when it came to the details of a crime scene.

‘Our scene is pretty messy,’ said Abbott. ‘Muddy, badly churned up, rained on and trampled. It couldn’t have been worse really. There’s no viable DNA to work with, for a start, and trace evidence is fragmentary. We’ve recovered some shoe marks close to where the body was found. They’ll be difficult to identify with any certainty, but we’re working on it.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘We’ve retrieved a few partials from the victim’s clothing and from the effigy,’ said Abbott. ‘Many of them are the victim’s own, of course. The others we haven’t been able to identify. There’s no match from the database.’

‘That’s privatisation for you,’ said someone.

Cooper turned round to look, but couldn’t see who had spoken. It could have been Gavin Murfin, but he looked too innocent and his mouth was full anyway.

Creeping privatisation was a standing grievance among some officers. And fingerprint records had already been privatised during the past twelve months. There was no storage room left at the Regional Identification Bureau in Nottingham. So, like other East Midlands forces, Derbyshire had decided to digitise their records and move to an entirely electronic process. Half a million paper records were being destroyed after they were scanned and stored on a secure server.

‘That’s nothing to do with it,’ said Superintendent Branagh sharply. And no one seemed ready to argue with her.

Abbott looked across at where Cooper sat and met his eye.

‘The one thing we have established,’ he said, ‘is that the material used in making the effigy matches samples of fabric found in the victim’s home. There’s also a sketch that resembles the final design. So it seems we can confirm that the victim created the effigy herself.’

Cooper breathed a sigh of relief. At least he’d been right about something. He looked across the room and gasped in surprise. If he wasn’t mistaken, he’d almost caught Diane Fry smiling.

19

In Edendale that evening the streets were wet with more rain. The Christmas lights hadn’t gone up in the town yet. But it wouldn’t be long, now that it was November. Most of the shops just couldn’t wait to get the Halloween costumes and Guy Fawkes masks off their shelves and fill the space with Christmas gift wrap and tinsel.

Ben Cooper had almost forgotten that he was expected somewhere that evening. He was supposed to be helping his sister Claire get her new shop ready for opening.

Well, his family expected him to forget things, or to be too busy to turn up, or to get called away. And sometimes, lately, they’d expected him just not to be up to it. But that had changed now, hadn’t it?

Claire had closed the old shop months ago. To be fair, it had been a bit of a niche venture, even when times were good. He could have told her that at the time, but he knew she wouldn’t be willing to hear it. If you wanted to do something badly enough, you needed encouragement and support from your family and friends, not discouraging words and predictions of disaster.

Still, it was certainly true that the market for healing crystals and scented candles had fallen through the floor when the economic downturn came along. Edendale people didn’t really go for that sort of thing. The older residents were happy with their goose fat and paraffin lamps. The younger ones thought you could get it all on the internet.

And visitors to the area were spending less money than ever in the town. Even those with a bit of spare cash preferred to spend it in the farm shops or the outdoor clothing stores, or perhaps to visit one of those historic attractions like Knowle Abbey. Small local businesses were struggling against the competition, whatever area of retail they were in.

Cooper thought of the dreamcatcher and the Tarot cards in Sandra Blair’s cottage at Crowdecote. It was ironic to think that Sandra might have been a customer of Claire’s at one time, in the old shop. But Sandra Blair was dead and Claire Cooper had moved on.

The new shop was just off the market square in Edendale. It stood in the steep, cobbled alley called Nick i’th Tor. There had been a half-hearted campaign recently to change the name of the street on the argument that visitors couldn’t pronounce it so were too embarrassed to ask for directions to it. But the idea never stood a chance. Edendale was too proud of its history and too fond of its traditions – even if no one knew what they meant.

He could see through the front window that his brother Matt was in the shop, putting up some shelves for one of the displays. Claire wouldn’t lash out money on professional shopfitters when she could persuade members of her family to do the job for her. But then all the Coopers were like that. It seemed to be an inherited trait.

‘Hi, Matt,’ he said as he entered.

As soon as he opened the door, he was hit by the powerful smells of fresh paint and plaster, and newly sawn timber.

Matt turned. His broad shoulders and increasing girth had been crammed into an old set of blue overalls that hadn’t really fitted him for a couple of years now. Only the lower buttons were fastened on the front, exposing an ancient woolly sweater full of holes. He looked like a grizzly bear struggling to get out of a duvet cover. His face was red and there was a smudge of grease on his cheek. In fact, he looked pretty much as he always did back at the farm.

‘Oh, you made it,’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to be on my own again tonight.’

‘Where’s the boss?’

‘Who?’

‘The owner of the shop. Shouldn’t she be here supervising?’

‘Oh, Claire’s not going to be here tonight. She’s been down in Birmingham for some trade exhibition or something. Networking and looking at new product lines.’

‘Looking at new product lines?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘Oh, I can just hear her saying it.’