Murfin looked up suddenly. Cooper sensed a presence at his shoulder and turned, just as a new voice broke in. A voice he recognised instantly. Diane Fry.

'And meanwhile,' she said, 'they were all hoping they could knock off work and get home, or to the pub, as soon as possible. Because no one wanted to start making big decisions, did they? G.o.d forbid. Especially not you, I suppose.'

One thing Cooper had never got accustomed to was the way Fry could appear unexpectedly. She was able to move almost silently when she wanted to. Most disturbing was the fact that you didn't know how long she'd been standing there, listening.

Murfin's face changed as he looked at her. 'Wouldn't you want to get home? Oh, but you don't have a family, I forgot. Nothing for you to go home for.'

Fry's lips tightened, but Cooper stepped in before she could respond.

'This sort of thing doesn't help. Diane, you're welcome to sit in, but we need to listen. Go on, Gavin.'

Murfin waited to see if Fry took a chair. But instead she paced restlessly between the desks, her thin shoulders hunched like a prowling cat.

'Well, it was a while before we managed to trace their movements. The Pearsons hadn't told anyone where they were going, and of course the people at the pub where they'd been for dinner earlier that evening had no idea the couple were missing. It was a double whammy, if you like. That's what caused the delay. Well, mostly.'

'It could have been what caused their deaths, too,' said Fry.

She had remained standing in the middle of the room. Of course, she no longer had a desk in this department, but Cooper felt sure she did it deliberately, to make everyone else feel uncomfortable.

'If they died,' replied Murfin stubbornly.

Fry raised her eyebrow. 'You're on the "deliberate disappearance" side of the argument then, are you?'

'Yes, they legged it, without a doubt,' said Murfin. 'It's obvious. They were about to get pulled by the fraud squad in Surrey, so they did a bunk with the cash. I reckon David Pearson planned the best time to make a break for it, when they were away from home anyway. And they set up that delay for themselves so they had time to put some distance in before anyone noticed they were gone. They played us all for idiots, as if they knew exactly what we do.'

'And ... what? David Pearson deliberately left his wallet and phone behind?'

'Of course he did. It makes no difference.' Murfin leaned forward, directing his comments at Fry. 'It's what I would do myself, if I was going to change my ident.i.ty. I wouldn't carry proof of who I really was. The Pearsons wouldn't care if their stuff was found, not once they'd got clear. In fact, you know what? I reckon they've been laughing at us all this time for not finding those things sooner.'

When the impromptu meeting broke up in preparation for the full briefing, Cooper took Fry to one side.

'Gavin could be right, you know,' he said.

'When did that ever happen?'

'He has experience,' said Cooper. 'More experience than you or me. Doesn't that count for anything, Diane?'

'The actions taken in the initial stages of the inquiry were flawed,' said Fry impatiently. 'And the first mistake was sending DC Gavin Murfin.'

Exasperated, Cooper watched her go, walking down the corridor to greet her DCI from the Major Crime Unit. He shook his head in despair. He seemed to have spent a huge part of his life watching Diane Fry walk away.

'But hey,' he called. 'Diane a what about the victim you found at the Light House?'

Fry paused just for a moment, barely breaking her stride.

'Oh,' she said. 'Don't you worry about that, DS Cooper. The investigation is in good hands this time.'

Cooper nodded, reluctantly forced to accept her answer, and even the tone it had been delivered in.

But it was true what he'd said. There were very few murder cases that dragged on for months, let alone years. Usually the story was an obvious one. A body turned up, and a suspect presented himself on a plate. Charges were brought and the crime went down in the files as detected.

So there was a powerful temptation to use the logic in reverse. If a case like the Pearson inquiry had gone on for years, with no sign of a body, the chances were high that it wasn't a murder. Experience alone suggested that conclusion, and statistics backed it up.

So Gavin Murfin was far from alone in the opinion he'd formed. He might just be the only one prepared to voice it so openly right now.

DCI Alistair Mackenzie had arrived to take charge as senior investigating officer. He was a big man, over six feet tall and wide across the shoulders. A bit top-heavy perhaps, carrying too much weight above the belt to be fast on his feet. He had a shrewd stare, and a habit of tilting his head on one side when he looked at you.

Fry had begun to get used to him. She liked to know who she was dealing with, particularly if they could be influential in her career. She'd weighed him up when they'd worked together briefly after he was drafted into E Division for the Bridge End Farm inquiry. She didn't think he'd be difficult to handle, even though he'd once accused her of being a farm girl. That impression she could dispel pretty quickly.

'Everything all right, Diane?' asked Mackenzie.

'Yes, sir. Fine.'

'It's a bit strange to be back among your old colleagues so soon, I suppose?'

'It's not a problem.'

'That's what I like to hear.'

Fry knew he liked to hear that. She'd heard him say it before. The DCI wanted to think his officers could cope with anything. Finding yourself back among your former colleagues, the ones you'd tried so hard to escape from, was definitely nothing to worry about. It was no problem. No problem at all.

In a back street in the north of Edendale, a white Mitsubishi L200 pickup was parked at the kerb outside a semi-detached council house. People on the street pa.s.sed it without comment a barely noticing it, in fact, seeing just another workmen's vehicle. Repairs were being carried out on some of the homes on the Devonshire Estate. Vans, pickups and builder's skips had been a common sight in the street for months.

The paintwork of the Mitsubishi was spattered with tarry black specks, as if it had been parked under a sycamore tree. But that wasn't unusual either. The clouds of smoke drifting over the moors had been depositing sooty debris far and wide, ever since the first moorland fire had started in the Peak District six weeks ago.

So when two men appeared from one of the houses, no one took any notice of them. After they'd driven away, not a single pa.s.ser-by in the street could have said what the men looked like. No one could have had a guess at the make or registration number of the pickup. A few wouldn't even have been sure that it was white.

But that was always the way with memories. There was almost nothing you could rely on as being completely accurate.

7.

When Cooper entered the conference room, he found that his immediate boss, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, had been drafted in for the briefing to represent E Division. Hitchens had the unenviable task of summing up the efforts made in the original Pearson inquiry, and the spa.r.s.eness of the ultimate results.

As he listened with the other officers in the room, Cooper became aware for the first time of the complications of the inquiry. He'd been a DC on the division then, but too lowly in the hierarchy to grasp the overall picture. He recalled taking witness statements that had provided nothing of any value to the investigation, talking for hours to people who had no useful information to give. He'd been sent back to ask more and more questions, until he felt he was sc.r.a.ping the barrel and not producing a thing for his efforts.

So much was known about David and Trisha Pearson after all those months of careful investigation. Yet so little of it had proved to be of any use in finding them.

David Pearson, aged thirty-six, a senior adviser with Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. His wife Patricia Pearson, known as Trisha, aged thirty-three and working in public relations. A couple with no children, but a nice home in the Deepdene Wood area of Dorking, Surrey. They had spent a summer holiday in the Seych.e.l.les that year, but had chosen to take their Christmas break in the Peak District.

On the night they disappeared, the Pearsons had been to the George in Castleton for dinner. Mushrooms in peppercorn sauce, Bantry Bay mussels, honey-glazed ham shank. At least they'd eaten well on their last night, not to mention the two bottles of wine they'd drunk.

At the end of the meal they had set off to walk back to their holiday cottage on Brecks Farm, near the village of Peak Forest, a distance of about three miles from the George. And that was the last anyone saw or heard of them. Not a phone call, not a single confirmed sighting, not a shred of paper trail to follow.

Hitchens tried to summarise the main facts of the case as best he could. The DI had been putting on weight recently, and there were traces of grey in his hair. His manner suggested this was one inquiry that had contributed to his premature ageing.

'The Pearsons stayed late over their meal at the George, finishing the extra bottle of wine,' he said. 'They stayed much too late. By the time they left the restaurant, the snow had started. They were foolish to attempt to walk back to the cottage across the moor in those conditions. It wasn't surprising that they never made it. The mystery was what happened to their bodies. They were never found.'

'So what were the theories?' asked someone.

'There were several. But they boil down to two basic scenarios.'

Hitchens turned to use the whiteboard, perhaps hoping that it would draw the attention of all those eyes away from him for a few minutes. He wasn't a natural public speaker, which was a drawback in anyone with aspirations to become a senior officer. The TV crews would be arriving before long, and the DI wasn't the sort of man to make a good show in front of the cameras.

'Scenario number one,' he said, scrawling the phrase as he spoke. 'The Pearsons lost their way in the snowstorm and died somewhere on the moors before they reached their destination. In that case, we would normally have expected to find their bodies, which we didn't. So, what then? Well, they might have strayed so far off their route that they hit the flooded open-cast workings at Wolfstones Quarry, which were partly frozen over. Or they could have taken shelter in a cave, or the entrance to one of the old lead mines, and gone in too deep. They wouldn't be the first to go in and never come out. Some say that a party of cavers will turn up their bones one day.'

'Did we send divers into the quarry?'

'No, it wasn't feasible. The edges of the water were searched, but there was no indication at what point they might have gone in. It isn't a small body of water, you know. Without a reference point to start from, it was futile. You could tie up a team of divers for months without anything to show for it.'

DCI Mackenzie looked up at the pause. He was reading from a file, as if following the explanation by Hitchens and comparing it to the written record.

'There was another theory too, though,' he put in.

Hitchens sighed. 'Yes, this was the one that seemed to find most favour at the time. It was the easiest option, of course. Not that I'm saying it influenced the outcome of the inquiry exactly, but, you know ... it might have been a factor.'

'And this theory was ...?' prompted Mackenzie.

'Okay. Scenario number two.' Hitchens wrote it on the board. 'The theory that the Pearsons disappeared deliberately, did a bunk and changed their ident.i.ties. The suggestion was that they wanted people to a.s.sume they'd died an accidental death.'

'Why would they do that, sir?'

The voice came from the back of the room, and Hitchens scanned the faces, looking for the speaker. Cooper recognised it as Luke Irvine. He turned and saw Irvine sitting with Gavin Murfin on the back row. That could be an unholy alliance.

'When the police in Surrey looked into their backgrounds, they found evidence that David Pearson had been defrauding his employers, and their clients,' said Hitchens. 'It seems he'd been sifting funds out of client accounts for years, bit by bit. Some of it was in various savings accounts under his and Trisha's names, but the suspicion was that far more money had been taken that wasn't accounted for. It might only have existed in the form of cash.'

'So they staged their own disappearance and vanished with the cash to make a new life for themselves somewhere?' asked Irvine. 'Anywhere in particular?'

Hitchens shrugged uncomfortably. 'Spain, South America. Who knows?'

'There was the Canoe Man case a couple of years before.'

Becky Hurst. That was a voice Cooper didn't expect. He swivelled and caught Hurst's eye. She gave him a small smile, perhaps intended to be rea.s.suring.

'Yes, I'm sure we remember that,' said Hitchens.

'In that case, he almost got away with it,' pointed out Hurst. 'If he hadn't let the estate agent take his photograph when he bought the apartment in Panama, he might still be there. He didn't realise they were going to use it in their advertising on the internet. But the Pearsons ... they would have learned from what he did wrong.'

'If that's what they were planning.'

'How did they get away from the area, then?' asked Hurst. 'Was there any evidence they actually did go back to the cottage that night? Or did they have another vehicle kept handy somewhere?'

'We don't know.'

'I suppose they were smart enough to cover their tracks pretty well.'

Hitchens hesitated, and glanced at Mackenzie, who didn't react.

'This was only a theory,' he said. 'It was never established as a fact. The reality is, we don't know what happened. We need that information first.'

'Before we do what? Write them off as accidental deaths? Just another misadventure?'

'That would be up to the coroner.'

Diane Fry hadn't yet spoken. Cooper could see her sitting to one side, near the wall. Like Mackenzie, she had been slowly turning pages of the file. He knew Fry well enough to be aware that she had a terrific memory for details. The significant facts of the case would already be logged in her mind.

When she did speak, Fry chose her timing perfectly a not raising her voice, but inserting her question precisely into the momentary silence.

'Two people went missing in bad weather, and there was no proper search?'

Hitchens looked surprised.

'I wouldn't say that. It just wasn't feasible to mount a full search operation straight away, given the conditions. The helicopter couldn't fly, and it was pointless trying to get boots on the ground. We would only have been putting more lives at risk.'

'According to the incident log, it was five days before the search of the moor was completed.'

'We did our best. Buxton Mountain Rescue went up there. They did a sweep of the immediate area as soon as the snow stopped and they had daylight hours to work in. Cave rescue checked out the disused mine shafts. No signs of the missing people. There was nothing. But, yes a it was five days before we were satisfied that we'd done a thorough search.'

Cooper thought of the expanse of Oxlow Moor, and the neighbouring areas. Old Moor, Bradwell Moor. That was a lot of ground to cover.

'Did they check all the shafts?' he said.

Hitchens held out his hands in a half-apologetic gesture. 'Who even knows how many shafts exist out there? How can we say it was all?'

'And why didn't they get dogs in?'

'Oh, the wrong kind of snow on the roads. The wrong kind of wheels on the snow. You know how it goes.'

'Would you say the inquiry was ongoing?' asked Fry.

'Theoretically. It was never officially closed, but ...'

'But n.o.body has been putting any work into it, I suppose.'

'Not for a long time. There have been no new leads. What do you expect?'

DCI Mackenzie stood up as a set of photographs was handed out. A head shot of Trisha Pearson, cropped from a group picture. She was dressed up, perhaps for a wedding, with her hair pulled tightly back. In the photo, it looked to be a deep chestnut red, but it could be misleading. He wouldn't have said she was beautiful, but she was quite a striking woman, her face radiating health and confidence. She was laughing, and her eyes glittered as if life was just a bit of fun.

And then there was her husband, David Pearson. Clear blue eyes, and fair hair that was a bit longer than was fashionable these days. He reminded Cooper of a young Robert Redford from the 1970s. About the time of The Way We Were, perhaps.

'As we all know, time is of the essence at the beginning of any investigation,' said Mackenzie. 'We have the golden hour, when there's the best opportunity to make progress in an inquiry. Okay, we might push it further to the first twenty-four hours, or then the first forty-eight. But once you give up a crime scene, you start to lose things. Evidence becomes lost or tainted, and then it's worthless. In this case, we lost control of the crime scene more than two years ago.'