The Kill Call

that Branagh woman? She’s empire-building already.’
    Fry shrugged. ‘That’s the name of the game at senior management level.’
    ‘God save me from promotion, then.’
    ‘I don’t think you need God’s help, Gavin.’
    Murfin shrugged. ‘I notice you’ve been doing your best to keep out of her way. So I don’t suppose you’re exactly her number one fan, either.’
    Fry didn’t answer. She still had some instinct for diplomatic silence.
    Murfin pulled a face as he took in the fields and the distant stone walls.
    ‘Witnesses are going to be a bit thin on the ground, Diane.’
    ‘Yes.’ Fry eyed the sheep suspiciously. ‘There are plenty of those things, though.’
    Murfin nodded. ‘Sheep see a lot of things. You’d be surprised. One day, some clever bugger at Ripley will come up with a scheme for surveillance sheep. Imagine them wandering about with miniature video cameras strapped to their heads, like hundreds of little woolly PCSOs.’
    She tried to picture some of E Division’s community support officers with the faces of sheep. But her imagination failed her.
    ‘The mind boggles,’ she said.
    ‘A bit of boggling now and then never did anyone any harm, in my opinion.’
    Fry sighed. ‘Where is everyone, Gavin?’
    ‘Oh, am I not enough for you?’
    ‘What about Hurst, and Irvine? Where are they?’
    ‘Processing.’
    ‘Still?’
    ‘It’s the price of success.’
    Fry didn’t need to ask any more. Sunday had been E Division’s strike day. Not a total withdrawal of labour in protest at their latest pay deal, as some officers would have liked, but a pre-planned operation targeting known criminals. Search warrants had been executed in various parts of the division. Arrests were made for assault, theft, burglary, going equipped, supplying Class-A drugs, and money laundering. Officers had recovered drugs, cigarettes, and a large amount of cash. Not a bad haul for the day, and the chiefs were happy. Intelligence-led, proactive policing at its best. But the consequent mountain of paperwork was horrendous. There were so many stages that followed from an arrest – prisoner handling, interviews, witness statements, case-file preparation …
    ‘And Ben Cooper –’ said Murfin.
    ‘Yes, I know. He’s got himself a cushy job.’
    Murfin nodded casually at the body tent. Apart from the coat, about all that could be seen of the victim was a pair of muddy brown brogues that almost protruded from the tent into the rain.
    ‘We’ve got cars out trying to locate a vehicle,’ he said. ‘Reckon he must have got himself out here somehow, mustn’t he? He isn’t a hiker, not in those shoes.’
    ‘No luck so far?’
    ‘No, sorry.’
    ‘It’ll be parked up in a lay-by somewhere. Unless he was brought out here by someone else, of course.’
    ‘By his killer. Right.’
    Fry didn’t answer. One of the other downsides of policing a rural area was the lack of CCTV cameras. One of the many downsides. If she’d still been working back in Birmingham, or any other city, they’d have caught the victim’s car on half a dozen cameras as it passed from A to B, registered his number plate at a car-park entry barrier, and probably got a nice, clear shot of him walking along the pavement to wherever he’d been going. And then they could have scanned the CCTV footage for possible suspects, grabbed images of a face from the screen for identification.
    But out here? Unless their victim had been idiot enough to go more than ten miles an hour over the limit on a stretch of the A6 where the speed cameras were actually operating, his movements might as well have been invisible.
    ‘If someone else took his car,’ said Murfin, ‘they might have dumped it and torched it by now.’
    ‘If they have, it’ll turn up somewhere.’
    Murfin was wrestling with a decrepit Ordnance Survey map. Normally, he swore by his sat-nav, and never took driving instructions from anyone but TomTom, or his wife. That wasn’t much use when you’d left your car two fields away, though Fry knew that Wayne Abbott had a GPS device to map the location of a crime scene precisely.
    ‘We’re somewhere about here,’ said Murfin, stabbing a finger at a square of damp plastic. ‘Longstone Moor that way, the nearest village is Birchlow, over there. A few more villages across the valley. And a load of quarries all around us, some of them still in use. There’s a big mill down in that dip. Not textiles, it processes stone from the