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horse.
    ‘We’re not late,’ said Ben. ‘We don’t have an appointment to meet. Personally, I’d rather get home alive.’
    ‘Oh, am I driving too fast?’
    ‘Just a bit.’
    ‘Sorry. I forgot the KGB were in the car.’
    Matt had insisted on driving them down from Edendale that morning, because he desperately wanted to show off the new 4x4. In the visitor centre at the arboretum, the first thing Ben had noticed was a huge, carved police officer standing just inside the entrance. It must have been about twelve feet high, like a giant totem pole. A bobby complete with tunic and helmet, but made out of some sort of copper-coloured wood.
    After picking up a guide book, they had taken advantage of a break in the rain to cross Millennium Avenue to the plinth marking the start of The Beat, a long avenue of chestnuts. At the top of it was their destination, the Police Memorial Garden.
    As they walked down The Beat, it had seemed to Ben that the entire history of Britain’s armed forces must be recorded here, in one way or another. There was a memorial to the Rats of Tobruk, the Iraq and Afghanistan willows, and trees planted for the First Army Veterans. Everyone from the Kenya Police to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was remembered.
    The guide book said that chestnuts had been chosen for The Beat because the first police truncheons were made from their wood, chestnut being particularly durable – not to say hard, if you were cracked across the skull with it. Several of the trees had been grown from conkers taken from Drayton Manor, the home of Sir Robert Peel himself. Who knew that the founder of the police service had grown his own chestnut trees?
    Ben saw that Matt and Claire had reached the Memorial Garden before him. He supposed he must have been dawdling, subconsciously delaying the moment. Yet he’d promised himself he’d face up to everything he had to deal with from now on. Nothing was to be gained from shutting his memories away and slamming the lid down tight.
    Startled by a sound behind him in the office, Cooper looked around guiltily, remembering where he was. For the first time, he became aware of the atmosphere in the office, a little bit more relaxed than usual.
    ‘So where’s DS Fry?’ he asked Irvine.
    ‘Call-out to a body.’
    ‘Suspicious?’
    ‘Sounds like it.’
    ‘Have we got some details?’
    ‘Here somewhere,’ said Irvine.
    Cooper read quickly through a copy of the incident log. The Eden Valley Hunt? What were they doing with the hunt? Saboteurs? That could be tricky. Fry would be totally out of her depth.
    Without even bothering to sit down at his desk, he made a call to a familiar mobile number, but only got the recorded voicemail message. Irvine and Hurst watched him in amazement as he headed back out of the office.
    ‘Diane? I think you’ll need me. I’m on my way.’
    ‘Don’t forget,’ said the uniformed inspector, surveying the small group of officers he’d been allocated that morning, ‘it’s perfectly OK for them to be killed – as long as they’re shot.’
    Standing on a roadside near Birchlow, Diane Fry watched the inspector at work. Like a practised mind reader, she could tell what he was thinking. With luck, they wouldn’t be called on to do very much today, except watch.
    Officers nodded and shuffled their feet. They adjusted their high-vis jackets and tucked in the scarves they hoped would stop the rain from trickling down their necks. Fry thought some of them looked bored already. With luck, they’d be even more fed up before the morning was over. Their presence was supposed to be a deterrent, rather than anything else. It was policing as a spectator sport.
    The inspector’s name was Redfearn, a grey-haired veteran approaching his thirty years’ service, twelve of which had been spent in the Met before he returned to Derbyshire. Fry always wondered how he’d managed to maintain an unruffled, pragmatic manner all that time. It was great for dealing with