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pictures she’d taken.’
    ‘Suppose the son drove and the daughter took the pictures?’
    ‘Quite a conspiracy.’
    ‘Stranger things have happened.’
    ‘You’re right. They could have been lying, but we couldn’t break their stories.’
    ‘Were the children suspects?’
    ‘We ruled nobody in and nobody out. Warren wasn’t exactly a caring father. But if there’d been sexual abuse, incest, whatever, nobody was admitting it. Kirsty constantly broke down in tears, but she was a kid and her dad had been murdered, so it wasn’t a surprise. We never got much sense out of her. When Sam was interviewed, he answered in sullen monosyllables. Chip off the old block. He’d felt the back of Warren’s hand more than once, eventhough he’d left school and was as big as his father. I could picture him retaliating with a punch or a kicking. But murder? We had nothing to pin on him.’
    ‘All the data tells us that patricide is rare,’ Linz said.
    ‘Sad epitaph for the tombstone,’ Hannah said. ‘Everyone wanted me dead.’
    ‘One more thing. Whoever killed Warren Howe pushed him into the trench he’d excavated and threw a bit of sacking and a few rose petals over him.’
    A picture formed in Hannah’s mind, as dark as if painted by Cézanne in his bleakest mood. The torn and blood-soaked corpse, dumped in the damp ground.
    ‘To my mind,’ Nick said, ‘that was Warren Howe’s epitaph. He dug his own grave .’

Chapter Three
    The gathering dusk had become a favourite time for Daniel. He wandered outside the cottage and savoured the scent of old roses, and the colours mingling on the fell, tints of blue and indigo deepening as the sky grew dark. The slopes looked so rich and sensuous that if he could only brush them with his fingertips, it would be like touching velvet.
    The evening air was chill after the heat of the day, but he stoked the cast-iron chiminea and smelled the logs as they burned. A fox on the prowl rustled in the bracken, a trio of brown-breasted mallards squealed and flapped as they rose from the tarn and fled over the trees. But whatever the tourist brochures said, Brackdale wasn’t a wholly peaceful place. Years back, a young man who lived at Tarn Cottage, Barrie Gilpin, had been suspected of killing a woman whose body was laid out on the Sacrifice Stone.
    Thank God, that was done with. Sitting down on an upturned crate between the potted lavenders, he shut his eyes. It awed him that the bedrock of the Lake District wasas old as any in the world. The constancy of the lakes and mountains satisfied a need within him. Ever since his father had torn their family apart, he’d burned with desire to belong, to feel complete. At last he’d found a place he wanted to become part of.
    He would love Louise to see the Lakes as he saw them. Splitting up with Rodney might be the making of her. Like a modern counterpart of a tightly corseted Victorian, she needed to unbutton herself, learn the art of relaxation. The last time they’d spoken, she’d made it clear that for Daniel to downshift to the Lakes at the precise moment his career was taking off was madness.
    But he’d needed to escape. For as long as he could remember – certainly since his father abandoned the family – Daniel had worked. And worked and worked. After school studies, academic research. Each year he set new goals, more demanding than the last. He didn’t care about the money, although he earned a lot of it. What mattered was to break new ground. Soon everyone wanted a piece of him. Success made him a minor celebrity, people he didn’t know envied him and he’d overheard someone in the Senior Common Room referring to him as The Lucky Kind. Always another project, always another offer he could not refuse. No time to think, no time to relax, but that didn’t matter because he was doing so well and you had to make the most of every opportunity and, and, and, and…
    And he’d been away when his father died and he’d missed the