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Noble’s untouched drink. Taking the hint, Noble hastily drained his own cup before it could be sequestered.
    Back in his car, Brook didn’t turn towards Borrowash to follow Noble to the A52 and back to Derby. Instead he followed the road south towards open country and the parklands of Elvaston Castle. When the road turned sharply, Brook pulled his car to the kerb and hopped out. He did a quick search of the ground, both on the pavement and the road. In a patch of mud at the side of the road he saw a circular mark that might have been caused by a traffic cone being placed there. Helooked back up towards the river bridge but it had been obscured by the bend.
    Brook took out his basic mobile phone and switched it on. As usual, there were no messages – only DS Noble had the number. He spent several minutes trying to work out how the phone’s camera worked, then took a rather grainy picture of the mark in the road and, after storing it, turned the phone off again.
    He jumped back in the BMW and drove on into the leafy hamlet of Thulston, looking all the while for a stack of road-traffic cones at the side of the road. There were none. Leaving Thulston, he arrived at a T-junction. He looked left then right.
    ‘So which way did you go from here?’ A car horn sounded behind him so Brook swung right to pick up the ring road back into town.

Five

    A S THE MID-MORNING SUN STREAMED over his shoulder, Adam Rifkind pulled a hand through his tinted blond hair to move it away from his face and show his handsome features to best advantage. The thirty-five-year-old lecturer eyed the handful of bored-looking A-level students scattered around Derby College’s Media Suite, slumping in their chairs, exhausted from having to drag themselves out of bed at eleven o’clock in the morning for a seminar.
    Few returned eye-contact. Some stared glassy-eyed into space, while others nodded their heads to iPods and texted friends they would see in an hour – assuming they weren’t already in the same room.
    Though he prided himself on his youthful appearance and outlook, Rifkind experienced an unexpected stab of yearning for his own carefree youth. He knew most of his students would deny it, but they didn’t have a care in the world. No work, no marriage, no mortgage and no self-loathing – the bright futures they imagined for themselves were not yet behind them.
    Rifkind looked at his watch and stifled a yawn. It had been a tough academic year, and finding time for his novel wasgetting harder. Late nights didn’t help. At least that was one problem he’d finally solved.
    He surveyed the apathy before him – Derby’s finest preparing themselves for the outside world with a gentle snooze in Media Studies, the course which always attracted the oddest blend of students. Half of the group were padding out a vocational timetable of bricklaying and construction with the easiest-sounding course they could find and, unfortunately, no matter how much the prospectus emphasised the opposite, Media Studies would always appeal to those who thought it consisted entirely of watching films and TV.
    The bear-like Wilson Woodrow and his cronies were part of that crowd. Derby’s future builders, bricklayers and jobbing gardeners sat together on a row, riffing about whose parents had splashed out the most money for their offspring’s phone.
    But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The brightest members of his English Literature set made up the numbers and raised the level of debate whenever the need arose to discuss or, God forbid, write about what they had discovered during a particular unit of study.
    Russell Thomson – Rusty, for obvious reasons – was one. A bright boy, he sat alone and seemed in no need of the distractions of his peers as he looked saucer-eyed at the blank screen dominating a whole wall of the media suite. He was relatively new to the area and had moved with his mother from Wales, for what reason Rifkind didn’t know – though he had