Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t like her, do you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Faith, of course.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose she’s OK. She’s one of the group, isn’t she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, the way you reacted to her.’

  ‘I’m just not interested in gossip about someone’s boyfriend,’ he said, a bit too tetchily.

  ‘All right, all right. But there’s one funny thing, Nick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Faith since last year, and I only started working at St Anselm’s this term. How did she know I was teaching there?’

  ‘No idea.’

  They walked on in silence. The path entered water-company property before diverting at a second set of gates onto a steep cobbled track that led up onto White Brow. Below, Sophie could see the old water-treatment plant, which had been abandoned years ago. The building was extensive and had glass skylights running along its roofs. But it was rapidly falling into dilapidation, and many of the panes of glass were smashed.

  Beyond the dam, they walked along the edge of Kinder Reservoir, crossing a couple of streams. The dark slopes of Kinder itself loomed across the water. At one point, they reached a muddy section, where they had to divert and go round a gnarled hawthorn tree leaning almost horizontally towards the path. Darius sat astride a branch as if riding a horse and grinned at the rest of the group.

  ‘Take a photo,’ he said.

  Elsa obliged him, as she always did.

  Past the furthest arm of the reservoir, Sophie looked up at the mottled slopes of Kinder, with patches of purple heather still clinging to their flowers. She could already see low cloud sitting on Ashop Head, like steam rising from a giant cowpat.

  They could have worked their way up William Clough and crossed the rocky stream, but instead they veered off to the right and began to climb a steep, muddy path up towards the summit of Sandy Heys.

  The group paused just below the ridge for a breather, and to enjoy the spectacular view over the reservoir towards Chinley Head and the hills on the Cheshire border, with the lower slopes of Kinder a series of green humps below them until the darker woodland encroached. The High Peak looked bright and peaceful from here, with shafts of sunlight breaking through the cloud to bathe the landscape.

  Sophie turned back to the hill. Over the next rise, wisps of cloud swirled as if waiting for their arrival.

  ‘All right,’ called Darius. ‘Let’s keep going, folks.’

  Without a word, they stood up, adjusted their rucksacks and began to climb again. Within a few yards they were out of the sunlight. The rocks at the top of the slope were wet, the clumps of tussocky grass sodden underfoot.

  Striated lumps of stone lay along the edge of the plateau like unearthed graves, battered into eroded slabs. Deeper in, the outcrops had become gnarled and twisted into menacing shapes, protrusions bulging like eyes, sharp slivers of rock reaching towards the path like the beaks of prehistoric birds. Even in daylight, Kinder was populated by monsters. In the complete darkness of a High Peak night, primitive superstitions must have run riot here.

  Sophie felt uneasy. Her instincts told her hundreds of eyes were watching her from among those scattered stones.

  3

  Diane Fry had barely exchanged a word with Ben Cooper since the last time they’d met. Now, he saw her standing in the Athertons’ kitchen. Even in the unflattering scene suit and hood, he recognised the angle of her head and stiffness of her shoulders.

  Cooper watched her for a moment from the doorway. He was expecting an announcement at any time about her promotion to DI in Major Crime at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, but it hadn’t come yet. They would be back at the same rank again, the way they were when they first met as DCs in Edendale after Fry transferred from the West Midlands.

  He wanted to ask someone about the promotion, but there was no one he felt able to approach. It didn’t seem appropriate, though curiosity was consuming him.

  But something was going to happen. Cooper could feel it in the air, sense it in that unacknowledged network of signals that constantly flowed through a large organisation like the police force. You grew attuned to their sound after a while in the job. The change in tone of emails on a particular subject, the sudden absence of someone’s name on the list of recipients or the warnings to watch out for some kind of professional misconduct that he’d never even thought of but that someone, somewhere in the organisation must have committed.

  And then there were the ominous mutterings about spending reviews, which always led to doom-laden speculation about whose budget would be cut next. Sometimes the tone could be unintentionally disturbing. A flow of vague information created a hotbed for rumour.

  Of course, it was possible that Fry wouldn’t get the DI vacancy at EMSOU even if she was promoted. Like Cooper himself, she was still employed by Derbyshire Constabulary and was only on assignment to the regional unit. She could be redeployed to anywhere in the county, even back into uniform or to a desk job at Ripley.

  That thought made Cooper laugh. The image of Diane Fry sitting at a desk in an office at headquarters sending out memos and chairing meetings was just too incongruous.

  Just at that moment, Fry turned and saw him. Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ she said.

  ‘Good to see you too.’

  Her expression didn’t change. ‘I’m busy here, as you can see.’

  ‘I know. I came to ask if you needed any assistance. Your colleagues from EMSOU seem to have left you on your own.’

  ‘I can manage, thank you.’

  She made it sound as if he’d insulted her. Cooper shrugged inside his scene suit. Fry had always been stubborn and independent. But a refusal to accept help when it was offered seemed to Cooper like a weakness, not a strength.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Diane.’

  Fry suddenly softened under his gaze.

  ‘So how are you?’ she said.

  Well, that was almost human. She’d apparently remembered how to greet people she knew.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. Busy, as always. What about you? Anything new?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Cooper moved closer to where she was standing. The sleeves of their scene suits rustled against each other, a papery whisper in the silence of the Athertons’ kitchen.

  He looked down to see what Fry had been examining so closely when he came in. A book lay open on the kitchen table, a bloody thumbprint left clear and distinct on the edge of a page.

  ‘A recipe book?’ he said.

  ‘Mary Berry’s Fast Cakes,’ said Fry.

  ‘Is this what the argument was over?’

  Fry nodded. ‘Maybe they just weren’t fast enough,’ she said.

  Cooper leaned a little nearer to peer at the book. Pineapple upside-down cake. It sounded good. But it would never be made now.

  A crime scene examiner entered the kitchen and they backed away to allow him to dust for more fingerprints.

  ‘This should be an easy one anyway,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Maybe. Most of them are hard going.’

  Hard going. That was exactly how he thought of making conversation with Diane Fry. She gave so little, though he knew she had a lot more she could give if she wanted to. But that was the way she was, and she would probably never change. Fry would always be hard work.

  ‘Your colleagues from St Ann’s have abandoned you, then?’ said Cooper.

  ‘They aren’t in St Ann’s any more. They’ve moved somewhere else.’

  ‘Oh yes. Their secret base. The one everybody knows about.’

  ‘They have other priorities,’ said Fry.

  ‘Anything I should be aware of?’

  Fry didn’t bother to answer this time, and Cooper wasn’t surprised.

  The noise going on around them hardly mattered. They had nothing else to say to each other, and it might as well have been silence.r />
  Outside, Cooper looked up and saw the first signs of mist slowly rolling down from the hills above Edendale.

  The danger arrived slowly, settling on the higher slopes of Kinder Scout and creeping into the cloughs like tendrils of smoke. A blanket of it had descended from the sky, deadening the Peak District air. The rest of Derbyshire withdrew into the distance, beyond a dank grey wall. Sophie Pullen watched her companions vanish into a tide of invisible menace. They were entering fog.

  Sophie said nothing at first. The group had been winding its way across the plateau in single file, trying to stick to the narrow track. She was bringing up the rear, her feet squelching in her boots after she’d stepped onto boggy ground half a mile back. She was tired and uncomfortable, but she didn’t want to be the one who started complaining.

  So she followed on behind Liam Sharpe, who looked out of condition and was struggling on the uphill stretches. Sophie could see him panting and wiping a hand round the neck of his lime-green Craghopper as if he was sweating despite the cool breeze.

  Only the Warburtons were further back. Sam had trouble with the steep ascent because of his bad knee and had stopped several times with his wife, both of them leaning on their hiking poles.

  As usual, Sophie’s partner, Nick, was out at the front with their leader, Darius Roth. She could hear Darius’s voice drifting back to her, though she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Boasting about his knowledge of the moors probably. She saw Nick turn to the two young women immediately behind him as Darius gestured at the horizon. He didn’t look Sophie’s way at all. She scowled at the back of his head, covered in that ridiculous Russian Army cap. He hadn’t even noticed that she’d dropped back.

  The ascent of Sandy Heys had been arduous enough for some of the group. Sophie could see them already tiring and stopping to take drinks from their water bottles. Everyone was taking photographs on their mobile phones, except the Warburtons, who’d brought an actual digital camera.

  ‘Come on, folks, this way,’ said Darius.

  He was wearing an oilcloth safari fedora now, which he must have been carrying in one of the vast pockets of his shooting jacket.

  ‘Are you sure?’ called Sam Warburton.

  ‘Yes, we’re going to cross the plateau.’

  Nick leaned towards Sophie as she drew alongside him.

  ‘The original mass trespassers didn’t do that,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you’ve told us that before. It’s just some obsession of Darius’s.’

  ‘And we know Darius’s obsessions have to be respected.’

  The Gould brothers were striding ahead, looking for signs of the restoration project, Moors for the Future. Dams had been built to hold back water so that the peat wasn’t scoured away. Vegetation was growing back on that part of the plateau, they said. Sphagnum moss returning to the moor.

  But there was no vegetation here. Just the wet, black morass of treacherous bog and outcrops of bare rock.

  Sophie lowered her eyes to watch her footing on the uneven ground. When she looked up again, she suddenly couldn’t see how many people were walking ahead of her. Nick and Darius had disappeared in the fog, and so had the two young women. The Gould brothers, Duncan and Theo, were about to vanish too, marching shoulder to shoulder like soldiers bent under their backpacks.

  For some reason, Faith Matthew and her brother, Jonathan, had strayed off the path and were vague shapes away to the left. Jonathan’s outline was distinctive – very tall and thin, his shoulders slightly hunched, his hair long and untidy. He’d been singing quietly to himself, some song that his band were rehearsing. But his voice was muffled now by the fog.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Sophie.

  Liam looked over his shoulder. ‘What?’

  She realised he looked quite ill. His expression was distracted, and his forehead creased in puzzlement. He’d been thinking about something else and he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed the weather?’

  He stopped and gazed around as if he were seeing the plateau for the first time.

  ‘There’s a bit of cloud coming down,’ he said.

  ‘A bit? I can’t even make out Nick and the others now.’

  Liam hitched his rucksack up onto his shoulders.

  ‘We’d better catch up, then.’

  They redoubled their pace and within a couple of minutes they could see the leading group again. Jonathan was still wandering several yards away from the path, looking stooped and dejected, kicking irritably at a clump of coarse grass. His sister seemed to have rejoined the lead group. Her red hat bobbed among the figures around Darius.

  Darius turned and looked back, ignoring the chattering of the students for a few seconds, as if even he was concerned. But the moment passed and he smiled again, tossing back a lock of hair as he called to Jonathan, or perhaps to Faith. It was hard to tell.

  Ahead of them, the murk was getting thicker, swallowing whole rock formations, reducing visibility to no more than a few feet.

  ‘We ought to warn them,’ said Sophie.

  ‘They must have seen it for themselves by now,’ said Liam. ‘Darius doesn’t seem too bothered, though.’

  ‘When is Darius ever bothered about anything? He loves taking risks.’

  Sophie jumped in surprise as a motionless crowd of spectators seemed to emerge from the mist on her right. But these weren’t people. They were only the twisted rocks of the Kinder plateau, sculpted by the centuries into the shapes of monsters and demons.

  Half of the group might have been miles away but for disjointed fragments of conversation reaching her through a surge of fog.

  Sophie shook her head, feeling the moisture slide across her face and drip from her hair, and shivered at the first stab of a damp chill. Even the faintest warmth of the October sun had been left far behind now, blotted out by that dense grey blanket.

  It was only later that Sophie heard the noises and saw the lights, and the monstrous figure on the hillside that she would never forget. And then the first cries of pain came out of the fog. And finally, she was there when death reduced their party from thirteen to twelve.

  But Sophie Pullen had been the first to see the danger that day.

  At least, that was what she told everyone afterwards.

  4

  Patiently Diane Fry waited until long after Ben Cooper had left the crime scene and driven out of Haddon Close. She watched from the window of the Athertons’ sitting room as Cooper’s red Toyota disappeared round the corner on its way back to the local police station in Edendale’s West Street.

  Then Fry got out of the town as quickly as she could. She found it hard to believe that she’d once lived in this backwater. Yes, Edendale was changing, but very slowly. In a few decades’ time, it might reach the twenty-first century. There were still villages around the Eden Valley where you couldn’t get a mobile-phone signal, where the erratic broadband connection was slower than one megabit per second at best. There were Third World countries with better facilities than that.

  Yet each year a large proportion of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale. Even today, in late October, the market square was choked by the volume of traffic, either passing through or looking for parking spaces. Most of them clustered by the bridge over the River Eden or strolled along steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick I’th Tor. Pubs and tearooms and craft shops jostled for space in the alleys, attracted by the influx of tourists. Fry had seen enough of them during her time in Edendale.

  Beyond the town centre, the road climbed steadily out of the valley. Residential streets spiralled up the hillsides, with houses lining narrow, winding lanes that twisted and turned to follow the undulating landscape.

  And that was another problem. The older houses hadn’t been built for people who owned cars and as a result vehicles were parked nose to tail along the kerb, making driving on those lanes like tackling an obstacle course.


  On the edge of Edendale, she passed a series of small council estates, which petered out into farmland. In some places, it was difficult to see where the town became country, with fields full of sheep lying side by side with unused farm buildings converted into designer homes. For now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of the surrounding hills. But eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of land and the town would continue to spread. Fry hoped she wouldn’t be around to see it.

  After half an hour, she left the gathering mist behind her as the hills began to level out. She was on the Flying Mile, a flat, straight stretch of the A632 between Chesterfield and Matlock, when Fry took a call from her boss at the Major Crime Unit, DCI Alistair Mackenzie.

  ‘DS Fry?’ he said. ‘Are you on your way back from Derbyshire?’

  ‘I’m en route now. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’

  He grunted, and she pictured Mackenzie checking his watch. It was an automatic reaction, something he always did when anybody mentioned an interval of time, as if he had to confirm for himself that thirty minutes was a genuine measurement on the clock. Some of the staff at EMSOU called him the Time Lord, though only ever behind his back, of course.

  ‘We’ll wait for you,’ he said.

  ‘Wait for me why?’ said Fry. ‘What’s happening, sir?’

  ‘We’ve got an operation on this afternoon. We’re all ready to go, but I want you to be part of it.’

  Fry felt her foot press down on the accelerator instinctively.

  ‘I’ll be there in twenty.’

  ‘Great stuff.’

  He didn’t even pause to look at his watch this time, just ended the call. There would probably be a room full of officers somewhere kicking their heels and waiting for him to give the word.

  Feeling the catch of excitement in her chest, Fry swung the Audi out of Matlock and up the hill through Tansley towards the motorway. The Major Crime Unit had moved from its offices at St Ann’s Police Station in Nottingham, and now she had to drive to the northern outskirts of the city every morning to reach the new EMSOU base just off junction 27 of the M1.