Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  As usual, Fry called at the BP service station on Clifton Lane and bought a few supplies at the Spar shop, along with a cappuccino. Something told her she would need to stay alert today. Opposite the service station was a piece of rough ground used as a car park for the Trent River Walk. She pulled off the road to drink her coffee safely.

  She’d hardly slept last night. People talked about your whole life flashing in front of you just before you died. She’d always imagined that would be horrible. She had too many incidents in her life that she might regret, if she ever had to stop and think about them. Most of the time, she managed to push them to the back of her mind, bury them in the deepest parts of her subconscious, where they never troubled her.

  But the summons to Ripley had changed that. It had forced her to review the last few years of her life, to work out what in particular Professional Standards might want to interview her about. Of course, they might want to speak to her as a witness in someone else’s disciplinary hearing. So why had her subconscious spent all last night pulling out incident after incident from her career for her to worry about?

  Fry took a sip of her coffee as she watched the traffic passing along Clifton Lane towards the bridge. She had to accept the fact that she’d lived a charmed life in some ways. She’d got away with things she shouldn’t have done, strictly speaking. But no one had reported her. Perhaps it had given her a false sense of security. That was fatal.

  Well, it seemed likely that someone had reported her now, made a complaint about her behaviour. A member of the public, or a fellow officer?

  The second was far worse. The public made complaints against police officers all the time, but most of them were trivial or malicious, and very few of them were ever followed through to the stage of a disciplinary hearing. Police officers, on the other hand, were reluctant to blow the whistle on their colleagues. It was a world of ‘us and them’ out there. No one wanted to be a grass. So it had to be something serious.

  In her head, Fry ran through a list of the people she might have offended or antagonised. After a moment, she realised it was pointless. An opposite list would be a lot shorter.

  She drained her coffee and poked at the junk mail on the seat, as if something there might give her a clue. So what was it to be? Misconduct or gross misconduct? Honesty, confidentiality or fitness for work? Not a criminal offence at least or she would already have been arrested, wouldn’t she?

  Or would she? She wasn’t entirely sure how the PSD operated. Perhaps they were waiting to arrest her when she arrived at Ripley. So maybe she should make a run for it and try to disappear, like any other criminal?

  She laughed to herself. As if there was any other option but to see it through.

  Fry spotted a litter bin at the edge of the car park. She gathered her junk mail together and took it with her empty coffee cup to dispose of. If only she could gather up the debris of her past life and dispose of it in the same manner.

  But that wasn’t the way life worked, was it? Your actions had a habit of catching up with you.

  9

  A damp road, damp grass, damp sheep, a stone wall dripping with moisture. As Ben Cooper headed out of Edendale towards Hayfield, he could already see the mist hanging low over the moors and drifting into the valleys. Dark copses stood out against the grey background, a series of hills getting fainter and fainter into the distance.

  As he left the outskirts of the town behind, the stone slates of the roofs gradually petered out along the River Eden, the deep green of the Eden Forest swarming along the opposite hillside. Beyond the limestone hills and a patchwork of fields divided by drystone walls lay the brooding, desolate moors of the Dark Peak, rising to the plateau of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District.

  The route took him westwards through a series of White Peak villages. Abney, Bradwell, Hucklow, Tideswell. To Cooper, they were all places steeped in history and crime.

  Turning onto the A623, he hit the A6 near Chapel-en-le-Frith and headed north over Chinley Head. He could have driven to Castleton and crossed the Winnats Pass to reach the same point, but even in October the area was likely to be busy with tourists visiting the show caves and Blue John mines.

  Only ten miles north of Buxton, Hayfield was an old village, once a staging post on the packhorse route across the Pennines from Cheshire to Yorkshire. The settlement had grown with the arrival of cotton and the railways until it straggled down the valley into the basin of the River Sett.

  North-east of the village lay a reservoir that controlled the flow of the River Kinder, avoiding the risk of flooding that had previously once been a serious problem in Hayfield, necessitating raising the height of the main street. The church had famously been flooded, causing corpses to rise up from their graves.

  These days, it was the gateway to the west side of Kinder. An increasing number of residents were people who’d moved from Manchester and Stockport seeking a better quality of life. Hayfield was undergoing gentrification.

  There was a big car park on the western side of the village, next to a now deserted visitor centre at the start of the Sett Valley Trail. But that side was mostly residential. The shops and pubs were on the eastern side, where the streets were choked with parked cars. At every corner, he found vehicles coming at him on the wrong side of the road.

  A narrow road leading off to the side of the Royal Hotel passed another pub, the Sportsman, before arriving at Bowden Bridge quarry, the starting point for the famous Mass Trespass. From here, the view extended over the valley of the Sett to the high plateau of Kinder Scout, stretching across the eastern horizon like an enormous beached whale. What looked like a weeping wound in the whale’s flank was Kinder Downfall.

  National Trust rangers had opened an access onto the moor for the police. Cooper met up with Carol Villiers and they got a ride up the hill in a Land Rover. They would have to walk the rest of the way when they came within reach of Kinder Gates and the Sandy Heys cliffs.

  Villiers looked at him as they clambered into the back of the Land Rover.

  ‘It is an unexplained death,’ she said. ‘But probably an accident.’

  ‘We can’t say that yet.’

  Cooper stared out of the window at the landscape, wondering if it was Kinder itself that was raising the hackles of his suspicion.

  ‘What do we know about the victim so far?’ he said.

  ‘Faith Matthew,’ said Villiers. ‘She was a nurse. Contracted to an agency, so she worked in different locations, both NHS and private hospitals. She has an address in Market Street, Hayfield. Aged thirty, unmarried, but there’s a boyfriend in the picture, by the name of Greg Barrett. He’s an electrician, runs his own business in the Hayfield and New Mills area.’

  ‘Any family?’

  ‘Not locally. Her parents live in Manchester. They’re due in Hayfield today, though. And there’s a younger brother, Jonathan, who was also on the walk yesterday. Luke is working on getting some information on the rest of the group. The only other thing we know is that Miss Matthew drove a silver Honda Jazz, which has been recovered from the car park at Bowden Bridge quarry.’

  ‘Good.’

  When they got out of the Land Rover, Cooper could see the fog was still lingering at this height. In places it was dense enough to reduce visibility. It also changed the sound of the voices he could hear, their tones distorted as if the upper range of human vocal chords had been suppressed.

  ‘High-pitched sounds are muffled by fog,’ said Villiers when he mentioned it. ‘That’s why foghorns have such a low pitch, to carry a long distance.’

  ‘Something to do with the vibration of air on water molecules, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Beyond the covering of fog, Kinder was basically a massive bog. No one with any sense would come walking here after a period of heavy rain. Well . . . Cooper mentally corrected himself. No one with the smallest bit of local knowledge.

  In places, the peat layer was fifteen feet thick. But eros
ion had already set in five millennia ago. Higher rainfall had worn deep gulleys into a pattern of meandering groughs, cutting right through to the bedrock. The process had been accelerated by acid rain from the nearby industrial cities. Now a trig point on Kinder stood a couple of metres clear of the eroded surface around it.

  Cooper could almost feel the connection with the past through the soles of his boots on the muddy track. Fifteen feet represented a lot of the world’s history. You could walk along the groughs and pass between walls of peat representing ten thousand years of the Earth’s formation. It was like walking in a channel dug directly through time.

  These moors had been laid down after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Within that black, sodden mass lay the remains of dead trees, grass, fungi, insects and animal carcasses, all preserved by the acidic conditions and a lack of oxygen. Occasionally, human remains were unearthed from a bog, shrivelled but intact, dried like a pickled walnut.

  On the surface lurked dark gritstone outcrops, weather-beaten rocks sculpted into shapes the human eye struggled to make sense of. They’d been formed by exposure to ice, rain and wind over lengths of time he couldn’t even imagine. They stood here on Kinder like reminders of the prehistoric past. Nothing that happened in the last few centuries had even touched them.

  Ahead, Cooper could see uniformed officers and crime scene examiners.

  ‘That’s the top of the Downfall,’ said Villiers.

  Kinder Downfall flowed west over the gritstone cliffs at the edge of the plateau, barely a trickle in summer but impressive when it was in full spate. With a strong westerly wind, the water was blown back on itself, and the resulting cloud of spray could be seen from as far away as Stockport. If you were close to the Downfall, you could get wet from above and below at the same time. In cold winters the water could freeze against the rock, creating vertical sheets of ice that hung in the air like organ pipes, providing a challenge for climbers with their axes, ropes and crampons.

  No wonder this was regarded as a magical place. Even on the sunniest day, that cliff of shattered rock looked like the edge of the world. He’d stood at the top many times and looked down over the valley, his eye attracted by the glint of light off a pool of water below – the legendary Mermaid’s Pool.

  The village of Kinder once lay on the side of the mountain. Now there was only a mythical nymph who came to bathe in the Mermaid’s Pool. If you met her, she would either make you immortal or drag you to the bottom of the pool and drown you. The water was said to be so deep that it connected to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Kinder was an awfully long way from the sea. But a fact like that didn’t get in a storyteller’s way. Inconvenient reality was never a barrier to the creation of a legend.

  At the Downfall, the forensic team had cordoned off the approach to the edge of a massive gritstone slab that jutted out into space over the ravine. Dead Woman’s Drop. There must be an old story to account for the name, some incident from the distant past that Cooper was unaware of.

  Outdoor crime scenes often caused problems for officers trying to tape off the scene. Sometimes they could use a tree or a bush, or a gate or a wall. Here on Kinder, there were none of those things. There weren’t any trees in sight across the whole of the plateau. Strong winds and rain could be problems too. They would be struggling to get tents up in this exposed position. The only answer was to work as quickly as possible and hope for the best.

  Stepping plates also looked a bit futile. But Cooper followed the designated route to the edge and looked down, experiencing a momentary wave of vertigo at the sudden shift in perspective. A splash of bright red seemed to leap at him out of the fog, and he almost ducked at the sensation of something hurtling towards him.

  But it was an illusion. That splash of red wasn’t moving. It was Faith Matthew’s body, lying spreadeagled at the foot of the Downfall, broken on the jagged and unforgiving rock. She’d fallen fifty feet from a vertical drop into the ravine. Her red jacket was spread out around her as if it had ballooned like a parachute as she fell. Her left arm and leg were thrown out at an odd angle, the bones shattered by the impact on the rock. Her right arm and leg were concealed beneath her body.

  Cooper frowned. That seemed an odd way to fall. The natural instinct when you felt yourself falling face forward was to throw both your arms out to protect yourself. This looked as though Faith had been twisting her body as she fell, like a cat adjusting its position in mid-air. Could she have bounced off the side of the Downfall on the way down?

  He kneeled and peered cautiously over the edge. No, the drop was sheer. There was nothing Faith could have hit before she impacted on the rock where she lay.

  Thoughtfully, Cooper stood up and brushed off his knees. Damp had soaked into his trousers just in those few seconds of contact with the surface of the gritstone.

  He walked back to the cordon and examined the spot Faith Matthew had fallen from. A CSI was crouched over the ground with a camera.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Cooper called.

  ‘A few shoe marks in a layer of mud. They’re not very clear.’

  ‘Just one set of boots? Or more?’

  ‘Just one, so far as we can tell.’

  Cooper pointed at a print, set at a different angle to the others.

  ‘Have you recorded that one?’

  ‘Of course. Why?’

  ‘I’d like someone to focus on analysing which direction that print is facing.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Cooper took another look at the corpse. It glittered with moisture, and the gritstone was dark and wet all around it. A few trickles of water still dripped from the overhang onto the body. Faith’s hat had fallen a few yards away and teetered on the brink of the waterfall.

  But he couldn’t see Faith Matthew’s face from here. And that was what he needed most of all.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he called Chloe Young’s number at the hospital in Edendale.

  ‘Ben? What’s up?’ she said.

  ‘I’d like you to take a look at a body in situ,’ he said. ‘Are you free?’

  ‘Now? Yes, OK, if you want my opinion. Where is it?’

  Cooper told her.

  ‘Oh my goodness. I’d better make sure I’ve got the right gear.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll have something that will do. I’ll get someone to watch out for you and drive you up onto the moor.’

  ‘Wait . . . Is this the missing hiker?’ said Young.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Not an accident, then? She was pushed?’

  ‘That,’ said Cooper, ‘is what I need your opinion on.’

  10

  Detective Constable Luke Irvine looked as though he felt out of place in the Bowden Bridge car park, surrounded by the cars of walkers getting ready for an afternoon in the hills. He joined Ben Cooper and Carol Villiers in Cooper’s car, leaned over from the back seat and flipped open his notebook.

  ‘So,’ said Irvine. ‘This is what I’ve got so far. They were a party of thirteen hikers in total. They call themselves the New Trespassers Walking Club. I have no idea why.’

  Cooper looked up at the looming mass of Kinder Scout. ‘Well, I think I might have a good idea. You don’t know the history of Kinder, Luke?’

  Irvine shrugged. ‘It’s just a hill, isn’t it? And not a very interesting one, if you ask me. It’s too flat. We have better-looking hills in Yorkshire.’

  ‘It’s over two thousand feet, so strictly speaking it qualifies as a mountain.’

  ‘It’s still kind of dull.’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not dull at all.’

  Cooper had been on Kinder Scout many times over the years. He’d struggled up and down its slopes and walked across the plateau at all seasons of the year, in all kinds of weather. There had been times when he could hardly move because of the heavy peat clinging to his boots, when every step he took was an enormous effort against the grip of the sticky morass, as if Kinder was the su
rface of an alien planet with twice the mass of Earth.

  And there had been walks in the summer, when the top few inches were dry and bouncy like a trampoline, turning his steps into an exhilarating leap as the pull of gravity suddenly halved.

  At any time, stepping out onto Kinder was leaving the real world behind. And yes, there had been times when the weather changed while he was on the mountain. The cloud level came down, a mist or fog rolled in, snow began to fall, or the light began to fail. Then you weren’t just in an alien landscape. You were in great danger.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ said Cooper. ‘They named themselves after the Kinder Mass Trespass.’

  ‘The what?’

  Cooper tapped his steering wheel impatiently.

  ‘The Mass Trespass. It was in 1932.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Irvine. ‘Before my time.’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Cooper. ‘But still . . .’

  The Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout had been a famous act of civil disobedience that had given impetus to the campaign for access to the moors and eventually led to the Peak District becoming Britain’s first national park.

  That day, a large party of ramblers had clashed violently with gamekeepers and bailiffs employed by local landowners. Several had been arrested and sent to prison. They’d become martyrs in a symbolic battle between the working classes and wealthy landowners, and Kinder Scout had been their battleground. It was a story that was taught to schoolchildren in Derbyshire, celebrated in books and TV programmes, marked by commemorative plaques.

  Cooper had seen photographs of the Mass Trespass, showing troops of laughing young men with Brylcreemed hair, wearing tweed jackets and shorts, like a bunch of 1930s schoolboys on an outing.

  ‘The trespass was eighty-six years ago,’ said Villiers.

  ‘But it never lost its symbolism, did it? It was all about the exercise of freedom, and resistance to the status quo.’

  ‘It sounds like something I ought to know about,’ said Irvine.

  ‘Yes, you should.’ Cooper looked at him, surprised at Irvine’s ignorance on the subject. ‘Some time. So who are the leaders of this walking group?’