‘Oh, that crime scene.’
‘Could you take me there this weekend?’
‘Ben, I can’t just do that. I mean, what would Diane Fry say?’
‘Make it Sunday,’ said Cooper. ‘She won’t be around then. There’ll just be a scene guard, maybe some forensics staff at most.’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘You’re the only one I can rely on, Carol,’ he said.
She was silent for a moment. He heard laughter, a few bars of music, the faint chink of glasses. At one time, he would have longed to be there himself in the bar, chatting and drinking with a crowd of friends. Right now, the thought made him nervous. The idea of that sea of curious faces staring at him was intolerable. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He felt the tremor beginning in his hands, the irritation burning at the back of his throat. In another second, he would have to put the phone down and forget the whole thing.
‘You’ll get me in real bother, you know,’ said Villiers.
‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said.
He heard her sigh. ‘It had better be, Ben. It had better be.’
That night, Ben Cooper sat above Josh Lane’s home at Derwent Park. He was watching the colour of the stone in the quarry change from grey to black as clouds covered the stars. It was as if someone had turned the lights off in the Peak District, plunging the valley into darkness. The air felt chilly. And he could see from the sky in the west that another deluge was on its way.
Cooper settled down under a hawthorn tree to watch. A few cars arrived, people greeted each other, but no one came near Josh Lane. Music played somewhere, a woman laughed, a phone rang. But Lane’s curtains remained drawn, and his door closed.
As midnight approached, it began to rain again. Cooper unfolded his waxed coat, pulled it on and drew up the hood, letting the raindrops drum on the fabric. A sheep approached the tree, stared at him with wild eyes, then moved on to the next shelter, bleating its annoyance.
Sitting here, the feeling of freedom was invigorating. Tomorrow, Diane Fry would be up to her neck in prioritisation and resource allocation. But he would still be free. It was only when he went to sleep that reality came crashing into his head, the reek of smoke and the scorch of flames, the images of a roaring inferno.
His nightmares did change sometimes. There were nights when he dreamed he was choking on a tube, unable to breathe normally because of the plastic cylinder thrust down his throat. He would wake up thrashing in his bed, wanting to pull the tube out to get air into his painful, burning lungs.
But of course, that had really happened to him, so perhaps it couldn’t be called a nightmare at all. The distinction between a dream world and the quagmire of distorted memories was a difficult one to make. He hadn’t yet learned to detect the dividing line, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. As a result, he never quite knew which world he was in.
Intubation, they’d called it in the hospital. Necessary because he was showing symptoms of upper airway problems. A tube had to be inserted in his throat to keep his airway from closing due to swelling, the result of heat damage to the tissues of the respiratory tract. It was just one of the major consequences of smoke inhalation. Smoke also blocked the intake of oxygen to the lungs and raised carbon monoxide levels, reducing the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues. Inhalation of smoke particles and chemicals like carbon monoxide and cyanide caused direct irritation of the lung. But at least smoke cooled rapidly once it was inhaled and heat damage was limited to the tissues of the mouth and upper throat.
His latest test results at the hospital showed that there was still a significant decline in his PEF, his peak expiratory flow. Permanent respiratory tract damage would be bad news. It could even see him leaving the police service completely. Those memories weren’t something he could put behind him and forget, as many people thought. Because they didn’t just belong to the past. They affected his present, and would have an impact on his future too.
No, it wasn’t possible to keep those memories out. Far from it. Sometimes he felt as though they were tearing through the walls, trying to get inside his head.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Saturday
There was free parking near Ravenscar station. That was hardly ever the case inside the national park. As he headed up the path, Cooper passed a few people walking their dogs back to the car park. The figure ahead of him was moving slowly, so he stopped to look down the slope at the railway line.
Ravenscar station was a grand name for what was basically a platform a few yards long, where a spur stopped at the buffers to let off passengers for the National Stone Centre and the High Peak Trail. This had never served as a station in the days of British Rail or its successors. It had been built in the middle of abandoned quarries by a group of enthusiasts who wanted to run restored steam locomotives up the incline from Wirksworth. There was only a summer service on the Ravenscar line. In winter it would be dead here, apart from the occasional maintenance team perhaps.
A tarmac freight truck stood on rails by the exit from the station, still loaded with stone, though brambles were growing over it now. The hoppers above it would have tipped the stone in from the quarry.
They were moving again. Cooper began to walk up the steep incline, passing waymarks for the Stone Centre. A hum in the trees above reminded him of the industrial centre close by. There was wet limestone dust under his feet, masses of tall buddleia in flower on the slopes, butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom over his head. They would disappear when it rained again.
A bridge crossed the track at a sharp angle, and he passed the remains of a large lime kiln buttressed like the walls of a castle. The entrances to the kiln had been sealed up with breeze block, but of course someone had knocked holes into the bottom sections. A glimpse inside suggested that the alcoves had been used, probably by rough sleepers, certainly for smoking cigarettes and drinking cider.
He slipped in a patch of mud. An off-roader had been through here and churned up the track. When the winter came, and these beeches and sycamores shed their leaves, it would be impossible to use this route past the lime kiln.
Lane had disappeared round a bend at the top of the slope. Cooper put on a bit more speed. He still didn’t cope well with hills. His lungs burned whenever his breathing became hard. But it was appropriate, in a way. It was a constant physical reminder of the reasons why he was here.
At the top, he emerged in an old quarry. There were six of them within the site of the National Stone Centre, so he’d probably reached his destination. Limestone quarrying had created an amphitheatre here, with an almost level floor and sheer rock faces on three sides. Dozens of jackdaws circled overhead, or perched in the trees struggling to maintain a foothold on the upper ledges.
Cooper had been here on a school outing not long after the centre opened. Groups were allowed to go gem panning, sifting through buckets of wet sand to find interesting semi-precious stones, which they were allowed to take home. A lot of kids loved that. But the young Ben Cooper couldn’t help being disappointed by how obvious it was that the bits of stone had been planted for children to find. He found the genuine bits of geology on the site far more interesting.
There were so many fossils underfoot in the rocks as he walked along the paths that he’d been aware of walking on history here, more than anywhere else he knew. In his imagination, he was moving through exotic sea creatures, touching a coral reef, paddling on the floor of an ancient lagoon. He was just three hundred million years too late for his tropical holiday.
He could see Josh Lane clearly now. He was dressed in a black anorak and blue denims, and his head was bare, showing a gleam of gelled hair. At least his boots must be practical. Cooper noticed that he’d come to a halt by a picnic area. It had been built by young people serving community sentences, part of a system called restorative justice. It was supposed to be based on the the concept of ‘closing the circle’, a North American Indian belief that a circle was broken when a crime w
as committed in a community. Restoration could only be achieved when the offender made amends to the community and closed the circle.
Here, the amends to the community consisted of a circle of stone seats, with relief carvings depicting the prehistoric sea creatures which had once lived here. The reef they’d lived on was just behind him, exposed by centuries of quarrying.
Cooper looked round, and stepped behind a stretch of stone wall. In fact, it wasn’t just any wall, but the Millennium Wall, a series of dry-stone sections representing a range of styles from all over the UK. Round boulders from Galloway, tight wedges from Caithness, a stone-faced earth wall from Wales that looked like a length snipped from Offa’s Dyke.
From Lane’s stance, it looked almost as though he was aware of being watched. His interest in the restorative justice project seemed to Cooper to be an act of defiance, a provocative gesture. Lane was symbolically putting two fingers up, just as he had been all these months. Could that really just be in his imagination?
Right in front of Cooper’s face as he ducked down was the Derbyshire section, built in two contrasting styles – the irregular fractures of limestone and the regular coursing of gritstone. Even in the construction of its walls, the Peak District was divided: rolling farmland and bleak peat moor, picturesque villages and the empty black wastes. The White Peak and the Dark Peak. Good and evil. Their presence in the landscape had never been so obvious to Cooper as he crouched behind that wall.
The frustration was beginning to get difficult to tolerate.
‘Move on, move on,’ he muttered to himself.
As if he’d heard from this distance, Lane began to walk up the slope again. Through the trees above, Cooper glimpsed the blue glass of the Discovery Centre. In front of the entrance was a set of wide steps, where he’d once walked up through the different eras of stone, right up to the final step made of Antrim basalt, a mere sixty million years old. He assumed that Josh Lane was going into the café at the Discovery Centre. He would probably sit and have a coffee, maybe a sandwich.
Cooper sat down to wait. The High Peak Trail ran over the bridge just before the car park and he could hear people chatting as they passed overhead. Just beyond a small lime kiln there had once been a small settlement of half a dozen cottages. The Coal Hills hamlet. With that kiln smoking all day and all night, it must have been a nightmarish place to live in. But the hamlet had been abandoned and demolished in the 1930s – not because of the smoke, but when the water supply in this limestone area became unreliable. All that remained now were a few heaps of tumbled stones covered in moss.
Nearer to the road was the Derbyshire Eco Centre, where even the bike shed had solar panels. He saw more and more solar panels these days. Wind turbines too – sometimes just the odd one running a small-scale rural enterprise, but in other locations an entire wind farm, the turbine blades turning slowly, some even stopped.
There was no wind this summer, let alone any sun. Soon there’d be talk of harnessing water power to plug the gap in the country’s energy supply. Cooper had heard there was already a water turbine operating down in Alport, a derelict watermill converted to harness the flow of the River Bradford. Surely that was a better idea? It reused an existing site, and a water turbine was always hidden away in a valley. Not like these giant structures on the hillsides, visible for miles. They made him think of Don Quixote, famous for his futile tilting at windmills in the cause of justice. But at least he’d never given up.
A Royal Mail van pulled into the car park and an employee in his orange reflective jacket got out carrying a parcel of fish and chips for his lunch. The smell as he passed reminded Cooper that he was likely to miss lunch himself. But it was good that he was thinking about food with enthusiasm, even if he wasn’t actually eating.
‘What is it you’re after? You must want something?’
Cooper turned at the sound of the voice, and found Josh Lane looking down at him, his hands thrust into the pockets of his anorak. The defiant expression was certainly deliberate now. He stood just out of reach, his boots firmly planted on the limestone, dirt from the path crumbling on to the embedded fossils.
It took Cooper a moment to recover from the shock.
‘Perhaps just to talk,’ he said.
Lane laughed. ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Look, I’m on bail. I’ve already been charged. So you can’t ask me any questions. You shouldn’t even be talking to me. My brief says once I’ve been charged and appeared in court, that’s it.’
‘You probably have a good defence lawyer.’
‘No, he’s just some duty solicitor they gave me.’
‘He’ll be all right,’ said Cooper. ‘Most of them are. But I’ve had the training. I know the way it has to be done.’
‘There are regulations. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act.’
‘That’s right, as a rule. But in fact there’s a paragraph in Code C of PACE. I don’t suppose you read it? It allows an interview after charge, if it’s necessary to prevent harm to another person or to clear up ambiguity in a previous statement.’
‘That’s an anti-terrorism measure, surely.’
Cooper shrugged. ‘It’s open to interpretation.’
‘So where’s the caution? What about “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence”? Why aren’t you taking me down to the station? Where’s the interview room and the tape recorder? And why are you here on your own? Do you think I’m stupid?’
‘No, not that,’ said Cooper.
‘You’re going to be in big trouble, my friend. And we both know it.’
‘I want to hear from you if you understand what you did.’
Lane looked at him more closely. ‘You look like shit. You’re sick.’
Cooper nodded. ‘I’ve been better.’
‘What is this? Do you want me to say I’m sorry or something? It’s not going to happen.’
But there was nothing else to say now, nothing that was worthwhile, nothing that could help him or Liz. His fists clenched inside his waxed coat, Cooper continued to watch Lane, oblivious to the rain that was beginning to fall.
Lane shook his head, exasperated at his silence.
‘Come on, come on,’ he said. ‘Do something. What is it? Do you want to take a swing at me? Do it, then. That would finish your career for good. But maybe you don’t care.’
Cooper still said nothing.
‘Suit yourself, then. I’m out of here. But if you don’t stop following me— Well, if you come near me again, I’ll report you for harassment.’
He began to walk away, then turned as Cooper remained standing on the path.
‘You know, you’re sick,’ he said. ‘Sick.’
Cooper watched him go. How had he managed to let Josh Lane spot him so easily? Was he so out of practice? Or could it be that he’d deliberately revealed his presence? Had he intended that Lane should see him?
It was confusing, not knowing his own intentions. Right now, his emotions seemed to be leading him, instead of his brains or his professional instincts.
Lane probably thought Cooper would back off and give up after their confrontation at the National Stone Centre. But that would have defeated the whole object.
Cooper got back in his Toyota and kept Lane’s Honda in view as it drove back into Wirksworth. He followed it all the way through the town and into the Market Place, where Lane turned past Crown Yard and the Blacks Head pub and climbed the hill called West End. They passed through the Yokecliffe area and were soon out into the country heading towards Hopton.
By the time they reached the wetlands at the northern end of Carsington Water, Cooper’s mind had begun to stray towards the Knockerdown Inn again. Lane certainly had a tendency to be drawn to pubs. But instead he indicated right on the Carsington bypass and drove into the village past the little Gothic-style church, where the open grave had been filled in and marked with a brand new headstone.
Was he heading t
o the Miners Arms for a pint of Marston’s Pedigree? No, he was stopping just past it. Cooper didn’t slow down, but drove on towards the gardens of Hopton Hall.
There was no need for Prospectus Assurance flexitime. It was Saturday morning, and Ralph Edge was at home. Cooper had seen his Mercedes standing on the drive.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Sunday
Diane Fry had been expecting to be pushed out of the way at any moment. She knew better than anyone how these things worked. The Major Crime Unit would arrive, DCI Alistair Mackenzie and an entire team to take charge of the inquiry, including whoever had replaced her as a DS at St Ann’s in Nottingham. So far it hadn’t happened. The MCU had been too busy with ongoing operations, their resources stretched too far. There must have been discussions at a higher level, but no one had bothered to fill her in yet. She’d been quite happy to leave it that way. She’d been enjoying the freedom of action.
But on Sunday morning, all that changed. An email came through, informing her that DCI Mackenzie would be assuming the role of Senior Investigating Officer and setting up an incident room. And that was it – an email. Was that all she was worth now?
Fry felt her determination harden. Before the MCU arrived, she ought to get everything done that she could. It would be perfect if she could make some positive progress on the Glen Turner murder inquiry. She hadn’t been back to the scene at Sparrow Wood since Thursday. There was time to put that right today. Already she was putting her coat on when the call came in. There had been an incident at Sparrow Wood. Time to get on the road.
The B5056. It was probably the quietest stretch of road that Ben Cooper had ever driven on in the Peak District. Its route parted from the busy A515 just north of Ashbourne and snaked its way northwards, heading vaguely in the direction of Bakewell some twenty miles away. A substantial length of the B5056 formed the eastern boundary of the national park. But that seemed to be almost its only purpose. The road successfully managed to avoid villages, except for the tiny settlements of Longcliffe and Grangemill, each of them more of a glorified crossroads than a village.
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