Dark Peak

by Adam J. Wright

  Elly assumed the boy standing next to Sarah in the bike picture was her older brother, Mitchell. His bike was in the picture too, the black ten-speed, but instead of sitting on it, Mitchell was holding it with one hand while he waved at the camera with the other. He was smiling, face and posture carefree, unlike Sarah’s.

  Elly pocketed the photo before returning to the trunk, grabbing the handle and dragging it closer to the bulb’s pale light. She rummaged through its contents, finding more pictures of Sarah and Mitchell that seemed to have been taken the same day as the bike photo as well as a handful of shots of a woman with long, dark hair Elly assumed to be Margaret Walker, Sarah’s mother.

  Margaret seemed as carefree as her son in all of the pictures except one. She appeared to have been shot by the camera without her knowledge because, unlike the other pictures she appeared in, she wasn’t looking at the camera and smiling. In this one, she was outside Edge House, leaning against the large window of the room that was now totally empty. She had a cigarette in her hand and she was looking towards the woods at the edge of the gravel. Her face was pensive, her arms folded, and her posture seemed defensive.

  The room beyond the window Margaret was leaning against wasn’t empty, as it was now. There was an artist’s easel in there, the canvas resting on it covered by a cloth of some kind. Next to the easel was a small table littered with sketch books, pencils, paint tubes, brushes, and an artist’s palette.

  Elly shoved the photo into her pocket along with the bike picture.

  She wanted to find an image of Michael Walker himself to add to the whiteboard. But it seemed he was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it because most of the pictures were of Margaret, Sarah, and Mitchell.

  Digging deeper into the trunk, she grasped a handful of photos from the bottom and brought them into the light. These were much older and were black and white. The first picture Elly looked at showed two dark-haired boys playing in a stream. They were holding nets on long poles and seemed to be attempting to catch fish. Elly guessed their ages at ten and eight. Sitting on the bank behind them was a girl who was maybe four or five years old. She wore a light-coloured 1960s style broadcloth dress and stared vacantly into the water, her face mostly obscured from the camera by her long dark hair.

  Elly slid the photo into her pocket. She had no idea who the children were but guessed she might be looking at a young Michael Walker and his siblings.

  The next picture showed the same three children standing outside Edge House, although some features of the house were different. The front door, beside which the children were standing, had a large knocker in the shape of an eagle’s head. Elly hadn’t seen that eagle’s head on the front door when she’d driven past the door earlier. She was sure there’d been a lion’s head, not an eagle’s.

  The window that Margaret Walker had been leaning against in her photo also looked different. The lead work criss-crossing the panes was spaced farther apart in the older picture.

  The two boys were standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera. The girl had a tight-lipped expression on her face, an expression that was mirrored by Sarah Walker in a photograph taken years later.

  Flicking through the other photos in her hand, she found one that was in colour. The image showed the two boys, now young men. The eldest was in his early twenties while his younger brother looked around eighteen. The photograph had been taken in a village on what looked like a warm summer day. The young men sat at a table outside a pub, pints of beer sitting before them. From the wide shirt collars the two wore and the flared jeans Elly could see on the people in the background, she guessed this picture to be from the seventies. Part of the pub’s name was visible in the photo, painted on the wall above the young men’s heads. MAID. There was no sign of the girl from the previous photos. Maybe she’d taken the pic, pointing the camera at her brothers with that same tight-lipped expression she and Sarah Walker shared.

  Elly put the photos into her pocket, along with the others. She had no doubt that one of the boys was Michael Walker. An Internet search should tell her which one, since there were bound to be pictures of Walker on the net. She should also be able to find out more about his brother and sister. It was even possible she could be able to track them down and interview them.

  As she reached into the trunk again, a sound from within the house startled her. Somewhere, a phone was ringing. It was the strident ring of an old-fashioned phone, the type with a bell inside the casing.

  Elly waited for it to stop. When it finally did, she breathed a sigh of relief and resumed digging through the trunk.

  The phone rang again. When it finally stopped after fifteen rings, Elly felt unnerved. Whoever was ringing the house obviously expected someone to be here. That someone could be on their way here now. Or the caller, who was obviously insistent based on the length of time they’d stayed on the other end of the line while the phone was ringing, might come to the house.

  She couldn’t risk being here any longer. Maybe she’d come back another time and leave the car parked somewhere else, somewhere it wouldn’t look out of place. She could sneak through the woods to get to the house, come after dark and bring a torch.

  “Oh God, what’s come over me?” she asked herself. Less than seventy-two hours ago, she’d been sitting in the Belanger with Glenister discussing Derbyshire as if it were nothing more than a concept, and now here she was breaking into a house and stealing photos.

  She closed the trunk and slid it back to its resting place in the shadows. It left a trail in the dust on the floor but there was nothing she could do about that unless she swept the entire attic and she didn’t have time for that. She suddenly felt as if she had no time at all.

  After checking that the attic looked more or less how she’d found it, she opened the trapdoor in the floor. As the ladder clattered to the floor below, she turned off the lights. When she got to the foyer, the phone started ringing again, making her heart leap into her mouth. She could still hear its insistent call as she got into her car and started the engine.

  She pushed the Mini as fast as she dared along the track through the woods and didn’t relax until she was on the main road, driving south aimlessly, not ready to return to the cottage yet because she felt as if she were on fire with adrenaline.

  A minute later, she reached the village of Relby and hit the brakes when she saw the pub. She took the photos from her pocket and found the one of the two young men sitting at a table with their beers in the seventies. She held it up to the car window and checked the pub. This was the place. The MAID visible in the photo was part of the pub’s name, THE MERMAID.

  There might be patrons here who remembered Michael Walker, who could tell her about his younger days as well as his later life.

  After all, the seventies was when Josie Wagner had been murdered. Elly might be able to find some information that placed Walker at the scene of the crime or suggested he knew Josie.

  She looked at the photo in her hand and wondered if it had been taken while Josie was still alive or after her naked body had been discovered at Blackden Edge.

  Elly looked at the faces of the two young men in their wide-collared shirts and wondered if she was looking into the eyes of a future killer or those of one who had already done the deed.

  12

  Into the Woods

  Mitch arrived at Edge House on Monday morning and parked the Jeep in the early morning sunshine that had burned the mist off the moors and promised a warm day ahead. He got his suitcase out of the boot and placed it by the front door before returning to the Jeep and getting the house key and the journal from the passenger seat.

  He’d spent a couple of hours after getting off the phone with Battle last night going over the words and pictures in the journal, searching for any mention of Sarah. But apart from her portrait and the lock of hair, which was probably hers, there was nothing else.

  Most of the book seemed to be written in some sort
of linguistic and pictorial code, with names and drawings of flowers signifying something other than flora. Some of the walks detailed in the book mentioned flowers that could not have been seen by the writer at the times described because the flowers would have been out of season. A walk along a snowy riverbank, for instance, mentioned a visit to a patch of columbine plants. Mitch knew that the columbine, also known as aquilegia, bloomed in late spring and early summer, not in winter.

  In another passage, flowering winter heliotropes were mentioned in a part of the journal that was clearly written during the summer, based on the descriptions of the weather. Winter heliotropes did not flower later than March.

  Mitch believed these anomalies were not errors on the part of the journal’s author but that in some cases the flower names represented something other than flora.

  He’d considered taking the journal to Battle but dismissed the notion every time. According to Battle, the investigation into Sarah’s disappearance hadn’t been conducted properly because it may have been obstructed by senior members of the police force. If Mitch handed the journal over, who was to say the same thing wouldn’t happen again? Besides, apart from the lock of hair taped to one of its pages, the journal was nothing more than a book of sketches and recollections of walks in the countryside.

  If he had any chance of finding out what happened to Sarah, he had to crack the journal’s code himself. If his father had played some part in what had happened on December 21st, 1987, Mitch was sure there would be proof hiding behind the flower metaphors. He just had to figure out the code.

  He’d chosen to stay at Edge House while he tried to find the truth behind his sister’s disappearance. This was where she’d lived all her short life. It was where their father had continued to live after she was gone. If there were any clues that would help Mitch decipher the journal, they were most likely in this house.

  This was his best shot at finally finding out what happened to Sarah, after thirty years of not knowing. So he’d arranged to be here for as long as it took. After finding the lock of hair in the journal, he’d rung Ed Yardley, a gardener who worked for Mitch during busy times, and asked him to take over the business while he was away. He told Ed he had “family problems” and didn’t know how long he’d be gone.

  “Family problems,” Mitch muttered to himself as he opened the front door of Edge House and stepped into the foyer. “That’s putting it lightly.”

  The first thing he had to do was fix the back door. He went into the kitchen and took a ring of keys from the hook on the wall. Somewhere among them was a key to the garage, which was where he’d expect to find some tools. He went out through the front door and over to the side of the house where the garage was situated. It sat towards the rear of the property, next to the wall that surrounded the garden.

  The garage had two doors: a large metal door that slid up to allow vehicular access and a wooden side door. Both were painted dark green. Mitch searched through the keys on the ring and found one with the same manufacturer’s name stamped in it as was in the large door. He tried it and the door unlocked. Mitch slid it up, letting daylight into the interior of the garage.

  There was a dark green Land Rover Defender parked in there, sitting among workbenches and tool racks. Mitch found a hammer and various screwdrivers, which he threw into a half-empty toolbox that was sitting on a shelf. He took the box, along with a couple of lengths of wood that had been discarded beneath the shelf, around the house to the back door and began nailing the door shut from the inside. He affixed the lengths of wood and screwed them into place, barricading the door.

  With the door secured, he took the tools back to the garage and locked it up. As he was walking back around the front of the house, a police car came crunching over the gravel and stopped by the Jeep. Two uniformed officers, one a blonde woman, the other a dark-haired man, got out and came over to him.

  “Morning, sir,” the female officer said, showing him her warrant card. “I’m Officer Preston, a Scenes of Crime Officer from the Buxton station, and this is my colleague, Officer White. We’ve come to dust your house for fingerprints following the break-in you reported on Friday. DCI Battle said we had your permission to enter the house and get to work.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mitch said. “Go ahead.”

  “We were going to let ourselves in through the back door,” she said. “DCI Battle said you’d returned home to Leamington Spa.”

  “I changed my mind,” Mitch told her. “I’m going to stay here for a while. I’ve sealed the back door, so I’ll let you in the front.”

  “Thank you,” she said as he let them into the house. “I’ll let DCI Battle know you’re here. I believe he wanted to have a word with you. Will you be here for the next hour or so?”

  Mitch nodded.

  She told Officer White to get started in the kitchen and she took her phone outside for some privacy. Mitch heard her say, “Mr. Walker is here, sir.”

  When she came back in, she said, “He’ll be here shortly,” and went to join her colleague in the kitchen.

  Mitch explored the rooms that opened off the foyer. The first was empty of any furnishings whatsoever. The second, the room DS Morgan had taken Leigh into to watch TV, was a modestly-furnished living room.

  He went in, sat on the sofa, and began leafing through the journal. He was certain the code could be cracked. Although the images and words looked innocent to the casual reader, his father must have feared that someone would see through them and discover whatever truth they were hiding because he’d locked the journal away in his safe deposit box. Doing that had been a mistake. If he’d left it in plain view—on one of the bookshelves in the living room, for instance—no one would have looked at it twice. It was only its presence in the bank vault that had told Mitch it was no ordinary journal of walks and sketches.

  Michael Walker had drawn attention to the one thing he obviously wanted to hide. Of course, he hadn’t known he was going to die a couple of days after depositing the book at the bank, or that Mitch was going to come along and find it.

  Mitch knew he needed to find the locations written about in the pages. The sketches would help if he had any knowledge of the Peak District but he had none. He didn’t recognise any of the places in the sketches. Some of the writings mentioned caves, waterfalls, rivers, and bridges, locations he could eventually pinpoint although it would take a lot of time. There was only one passage he’d read that mentioned a specific place.

  In the woods near Edge House, the foxgloves blush pink, hiding their secret.

  It was both specific and maddeningly vague. The house was virtually surrounded by woods and there would be wild foxglove plants everywhere. Also, foxgloves weren’t perennial plants; they didn’t recur every year. They were biennial, taking two years to grow and then dying off. They were known to reseed themselves abundantly but the stand of pink plants mentioned in the journal would be long gone, if it ever existed at all and wasn’t just a figment of the writer’s imagination.

  He left the journal on the coffee table and went outside to prove his own theory correct, that the woods around the house would be full of foxglove. He walked to the edge of the gravel and stared into the sun-dappled woods. As expected, he saw patches of wild foxglove scattered here and there. The reference in the journal was meaningless.

  “Looking for something specific, sir?”

  The voice came from behind him. Mitch turned to see Battle approaching. The detective’s green Range Rover was parked next to the police car but Mitch hadn’t heard it arrive because he’d been so wrapped up in his thoughts.

  “You got here quickly,” Mitch said.

  “Well, I was on my way as it turns out. I was bringing Mrs. Jenkins to have a look around the house. You did say that was all right. She’s in there now. We’ll soon know if those thieves took anything. What are you doing out here? Find anything interesting?”

  “Just admiring the woods,” Mitch said.

  “I don’t blame you,�
�� Battle said. “This is a lovely part of the world, if a bit wild in places. Those moors for instance,”—he gestured to the drop-off behind the house and the sunlit moors beyond—“you could hide a body in there and it might lie there undiscovered for decades, perhaps forever. This land keeps its secrets.”

  “Very poetic,” Mitch said.

  “Not really. I don’t like secrets, Mr. Walker. It’s my job to uncover the truth. Although God knows that’s difficult sometimes.”

  Mitch nodded. “It must be rewarding sometimes as well, though.”

  “It can be,” Battle said. He pointed at the woods. “Care for a stroll?”

  “Sure.” Mitch wasn’t sure why Battle had rushed over here to talk to him but now that the detective was here, there were a few things Mitch wanted to ask him regarding his father.

  They stepped off the gravel and into the trees, following a trail that had been made by boots treading through the undergrowth. Mitch wondered if this was a route his father had walked often, his footfalls creating the trail over time.

  “When you rang me last night, you said you had something I might be interested in,” Battle said. He wasn’t looking directly at Mitch but instead gazed up at the sunlight filtering through the branches above them.

  “I told you, it was nothing,” Mitch said.

  “Still, if you have any information pertaining to an ongoing criminal investigation—anything at all—you should hand it over to me.”

  “An ongoing investigation?” Mitch asked. “You told me yourself that my father wasn’t being investigated for anything. Your superiors made sure of that.”

  “I did,” Battle admitted, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying to uncover the truth about what happened to those girls.”

  “Those girls?” Mitch asked.