Dark Peak

by Adam J. Wright

  Mitch fished in his pocket for a coin, found one and inserted it into the slot. When he twisted it, the lid popped off and fell to the ground, leaving Mitch with the tin and its contents.

  The inside of the tin had been sealed and looked shiny and new. A delicate gold chain rested inside, long enough to be a necklace. Attached to the chain was a flat, gold emblem in the shape of a heart.

  Mitch didn’t recognise it and was sure Sarah had never owned such a necklace. So this must have belonged to one of the other girls. Maybe one of the Hatton sisters had worn it, or Josie Wagner, or the aunt Mitch had never known about.

  There was one thing Mitch was sure about: the piece of jewellery he was looking at had once adorned the neck of one of the victims of the Blackden Edge Murderer.

  14

  Family Matters

  Elly’s investigation had been cut short on Sunday because when she’d returned to the cottage, she’d found she had no Internet connection and no phone signal. She’d supposed that was a regular occurrence in this area and had spent the rest of the day pottering around the cottage doing nothing more than watching TV and sitting in the garden.

  When she padded downstairs in her cotton pyjamas on Monday morning, she noticed her phone had a signal and was telling her she had two new voicemails.

  One of those alerts had been on there since Friday night but she’d been ignoring it because she was sure she knew who the message was from.

  Sure enough, it was Paul’s voice on the line. “Hey, hun, I was just wondering where you are. I came round to see you but you’re not here. Your car isn’t here either so I guess you’ve gone out somewhere. Call me.”

  Elly deleted the message. She was glad she’d decided to come to the Peak District on Friday and wasn’t at home when Paul had come round. What had he come to the house for on Friday anyway? He’d said he was coming on Saturday to collect his stuff. And why the hell was he calling her hun? Maybe his relationship with his personal assistant wasn’t going so well. Maybe there was trouble in paradise. Whatever, it wasn’t her problem. Paul had made his bed so now he could lie in it.

  The next message was Paul again, this one left on Saturday. “Hi, Elly, it’s me, Paul. I’m at the house like we arranged but you’re still not here. Is everything okay? Call me, I’m worried about you.”

  “Is everything okay?” she asked the phone incredulously as she deleted that message too. “No, everything isn’t bloody okay! Go back to your bit of fluff and leave me alone.”

  She made herself a cup of tea, concentrating on her actions to put thoughts of Paul out of her mind. Then she went to the dining table and booted up the laptop. The Internet connection had returned so it was time to get to work.

  The photos she’d stolen from Edge House were fixed to the whiteboard with magnets. Elly had arranged them across the top of the board in what she assumed was their chronological order: the three children at the stream, the same children in front of Edge House, the two young men in front of The Mermaid pub, Margaret Walker looking pensive by the window through which an artist’s easel could be seen, and finally the photo of Sarah and Mitchell standing on the lawn of Edge House with their bikes.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the women in the Walker family weren’t happy. Elly wondered if it was just general malaise or if it could be linked to something more serious, like abuse.

  Sitting at the table, she used the laptop to search for information about the family. She got a number of hits and placed the results into separate tabs. Then she put the tabs in chronological order, the same as the photos on the board.

  Most of the articles came from a site that held archived articles from a local newspaper called The Peak Observer. This was the same newspaper that had printed the headline BLACKDEN EDGE MURDERER STRIKES AGAIN! above its write-up of the Josie Wagner murder.

  The first article was from 1948 and was headlined GOTHIC MANSIONS SOLD. It was a short piece, stating that two Gothic-styled mansions designed in the nineteenth century by architect Julian Frey had been sold to a Frank Walker and his wife Gwen Walker (née Jones). The couple had moved into the area from Porth Y Nant in Wales and were wealthy due to Gwen’s family owning a successful granite quarrying business in Gwynedd.

  Edge House had stood empty since 1916, when the previous owner’s son had been killed in World War I and the father had taken his own life by wandering on the moors until he died of exposure. Blackmoor House had been owned by a wealthy grocery shop magnate who had decided to move to London where his businesses were situated.

  Elly sectioned off a corner of the whiteboard and wrote “Frank Walker” and “Gwen Jones”, connecting them with a blue line. Beneath their names, she wrote “Blackmoor House.” She had no idea why the couple needed two houses but it was a testament to their wealth, and perhaps that was the point; they moved to the Peak District and let everyone know how well-off they were. Money and status meant a lot back then and a display of both was a way to gain power in social circles.

  The next article on the laptop was from the same newspaper but at a much later date, 1962. This was a piece that mentioned Frank Walker’s purchase of a limestone quarry in the Dark Peak area and the formation of his new business venture, Walker & Sons Aggregates. The article informed readers that the sons referred to in the company’s title were Michael, aged eight, and Silas, aged five. Frank said he’d started the new company because he wanted to build a future for the boys. The article also mentioned that Frank had a three-year-old daughter named Olivia.

  Elly looked at the photo of the children playing in the stream. So the eldest boy was Michael, the younger boy Silas, and the girl on the bank Olivia. She wrote Silas’ and Olivia’s names on the whiteboard.

  The picture Elly had assumed was taken outside Edge House, with the children standing by the front door, was probably actually taken at Blackmoor House. That explained why the door knocker was in the shape of an eagle and not a lion.

  The next article on the computer had a headline that read OLIVIA WALKER MISSING. Apparently, the poor girl had left the house one evening and never returned. Her jacket had been found at Blackden Edge where, according to the article, two sisters named Mary and Evie Hatton had vanished the previous year.

  So that explained the “Blackden Edge Murderer Strikes Again” headline that had intrigued a wannabe detective at Wollstonecraft Publishing. By the time Josie Wagner’s body was found at Blackden Edge in 1977, three girls had already gone missing from the area.

  Elly turned to the photo of Michael and Silas sitting outside The Mermaid pub. Glenister had told her that Michael might be the Blackden Edge Murderer but why not Silas? It was suspicious that Michael’s sister and daughter both went missing but equally so that the two vanished girls were Silas’ sister and niece.

  “Which one of you did it?” she asked the smiling boys in the photograph. She thought about it some more and then added, “Maybe you both did.”

  The next article on the computer was the one Elly already had on the murder board, the article from 1987 headlined SEVEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL GOES MISSING IN PEAK DISTRICT, detailing the disappearance of Sarah Walker. She’d been walking in the woods with her brother, Mitchell, and had vanished virtually from under his nose. It sounded suspicious to Elly. She didn’t think Mitchell, who’d been nine at the time, had killed his sister, although God knew things like that happened, but wondered if he’d taken Sarah to meet someone else in those woods. Uncle Silas, maybe?

  The last search result she’d put into a tab on the laptop was a brief article dated 1989 that stated that Michael Walker had sold his share of Walker & Sons Aggregates to his brother. Silas had said that he was pleased to take over the family business and would eventually pass it on to his son Jack to keep Frank Walker’s dream alive.

  No reason was given for Michael Walker leaving the company. Maybe the loss of his family had killed his passion for the business and he’d just decided to get out. There was a picture of the two brothers shaking hand
s. Michael was leaning over his younger brother because Silas was in a wheelchair.

  Elly wondered how long he’d been in the chair because it would be a stretch to believe he could be the Blackden Edge Murderer while wheelchair-bound.

  She typed on the laptop again, this time putting “Silas Walker” into the search engine. She got some of the same results from the previous search and a couple of new ones. One of the new results caught her attention straight away.

  QUARRY ACCIDENT INJURES OWNER’S SON

  Elly clicked on the link. The first thing she saw was a black-and-white photo of a quarry with a caption underneath it that read: “Walker & Sons Aggregates quarry, Derbyshire.” The article was dated June 12th, 1977. It said that Silas Walker, 20, son of the owner of Walker & Sons Aggregates had been at the limestone quarry on the night of June 9th and had been involved in an accident that had left him with extensive back injuries. It wasn’t known why he’d been at the quarry in the dead of night.

  The article was frustratingly brief. Elly returned to the search page to see if she could find anything else about the accident but there was no more information. The only other new information she could find regarding Silas was a wedding announcement from 1975, saying he’d married a girl named Alice Davies from the village of Leath in North Derbyshire. The wedding had taken place at St. Paul’s Church, Relby, and the newlywed couple would be living at Blackmoor House, one of two estates owned by the Walker family.

  Elly wrote the name “Alice Davies” on the whiteboard and connected it to Silas’ name with a blue line. Then she drew a second line to connect them to Blackmoor House.

  The board was filling up but the identity of who the large question mark in its centre represented was still an enigma. At this point, Elly would put her money on Michael or Silas, but Silas’ wheelchair probably ruled him out.

  She gulped down her tea and went to the kitchen to put the cup in the sink. She looked out at the sunlit moors and distant hills. She needed to get outside. Returning to Edge House wasn’t an option right now because the police were interested in the place and might show up at any time. Maybe she’d go back there later in the week when the heat on the place had died down.

  In the meantime, she’d track down Gordon Farley, the retired detective who’d been second-in-command in the Josie Wagner murder case and lead investigator in Sarah Walker’s missing person case. She also needed to speak to Stewart Battle, who’d been involved in the Sarah Walker case and had been in charge of the hunt for the missing journalist Lindsey Grofield.

  But there was somewhere else she wanted to visit first. The article about Silas Walker’s marriage had mentioned a St. Paul’s Church in Relby. It stood to reason that the church’s graveyard would be where Michael Walker was buried. Elly felt a burning need to see the grave. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way until she happened to glance at the faces of the girls in the photos. If Michael Walker was the man responsible for destroying the lives of these women, then Elly needed to see his grave so that she knew he could never hurt anyone ever again.

  On a conceptual level, she knew he couldn’t cause any more pain to any other women but to see his final resting place with her own eyes would give her a sense of closure.

  She went upstairs to get dressed. It was time to pay a visit to the dead.

  15

  Silas

  Mitch was sitting on the lawn in the sunshine with the journal in his hands. After finding the necklace, he’d tried to sit on the sofa and read the journal but had felt as if the walls of the living room were closing in on him, squeezing the air from the room and entombing him within Edge House. Leaving the tobacco tin and necklace on the coffee table, he’d come outside for some fresh air. It wasn’t until he’d reached the lawn that he’d felt far enough away from the cloying atmosphere of the house to be able to breathe normally again.

  Now, he knew that the writing in the journal was written in a secret language that led to the secrets of the past. It was the language of murder.

  Discovering the necklace had convinced him that the journal could be decoded but now he desperately needed to find a clue to decipher some other cryptic passages within its pages. The landscape sketches were the obvious place to start but if he wanted to find out where these places were, he was going to have to show the sketches to someone else, someone who knew the Peak District well.

  He didn’t want to do that, so that brought him back to attempting to decode the words, the secret language that appeared on the surface to be nothing more than recollections of walks in the countryside but beneath the surface veneer spoke of tragedy and death.

  He looked up from the book when he heard a car coming up the track. Thinking it might be Battle again, he went inside and slid the journal, along with the tobacco tin, under the sofa before going back outside to greet whoever was driving to the house.

  The car that emerged from behind the trees was a large black SUV. Mitch didn’t recognize the man behind the wheel but the woman in the passenger seat looked familiar. He seemed to think that when he’d known her before, the hair that was now white had been blonde. And the expression that was at the moment set into a hard scowl had been softer, kinder.

  The SUV stopped and the engine died. The driver got out and nodded to Mitch in a manner that was polite but certainly not friendly. “Mitch,” he said, “it’s been a long time.” He went around to the rear of the vehicle and removed a wheelchair from the boot. He unfolded it before assisting a large, dark-haired, bearded man out of the back seat of the SUV and into the chair.

  Now Mitch knew who his visitors were. The man in the wheelchair was his father’s brother, Silas. The woman with the hard face was his Aunt Alice, which meant the driver was Jack, their son. Mitch hadn’t seen Jack since he’d been nine and Jack seven, so it was no wonder he hadn’t recognised him.

  Jack took the handles of the wheelchair and wheeled it towards Mitch. Alice got out of the SUV and stood by her husband’s side with a face like thunder.

  “We haven’t seen you around here for a while,” Silas said, offering a smile that he didn’t seem entirely invested in. “How are you, lad?”

  “I’m fine,” Mitch said. He didn’t know what else to say. This wasn’t exactly a happy family reunion. The atmosphere seemed almost as oppressive as it had felt in the living room. Mitch wasn’t sure why but his skin began to prickle and he felt the fight-or-flight instinct kick in. He forced himself to remain calm.

  “We’re not staying long,” Alice said, tight-lipped. “Silas just wants a word with you.” She put a hand on her husband’s shoulder, as if prompting him to get on with whatever he’d come here to say.

  “I’ll get right to it,” Silas said. “Mercer and Robinson tell us that you want to sell Edge House. So I’ve come here to do you a favour. The house needs a lot of work doing to it before you can sell it. I can save you the bother. I’ll give you a good price for it in the state it’s in now. You won’t get a fairer offer than that.”

  “The house isn’t for sale at the moment,” Mitch told him.

  “What do you mean it isn’t for sale? Of course it is. The solicitors told us you don’t want it.”

  “How do they know what I want?”

  “Because you told John Mercer you wanted to sell.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.” Mitch didn’t like the idea that Mercer had been speaking to Silas about their meeting. What else had the solicitor told Silas about? Had Silas known when Mitch would be in Matlock? He thought of the slashed tyre on his Jeep. Silas didn’t know what vehicle he drove but if he’d waited around outside the solicitor’s office and seen Mitch arrive…

  Now he was being paranoid, wasn’t he?

  “My parents bought that house,” Silas said, stabbing his finger towards Edge House. “It belongs in the family.”

  “I am family,” Mitch said. He realised he was making an argument to keep a house he hated and if Silas had made this offer a couple of days ago, Mitch would have handed over the
keys there and then. But things were different now. He’d already discovered one of the journal’s secrets in the grounds of Edge House and for all he knew, there could be others. If he was going to find out what had happened to Sarah, he needed the house just as much as he needed the journal.

  “Call yourself family?” Alice scoffed. “We haven’t seen hide nor hair of you in thirty years.”

  “That isn’t my fault,” Mitch said. “My mother took me away from here. I was only a child at the time.”

  Silas nodded. “That’s right. But you’re in control of your own actions now, aren’t you? You must have built a life for yourself somewhere else so why don’t you go back there and leave Walker family business to those of us who’ve been loyal to your father all his life?” Before Mitch could answer, he added, “Michael didn’t ever get over you leaving, you know. He was never the same man after that. You and your mum destroyed him and we were here to pick up the pieces.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Mitch said, “but I already told you, it wasn’t my choice. After Sarah disappeared, my mum—”

  “Don’t bring your sister into it,” Alice said. “We don’t need to be reminded of all that again.”

  Mitch wheeled on her. “I’m sure it would be convenient for you to just forget Sarah but she was my sister and I can’t forget.”

  Alice narrowed her eyes, full of fury. “You come back here after all this time saying you can’t forget a dead girl but you soon forgot your father while he was alive, didn’t you? I’ll bet you haven’t even visited his grave. All you’re interested in is his money, like a vulture picking apart a carcass.”

  “That isn’t true,” Mitch said with conviction. He was here to find out what had happened to Sarah and those other girls who’d died by a madman’s hand. But he couldn’t say that because he sure as hell didn’t trust anyone standing in front of him right now. Instead, he turned to Silas. “You know what it’s like to lose a sister. Have you forgotten Olivia?”