Dark Peak

by Adam J. Wright

  Trying to distract herself from that question, she put the radio on. She usually listened to a station that played eighties and nineties hits and right now it was playing “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. Elly sang along as she left Relby behind and drove along the tree-shrouded road.

  An hour later, she was standing in front of Gordon Farley’s house by the river in Bakewell. Actually, she was standing behind it because the house’s rear gardens backed onto the river and Elly had guessed that the most likely place she’d find Farley on a warm day such as today was in his garden.

  She was right. As she’d walked along the wide, cemented riverbank along with the many locals and visitors to the town who were out for a stroll, enjoying the sunshine, she’d spotted Farley working on a flowerbed with a trowel, digging into the soil beneath a spray of pink and white flowers.

  He was easily recognisable. He looked exactly the same as he did in the photo, right down to his loose blue shirt and white panama hat.

  Elly approached the wooden gate set in the low stone wall surrounding Farley’s garden and cleared her throat to get his attention. He looked up from his work. He was in his sixties but looked lean and fit. When he saw Elly, he gave her a nod and smiled. “Afternoon. Can I help you?”

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you,” Elly said. “My name is—”

  “I know who you are,” he said. “I’ve read Heart of a Killer three times. I may be retired but I can’t seem to shake my fascination with criminals. Don’t feel you have to stand outside the gate. You can come in if you like.” He waited until Elly had opened the gate and entered the garden and then said, “Now, what would you like to talk about, Miss Cooper?”

  “One of your old cases.”

  He grinned. “They’re all old. I’ve been retired for seventeen years.”

  “Yes, I know,” Elly said. “You retired on New Year’s Eve 1999.”

  “That’s right. The night that poor Grofield girl went missing from the pub not far from here. Is that what you want to talk to me about?”

  “No, I want to discuss a couple of your earlier cases, if that’s all right. The murder of Josie Wagner and the disappearance of Sarah Walker.”

  Farley’s face darkened slightly. “They were bad ones. What had been done to Josie’s body didn’t bear thinking about, and as for Sarah, just seven years old and never seen again. It makes me shudder to think what might have happened to that poor girl.”

  “Yes,” Elly said. She tried not to think about what might have happened to the girls after they disappeared. “I’d like to discuss Michael Walker,” she told Farley.

  He nodded slowly. “I’ve known for seventeen years that someone would come to me wanting to talk about Walker. I suppose I should have realised it would happen after his death. You’d better come in. I’ll put the kettle on.” He set the trowel down and opened the back door to the house, leading Elly into a bright farmhouse-style kitchen that smelled faintly of eggs and bacon. A small wooden table with two chairs sat in one corner.

  “Please, take a seat,” Farley said, filling the kettle and taking two mugs from a cupboard.

  Elly unslung the camera from around her neck and placed it on the table before sitting down.

  “What would you like to know about Michael Walker?” Farley asked. “I don’t know all that much because we were warned away from looking at him too deeply.”

  “How did his name crop up during the investigation of Josie Wagner’s murder?” Elly asked.

  While he waited for the kettle to boil, he stared out the window at his garden and the river beyond. But Elly was sure he wasn’t actually looking at what was in front of his eyes but was instead staring through a window into the past.

  “I was only twenty-three when Josie Wagner’s body was found,” he said. “A junior detective on his first case, wanting to make an impression. John Hanscombe was in charge of the detectives in those days and John was a big bull of a man, old-school in every way. He liked cases to be solved early, all of us did. But John was fanatical about it. He was always talking about putting cases to bed and considered any case that dragged on for weeks to be a personal failure. So when we arrived at Blackden Edge, John said to me, ‘Let’s put this one to bed early, Gordon. I know who did this and we’re going to get the bastard’.”

  Farley went quiet for a moment and Elly wondered if he was remembering the condition Josie Wagner’s body had been found in. The kettle clicked off, bringing Farley back to the present. He put tea bags into the mugs and poured boiling water over them.

  “Was John talking about Michael Walker?” Elly asked.

  “Yes, he was,” Farley said, stirring the tea bags in the water. “He’d had some dealings with the Walkers already, when Olivia disappeared a couple of years earlier. John was sure Michael Walker was involved in Olivia’s disappearance.”

  Farley finished making the tea and came over to the table with the mugs. He set one in front of Elly, along with a pint of milk from the fridge and a sugar dish.

  “Thanks,” Elly said. “So why did John think Michael Walker was guilty?”

  “John suspected the father at first. As soon as the investigation began, it became clear that Olivia Walker had been the victim of some kind of abuse before she disappeared. Everyone the police interviewed said they suspected something wasn’t right about that family. The boys seemed like normal kids but Olivia was shy and withdrawn.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily indicate abuse,” Elly said, stirring sugar and milk into her tea.

  “No, it doesn’t. But there were other indicators too. Two nights before she disappeared, Olivia was found wandering along the road near Blackmoor House by a passing motorist. She was in her nightgown, half-frozen, and covered in scratches and bruises. She got into the motorist’s car and begged him to take her far away and not make her go back home. He took her to the nearest police station where she repeatedly told officers she couldn’t go back home. When asked why, she went silent. There was nothing anyone could do other than send her home. Her father, Frank, picked her up from the station.”

  “Didn’t the police ask him why his daughter ran away and was begging not to go home?” Elly asked.

  Farley shrugged. “Frank Walker was a very influential man and this was a long time ago. The world was different then. Olivia didn’t utter a word against her father so the officers had no choice other than to send her home.”

  “And two nights later, Olivia vanished,” Elly said.

  “Yes, and at first, John went after Frank Walker. He’d read the report about the night Olivia was found wandering in the road and he’d decided that Frank had doled out some kind of physical punishment on Olivia, gone too far, and killed her. But Frank had a rock-solid alibi. He was drinking in The Mermaid pub on the night Olivia disappeared. He was there all night, along with Silas and Silas’ wife Alice. They were seen there by many independent witnesses. The pub was having some kind of disco night and was busy.”

  “But Michael wasn’t there,” Elly said.

  “No, he wasn’t.

  “What about Frank’s wife, Gwen?”

  “She died from emphysema in 1969.”

  Elly took a sip of tea. The Walker family had certainly experienced its fair share of tragedy. The women, especially, seemed to meet an early demise. If Frank, Silas, and Alice had nothing to do with Olivia’s disappearance, the question mark on her whiteboard was starting to point in one direction only. “Where was Michael that night?”

  “He said he was out walking along the fells.”

  “At night? In winter?”

  Farley nodded. “I admit, it sounds implausible. The weather up on those hills in winter is no joke. But Michael was a keen artist and he said he was out walking that night with his sketchbook. He had sketches in the book that he said proved it but they didn’t really prove anything. He could have drawn them at any time.”

  “But he was never arrested,” Elly said.

  “No. He was questioned on a co
uple of occasions but nothing really came out of it.

  “Were there any other suspects?”

  “No, there was nobody else John Hanscombe even remotely liked for the crime. He was sure it was Michael. His theory was that Olivia had been abused but the abuse had come from her brother, not her father. There was no actual evidence pointing to Michael but his lack of a real alibi was enough for John.”

  Farley took a swallow of his tea. “And, you see, if Michael Walker had abducted Olivia at Blackden Edge, then he was also responsible for the abduction of Mary and Evie Hatton the year before. The fact that the girls all disappeared from the same area was impossible to overlook. And Michael didn’t have an alibi for that night either. Apparently, he’d been driving around in his Triumph Stag. No destination in particular, just tooling around in his sports car. When asked if he’d driven up to the Dark Peak area, he said he couldn’t remember.”

  He threw up his hands in a questioning gesture. “So did he do it? We’ll never know because the Chief told John to leave Michael alone. John was livid. He was sure Walker was guilty and thought he was eventually going to crack him in the interview room. But the word came down from on high that the Walkers were out of bounds. All of them. We knew why, of course. The Chief and Frank Walker played golf together. It may even have gone deeper than that; there could have been financial incentives from Frank for the Chief to look the other way where his family was concerned.”

  Elly thought about what Farley had just told her. There was no evidence that Michael had committed any crime at all, yet there was evidence that other people who would have been suspects were definitely not involved in the disappearance of Olivia Walker. In her mind, she conjured up an image of the whiteboard in the cottage. She mentally erased the names of Frank, Silas, Alice, and Gwen. That left Michael Walker. Unless the Blackden Edge Murderer was just a murderer taking random women and girls. But what were the odds of Michael’s sister and daughter both being taken by chance by the same serial killer?

  “Then there was the Sarah Walker case,” she prompted Farley.

  “Yes, the Sarah Walker case.” His eyes took on a faraway look, as if they were looking into the past again. “That was 1987. John Hanscombe had left the force by then. Retired in 1982 and died of a heart attack only a couple of months later. I was lead detective on Sarah’s case, assisted by a fresh-faced DS named Stewart Battle.” He chuckled. “Poor lad was thrown in at the deep end just like I’d been with the Josie Wagner case. We had it tough, too. On the one hand, our superiors were telling us to tread carefully around the Walkers and on the other, Michael was begging us to pull out all the stops to find his daughter.”

  “Was he?” Elly asked, surprised. “That doesn’t sound like the action of a guilty man.”

  “I agree. Because I’d been on Olivia’s case, I suspected Michael as soon as I heard Sarah Walker was missing. But everything I saw in that man’s body language told me he was genuinely distraught. I believe he was innocent based on that alone. Unless he was capable of pulling off an Oscar award-winning performance, Michael Walker had nothing to do with his daughter’s disappearance.”

  Elly finished her tea and put the empty mug on the table. If Farley’s assessment of Michael Walker was correct and he was innocent of any wrongdoing in the case of his daughter, could he still be guilty in the case of his sister? It seemed a stretch to think that he’d killed his sister in 1977 and then someone else had killed his daughter ten years later but the two events could be linked. Maybe she should reinstate the names she’d mentally erased from her mental whiteboard.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Farley said, “the Sarah Walker case ended my career. I retired twelve years after she disappeared because my confidence as a detective, my confidence in myself, was shaken. I’d seen a young woman cut to pieces on Blackden Edge and then tried to find a missing seven-year-old. Seven, for God’s sake. It was too much. I felt like I’d failed both those girls, especially Sarah. It hit me hard and I started drinking. When I left the force on New Year’s Eve 1999, I’m sure the senior officers weren’t just celebrating the new millennium that night, they were probably happier to see me leave than they were to see 2000 arrive.”

  “New Year’s Eve 1999,” Elly said. “The night Lindsey Grofield went missing.”

  Farley gave a sardonic smile. “Yeah, I woke up on my first day of retirement to discover another girl had gone missing and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Perhaps, if I’d still been on the job, I could have found her.” He looked down at the table with eyes that held a mix of regret and sorrow. “Well, as it turned out, no one found Lindsey Grofield. Her name just got added to the list with all the other missing girls.”

  Elly found it easy to believe the other disappearances were connected but Lindsey Grofield seemed like the odd one out. She’d gone missing from Bakewell, not Blackden Edge, and her disappearance had occurred twenty-five years after the Hatton sisters went missing.

  “Do you think Lindsey’s name belongs on that list?” she asked. “It seems unlikely that her disappearance is connected to the others.”

  “Well, officially, none of them are connected,” Farley said. “The police have always maintained that each disappearance, and Josie Wagner’s murder, are totally separate crimes perpetrated by different people. They didn’t want a media circus, you see. They justified their decision by the fact that the only evidence linking the crimes is circumstantial. There was no matching DNA at every scene or calling card left by the killer that links the girls’ abductions together.”

  “Do you believe that? That none of them are connected?”

  “Of course not,” he scoffed. “And neither do you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be writing a book about it. I assume that’s what you’re doing here.”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “Good. It’s about time those girls got some kind of justice. We were silenced at the time, of course, and from what Battle tells me, the police are still sticking to their story that there’s no connection between any of it. Maybe your book can make people question that. The cases need to be re-opened, new investigations carried out. I’d do it myself but I told you, I’m tired. If I got involved in all that again, I think it would kill me.”

  He looked at her closely, considering something. “I’ll make you a deal. If you sign my copy of Heart of a Killer, I’ll show you something the police received a few weeks after Lindsey Grofield’s disappearance. It might be a letter from the killer. Or it might be nothing. Nobody’s sure exactly what it is. The original is sitting in an evidence locker but I’ve got a photocopy of it here in the house.”

  “Of course,” Elly said immediately.

  Farley got up and went into the living room. He came back less than a minute later with a hardback copy of Heart of a Killer and a folded sheet of paper. He passed the book to Elly along with a fountain pen.

  When she opened the book to the title page and brought the pen to the paper, she found her hand was trembling slightly. If the sheet of paper in Farley’s hand was an actual photocopy of a letter from the Blackden Edge Murderer, it could contain the answer to everything.

  She told herself to calm down. The police had had this letter for eighteen years. If there were any clues to the killer’s identity in it, they’d have acted on them by now. Or maybe not. Maybe the protection that seemed to surround the Walkers prevented the police from doing anything.

  Was that why Farley was showing her the letter? Because he knew she could act on its contents where the authorities wouldn’t?

  She signed the book, To Gordon, A fellow seeker of truth, and signed it. The signature didn’t look anything like her usual one. She put the cap on the pen with a shaky hand.

  “Thank you,” Farley said. “Now, I can see you’re excited about seeing this letter. First, let me explain why it might be nothing more than the work of a crackpot. It was received at the Buxton police station after Lindsey Grofield’s disappeance. The word URGENT was printed on the
envelope in capital letters. According to the postmark, it had been posted in Matlock.”

  Elly asked, “Do you mind if I make notes?”

  “Of course not.”

  She searched her pockets for something to write on and came up with a grocery receipt. She picked up the fountain pen again and wrote “letter posted in Matlock” on the slip of paper.

  “Do you want some better paper?” Farley asked. “I’ve got a notebook in the living room.”

  “No, this is fine. Go on, please.”

  “When Battle read the contents of the letter,” he said, “he had the lab analyse the paper and the envelope for DNA, fingerprints, and chemicals. Everything came back negative. The paper and envelope were Basildon Bond, a common brand. As I said, the original is locked up but Battle had some photocopies made.”

  Elly looked at the paper in Farley’s hand. She wanted to see it now.

  “At first, Battle tried to keep me in the dark. He knew how the Wagner and Walker cases had affected me and he wanted me to enjoy my retirement. So, instead of telling me about the letter, he came to me and asked me to teach him about flowers.

  “I thought that was a strange request since he’d shown absolutely no interest in flowers all the years we worked together. Then I thought it was his excuse to come and visit me, keep an eye on me and make sure I was all right.

  “It turns out, I was wrong. He only seemed to be interested in certain flowers, all of them wildflowers. But there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind his choices. Finally, I confronted him and asked him why he really wanted to learn about these particular flowers. He told me he’d received a letter that may be nothing or may be from the Blackden Edge Murderer.”

  “I don’t understand the connection,” she said. “To the flowers, I mean.”

  “You will. Anyway, I made Battle show me a copy of the letter and he gave me this. Unfortunately, when you read it, you’ll understand why it could be nothing at all.”

  He slid the paper across the table to her.

  Elly opened it. The photocopy was of good quality. The original letter had been folded in two places to make it fit into the envelope but the folds didn’t interfere with the writing, which was neat and blocky. As soon as Elly read it, she realised why this letter hadn’t exactly blown the case wide open and led to an arrest of the Blackden Edge Murderer. It was a poem about flowers.