Secrets of Death

by Stephen Booth

  He crossed the bridge, turned left at the lights and drove on to the narrow road that ran up the northern arm of Ladybower. The reservoir formed an enormous stylised letter ‘Y’ in the landscape. The Fairholmes Visitor Centre lay right at the tip of Ladybower’s northern arm, where it was separated from Derwent Reservoir by another dam with castellated twin towers. Though Fairholmes was run by Severn Trent Water, there was a ranger service station here, as well as a cycle hire centre. A bus service ran all the way between Fairholmes and Fearfall Wood on the side of the A57.

  As Irvine was parking, his phone rang. He saw straight away that it was his parents, calling from Denby Dale because they knew he ought to have finished work by now. They worried that he’d get too obsessed with the job and be working all hours of the day and night, with no social life, no proper meals and far too much alcohol. They’d watched so many TV crime dramas that they had a distorted view of police work which he couldn’t get out of their minds, no matter how often he tried to explain the reality to them.

  ‘Hello? Mum?’ he said.

  It was usually his mother who made the call. Sometimes she passed him on to his dad, but she was the one who waited impatiently by the phone until the clock said it was okay to ring.

  ‘I’m just out for a run,’ he said. ‘Ladybower. No, Ladybower. The big reservoir. You know, I showed it to you and Dad when you came down. Yes, like Ingbirchworth but a lot bigger.’

  He put his money into the parking machine and stuck the ticket on his car, shooing away a Mallard duck pecking at his trainers. An enormous flock of ducks owned the car park at Fairholmes. When you drove in, you had to wait for dozens of them to waddle slowly across the tarmac to make way for your car. When you walked towards the café, they followed you. When you came out, they clustered round your legs, making hopeful little quacking noises. If you sat at a picnic table, they gradually surrounded you, until you were sitting in a sea of gently undulating feathers.

  ‘No, I haven’t started going to church regularly, Mum,’ he said. ‘Don’t start asking me why not. I don’t have to say why not. I’ll go if I want to.’

  Irvine rolled his eyes. Near the far wall of the car park, an elderly woman was ripping up chunks of bread and scattering the pieces on the ground. It prompted a surge of movement around the site and a waddling tide converged on her.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m eating properly. Busy at work, but …’

  He began to do his warm-ups. A group of walkers were picnicking at a table. A man sat smoking a cigarette. A minibus pulled away, carrying a group of people home from a day out. Two exhausted-looking cyclists unfastened their helmets. A motorcyclist checked over his bike.

  A dog was barking. And, while two women chatted at a table, their pre-school children ran around the grass throwing sticks at the ducks. The ducks didn’t seem unduly worried, though. They outnumbered everything at Fairholmes.

  ‘No news, then?’ he said. ‘Just calling to check up on me? Yes, I’m eating properly – I just said that. I’m off for my run now, Mum. Okay? See you, then.’

  Irvine tucked his phone in a pocket and headed off on the trail away from the visitor centre. He noticed that the water levels were low in Ladybower for the time of year. In a dry summer, the water could get even lower, exposing the sandy shallows at the edges. And sometimes other things appeared if the reservoir was low enough. Though Irvine had never seen it himself, he’d heard people talk about the long hot summer of 1976 when the walls of houses and a church had been visible, the submerged remains of Derwent village, which had been lost when the valley was flooded. An old man he’d met leaning on the bar in the Angler’s Rest had claimed to have seen the church spire still rising out of the water before it was blown up in 1947.

  The Peak District was known for its rainfall. It was why so many reservoirs had been built over the years to store water supplies for cities like Manchester and Sheffield. It was frightening to think of the amount of water already held in those reservoirs. More than ten million gallons were contained in the Upper Derwent Valley alone.

  Irvine had been running for fifteen minutes when he heard shouting. He rounded a corner of the trail and saw a small group of people milling around near the edge of the water. Some of them were pointing at the surface of the reservoir, though there was nothing to be seen out there. For a moment, it crossed Irvine’s mind that some townie had imagined they’d sighted the Loch Ness monster or its Derbyshire equivalent. What would the equivalent of Nessie be at Ladybower? Bowie?

  So Irvine was smiling at his own joke as he jogged up to the group. He was about to pass, but they all turned and looked at him as if he was exactly what they’d been hoping for. He noticed a small pile of clothes on the bank.

  ‘He’s gone in,’ someone said. ‘Gone in and gone under.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We don’t know. He was here when we passed earlier on, but now he’s gone.’

  ‘How long is it since you saw him alive?’

  ‘It must be nearly two hours.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  Although it was June, the water in the reservoir would be very cold and there were powerful undercurrents. Even a strong, healthy swimmer could be affected by the temperature and get into difficulties.

  Irvine gazed out at the reservoir, shading his eyes against the dazzle of sunlight off the water. A light breeze was blowing down the Upper Derwent Valley, kicking up little waves and ripples here and there on the surface, confusing the eye. It was hard to make out anything too far from the shore. This was a reservoir, after all. Though some of the banks looked sandy in places, there was a steep drop and the water would be colder and colder the further out you got.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked one of the group. ‘We’ve called 999. What else can we do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Quietly, Irvine cursed to himself. So a body was in Ladybower somewhere. There were five hundred and twenty acres of it, with thirteen miles of shoreline along its two arms. Twenty-eight million gallons of water could hide a lot of bodies, unless they surfaced. How could anyone ever hope to find it? He’d have to call out the water search team with their boats and divers.

  But no. There it was, just fifty yards out. He could see it, bobbing on the surface like a dead fish. A human body. Was the person alive or dead?

  He pointed. ‘There. Right there.’

  Everyone had seen it now. A man stripped off his shirt and plunged in. Another one followed him. Irvine waded into the shallows and helped them drag the limp body ashore. The victim wasn’t breathing. For several minutes Irvine and one of the other men took it in turns to do CPR until they were exhausted from the chest compressions.

  ‘Should we put him in the recovery position?’ said someone anxiously.

  Finally, an ambulance arrived and the paramedic took over. As he stood watching, Irvine came to the unavoidable conclusion that the victim was dead. Yet no one had seen him go into the water. Could he be sure the man had drowned?

  Irvine tried to recall the details of his training. How did you determine a drowning? Note the appearance of the victim’s eyes. The eyes of a person who’d drowned could appear glistening and lifelike. It helped to determine that the victim had died in the water and not beforehand. And the skin condition. A body immersed between one and two hours had a wrinkled appearance. Longer than two hours and the skin started to separate and slip off the hands, like a pair of crumpled gloves.

  Well, this body certainly looked wrinkled, but there was no sign of the skin separating. The eyes glistened, so the victim must have drowned within the last two hours.

  Irvine looked into the dead, glittering eyes. They did look as though they were still alive, still staring at something in the distance. He wondered if they’d seen the tunnel, if even now they were approaching the light.

  He made the call to the control room. It would be interesting to see if he was right in his assessment.

  After he’d finished calling in
the details, Irvine found himself standing there on the side of the reservoir with nothing else to do until more help arrived, except to stare at the waterlogged body with its glistening eyes and wrinkled skin. It was only then that he started to feel horribly sick.

  17

  Cooper parked his Toyota at the edge of the road opposite the Barrel Inn, slotting in alongside half a dozen vehicles already there.

  He’d always thought the Barrel had the best views of any Peak District pub and that was saying something. It stood at the side of a road that climbed from Foolow up Eyam Edge, then ran along the top of the edge to Sir William Hill, reaching a height of over fourteen hundred feet at its summit before descending to Grindleford. This had once been a turnpike road from Buxton, but now it wasn’t much used except for trips to the Barrel.

  He glanced along the line of parked cars to see if anyone was in them. During the last few days, he’d found himself being influenced by the unnerving expectation of death. Every time he saw someone sitting in a parked car, he automatically checked to see if they were still alive.

  Sometimes it was difficult to tell. Drivers who were sitting with their heads back against the seat and their eyes glazed over turned out to be listening to Coldplay on an iPod or engaged in a tedious phone conversation with their sales manager. Occasionally, in Edendale, someone was actually asleep at the wheel, dozing while they waited for a partner to come back from the shops or finish a dentist’s appointment.

  Was he getting paranoid about it? Probably yes.

  Cooper nodded to himself. ‘Paranoid,’ he said. ‘That’s me. But for good reason.’

  And he wasn’t alone. Extra police officers were out on the streets in Edendale to keep an eye out – or ‘high visibility patrol’, as managers preferred to call it.

  He was a bit early arriving at the Barrel, so he leaned on his car for a few minutes. Immediately in front of him was a steep drop and an immense view towards the southern horizon. Not only was this the highest pub in Derbyshire, but he was standing right on the divide between the White Peak and Dark Peak. A hundred yards below him was the top of the limestone layer, which rose to form the plateau to the south. Riber Castle was supposed to be visible on the skyline on a good day. That was over the other side of Matlock, nearly twenty miles away.

  Cooper looked down again and could see the village of Foolow nestled in a cluster of trees. It looked very peaceful from here. And it was his home now.

  Looking at the landscape from this vantage point, it struck him that he was living only a few fields away from Carol Villiers. She was still staying with her parents, Stan and Vera Parry, who ran a bed-and-breakfast on the high street in Tideswell. Would she come to visit his new house, perhaps when she wasn’t out with a friend in Derby? Or was she staying away from Foolow for a reason?

  He shaded his eyes against the sun as he searched for Tideswell in the landscape and thought he could make out the pinnacles on the tower of St John the Baptist, the church they called the Cathedral of the Peak. When Carol Villiers returned to Edendale, she had been older, leaner and more tanned than when he’d last seen her. And there had been something else different: an air of confidence, a firm angle of the jaw and a self-assurance in the way she held her head. Her pale hair was pulled back from her face in a more masculine style. Despite that, he’d recognised her immediately.

  Well, Carol Villiers was no Diane Fry. His mother would have approved of Villiers, for a start. Back in their school days she’d been a lively, sports-obsessed girl who was into swimming and running half-marathons and had talked a lot about some female role models who had been prominent in athletics at the time, but whose names he’d long since forgotten.

  Yet there had been an extra dimension to her by the time she returned to Derbyshire and joined the police – a shadow in her eyes, a darkness behind the professional façade. Part of that darkness might be explained by the loss of her husband in Helmand. And perhaps there were other experiences, too, that she was unwilling to talk about.

  He remembered Carol showing him a photograph of herself in her uniform, with black-and-red flashes, her corporal’s stripes on her sleeve, an MP badge, and a white top to her military cap. The cap was what gave the RAF Police their nickname of Snowdrops.

  There had been occasions when he’d wished she was still carrying the Browning nine millimetre she’d been equipped with in the RAFP. In Derbyshire, very few officers were armed. An extendable baton and a pepper spray were all they had as a matter of course, unless a unit with a Taser was available.

  Armed or unarmed, he was always glad that Carol Villiers had his back. He wished there were more that he could do for her, to help lighten that shadow in her eyes.

  Cooper put Villiers firmly out of his mind. He was here for a different reason and he was unsure how it would go. Perhaps he shouldn’t have agreed to the meeting with Chloe Young. It seemed a bit unprofessional. But there was no doubt about it – he needed to be here.

  He turned towards the pub. The Barrel Inn dated from the sixteenth century, with ancient stone walls and a slightly wavy-looking roof, and a few tables and chairs set outside on a flagged terrace in a little sun trap. The front of the pub was bursting with colour, flowers blooming in hanging baskets and window boxes, and more in clay pots and stone planters.

  Bretton was one of those names on a map that could no longer be called a village, consisting of barely a scatter of houses. Yet it had once had its own peculiar tradition, like so many Peak District villages. Here, they used to cover a ram in soap to make it slippery, then runners had to try to catch it as it raced down the road towards Grindleford. And, like nearby Eyam, Bretton had lost many of its inhabitants to the plague in the seventeenth century. Their graves lay in a field marked with flat little headstones.

  A yellow VW Beetle came down the road from the direction of Grindleford, slowed and drew into the parking area a few places up from his Toyota. Dr Chloe Young emerged. He noticed that, like him, she stopped to gaze at the view before she did anything else. He wondered what she saw in the landscape. He had an unaccountable urge to find out.

  Dr Young looked very different with her hair down. Cooper found himself wondering how long it took her in the morning to pin it back out of the way in that complicated knot she’d worn when he first saw her in the mortuary. She was dressed casually too, in a light cotton top and blue jeans. She might have been wearing something similar under the mortuary apron and scrubs, but you could never tell.

  They ordered drinks and took them out to one of the tables. Cooper was glad that the weather was good enough to sit outside. The subject of their conversation might disturb the customers already eating meals inside the pub. That had happened to him before, when he’d become involved in some discussion of death, murder and violence, only to become aware of the horrified stares and the uncomfortable silence around him.

  When Chloe Young put in an order for a baked potato, Cooper realised he hadn’t eaten for several hours and decided to join her. The food was good here. He recalled once eating wild boar when he’d been here with Matt and drinking Marston’s Pedigree. But tonight, he had to be totally sober.

  ‘How do you come to know the Barrel?’ he asked Dr Young when they sat down.

  ‘My family are from Sheffield,’ she said. ‘We’ve always regarded the Peak District as ours. It’s our backyard, in a way.’

  ‘People in Manchester say the same thing.’

  She laughed. ‘They’re wrong, though.’

  He liked the way she laughed so easily. It was a warm laugh and it made him smile too.

  ‘So you’re from Sheffield?’ he said. ‘You don’t sound like a Sheffielder.’

  ‘I’ll have to work on that, then. I must have spent too much time down south. After I graduated from Cambridge, I did some postgraduate work and had a spell in a research position in London. Then I came back north and I’ve been working in Sheffield for the past year. I don’t know where I’ll end up next.’

  ‘There’
s going to be a vacancy in Edendale,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Oh, you mean when Dr van Doon retires? I think she might be good for a few years yet.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You sound a bit disappointed. Do you find her difficult to work with?’

  ‘I …’ Cooper didn’t want to admit that he did sometimes find Juliana van Doon difficult. It might suggest he was the awkward one. ‘No, she’s fine. Very professional.’

  Dr Young took a drink and gazed across the road at the view. ‘I missed the north,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s why I wanted to come back. I particularly missed all this.’

  ‘Your backyard.’

  ‘It used to feel like my own personal national park. You don’t know how lucky you are, living here.’

  Cooper nodded. She was right. Sometimes he did forget how lucky he was. When you lived in a place, you tended to take it for granted. It was good to be reminded now and then.

  Their baked potatoes arrived and Dr Young began to eat. She seemed quite unselfconscious and at ease with him, as if she’d known him all her life. For a moment, Cooper wondered whether she did know him. Perhaps they’d encountered each other at some time in the past and he’d forgotten – though she was the sort of person he was unlikely to forget.

  ‘Your suicides, then,’ she said, with her fork poised in mid-air. ‘Your epidemic, as Dr van Doon called it. Though I think I detected that you didn’t like the term.’

  ‘No, epidemic isn’t a good word. It gives the wrong impression. As if it might infect other people.’

  ‘And that could cause copycat incidents.’