‘The assumption will be death by misadventure.’
‘Tried to climb a mountain in bad weather, then fell, and died of exposure before she could be found? It sounds reasonable.’
‘It’s the sort of thing people do all the time around here. It’s as if they think bad weather isn’t real, just a bit of gloss added by the National Park Authority to make the scenery more picturesque.’
Cooper turned and looked over the surrounding moorland. Today the Peak District really did look like a scene from one of those old-fashioned winters that people always talked about. The snow that had fallen earlier in the week had smoothed out the familiar features of the landscape, until the hills and valleys had become unrecognizable.
Everyone who had lived in the area before the mid-1980s had their own tales of deep snows that brought everything to a halt, of chest-high snowdrifts and people skating on iced-over rivers.
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It was said that Burbagc Edge had once been covered in drifts thirty feet deep, that it had taken years for its birch trees to recover from the damage after the weight of snow had snapped their boughs like matchsticks and ripped them limb from limb where they stood. On days like that, it was foolhardy to venture on to the moors.
Cooper turned over the plastic bag containing the woman’s purse, which he had found in the left-hand pocket of her coat, the first part of her to emerge from the snow. A cash card and bank statement revealed her name to be Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale. Why had no one reported Marie Tennent missing? He knew without checking that she wasn’t on the missing persons list he had been through it only yesterday with Gavin Murfin, and she had been lying here longer than that. So where were Marie’s family? What about her friends and neighbours?
The postmortem would tell them whether Marie Tennent had been injured or had collapsed through the cold, or had simply lain down and frozen to death. The physical circumstances could be established in the mortuary; but no amount of examination of the brain would prove her state of mind.
‘I can see some animal traces,’ said Lix. ‘They might help with time of death.’
‘Yes. [hanks.’
Rut Cooper was looking at the dead woman’s face. She lay curled on her side, and her head was towards him, with her hands at her temples, as if she had been covering her ears to shut out the sound of approaching death. Her eyes were closed, and the skin of her face was white and rimed with a thin layer of frost. Her nose and lips were already starting to turn black.
Cooper knew his colleagues sometimes accused him of being over-imaginative. And he wasn’t supposing that he could read the expression of a corpse. But he did know one thing, which a quick glance over his shoulder confirmed. When she died, Marie
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Tennent had been facing towards Irontongue Hill, not away from it. The remains of the tail fin of the wrecked Lancaster bomber SU-V were plainly visible from here. The last thing Marie would have seen in life was a rustv fragment of Sugar Uncle Victor.
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Cooper recalled what Dianc Fry had said about a name you heard for the first time, which then seemed to crop up again and again. He had been vaguely aware since: his childhood of
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the wreckage of the Lancaster bomber on Irontongue Hill. It was a story that would have appealed to him as a boy, when war had seemed exciting and glamorous, probably because it was something so distant that it was never likclv to touch him
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personally. He had missed the height of the Cold War, when people had believed they were in daily danger of being wiped out in a nuclear holocaust; he had been too young to remember Vietnam. It was all history, as remote as World War Two, not affecting real people that he knew. Yet the wreck had always been there, at the back of his mind.
Cooper didn’t think he had heard the name of the aircraft before yesterday. Lancaster SU-V. Sugar Uncle Victor. He was sure it would have stuck in his mind. It sounded so innocuous for a machine designed to kill and destroy. Lie didn’t think he could
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have missed the irony. Now the (light engineer of Sugar Uncle Victor had been drawn to his attention twice in two days. And here was a woman who might have been heading either towards or away from the wreck when she died.
There were too many assumptions that could be made in a case like this. The first assumption would be that Marie I ennent had been responsible for her own death, in one way or another. Suicide or misadventure. Did it matter? Perhaps only to the High Peak coroner, who liked his records to be neat.
‘Ben?’ called Li/. ‘I think you’re wanted over here.’
‘Coming.’
The doctor had been lowered on to the hill by the RAL rescue helicopter, which still hovered overhead, waiting to take the body up on the winch.
Cooper took a last look at the tattered tail hn barely visible above the rocks on Irontongue Hill. He would have to get up there one day soon and take a closer look at what was left of the aircraft that Pilot Officer Danny McTeague had walked away from. He couldn’t imagine what connection there might bebetween the wreck and two sudden deaths. But he had a strong feeling that they were rapidly going to become intertwined.
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It was as if the phantom shape of Sugar Uncle Victor was circling the Eden Valley again, its Merlin engines rumbling beneath the cloud cover, its slaughtered crew returning for a final mission. It was as if the ancient Lancaster had flown in under the slipstream of Alison Morrissey’s Air Canada Boeing 767 from Toronto.
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.Frank Bainc leaned against the wall of the post office next to the Buttcrcross. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the snow, where it fi//Jed briefly. He drew hard on the smoke and held the cigarette cupped in his hand as he watched two teenage boys lean their bikes against the window of the post office and run inside.
A DAF articulated lorry came down Buxton Road towards the roundabout. Instead of turning on to the relief road, it came straight on towards the Buttercross. Baine let out a lungful of smoke, noting the lorry’s registration number automatically as its driver applied the air brakes and pulled up a few yards short of the traffic lights. A line of cars immediately began to build up behind the lorry as it blocked the carriageway.
A man climbed down from the passenger side of the cab. Baine couldn’t sec him until the lorry indicated and pulled away again towards the lights. Then he watched George Malkin cross the road. Malkin didn’t look at him until he was within a few feet.
‘Frank Bainc?’
‘That’s me. I love the transport.’
Malkin didn’t answer.
Baine smiled and drew on his cigarette. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about money.’
The lower eastern slopes of Irontongue Flill were a favourite area tor motorcycle scramblers, bikers who liked to get off-road with their machines and spray a bit of dirt.
Only last Sunday, before the snow came, there had been a
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confrontation here between a party of hikers and a group of scramblers. For some time, there had been complaints that the motorcyclists had been churning up the pathways, turning the surface into mud impossible for walkers to cross without sinking
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up to their knees.
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This morning, someone had stolen a scramble hike from a trailer parked in a farmyard outside Edendale. A patrol car driving up the AS7 saw a rider in a lay-by next to the woods above the inn and stopped to question him. But he rode off as soon as he saw them, and they gave chase. The police crew were in a Range Rover, but they knew they wouldn’t have much hope of catching the biker if he went off-road. A hundred yards away was an open gateway leading on to one of the paths favoured by scramblers.
The motorbike slid across the gateway and ploughed through a snowdrift, scattering a white spray against the stone wall. The Range Rover skidded as the driver braked, but he kept control and turned into the g
ateway to follow the bike up the track.
The track rose steeply and started to get narrower.
‘We’d better call it off/ said the passenger.
‘just round this next bend, we’ll he able to see where he goes,’ said the driver. ‘Anvwav, he’ll be struggling if the snow
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gets any deeper.’
‘Watch out!’ shouted the passenger.
The bend had been too sharp and too sudden for the Range Rover. The driver skidded again, but this time failed to control the vehicle. It went off the track and slid a couple of yards into a streambcd, ending up with its bumper and front wheels in the water.
The driver turned off the engine. ‘Damn and blast,’ he said.
‘The garage won’t be pleased,’ said his passenger. ‘It had a new radiator only last week.’
‘Call in,’ said the driver.
He opened his door and stepped into a couple of inches of freezing cold water. The strcambed was full of uneven stones, and he had difficulty keeping his balance as he tried to get to the side against the force of the water. He reached out a hand to grasp the branch of a birch sapling grow ing out of the bank and found himself clutching something else an item of clothing. It
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was a shirt — a blue shirt, with a thin white stripe and white cuffs. He could see the label inside the collar and recognized that it was from a well-known manufacturer, not one of the cheap
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Portuguese things that he bought himself from the bargain shops in Eclendale.
The driver looked up, and saw that the streambed was full of clothes. There were shirts and trousers draped across the stones, and socks and jockey shorts with water bubbling over them as if somebody had decided to do their washing the primitive way. A blue and red striped tic hung from a clump of dead heather. A shoe had Oiled with water and sunk to the bottom, where its laces waved in the current like strands of seaweed.
Then the driver remembered the unidentified body found near here, the man who had been hit by the snowplough. There had been an overnight bag with the bodv, but it had been empty
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of clothes.
‘Have you called in yet?’ he shouted to his partner.
‘Yes.’ ‘
‘Do it again, then.’
Ben Cooper had decided to walk to Dam Street. The house where Marie Tennent had lived was no more than half a mile from divisional headquarters, just across town in the tangle of backstreets near one of the old silk mills. It hardly seemed worth getting a car out, not when the streets were still clogged with crawling vehicles and pedestrians slithering
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around in the roadway because the pavements hadn’t been cleared yet. Besides, there were few enough places to park in the Dam Street area, even without the snow. The millworkers’ houses had been built long before anybody needed either garages or streets wide enough to park cars on.
The silk mill itself had recently been converted into a heritage centre. The old three-storey stone building had become derelict and for wears had been in danger of demolition, but now a new
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cafe and shop had been built. Cooper wondered what on earth had possessed the designers to build the extension out of red brick when the old mill and all the other buildings around it were stone. The Peak District was stone country. Brick felt like an alien substance. On the corner of Dam Street, a man in a hooded parka was walking a Doberman tightlv held on a chain. He eved Cooper
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suspiciously, hauling hack on the Jog’s lead as if trying to give the impression it would attack at the slightest provocation.
Cooper let him pass and walked on until he located Marie Tcnncnt’s house. It was at the end of a terrace, with a tiny front garden and a view to the side over the millpond at the
hack of the heritage centre. Between the house and the one
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next door was a high stone wall that effectively prevented any communication with the neighbours. It seemed peculiarly quiet at this end of the street. Part of the effect was perhaps caused hv the stretch of water, which was covered hv a thin skin of ice. Cooper looked at the houses on the opposite side of the street. Their windows and doors were hoarded up. They were either awaiting renovation or demolition.
First he knocked on the neighbour’s door, but got no reply. He had decided to try again after he checked out number 10
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when there was a voice behind him.
‘Yeah?’
It was the man with the Doberman, and he was fiddling with the chain as if he were about to let the dog loose. The dog didn’t look particularly interested, but Cooper didn’t feel like taking a chance. He showed his ID.
‘Do you live here, sir?’
‘I suppose so. What do you want?’
‘I’m making some enquiries about your next-door neighbour, Marie Tennent.’
‘Scottish lass?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think she’s Scottish.’
‘Her name’s Tennent.
‘Ihat’s it. Like the lager. What s she done, then? Sit!’
I he Doberman sat with a sigh of relief. On closer inspection, the dog looked worn out, as if it had been pounding the streets for too long. In fact, it looked like some of the Edcndale coppers used to when they had done a quick shift changeover and had been on duty eighteen hours out of twenty-four.
‘I’m afraid she’s had an accident,’ said Cooper.
‘That’s copper’s talk, isn’t it? You don’t know how to say what you mean, you lot. Dead, is she?’
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‘Yes. Did you know her well?’
‘Hardly at all. Kept herself to herself, she did.’
‘Perhaps she was frightened of dogs.’
The man watched Cooper walk to the door of number 10 and open it with the key he had been given by the agents. Cooper glanced back for a second. Two strings of saliva had run out of the Dobcrman’s mouth and were dripping on to the pavement. The muscles in its shoulders and haunches had tensed. He was glad when the door opened at the hrst attempt, letting him into the cold interior of Marie Tenncnt’s home.
The first thing he saw in the hallway was the green message light Hashing on an answering machine. He pressed the button and got a Scots voice. Not Highland, more urban Scots maybe Glasgow or Edinburgh, he was never sure of the difference. It was a woman, middle-aged, who didn’t bother to identify herself. There was no phone number given either for the return call.
‘Marie, give me a ring when you can. Let me know how vou’re going on, so 1 don’t worry about you.’
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There were bills piled up on a table and yellow Post-it notes stuck to the bottom of the mirror. There was a red coat hanging on a hook behind the door, a pair of shoes under the table, and a box of books on the floor that had been delivered by the postman but not opened.
Cooper paused, trying to assimilate the immediate impressions of the house. There was something in the atmosphere that didn’t seem quite right. In an apparently empty house, an unexplained noise was immediately noticeable. But it wasn’t a noise that he had heard. He moved his head from side to side, sniffing carefully for gas or the smell of burning, or for the odour of something dead and decomposing. But there were none of the smells that would normally have set his alarm bells ringing. There was a faint, elusive scent in the hallway, but it evaded his senses after the first whiff, before he could identify it. lie wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. It could simply be a lingering squirt of air freshener or a suggestion of recently used disinfectant.
The hallway was cold, but no colder than any other house that had been standing empty for a couple of days. He supposed
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there was no central heating in these cottages. Or, if there was, it would be on a timer, to save gas. If that was the case, then this was a time of day when Marie wou
ld not have expected to he at home, and that might have meant she had a job to go to.
Cooper stood completely still and listened. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. It was one of the worst sounds you could ever hear — the ticking of a clock in an empty house after its owner had died. It was a reminder that the world would carry on just the same after you had gone, that the second hand wouldn’t even hesitate in its movement as you passed from living to dying.
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Tick, you were there. Tick, you were gone. As if you had never mattered. It was a sound that struck straight to some primal fear in the guts the knowledge that time was steadily counting you down to your own death.
Your clock ought to stop when you died. Cooper knew it was one of those irrational things, something that welled up from a deep superstition. But he wanted to climb up on a kitchen chair and take the battery out of the clock or remove its counterweight, to bring its hands to a halt. He wanted to demand silent respect in the presence of death. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he allowed the ticking to follow him around the house as he moved from room to room; he permitted it to mock him with its sound, like the chuckle of a malevolent mechanical toy.
The first door off the hallway opened on to a sitting room. Cooper walked straight to the fireplace and checked the items on the mantelpiece. A recent gas bill had been shoved behind a cracked Chinese willow-pattern bowl, and there was a Somerfield’s checkout receipt with it. He turned to the fold-out mahogany dining table in the corner. There was a glass vase containing a dried-flower arrangement standing on a raffia mat. But there was no suicide note.
The room also contained a desk, which was packed with bank and credit-card statements, letters and old photographs. Cooper carefully separated some of the more recent letters to study them for the names of Marie Tennent’s closest contacts. He took a few moments to make a note of some names and addresses. None of them was local, and none sounded like a boyfriend. One was
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