The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, one crucial thing: what route would he have taken on his way to his last delivery?’

  ‘According to the schedule, his previous call was at a farm the other side of Dove Holes. He was almost in Buxton.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘He would have driven up the A6 then. No doubt about that.’

  ‘Well, no satnav would convince you that you weren’t on the A6,’ said Villiers.

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It was after he left the A6 that he went astray somehow.’

  Cooper remembered something one of the Shawhead residents had said the previous day. Who was it now? Yes, Tania Durkin. She’d talked about Shawhead being ‘nowhere’.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t following a diversion sign, that’s for sure. They wouldn’t divert traffic up Cloughpit Lane, no matter what. It goes nowhere.’

  Well, this might be the road to nowhere. But Cooper recalled seeing roadworks near Chinley when he drove past it on the A6. A section of road was closed near the PVC factory at Whitehough for resurfacing or repairs to a collapsed stretch. He felt sure there had been a diversion, probably through the centre of Chinley village to Leadenknowle.

  He despatched a couple of uniformed officers back down to the corner where Cloughpit Lane turned off the road between Furness Vale and New Mills. They had instructions to search the verges and undergrowth, and to check behind stone walls. Whatever they could find that shouldn’t be there. You never knew your luck, as long as you tested every possibility.

  The two dead sheep that had been found during the search lay over the wall in one of Grant Swindells’ fields, close to the railway embankment. Among the firmest evidence Cooper had from the scene at the bridge was the presence of sheep on the road. Had Mac Kelsey run into the stray flock milling about on Cloughpit Lane?

  Some drivers got very impatient with sheep on the road and tried to push them out of the way with their vehicles. But sheep didn’t react in predictable ways. They tended to panic. Might Kelsey have driven over a couple of ewes in his irritation? Did these sheep die under the wheels of his curtainsider? That would have angered Grant Swindells, no doubt. Perhaps Kelsey’s death was the result of a violent argument with the farmer over the damage to his stock.

  It was certain that at some point both Kelsey’s body and those of the sheep had been removed from the scene. It seemed reasonable to conclude that the same person or person had moved both. And Swindells had been hanging about at the scene too, not just Amanda Hibbert. Cooper had encountered him almost straight away when he arrived on Tuesday morning.

  It was behaviour typical of an individual who was implicated in the crime. When you’d killed someone and buried their body under a heap of stones, most people couldn’t just sit still at home not knowing whether it was about to be found or not. There was an irresistible impulse to see what was happening and what the police were doing. And whether they were looking in the wrong direction.

  Cooper’s thoughts went back to the scene in Shawhead when the crowd of residents had gathered in the road. There was one moment that had struck him. Hadn’t Ian Hibbert seemed a little frightened of Swindells? Why would that be?

  Yesterday a Scenes of Crime officer had visited Shawhead Cottages and taken Amanda Hibbert’s fingerprints for elimination purposes. It would have been with the old ink pad and paper technique. He could picture her expression of horror at the black stains covering her hands. The ink washed off easily, though he’d known SOCOs tell people it would ‘wear off in a few weeks’ just for a joke. Even SOCOs were human, after all. But if an officer had told Mrs Hibbert that, no doubt he’d soon be hearing about it. She would be down here at the bridge bashing his ear with her complaints.

  Now he was wondering whether he was going to have to take prints from everyone at Shawhead.

  Cooper turned to Villiers. He didn’t need a map to guess the answer to his question, but he asked it anyway.

  ‘The site where Mac Kelsey was buried,’ he said. ‘How near is that footpath we identified on the map?’

  ‘It’s just on the other side of the wall,’ said Villiers.

  ‘I thought so.’

  Cooper walked under the Cloughpit Lane bridge. The underside of the nearest arch was streaked white where salt had leaked out of the damp stone. Within a few yards, he was standing in the gap between the two arches, looking up into daylight. He could see the stone parapet and the broken branches of the elder sapling growing out of it.

  In his imagination he saw figures appearing up there, their heads peering over the parapet before they scrambled down onto the roof of the lorry. Sitting here in his cab, Mac Kelsey would already be confused and distracted. He ought to have been reaching for his phone to call somebody for help, surely? That would be the first thing that anyone would do. But Kelsey hadn’t made that call. He’d been interrupted.

  Unfortunately, Cooper’s imagination couldn’t manage to fill in the details of the faces he pictured above him on the parapet. They were just grey blurs, anonymous and of indeterminate gender.

  Why was he picturing two people? Because it seemed like a crime committed by more than one. Kelsey was a big man. Not fit perhaps – he had a sedentary job, after all. But he must have been heavy, and strong. Overpowering was a job for more than one person.

  And Cooper felt sure this had been an ambush, planned and executed well. True, whoever did it had relied on some measure of luck. But there was one other thing they seemed to have relied on. They had depended on no one coming along the road while they were carrying out their assault. Otherwise there would have been witnesses.

  Standing there, in the middle of the Cloughpit Lane bridge, Cooper concluded that it meant someone who was familiar with Shawhead. Someone who knew the habits of the residents and could predict what times they came in and out, and when it would be quiet. They’d banked on being unobserved, and it had worked.

  An hour later, when the black van had been and collected the body bag from the field, Cooper went back to his car to return to Edendale.

  One of his jobs was to meet Anne Kelsey when she was brought to the mortuary at the Edendale District General Hospital.

  He had to wait with her for a few minutes before they were allowed into the viewing area. It gave the mortuary staff enough time to clean up the features of the corpse sufficiently.

  When they finally went in, Anne Kelsey seemed prepared.

  ‘Is this your husband, Mrs Kelsey?’ asked Cooper.

  She took just one ragged breath.

  ‘Yes, of course it—’ she said. And then a pause as she took in the obvious signs of his injuries. ‘But who would do that to him? And why? For heaven’s sake, why?’

  Who and why. They were always the questions that bereaved relatives asked when faced with the brutal truth. Once they found themselves in the viewing room at the mortuary for a formal identification there was no point any more in trying to deny the reality. It was too late then to pretend it was all a mistake, that it was someone else’s husband or wife on the slab. The last shreds of hope died at that moment. And only the questions remained.

  ‘Why?’ she said again, turning her contorted face up to Cooper’s in an angry snarl, as if he was personally guilty, the culprit for her spouse’s murder standing right before her eyes.

  Cooper flinched at her expression. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know that. Not yet.’

  ‘But you’ll find out. You’ll catch the person who did it.’

  And now they were no longer questions, but statements. Instructions. Her husband had been killed and it was someone’s job to deal with it, to bring her all the answers she demanded, all the explanations she needed to know.

  And it wasn’t just anyone’s job. It was Detective Inspector Ben Cooper’s job.

  ‘We’ll do our best, Mrs Kelsey,’ he said. ‘I promise you that.’

  Cooper had his phone turned to silent while he was in the mortuary. So it was as he left and went back to sit in his Toyota that he checked his mes
sages and returned a call to Becky Hurst.

  Hurst had been called to an incident in New Mills. She was only three miles away from the site of Mac Kelsey’s murder at Shawhead. And she had another dead body on her hands.

  ‘It definitely looks like a suicide,’ she said. ‘He was found hanging from a walkway over the river here.’

  Cooper started the car. ‘The Millennium Walkway?’ he said.

  Hurst laughed. ‘Is there anywhere in this area you don’t know?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be calling me if it was just a suicide,’ said Cooper. ‘There must be something else.’

  He could hear noises in the background of the call. A rushing sound. The roaring of water over a weir. The sound had a strange, echoey quality as if the water was flowing in a confined space. The Torrs, of course. A one-hundred-foot gorge below the town of New Mills. That was where Becky Hurst was standing.

  ‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘I think there may be a connection with the murder inquiry at Shawhead. I’d like you to tell me whether I’m right or wrong.’

  14

  On his way into New Mills, Ben Cooper had reached the uncomfortably sharp right-hand turn from the lights at the foot of Albion Road and dropped down the hill past Newtown railway station and the big Swizzels Matlow sweet factory to the bridge over the Torrs gorge.

  Cooper hadn’t been to New Mills for a while. Not since his CID team had helped to execute search warrants in the Hague Bar area as part of a major drugs operation in the town. When you’d only visited properties where drug dealers were operating, or a house that had been converted into a cannabis farm, you could get quite a negative impression of a place. It tended to reinforce the stereotypes.

  He thought about what Gavin Murfin had said about New Mills. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before, of course. The town sat in a sort of no man’s land. It wasn’t really part of Derbyshire and it didn’t belong to Manchester either. That could give a community like this a sort of pariah status.

  Modern New Mills looked like a typical mill town, owing more to similar places in Lancashire than to Derbyshire, with a warren of narrow streets and stone-built cottages. The typical air of post-industrial decline had been compensated for by its growth as a home for Manchester commuters, and a lot of new houses had been built.

  Cooper remembered a detail he ought to have asked for a check on and he phoned Carol Villiers, who was still at the bridge scene.

  ‘Carol, can you make sure Scenes of Crime examine the satnav in the cab of the lorry?’ he said. ‘Any faults on it, what settings it was on.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘How was the widow, by the way?’ she said.

  ‘The usual. In denial.’

  ‘Did she hold together for the identification?’

  ‘Yes, I think she’ll be fine.’

  Cooper ended the call. Had he really just said Anne Kelsey would be ‘fine’? What sort of word was that to use in the circumstances? No one whose husband had just been murdered was ‘fine’.

  Below New Mills in a gorge one hundred feet deep was Riverside Park, extending for two miles along the River Goyt. It started at the Goytside Meadows nature reserve to the south, ran under the Union Road bridge, and snaked through the gorge known as the Torrs and past Torr Vale Mill, where it was linked by the Millennium Walkway.

  Until the nineteenth century New Mills was virtually cut in two by the deep gorge of the River Goyt, known as the Torrs. The only crossing involved a tortuous descent to a bridge just above river level, followed by an equally tough ascent on the other side. The problem wasn’t fully solved until the construction of the Union Road bridge, ninety-five feet high, built over the centre of the gorge and constructed out of rock from the Torrs. Viewed from the level of the river, it looked impressive.

  With difficulty, Cooper found a space to park his car on the approach to the gorge, tucking as far in as he could behind a marked police car.

  A series of arched bridges now crossed the gorge at the Union Road end. Two rivers met here. The Sett rose way up near Edale Cross on Kinder Scout, while the Goyt flowed from the Axe Edge moors through Whaley Bridge to reach New Mills. At Furness Vale they said that the colour of the River Goyt had once run red, its colour depending on discharges from the calico print mills in the valley. From these two rivers, millions of litres of water must pour over the Torrs weir every day – perhaps billions of litres during a wet winter.

  There had been at least two other mills down here. The site of one had been restored as a hydro power project, with a twelve-ton reverse Archimedes screw nicknamed Archie. It was owned by the community and generated enough electricity to supply the Co-op supermarket off Church Road and fed some surplus energy into the national grid.

  It had been big news for New Mills for a while, the local papers full of pictures of the massive screw being lowered two hundred feet from the Union Road bridge for installation. The other major event for the town had been the construction of the Millennium Walkway.

  The walkway was part cantilevered from the railway embankment and part raised on pillars set into the river bed. It consisted of a steel rail, a few strands of wire cable forming the sides. Willowherb sprouted out of the high retaining wall of the railway embankment. A train passed overhead as he approached the scene of the hanging.

  Cooper stepped onto the walkway and was immediately bombarded by a host of sensations. The reverberation of footsteps on the walkway, the slight vibration of the deck underfoot, the roar of the weir drowning out all other sounds. He was very conscious of the only surviving mill in the gorge, Torr Vale, located on its wooded peninsula in a dramatic curve of the Goyt. He leaned on the rail and gazed down at the weir and the sluice gate of the old mill.

  DC Becky Hurst met him on the walkway. The remains of the suicide victim had been lowered to the level of the river and were now lying in a black body bag on a concrete platform that had once been the site of some ruined mill buildings.

  ‘According to the driving licence and credit cards in his wallet, this man is Scott Brooks. He lives at an address on Peak Road, New Mills.’

  ‘Are there any suspicious circumstances?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘No signs of foul play,’ admitted Hurst. ‘He left a bag the rope had been in and he fastened a scarf round his neck to protect him from getting cut.’

  Cooper stood at the steel rail and looked down.

  ‘How long was the rope?’ he asked.

  ‘Six or seven feet.’

  ‘A long drop hanging,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s quite unusual.’

  Everyone knew that hanging wasn’t a 100 per cent certain way of killing yourself. Top of the list was a shotgun to the head. You couldn’t miss with a shotgun at close range. Unlike many farmers in the rural parts of the Peak District, Scott Brooks perhaps didn’t have access to a firearm.

  But suicides by hanging were usually of the short drop type. A simple noose from the ceiling and a chair kicked away. A short drop caused death by asphyxiation. It was the method of choice for prisoners who had no other means of killing themselves in their cells.

  The long drop was a different matter. It was the old means of judicial execution until capital punishment was abolished in the 1960s. It was designed to fracture the cervical vertebrae and produce immediate unconsciousness and almost instant death. A drop of five to nine feet was said to be the optimum, depending on the height and weight of the victim. Too long a drop and you risked complete decapitation.

  ‘It’s a very public way to kill yourself too,’ said Cooper. ‘Most people who really want to do away with themselves get on with it quietly at home. When it happens so publicly, it’s usually a cry for help rather than a serious suicide attempt. Individuals who climb up onto bridges or window ledges – they’re really hoping to get lots of attention. They want someone to talk them down at the last minute.’

  ‘It isn’t as public as you might think,’ said Hurst. ‘Not at the time Mr Brooks chose to come here.’r />
  She pointed up at Torr Vale Mill, which was the only building overlooking the scene.

  ‘According to local officers, the mill has been semi-derelict for about fifteen years since it was closed,’ she said. ‘There is some usage now. The company that took it over are converting part of the mill into office spaces and there’s one floor where they hold events sometimes. Concerts, even weddings.’

  Cooper looked at the five-storey main building. Lights were on in some of the third-floor windows. But on the tip of the curve, where the river roared round a bend and disappeared, there was a gaping hole in the mill complex, the ruins of former buildings with exposed beams and piles of rubble.

  ‘About fifteen years ago there was a major fire caused by trespassers,’ said Hurst. ‘It destroyed one entire building. Because the fire exposed asbestos that had been used in the boiler house, they had to demolish that too. The old cotton mill is still there, plus the weaving shed, the chimney stack, the foreman’s house and some other buildings.’

  On this side of the river the elegant curve of the walkway clung to the high retaining wall of the railway line until it disappeared beyond the mill. At the far end a path led up to the railway bridge and the entrance to New Mills Central station. The walkway itself continued into the woods along the bank of the river and became the Goyt Way, while a separate path crossed a footbridge to the mill.

  ‘Did nobody see anything?’ said Cooper, already guessing the answer.

  ‘As far as we can establish, there was no one else on the walkway, or in this part of the Torrs. So to see anything, you’d either have to be looking out of one of the upper windows at the old mill, or watching from the viewpoint at the heritage centre. No one has reported seeing a man committing suicide by hanging himself. But that doesn’t prove anything.’

  Cooper nodded. The fact that no one had reported seeing Scott Brooks hanging himself from the walkway didn’t necessarily mean that no one had seen him do it. Some individuals were as likely to have stood filming it on their mobile phones, rather than dialling 999 or trying to help. They might be uploading their footage to Facebook or YouTube right now.