Desperately, he felt further along the stone facade. There had been windows here at one time, but they too had been boarded over. He tugged at a corner of a board, but couldn’t shift it. He realised the building itself had been blinded. No door, and no windows. It was an eyeless dinosaur abandoned in the burning landscape.
Finally he found a side door left open a crack, and slid inside. It was so good to be out of the smoke. But the interior was even darker – pitch black as a cave, thanks to the boarded-up windows. No doubt the electricity was off too. He could smell the mustiness that always invaded empty buildings, though the pub hadn’t been closed for all that long. Decades of stale beer and cigarette smoke were coming into their own now, oozing from the corners and seeping out of the floorboards.
And there was something else too, lurking beneath the mustiness. A thick, rank smell that seemed to stick to the mucus in his nose and throat. On top of the smoke, it made him feel nauseous. He struggled to control the instinct to gag. It was a stink like the smell of fear.
‘Hello!’ he called. ‘Anyone here?’
The sound of his own voice echoed back to him. He wasn’t certain what part of the building he was in. He had never used this side door when the pub was open. He might be somewhere near the kitchens, he couldn’t be sure. He would have to wait a few minutes for his eyesight to adjust to the darkness.
Merritt took a step forward, hands outstretched to feel for the presence of a wall or doorway. His boots crunched on broken glass. The noise sounded unnaturally loud, as if the glass had been left there deliberately as a warning of intruders.
‘Hello? Hello?’
There was no answer. Or was there? Did he detect a faint rustle in the darkness, the sound of breathing that wasn’t his own?
He turned quickly, overwhelmed by a sudden fear that there was someone behind him in the blackness. The broken glass squealed under his boots like a small creature crushed to death against the concrete.
‘Is that …? Is …?’
But the blow on his skull came out of nowhere. Merritt cried out in pain, saw flashes of blinding light in the darkness, felt his legs begin to crumple. Then a second impact drove consciousness from his brain, and he hit the floor, stunned and bleeding, with fragments of glass pressing into his skin, his eyelids twitching as his nerve endings spasmed in agony.
As he lay face down in the dust, Aidan Merritt never felt the third blow – even though it was the one that killed him.
2
The E Division headquarters building in Edendale was starting to look a bit grubby these days – in some parts as grimy as if it had been in the middle of a fire itself. Outside, the woodwork hadn’t been painted for a while, and the stone facing was becoming dark and mottled. Even the brackets for the lights near the security cameras looked as though they were being slowly eaten by acid rain.
As Cooper drove up West Street towards the police station, it seemed that only the rails to the disabled ramp stood out, bright yellow and gleaming in the sun.
But no, he was wrong. There was one other patch of yellow noticeable on the front of the building – the public phone used to contact officers at times when the station was closed. And the times it was closed were becoming increasingly frequent.
When they’d gone through the security barrier and parked among the marked vehicles and CID cars at the back of the building, Cooper locked the Toyota and stood for a moment looking up at the hills above the town.
Edendale sat in a kind of shallow bowl. In every direction you looked, you saw hills. Any road you took out of town went uphill. In the streets down by the river, the climate could be totally different from what was happening up there on the moors of the Dark Peak. A bit of drizzle falling on shoppers on Clappergate could have turned into a snowstorm by the time you reached the Snake Pass on your way to Glossop.
Today, though the sun was shining on Edendale, Cooper could see that the moors to the north and west of the town were black with smoke. It had been another dry spring, with little rain falling on Derbyshire for months. Despite heavy falls of snow in the winter, the high expanses of peat moor soon dried out. And it didn’t even need to be warm – this spring certainly hadn’t been. The plateaux were constantly scoured by wind, which evaporated the moisture and left the peat and banks of heather parched and vulnerable to the threat of wildfires. One January a fire had ignited at minus five degrees Celsius, burning dry winter vegetation above soil that was still frozen solid.
Summer could be a bad time too, when the sun was hot and more visitors crowded on to the moors. But at least there was new growth of foliage then. In the spring, there was only the old vegetation, woody and desiccated. Firefighters called it the fuel load. This spring, the moors were like a vast tinderbox, just waiting for a spark to create these catastrophic fires.
With so much flammable material, and ideal conditions, the fires could burn for days, or for weeks. To the north, near Sheffield, a moorland fire had been smouldering continuously since 1978, after it burned down through the peat into underlying strata of coal. Once that happened, there was no way to put it out.
‘I remember fires like these when I was growing up,’ said Villiers, coming to stand at his shoulder. ‘I thought the whole world was coming to an end. It was like Armageddon. I can’t recall what year it was, but I was quite young.’
‘The worst year was 1976,’ said Cooper.
‘What? I’m not that old.’
‘Nineteen eighty, then. And 1995, 2003 – they were all bad years. All showed spikes in the number of moorland fires.’
For weeks now, national park rangers had been warning people not to light barbecues or camp fires, because of the higher than normal risk of fires. There had already been six moorland fires in the national park in the past two months.
Moorland fires could have a particularly devastating effect at this time of year, wiping out ground-nesting birds and even small mammals such as lambs, which couldn’t escape the advance of the flames. Wildfires not only harmed wildlife but destroyed rare plants and caused erosion. They undid years of hard work in managing those rare environments.
In the past few weeks alone, fires had broken out at Stanton Moor, at Ramshaw Rocks near Warslow, and on Moscar Moor near Ladybower Reservoir. Much of the land was owned by the water companies like United Utilities. In a way, that was an advantage: the companies couldn’t tolerate the resulting run-off into the water supply, so they were willing to cough up the money needed to hire helicopters at two thousand pounds an hour.
Over the Easter period in 2003, landowners had spent around sixty thousand pounds in five days on helicopters to help extinguish three simultaneous fires on Kinder and Bleaklow. There was no contribution to the cost from the state, and lobbying government to fund the use of helicopters had proved fruitless.
Ironically, one of the problems was developing sustainable water supplies out on the moors. The most difficult and severe fires were in remote, inaccessible locations. Water was usually some distance away – and the key to putting fires out was to get water on them. One of the biggest challenges was a logistical one. For years, the authorities had been talking about developing a network of ponds and pipelines across the moors to increase the speed of delivering water to a fire site. It hadn’t happened yet.
They walked towards the door of the station, and Villiers keyed in the security code. A prisoner transport vehicle had drawn up outside the custody suite, and a prisoner was being unloaded from the cage at the back.
Cooper had worked in this division for fifteen years, some of that time in section stations like Bakewell and Matlock, but most of it here at divisional headquarters in Edendale. He was becoming almost as well known as his father had been before him, that old-fashioned copper people in the town still talked about, both for the way he had spent his life and the way he’d died.
In the CID room, the atmosphere felt strained. Cooper detected it as soon as he walked through the door. He looked round the room. The two young
est DCs, Becky Hurst and Luke Irvine, were busy, their heads down, desks piled with paperwork, keyboards clattering, phones ringing intermittently. As usual, they were trying to deal with several things at once.
Meanwhile, the most experienced member of the team, DC Gavin Murfin, was amusing himself by filling in application forms for jobs he could never hope to get, and would never actually apply for. Today he was completing Form 518, the Specialist Post Application form for a Surveillance Operative at the East Midlands Counter Terrorism Intelligence Unit. He’d said yesterday that he liked the fact that the form was designated Restricted when complete.
Murfin looked up when he saw Cooper arrive. His pen was poised dramatically in mid-air.
‘Ah, boss,’ he called. ‘Would you say I “create processes that make sure stakeholders’ and customers’ views and needs are clearly identified and responded to”?’
‘No,’ said Cooper.
‘Would you agree that “this officer’s performance in their current position is satisfactory”?’
‘No.’
‘Or that “the officer meets the person specification/promotion criteria”?’
‘No.’
‘Ben, I have to tell you – my line supervisor’s comments are a very important part of the application process.’
‘It’s still no.’
Murfin sighed. ‘Well, that’s buggered this one, then.’
Keyboards had fallen silent, and the rustle of paperwork had stopped. Even the phones seemed to have taken a break. Cooper could feel the rest of the team watching him carefully.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘Give me that, Gavin.’
‘It’s restricted,’ protested Murfin.
‘Only when complete.’
‘Well, all right.’
Cooper glanced over the form, feeling slightly uneasy about what Murfin might have been writing. When he was in this mood, anything could happen. And as Gavin had pointed out, Cooper was his line supervisor and therefore responsible for his activities.
He ran his finger down the first page, which asked for personal details. For the question ‘Which of the following best describes your religious affiliation?’, Murfin had crossed out all the options and written ‘Jedi knight’. The next question was: ‘How do you identify your sexual orientation?’
‘I’ll put “backwards” for that one,’ said Cooper.
‘But I’m not—’
‘Yes you are. And now I’m going to file your application in the usual manner.’
Cooper ripped the form slowly in half, and dropped the two pieces into the nearest waste-paper bin. As he did it, he could almost hear the tension in the room ease, like a quiet sigh of relief. Even Murfin smiled, as if it was just the result he’d been hoping for.
‘Gavin, why are you even bothering with all that?’ asked Villiers in the subsequent silence. ‘You’re due to retire next month anyway.’
‘Well, exactly,’ said Murfin. ‘I wouldn’t have dared do it before. Blimey, I would have got myself into so much trouble. But now I’m retiring, it doesn’t matter, see. I can put what I like on the forms, and no one will take any notice.’
‘Has this been some lifelong ambition, then?’
‘It’s been Jean’s ambition. You know how I hate to disappoint her.’
‘She’s been disappointed in you all her life, Gavin.’
Murfin shook his head. ‘No, that’s not true. It’s only since she married me. She was perfectly happy until then.’
Cooper bit his lip, trying not to laugh. Though Gavin seemed to be joking, it felt as though laughing would be the wrong thing to do right now.
Murfin was becoming such a contrast to Hurst and Irvine, who were still young in service. A couple of weeks ago, Cooper had overheard Irvine referring to his colleague as a ‘flub’, and had to caution him about his attitude. The ironic thing was that Irvine could only have picked up the expression from Gavin Murfin himself, since no one else used it these days.
In the last few months, Murfin had reverted to the language he’d learned on the job as a young PC thirty years ago, in less politically correct times.
‘I seem to have mislaid my acronym book,’ said Murfin. ‘What’s NIM?’
‘The National Intelligence Model. You ought to know that if you’re applying for a job as … what is it? A Surveillance Operative with the Counter Terrorism Unit.’
‘Right. I’m an ideal candidate as a SOCTU with a specialised knowledge of NIM and, er … give me another one.’
‘BONGO,’ said Irvine.
Murfin frowned, and ran his tongue round the inside of his teeth as if searching for a last crumb. Then he seemed to take the decision to ignore the jibe. The relaxed attitude of his shoulders seemed to say, ‘All water off a duck’s back, mate.’ BONGO was the old-timer’s slang for a lazy police officer. It stood for ‘Books On, Never Goes Out’.
‘Maybe we should get some work done,’ said Villiers.
Carol Villiers had been back in Derbyshire for only a few months. She’d been lucky with a successful application when her period of service in the RAF Police came to an end. There certainly hadn’t been many successful applications since then. Derbyshire Constabulary, like every other regional police force, had been finding ways of saving money for a couple of years now. That meant reducing staff numbers wherever possible. Specialist functions were being shared with neighbouring forces, and officers who left were rarely replaced. Retirement was more than encouraged; it was being made compulsory for those who had already served their thirty years.
‘Did anything come of that last tip-off, Gavin?’ asked Cooper.
‘No, it was a LOB.’
‘A load of …?’
‘Yeah. That. There’s been another theft, though. One more down for Postman Pat.’
‘Where?’ asked Cooper.
‘Luke has the details.’
Murfin aside, one of the reasons for the tension was that Cooper’s team had been working on an inquiry into the theft of postboxes. All over Britain, the famous red Victorian boxes were being stolen by criminals who sold them for thousands of pounds on internet auction sites. In rural areas, they were ripped from lamp posts and telegraph poles, or chiselled out of walls. In some cases, entire pillar boxes had been uprooted from the ground, with vehicles used to drag them from their foundations. Many antique boxes were being sold as souvenirs to collectors abroad, especially in the USA. It wasn’t an opportunist thing people did on the way home from the pub. You needed heavy cutting equipment to take some of those boxes away.
Postbox prices had risen since the Royal Mail stopped auctioning off old stock nearly ten years ago. It was said that boxes dating back to Queen Victoria’s reign and bearing the VR mark could fetch up to five thousand pounds in America. George V boxes were worth around a thousand quid, while even the more modern ones could go for hundreds.
Originally the theory had been that thieves wanted the scrap metal, but any legitimate scrapyard wasn’t going to want those postboxes – they were far too distinctive. One of the difficulties, though, was distinguishing them from genuinely sourced items and Chinese replicas.
So it was the boxes themselves that appeared to be the target, rather than the mail they contained. The number of thefts had been accelerating, with around thirteen boxes removed in the last two months alone. In one incident in a village near Edendale, thieves had posed as workmen to be inconspicuous, and waited until the mail had been collected.
It forced Cooper to picture a gang of thieves lurking behind a wall with a JCB until the postman had left. But more bizarre things than that happened in the Peak District every week.
Irvine waved across the room, while taking a phone call at the same time.
‘I’ll bring you up to date in a minute,’ he said.
‘Okay. Other than that, anything happening?’
‘There’s been a cow rampage,’ said Murfin. ‘But uniforms are dealing with that.’
‘Could you try to communicate
a bit more clearly, Gavin?’ said Cooper.
Murfin eyed him cautiously.
‘Oh yeah. Walker with a dog, chased by cows when he tried to cross their field. Walker escaped with a scare, but dog got badly knocked about by cows. It happens every year.’
‘With relentless regularity.’
And so it did. People thought it was only bulls that were dangerous, but cows were more likely to attack you, especially if you had a dog, and particularly in the spring. It was the animal they were going for, of course. They associated dogs with the loss of their calves.
Some things came round every year, as regularly as Christmas. Other types of crime, like the postbox thefts, were steadily increasing – and therefore figuring more prominently in Cooper’s preoccupations. The number of farms being targeted had gone up by sixty per cent in the last twelve months, as his brother Matt would readily testify from his recent experiences at Bridge End.
Poaching was a good example, too. It wasn’t unexpected, when jobs were being lost and everyone was feeling the effects of the downturn and financial cutbacks.
At least there had been no riots and outbreaks of looting in Edendale. That was a phenomenon that was generally confined to the cities and larger towns. Derbyshire Constabulary had sent officers to help out in London at the height of the troubles the previous summer.
‘Oh yes,’ said Murfin. ‘And the control room took a call from one of the fire crews up on the moors. The white-hat guy, you know.’
‘The incident commander.’
‘Yeah. Well he’s called in to report a breakin at an old pub. His firefighters passed it on their way to the fires. They saw a white pickup driving away, and they say some boards have been pulled off one of the doors at the back.’
‘He must mean the Light House. It’s been empty for months, ever since the last owners went bust.’
‘Oh, I know that place,’ said Murfin. ‘And you’re right – it was all boarded up last time I went past. Would they have left anything inside worth nicking?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I think it’s due to come up for auction in a few weeks’ time,’ said Hurst. ‘They must be hoping someone will take it on as a going concern.’
Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) Page 2
