‘Go on. I bet you’ve wondered. Do you think Villiers knows those SAS death grips? Can she kill someone with nothing but a ballpoint pen? Only, I’ve got a spare one, if she needs it.’
Cooper couldn’t help following Murfin’s gaze. The sight of the two women drew his attention irresistibly. They seemed to be talking to each other now. He strained to hear what they were saying, but Villiers was sitting with her back to him, and Fry was speaking too quietly to be heard against the background noise of ringing phones. That was unlike her, too. She had never been one to whisper or mumble. And she had certainly never been afraid of letting people hear her opinions.
‘Wishing you could lip-read?’ said Murfin.
‘What? Of course not,’ said Cooper, though it was exactly what he’d been thinking.
‘Mostly swear words, I reckon. A bit of sarcasm. Ritual abuse.’
Cooper looked at Fry’s expression again, saw a raised eyebrow that accompanied a murmured question.
‘No, Gavin,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think so.’
Becky Hurst had been busy working on her PC, but she stopped when an officer brought in a copy of the Sheffield evening paper to show her.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she said.
Cooper caught her outraged tone.
‘Becky?’
‘People are starting to treat the Savages as some kind of heroes.’
‘What is it?’
‘This story in the Sheffield paper. It’s as if they’re Robin Hood and his Merry Men or some rubbish. Unbelievable.’
Murfin chuckled. ‘Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? But they’re only doing the first part, surely?’
‘How do we know?’ said Cooper.
‘Well…’
‘We don’t know, do we? We don’t know anything about them.’
‘Still, whoever they are – they’re not heroes.’
‘It’s the way they’re managing to come and go at will,’ said Murfin. ‘Evading capture, eluding the police. The public love all that. It makes them think they’re watching a Hollywood film. You’ll see, they’ll be built up into legends if we don’t catch them soon. There’ll be stories told about them, all kinds of exaggerations. Songs, jokes – it’ll all happen.’
‘There’s already a Facebook fan page,’ said Irvine.
‘A what?’ asked Cooper.
‘A fan page. On Facebook.’ Irvine looked at him as if that was enough explanation for anyone.
‘Show me,’ said Cooper.
Irvine called up the page. It was headed We all luv the Savages. Cooper read through a few of the messages before he could stand any more.
These guys are legend.
Just brilliant the way they’re giving the f***ing cops the runaround. Ram it to the pigs!
You said it, dude. More power to the Savages.
‘Who are these people?’ he said.
‘All kinds of folk. It’s been building up ever since the first attack. Not the first one in Riddings, I mean the first one attributed to the Savages.’
‘In Hathersage.’
‘Right. That guy they robbed was a banker.’
‘No, he was a financial adviser,’ said Cooper.
‘Still. You know how people feel. That was enough for public support to come down on the side of the Savages. And then, with them sticking it to the police the way they have…’
‘So these are their groupies. Criminals with a fan club. Pity we can’t shut them down.’
‘We could try. Facebook might cooperate.’
‘It’s freedom, though, isn’t it?’ said Irvine. ‘That’s what the internet is supposed to be about, the freedom to express your own views and share information.’
‘Freedom can be used as a weapon, too,’ said Hurst.
Surprised, Cooper looked round at her. He was seeing a side of her he hadn’t noticed before.
Hurst flushed slightly at his look.
‘Well, it’s true,’ she said defiantly. ‘Sometimes you have to protect people from themselves.’
Irvine laughed. ‘Listen to Maggie Thatcher. It’ll be no such thing as society next. Roll on the Fourth Reich.’
‘That’s very offensive,’ said Hurst, going redder.
‘Well, lighten up.’
‘All right,’ said Cooper firmly. ‘That’s enough. You two can continue your political debate in your own time.’
Hurst and Irvine went back to their desks in silence. Hurst ostentatiously picked up her phone and turned her back to her colleague to make a call. Cooper looked round the office, wondering where the suddenly sour atmosphere had come from. But Fry was no longer there. She seemed to have faded into the background, vanishing as unexpectedly as she’d arrived.
Carol Villiers placed copies of her reports on Cooper’s desk for him to check, along with an envelope of crime-scene photographs from Riddings.
‘Not much love lost there, then,’ she said. ‘That was a surprise.’
‘They’re okay,’ said Cooper. ‘I think they like each other really.’
‘Some people have a funny way of showing it.’
‘Yes, they do.’
Cooper opened the envelope and spread the photos out on his desk. Some of them still made him flinch. For some reason, the scene of a violent crime always looked so much more sordid in the photographs than in real life. It might be because the victim was no longer a person, but had been reduced to a tangle of pale, dead limbs, an untidy heap of clothes, a drying bloodstain on the floor. The small details of that person’s life were just so much rubbish scattered in the background, every item marked with a crime-scene number.
Many murder scenes were sordid in reality too, of course. Grubby bedrooms heaped with dirty washing, sitting rooms stacked with leaking plastic bags and cardboard boxes, filthy back alleys jammed with waste bins, stinking of rotten food and infested with rats.
Zoe Barron’s kitchen was nothing like that. Cooper remembered its gleaming newness, its almost clinical cleanliness – a spare, minimalist lack of clutter that seemed unnatural. Definitely not the way he thought of a kitchen, anyway. A long, long way from the kitchen he recalled in his childhood at Bridge End Farm, his mother surrounded by pans and cooking smells, a huge pine table without an inch of clear space.
And yet these photographs had reduced the kitchen at Valley View to the same sordid level as a rat-infested alley. Blood and violent death could do that. Zoe Barron would be appalled. Muddy footprints, the cold light of the camera’s flash, the peculiarly dead quality of a digital image. All the gleam of the steel and marble had been sucked out, drained away the way Zoe’s life had been.
Cooper stared for a long while at the sprawled body. Zoe Barron was no longer a human being with a past, a present and a future, an individual with a life and relationships and all the human hopes and fears. She was no longer even a name, but a series of numbers.
Finally he could look no longer. He felt the anger growing inside him, like a surge of acid through his veins. His hands began to tremble, his ears buzzed with the rush of blood as an overwhelming desire took hold of him. The need to hit out, to lash out at anything that came within range.
He gritted his teeth in his effort to fight back the rage.
‘Some Robin Hood,’ he said. ‘Some bloody Robin Hood.’
***
Monica Gamble was tired. She’d been tired for years now. Not because she was ill – well, not all the time anyway. She was exhausted from the ordeal of living with her husband. Thirty-five years they’d been married. It was a life sentence. Two or three life sentences. From what she’d read in the papers, some murderers got out after twelve years.
Monica didn’t know what crime she’d committed to end up lumbered like this. Barry was the equivalent of the most annoying cell mate you could imagine getting banged up with in prison. She supposed anyone could get irritating after thirty-five years of close contact. But Barry made a special art of being annoying.
‘It’s a mistake
to lie to the police, though, isn’t it?’ he said that night. ‘They always find out you’re lying, one way or another. They just keep on and on asking questions, until they catch you out.’
‘But they haven’t asked us anything important yet. So we’re not lying.’
‘No,’ said Barry doubtfully.
‘Well? We’re not, are we?’
He shook his head, still looking worried. ‘It makes no difference. They’ll be annoyed with us if they find out.’
‘Let them be annoyed.’
‘We’ll be in trouble.’
‘For God’s sake, Barry, do you think you can live your whole life avoiding trouble? That would be so boring, even if you could. It’s the thought of getting in trouble that makes life interesting. It’s the excitement of the risk. Don’t you see that?’
Monica gazed into his face, and sighed. Clearly he didn’t see it. She could read it in his puzzled eyes and wrinkled brow.
‘Look, just answer their questions as briefly as you can, and don’t volunteer any information. You can do that, surely?’
She flinched as she felt her nails digging into the palms of her hands. What had she done to deserve this?
Barry wandered off to his shed and left her standing in the garden in the dusk. Instead of going back into the house, she stayed out for a while. She was gazing upwards, beyond the village, watching the edge as the rocks were painted in vivid colours and shaped by the evening light.
In earlier years, Monica had often heard Barry point out those shapes to the children, encouraging them to picture faces or the outlines of animals in the rock. He said it developed their imaginations. It was true that if you watched the rocks in the setting sun, they seemed to move as perspectives changed, the shadows shifted and lengthened, and darkness filled a crevice to form the suggestion of a mouth or an eye. If you stared long enough, you could see a dragon turn its head to gaze across the valley, a giant dog rise from the ground, a cruel profile sink slowly into the dusk until it was lost from sight.
The children had asked once whether all those creatures came to life at night, when no one was looking. And Barry had said yes, they did. She supposed there was no harm in it. Nothing wrong with letting kids exercise their imaginations. It was better for them than all that sitting in front of TV screens and Game Boys, all that squinting at text messages on their mobile phones.
When she was a child herself, Monica had pictured all kinds of beasts roaming the flats, those wide plains of heather and mat grass that filled the space above the edges. She knew the stories were just folk tales to frighten the gullible. No one would go walking up there in the dark, would they? No one with any sense. Not if they had an ounce of imagination.
Monica had her own theory about those folk stories. She figured they represented natural common sense, a little bit of sound psychological strategy. After all, it was better to place your demons right out there in the dark, and leave them wailing mournfully on the edge. So much better than to keep them prowling endlessly inside your head.
18
Saturday
Above the villages of Riddings and Froggatt, the A625 swung up the hill and climbed through dense trees until it emerged again on to open ground near the Grouse Inn and reached the Longshaw Estate. At a triangular junction just below Longshaw was one of the Peak District’s quirkiest tourist attractions. It was a strange one, even for an area known for its quirkiness. It was a wooden pole, standing upright in the middle of a field.
Cooper knew that many visitors thought it was a joke. They came away convinced that the National Trust tourist sign that just said ‘Wooden Pole’ must be a fake – a hoax perpetrated on them by a local farmer. Yet thousands of them still came every year to look at the pole, and take photographs of it.
It was actually a packhorse route marker from the eighteenth century, marking the way up from Hathersage towards Dronfield. The track in a hollow just below it was the old road itself. The present pole wasn’t the original, but it had been there many years. It was so much of a landmark that the area around it was now known locally as Wooden Pole.
There was no explanation of all this on the sign, though. Cooper liked that. A bit of mystery in the landscape was good. Let the tourists go home wondering. A little further north there was another pole, above Stanage Edge. Carvings in the rocks at its base dated back four centuries to 1550, when it must have been a bit different around here.
He sat with Liz on a grassy slope overlooking the Longshaw Estate and Padley Gorge. Somewhere a long way below them ran Totley Tunnel, carrying the railway line from Sheffield that emerged at the little station down there in the gorge.
‘When we were children, Grandad Cooper used to tell us that there was a penny on top of this pole,’ he said. ‘He said if one of us climbed up to collect it, we could have it.’
Liz murmured comfortably. Her eyes were closed, her face turned up to the sun.
‘It used to be considered okay to tell kids anything in those days, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Except one afternoon, a couple of years ago, I overheard Matt telling his girls there was a pound coin on top.’
‘Well, that’s inflation for you.’
Cooper laughed. ‘Worse than that. They didn’t believe him for a second. Kids are much smarter now than we ever were.’
‘Less gullible, anyway.’
‘Some people say it’s a boundary pole, marking the spot where Yorkshire becomes Derbyshire, or vice versa. I seem to remember there was an old man who lived near here who claimed that lots of poles were erected on the moors during the Second World War, to prevent the Germans landing gliders full of troops to invade Sheffield.’
‘That’s the way it goes around here. You make up your own stories, and people choose which they want to believe.’
‘You’re right. It’s always been like that, I think.’
The National Trust sign was pretty much as Cooper remembered it. When you went up close to see what it told you about the pole, all it said was: Keep to the paths, do not climb the walls, keep dogs on leads. Observe the by-laws.
The pole stood about twenty feet high, but it was rather a knobbly-looking affair. In fact, it had the appearance of a failed totem pole, one that had been abandoned before the proper carving had been done. Basically, it was the trunk of a spindly tree, possibly a silver birch.
‘I’m glad we got this time together,’ said Liz. ‘I suspect you’d only be thinking about the Riddings case otherwise. You do get a bit obsessive, Ben.’
‘There are two Riddings cases,’ said Cooper.
‘Oh?’
That was one of the things he liked about her. She worried about him getting obsessed with particular cases, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she experienced the same surge of interest. It was evident in her voice, just that one word.
‘It’s not really clear yet,’ he said. ‘Too few obvious lines of inquiry to follow. But I think the hunt for the Savages is misguided. Well – not misguided, but not relevant to Riddings, or to the death of Zoe Barron.’
Liz sat up. ‘Have you told your DI?’
‘No. It would be the wrong thing to say at the moment.’
‘Mmm. You have to toe the party line.’
‘Yes.’
‘Or appear to be doing so, anyway.’
‘I can ask appropriate questions. But I can’t tell Mr Hitchens and Superintendent Branagh that they’re wrong. Not without some evidence.’
‘You’d better find some evidence, then. What’s your theory?’
‘I don’t have one yet,’ said Cooper. ‘I just have the feeling that the answer lies over there, in Riddings. There’s an awful lot of hate in that village.’
The words sounded wrong and out of place in this location, with the sun beating down on them, the hills rolling gently away to the west, the sound of sheep quietly bleating to each other in a field down the valley. But Cooper knew what he’d said was right. He could sense it wherever he went in Riddings, and not just from
Richard Nowak or Alan Slattery. They were open about it. Those who concealed their feelings were the most worrying.
‘This latest attack,’ said Liz. ‘Mr and Mrs Holland?’
‘Yes. You were there, at their house. Fourways.’
‘We found very little in the way of forensic evidence, you know.’
‘I heard.’
‘So unless the lady can provide any information about the intruder
…?’
Cooper hadn’t been present at the interviews with Mrs Holland, but he’d read the transcripts. She’d told her interviewers that she had caught sight of a single figure in the garden of their home, no more than a glimpse of the intruder through a window. She couldn’t say whether he had been heading towards the house, or away from it. She couldn’t even say for certain that it was a he. When pressed, though, she swore that the intruder was wearing a dark mask. Otherwise she would have been able to see a face, wouldn’t she?
‘Nothing of any use so far,’ said Cooper.
‘Perhaps she’ll remember something later.’
‘She thinks the intruder she saw wore a mask.’
‘Like the Savages do.’
‘But there was only one intruder at Fourways, so far as we can tell. The Savages always operate in a group, two or three of them at least.’
‘I see.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t make me call them the Savages,’ he said.
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘Besides…’
‘What?’
‘There’s really no evidence that anyone was trying to break in at the Hollands’ place.’
Liz nodded. ‘No, that’s what we found, from a forensic point of view. No tool marks on the doors, no broken windows, nothing. The intruder was outside. And even then, he was careful not to leave footprints on soft ground.’
‘Careful, or lucky.’
‘The result is the same.’
‘Apparently the Hollands even set off their own burglar alarm,’ said Cooper. ‘They activated the motion sensors and didn’t turn the alarm off.’
‘Well, it would be the last thing on your mind, with your husband breathing his last on the doorstep.’
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