Ben Cooper and Diane Fry 11 - The Devil’s Edge

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper wondered how he would feel if he owned that nice house in Lowtown, and someone broke into it. He’d been told that owning property changed your attitude completely, made you much more territorial, more aggressively prepared to defend your domain. Well, he’d seen that at first hand. Because it had certainly happened to his brother. He’d watched Matt turn into a paranoid wreck since he became responsible for the family farm at Bridge End. He patrolled his boundaries every day, like a one-man army, ever vigilant for the appearance of invaders. He was the Home Guard, ready to repel Hitler’s Nazi hordes with a pitchfork. That level of anxiety must be exhausting. Was owning property really worth it?

  ‘Do you think the Savages are local?’ asked Liz, voicing the question that many people were asking. ‘Or are they coming out from Sheffield?’

  There were few people he could have discussed details of the case with. But Liz was in the job herself, a scene-of-crime officer in E Division. She’d even attended one of the scenes, the most recent incident in Baslow.

  ‘They know the area pretty well, either way,’ said Cooper. ‘They’ve chosen their targets like professionals so far. And they’ve got their approaches and exits figured out to the last detail. At least, it seems so – since we haven’t got much of a lead on them yet.’

  They had a table booked at the Columbine. It was in the cellar, but that was okay. In Edendale, there wasn’t much of a choice of restaurants where last orders were taken at ten. And even at the Columbine that was only from May to October, for the visitors. Edendale people didn’t eat so late.

  Cooper was looking forward to getting in front of a High Peak rib-eye steak pan-fried in Cajun spices. Add a bottle of Czech beer, and he’d be happy. And he’d be able to forget about the Savages for a while.

  They opened the door of the restaurant, and Cooper paused for a moment to look back at the street, watching the people beginning to head out of town, back to the safety of their homes. If anyone’s home was safe, with individuals like the Savages on the loose.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least they haven’t killed anybody yet.’

  In Riddings, a figure was moving in the Barrons’ garden. Barry Gamble was approaching the house cautiously. The last time he’d been on the drive at Valley View, it hadn’t been a happy experience. Some people just didn’t appreciate neighbourly concern. He hoped there was no one hanging around outside, no chance of seeing any of the Barrons. He would just have a quick check, make sure everything was okay, then get back to his own house a few hundred yards away in Chapel Close.

  Gamble tutted at the roof trusses and window frames stacked untidily against the wall. That was asking for trouble, in his opinion. It gave the impression the house was empty and vulnerable while construction work was going on. The improvements seemed to have stalled, though. The area that had been cleared behind the garage was supposed to be an extension for a gym and family room, so he’d heard. But the foundations were still visible, the breeze-block walls hardly a foot high where they’d been abandoned. Perhaps the Barrons had run out of money, like everyone else. The thought gave Gamble a little twinge of satisfaction.

  He wondered if some item of builders’ materials had made the noise he’d heard. A dull thump and a crash, loud on the night air. And then there had been some kind of scrabbling in the undergrowth. But he was used to that sound. There was plenty of wildlife in Riddings at night – foxes, badgers, rabbits. Even the occasional deer down off Stoke Flat. The noises animals made in the dark were alarming, for anyone who wasn’t used to them the way he was.

  Gamble skirted the garage and headed towards the back of the house, conscious of the sound of his footsteps on the gravel drive. He tried to tread lightly, but gravel was always a nuisance. He’d learned to avoid it whenever he could. A nice bit of paving or a patch of grass was so much easier.

  He began to rehearse his excuses in case someone came out and challenged him. I was just passing, and I thought I heard … Can’t be too careful, eh? Well, as long as everything’s all right, I’ll be getting along. He couldn’t remember whether the Barrons had installed motion sensors at Valley View that would activate the security lights. He thought not, though.

  The house was very quiet as he came near it. The younger Barron children would be in bed by now. He knew their bedrooms were on the other side of the house, overlooking the garden. Their parents tended to sit up late watching TV. He’d seen the light flickering on the curtains until one o’clock in the morning sometimes.

  Gamble peered through the kitchen window. A bit of light came through the open doorway from the hall. But there wasn’t much to see inside. No intruders, no damage, no signs of a breakin or disturbance. No one visible inside the house, no soul moving at all.

  In fact, there was only one thing for Barry Gamble to see. One thing that made him catch his breath with fear and excitement. It was nothing but a trickle. A narrow worm, red and glistening in a patch of light. A thin trickle of blood, creeping slowly across the terracotta tiles.

  2

  Wednesday

  Ben Cooper arrived under the Devil’s Edge as the morning was already getting warm. He followed the directions of a uniformed officer and parked his Toyota on a narrow verge behind a line of vehicles that had reached the scene before him. He unbuckled his seat belt, pressed redial on his mobile phone, and stepped out of the car into the smells of newmown grass and horse manure.

  ‘Gavin, it’s Ben. Did you get the message earlier? See if you can round up Luke and Becky and get them out to Riddings asap. Drop everything else, mate. This is a priority.’

  As he put his phone back into his pocket, Cooper was wishing he’d got a call-out earlier. He couldn’t deny that the adrenalin was flowing. This was his first big challenge as a recently promoted detective sergeant. He had to do a good job, make sure he got his team focused and producing results. Results were what everyone demanded. But you had to be on scene early, and get in at the start, if you were going to play a leading role. Otherwise you started to look like an extra.

  He began to walk towards the blue and white tape marking out the crime scene. According to a street sign, he was on Curbar Lane.

  Cooper wasn’t too familiar with Riddings. In normal times, these villages weren’t usually the focus of crime. Expensive houses and affluent middle-class residents, by and large. A few months ago, this road had appeared on a list of the most expensive places to buy property in the East Midlands, along with a similar location in Curbar. Decent houses were pricey everywhere in the Peak District. But Riddings and its neighbouring villages seemed to have an appeal all of their own. A highly desirable location. He could almost write the estate agent’s details himself.

  The villages of Froggatt, Curbar and Riddings lay on the banks of the River Derwent, between the bigger communities of Grindleford and Baslow. From all of these Derwentside villages, the view to the east was blocked by a series of high gritstone edges – Gardom, Baslow, Curbar, Froggatt. Created through glacial action twenty thousand years ago, they formed a great curve of rock faces swinging away to the north and south, a formidable barrier protecting the clusters of grey-roofed houses in the valley and the wooded dales to the west. An almost continuous twelve-mile-long wall of rock.

  Cooper paused for a moment when he reached the outer cordon and looked up. Riddings Edge was considered a mecca for climbers, with routes up to seventy feet high. He knew a few rock climbers, and they told him it presented some of the most testing challenges, comparable to the popular sections of Stanage Edge. Sheer perpendicular faces were split vertically like shattered teeth, angles shifted suddenly to steep slabs or overhangs. Some stretches of rock were said to be notorious for crumbling unexpectedly under the fingers, so that a hold that seemed perfect one second disappeared into thin air the next. Climbers looking for something easier tended to head a bit further north, to Froggatt.

  With one hand Cooper shaded his eyes against the sun to study the edge itself. Grotesque, twisted outlines of weather-worn g
ritstone. Jutting outcrops, misshapen boulders, broken shards of stone, so dark that they seemed to absorb the light. Against the sun, some of the rocks were impossible to distinguish from watching human figures.

  He pictured what was beyond the edges. Desolate expanses of scrub known as flats, and vast tracts of moorland beyond them. Above Riddings Edge was the biggest area of moorland, known simply as Big Moor. If you took the trouble to walk to the highest point of the moor, you would see what lay beyond – the suburbs of Totley, Dore, Beauchief, the first tentacles of the city of Sheffield, reaching out towards the Peak.

  Cooper gave his name to an officer at the inner cordon, just inside an impressive entrance with electric wrought-iron gates and a long driveway leading up to the front of the property. A Land Rover Discovery stood on a paved parking area, next to a brick-red Beetle Cabriolet. Beyond the house, he saw landscaped gardens, a water feature with a fountain, shrub borders, a lawn containing a children’s trampoline.

  He headed towards a group of figures and made out his DI, Paul Hitchens, who nodded to him briefly.

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Hitchens was looking well fed these days, or maybe losing a battle against middle-aged spread. He was always dressed smartly, though – in a suit and tie, like a middle manager in a large insurance company. Cooper brushed automatically at his own leather jacket, wondering whether he should think about changing his image.

  The DI’s expression was serious and preoccupied. Cooper decided he ought to make an effort not to let his excitement show too much.

  ‘House invasion?’ he said.

  ‘And a bad one.’

  August had been a hell of a month under the Devil’s Edge. Warm weather and long evenings tempted people to leave their windows open at night, a back door ajar, their house unattended. It was an opportunist thief’s dream.

  But these weren’t opportunist thieves. Their attacks were planned. They had everything so well worked out that they seemed to disappear after the event. Disappeared without a trace, the newspaper reports said. Well, almost.

  ‘Ben, suppose we were looking at this scene without any preconceptions,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, if the children had been harmed, we might be thinking murder-suicide. Father kills the wife, the kids and then himself. It happens.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Too often.’

  They were both silent for a moment, watching the crime-scene examiners go about their work. The circus had arrived early this morning, the SOCOs and medical examiner, the photographers and CID, and the task force officers in their overalls conducting a fingertip search. They were all here promptly, arriving like magic. It was as if everyone had already known where to go, as though they were expecting something like this to happen. Well, it was that kind of summer. One where death had been inevitable.

  ‘Or it can be the mother. That happens too,’ said Hitchens, as if as an afterthought.

  ‘No. The mother does it differently. A woman sets fire to the house, so she doesn’t have to see them die.’

  ‘Yes. And these children are unharmed anyway.’

  ‘We know, though, don’t we?’ said Cooper at last.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. The Savages.’

  ‘If you like that name, sir.’

  ‘Well, this was definitely savage. They’ve upped the stakes, Ben. This is a deliberate escalation.’

  As he listened to Hitchens, Cooper was trying to absorb the atmosphere of the house. There was always a lingering atmosphere after a violent crime – a sense of the shock and fear, the impact of death echoing from the walls.

  ‘Maybe it was deliberate,’ he said. ‘But perhaps it all just went wrong for them this time.’

  SOCOs were busy everywhere, dusting for fingerprints, hoovering up trace evidence, examining the garden for shoe marks. Cooper realised that he’d arrived only just in time to see the body in situ. A black van was already waiting on the drive to take it away.

  ‘Besides,’ said Hitchens, ‘the husband isn’t dead. Not yet. Want to take a look?’

  Cooper could see the body from the back door. It lay on the kitchen floor, the face turned slightly towards him. A woman, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt stained red at the shoulders. A woman lying in a pool of darkening blood. The stain had spread right across the floor and soaked into the tiles.

  There were always a lot of people around at a murder scene. Many of these officers would never have attended a violent death before. Some of them were trying to avoid looking at the body, in case they couldn’t forget it afterwards. It was different if you had an immediate job to do. If you walked into a crime scene with a professional attitude, thinking about carrying out your work, it really focused the mind. Then you were able to concentrate on looking at the evidence, assessing the circumstances of death, planning what should be done next. Sometimes it was only later, when you saw the photographs of the scene, that reality hit you.

  ‘The victim’s name is Barron,’ said Hitchens. ‘Zoe Barron, aged thirty-six.’

  ‘The husband?’

  ‘Jake.’

  ‘Okay.’

  When she was attacked, Zoe Barron had been clutching a bottle of wine. Château d’Arche Sauternes, according to the label. It had smashed on the tiles as she fell. The golden liquid had formed thin streams through her blood, and now the smell of wine was turning sour on the morning air. The back door stood open, and flies were starting to converge on the kitchen.

  It was the sight and smell of the wine that made Cooper feel suddenly nauseous, the way that blood and the presence of a corpse no longer did. He felt guilty at the excitement he’d experienced on the way here, the adrenalin that had been surging through his body and heightening his sensations as he stepped out of the car. Zoe Barron’s dead eyes stared like a reproach.

  ‘You know we’re already taking a lot of flak over these incidents,’ said Hitchens quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, take it from me, Ben – that was nothing. The shit is really going to hit the fan now.’

  Because the Barron family were far from the first. There had already been four attacks in the space of a few weeks. All the incidents had taken place in villages along the eastern edges, with high-value properties targeted in Hathersage, Padley and Baslow. Aggravated burglaries, with at least two cases of GBH if they ever came to court. Two people had suffered injuries at the hands of ruthless offenders who showed no hesitation in using violence to get in and out quickly. No sneaking through windows while the occupants were asleep for these men.

  Yet from the way the Barrons were found, it seemed as though they had expected nothing. For them, it had probably been a normal day. A spell of warm weather meant a chance to tidy up in the garden, a spot of maintenance on the back fence before the autumn began. There were probably no signs of danger as twilight fell in Riddings – only the late-afternoon sun catching the edge, picking out those grotesque, twisted gritstone shapes.

  And inside the house? The kitchen was the most dangerous place in any home, the room where more people were killed or injured than any other. But most of those cases were accidents. A fire, a fall, or a faulty electrical connection.

  Zoe Barron’s death looked at first glance as though it might have been an accident. The dropped wine bottle, the slippery floor, the hard tiles. And that head injury, oozing blood. But the circumstances were different. The husband, for example. Jake Barron had been found in the sitting room, sprawled in front of a fifty-inch plasma TV.

  ‘He was lucky,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘So he’s alive, you say?’

  ‘Just about. He has serious head injuries. If he survives, there’s a high probability of brain damage.’

  ‘What about the children? There are children, aren’t there? In a house this size …’

  ‘Yes, three. Social Services have taken custody of them while some relatives are tracked down. There are grandparents living in Sheffield, and a sister somewh
ere in Nottinghamshire, I think. None of the kids seems to be injured, but they’re in shock, of course.’

  ‘Did they see anything? Or is it too early to interview them?’

  Hitchens shrugged. ‘It doesn’t seem likely that they did. They were all upstairs in their bedrooms. The youngest was already asleep, and the older two were watching TV, listening to their iPods, chatting to their friends on their mobile phones. All at the same time, as far as we can tell. I suppose it’s one of the advantages of giving kids all those electronic gadgets to use. Personally, I’ve always thought it cuts them off from the real world too much. But sometimes …’

  ‘Sometimes that can be a good thing,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Exactly.’

  There was a stir behind them in the doorway, and Cooper turned. Detective Superintendent Branagh had arrived. There was no doubt who would be Senior Investigating Officer on this one, then. The inquiry was getting the superintendent’s personal touch. Of course it was. A major, high-profile case like this. A sergeant would be a long way down the pecking order.

  Branagh brought an air of authority on to the scene. She had a physical presence that made other officers step back. Cooper sometimes thought it was the shoulders that did it. She was built like a professional swimmer, broad and flat across the shoulders, an effect emphasised by the cut of the jackets she wore. She moved like a rugby player ploughing through the opposition, her face set in a determined glower. Cooper knew he would hate to get on the wrong side of her. But so far he seemed be in her good books. It was to Superintendent Branagh he owed his promotion.

  After Hitchens had briefed her, Branagh cast a sharp eye around the immediate scene, then walked to the sitting room window.

  ‘Neighbours?’ she said.

  ‘Not so as you’d notice, ma’am,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘What? This isn’t an isolated farmhouse. We’re in a village. There were plenty of houses visible as we came up the road.’

  ‘Well, take a look for yourself.’

  Each property in the area was screened by high hedges or thick banks of conifers, with long drives and gates to separate them from the road. A desire for privacy was a double-edged sword. In other villages, where smaller cottages clustered together, no strangers could have got too close without the neighbours seeing them. Here, some of these homes were as isolated from prying eyes as if they stood alone on the remotest plateau of Kinder Scout. More so, actually, when you considered the number of walkers scattered across open-access land.