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

by Stephen Booth

  Her husband shrugged and wandered away a few feet, making a show of examining the rose bush outside the window.

  ‘Actually, I was wondering if you might have seen anything last night,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Oh, anything suspicious? That’s what you say, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Any unusual activity, strangers hanging around, vehicles you didn’t recognise?’

  She looked disappointed. ‘No. We would have told someone already if we’d seen anything like that.’

  ‘How long have you lived here in Riddings?’

  ‘About five years,’ she said. ‘Martin was a very successful commercial lawyer. He still does a certain amount of consultancy work, but at least I get to spend time with him now. And there’s the house. It’s lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very nice. It must be a wonderful place to live.’

  ‘All this business is very worrying, though. Nowhere is safe, is it? Not these days. We thought a place like this, in the country …’

  ‘Unfortunately, it’s not the case.’

  ‘I suppose it’s the times we live in. People need money badly. And they look at houses like ours and think we have more than our share. That must be what makes them do things like this, don’t you think? It’s envy, isn’t it? Envy, pure and simple. It’s an emotion that can really eat into people.’

  She sounded as though she was speaking from experience. Cooper was about to ask her why, when his phone buzzed. There was a text message from Becky Hurst, asking to speak to him when he was free.

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘But if you do happen to think of anything, here’s my card.’

  Mr Holland had turned to look at him again with a glower, his hands thrust into the pockets of his corduroy trousers. Cooper handed his card to Mrs Holland, simply on the basis that she seemed to be the one who was most interested.

  ‘Well, you ought to check on the people who go up on the edge at night,’ she said.

  ‘Which people?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘You’ll see them. There are always cars parked up at the gap, no matter what time of night you go past. Goodness knows what they do up there. I wouldn’t care to think.’

  ‘We’ll be checking on everything.’

  ‘Be sure that you do.’

  Cooper thought he was probably going to have to get used to people telling him what to do. Here, everyone would think it was their right.

  On his way out on to Curbar Lane, Cooper had to squeeze past a gardener’s van drawn up in the gateway with a trailer full of freshly sawn branches. There must be plenty of work for gardeners in this area. Maintenance of all these lawns and flower borders had to be an endless task, like painting the Forth Bridge.

  Working near the van was a gardener with short-cropped blond hair. The young man failed to look up as Cooper passed, which was odd. The natural thing would be to show curiosity about what was happening. A few yards down the lane, when his car was out of sight round a bend, Cooper pulled over and wrote down the name of the company from the side of the van. AJS Gardening Services.

  While he was stopped, he called Becky Hurst.

  ‘What’s up, Becky?’

  ‘I thought you should know, Sarge. I took the side lane by the Methodist church. Chapel Close? Mr Gamble lives at number four. He’s the member of the public who called the incident in.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mr Gamble.’

  ‘Well, his wife was in. Her name is Monica.’

  ‘Where’s her husband?’

  ‘She didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know?’

  ‘She told me she often doesn’t know where he is. Sorry.’

  ‘He should never have been allowed to wander off from the scene,’ said Cooper.

  ‘He did make a statement to the FOAs.’

  ‘The first officers to arrive didn’t know what sort of incident they were dealing with. We really need to speak to Mr Gamble again, and soon. I don’t like the fact that he’s disappeared, Becky.’

  ‘No, that’s why I thought you ought to know straight away.’

  ‘You were right. Thanks, Becky.’

  ‘The good news is that he can’t have gone far. He hasn’t taken their car, so he’s likely to be on foot. I’ve got his mobile number from his wife. I’m trying to call him, but there’s no answer so far.’

  ‘Okay. Keep at it.’

  Cooper started the car and drove on. He really didn’t like Mr Gamble being missing. He liked even less the knowledge that before long, someone was going to ask him about Gamble. Either his DI or Superintendent Branagh would want to know where the informant was. I don’t know wasn’t a good enough answer.

  The Chadwicks’ home, The Cottage, was a barn conversion with big Velux windows installed in the roof. As Cooper approached, two herons took off from behind the house and flapped ponderously away over the village, their feet trailing clumsily below their bodies. You didn’t often see two herons together. He felt sure there must be a pond behind the house, nicely stocked with fish.

  He passed a Nissan Qashqai and a Mercedes Kompressor standing close together in front of a double garage. A small boat trailer was parked on the drive. He looked for the burglar alarm, and found a yellow box high on the front wall. There was also a security light at the bottom of the drive.

  The Chadwicks were outside, enjoying the sun, seated on garden chairs under a parasol. Mr Chadwick rose to greet him. He was a tall man with anxious eyes and a balding head shiny with perspiration.

  ‘Bill Chadwick. This is my wife, Retty. Marietta, that is. We call her Retty.’

  Cooper showed his warrant card, even though they hadn’t asked to see it. It was odd how some people were so trusting when he said he was a police officer. No matter what was going on around them, they still felt no reason to be suspicious of strangers.

  ‘You’ll have heard …?’ he began.

  ‘At Valley View, yes. The Barrons.’

  ‘It’s so close,’ said Mrs Chadwick. ‘Ever so close. Just across the lane.’

  They all looked instinctively towards Valley View, though it wasn’t even possible to see Curbar Lane from here, let alone anything of the Barrons’ property. Trees and the corner of a wall, then more trees. And beyond the trees, Riddings Edge. So close? Cooper wondered if the Chadwicks knew what it was actually like to have neighbours living practically on top of you, packed in cheek by jowl, so close that you could hear them clearly through the walls on either side of you. There were lots of people in Edendale who knew what that was like. His own ground-floor flat in Welbeck Street sometimes echoed to the slam of a door from the tenant upstairs, the clatter of feet on the stairs, the blare of old Mrs Shelley’s TV set next door.

  ‘Obviously you’re some of the Barrons’ closest neighbours,’ he said.

  ‘And you wondered if we might have noticed anything,’ said Chadwick. ‘Obviously. But I’m afraid we didn’t.’

  ‘But you were at home last night?’

  ‘Actually, we went out as soon as it got dark,’ said Chadwick.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Up on to the edge.’

  ‘Really?’

  Cooper couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. He’d been warned only a few minutes earlier about the people who went up on the edge at night. But he hadn’t thought the Chadwicks were the sort of people Mrs Holland was referring to. From her tone of voice, he’d been picturing a dogging site, where people had sex in public while others watched. The growing number of such sites was a regular cause of complaints from residents in secluded parts of Derbyshire. But they didn’t attract people like the Chadwicks, surely?

  ‘Yes, we were out for a couple of hours,’ said Chadwick.

  ‘In the dark? Why?’

  ‘Well, it has to be at night-time. It needs to be dark, to watch properly. You can’t see anything in daylight, of course.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cooper, still hoping that he was wrong.

  Chadwick nodded. ‘Yes, we were watching the Perseid me
teor shower.’

  ‘Of course you were.’

  ‘It was one of the best nights for viewing. A nice clear sky – but not much moon. We saw lots of shooting stars. A wonderful experience to watch them from a place like that.’

  ‘While you were up there, you didn’t notice anything at all?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Well, we gathered there was some trouble. Lots of sirens and flashing lights disturbing the peace during the night. We don’t get that here very often. I see it in Sheffield, yes. But not in Riddings.’

  ‘Oh, you work in Sheffield, sir?’

  Chadwick shuffled his feet and blinked nervously. A trickle of sweat ran across his temple. ‘Yes. Er … in a way.’

  Immediately Cooper began to study him more keenly. It was unusual to see someone thrown into confusion by such a simple question. You either worked in Sheffield or you didn’t. Unless your job involved travelling around the country, and you were only in Sheffield sometimes. But in that case, why not just say so? What was the cause of the embarrassment?

  ‘I’m a head teacher,’ said Chadwick. ‘Was a head teacher.’

  ‘So you’re retired?’

  ‘I’m on gardening leave.’

  Cooper glanced instinctively at the manicured lawn and neat flower beds around them, before he recognised the euphemism.

  ‘What happened?’

  Chadwick shrugged. ‘I lost it. Simply as that, really. It all just became too much one day. Oh, it had been building up for a while. Quite a few years, actually, when I look back. There was a time in my career when I used to get up in the morning and think Great, I’m going to work today. It was exciting. I relished the challenge. I thought only about what I could achieve each day. But gradually it all changed. I began to wake up in the early hours and feel sick. Sick to my stomach at the thought of having to face school. And it wasn’t just the kids, either. God knows, they were bad enough. But there were all the whingeing staff, the stupid parents, the endless, endless hassle, everyone expecting me to do something to solve their problem, to make their life easier, to produce some magic solution out of a hat to make their child more intelligent, better behaved, more talented at music or football, or less of a bully. It was always my fault when things didn’t happen the way they wanted. And … oh God, I don’t really want to think about it. It makes my guts churn even now.’

  ‘So you were suspended.’

  ‘Not exactly. It was … a mutual arrangement. A spell away from the job, while things are sorted out. Or that’s what they said. Maybe it’s just to allow the governors time to find a new head to replace me. My deputy will be happy enough with that, I dare say. Or they could be hoping I’ll give up the fight and resign. It would save them money.’

  ‘I see.’

  Chadwick screwed up his eyes and gazed into the distance, staring at something that Cooper couldn’t see.

  ‘Or maybe …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I wonder sometimes. Perhaps everyone is just waiting for me to do the decent thing, and top myself.’

  Too surprised to know how to respond, Cooper watched Chadwick turn away and walk slowly into the house, as if seeking the shade. He moved like a wounded animal, creeping away to find somewhere quiet and dark.

  Cooper looked at Mrs Chadwick. She smiled sadly.

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s been like that for a while. It doesn’t seem to get any better.’

  ‘Do you have any family living here?’

  ‘We have a daughter, Bryony. She’s seventeen, nearly eighteen.’

  ‘Where would she have been last night?’

  ‘Oh, she was out.’

  Mrs Chadwick became more relaxed now that she had been steered on to a different subject.

  ‘Bryony got her A level results last week,’ she said. ‘So she was out celebrating with her friends from school. She’ll be off to uni in September.’

  ‘Good grades? All A stars?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m the only person who never got any,’ said Cooper.

  The woman was becoming more animated as she spoke of her daughter. This was a far more comfortable topic, something to be seized on gratefully when life was going wrong.

  ‘We wanted her to do a gap year,’ she said. ‘The way we both did ourselves when we were students. It was a terrific experience for us. And, of course, it helped us to work through in our minds what we really wanted to do with our lives. I don’t think you can do that without seeing a bit of the world, do you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But Bryony wasn’t interested in a gap year. She says she knows what she wants to do. She’s set out her plan, and she needs to get on with it and earn her qualifications if she’s going to meet her goals. A gap year would just be a waste of time and set back her schedule. She’s very driven, you see. Very ambitious. Obviously we’re giving her all the support she needs. We’re very proud of her.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’

  A shadow of anxiety passed across her face, and she glanced back towards the house. It was sad that a few moments of silence was enough to cause that apprehension. But she saw her husband pass in front of a window, and the concern eased.

  ‘She’s chosen her university herself, too,’ she said. ‘I went to Oxford. St Hilda’s. But Bryony wanted to go to Bristol for some reason. She insisted on putting it down as her first choice. Something about them having the best reputation in her subject. As I said, she’s very …’

  ‘Driven?’

  ‘Quite.’

  A very slim girl with long dark hair appeared round a corner of the house. She saw Cooper, and walked quickly away again.

  ‘Was that your daughter?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s Bryony, yes.’

  Mrs Chadwick escorted Cooper to his car. Usually people were only too glad to see him leave, and shut the door behind him as quickly as possible. But this woman seemed to want to linger. Did she want to talk more about the achievements of her daughter? Or was there another subject she longed to discuss, but was afraid to force on him? Something she might be ashamed of. That self-conscious, embarrassed look again. She was a person afraid of showing too much emotion, yet struggling to hold it inside any longer.

  ‘So what actually happened, Mrs Chadwick?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘To your husband?’

  She nodded, and her shoulders seemed to slump, as if a great weight of tension had been lifted from her.

  ‘A child pushed him too far one day,’ she said. ‘A fourteen-year-old kid. Student, we’re supposed to call them, aren’t we? Cocky little devil he was, by all accounts. Everyone knew he was trouble. He just kept pushing and pushing to see how far he could go, wanted to find out what he could get away with. You know the type. You must see them all the time in your job.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Usually when they’re a bit older.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you wouldn’t see so many of them if teachers like Bill were allowed to keep proper discipline in our schools.’

  Cooper knew that a lot of police officers would agree with this view. More than one of them had gone the same way as Mr Chadwick when they’d been pushed too far. There was only so much you could take, after all. Everyone had a breaking point.

  ‘Is your husband getting help?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. Regular counselling sessions. Medication for his depression. I don’t think the medication is working properly yet.’ She paused. ‘That, or he’s stopped taking it.’

  Cooper glanced at her, saw the strain in her eyes. ‘It must be a difficult thing to live with.’

  She smiled through a sudden welling of tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Yes, it is. We just hope that we can all rely on some support when we need it, don’t we?’

  Cooper drove back along Curbar Lane to Valley View and took a look at the Barrons’ property with new eyes, trying to see it as a passer-by might.

  One thing immediately struck him. At the fr
ont, everything seemed to have been done to advertise the fact that there was plenty worth stealing inside – electric gates with an entryphone system, a security camera pointing at the gate, little yellow signs warning of an electric fence topping the dry-stone wall. Yet at the back, the property had been pretty much left open, the fences low and the trees cleared to provide a view of the edge from the patio and balcony. Whoever designed this landscape had seen the edge as an attraction, not a threat.

  He supposed most of the residents of Riddings would be commuters, or well-off retired people like the Hollands. These weren’t the seriously rich, just the affluent and comfortable. Definitely not a tourist-friendly village, though.

  Many of these people would have come here from the city, seeking peace and quiet, looking for a refuge from noise and traffic – and an escape from crime. Perhaps they had encountered violence on the streets of Sheffield and Manchester, or become nervous at the stories of robberies and shootings every week in the newspapers, feared the monsters stalking their cities. So they had sought refuge in a rural haven. The village of Riddings, in the eastern edges. Secluded properties, respectable neighbours. Yet it seemed that for some of them, their monsters had followed them to their sanctuary.

  Of course, everyone had monsters in their lives. Most people left them behind in their childhood, locked away safely in a fading corner of memory. Some kept them with them, all the way through their lives. Cooper was one of those people, so he knew all about it. His monsters were always close by, glimpsed from the corner of his eye, forever lurking in the darkness, breathing quietly in the silent hours of the night.

  He paused outside the Barrons’ back door, watching the sunlight catching the windows, hearing the birds singing in the trees, listening to the quiet engine of the black van as it took Zoe Barron’s body away.

  He knew that most people never met their monsters in the flesh.

  But a few were not so lucky.

  4

  Handymen, gardeners, tree surgeons. The village noticeboard advertised all of their services, alongside the times of mobile library visits, instructions for the council’s blue bag recycling scheme, and a poster announcing the attractions of Riddings Show, which was due to take place on Saturday.