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

by Stephen Booth

  At least that was what her son said. He faced Cooper and Villiers on the doorstep of South Croft, his arms folded, an aggressive scowl on his face. The very image of a perfect guard dog.

  ‘She didn’t see anything, anyway,’ he said. ‘On Tuesday she’d been down at some community effort that she was keen on. I don’t know what …’

  ‘The balsam bashing?’

  ‘Something like that. Well, Mum’s not up to that sort of malarkey, not anything physical. She soon got tired, and one of the organisers brought her home. She went straight to bed and she was fast asleep by the time it all kicked off. Never heard a thing.’

  ‘I see.’

  Slattery looked from Cooper to Villiers challengingly. ‘Since then she’s been frightened out of her wits thinking that it could have been her that got attacked, worrying about what might happen next. That’s why I came down to stay with her for a bit. The tablets are helping, but I don’t want her being harassed by you lot. Or any of those pillocks in the village either.’

  ‘Who do you mean, sir?’ asked Villiers politely.

  ‘Any of them. They’re all cut from the same cloth. If my dad was still alive, he wouldn’t have taken any nonsense. But Mum is on her own, and she can’t cope with it all.’

  ‘The Barrons?’

  ‘Well, that Jake Barron is a real piece of work. Mind you, I could say the same about a lot of people in Riddings – look at the teacher who beat up one of his own pupils, the gangster from Moorside House who drives round in the BMW, the dodgy East European businessman, the mad character at Riddings Lodge …’

  ‘What about the Hollands? Nothing against them?’

  ‘Pussies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They let themselves be intimidated. I wouldn’t allow that to happen to Mum. If one of them tried to bully her with their fancy lawyers, they’d have me to deal with.’

  ‘You know it’s never wise to take the law into your own hands, don’t you?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Like the law is doing such a great job of protecting people round here.’

  ‘Was there some kind of legal dispute?’ asked Villiers.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my mum. And I’m not having you asking her questions. If you want to know about it, ask Jake Barron – or that Nowak person.’

  Slattery slammed the door. Cooper and Villiers looked at each other.

  ‘Well, that told us,’ said Villiers.

  ‘It told us something,’ said Cooper.

  Gavin Murfin and Becky Hurst were on The Green, comparing notes at the horse trough. It had become an unofficial meeting place in the village, given that there was no pub or shop, or any other facilities at all, apart from the phone box a few yards down the hill.

  ‘Gavin. How is it going?’

  ‘Deadly,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Have you both met Carol?’

  ‘Yes, at the office. Good to have you on board,’ said Hurst.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So what have we got?’ asked Cooper. ‘Anything or nothing? Tell me we have something, please.’

  ‘I spoke to some walkers,’ said Hurst. ‘They’re regulars in this area, often go up on the edge in the evening and come down when it starts getting dark.’

  ‘They were up there on Tuesday night?’

  ‘Yes. And they walked back down through the village, so they passed the corner of Curbar Lane. I asked them if they saw anyone around.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘All they can remember was seeing someone in the phone box on The Green, making a call. It was about the right time.’

  ‘That doesn’t help very much. Did they see who it was? Any description?’

  ‘No, he had his back to them. Making a call, like I said.’

  ‘A man, then.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘If we could find out who that was, he might be a good witness. Even when you’re on the phone, you notice things from a kiosk. They’re glass on all sides, and you can’t help looking at people and cars going past.’

  Hurst shook her head. ‘We’d have to go round the whole village again to stand a chance of identifying him. And he might not have been local anyway.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’

  ‘It’s clutching at straws, Ben.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘What about Cliff College?’

  ‘I spoke to someone on reception,’ said Murfin. ‘Their registration date is the first of September.’

  ‘No students, then?’

  ‘There are just a few staff on site.’

  ‘Okay. So what do we have from the neighbours, really?’

  ‘No one saw anything,’ said Murfin. ‘Not a thing. No suspicious vehicles, not even a person they didn’t recognise. We have no evidence that anyone came in via the front of the property.’

  ‘So … if the attackers didn’t come through the village, they must have come the other way.’

  Cooper found himself looking at the edge. It was certainly hard to ignore. His eyes were drawn to it irresistibly. He saw a ledge of rock jutting out into space at the top of the cliff face. There were many of those spurs and outcrops. They looked precarious, not a place to stand for too long if you had a problem with heights or sudden drops. A very similar location had been used by a film crew for an iconic shot in the filming of Pride and Prejudice. Keira Knightley posing almost in mid-air, with an immense panorama of the Peak District spread out in front of her. It struck Cooper that he could get an incredible bird’s-eye view of Riddings from one of those outcrops – a perspective even Google couldn‘t achieve.

  ‘Did you talk to the lottery winner, Ben?’ asked Murfin.

  ‘Yes, Russell Edson. Why?’

  ‘I was just wondering – what does this Russell Edson do with himself all day?’

  ‘Not much, I suppose.’

  ‘And his mother – what’s her name?’

  ‘Glenys. She does even less, I should think. Unless you count a couple of hours a day having facials and applying make-up.’

  ‘One of those who needs scaffolding and a truck full of cement, is she? But otherwise it’s a life of idleness, like?’

  ‘There’s a housekeeper at Riddings Lodge. And Mr Edson gets a man in to do everything else. Or a woman, maybe.’

  Murfin shook his head. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said.

  ‘What isn’t? Getting a man in?’

  ‘No. I mean, doing nothing all day. I don’t care who you are, or how much money you’ve got – you can’t just sit and do nothing for hour after hour, day after day. You’d go mad. You’d start tearing up the furniture.’

  ‘Or the antique tapestries,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well I think you’re right, Gavin. The brain can’t stand total inactivity.’

  ‘And I bet he’s not a stupid bloke, is he?’

  ‘No, definitely not.’

  ‘So he must do something,’ said Murfin. ‘Stands to reason. Even if he doesn’t actually do anything, he must be thinking about something. Planning.’

  ‘Right. Planning what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well. Thanks, Gavin.’

  ‘Gavin Murfin seems … experienced,’ said Villiers as they got back into the car.

  ‘He’s close to his thirty,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You know what that means?’

  ‘Yes. He’s one of the lucky generation. While poor Luke and Becky …’

  ‘Best not to mention it.’

  For police officers looking forward to retirement, thirty had always been the magic figure. Having paid in a compulsory eleven per cent of their salary for three decades, that was the moment they could claim their full pension.

  But times changed. The younger officers would have to put in thirty-five years’ service now to earn their pension. No wonder Gavin Murfin was looking so smug about his approaching landmark.

  ‘I was lucky too, I suppose,’ said Villiers. ‘Comin
g in from the services.’

  ‘Yes, you were. These days new recruits are expected to work for nothing as special constables for eighteen months, or pay for their own training.’

  ‘Would you have done that, if it was the system when you signed up?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Cooper. ‘Well, to be honest, I don’t think I could have afforded to.’

  He started the car. Villiers had put her finger on something he hadn’t really thought about. That would have been a really tough decision to make. But he couldn’t imagine what else he would have done. If he hadn’t been able to join the police when he left High Peak College, he might have ended up as one of those jobbing gardeners or handymen, finding work wherever it came from. He didn’t have qualifications for anything else in particular.

  ‘I gather your team have talked to some of the neighbours already,’ said Villiers.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Cooper. ‘But I want to get round them all myself. I need a good idea of who these people are. You can’t get that at second hand, no matter how well Becky and Luke do their jobs.’

  ‘Or Gavin.’

  ‘Yes, or Gavin.’

  ‘Can I ask you something, Ben?’ said Villiers.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Well, we always had a clear command structure in the services,’ she said. ‘Briefing, debriefing, rules of engagement. And keeping lines of communication open was vital. We never did anything or went anywhere without someone else knowing exactly what we were doing.’

  ‘Your point is?’

  ‘I thought it was a bit like that in the police. There’s an SIO in charge of the case. There are collators and action managers in the incident room. Aren’t they the people who establish the lines of inquiry and allocate tasks?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yet you’re following a theory of your own,’ said Villiers. ‘Isn’t that a dangerous game?’

  ‘If I’m right, it’ll be worth it.’

  She nodded, smiling quietly to herself. Cooper waited for another comment, a challenge or a cautionary word. He expected her to question what he was doing. She was quite right to do so.

  But he waited, and she said only one more word.

  ‘Interesting.’

  It was then that Cooper saw AJS Gardening Services again. Their van was white, and looked a bit older and more battered than the vehicle belonging to the landscape contractor down the road, Mr Monk. The signage on the sides of this one had probably been done by hand from a DIY kit.

  Cooper got out of his car and walked up to the van. Two men were in deep conversation at the back doors, discussing something about their equipment. A preference for a petrol or electric mower, perhaps. Comparing the size of their dibbers.

  Cooper identified himself. One of them was the blond young man he’d seen the previous day, while the other was a bit older, and darker, with a few days’ growth of beard.

  ‘Did I speak to you before?’ asked the younger of the two.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You’re police, right?’

  ‘Yes. Detective Sergeant Cooper.’

  ‘I spoke to one of your pals, then.’

  ‘Is this your company, AJS?’

  ‘That’s me. AJS Gardening Services. Adrian J. Summers, see. Great name for a gardener, isn’t it? Summers? Gives just the right image. This is my mate Dave.’

  The other man nodded awkwardly. Cooper studied him for a moment, feeling a flicker of recognition. If he was local, there was a chance he’d encountered the man during the course of his duties. Perhaps not an arrest – he usually had a good memory for the faces of people he’d nicked. He was more likely a witness, or even a victim.

  ‘Just routine, but I’d like a list of names from you. Yours, and all the staff you might have had working for you in Riddings during the past week or so.’

  ‘There’s not many of us,’ said Summers. ‘I’m only a small outfit. But, yeah – no problem.’

  ‘If you could do that list for me now, I’ll send an officer along to collect it shortly.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You might also note which houses you work on in this area.’

  He left them to it and went back to his car. Their names could be put through the HOLMES indexes, along with AJS Gardening Services, to see if there was any common link with earlier attacks. That was what HOLMES was good at, sifting through mountains of data for connections. It wasn’t beyond imagining that these same gardeners had worked at properties in Hathersage, Baslow and Padley. If they had, it would be flagged up as something rather more than a coincidence.

  ‘Want me to collect that list?’ asked Villiers.

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’ll get Luke or Becky to do it when they’re free.’

  ‘It’s not about gravel again, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s about knowledge.’

  A movement caught his eye, and he looked up. A red hang-glider was sweeping down from Riddings Edge, banking as it caught a thermal and rising high into the air again.

  Hang-gliding and paragliding had become increasingly popular over the last ten years or so, and on summer weekends the skies seemed full of them, buzzing around like enormous flies.

  The sport needed a breeze and an updraught, so Mam Tor near Castleton was generally considered the ideal spot – the ridge caught the wind from all directions. But some of these eastern edges were popular too. Like most flying, the hardest parts were said to be taking off and landing. Once in the air, they could glide for ages on a good day, and if they caught a thermal it was possible for experienced pilots to travel as far as the coast. Though they didn’t look it, hang-gliders were claimed to be capable of flight speeds up to seventy miles an hour.

  There were licensed training schools in the Peak District, but Cooper knew it wasn’t a cheap sport. He’d heard that the training cost eight hundred pounds or more, on top of the two to four thousand you would pay for a hang-glider or paraglider canopy, and a few hundred more for personal equipment. If you could afford to live in a place like Riddings, that probably wouldn’t be a problem. But he couldn’t imagine any of the inhabitants he’d met so far being tempted to launch themselves out into space from the edge with nothing but carbon-fibre spars and a few feet of polyester cloth to support them.

  He thought of the theories being bandied about in the media and on the internet about thieves who flew down on their targets by hang-glider. It was complete madness. For a start, those things must weigh around thirty kilos, even when they were packed in a bag for carrying.

  Cooper watched the trajectory of the hang-glider as it swooped over the valley and passed in front of the edge. Totally impractical as a means of transport. Still, you would get a really good view of what lay below, even better than from an outcrop on the edge. You would be able to look directly down on the climbers who were still clinging precariously to the rock faces as the afternoon drew to a close.

  He looked back at the climbers again. Watching them inching their way up the rock one hold at a time, he felt like slapping himself on the forehead. He’d been a complete idiot. But at least he knew now where those white handprints had come from.

  Remnants of quarrying activity were scattered all over this area. Half-formed millstones lay below Riddings Edge, some of them covered in lichen as if slowly being reabsorbed into the landscape. Quarrymen had come to the eastern edges looking for the coarse sedimentary rock known as gritstone.

  Now, for climbers, gritstone possessed friction properties that compensated for a lack of holds on the sheer faces. It was best climbed in the autumn or spring, when the sun was out, the midges were on holiday, and the moisture had seeped off the rock. Like at Stanage Edge, on a fine weekend there were cars parked along the side of every road, and so many people climbing that the only sound was the cacophony of karabiners.

  Cooper had no trouble finding what he needed. Near the car park at the top of The Hill, a foam crash pad had been left at the foot of a boulder
– the sort of thing a climber placed on the ground in case of a fall, to reduce the risk of serious injury. A man was standing at the foot of the rock face coiling a length of rope, and Cooper interrupted him to ask him about the equipment that was used on the edges.

  ‘We’re trads,’ said the climber. ‘Traditional rock climbers. We don’t use bolts on gritstone. We respect the rock.’

  He was wearing a helmet and rock boots, and was hung about with a full rack of gear – rope, harness, karabiners, belay devices, wires, hexes, cams. And there on his harness was the item Cooper was most interested in – a chalk bag.

  ‘Our aim is to leave the rock as we found it. There’s been a spate of chipping on these faces recently – where people create a hold artificially, you know? When we see that, we report it to the Access and Conservation Team at the British Mountaineering Council. It has no place on gritstone.’

  ‘But what about the white handprints?’ asked Cooper, looking up at the rock. ‘They’re all over the place.’

  ‘Yes, it is rather a lasting visual sign. But we only use what we need, and we clean up any spillage.’

  And they were certainly visible from here. White marks showed up in every spot where a climber had sought a hold. Some of the chalk had faded as it weathered; some marks were still clear and fresh.

  ‘The chalk is used on the hands to combat sweat and improve grip, right?’

  ‘That’s it. Some of these faces barely have even crimps, small fingerholds. If your hands are sweating …’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘It helps if you happen to do a highball off the face.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A highball. A fall.’

  Cooper looked at the sheer face of the edge.

  ‘If you were far enough up the face when you did a highball, you’d be killed.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the climber. ‘We call that a deathball.’

  Above them, a climber was reaching the end of a traverse and completing the mantelshelf – the final move of the route, where he had to press down with his hands until his arms were straight and get his legs up behind him to place a foot on the shelf. It looked difficult to do if you were tired after a climb.