Czytaj książkę: «Lost River»
Lost River
Stephen Booth
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCoiimsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
Copyright © Stephen Booth 2010
Stephen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007243488
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007290604
Version: 2015-01-19
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For Lesley, as always
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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12
13
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19
20
21
22
23
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25
26
27
28
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30
31
32
Keep Reading
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
1
Monday
On the banks of the river, Ben Cooper was running. His breath came ragged and hot in his throat. The sweat ran into his eyes. All around him, water rushed over stones, pale rocks gleamed under the surface, wet slabs of limestone caught the glare of sunlight trapped in a narrow valley. As he splashed at the edge of the water, he saw shimmers of steam rising from the wet grass, bursts of foam on the edge of his vision. And he saw long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels.
A hundred yards away, someone had started to scream. The noise echoed off the limestone cliffs, and shrieked among the caves and pinnacles of the dale. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to block out the noise, to stop the pain of the screaming.
But he knew it would never stop, would never be out of his head again.
Behind him, other people were running. He could hear them stumbling and gasping, crashing into trees, cursing each other. The outlines of the Twelve Apostles swayed against the sky above him, jagged stone spires bursting from the hillside like teeth.
Cooper stopped to swipe the sweat from his eyes, wondering whether he was seeing anything properly. The sun reflecting off the water created impenetrable shadows and glittering fringes of light, caught strands of grass waving below the surface like hair. A fish popped up to the air, another jumped and splashed across the river. Water foamed around an obstruction, a shape lying deep on the gravel bed.
Cooper shook his head. Who was screaming? Why didn’t someone tell them to stop? There were enough people here by the river. Scores of people. Dozens of families had been drawn into Dovedale by the hot May bank holiday weather. Sensing the sudden burst of excitement, they milled aimlessly on the banks like panicked sheep. In the distance, he could see them lining the stepping stones in a dumb row.
Nearby, a man stood on the bank, his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers. Cooper had the mad impression that he was some kind of priest, performing a blessing. High on an arch of rock another figure hunched, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey.
In the water, Cooper saw another rock. More rocks everywhere, lying half in and half out of the river, worn as smooth as skin. Pale, wet skin, everywhere in the water. What chance did he have of distinguishing anything? No chance. No chance, until it was too late.
He looked up again. Was it really someone screaming? Or was it just a bird, startled from its roost in the birches on the limestone edge? A whole flock of birds screeching to each other, over and over, a cacophony of despair. It felt as though the rocks themselves were screaming.
He breathed deeply, tried to focus, forced himself to be calm. Now wasn’t the time to lose his head. He was a police officer, and everyone was looking to him to do something. He lowered his eyes, and kept running. Still there was too much light glaring off the water, too many shadows, too much random movement. The roots of an ash tree covered in algae crouched at the edge of the water. A broken branch lay like a severed limb.
There were shouts up ahead now, and the sound of an engine. Voices calling questions, and shouting instructions. Finally, someone was trying to take charge of the chaos. He stumbled into the water, splashed spray in a wide, glittering arc. The coldness of the water was a painful shock, a blast of ice on his hot skin. He missed his footing on a wet stone, slipped, found himself crouching low over the water, staring at a broken reflection of his own face.
No. Not his own face. It was smaller, motionless – a white face, hair floating, the blood washed clear by cold, crystal streams, a green summer dress tangled on the body like weeds. A green shroud of weeds barely stirring in the water.
He plunged his hands into the river and grasped the limp arms. With a heave, he drew the body up out of the water, into the air, and held the cold form in arms, hardly daring to look at the white face. The limbs flopped, her head lolled back on her neck. Water cascaded from the folds of her dress and oozed from the sides of her mouth.
Finally, Cooper raised his voice.
‘Here,’ he called.
And then the screaming stopped. The limestone gorge fell silent. And there was only the roar of rushing water – the endless sound of the River Dove, never stopping, continually washing clean. A torrent of water, purifying death.
Cooper turned towards the bank. And that was when he saw them. They were standing close together, but apart from the crowd, as if the onlookers had instinctively drawn away. Two adults, and a boy of about thirteen. He stared at them in despair, his mouth moving but no words coming out.
Their isolation, the tense attitude of their bodies, the desolation of their expressions – they all told him the same story. This was the dead girl’s family.
2
Well, the tourist authority would love it. They’d be sending out the ice-cream vans and unfolding the awnings at the tea rooms. For once, summer had come early in the Peak District.
The thought was no consolation to Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, as she sat in her car on a hot street in Edendale. The windows were open, but there wasn’t enough breeze here to ruffle her hair, let alone to cool the clammy interior of a black Audi. She cursed herself for having parked with the front seats in full sun, so the heat had been focused on the fake leather like a laser aimed through the windscreen. She couldn’t even use her air conditioning without risking the battery. Now the heat was rising all around her in a mist, steaming up the mirrors. Another half hour of this, and she might spontaneously combust. That was, if she didn’t die of boredom first.
She thumbed the button on her handset.
‘Anything happening?’
‘Not yet. It’s all quiet.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
Fry sighed, glanced in her rear-view mirror, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The Audi was a new car, since she’d finally got rid of the battered old Peugeot. But she hadn’t been able to tear herself away from black. These days, everyone seemed to go for silver grey or metallic blue, but personally she tended to agree with Henry Ford – anything, so long as it was black.
Of course, it wasn’t the best choice when the summer decided to start early, with a heat wave at the end of May. Black seemed to absorb every last drop of heat.
What she needed was movement. Her foot on the accelerator, a breeze whipping past the windows. The air con going full blast. She wouldn’t really care where she was heading, if only she was moving. Out of this housing estate, out of the town of Edendale, and into the Derbyshire countryside for the sake of a cool breeze on the hills. She never thought she would hear herself say it.
A voice crackled.
‘Still nothing. Shall we call it a day?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’m dying here, Diane.’
‘I’ll make sure you get a good funeral, Gavin.’
In the CID car, DC Gavin Murfin and young DC Becky Hurst would really be getting on each other’s nerves by now. Murfin would be dropping crumbs on the floor and sweating, and Hurst would be talking too much and spraying the interior with air freshener. One of them would probably kill the other, if she made them sit in the sun any longer. Fry pictured the contest. If she had to place a bet, her money would be on Hurst. She was younger, faster, and meaner.
Fry looked up the street again at a suggestion of movement. An old man walking an ancient dog. Neither of them was moving at more than half a mile an hour. The dog was black, like her car. Its head drooped as it slowly put one foot in front of the other on the pavement, heading towards the corner shop at the end of the street.
They weren’t what she was watching for. Her target was a fair-haired man in his late twenties, wearing a baseball cap. Intelligence said that he was living in one of these houses halfway along the street, a typical Devonshire Estate council-owned semi. But she was starting to think he might have moved home.
‘I’d better start making a note of what music I want,’ said Murfin.
‘What?’
‘At my funeral. I don’t want any of this happy-clappy, cele-brating-his-life sort of stuff. I want everyone to cry when I go.’
‘Gavin, can we keep the chatter to a minimum, please?’
She heard him sigh. ‘Okay, boss.’
In the last few months, Fry had found herself thinking about moving home, too. She wasn’t sure whether it was the new car, or all the other things that she had to think about, particularly the major decisions she had to make. Decisions that she’d been putting off for weeks.
Whatever the reason, her flat at number 12 Grosvenor Avenue had begun to feel narrow and confining, as if she was living in a cell. The detached Victorian villa, once so solid and prosperous, had started to flake at the edges, the window frames warping with damp, tiles slipping off the roof during the night and frightening her half to death with their noise.
‘Is this him, Diane?’
Fry watched a white baseball cap emerge from behind an overgrown privet hedge on to the pavement.
‘No, it’s female.’
‘Oh, yeah. You’re right. Female, and suffering from a recent fashion disaster.’
Despite herself, Fry smiled. ‘You being the expert, of course, Gavin.’
She could hear another voice in the background. Hurst, giving Murfin some earache.
‘Becky says I’m being sexist,’ said Murfin. ‘So I’m going to have to go and kill myself.’
‘Fair enough.’
Fry looked at the row of council houses, wondering about the kind of people who lived here, rent paid out of their Social Security benefits. Some of them hardly seemed to care about the conditions they brought their children up in.
When she’d first moved into her flat, there had been a private landlord – absent, but at least a real person who could be spoken to occasionally. Last winter, the property had been sold to a development company with an office somewhere in Manchester and an automated switchboard that put you on hold whenever you phoned with complaints.
It was a shame. When she looked around the other houses in Grosvenor Avenue, she saw what could be done by a responsible owner. But the present landlords didn’t worry about their steady turnover of tenants, who were mostly migrant workers with jobs in the bigger Edendale hotels, and a few students on courses at High Peak College. The former tended to disappear in the winter when the tourist season was over, and the latter were gone in the summer. Fry had been the longest surviving tenant for two or three years now. No doubt the owners wondered why she was still there. She was starting to wonder that herself. It was probably time to say goodbye to the mock porticos, and the flat on the first floor, with its washed-out carpets and indelible background smells.
But where would she go if she left Grosvenor Avenue? Well, that was yet another decision – one she wasn’t equipped to make right now. She had far more important things to think about. Subjects that would dominate her thoughts, if she let them. Decisions that would change her life for ever.
Fry swore under her breath and turned up the fan to coax a bit more action out of the air con. When she first joined the police, back in Birmingham, she hadn’t anticipated how much of her time would be spent sitting in cars. And always uncomfortably, too – wearing a uniform that didn’t fit because it was designed for a man, strapped into a stab-proof vest that pinched her skin in awkward places because…well, because it was designed for a man.
And then, when she moved to CID, she’d been too excited to take in what everyone told her – that she’d spend just as much time in car. And when she wasn’t in a car, she would be sitting at a desk, filling in forms, compiling case files, answering endless queries from the Crown Prosecution Service. Like so many other police officers, she lived for the moment when she got a chance to get out of the office. Well, maybe she had the answer to that. Perhaps she had a road trip coming up.
Recently, she’d been working hard to get back in physical condition, to regain all those skills that she’d learned under her old Shotokan master in Dudley. If you didn’t train regularly, you lost those skills. But now her body was tuned and fit again. Her natural leanness was no longer taken as a sign of poor health. As for her mind…well, maybe there was still some work to do.
Then her phone rang. Though she’d been getting desperate for something to happen, Fry was actually irritated. She checked the caller ID and saw it was Ben Cooper. It had better be important.
‘Ben?’
‘She’s dead, Diane.’
‘Who is?’
The connection was very bad. His voice was intermittent, crackly and fragmented like a message from outer space. Detective Constable Cooper calling from Planet Derbyshire.
‘The little girl. The paramedics tried to revive her, but she was dead.’
‘Ben, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I tried, Diane. But she was already –’
‘You’re breaking up badly. Where are you?’
‘Dovedale. It’s –’
But then he was gone completely, his signal lost in some valley in the depths of the Peak District. Dovedale? She had an idea that it was way down in the south of the division, somewhere near Ashbourne.
Fry frowned. Just before Cooper was cut off, she thought she’d heard a siren somewhere in the background. She dialled his mobile number, got the unobtainable tone. She tried again, with the same result. No surprise there. So she used her radio to call the Control Room.
‘An incident in Dovedale. Have you got anything coming in?’
She listened as the call handler found the incident log and read her the details. There was no mention of DC Cooper, just a series of 999 calls recorded from the public at irregular intervals, probably as people got signals on their mobiles. Units were attending the scene, along with paramedics and ambulance. One casualty reported. She supposed it would all become clear in due course.
‘Thank you.’
When she thumbed the button again, she got Gavin Murfin’s voice yelling for her.
‘Diane, where are you? He’s on the move, on the move. Your direction. Repeat, your direction. Have you got a visual?’
‘What?’
Fry looked up and saw movement on the pavement a few yards ahead of her position. But it was only the old man coming back towards her, flat cap pulled over his eyes, dog lead in one hand, plastic carrier bag in the other. The dog dug its heels in and stopped to water a lamp post.
‘Nothing. Nothing in sight here.’
‘He’s long gone,’ said Murfin. ‘He was legging it. Didn’t you see him?’
‘No.’
While his dog performed its business, the old man stood and stared at her defiantly like some ancient accusing angel.
‘Bloody Hell, Gavin,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve lost him.’
For the past half hour, Cooper had been listening to the yelp and wail. The modern tones of emergency response vehicles, howling up the dale one after another. The noises merged inside his head with an echo of the screaming. The noise still bounced off the sides of his skull in the same way it had rico-cheted among the caves and pinnacles of Dovedale.
He still didn’t know who had screamed. Perhaps it was the mother. Or it might just have been some random bystander, reacting with horror to a glimpse of a body in the water. A small, white face. Long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels…
‘Their name is Nield.’
The tall uniformed sergeant was called Wragg. Cooper remembered him vaguely, and thought he’d probably turned up at a couple of major incidents in E Division when he was still a PC. He was fairly recently promoted, and was based at Ashbourne section now. He was wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over his uniform, and had removed his cap to reveal close-cropped fair hair. He looked harassed, but it might just be the heat.
‘Local?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes, by some miracle. Among all these crowds, you’d think it’d be city people who suffered an incident like this. You know, the sort who’ve never actually seen a river before. Folk who don’t think you can drown in water unless there’s a sign telling you so.’
‘You’ve seen too many tourists.’
‘You got that right,’ said Wragg. ‘I never want to catch duty on a bank holiday again, I can tell you. Do you know how long it took me to get my car through those jams? You won’t be able to move down here later.’
‘That will be somebody else’s headache.’
‘I wish.’
Cooper was leaning against Wragg’s car. He had a clear view up the gorge towards the weirs, and beyond them, the pool where he’d pulled the body out of the water.
‘How old is she?’ he said.
‘Eight.’
‘She’s only eight years old?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was here with her parents. How the hell did it happen?’
‘They say their dog went into the water to fetch a stick. A golden retriever, it is. It seems the girl ran in after the dog. Only the dog came out.’
Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘Where are the parents now?’
‘Gone with her to hospital.’
‘They surely don’t think she’ll be revived. Do they?’
Wragg shaded his eyes with a hand as he watched some members of the public being shepherded away from the scene.
‘You don’t give up in these circumstances,’ he said. ‘That’s the very last thing you do.’
Events had moved pretty quickly once the girl’s body had been recovered from the water. Cooper had carried her to the bank and laid her on the grass. Then a woman had come forward from the crowd of bystanders, saying she was a nurse. Cooper had handed over resuscitation efforts to her, and she kept it going until the fast-response paramedic arrived, closely followed by the ambulance and Sergeant Wragg and his colleagues from the Ashbourne section station.
‘We’ll need a statement from you, of course,’ said Wragg.
‘But it will do later. We’re trying to catch as many witnesses as we can among the public before they disappear.’
‘Of course.’
‘But there doesn’t seem any doubt it was an accidental drowning.’
‘There was blood, though,’ said Cooper. ‘Blood in the water. She had an injury on her head.’
‘She probably fell and hit her head on a stone. That would explain why she drowned in such a shallow depth.’
‘“Probably“?’
‘There’s hardly going to be any trace evidence,’ said Wragg irritably. ‘The stone is somewhere out there being washed by thousands of gallons of water every second. We’ll see what eye-witness statements say, but I think you’ll find that’s it.’
‘Yes, all right.’
There had been no blood on the girl when he’d picked her up. But Cooper remembered seeing the wound now, an abrasion and broken skin on her forehead. The toughest thing he’d ever done was putting that body down, handing the little girl over to someone else. It felt like abandoning her to her fate. For some ridiculous reason, his instinct had been telling him he was the only person who could save her.
It was strange what your mind could do in a crisis. Sometimes, the rational part of your brain cut out altogether and you acted entirely on instinct, with no conscious thought involved. But occasionally your mind presented you with odd flashes of information that didn’t even seem to be relevant at the time.
Right now, Cooper was remembering images from the last hour or so. Paler rocks under the surface, streams of blood swirling in the current like eels. Jagged limestone spires at crazy angles. A dead, white face with floating hair. And a man with his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers.
‘Anyway, the Nield family…’ said Wragg, consulting his notebook. ‘Father is a supermarket manager in Ashbourne. Mum is a teacher. There’s a boy, about thirteen years old, name of Alex. They’re all in a state of shock, as you can imagine.’
‘And the girl?’ said Cooper.
‘What?’
‘The girl. You haven’t mentioned her name. She must have a name.’
Wragg looked taken aback.
‘Of course. Her name is Emily – Emily Nield. She’s eight years old.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s what I wanted to know.’
He was aware of the noise of tourist cars rattling over the cattle grids out of Dovedale. Streams of scree had spilled from Thorpe Cloud like ash from a small volcano, slithering slowly towards the valley bottom. Two spaniels splashed in the water, scattering the mallards.
Many visitors were still clustered on the smooth, green slopes of the lower dale, where the limestone grassland had been grazed short by rabbits and sheep. Some were making their way down to the car park from the slopes of the dale, where they’d been exploring the woods or the limestone pinnacles and caves.
Suddenly, Cooper pushed himself away from the car.
‘Just a minute.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Wragg.
But Cooper didn’t bother answering. He ran over to the car park and began to dodge between the groups of people, searching for a face. Some of them stared at him as if he was mad. But he was sure he’d seen someone he recognized. It was just a glimpse, a face half turned away in shadow, but the angle of a cheek and the tilt of a head were distinctive. It was a face he remembered for a reason, one that should mean something important.
He stopped two women getting into their Land Rover Discovery.
‘Excuse me, did you happen to see…?’
But he didn’t know what he wanted to ask them, and they hurriedly slammed their doors, fearing that he was some lunatic.
Cooper stopped, shaking his head. Maybe he was mad. But that face had been important, if only he could pin down its meaning.
Frustrated, he walked slowly back to the police vehicles. The River Dove was returning to its normal state after the excitement. Small brown birds with white bibs hopped from stones and plunged into the water after food. Dippers, they were called. It was said that crayfish and freshwater shrimps lived in this river. The water gave life to so many creatures. But it could take life away, too.
‘DC Cooper, are you okay?’ asked Wragg.
‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘You’re shivering.’
‘Oh, I’m just cold.’
Wragg stared at him with a baffled expression. He wiped the sweat from his own face with a handkerchief and squinted up at the glaring sun.
‘Oh, yeah. Chilly day, isn’t it?’
Cooper didn’t reply. He couldn’t tell Wragg what he really felt. It sounded too ridiculous. But right now, he felt chilled to the bone.
3
And that was it. The entire operation blown in a few seconds of inattention. Fry turned off the engine of the Audi, got out and stood on the pavement, waiting for Murfin and Hurst to join her.
‘What went wrong, boss?’ asked Murfin. He looked exhausted and irritable, perspiration standing out on his forehead.
‘I missed the signal,’ said Fry.
‘That’s tough.’
He exchanged glances with Hurst, who stood in the background, unsure of her position, or what she was expected to do now. And who could blame her, when she was given this kind of poor leadership?
Fry couldn’t stand the quizzical look the Murfin was giving her. As if she never made mistakes like everyone else. Well, she had to admit this was going to be an expensive mistake. Expensive in time and resources. And even more expensive in terms of damage to her career, when Detective Superintendent Branagh got to hear about it.
From the moment she arrived in E Division, Branagh had made it clear that she wasn’t DS Fry’s biggest fan. Now she had just proved to the Super that she couldn’t even organize a simple drugs surveillance. Piss-up and brewery would be words on Branagh’s lips. Damn it, this was the worst thing that could have happened. And it was all Ben Cooper’s fault.
Emily Nield had been taken to the Royal Derby Hospital, which had a new Accident and Emergency department off the Uttoxeter Road, just outside the city. Cooper found her family sitting in A&E. Through a window, he could see a doctor already speaking to them, with that practised shake of the head that conveyed bad news. In this case, probably the worst news it could possibly be.
Cooper waited a few minutes, watching hospital staff come and go. He was unsure of his reception, and didn’t want to rush in where he wasn’t welcome. But he needed to know the worst. And somehow he also needed to make contact.
The father of Emily Nield had his back to the window, but Cooper could see he was a man in his forties, with short dark hair turning grey at the temples. He was dressed in the style that some politicians adopted when they were trying to look casual for the cameras. A blue shirt with the cuffs turned back on strong-looking wrists, cream chinos that were now stained around the knees. The mother’s face was red and puffy, half hidden by a tissue. Cooper wondered where the boy was. Hadn’t there been a teenage boy with them?
He caught the attention of the doctor as she came out and identified himself.
‘Yes, I’m afraid Emily Nield was declared dead on arrival. Very sad.’
‘Thank you. Can I speak to the parents?’
‘If they’re willing.’
Finally, he judged the moment was right, and went into the room to introduce himself.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.
There had been so many times that those three words had seemed to convey very little. They were said without sincerity, with only self-interest in mind. But right now, they seemed to mean no more than the amount of breath he’d used to inhale before he said them. What words could you say to parents who’d just seen their youngest child die in front of their eyes?
He always hated meeting people for the first time in circumstances like these. It was impossible to know from looking at them what sort of people they had been before they were broken, before their world was turned upside down for ever. They might have been people full of joy, the kind who took the greatest delight in life, their expressions always lit up by smiles. No one would know that from their faces now. In just a couple of hours, the pain had been etched too deeply into their faces, the light in their eyes had been dimmed too far. Sometimes that light never returned.
It was always worst for parents, too. No parent should have to be present at the death of a child. It was contrary to the natural order of things. And Emily Nield had been, what – eight years old? To Cooper, it felt like a tragedy beyond measure. He had no words that could express to the Nields the way he felt.
Mr Nield stood up and shook his hand in an awkward, solemn way. Nield was a tall man, an inch or two taller than Cooper when he was standing. The slight hunch of his shoulders suggested he was uncomfortable about his height.
‘We need to thank you,’ he said.
‘No. There’s no need, sir. I did nothing.’
His thanks made Cooper’s throat tighten with a surge of emotion that he struggled to hide.
‘You tried,’ said Nield. ‘You did your best for our little girl. Yes, you did your best. No one can say more than that in this world.’
Cooper smiled. But when he looked the man directly in the eyes, his smile faded. He recognized him now. This was the man he’d seen on the bank of the River Dove, hands raised as if in blessing. Yet a few minutes later, Nield had been standing in a little group with his family. Cooper wondered if his sense of time had been distorted during the incident. He would have to find out from Sergeant Wragg how long it had taken from the girl entering the water, or from the alarm first being raised. Possibly events had seemed to happen much faster than they really did.
‘I’m Robert Nield, by the way,’ said the man. ‘This is my wife, Dawn. Our son Alex is here somewhere. I think one of the staff took him out of the way of…Well, they’ve all been very kind. They couldn’t have treated us better.’
‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper.’
‘You’re a policeman. We actually didn’t realize that, did we, love?’
Mrs Nield shook her head. She hadn’t spoken yet, but at least her face appeared briefly from behind the tissue.
‘I’m a detective with Derbyshire Constabulary.’
‘We know a few of your people,’ said Nield, ‘but I don’t think I’ve come across you before.’
‘I’m based in Edendale, sir.’
‘That would explain it. We’re Ashbourne people.’
‘Yes, I know.’
Nield looked at him curiously, as if he too was searching for an elusive memory, a connection that he wasn’t quite making. Cooper was used to that look from people he’d never met before. Often they’d known his father, a long-serving police sergeant of the old school who’d practically been the centre of the community in Edendale. Sergeant Joe Cooper was known to thousands, even now. And those who’d never met him in life knew of his death.
Well, it would come to Nield later, when he was thinking straight again. He could deal with it then.
‘I don’t know what arrangements have been made, but I could run you home,’ said Cooper. ‘My car is just outside.’
‘That’s good of you. I’d completely forgotten, but I left our car behind when we came in the ambulance.’
‘In the Dovedale car park?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you like, we can drop your wife and son home, then I’ll take you to pick up your car. How does that sound?’
‘Excellent.’
‘As long as you feel up to driving. If not, I can arrange for it to be taken care of.’
‘No, I’ll be fine. We’ll find Alex, and we can be off.’
‘I keep thinking “if only we could turn back the clock”,’ said Dawn Nield as they walked to Cooper’s Toyota. ‘Just a few minutes, or a few seconds. If only I’d been watching Emily more closely, if we hadn’t been throwing the stick for Buster, or we’d chosen to go somewhere else that day instead of Dovedale. Robert said it would be crowded on a bank holiday. That was why we went early. If we’d set off a bit later, we might not have been able to park the car, or there might have been more people around when it happened…’
‘Love, there’s no point in tormenting yourself,’ said Nield.
‘No, you’re right.’
Dawn wiped her eyes and looked briefly at Cooper. He read everything in that fleeting glance. While she might tell her husband he was right, those were no more than the words that came automatically from her mouth. What was happening inside her head was a whole world away. He knew she would never stop tormenting herself, could never rid herself of the endless ‘what ifs’. That list of possibilities would run through her mind in a constant loop, the moments when history might have been changed, playing over and over again like scenes from a film she had never actually watched. For the rest of her life, she would still be asking herself: What if?
The drive back to Ashbourne on the A52 took only twenty minutes. Cooper was glad it wasn’t a longer journey. The atmosphere in the car became uncomfortable as the Nields fell silent, each of them absorbed in their own thoughts. He’d tried to fill in some of the silences himself, but there was a limit to how much you could say in these circumstances without starting to sound ridiculous and insincere.
Ashbourne was a town built mostly of red brick, which made it look totally different from the limestone and millstone grit of Edendale to the north. This was clay country, softer than the White Peak, less forbidding than the bleak moorlands of the Dark Peak.
At school, in Geography lessons, Cooper had learned the significance of the boundary of Red Triassic rock which ran from Ashbourne to Thorpe, leaving the limestone gorge of Dovedale in startling contrast on the other side.
Perhaps it was all that red brick, but somehow the town felt unfamiliar to Cooper, as if he had already left his comfort zone. The Pennine hills were in his blood, and nothing could replace them. If he were ever to move, even the few miles to Ashbourne, it wouldn’t feel like home.
As he drove into the town, Cooper could see the last stages of construction work taking place on Clifton Road, where a new hospital was due to open next year. He wondered if it would have its own A&E department, whether it would have made any difference if Emily had got to hospital a few minutes quicker.
But he recalled the body he’d held in his arms, the futile attempts to resuscitate her on the riverbank. Surely she had already been dead when she came out of the water?
The boy was very quiet. At least the mother had let some of it out in that burst of emotion. But Alex was dumb. He was a slim youth, a bit under-sized for thirteen perhaps. He had dark hair like his father’s, but allowed to grow long, so that it fell over his face. His mother occasionally tried to push it back into position, and each time the boy flinched away from her. Alex had dark eyes, too, that gazed into Cooper’s every time he looked in his rear-view mirror.
Shock took people in different ways, of course. It was slightly disturbing, though, the way the boy kept looking at him and saying nothing. It was as if he was trying to weigh up Cooper’s trustworthiness, wondering whether he could share some secret with him. It was highly likely that he found it impossible to talk to either of his parents at that age. What thirteen-year-old could? A stranger to talk to might be exactly what he needed.
But how did you communicate to a thirteen-year-old boy that he was welcome to talk if he wanted to? Probably you didn’t. Teenagers were like animals, weren’t they? You had to wait until they came to you.
The Nields lived on the Shires Estate, off Wyaston Road. Executive homes with a view of the countryside where the road turned into a steep hill before curving to a dead end just short of the A52. At the bottom, children were playing football in the road. You didn’t see that too often.
The Nields’ house looked to be ten or twelve years old, with carriage lamps and hanging baskets, an oriel bay window and two half-timbered gables. It was set back from the road behind a neatly trimmed beech hedge, and a paved driveway led up to a double garage.
A house like this was usually described in estate agents’ adverts as a period-style detached residence. Cooper turned and looked at the view beyond the end of the close – Peak District hills on the horizon, including the distinctive pyramid shape of Thorpe Cloud. A detached residence in a much sought-after area, then. Lucky Nields.
He dropped Dawn and Alex off at the house, reassured to see a member of the family waiting anxiously for them on the drive. Nield explained that it was his wife’s sister, come up from Derby to be with her.
‘Thank you,’ said Nield, when Cooper returned him to the car park in Dovedale. ‘I don’t know how to thank you enough.’
‘There’s really no need, sir.’
Cooper watched Nield drive away in his silver VW Passat.
The car park was almost empty now, and access to the dale itself sealed off by police tape. Beyond the tape, Cooper could see Sergeant Wragg’s yellow high-vis jacket down by the river. But he felt reluctant to go near the water. The thought of its noise and icy coldness made him shiver. The image of water foaming over a weir caused his skin to crawl with apprehension.
Shading his eyes with his hands, Cooper gazed into the distance for the furthest glimpse of water he could get before a curve in the dale hid the Dove from view. He knew that the river rose way in the north, on the slopes of Axe Edge, close to the Leek to Buxton road. It ran roughly southwards for forty-five miles to join the Trent. For much of its course, it ran with one bank in Derbyshire and the other in Staffordshire. Which meant, strictly speaking, that his jurisdiction as an officer of Derbyshire Constabulary ended in the middle of the water, about halfway across the stepping stones.
He pictured the Dove widening as it reached Hollinsclough and flowed beneath the reef knolls of Hollins Hill, Crome Hill, Parkhouse and Hitter into the tourist village of Harrington. It was after Hartington that the valley became a gorge, the meadows ending abruptly at Beresford Dale. Wolfscote Dale, Mill Dale, and then the northern entrance into Dovedale itself, where more than a million visitors a year came to admire the wooded slopes and white limestone rocks carved by nature into towers, caves and spires.
South of here, the Dove was joined by the River Manifold before flowing through the lowlands of Southern Derbyshire on its way to the Trent at Newton Solney.
Past those stepping stones, on a curve of the river, was a series of rocky outcrops, all with picturesque names. Dovedale Castle, the Twelve Apostles, Lovers’ Leap. They were picked out on maps and photographed by tourists as they strolled along the banks of the river in the summer. Pickering Tor, Tissington Spires, the Rocky Bunster. One of the most prominent features was a natural arch on the eastern side of the dale. For some reason, whoever had named these rocks had suffered an imagination failure at this point. According to the Ordnance Survey map, this was called simply the Natural Arch. A bit disappointing, really. You would have expected the Devil’s Bow or the Mouth of Hell.
Cooper tried to sort out his memories, to clarify what he’d seen in Dovedale, and what he hadn’t. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get an image of Robert Nield out of his head, hands raised, water dripping from his fingers.
But the image only flashed across his memory. With it came another, much stronger recollection. The feel of a cold, limp body. Not yet stiff, but icy. The coldness of the freshly dead.
Above the weirs, the river looked too shallow for anyone to drown in. Anyone but a small child, anyway. Downstream, the water was deeper between the weirs. The current formed deceptive pools. How had the Nields managed to choose a stretch of river where the water was that bit deeper, the crowds were sparser, and everyone seemed to be looking the other way?
But that was the way it went with these things. A combination of circumstances that no one could have predicted, and this was the outcome.
Cooper started the Toyota and turned north towards Edendale. He found he wasn’t even convincing himself. A combination of circumstances? Or was it something more?
The cold eating into his bones could not be explained by the weather.
4
And how do you feel about it now? It was a question Diane Fry expected to be asked at any moment. It was, after all, a question that she’d asked herself many times, trying to analyse her own feelings, to make an inventory of the emotions as they welled up inside her. Pain, fear, horror. An awful sense of loss. And some other emotions so deep and nameless that they didn’t fit into any inventory. It didn’t matter what questions they asked her. No neat list would contain those feelings, no analysis could pin them down.
She recalled that rainy Monday morning in March, when she’d found Detective Inspector Gareth Blake standing in her boss’s office at E Division headquarters in Edendale. She hadn’t recognized him at first, as she automatically held out her hand, seeing a man who wasn’t much above her own age, his hair just starting to recede a little from his forehead, grey eyes observing her sharply from behind tiny, frameless glasses.
‘Diane,’ he said.
And then she’d remembered him. It was the voice that did it. She and Blake had worked together years ago, on the same uniformed shift in the West Midlands. But he’d been ambitious and got himself noticed, earning an early promotion. He was more mature now, better dressed, with a sharper hairstyle. The reek of ambition still hung in the air around him, though.
So what was Blake’s specialty now?
Cold case rape enquiries. Well, of course.
And then there had been Rachel Murchison, smartly dressed in a black suit and a white blouse, dark hair tied neatly back, businesslike and self-confident, but with a guarded watchfulness. A specialist counsellor, there to judge her psychological state.
Some of the phrases leapt out at her from the conversation that had followed.
‘Obviously, we don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane.’
That was Blake, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear.
‘It’s understandable that you feel a need to be in control. Perfectly normal, in the circumstances.’
Murchison’s contribution. Well, Fry hadn’t wanted this woman telling her whether she was behaving normally or not. She didn’t want to hear it from anyone else, for that matter.
Just the sound of her name from Blake’s lips had brought back the memories she’d been trying to suppress, but which would now forever bubble up in her mind. She remembered how both of them, Blake and Murchison, had watched her carefully, trying to assess her reaction.
In the days that followed, others had seemed to be watching her in that some careful manner. But they could never comprehend the painful attempt to balance two powerful urges. The need to keep her most terrible memories safely buried now had to be set against this urge she’d suddenly discovered growing inside – the burning desire for vengeance and justice. No one could understand that. Not even Ben Cooper.
DC Ben Cooper had already been the darling of E Division when she arrived in Derbyshire. She’d been told how wonderful he was, what areas he was the expert in, the heights of knowledge he’d attained that no one else could possibly aspire to. She’d heard his name mentioned so many times before she actually met him that she’d already formed a picture of this Mister Perfect, the detective everyone loved, the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently.
When he entered the CID room that first day back from leave, he could only have lived up to expectations if he’d been walking on water, or floating in a golden glow and trailing a string of haloes from his angelic backside. DC Ben Cooper had been set up for her to despise from the outset. No one liked a goody-goody.
But things had changed since then. Fry knew better than anyone that he was no Mister Perfect.
For years, her instinct had been to concentrate totally on her work. And that was a familiar story. She was no different from all the washed-up people everywhere, all the fools who’d ever messed up their lives or destroyed their relationships. Work was safe ground, a place where personal feelings could be put aside, shrugged off with her coat at the door of the office. The trouble was, right now she could feel the safe ground shifting under her feet. She was still as dedicated to the job as she’d ever been. But she had a suspicion the job wasn’t quite so loyal to her any more.
Fry was waiting to be called into Superintendent Branagh’s office, back at E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale. She felt like a naughty school girl sent to see the headmistress.
‘Michael Lowndes,’ said Branagh, when she was finally summoned. ‘What went wrong?’
There was no point in trying to make excuses. Branagh had eyes that could look right through you.
‘I took my eye off the ball, ma’am.’
‘Obviously. You were supposed to follow him to the meeting, and take the main players out. You were in position, and so was your team. We only put together this operation so that Lowndes would lead us to the others.’
‘We failed,’ said Fry.
‘We?’
Fry swallowed. ‘I failed.’
Branagh sat back in her chair and studied her for a few moments. ‘Diane, we’ve been patient with you for a while now,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘We’ve given you some leeway, allowed you plenty of space. But you have a decision to make, and it’s time you made it. I believe it’s starting to affect your performance.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Have you some other explanation?’
But Fry hadn’t. She couldn’t blame anyone else but herself.
‘DS Fry, I want you to make a decision here and now. I don’t like to put pressure on you in these circumstances, but I have wider issues to consider.’
Fry looked at her, wondering if she would be as terrifying herself if she ever reached the dizzy heights of such a senior rank. Not that it was likely.
The last time Fry had sat in this office was when DI Gareth Blake and the specialist rape counsellor Rachel Murchison had arrived from the West Midlands, bringing the news of a DNA hit that would enable them to re-open the enquiry in which she was the victim. A cold case rape enquiry. All they needed was her decision, whether she wanted to go ahead with a fresh enquiry, or close the book and put the whole thing behind her.
Blake’s words still echoed in her mind. She’d been turning them over and over since that day.
‘When we get a cold case hit, we consult the CPS before we consider intruding into a victim’s life. We have to take a close look at how strong a case we’ve got, and whether we can do something to strengthen it.’
‘With the help of the victim.’
‘Of course. And in this case…’
‘In my case. This is personal. Don’t try to pretend it isn’t.’
‘In your case, we had a very credible witness report from the victim. From you, Diane. Everything is on file for this one. We have an e-fit record in the imaging unit, and a copy of everything has been kept by the FSS. But the bottom line is, we got a DNA match.’
DNA, the holy grail of trace evidence. The national DNA database had gone live in 1995 and every week now the Forensic Science Service laboratory in Birmingham matched more than a thousand profiles taken from crime scenes, solving crimes up to thirty years old. Soon, the database would hit its target of three million profiles.
It was so easy to believe that DNA evidence was foolproof. Yet the larger the database, the greater the chance of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime. For some, it was too much like the beginnings of a Big Brother society they didn’t really want to be part of.
‘The time is now,’ said Branagh. ‘Do we have a decision?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Excellent. I’m granting you indefinite leave of absence.’
Branagh made a note in a file on her desk.
‘Of course, since we don’t know how long you’ll be away from the division, there’ll be an appointment to Acting DS in your place.’
Leaving Branagh’s office, Fry pulled out her mobile and dialled a number.
‘Dad? Will you be at home tomorrow? Yes. I’m coming to see you.’
Ben Cooper turned right and dropped the Toyota down a gear to go up the steep street. Edendale was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park. At Buxton and other towns, the line on the map took wide sweeps around them and back again, to exclude them from national park planning restrictions. But Edendale sat too deep within the hills to be excluded. It lay in the middle of a valley running west to east, halfway between the Hope and the Wye. The River Eden came down from the hills and meandered its way through the town before escaping to the east. Because of its position, every road in the town led upwards, out on to the moors.
Castleton Road climbed past close-packed residential areas that spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying landscape. Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same stone. Finally, the housing petered out in a scattering of small-holdings and small-scale dairy farms.
For the moment, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by a barrier of hills. But the pressure of housing demand might force it to expand some time – either southwards into the gentle limestone hills of the White Peak, or north towards the bare gritstone moors of the Dark Peak.
By the river in the centre of town, the Buttercross area was where Edendale’s antique shops clustered. This was the oldest and most picturesque part of the town, including Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, where the stone-walled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lichen-covered millstones.
In this area, his sister Claire’s shop stood empty now, the ‘To Let’ signs up, and all its stock sold off. There wasn’t much hope of a sale at the moment. It was hardly the only empty shop in town anyway. Time moved a bit more slowly here than in other parts of the country, and the recession had come along late, its ripple effects hitting the Eden Valley some months after the stone that had been dropped into the water of the UK economy.
At the height of the recession, twenty per cent of retail property had stood vacant in the city of Derby. In the north of the county, smaller market towns like Edendale had survived for a while on their tourism business – thanks to all those people who’d decided to spend their holidays in Britain rather than fly to the Maldives. And now, while the papers talked about the green shoots of recovery, the shutters were still up in Edendale’s High Street.
But Claire Cooper was ready to make a fresh start. She was a ‘glass half-full’ sort of person, and saw it as an opportunity. Even Matt might be pushed and cajoled into adopting a more optimistic outlook than he’d expressed for a long time.
At E Division, Gavin Murfin would be retiring in a few years’ time, finally able to claim a full pension at the end of his thirty years’ service. Gavin’s eldest was due to get married soon. He’d probably be a grandfather before long. But what would he do with himself in his mid-fifties, a career in Derbyshire Constabulary behind him, and too much time on his hands? It was funny how that happened in someone’s life. Time turned them into a person their friends didn’t recognize and had no connection with. Old colleagues who’d depended on each other’s support for years suddenly found they had nothing in common, no way even of sharing the office gossip. You couldn’t talk about work to a civilian. And all of that could be a brutal wrench for some officers. Too cruel a rupture.
Cooper had a sudden vision of himself in twenty years’ time, overweight and middle-aged, slouching around the CID room at Edendale, checking his watch to see if it was time to go home yet, setting a bad example for the younger DCs, grumbling about always missing out on promotion. He could become another Gavin Murfin.
No, surely not.
But some things never changed. Every division was still struggling to meet all its targets. Sanctioned Detection Rate, Crime Reduction Figures, PDR Completion Rate, Public Confidence Measure. The list seemed endless and unattainable.
Number 8 Welbeck Street lay just across the river from the town centre, close enough for him to walk to work if he wanted to. It benefited from a conservatory, and long gardens between Welbeck Street and the shops on Meadow Road. Unfortunately, his landlady Mrs Shelley, who lived next door, was becoming dottier and dottier, and he wasn’t sure how long he had left before her acquisitive relatives took over the two houses. No doubt they had their own plans.
He did still have a cat, though. Not the original black moggy who had come with the ground-floor flat as a sitting tenant. The poor chap had died one night in his sleep, and the flat had felt very empty without him.
Cooper’s new cat had chosen him one day when he visited the Fox Lane animal sanctuary. She had hooked him with her claws as he passed her cage, and refused to let go. One look into her anxious bright green eyes had left him with no option.
Now she was very much at home in Welbeck Street, enjoying the freedom of roaming the back gardens. He was gradually getting used to seeing tabby stripes instead of long black fur.
It had taken him ages to name the new cat. Naming an animal seemed such a simple thing. It wasn’t like choosing a name for a child, when something that suited a gurgling baby also had to be cool enough to avoid bullying when a child reached its teens, and appropriate for a responsible adult who didn’t want to sound like a porn star.
Claire had told him that a cat was the Celtic equivalent to the mythical two-headed dog Cerberus, the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. So he’d toyed with some names from Celtic mythology. Brigid, Mari, Morgan, Rhiannon. Wikipedia had come up with a whole list. But none of them had seemed right. They sounded too much like witches.
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