Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) (2 page)

‘I can’t imagine the amount of devastation up there,’ he said. ‘It’ll take years for the moors to recover.’

‘It was the same last year,’ said Villiers. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Which means that some areas haven’t even had time to grow back properly. If it goes on like this every year, Carol, Derbyshire will never look the same again.’

Villiers had been brought up in this area too. In fact, they’d known each other at school. She was the only member of the CID team at Derbyshire Constabulary’s E Division who came close to sharing his background. Her arrival after a spell of service with the RAF Police had been like a breath of fresh air. Cooper couldn’t imagine speaking like this to anyone else – like, say, Diane Fry, who had been his boss when he was still a DC. Well, not without being sneered at as a country bumpkin, anyway.

A sudden gust of wind dispersed the smoke for a moment. Then it thickened again, scudding across the hillside in dark, roiling masses. Cooper and Villiers peered fruitlessly up the road, trying to make out any details beyond the barrier fifty yards ahead.

‘It doesn’t look as though this route is closed,’ said Villiers.

‘It should be. It’s getting dangerous.’

‘Maybe it’s just deteriorated in the last few minutes.’

‘Perhaps.’

Cooper coughed and pressed the button to raise the windows. The day was unseasonably warm for April, and the air conditioning in the Toyota wasn’t brilliant. But one breath of that smoke rolling towards the car was enough
to make him want to withdraw from the area as soon as possible.

‘I’ll turn round,’ he said. ‘Did you notice a gateway?’

‘The nearest one is back round the bend there.’

‘Okay. Let’s just pray nothing comes round too fast.’

When he twisted round to look over his shoulder, Cooper felt another stab of pain. He hated twinges like that. Not for the discomfort itself, but because they made him feel that middle age might not be too far away. He was only in his thirties, for heaven’s sake. But the job could take a disproportionate toll on your body sometimes. His wedding was coming up in a few months’ time, and he ought to be fit for that. Liz certainly would, judging by the amount of dieting and exercising she was doing, the number of health and beauty treatments she was booking. At this rate, he’d look like the bride’s elderly uncle instead of the groom.

Villiers got out to direct him back to the gateway. By the time Cooper had turned the Toyota round, a Traffic car was coming up the road towards them. The officer driving lowered his window when he recognised Cooper.

‘Yes, it’s bad,’ he said. ‘But the wind is shifting so much we can’t keep track of which routes are being affected. I keep expecting to come across an RTC, but so far we’ve been lucky.’

Cooper could see the likelihood of a road accident in these conditions. It only needed one unsuspecting motorist to come round a corner too fast. It happened often enough anyway, without the additional hazard of reduced visibility.

‘We’ll leave you to it then,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

When he and Villiers got to the higher ground on the main road, Cooper had a clear view across the valley to the burning moorland. Only then did he realise that the ribbons
of smoke they’d run into stretched for miles. Black clouds rose against the sky on the high plateau, swirling and breaking to reveal banks of flame scattered across the moor. Within a few yards of the fire the smoke dipped suddenly where it was caught by the wind. From there it slithered down the hillside, forming long trails like black fingers reaching towards the houses in the valley below.

‘We’re going to run into that smoke again in a minute,’ said Villiers.

‘You’re right.’

‘And it’s even worse there, Ben. It’s thicker and blacker.’

‘We can’t avoid it,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s directly above the road.’

‘Take it steady, then.’

‘Of course. You know me. I always do.’

They began to descend the steep hill towards the town of Edendale. And a few moments later, the sun went out.

By the time his hands touched the wooden boards, Aidan Merritt was nearly blinded by the tears streaming from his eyes. He banged on the boards with his fists, fumbled along the edges of the wall where the door frame should have been, but found no crack to get a grip on.

Desperately, he felt further along the stone facade. There had been windows here at one time, but they too had been boarded over. He tugged at a corner of a board, but couldn’t shift it. He realised the building itself had been blinded. No door, and no windows. It was an eyeless dinosaur abandoned in the burning landscape.

Finally he found a side door left open a crack, and slid inside. It was so good to be out of the smoke. But the interior was even darker – pitch black as a cave, thanks to the boarded-up windows. No doubt the electricity was off too. He could
smell the mustiness that always invaded empty buildings, though the pub hadn’t been closed for all that long. Decades of stale beer and cigarette smoke were coming into their own now, oozing from the corners and seeping out of the floorboards.

And there was something else too, lurking beneath the mustiness. A thick, rank smell that seemed to stick to the mucus in his nose and throat. On top of the smoke, it made him feel nauseous. He struggled to control the instinct to gag. It was a stink like the smell of fear.

‘Hello!’ he called. ‘Anyone here?’

The sound of his own voice echoed back to him. He wasn’t certain what part of the building he was in. He had never used this side door when the pub was open. He might be somewhere near the kitchens, he couldn’t be sure. He would have to wait a few minutes for his eyesight to adjust to the darkness.

Merritt took a step forward, hands outstretched to feel for the presence of a wall or doorway. His boots crunched on broken glass. The noise sounded unnaturally loud, as if the glass had been left there deliberately as a warning of intruders.

‘Hello? Hello?’

There was no answer. Or was there? Did he detect a faint rustle in the darkness, the sound of breathing that wasn’t his own?

He turned quickly, overwhelmed by a sudden fear that there was someone behind him in the blackness. The broken glass squealed under his boots like a small creature crushed to death against the concrete.

‘Is that …? Is …?’

But the blow on his skull came out of nowhere. Merritt cried out in pain, saw flashes of blinding light in the darkness, felt his legs begin to crumple. Then a second impact
drove consciousness from his brain, and he hit the floor, stunned and bleeding, with fragments of glass pressing into his skin, his eyelids twitching as his nerve endings spasmed in agony.

As he lay face down in the dust, Aidan Merritt never felt the third blow – even though it was the one that killed him.

The
E Division headquarters building in Edendale was starting to look a bit grubby these days – in some parts as grimy as if it had been in the middle of a fire itself. Outside, the woodwork hadn’t been painted for a while, and the stone facing was becoming dark and mottled. Even the brackets for the lights near the security cameras looked as though they were being slowly eaten by acid rain.

As Cooper drove up West Street towards the police station, it seemed that only the rails to the disabled ramp stood out, bright yellow and gleaming in the sun.

But no, he was wrong. There was one other patch of yellow noticeable on the front of the building – the public phone used to contact officers at times when the station was closed. And the times it was closed were becoming increasingly frequent.

When they’d gone through the security barrier and parked among the marked vehicles and CID cars at the back of the building, Cooper locked the Toyota and stood for a moment looking up at the hills above the town.

Edendale sat in a kind of shallow bowl. In every direction you looked, you saw hills. Any road you took out of town went uphill. In the streets down by the river, the climate could be totally different from what was happening up there on the moors of the Dark Peak. A bit of drizzle falling on
shoppers on Clappergate could have turned into a snowstorm by the time you reached the Snake Pass on your way to Glossop.

Today, though the sun was shining on Edendale, Cooper could see that the moors to the north and west of the town were black with smoke. It had been another dry spring, with little rain falling on Derbyshire for months. Despite heavy falls of snow in the winter, the high expanses of peat moor soon dried out. And it didn’t even need to be warm – this spring certainly hadn’t been. The plateaux were constantly scoured by wind, which evaporated the moisture and left the peat and banks of heather parched and vulnerable to the threat of wildfires. One January a fire had ignited at minus five degrees Celsius, burning dry winter vegetation above soil that was still frozen solid.

Summer could be a bad time too, when the sun was hot and more visitors crowded on to the moors. But at least there was new growth of foliage then. In the spring, there was only the old vegetation, woody and desiccated. Firefighters called it the fuel load. This spring, the moors were like a vast tinderbox, just waiting for a spark to create these catastrophic fires.

With so much flammable material, and ideal conditions, the fires could burn for days, or for weeks. To the north, near Sheffield, a moorland fire had been smouldering continuously since 1978, after it burned down through the peat into underlying strata of coal. Once that happened, there was no way to put it out.

‘I remember fires like these when I was growing up,’ said Villiers, coming to stand at his shoulder. ‘I thought the whole world was coming to an end. It was like Armageddon. I can’t recall what year it was, but I was quite young.’

‘The worst year was 1976,’ said Cooper.

‘What? I’m not that old.’

‘Nineteen
eighty, then. And 1995, 2003 – they were all bad years. All showed spikes in the number of moorland fires.’

For weeks now, national park rangers had been warning people not to light barbecues or camp fires, because of the higher than normal risk of fires. There had already been six moorland fires in the national park in the past two months.

Moorland fires could have a particularly devastating effect at this time of year, wiping out ground-nesting birds and even small mammals such as lambs, which couldn’t escape the advance of the flames. Wildfires not only harmed wildlife but destroyed rare plants and caused erosion. They undid years of hard work in managing those rare environments.

In the past few weeks alone, fires had broken out at Stanton Moor, at Ramshaw Rocks near Warslow, and on Moscar Moor near Ladybower Reservoir. Much of the land was owned by the water companies like United Utilities. In a way, that was an advantage: the companies couldn’t tolerate the resulting run-off into the water supply, so they were willing to cough up the money needed to hire helicopters at two thousand pounds an hour.

Over the Easter period in 2003, landowners had spent around sixty thousand pounds in five days on helicopters to help extinguish three simultaneous fires on Kinder and Bleaklow. There was no contribution to the cost from the state, and lobbying government to fund the use of helicopters had proved fruitless.

Ironically, one of the problems was developing sustainable water supplies out on the moors. The most difficult and severe fires were in remote, inaccessible locations. Water was usually some distance away – and the key to putting fires out was to get water on them. One of the biggest challenges was a logistical one. For years, the authorities had been talking about developing a network of ponds and
pipelines across the moors to increase the speed of delivering water to a fire site. It hadn’t happened yet.

They walked towards the door of the station, and Villiers keyed in the security code. A prisoner transport vehicle had drawn up outside the custody suite, and a prisoner was being unloaded from the cage at the back.

Cooper had worked in this division for fifteen years, some of that time in section stations like Bakewell and Matlock, but most of it here at divisional headquarters in Edendale. He was becoming almost as well known as his father had been before him, that old-fashioned copper people in the town still talked about, both for the way he had spent his life and the way he’d died.

In the CID room, the atmosphere felt strained. Cooper detected it as soon as he walked through the door. He looked round the room. The two youngest DCs, Becky Hurst and Luke Irvine, were busy, their heads down, desks piled with paperwork, keyboards clattering, phones ringing intermittently. As usual, they were trying to deal with several things at once.

Meanwhile, the most experienced member of the team, DC Gavin Murfin, was amusing himself by filling in application forms for jobs he could never hope to get, and would never actually apply for. Today he was completing Form 518, the Specialist Post Application form for a Surveillance Operative at the East Midlands Counter Terrorism Intelligence Unit. He’d said yesterday that he liked the fact that the form was designated
Restricted when complete.

Murfin looked up when he saw Cooper arrive. His pen was poised dramatically in mid-air.

‘Ah, boss,’ he called. ‘Would you say I “create processes that make sure stakeholders’ and customers’ views and needs are clearly identified and responded to”?’

‘No,’ said
Cooper.

‘Would you agree that “this officer’s performance in their current position is satisfactory”?’

‘No.’

‘Or that “the officer meets the person specification/promotion criteria”?’

‘No.’

‘Ben, I have to tell you – my line supervisor’s comments are a very important part of the application process.’

‘It’s still no.’

Murfin sighed. ‘Well, that’s buggered this one, then.’

Keyboards had fallen silent, and the rustle of paperwork had stopped. Even the phones seemed to have taken a break. Cooper could feel the rest of the team watching him carefully.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘Give me that, Gavin.’

‘It’s restricted,’ protested Murfin.