Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) (4 page)

But nothing was normal now. His four-hourly doses of oral morphine were vital to get him through the day, though they made him prone to vomiting, constipation and dry mouth. The cancer had also affected his liver. The doctors told him that worsening renal function altered the metabolisation of the morphine and caused toxicity. The explanation meant nothing to him. But he knew what the results were. Agitation, confusion, hallucinations, involuntary jerking of his limbs and vivid dreams.

Yes, those vivid dreams. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep at all. At other times he was afraid to sleep, because his dreams woke him in a panic, sweating in the face of unnameable fears.

Were those nightmares caused by morphine toxicity, or by something else entirely?

The road from Edendale climbed steeply over the edge of Abney Moor and passed through the Hazlebadge parish. From here, the Light House was already visible. Cooper glimpsed it now and then from the highest points of the road as a distinctive feature on the horizon.

The pub had always seemed to draw his eye, as if it was trying to lure him, to tempt him to call in for a visit. It was a famous landmark in this part of the Peak District. Famous when it was open, at least. The Light House had shut its doors six month ago.

Well, it was just one of thousands of rural pubs that had closed during the last few years. But this one was such a
shame. The pub stood on the highest point of Oxlow Moor and was known as a landmark for miles around. The roof line and the shape of the chimneys were recognisable from a great distance, unmistakably the Light House. When it was open, the illuminated facade of the pub had been visible at night in all directions, from the B6061 above Winnats Pass to the main road running south-west out of Edendale towards Peak Forest.

The Light House might still be visible now, once the smoke of the wildfires had cleared. But it was no longer the landmark Cooper had known. The roof line was still there, and the shape of the chimneys. But the pub itself was a blank, windowless and dead.

Finding the place was the difficulty, though. Its presence on the skyline gave no clue how you were supposed to reach it. And within minutes it had vanished again as the road descended past the abandoned open-cast mine workings at Shuttle Rake and Moss Rake.

From one short stretch of road, he could see part of the vast quarry that served the Castleton cement works. Its walls were blasted into deep ledges like an enormous Roman amphitheatre glowing white in the sunlight. A stack of white silage bags formed a startling feature of the landscape, an unexpected contrast to the usual black silage stores. Many of the road signs directed quarry lorries towards the best routes to reach the sites that were still operating. Without them, large vehicles would constantly be attempting to negotiate the narrowest of lanes, getting stuck and bringing traffic to a complete halt.

Cooper turned on to a short stretch of Batham Gate, the old Roman road, where he glimpsed a herd of piebald horses grazing in the field. Then he turned again towards Bradwell Moor, where the Light House soon came back into view.

The
dark expanses of Oxlow Moor stretched away west and south, increasing the pub’s impression of isolation. Since the only approach was up the hill from the east, you used to be able to step out of the pub and feel as though you were in the middle of nowhere. Well, you
were
in the middle of nowhere. There was almost nothing in sight to remind you of civilisation, except the occasional farmstead nestled into the landscape on the more distant hills.

To the north he could see Rushup Edge and Mam Tor, with the plateau of Kinder Scout a ghostly grey presence behind them. Away to the east, he was looking across the Hope Valley to Winhill Pike, the distinctive conical tor on Win Hill. To the south-west, the view was over Jewelknoll Plantation to Ox Low, and a glimpse of farmland near Peak Forest. He knew Edendale was somewhere to the south-east, beyond Bradwell Moor, but the town was lost from view now.

He stopped for a moment, wound down the window and looked up the hill at the pub. A large auctioneer’s sign had been fixed high on the wall.
Historic landmark inn for sale by public auction.

Below his position, a track snaked away towards the remains of some disused lead mines, crossing the Limestone Way about a mile down. There were walkers on the trail now. He could hear the clang of gates being closed as they passed from one part of route to the next, sprung stainless-steel latches crashing into place. The sound was perfectly clear, though the trail was a long way below him.

All around the edges of the moor were irregular clusters of bumps and hollow – the traces of those long-abandoned mine workings, their mounds of spoil thrown up like giant ant heaps. At another time, sheep would have been dozing on those mounds, using the extra height for vantage points, or places of safety. Beneath a tumble of stones in the bottom
of each hollow would be the entrance to a disused mine shaft. Not so safe at all.

Many of the shafts had been filled in completely over the years. But some of them hadn’t. These workings were centuries old, and a few had been lost and forgotten – lost, that was, until someone stumbled on a loose stone and broke a leg, or slipped through a corroded capping plate and disappeared into the ground for ever.

Cooper put the Toyota back into gear and drove on over the moor, heading inexorably towards the clouds of black smoke on the skyline.

On Oxlow Moor, some of the firefighters were dousing smouldering hotspots with water from backpacks like garden sprayers. Others were stamping and kicking out the smaller fires, or flailing them with beaters.

Cooper found the incident commander by his white helmet and white tabard. He turned out to be the watch manager from Edendale fire station. This was a major incident, so somewhere there would be a Level Two commander in overall charge.

‘How dense is the smoke up there?’ asked Cooper.

‘How dense? You can’t see your hand in front of your face,’ said the fire chief, pushing back the visor of his helmet.

‘What’s the current Fire Severity Index?’

‘The FSI has been at five for the past two days. It can’t get any higher.’

Several square miles of moorland were burning now, with dense smoke trailing across the sky. At least barriers were out at strategic points along the adjacent roads to stop traffic. Some areas where earlier fires had started had been dampened down after a huge operation, but the ground was still smouldering.

Cooper
could see a silver-grey ranger’s Land Rover Defender towing a water bowser on to the moor, and one of the national park’s eight-wheel-drive Argo Centaurs operating alongside the fire service’s Unimog all-terrain tender.

Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service were only part of the operation when it came to a moorland fire like this one. National park rangers, National Trust wardens, water companies and other major landowners all became involved. They’d come together to form the Fire Operations Group more than fifteen years ago, after a serious moorland blaze. They drew up joint plans, shared specialist equipment and worked side by side to tackle major fires.

The fire chief shook his head at the scene on the moor. ‘I’d be a lot happier if you could get hold of the people who caused these fires.’

‘They aren’t accidental?’

He laughed. ‘Accidental? I’m not convinced you could even
do
this accidentally. It isn’t so easy to start a moorland fire just by dropping a match or something. When you drop a spent match or a cigarette end, it’s almost always on a path anyway. Bare earth or rock. Nothing that burns easily. These fires began way out in the middle of the dry heather, where they had the best chance of catching. If we’d found the remains of any Chinese lanterns, I might accept it as accidental.’

‘Chinese lanterns? Really?’

‘Absolutely. There’s been a complete craze for them recently. It’s mad. I mean, what is a Chinese lantern? You’re basically lighting a candle inside a paper bag and letting it drift off wherever the wind takes it. People send off whole swarms of them at once. Then they land on someone’s crop, or on a baking-dry moor like this, and the result is no surprise to anyone. Certainly not to me. And yet they call that an accident. Well, not in my book – it’s sheer recklessness with someone else’s property. They’re talking about
banning the things in some places, and it’s none too soon in my opinion. It’s already the case in other countries, even in China.’

Cooper remembered his brother complaining about Chinese lanterns too. Of course, Matt complained about a lot of things. But the National Farmers’ Union had said the lanterns were not only a fire hazard, but could also wreck farm machinery, or be chopped up and get into animal feed, with potentially fatal results for livestock.

‘But no signs of Chinese lanterns in this case? No one been holding a party and letting them off?’

‘Not so far as we can see,’ said the fireman. ‘There’d be wire frames left, even after they’d burned up.’

‘Arson, then?’

The watch manager shrugged. ‘Without a confession, there’s no way anyone can actually prove the fires were started deliberately.’

‘But that’s your gut instinct?’

‘Yes. But my gut instinct isn’t proof of anything.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Our own fire investigator is on his way, but we’ve narrowed down the location where we think the fire started. Or was started. Whichever. We believe there are traces of accelerant use.’

‘Petrol? Lighter fluid?’

‘Something of that nature. The burn pattern is distinctive. A higher rate of combustion, a greater degree of heat. In that one patch, the fire has just left ashes.’

‘Can we have a look?’

‘Sure. Just take care.’

As they walked, the fireman pointed up the slope, where the heather and bracken had been burnt off completely, leaving a blackened stretch of ground devoid of vegetation of any kind.

‘Next
thing, we’re going to have the archaeologists poking about up here,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Remains of some old stone buildings are showing through where the fire has caused most damage to the ground cover.’

‘Really?’

Cooper took a few steps up the slope to see more closely. Bare peat was visible in many places, and he could just see a line of muddy masonry protruding from the eroded surface. From this angle, it did look like the remains of a wall, or the foundations of a vanished structure.

‘How old?’ he asked.

‘No idea, Sergeant. But I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of people wanting to come out here and tell us. It could just be some old shepherd’s hut. On the other hand …’

‘Yes, it could be anything. There’s supposed to be an abandoned medieval village around here somewhere. There are always Roman sites turning up. We’re only a stone’s throw from Batham Gate, the old Roman road. There could have been a small fort here, for all we know. It’s an ideal position. Look at the vantage point they would have had.’

The fireman shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. I just hope we don’t start getting the blame for any damage that’s been done to it.’

Cooper knew that Oxlow Moor had a lot of history. Some of it, though, was more recent, and less harmless than a few passing Roman legionaries.

He turned and looked across the moor. The Light House wasn’t visible from here, because of the shape of the land. It must be over a mile away from his position.

‘I passed the old pub on the way here,’ he said. ‘There was a report of a break-in.’

‘That’s right. We used the place as a rendezvous point earlier, but the fires have been moving this way pretty
fast, as you can see. The prevailing wind is moving to the east.’

There was no mistaking the path of the fire. A huge tract of charred heather and bracken had been left in its wake as the flames advanced across a wide front. It looked as though an invading army had passed through, leaving nothing but scorched earth behind them.

‘Well I can check the pub on my way back,’ said Cooper. ‘I pass fairly close to it.’

There was a disturbance among the firefighters and rangers further up the hill. Someone called down and waved a hand in an urgent gesture.

‘What’s going on now?’ asked Cooper.

‘Oh Lord. It looks like they’ve found something else.’

‘More archaeological remains?’

‘Chief,’ shouted one of the firemen, ‘you might want to take a look at this.’

Out of curiosity, Cooper followed the watch manager up the hill through the remains of the burnt heather to where the firefighters had gathered. And within minutes he’d forgotten all about the break-in at the Light House.

A couple of hours later, the scene of the find on Oxlow Moor had been taped off, but only by driving plastic stakes into the burned peat around it. The taping seemed a bit unnecessary in view of the nature of the surroundings, but at least procedure was being followed. E Division’s crime-scene manager Wayne Abbott was present, which indicated the seriousness with which someone had responded to the finds. Cooper had been joined by Carol Villiers, dispatched from West Street on his call.

‘What have we got, then?’ he asked.

Abbott had been crouching in his white scene suit, but
stood up and greeted Cooper. The knees of the paper suit were stained with brown from the churned-up peat.

‘The main item is a small rucksack,’ he said. ‘Nylon manufacture mostly, so it’s survived being buried. I couldn’t say how long it’s been here, but a few years certainly.’

‘You’re saying “buried”. It wasn’t just dropped and lost?’

‘No way. It was dug into the peat and covered over. It was only a few inches down, but a layer of peat and then the heather or whatever growing on top of it would have concealed it pretty well. In fact, by the shape of it and the position it was lying in, I’d say it had been deliberately flattened, possibly by somebody jumping up and down on it.’

‘They were hoping it wouldn’t be found, then?’

‘Not for a long while. In fact they might have been hoping it would rot down eventually, but, like I say, it’s nylon.’

‘Non-biodegradable.’

‘Yes.’ Abbott lifted off a fragment of charred bracken that had fallen into the hole. ‘If we’re really lucky, we might get a partial footwear impression,’ he said. ‘That looks like a boot print to me, near the shoulder strap there. Out here, the soles of anyone’s boots would be covered in muddy peat, just like ours. You couldn’t stamp on a clean surface like this without leaving a mark.’