The Dead Place (29 page)

They were both silent for a moment.

'I don't know,' said Cooper.

But Fry finished reciting the message to the end, as if it was programmed into her memory.

'"It's perfectly simple. All you have to4o is find the dead place."'

'I still don't know, Diane.'

'All right. Then we have to follow the signs at "the gibbet and the rock". Let me make a few phone calls, and we'll go.'

'Are you sure of this? There could be other interpretations.'

Fry glanced at him as she picked up the phone. 'Yes, I'm sure. I'm starting to get inside his head here, Ben. Isn't that what you said we should be able to do? Well, I'm doing it.'

'The DI said no more chasing around the countryside '

But she was already speaking to someone on the phone. Cooper looked at the urn on his desk and the missing persons files. Oh, well. For once, he couldn't be accused of going off and doing his own thing. It was Fry's decision.

And she might be right. He hadn't learned the messages by heart the way she had, but Cooper could recall the one line Fry had missed quoting from the second call. You can see it for yourself. You can witness the last moments. They might not have a lot of time to waste.

Half an hour later, Cooper found himself driving back towards Wardlow. It was Matt who'd reminded him that the road

241 between Wardlow and Monsal Head had a local name Scratter. 'Scrat' was a dialect word for scratching or clawing, and horses had to 'scrat' up the hill. But some said the name came from skratti, the Scandinavian word for a demon. The Devil himself was called Old Scratch in local folk stories.

The Vikings had left quite a legacy in these parts. Derbyshire had once belonged to Denmark, with an invading army stationed in the next county, in the caves under Nottingham Castle. Those Vikings had been superstitious folk, and had peopled the landscape with demons and monsters, entire swarms of them lurking in every dark place and at every unfamiliar spot on the map.

Over the centuries, their descendants had been reluctant to give up the most sinister stories, even in the face of all that new-fangled religion and rationality. Some of those legends had taken such a powerful grip on the hills and shadowed valleys that they would never be dislodged. Demons hid in the very place names.

'Ben, this Professor Robertson,' said Fry as they drove through Wardlow. 'He's definitely weird, isn't he?'

'He's all right. He's just a bit. . .' Cooper hesitated, struggling for the right word. 'Well, perhaps a bit obsessive. Look, he has this specialized interest, a subject he thinks he's the world greatest expert on. He loves showing off his knowledge. That makes him appear rather . . .'

'Weird?'

'Just because he's slightly eccentric and obsessed with the rituals of death doesn't mean he goes home every night and acts out necrophiliac fantasies on the bodies of his victims.'

'Has he talked to you about necrophilia?'

'No.' 'So that one came from your own imagination, did it?'

Cooper sighed. 'You've obviously made your mind up about Freddy Robertson on no evidence. Is this some kind of intuition, Diane?'

242 'Intuition, bollocks. This is experience. I've met enough weirdos to know one when I see one.'

'Fair enough.'

'So is the professor married?'

'I don't know. He's never mentioned a Mrs Robertson.'

'Can you find out?'

'I suppose so.'

Cooper's assumption had been that Robertson was a bachelor, or divorced. Men with obsessions were difficult to live with. But you could never be sure - it was remarkable the compromises people could come to in their relationships.

'Oh, I forgot to tell you,' said Cooper. 'I had a really bad time at Mrs Gill's. All the family were there, getting ready for the funeral this afternoon. Audrey Steele's second funeral, that is. They interrogated me about how we were doing with the enquiry.'

'What did you tell them?'

'There wasn't much I could tell them. They weren't very happy with that. I was glad to get away before they formed a lynch mob.'

'These jobs have to be done.'

The outcrop called Peter's Stone or Gibbet Rock stood towards the north end of the Cressbrook Dale nature reserve, an area of limestone grassland, with ash woodlands further down the dale. There was a path along the stream into the dale, reached through a tiny, spring-loaded gate and a gap in the stone wall that was just wide enough for a slim person not wearing too many clothes. Cooper thought he would probably manage to squeeze through, as long as he was trying it before lunch and not after.

'There must be another way,' said Fry, looking at the fields full of sheep. In the bottom of the dale, the rushing stream looked impossible to cross.

'Yes, I think there is.'

Right at the junction of the Wardlow road, they found a

243 gateway in a farmyard, just wide enough for Cooper's Toyota to scrape through, past a mildewed hawthorn tree. The gate was secured only by a length of orange baler twine looped over the stone gate post. The four-wheel drive managed fine on the track until they came to a point where the swollen stream had breached the field wall and swamped the ground on the other side. Cooper stopped and looked up at Peter's Stone, still two hundred yards away.

'We're going to have to walk, I'm afraid.'

Fry opened the passenger door and looked down at the water lapping gently against the wheels. 'I'm not getting out on this side.'

'It's deep, but clean.'

'I'm not getting out.'

'I can lend you some wellies,' said Cooper. 'They're in the boot.'

'OK.'

The path had been liberally sprinkled with droppings by the sheep that watched them pass, their eyes unblinking, their jaws moving rhythmically. The ewes had recently been shorn, and the red splotches of their owner's mark showed clearly on their sides. Some still had lambs with them, a few months old now, but not yet ear-tagged.

'Make sure you stay on the path, Diane,' Cooper called as Fry began to lag behind.

'Why, are the sheep dangerous?'

'No, the ground is.'

Cooper smiled to himself as he climbed another stile. Fry had at least remembered him telling her how dangerous cows could be when they had calves with them. But sheep were different.

'The signs are warning about dangerous mineshafts. There must have been lead mining around here. The shafts get covered over, and sometimes you don't see one until you're right on top of it.'

244 Cooper realized he was talking to himself. He turned to see Fry still near the last stile, with an expression of disgust on her face.

'What's the matter?'

She was looking at her hand in horror, as if it had turned into an alien object on the end of her arm. She bent over and began to wipe it vigorously on a patch of damp grass.

'Oh, God, it's sheep shit,' she said. 'There's sheep shit on the top of this wall, and I put my hand right in it.'

'Sheep? Are you sure it isn't bird shit?' said Cooper.

'I don't care what kind of shit it is. It's on my hand.'

Cooper waited for her, wondering whether he ought to offer her a clean handkerchief or something, like a gentleman in a Jane Austen novel. But he didn't carry a handkerchief. He might have a few crumpled Kleenex tissues in his pocket. He started to look for one, but Fry had already found her own and was gingerly stepping over the stile, without using her hands.

'I was just saying . . .' he began.

'Stay on the path. I know.'

Cooper walked carefully through the grazing sheep and reclining cattle, not even looking at them as he passed. They glanced at him and went on cudding. But Fry shied away from the first ewe she came near, and the animal did the same, scrambling away and panicking its neighbours. The cattle slowly got up and moved away from her.

'Diane, stop bothering the animals,' said Cooper, turning to see what was going on.

'I'm not - they're bothering me.'

She turned at a rattle on the slope behind. An old ewe was peering over the ledge at her.

'See, that one threw a stone at me.'

Finally, they crossed a small ridge and found themselves at the foot of Peter's Stone - Gibbet Rock, as Tom Jarvis had called it. Cooper wondered if Anthony Lingard had been

245 gibbeted on top of the outcrop, or from the side of the rock itself. Or perhaps from the slope below it? There was nothing to indicate which.

On this side of the rock, there was a scree slope, an unstable mass of tiny, loose stones. Scree was notoriously difficult to climb, so a path had been worn towards the eastern side, where the gradient was steeper but more stable underfoot. Cooper looked up at the limestone outcrop. It was full of nooks and crevices.

They were breathing heavily by the time they had scrambled to the top of the outcrop. Cooper helped Fry up the last stretch, and stopped to get his breath back. From here, there was only one farmhouse visible on the skyline further down the dale. The opposite slope was formed of limestone terraces and more scree. Lumps of stone dislodged by the sheep lay around it like giant hailstones.

A few minutes later, Cooper lay half-hidden between two rocks, his head down in a deep crevice. He began to inch back towards the air, and when he emerged, he was clutching something in one hand.

'What have you got there?' asked Fry.

Cooper was panting, and red in the face from the blood rushing to his head while he was upside down.

'Well, it looks like a Tupperware box,' he said. 'It was tucked away out of sight in this fissure. And there's something inside it, see '

'Let's have a look.'

The box was about nine inches long, with a tight yellow lid. It wasn't actually Tupperware but something similar, made of tough translucent plastic. It had two handles that hinged on to the lid and held it in place, making the box pretty much airtight and waterproof. It had been hidden deep in the crevice, and concealed from casual view by a lump of limestone. Fry brushed off some dirt and eased open the lid.

'Lord, what's all that junk?' she said.

246 Cooper leaned over her shoulder. Among a lot of other stuff in the box, he glimpsed a small toy dog, an England badge, a set of coloured crayons and a pair of sunglasses. There was even a Matchbox Land Rover Freelander that he would have loved as a child.

'I can see a notebook, too,' he said, reaching to lift the crayons out of the way.

Fry held up a hand. 'Get it back to the office and let scenes of crime go through everything. If he's left us a clue here, we don't want to miss it.'

'We've got an appointment,' Cooper reminded her.

'Yes, I know.'

Fry looked at her hand and sniffed her fingers, checking for traces of sheep droppings.

'Don't worry,' said Cooper. 'The dress code is casual. The Duke and Duchess won't be at home.'

He took a last glance at the plastic box before they piled all the stuff back in. There were stickers and pens in a plastic Waitrose bag, a pencil sharpener, dart flights, sweets, and cloth badges advertising something called Les Randonneurs Mondiaux. A label inside the Waitrose bag said: Congratulations! You've found it!

247 21

The White Peak could boast very few celebrities, apart from some ageing pop stars and TV personalities. If Cooper racked his brains, he could only recall the singer Long John Baldry, who'd been born in Bakewell, Buxton's Tim Brooke-Taylor of The Goodies and DJ Dave Lee Travis. Great writers had passed through the area and moved on. Charlotte Bronte had created Jane Eyre while staying with a friend in Hathersage; Jane Austen had written part of Pride and Prejudice at a Bakewell hotel; and D.H. Lawrence had found his real-life inspiration for Mellors the gamekeeper living on the Via Gellia, near Matlock. So even literary links tended to be a bit tenuous.

As a result of the celebrity shortage, local people had to make do with the aristocracy. The dukes of Devonshire and Rutland had once owned the whole of this area between them, and large chunks of it still bore their names. The Devonshires' home at Chatsworth House was a major tourist attraction, more spectacular and more opulent than Buckingham Palace, and containing a substantial share of the nation's art treasures. Or so it had seemed to Cooper when he'd toured the house as a child.

Alder Hall had been one of the Devonshires' smaller properties, so insignificant that an early duke had presented the

248 estate as a gift to a less affluent cousin. The present hall had only fifteen bedrooms and two hundred acres of private grounds, so it would hardly have been missed.

The walls around the estate were high and festooned with ivy. Here and there, water gushed into stone troughs from drainage holes designed to relieve the pressure that built up behind the walls after heavy rain. The main gates were open when they arrived, so presumably the agent had got there before them. Cooper turned into the gateway and rolled the car slowly on to the gravel drive.

Well, there had probably been gravel here at some time. Now, it was hidden by the grass and weeds that had encroached from the shrubbery on either side. If the hall ever did get new owners, it would take quite a few doses of weedkiller to get this lot under control. Cooper could hear the stems of the couch grass scraping against the underside of the Toyota as he inched his way towards the first bend in the drive. He didn't know how far the hall was from the road, but he expected a good view of it at some point. What he got instead was the sight of a figure standing in the middle of the driveway, waving madly.

'What the heck is he doing?'

'I don't know. Is that the agent?' said Fry.

'I presume so. It looks as though he's trying to tell us something.' The man was signalling as if he wanted Cooper to go to the left. There was nowhere to turn off the drive, except into the bushes, so he skirted as close as he could to the edge.

'Maybe there's a pothole or something. I can't see for this long grass.'

But it wasn't a pothole. As they drew closer to the gesticulating figure, Cooper could see the decomposing body of a sheep lying on the driveway, its clean-pecked ribcage showing clearly through ragged tufts of wool.