The Devil's Edge (26 page)

‘And I suppose he’s out of your way when he’s in there,’ said Cooper.

She smiled. ‘Yes, that’s true. I can’t deny it’s a relief sometimes. We’ve been married quite a long time.’

‘But you don’t have any contact with him when he goes out to the shed,’ said Villiers. ‘You can’t see him from the house, can you?’

‘No. In fact often I don’t really know where he is. I just like to think he’s in his shed.’

Cooper looked at the padlock holding the hasp. ‘Do you know where the key is, at least?’

‘No.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘Are you sure?’

She sagged a little, unable to withstand even the slightest pressure.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s a spare. Barry doesn’t even know it exists.’

When she had fetched the key and the padlock was opened, Cooper stepped into the shed, hesitating as his eyes met the darkness inside.

‘There’s a light switch to your left,’ said Mrs Gamble.

‘Thank you.’

‘So this is his den, is it?’ asked Villiers.

‘I suppose you might call it that.’

On the shelves of the back room were an incredible variety of items. Polished stones, fossils, lumps of weather-worn wood, cones, feathers. And sitting in pride of place, like an evil presence, was a sheep skull. Its bones were bleached white, its jaws and grinning teeth still intact.

Cooper had seen many skulls from dead sheep. They lay around the fields, were often left perched on walls or gate posts. Sheep were suicidal creatures, after all. They died in the most unlikely of places. But their teeth tended to fall out, their jaws became dislocated, they crumbled in time. They were rarely as intact as this one.

‘What is all this stuff?’

‘His collection.’

‘A collection of what? This is just junk.’

‘Souvenirs. Mementos. Little things he’s picked up on his travels.’

‘His travels?’

‘His walks, I mean. Around Riddings, mostly. He calls them his patrols. I know some people think Barry is a bit odd. But it keeps him out of mischief.’

‘Oh, does it?’

One other item caught Cooper’s attention. It was a rough pentagram shaped out of twigs. He’d seen this sort of thing left at stone circles, like the one on Stoke Flat. There were often other tributes left, too – flowers, candles, a few old coins. Of course, it was a hangover from a more superstitious era, but it suited the atmosphere of the place. When travellers crossed these moors before the erection of guide stoops, they were living in a different age – a time of darkness and fear, a world of witches and gargoyles. Any token or charm that might help was worth trying.

Speaking of gargoyles … He turned back to the doorway.

‘Mrs Gamble, where
is
your husband?’

‘Do you think she knows more than she’s telling?’ asked Villiers, as they drove away from Chapel Close.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Cooper. ‘But so does everyone else around here. That’s always the way of it. No one wants to tell you more than is absolutely necessary.’

‘I suppose it’s human nature. If someone wants to tell you everything, you can bet there’s something wrong with them.’

‘That’s right. The nutter who sits down next to you in the pub. He’s the only person who ever wants to tell you everything about himself.’

They found Barry Gamble right where his wife had suggested. He was taking photographs of the edge from a children’s play area behind the village. To Cooper’s eye, it seemed that he was trying to get just the right juxtaposition of sheer rock face in the background with an empty swing in the foreground. He couldn’t quite think what that was supposed to symbolise.

‘Oh, what now?’ said Gamble when he saw them.

‘Mr Gamble, we had the traces on your clothes analysed, you know.’

‘Well, I supposed that was what you must be doing. I didn’t think you just wanted to try them on for size.’

‘It’s obvious from those traces that you must have been on every property in this part of Riddings. Without the permission or knowledge of the owners, I would imagine.’

‘No one sees me.’

‘Do you really think so? Even after Thursday night, when you were seen by those kids hanging around their party at The Cottage?’

Gamble shuffled in embarrassment. ‘Yes, well that was unfortunate. But usually …’

‘Unfortunate? You could get yourself into a lot of trouble.’

‘Think about your wife,’ added Villiers. ‘What did she have to say to you after Thursday night?’

‘She told me I was too old for this nonsense.
This nonsense
. I ask you. Besides, I’m not the one showing my age. I said,
Take a look in the mirror, Monica. That’s no spring chicken you see
.’

Villiers looked up from her notes. ‘And how did she take that comment?’

Gamble grimaced. ‘Oh, she didn’t take it well. She didn’t take any of it very well at all.’

‘I think you must be very familiar with all the lanes and tracks in this area,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, I am. I can’t deny that.’

‘Even some that no one else is aware of?’

Gamble fidgeted with his hat, worrying at the beads around the brim. Cooper felt an urge to grab it off his head and hurl it across the garden. But that would be silly and childish, not the actions of a responsible police officer. He might get someone else to do it instead.

‘There are a couple of old trackways that have been there for hundreds of years,’ said Gamble. ‘Worn away and sunk into the ground. None of these people round here either know or care about them.’

‘I might want you to show them to me some time soon,’ said Cooper.

‘I can do that. I suppose you’ll be around.’

‘You can bet on that.’

‘So, what do you know of any feuds or disputes between residents in Riddings?’ asked Villiers cheerfully.

Gamble’s eyes gleamed. ‘Oh, well. How long have you got?’

He began to reel off details. Gamble might seem a bit vague about some things, but his brain was like a well-organised filing cabinet when it came to the activities of his neighbours. He knew all about the court case between Nowak and the Barrons, about the confrontation between William Chadwick and Jake Barron over the dog, and about Richard Nowak’s complaints against Mrs Slattery. He had observed every last second of the argument between Nowak and Alan Slattery at the show on Saturday.

Unfortunately, his litany ran out before he’d told Cooper anything he didn’t already know.

When he’d finished, Gamble smiled at them with satisfaction.

‘I’m glad to help,’ he said.

‘What about the Hollands?’ asked Cooper.

He shrugged. ‘They keep themselves to themselves, pretty much.’

‘You missed out on Thursday night, then,’ said Villiers.

‘What?’

‘When the Hollands had an intruder at Fourways.’

‘You know where I was that night.’

‘Yes, we do.’

Cooper studied him thoughtfully, reflecting that if it hadn’t been for the teenagers and their pursuit of him on Thursday, Gamble might actually have been on hand to witness the incident at Fourways. It certainly wasn’t like him to have missed something. What a pity he hadn’t been there to tell the story.

‘And Mr Edson?’

Gamble sniffed, and tugged at the brim of his hat.

‘Him? No chance. Can’t get near the bugger.’

‘So that’s it,’ said Cooper when they left Gamble to his own devices and the attentions of his wife.

‘Not quite,’ said Villiers. ‘There’s your message.’

‘What?’

‘
Sheffeild Rode
. And the surveyor’s mark. You had an idea that you’d seen it somewhere.’

‘Of course.’

Cooper looked up at the Devils’ Edge, shading his eyes against the brightness of the sky. Had he just seen something drop over the edge? He couldn’t be sure what it was. A climber? A bird? He had no idea.

He scanned the face of the rock, trying to pick out a movement. But there was nothing. Whatever he’d seen was gone now, either vanished into a crack in the stone or lying motionless and too well camouflaged.

With a shrug, he went back to the car. The Devil’s Edge was full of illusions. He mustn’t let his imagination lead him astray. There was far too much tendency for that to happen already.

‘You’ve got your boots, then?’ said Villiers.

‘Always.’

Her phone buzzed. ‘Hold on a second.’

Cooper watched her face closely as she took the call, seeing her expression change. The animation faded, and was replaced by concern and despondency.

‘It’s Gavin. There’s been a call from the hospital,’ she said.

‘The hospital? That means bad news,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes.’

He closed his eyes in pain, as all the emotions of the past twenty-four hours rushed back into his mind. The man who’d been shot by Matt last night must have died from his injuries. It was the worst possible news. It meant that Matt might face a charge of manslaughter, at the very least. Or the case could become a murder inquiry. It raised the stakes to a whole different level.

‘Yes, it’s Jake Barron,’ said Villiers. ‘They’ve turned his life-support machine off. He never regained consciousness.’

24

It was amazing how different the landscape on the edge was from the White Peak country below it. Down there were green fields carved by limestone walls, wooded valleys with clear streams, a distinct sense of a place formed by human activity. None of that was present on the moors. Almost all signs of human occupation had been wiped out. Big Moor had reverted to a wild place.

Cooper unfolded his Ordnance Survey map of the White Peak. Previous generations of inhabitants had certainly used their imaginations. All along these edges, rock formations had been given evocative names. Many of them spoke of the dark imaginings of people who had been obliged to find their way across these moors in fog and snow, and maybe at night too. A traveller crossing Big Moor on the way from Sheffield would have to identify a specific rock from a distance if he was going to navigate his way safely through the bogs. It would have been an essential skill for the preservation of life and limb, not to mention the ability to arrive at the right spot for a steep descent into the valley.

How would you pass on instructions for a crossing like that? Only by describing the shape of a rock in terms someone else would recognise. The Eagle Stone, the Toad’s Mouth, the Three Men. A traveller would have watched for the moment when a shape became recognisable, like a sailor scanning the coast for the glimpse of a lighthouse. He would be waiting for a giant black toad to open its mouth, for a monstrous bird to spread its wings on the horizon.

No wonder, in those superstitious times, that stories of monsters and demons had thrived. A packhorse lost in a bog could have been swallowed by a serpent. A man falling to his death from the edge would have been led astray from the path by an evil spirit. It wasn’t so difficult to believe when you could see those monstrous shapes in the desolate landscape. Things that were moving, changing. Practically breathing.

‘There are still traces of the old packhorse routes somewhere on these moors,’ said Cooper. ‘Tracks and hollow ways. It’s funny to think how localised people were back in those days. They knew nothing about the geography of neighbouring valleys. And that was because of the moorlands that separated them. They were pretty inhospitable places.’

‘I know villages around here where you’re still considered a foreigner if you’re from the next valley,’ said Villiers.

Cooper smiled. ‘A foreigner? Practically an alien.’

He was tending to forget that Carol Villiers was local too. He’d become used to having to explain these things to outsiders who knew nothing about the area. But Carol understood.

‘All that travellers had to guide them at one time were the natural rock formations.’

‘The Salt Cellar. That was always my favourite.’

He nodded. ‘That’s further north, on Derwent Edge.’

It was true that some of the rocks on the eastern edges had less sinister, more domestic names. The Wheel Stones, the Cakes of Bread, the Salt Cellar. A few of the meanings were too far lost in time to be explained. Take the Glory Stones, or the Reform Stone. What glory did they refer to? What long-forgotten reforms? You could write a book about these stones, and unravel an entire layer of Derbyshire history just from their names. For all he knew, someone might have written that book already.

In the Middle Ages, the only exceptions a traveller might stumble over were the crosses set up by monastic landowners. These weren’t just an aid to travel; they marked the boundaries of property and reminded everyone of the power of the Catholic Church. Monasteries had felt it important to mark out their territory, even out here on the moors. An ancient cross base and the stump of a shaft were all that remained of the Lady Cross on Big Moor.

But guide stoops had been erected following the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War, to help all the extra trade generated by an improving economy. Derbyshire was slow to follow orders from central government – which was pretty much in character, he supposed. And in the end its guide stoops had been erected in a hurry, early in the eighteenth century.

Cooper knew he’d seen some of these stoops. He’d passed them when he was out walking, had stopped to look at them out of curiosity, and had their history explained to him. They were inscribed with the names of the nearest market towns in each direction, to help guide those travellers venturing into the wilds of Derbyshire.

He looked at the symbol on the message again, and the scrawled inscription,
Sheffeild Rode
. A guide stoop, then. But which one?

The path from the car park above Riddings passed the first guide stoop within a few yards. It was positioned just above the road, over the first stile – a tall, rectangular block of stone, well embedded in the ground. Carved from the local gritstone, it stood about five and a half feet high, and was a foot wide on each of its four faces.

‘This is a guide stoop?’ said Villiers, running her hand over the rough surface.

‘One of them.’

This stone was in too exposed a location, though, and had suffered badly from the weather over the last three hundred years. There must have been lettering cut into each of the faces, but the stone surfaces were totally eroded and the inscriptions illegible. All Cooper could make out was a ‘V’ sign on one face.

He pointed at the OS map.

‘We need to follow this track to the next one,’ he said.

Sheep sheltered under a hawthorn tree, the ground beneath it worn bare by their hooves. In places, the bracken came up to Cooper’s shoulders. But the masses of heather were coming into flower, turning the more distant hills into a purple haze.

They crossed a muddy stream on a bridge made of planks covered in wire mesh. A steep climb past the old walled enclosures brought them to a modern signpost at the top, pointing the way to White Edge and Birchen Edge.

Looking back, Cooper could see thirty or forty beehives sheltered in the lee of a wall in one of the enclosures. When he stood still, he became aware of the buzzing all around him. Thousands of honey bees were humming through the heather.

In the middle of the moor, there were no extraneous sounds, only the closest thing you could ever get to silence. The stillness made him more aware of the life stirring under his feet as he walked. Birds and rabbits scuttled away from his approach. The sweet scent of the heather blossom rose into the air with every step.

There were many boggart holes in the bare earth. Some of them looked deep, dug by animals into the shallow peat. Reddish-brown soil had been kicked out of the larger holes. You could put your arm right down into them, if you weren’t too worried about what you might touch. This was adder country, after all.

‘This place is full of legends, you know,’ he said.

‘Nice things, legends. I like ’em.’

‘You know about hobs, Carol?’

‘I know you have to show them respect, or they cause mischief in the house.’

‘You got that from your grandmother?’

‘Of course.’

Not too long ago, a bowl of cream would have been left on many Derbyshire hearths to ensure that the hobs did good for the household. Of course, many people believed that a hob’s real home was out here, in the wild landscape. There was a Hob Hurst’s House in Deep Dale, and another on Beeley Moor, just to the south of here.

Over there was an area called Leash Fen, said to have been a community the size of a small market town. There was nothing to be seen now. According to the stories, the town had sunk into the bog, and vanished without a trace. It sounded unlikely, until you went up there. In the winter, with your feet sinking deep into the ground, your trousers wet up to the knee, it was possible to imagine the fate of Leash Fen. If you had the imagination, you could even picture the ruins of the stone houses lying mouldering under the ground as the bog deepened over the centuries. In fact, there were probably other things under there too. Animals that had strayed off the track, a crashed Second World War German bomber, and maybe the odd hiker who had never returned home. Cooper wondered if global warming would dry out the bog one day, revealing all the buried secrets of Leash Fen.

They walked across the moor, following a faint track through the heather, until they came to another guide stoop. This one was smaller, less than three feet tall, possibly only the top half of a broken stone.

Cooper recalled that there was supposed to be one that had been damaged by gunfire when the military were training on the moor during the war. He felt that was further on, though – in Deadshaw Sick, near Barbrook Reservoir. This one had just fallen or been broken accidentally. It was probably a common fate for moorland stones. Yet the inscriptions were clear on each face.
Chasterfield Road, Hoope Road, Dronfeld Road
. The way the names of the towns were spelled must have reflected the accent of the stonemason, he supposed. None of the men who chiselled the letters on these guide stoops in the eighteenth century would have been entirely literate. Yet each of them had their own ideas about spelling. This one knew how to spell ‘road’, at least.

‘Not this one,’ he said.

‘How many more are there?’ asked Villiers.

‘I’m not sure. A lot of them will have disappeared over the decades. But at one time they would have been all over these moors. They were the only means the packhorse men had of navigating their way across, especially when there was snow on the ground to cover the trails.’

Cooper imagined the immense task it must have been to get these guide stoops into position. A full-sized stone had to weigh around four hundred kilos. Once they had been shaped and inscribed by the stonemason, they had to be transported from the mason’s yard, brought as far as possible by horse and cart, then probably dragged by wooden sledge and manpower to their final position.

‘In that case, we could spend all day out here.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.

He turned his body through three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to orientate himself. He could picture the old packhorse men doing this, too, taking their position from the sun or stars, or from a distant landmark.

Over that way, if you took a route directly across the moor, you would enter South Yorkshire and emerge in woods near the hamlet of Unthank. But in the other direction, you were in Derbyshire, the Derwent Valley – in the villages below the edges.

‘This way,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be too far.’

After five more minutes of walking, Villiers stopped and pointed across the moor.

‘Is that one over there?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

They could soon see a full-sized stone, standing straight and upright. For Cooper, it was as welcome a sight as it might have been for many weary travellers crossing this moor. When they reached it, Villiers rubbed a patch of lichen off the inscription.

‘It’s a bit eroded, but …’

‘What does it say?’

‘
Sheffeild Rode
. This is it, Ben.’

She looked flushed and excited, like a child who’d just won a treasure hunt, or discovered a hidden Easter egg.

They walked round it, exploring the wonderful tactile surface of the rough gritstone, tracing the letters on each of the four faces.
Bakwell Rode, Tidswall Rode, Hatharsich Rode
. And most carefully of all, they studied the symbol chiselled into the stone below
Sheffeild
. The horizontal line and arrow. The surveyor’s benchmark. The mason’s spelling had been eccentric, but the ‘Rode’ was consistent. And the inscription on that face was exactly as it had been reproduced on the message sent to the
Eden Valley Times
.

‘Brilliant,’ said Villiers. ‘I’m so glad we found it.’

But Cooper was shaking his head.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s the wrong way round,’ he said.

‘What?’

Cooper had orientated himself at the last stone, and had retained his sense of direction as he covered the last few hundreds yards across the moor. He knew which way was which.

‘The route to Sheffield would be that way, to the east,’ he said. ‘This guide stoop needs turning ninety degrees to be pointing in the right direction. I suppose it must have fallen over and been replaced at some time. And whoever repositioned it didn’t worry too much about getting the direction right.’

‘Well, they don’t exactly serve a useful purpose any more, do they? I mean, nobody is likely to follow their directions.’

‘No, they’re just history, I suppose,’ said Cooper. ‘Another part of our useless heritage.’

Villiers ran a hand over the eroded stone. ‘So the Sheffield road …?’

‘Isn’t the Sheffield road at all. The hand is pointing south instead.’ Cooper turned round to face the other way. ‘It points downhill, look. Directly towards Riddings.’

He gazed down the slope. Nothing looked quite so dead as dead heather. Though it was probably only last year’s growth, the stems of the dead plants already looked fossilised, dry and skeletal, their brittle stems crumbling under his boots. They were petrified, as if they were already on their way to becoming the next layer of peat.

‘And I think that could be the packhorse way,’ he said.

From the guide stoop, there was a clear route winding its way down the hillside. Overgrown with bracken and reeds, it looked hardly more than a rabbit track. But for the route to have remained distinct even during the summer, there must at least be well-compacted earth, or more likely stone slabs laid on the ground to make it passable in wet weather. Otherwise the undergrowth would have covered it completely in time.

With his back to the guide stoop, Cooper let his eye follow the line of the track downhill. It curved between the scattered rocks, taking a circuitous route that avoided the steepest parts of the slope.

‘Is that what you’d call a road?’ said Villiers, when he pointed it out.

‘Some people would. If they used tracks and old pathways to get around this area. That looks almost like a three-lane highway.’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose we should follow it, then?’

Towards the end of the track, just before they reached the outskirts of the village, they stumbled across an area enclosed by half-tumbled stone walls and fractured lengths of barbed-wire fencing.