The Devil's Edge (13 page)

Cooper watched the trajectory of the hang-glider as it swooped over the valley and passed in front of the edge. Totally impractical as a means of transport. Still, you would get a really good view of what lay below, even better than from an outcrop on the edge. You would be able to look directly down on the climbers who were still clinging precariously to the rock faces as the afternoon drew to a close.

He looked back at the climbers again. Watching them inching their way up the rock one hold at a time, he felt like slapping himself on the forehead. He’d been a complete idiot. But at least he knew now where those white handprints had come from.

Remnants of quarrying activity were scattered all over this area. Half-formed millstones lay below Riddings Edge, some of them covered in lichen as if slowly being reabsorbed into the landscape. Quarrymen had come to the eastern edges looking for the coarse sedimentary rock known as gritstone.

Now, for climbers, gritstone possessed friction properties that compensated for a lack of holds on the sheer faces. It was best climbed in the autumn or spring, when the sun was out, the midges were on holiday, and the moisture had seeped off the rock. Like at Stanage Edge, on a fine weekend there were cars parked along the side of every road, and so many people climbing that the only sound was the cacophony of karabiners.

Cooper had no trouble finding what he needed. Near the car park at the top of The Hill, a foam crash pad had been left at the foot of a boulder – the sort of thing a climber placed on the ground in case of a fall, to reduce the risk of serious injury. A man was standing at the foot of the rock face coiling a length of rope, and Cooper interrupted him to ask him about the equipment that was used on the edges.

‘We’re trads,’ said the climber. ‘Traditional rock climbers. We don’t use bolts on gritstone. We respect the rock.’

He was wearing a helmet and rock boots, and was hung about with a full rack of gear – rope, harness, karabiners, belay devices, wires, hexes, cams. And there on his harness was the item Cooper was most interested in – a chalk bag.

‘Our aim is to leave the rock as we found it. There’s been a spate of chipping on these faces recently – where people create a hold artificially, you know? When we see that, we report it to the Access and Conservation Team at the British Mountaineering Council. It has no place on gritstone.’

‘But what about the white handprints?’ asked Cooper, looking up at the rock. ‘They’re all over the place.’

‘Yes, it is rather a lasting visual sign. But we only use what we need, and we clean up any spillage.’

And they were certainly visible from here. White marks showed up in every spot where a climber had sought a hold. Some of the chalk had faded as it weathered; some marks were still clear and fresh.

‘The chalk is used on the hands to combat sweat and improve grip, right?’

‘That’s it. Some of these faces barely have even crimps, small fingerholds. If your hands are sweating …’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘It helps if you happen to do a highball off the face.’

‘A what?’

‘A highball. A fall.’

Cooper looked at the sheer face of the edge.

‘If you were far enough up the face when you did a highball, you’d be killed.’

‘Oh no,’ said the climber. ‘We call that a deathball.’

Above them, a climber was reaching the end of a traverse and completing the mantelshelf – the final move of the route, where he had to press down with his hands until his arms were straight and get his legs up behind him to place a foot on the shelf. It looked difficult to do if you were tired after a climb.

‘These climbing routes,’ said Cooper. ‘They have names, don’t they?’

‘Yes. This one here is Hell’s Reach. My favourite is Torment. That’s a real challenge. Torment is an E1, at least.’

‘E1?’

‘Most routes are graded from Moderate to Extremely Severe. E1 is at the Extremely Severe end. It has an overhang – one up from sheer on the steepness scale.’

‘Sounds dangerous to me,’ said Villiers.

‘We had a guy who nearly died in a highball on this face,’ said the climber. ‘Well, he would have died, if he hadn’t got medical attention fast. That was thanks to the mountain rescue team.’

Cooper looked at Villiers. Neither of them bothered to remark how surprising it was that there weren’t more deaths in Hell’s Reach.

They drove back towards Edendale. For Cooper, it was a constant pleasure to escape into these hills, where the changing moods of the scenery never failed to fascinate him. Edendale sat right at a point where the areas known as the Dark Peak and the White Peak met.

The White Peak, to the south, was a human landscape of limestone farmland, dotted with wooded valleys and dry-stone walls, settled and shaped by people, and still a place where thousands of years of history might be expected to come to the surface. The bleak, empty moors of the Dark Peak to the north looked remote and forbidding, an uncompromising landscape that was anything but human. The bare, twisted faces of hardened gritstone appeared to absorb the sun instead of reflecting it as the limestone did. They seemed to stand aloof and brooding, untouched by humanity.

At the top of a hill just outside Edendale stood a pub called the Light House, with stunning views across both limestone and millstone grit. Rumour had it that the Light House, like so many rural pubs, was struggling financially. Village after village was losing its centre of community life. Cooper expected to drive past the Light House one day and find it permanently closed and boarded up, a depressing backdrop to the view.

He looked at his watch as they began the descent into the town.

‘I have to go back to the office for a while,’ he said. ‘But your shift is over, Carol. No overtime.’

‘All right.’

‘I’ll meet you later, then.’

‘What?’

‘You wanted to see the edge, didn’t you? The evening is a good time.’

‘You’re sure it’s okay?’

‘Yes. Trust me, a breath of fresh air is just what I need right now.’

At West Street, Cooper headed to the DI’s office to report, conscious that he hadn’t been keeping in touch as he ought to have done. But Hitchens was just about to go into a meeting with Superintendent Branagh, and hardly seemed to listen.

‘Yes. Great, Ben. Get your team to write everything up and feed it into HOLMES, won’t you?’

‘Of course, sir. Are we making any progress?’

‘We think we’ve got some promising leads from the forensic sweep. Right now, we’re setting up a joint operation with South Yorkshire. Hoping for some arrests. Taking the Savages off the streets. The super has the headlines written already.’

‘Really? Can I—’

‘Later, Ben. Keep up the good work.’

Cooper nodded as he watched Hitchens disappear.

‘Okay, fine. So perhaps I’m wrong more often than I thought.’

12

It was one of those peculiar transitions that Cooper experienced from time to time in the Peak District. Within a few minutes, he’d passed from a secluded cluster of affluent twenty-first-century homes into an alien stone landscape. Pools of peat-stained water, traces of primitive habitation.

Often the shift could be quite sudden. In this case, it had been the point where he turned the corner of a rocky outcrop and found himself on the far side of the Devil’s Edge. The wind had dropped, the sound of traffic fell away, the last sign of human habitation disappeared. It all happened in a second, within a distance of two or three steps. But he’d been concentrating on keeping his footing on the smooth rock, and he hadn’t noticed the exact moment of change.

He turned to see if Villiers was still behind him. He felt as though he’d walked through an invisible doorway by accident. Maybe he’d never be able to find it again to return to the twenty-first century. Would that be such a bad thing?

From the edge, he found himself looking eastwards across an expanse of scrub on Stoke Flat towards Big Moor. Big Moor was a kind of no-man’s-land, a buffer zone wedged between the Peak District National Park and the city of Sheffield. Out here on the moors, you stumbled across mysterious locations every few hundred yards. Isolated guide posts pointed the way across empty moorland, patterns were burned into the heather like UFO landing strips, memorial cairns commemorated long-forgotten deaths. And there were so many of those dark, twisted outcrops of rock, sculpted by centuries of wind and rain into bizarre shapes. and marked on the map by sinister names.

For Cooper, this was a landscape infested with evil. Hobs and boggarts, and all kinds of monsters. Ahead of him, the ground was scattered with curious lumps and hollows that his grandmother would have said were hob holes. You wouldn’t go walking across this moor at night, for fear of what might climb out of those holes and grab at your ankles with sharp claws. Of course, they were rabbit burrows, most likely. Or the remains of ancient mine shafts. But they could break your ankle just the same in the dark. They were as lethal as a hob any day.

Villiers was close behind him, hardly even breathing heavily from the climb. But her face was glowing and her eyes were bright as she gazed over the valley, sharing his pleasure at the panoramic view.

‘This is terrific,’ she said. ‘You know, I was never based anywhere in the world that compared to the Peak District.’

‘I suppose this kind of country doesn’t lend itself to air strips.’

He’d never really been able to explain the appeal that a landscape like this had for him. In a way, he felt it must mirror some hidden landscape inside his head. Those stories from local history and folklore were permanently lodged in his subconscious, a legacy of tribal memory. But it was here, in the physical environment of the edges and moors, that they came to life and were acted out by ghostly figures. Their spirits were caught and preserved in the ancient stones and trackways, their names immortalised on the map, their shapes and faces still vividly re-created in the imagination.

People talked about the mists of the past, as if history was wrapped in a gentle haze of nostalgia. But when Cooper thought about some aspects of his ancestors’ lives, the images in his mind tended to be swallowed by an evil fog – a swirling miasma of fear and superstition, a bitter smog of poverty and suffering.

They walked part of the way along the summit track, stopping whenever a new view opened up of rocks and valley. Dusk was falling quickly, changing the light every few minutes as the sun played among low clouds on the western horizon.

Seen from the valley, these gritstone edges resembled the long, broken battlements of an old fortress. One of Cooper’s nieces, seeing the edges one day, had said they were like the ruins of Helm’s Deep after the siege of the orc army. But from up here, high on the moors, there were fantastic views over the rooftops of the Derwentside villages, right out across the Peak District, with the Kinder plateau and Bleaklow in the far distance.

Turning to the south, he glimpsed a magical vision – a vast mansion gleaming gold in the midst of a green landscape. Chatsworth, of course. The home of the Duke of Devonshire, a favourite destination for millions of tourists. Its gilded window frames made the whole house glow in the evening sun.

He knew that Chatsworth was literally packed to the rafters with priceless antiques. Old Masters and oriental porcelain had been collected by dukes over the centuries. Da Vincis and Rembrandts hung on its walls. Delft vases and Blue John bowls mingled with Roman statues and precious silver. But security on the estate was top notch. Most of the thefts they experienced at Chatsworth were the result of tourists taking plants from the gardens.

‘This track was a millstone road, made by seventeenth-century quarrymen,’ said Cooper. ‘Then it was owned by one of the dukes, and he set gamekeepers to guard it against pesky ramblers. Now the public has access. It must be one of the best stretches of scenery in the country.’

‘No argument there.’ Villiers took a deep breath. ‘No matter how often I came home on leave, I never really felt I was back properly.’

‘It gets in the blood, doesn’t it?’

‘Like a virus. But in a good way.’

From the edge, they could see the steep, wooded slopes below, with a dense covering of rotting silver birch. You could make your way down to the woods, but only if you had good stability and the right footwear.

Riddings Edge was also littered with prehistoric sites. Ancient settlements, burials, field systems. To the north, the Stoke Flat stone circle was only a few yards from the main path. And old maps showed a network of packhorse trails crossing the moors, from a time when they provided the only route from north Derbyshire to the towns and cities in the east. It must have been a wild and lonely place for packhorse men and traders to navigate across in safety.

Yet these moors were within such easy reach of Sheffield, Chesterfield, Derby and the M1 motorway that they were possibly the easiest wild place in Britain to access from a major city. There were good footpaths too, and parking close to the top so that people could enjoy the views without a long walk.

The moors had originally been shaped by farming, tree clearance and grouse shooting. There was the purple haze of heather, and the strange, cackling call of the red grouse. And maybe a fleeting glimpse of a common lizard basking on weather-worn rocks. Here and there, under a tree, Cooper saw little mounds writhing with brown ants. There were hairy wood ants, fearsome creatures that squirted formic acid at you if you came too close. The smell of vinegar was the warning sign. There were adders here too. The snakes hibernated for winter. But in May, as the weather warmed up, they came out on to the moor to sun themselves.

No adders or lizards were out at this time of day, not even a deer. Cooper saw only a Coke can lying in the bracken. An aluminium can outlived most people. If it wasn’t picked up, this one would still be lying here in sixty years’ time. Maybe seventy or eighty. It wouldn’t have rotted or decomposed. There was nothing biodegradable about it. By the end of the century, this can would still be weathering slowly, its bright red surface faded to a dirty brown that matched the dead bracken. Yet the entire population of Riddings would be dead and gone. The human body was different. In the High Peak mortuary, Zoe Barron’s body was doing more than just fading.

He jumped as a pheasant burst from under his feet in an explosion of noise and feathers. He had failed to see it, been completely unaware of its presence as it lay motionless in the heather.

On other moors, the shooting season had started on the Glorious Twelfth. But Big Moor was owned by the National Park authority and designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its rare plants and wildlife. Despite the ease of access, this moorland had been left pretty much undisturbed since prehistoric times.

‘You think a lot, don’t you?’ said Villiers. ‘You’d forgotten I was here for a while – I could tell by your face. I don’t remember that about you, Ben.’

‘Sorry,’ said Cooper.

But she was right. He’d started to feel so relaxed with her that he hadn’t felt it necessary to concentrate on acknowledging her presence, the way courtesy demanded you had to do with strangers.

‘How long is it, then?’ he said.

‘Since we saw each other?’ she guessed.

‘Yes, sorry. That’s what I mean.’

‘When I was home on leave once, visiting the old folks. Maybe five years.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be about that. So … five years ago. Does that mean you’ve not been given any leave in the last five years?’

‘Well, you know …’

‘You had more interesting things to do.’

‘We move on, don’t we?’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘Just not always in a good way, I suppose.’

‘No.’

‘So which was it for you?

He watched her eyes as she thought about the question, saw the doubt and pain pass across her face, the conflicting memories of love and grief written as clear as any words could express.

‘Both, perhaps,’ she said. ‘Is that possible?’

‘I don’t know.’

Villiers was silent for a moment, and Cooper thought he’d said the wrong thing, hurt her by poking into all those darkest corners of her life that she was trying so hard not to remember.

‘What about you, Ben?’ she said finally. ‘Moving on in a good way?’

Cooper hesitated. His first instinct was to tell her everything, to spill out all his feelings, explain exactly what he felt about his family, about his job, about Liz. Everything, for good or bad.

But then he looked at her again, noticing once more how changed she was. No, the time wasn’t right. Not quite yet. He needed to be sure that he still knew her as well as he’d always thought he did.

He pointed away from the edge towards the flats. Large expanses of these would be covered in bright red reeds in the autumn. The colour would merge with the purple of the flowering heather like a swathe of dramatic fabric. The furthest hills were already carpeted in heather. To stand on a rocky outcrop on the edge and look westwards was like gazing out over a red sea, crimson and magenta waves moving gently in the breeze like an ocean of blood.

‘Let’s walk that way for a while, across the moor towards White Edge. There’s a Neolithic settlement called Swine Sty. We should be able to reach that and get back again before the light goes.’

‘Okay. You’re the boss.’

‘Watch out for the hob holes,’ said Cooper.

Villiers laughed. ‘Hob? Are you kidding.’

‘You know about hobs?’

‘Yes, from my childhood fairy stories.’

The footpath towards White Edge crossed an area of grassland that gleamed gold even on a day of mist and rain. They headed towards a solitary tree standing in forlorn isolation on the moor.

‘I spend most of my time in this country, of course,’ said Villiers. ‘I served with an RAFP flight at a station in Cambridgeshire after I came back from Afghanistan. Mostly community policing, but you’d be surprised how much drug detection work we did, not to mention more recently breathalysing military personnel suspected of drink-driving.’

Cooper noted that her breathing was getting a bit ragged now. But the strenuous activity didn’t stop her talking. It was as if these wide-open spaces, the empty landscapes above the Devil’s Edge, had given her the freedom to express what she might not have said down in the valley, among strangers.

‘My last posting was with Number Five Squadron at RAF Waddington,’ she said. ‘In April last year, my unit was deployed to Santander after the Icelandic volcano closed air space. We were assisting stranded British troops from Afghanistan, and some UK civilians. They came back to the UK on board HMS
Albion
.’

‘I remember that in the news.’

‘Outside unit level, I had a spell in the investigations branch, the Specialist Police Wing. That’s plain clothes, the investigation of serious crime. CID work, in fact. Some of that time with the SPW was spent in Germany. I even liaised with the Forensic Science Flight on forensic investigations.’

‘Your CV must have read like a dream for the interview panel,’ said Cooper.

She laughed. ‘Yes, I think I had everything. A local girl who knows the area, has life experience and leadership abilities. Not to mention the training. Our basic training includes on-and off-road driving, weapons training, lines of communication …’

‘And good physical fitness.’

‘We were tested every six months. That doesn’t happen here, I guess.’

Cooper remembered the way she’d looked at Gavin Murfin.

‘No.’

They were climbing now, towards the highest point of Big Moor. Beyond Swine Sty, the county boundary ran right along a stream called Bar Brook. The moors they could see in the middle distance lay in South Yorkshire.

‘This stuff is difficult to walk through,’ said Villiers.

‘It’s peat, but it’s shallow peat. Not like the depths on Kinder or Bleaklow.’

The result of the peat’s shallowness on these eastern moors was a mass of coarse, tussocky grass interspersed with boggy areas. Villiers was right – it was a difficult landscape to walk through. In places, it felt like wading through drifts of snow, with no idea what lay underneath. Blankets of dead bracken stems choked everything.

‘And you met your husband in the service?’ asked Cooper.

‘Glen had a posting to the Tactical Provost Squadron. The TPS take on forward policing tasks in conflict zones. He served with his unit in the Gulf – Iraq, you know.’ Villiers paused, seemed to reflect for a moment on something. ‘The rest of his guys are still in a conflict zone now, in Afghanistan. Those are just the more publicised taskings, though. Most of our work doesn’t get in the news.’

‘Close protection duties?’

‘Not me personally. But I was given the training. We all were. So stick close to me and you’ll be safe, Ben.’

‘Great.’

‘Mind you, I’m used to carrying a Browning nine-millimetre. An extendable baton doesn’t quite feel the same on the hip.’