The Devil's Edge (31 page)
‘One thing they didn’t reckon with was Barry Gamble,’ said Cooper. ‘He was right on the spot.’
‘Nothing like a bit of good surveillance.’
‘And then Summers got greedy. Well, he’d been getting away with it for weeks, and he was being built up as a folk hero, some sort of Robin Hood figure. He must have started to believe his own press, and thought he was untouchable. After he’d done the job with Edson, he saw an opportunity and two nights later decided to check out the neighbouring property. The Hollands were never involved in anything. Martin Holland was an incidental death.’
‘Collateral damage,’ said Villiers.
‘Summers is in custody anyway. They scooped him up in Sheffield, along with another accomplice.’
‘So the Savages’ time is over.’
‘I wonder, though,’ said Cooper.
‘What?’
‘Whether David Edson ever did recover fully from the head injury he suffered in that fall from the rock face. A good defence lawyer will be able to come up with medical evidence to show that he’s been left with a degree of permanent brain damage – enough to change his personality and impair his judgement. He’ll get manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.’
‘Well, that’s the way it goes.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s exactly how it goes.’
‘Russell and David Edson are no one’s idea of folk heroes,’ said Villiers. ‘But they’re not complete monsters either.’
No, thought Cooper. Who needed monsters and devils, when people had so much evil in them?
‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘everybody else in Riddings deserves a medal.’
‘What for?’
‘For not having murdered Barry Gamble.’
Villiers laughed. ‘Or any of their neighbours, in fact.’
‘Despite the provocation.’
‘At least those other monsters are off the streets,’ said Villiers. ‘The Savages, I mean. Now people can live their lives without fear again. No need to worry about being attacked in their own homes in the middle of the night.’
‘We always have monsters in our lives,’ said Cooper. ‘But sometimes the monsters are ourselves.’
It was difficult to understand all the bad things that happened in the world. But you had to make the attempt – it was part of the job. Sometimes, though, the only way was to find the evil inside yourself, and use it.
Cooper doubted if he would ever go back to the eastern edges with the same feeling about them. The Devil’s Edge had not only provided a backdrop, a barrier, a protection, a perspective. In the end, it had also given him the clues he needed to the secrets of Riddings.
Diane Fry let herself out of the custody suite on the ground floor, and crossed the walkway to enter the main building. She was oblivious to the weather, or her surroundings – at least, as far as it was possible not to be aware that she was in Derbyshire, in the middle of the Peak District, surrounded by these rural wastelands.
She was thinking of one thing – DCI Mackenzie’s parting shot, aimed at her as he left Bridge End Farm.
A real farm girl, aren’t you?
She wondered why she didn’t feel more resentful. Helping Cooper’s family had lost her an opportunity to transfer to the city. Okay, Derby might not be the biggest metropolis in the world, but at least it would have been a route out of this backwater. Somehow even that had gone wrong.
She walked back into the CID room, looking around hesitantly as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. She approached Cooper’s desk.
‘Your brother is just being processed out of the custody suite,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d want to know straight away.’
‘Great. I’ll take him home.’
‘Oh, okay. I’m sure that will be fine, Ben.’
‘Thanks …’ he began.
But Fry held up a hand, placed it between them like a shield.
‘There’s no need,’ she said. ‘Really. No need at all.’
A few minutes later, Cooper waited while his brother shook hands with Fry. That was something he’d never expected to see. But nothing was the same now. His family had come pretty close to the edge themselves.
Matt walked down with him to the car park and got into the passenger seat of the Toyota. Ben said nothing, and his brother looked at him as he fastened his seat belt.
‘I was just saying thank you,’ he said. ‘She did a good job. That other bloke from Derby knew nothing. If it had been left up to him, I reckon I’d be spending the next ten years of my life in a prison cell.’
‘Yes, it’s fine.’
‘Because they kept you out of it, didn’t they, Ben? You weren’t allowed anywhere near the investigation. That’s what they told me. Conflict of interest and all that.’
‘That’s right, yes. Conflict of interest.’
‘Because if you had got involved, it might have prejudiced the outcome. The Crown Prosecution Service could have gone ahead with charges just to show there was no favouritism to the family of a police officer. That’s what they told me.’
‘Yes, that can be a problem.’
Matt shook his head in despair. ‘It’s all been such a nightmare from the start. It’s appalling, the state the countryside has come to.’
Ben thought of Riddings, and how different it was from the way he’d always imagined a village should be. He supposed a place like that was a particular form of twenty-first-century Britain. It still retained the superficial appearance of a village, right down to the horse trough and the smell of manure. But the horse trough was a relic of the past, just like the empty phone box.
It was sad to see a village where farming had so thoroughly disappeared. In fact, it couldn’t really be called a village at all, could it? It was just a façade, a surface veneer of nostalgia. It was probably a symptom of things to come, a time when thriving rural communities would be a distant memory. A trace of a field pattern and an abandoned slurry pit on Big Moor.
He read the latest text from Liz on his phone.
R u ok?
Then he switched on the CD player, needing to fill the car with sound. In Riddings, he’d picked up a favourite Show of Hands album called
Roots
. Just the right thing to remind him that he was still in the countryside, not some outer suburb of Sheffield. Now, when he restarted it, the fourth track came on: ‘Country Life’. The vocals were Steve Knightley at his angriest on the hypocrisy of attitudes to the countryside. Cooper had chosen it because he remembered that it contained a verse inspired by the devastating foot and mouth outbreak:
Picture postcard hills on fire
Cattle burning in funeral pyres
Out to graze they look so sweet
We hate the blood, but we want the meat
But the lines that struck him now came at the end of the first chorus. They seemed amazingly appropriate:
One man’s family pays the price
For another man’s vision of country life
Ben thought of Zoe and Jake Barron, and Martin Holland, and of Barry Gamble. Even of Russell and David Edson, and poor old Glenys, all the other people who’d been affected by the events in Riddings. Every one of them had clung to their own vision of country life. In some cases, it was a vision of escape, or a yearning for peace and quiet. In others, it was a chance to act like the country squire.
The coffin of our English dream
Lies out on the village green
He started the Toyota, and drove slowly towards the exit. Before he reached the barrier, he saw Fry’s black Peugeot a few yards ahead, standing at the kerb on West Street. He wondered what she was doing, just sitting there in her car. What was she waiting for?
And then he saw the answer. Carol Villiers ran down the steps from the double doors at the front entrance. Without a glance towards the car park, she went up to Fry’s Peugeot, opened the passenger door and got in. Fry turned her head and said something. Again, that private communication between them, a moment that he wasn’t allowed to share. What were they talking about? Where were they going? When had they arranged this meeting?
It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. He felt a sharp stab of anxiety, an uneasy sense that something was going on he didn’t know about. And perhaps he would never find out what it was.
Although the barrier was up to let him drive out, Ben sat quite still, holding his breath, making no attempt to leave the car park as the Peugeot drove away down West Street.
‘So it’s good that you didn’t get involved,’ Matt was saying. ‘You left it up to Detective Sergeant Fry, without any interference. I’m glad you felt you could trust her.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ben, as he watched Fry’s car disappear into Edendale. ‘That’s very important, isn’t it? Trust.’
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