Dead And Buried Part 31

Murfin himself looked surprisingly chipper this morning. His desk in the CID room was cleared of forms and was now uncharacteristically tidy.

'Diane Fry won't be here much longer, I suppose,' he said. 'She'll have her inquiry tied up in no time, and she'll be off back to EMSOU a MC.'

'Yes, I wouldn't be surprised,' said Cooper. 'Why, were you thinking of inviting her to your retirement party?'

'Maybe. It's been interesting.'

'Interesting? In the Chinese sense?'

Murfin gazed out of the window with a smile. 'Well, we might all have learned something from the visit,' he said.

Cooper followed his gaze. He could see Diane Fry's black Audi in the car park at the back of the building. She'd reversed it into a spot near the extension where the scenes-of-crime department was now located.

'What's that on her rear b.u.mper?' said Cooper, his face crumpling into a puzzled frown.

'I can't imagine,' said Murfin.

'But it looks like ...'

'Oh,' said Murfin overtheatrically. 'So it does.'

'Gavin?'

'Yes, Ben?'

'I suppose I shouldn't ask.'

'No, that's probably for the best.'

'It's going to be another mystery, then,' said Cooper.

'You mean, how ...?'

'Yes. How Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, of the East Midlands Special Operations Unit a Major Crime, came to have an inflatable sheep tied to her rear b.u.mper when she left West Street. And it seems to be wearing lipstick and eye make-up, too.'

'I suppose it's just a memento,' said Murfin. 'One last sheep to remember us by.'

Early that morning, a retired firefighter from Glossop called Roger Kitson arrived at Brecks Farm, near Peak Forest, along with hundreds of other people. He followed the directions of a steward as he drove his car through a gateway and into a field where vehicles were already lined up, many of them muddy Land Rovers and other four-wheel drives.

Roger was there for one of the biggest events of the year in the stretch of country around Oxlow Moor a the annual sheepdog trials. Every year, the trials were held in fields behind Brecks Farm, going on all day from seven thirty in the morning to around six in the evening. As well as the feats of the sheepdogs themselves, there was a children's play area, side stalls, and plenty of food and drink to make the day.

But one of the real highlights of the event was a four-and-a-half-mile fell race, and that was why Roger Kitson was at Brecks Farm.

Roger was sixty-two years old, but he was a runner a a member of a club based near Stockport. Fell running was a gruelling sport, but it was more about stamina than strength. Last year, a couple of members from Dark Peak Fell Runners had finished the Oxlow Moor course in less than thirty minutes, with the advantage of good conditions. They would face compet.i.tion this year, though, as Roger saw there were teams entered from the Goyt Valley Striders, the Hallamshire Harriers and even the Hathersage Fat Boys.

Before the start of the race, he strolled round the field to see what was going on. He could tell that the trials had already begun, from the distinctive whistles and shouts of the shepherd piercing the morning air. A collie would be hard at work already, chivvying a reluctant bunch of sheep into a pen.

On a table near the secretary's tent stood the gleaming NatWest Trophy, ready to be presented to the owner of the winning sheepdog, along with smaller trophies for Best Driving Dog and Best Young Handler. One local farmer was raising money for the Border Collie Trust by growing half a beard, and he was attracting a lot of interest from photographers.

Roger joined a ma.s.s of runners in shorts and colourful vests waiting to set off on the opening climb, all with their identifying bib numbers tied to their singlets. He recognised the DPFR in their brown vests with yellow and purple hoops, and knew he would probably be a long way behind them. As a spectator, he'd seen the leading runners coming in one by one, each checking a watch as they approached the finishing line. He didn't mind what time he clocked up, as long as he completed the course. There was a trophy for the first veteran to finish, but he didn't expect to come close to that.

Today, the runners seemed to be all ages, shapes and sizes, but Roger kept reminding himself that stamina was the key to fell running. He overheard runners discussing the relative merits of their Walshes, the performance of a pair of Racers against Elite Extremes. He was wearing Walsh running shoes himself a they were hard-wearing enough to cope with both rocks and the wet peat they would be running over when they were up on the moor.

And then the race got under way. Within minutes of the start, the back markers were already struggling on the steep, rocky ascent, and Roger was among them. He made slow progress in the first few hundred yards, manoeuvring for the best route over the uneven rocky ground, sometimes being obliged to use his hands to keep his balance.

Slowly he approached the top of the ascent. Up ahead, something seemed to be happening. The leading runners were on the moor and pounding over the heather. But just before the first descent, there was chaos, with runners milling around aimlessly as if they'd lost sight of the route.

'What's going on?' Roger asked the runner in front of him.

'I don't know,' he gasped.

They kept going, losing sight of the lead runners. As they crested the hill, Roger could see smoke in the distance, drifting towards the runners, a clump of dry heather bursting into flame.

'Oh G.o.d. It's another fire,' he said.

'No, they've found something.'

He heard exclamations, someone calling for a phone, another voice insisting they should call the emergency services.

'Is somebody hurt?' he said.

As a firefighter, Roger had first-aid training. He pushed his way through the cl.u.s.ter of runners to see what the problem was. When he got near, people automatically stood back to let him through, as if happy to let someone else take over.

Roger found himself teetering on the edge of a hole exposed in the earth. Breathing hard, he looked down, expecting to see someone lying injured. But at first he couldn't figure out what he was looking at. He wiped the sweat from his forehead as his eyes started to adjust to the darkness in the hole.

'Oh, s.h.i.t.'

He took a step backwards and b.u.mped into the runners crowding behind him. He panicked, terrified of losing his footing and stumbling into the hole to join whatever lay down there.

Because Roger had just seen ... but what exactly had he seen?

Gingerly, he crouched and took a closer look. Yes, he'd been right the first time. It was a decomposed human hand, yellow and shrivelled, protruding from a bundle of black plastic, like a pale ghost rising out of Oxlow Moor.

25.

Diane Fry knew that Henry Pearson was staying at a hotel in Edendale. Even if he hadn't left his contact details, she had seen him on the TV news a a shot of him getting into his BMW with an armful of files, looking serious and dignified, like a lawyer going into court to fight an important case.

Pearson had also done a few sound bites directly to camera, speaking about how determined he was to discover what had happened to his son and daughter-in-law. That clip would be used over and over in the news bulletins.

Fry could see clearly that the sequence had been filmed in the car park of the Holiday Inn on Meadow Road, with the spire of All Saints Church visible in the background at the bottom of Clappergate.

When she rang the hotel that morning, she was put straight through to Mr Pearson's room.

'Yes?' he said eagerly, when Fry announced who she was. 'Is there any news?'

'Not at the moment. But we'd like you to come into the station for a chat. If you could, sir.'

'I'll be right there,' he said.

Well, that was short and sweet. Eager wasn't the word for it. Mr Pearson sounded positively desperate.

While she waited, she checked in with DCI Mackenzie, who was presiding over the incident room as SIO. Fry was grateful that he'd spared her this, the routine tasking and data a.n.a.lysis that went with a major inquiry. So far he'd given her a free hand, and she appreciated his faith in her.

Mackenzie confirmed that search teams were being a.s.sembled to begin operations on Oxlow Moor, focusing on the abandoned mine shafts.

'It's quite technical,' he said. 'The maps aren't as accurate as we'd like, and the extent of visible surface remains is unpredictable. So we need the specialists. But it will be done.'

'What about forensics?' asked Fry.

Mackenzie shook his head. 'Still no luck on the major blood source. We know it doesn't match the DNA profiles for the Pearsons. However, the lab say they've isolated another profile from the bloodstains. Small traces, but DNA from a separate individual.'

'A fourth person, then?'

'Yes, someone else who lost a small amount of blood. Also, there's a partial print recovered from David Pearson's mobile phone. Not David's or Trisha's. It should help.'

'If we can produce a suspect to compare it to,' said Fry.

'Exactly.' Mackenzie looked up. 'One thing we can be sure of, anyway.'

'What?'

'DS Cooper's two suspects aren't in the frame. These DNA profiles aren't a match to the samples Gullick and Naylor gave on arrest.'

When Cooper reached the weed-covered car park of the Light House, he could see only a few firefighters in the distance, still flailing with their beaters where hotspots were smouldering in the heather. Their activities had moved on and away from the pub. The nearest appliance was just visible on the edge of the moor, framed against the long ridge of Rushup Edge and the far-off Kinder Scout.

On the horizon, Kinder was also burning now, a double disaster. A brisk wind was whipping up flames twenty feet high across a front that must stretch more than a mile and a half. As the ranger had predicted, most of the firefighting equipment and resources had been drawn away from Oxlow to tackle the new wildfires spreading on the higher plateau.

If the fire was burning below ground level here, there was a danger it could burst up through the peat at any time. If that happened, the Light House could be at risk. There weren't enough men and equipment left on the moor to provide a spray curtain over the building and ensure those floating embers didn't land on the roof.

Again Cooper was overwhelmed by the impression of how isolated the Light House was. He and the empty pub were alone in the devastated landscape, like the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Despite the height and its commanding vantage point, he felt as though he was being observed. He imagined a movie camera in a helicopter, one of those dizzying overhead shots, pulling back to reveal that his tiny figure was the only movement in an expanse of desert.

'I don't know what film that would be from,' he said. Then he looked guiltily over his shoulder, in case he was caught talking to himself out loud.

Cooper shook himself and went to the back door of the pub, where a bored uniformed PC stood guard at the tape marking the cordon. The door was fixed permanently open now, and lights had been sent up inside the bar, where the body of Aidan Merritt had been found. How long ago had that been? Only a few days, surely? It seemed like a lifetime, though. Diane Fry had walked in here. And by that simple act, she had turned everything round.

Carol Villiers had already negotiated her way over the stepping plates to reach the main bar.

'So what are we looking for?' she asked.

'Cellars.'

She looked down at her feet, an automatic response.

'Access to the cellars,' said Cooper.

'I knew that.'

The furniture in the bar looked sad and rather seedy in the totally artificial illumination. From the ceiling hung horrible lights in fittings shaped like candles, but made out of some kind of rigid green plastic. Cooper could see the pictures on the walls more clearly, baffling images of steam trains and fly fishermen that bore no relationship to the history or location of the pub.

Somewhere there must be a trapdoor to provide access to the cellar from inside the pub. Cooper found it behind the bar counter, concealed by a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and old beer crates. He didn't think it had been hidden deliberately, just lost and forgotten under the general rubbish and disorder.

'We need to move all this stuff aside.'

Villiers helped him with the task. When the hatch was cleared, an iron handle became visible, set flush into the wood. Slowly Cooper eased the door up, and Villiers switched on her torch to locate a flight of stone steps. She recoiled at the aromas rising from the hatchway.

'Phew,' she said. 'There's nothing worse than the smell of stale beer.'

Cooper agreed. But there was more to the odour than that. A miasma rose around him, putting thoughts of ancient damp and mould into his mind. He felt as though he'd just opened Count Dracula's tomb, releasing centuries of decay.

He pulled out his own torch. 'Down we go, then.'

'You first,' said Villiers.

Cooper looked at her in surprise. 'What? Spiders?'

'Maybe,' she said defensively.

At the bottom of the steps, Cooper found a light switch. He was amazed when it worked, and the cellar sprang into view. Unlike the shuttered pub above, the cellar had always looked like this, bathed in artificial light. They were below ground, so there were no windows. And the air immediately felt cooler, with that hint of dampness.

Beer lines snaked up towards the bar, and a bewildering a.s.sortment of equipment lay around, some of it on shelves or left on empty kegs, or stored in the corner of the cellar. He saw a wooden mallet, stainless-steel buckets, disposable paper towels, a scrubbing brush, a pressure hosepipe, filter funnels and papers, a dip stick, beer taps and a gas bottle spanner.

A tiny s.p.a.ce off the cellar had been turned into an office. Well, more of a storage room really, with a few dusty filing cabinets lined up against the wall, a desk covered in box files, and a pile of old magazines a The Publican, Morning Advertiser.

On a shelf, Cooper found a stack of old sepia and black-and-white photographs in their frames, which must once have hung on the walls upstairs. He picked up a particularly old photo in a gilt frame, and wiped the dust off the gla.s.s. It was a group shot, taken some time around the start of the twentieth century, he guessed. A formally arranged bunch of people was pictured outside the front entrance of a pub. A large man with enormous whiskers posed importantly in the middle of the group, with men in leather ap.r.o.ns and women in white smocks spread out on either side and behind him, some of them standing, others sitting awkwardly on wooden chairs brought outside from the bar.

The pub was recognisably the Light House, its windows almost unchanged to the present day, the shape of its chimneys visible along the top of the print. But the lettering painted over the door didn't say The Light House. The pub had gone by a different name a century ago. Cooper squinted a bit more closely, trying to make out the lettering. Surely it was ...? Yes, he was sure. The pub had once been called the Burning Woman.

He put the photo down, and it slid off the pile with a sc.r.a.pe of gla.s.s. His automatic sense of disturbance at the name was probably a twenty-first-century response. No one would have thought anything of it back then. There were plenty of rural pubs whose names reflected gruesome episodes from history, or some lurid folk tale. The people of these parts seemed to have had particularly vivid and bloodthirsty imaginations.

He couldn't see the swinging wooden sign because of the angle the photograph had been taken from, but he guessed there would be a suitably graphic image to accompany the name. Someone would know the legend of the burning woman. Stories like that survived by word of mouth long after the signs had been taken down and the names sanitised.

'I can't help feeling the moulds are sending their spores directly towards me, even as I speak,' said Villiers.

'How did they get deliveries?' asked Cooper 'Can you see?'

'Over here.'

The double cellar doors to the outside were at the top of a narrow set of stone steps, with equally narrow ramps on either side. The hatches themselves were bolted on the inside. The bolts and hinges were old and starting to rust, reminding Cooper of the iron plate over the abandoned mine shaft.

He couldn't see even a crack of daylight round the edges of the doors. He tried to figure out where they emerged. Why hadn't he noticed them from the outside? The only possible answer was that they too were covered by something. He remembered the pile of old furniture stacked against the back wall. Heavy tables with metal bases, wrought-iron chairs, a heap of torn parasols on steel posts. They had been chucked on a mound like so much rubbish. They must be lying right on top of the cellar doors. Maybe it had been for additional security. Or perhaps no one expected beer deliveries to be made at this pub for the foreseeable future.