Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

31

The last time Cooper had been to Harpur Hill was for a match at Buxton Rugby Club’s ground, which claimed to have the highest posts in the country. They often played in appalling weather conditions up here. But then, Buxton was notorious for its weather, ever since a cricket match was interrupted by snow in the middle of June.

The village itself lay between the outskirts of Buxton and the quarries off the A515. A large proportion of Harpur Hill had been occupied for years by the sprawling, derelict buildings of an old University of Derby campus, which had once been High Peak College. After a new campus was created from Buxton’s former Devonshire Royal Hospital, the empty Harpur Hill buildings lay damaged and rotting, like a set of broken teeth, an incongruous lump of urban decay that split an ordinary village housing estate in half.

As Cooper passed through, he recalled that the site had attracted intruders, despite the security fencing. Thieves removed lead from the roofs and stripped out wiring. Once, a large pentagram had been found scratched into the floor of the refectory. Empty buildings were like a magnet for the curious and the opportunist.

DCs Becky Hurst and Gavin Murfin were in the car with him, the only officers available and willing to follow his instinct. He was lucky they hadn’t already been appropriated for other assignments.

At least he seemed to have got Diane Fry out of his hair for the time being. Her attention was on the George Redfearn inquiry, like everyone else – though Cooper had a strong suspicion the results might lead her straight back to him before long.

‘So what’s in Harpur Hill?’ asked Hurst doubtfully as they slowed almost to a halt behind a tractor towing a trailer of manure.

‘Elf ’n’ safety,’ said Murfin. ‘The temple of our new God.’

‘Is it?’ said Hurst. She twisted round to look at Murfin, who was slumped in the back seat. ‘I thought your God worked at the local pie shop.’

Cooper glanced in the rearview mirror. Murfin might well have a pie hidden somewhere in his pockets. He could smell the warm juice now, drifting through the car.

‘You’re just a heathen,’ said Murfin. ‘You wait until Judgment Day. Then we’ll see who gets chosen.’

‘You’re too heavy to float up to heaven,’ said Hurst. ‘You’ll sink the other way.’

Murfin sniffed and maintained a dignified silence for a few moments.

‘And the Blue Lagoon,’ he said suddenly. ‘Am I right?’

‘The what?’ asked Hurst.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Cooper.

Directly opposite the old university campus, the flooded Far Hill Quarry had also hit the headlines for a while. For years it had been known as the Blue Lagoon, because of its azure colour, which made it a popular place for swimming. It was also one of the most polluted stretches of water to be found anywhere in Derbyshire.

The attractive colouring had been caused by the surrounding limestone rocks, which leached calcite crystals into the water, turning it turquoise. Its alkalinity came from calcium oxide, a by-product of the quarrying process. The lagoon was known to contain car wrecks, dead animals, excrement and other kinds of toxic rubbish. Despite the signs warning that high pH levels could cause rashes, eye irritations, stomach problems and fungal infections, parents could be seen pulling their babies around in rubber rings on the water. Whole families regularly made the trek to the lagoon, gazing at the blue water as if to convince themselves they were in the Bahamas. It had been beautiful to look at, but horrendously dangerous.

But it wasn’t pretty any more. On the principle that the lagoon’s attraction was all about surface appearance, the council dyed the water black. When they visited Far Hill Quarry now, people didn’t think they were in the Bahamas any more. They knew perfectly well they were in Derbyshire.

‘One of the coffin roads started from somewhere near here,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh.’ Murfin gazed out of the car window. ‘You wouldn’t think you’d died and gone to heaven, would you?’

Hurst laughed. ‘I’m with you there, Gavin.’

Past Hoffman’s Bar, Cooper turned off by the Parks Inn and followed a twisting road that led up to the industrial estate. He found an engineering factory, a pet crematorium, then the gleaming, modern laboratory complex operated by the Health and Safety Executive.

From 1938 the RAF had turned a vast area of hillside above Harpur Hill into a series of underground munitions stores. Tunnels were dug out to house large amounts of ammunition and ordnance, including howitzer shells loaded with mustard gas and phosphorus. When the RAF left, the tunnels were used as a mushroom farm, then as a cold store for cheese, and finally as a warehouse for wines and spirits. Many of the bunkers could still be seen in the surrounding landscape, which was now used as testing grounds for the Health and Safety Laboratory.

Cooper wondered how many health and safety regulations had existed at the time when cheese was stored in the same tunnels that once contained chemical weapons. Local people had all kinds of stories about this place. The number of underground bunkers and mysterious explosions accounted for many of the rumours.

A sign pointed to a half-overgrown path that led down through the trees to a steep hillside and an area of limestone pasture. When Cooper got closer he saw that the sign was for the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory.

‘It’s an enormous site,’ said Hurst. ‘And there are just the three of us. How are we going to do this, Ben?’

‘Don’t you understand yet?’ said Cooper. ‘We only need to find the route of the old coffin road.’

He was aware of Hurst and Murfin looking at each other when he said that. Murfin gave a subtle shrug. His DCs were loyal, but even they didn’t believe in his theories.

The HSE’s own security teams had been asked to check the parts of the site nearest to the laboratories. But two or three public footpaths ran through the old RAF camp and these were the readily accessible areas. The route of the old coffin road must have followed one of these public rights of way. Sandra Blair’s group must have worked out the route for themselves. Not only did they walk it as a group, but they had their photograph taken around here. Was this the moment when someone suggested taking their protest further?

There were signs everywhere bearing the same message: ‘You are about to enter an area where hazardous activities take place.’ He was warned to watch for red flags flying to indicate danger.

A dark strip of woodland separated the Health and Safety testing grounds from some University of Sheffield laboratories on the western side. The Department of Civil and Structural Engineers, the Communications Research Group and CEDUS. What was that? Cooper couldn’t remember what the initials stood for, but he had a feeling it was to do with research into the blast effects of high-velocity explosives.

Hurst began to cast about like a terrier sniffing the ground for a fox. Murfin made a desultory show of peering through the windows of an abandoned building.

‘I hear you’ve been talking to Brendan Kilner,’ said Murfin, without turning round.

Cooper stared at him. He hadn’t mentioned his conversation with Kilner or his visit to Buxton Raceway. But he tended to forget how long Gavin Murfin had been in this job and how many people he knew. Gavin’s network of informants must be pretty extensive by now. No doubt someone in the crowd at Axe Edge saw him talking to Kilner and mentioned it to Murfin in the pub last night. He ought to have known that was a possibility.

‘He can be useful,’ he said.

‘Kilner is a lifelong criminal,’ said Murfin. ‘A born scrote. He probably mugged the midwife before he was five minutes old. These days they say he’s into the drugs trade because it’s more profitable.’

‘It doesn’t mean he can’t be useful for providing a bit of information, Gavin. You know that. Don’t be so cynical.’

Murfin grunted and kicked at a lump of broken concrete. ‘So you think it’s okay to spend your time with the bad guys?’

‘If it’s necessary. Now can we get on with it, Gavin?’

‘Just so we’re clear.’

The whole site was scattered with concrete bunkers, chimneys, ventilation shafts and scaffolding structures emerging from the ground, a CCTV camera on a gantry watching for walkers getting too close. A drop tower and old bomb stores. He passed Bunker 90. Further on the red flags were fluttering at half-mast. So no danger at the moment.

Ahead were the large main buildings, looking like any other modern office complex. They made the rest of the site seem like a vast playground filled with tunnels and towers, railway tracks and climbing frames, and places where you could just make things go bang. The high explosive testing tunnel ran for about a quarter of a mile across the site and was said to contain the scorched remains of a headless test dummy, still perched in a blackened chair in the path of an explosive blast.

Cooper produced a print of the photograph of the group taken on Sandra Blair’s phone.

‘About here, perhaps?’ he said.

Hurst squinted at the picture and the landscape in front of them. ‘Could be.’

Somewhere over there to the west the HSE had brought in some disused London Underground trains for testing after the 7 July bombings in the capital, when forty-two people were killed by bombs on the Tube in 2005. The carriages had been subjected to test explosions in a makeshift tunnel. As a result of the testing a series of burned-out Jubilee Line units with their windows and doors blown off had stood around the site for years, only a couple of hundred yards from a public footpath through the old RAF base.

They were on one of the public footpaths now, probably the one walked by Sandra Blair’s group. Becky Hurst pushed open the broken door of a concrete shed, which revealed a stack of old drums of Shell Tellus Oil.

‘What is that?’ she said.

‘Hydraulic fluid. That’s all.’

It was strange that the HSE had made no attempt to divert the footpaths, the way Deeplow Quarry had done. Instead, they had installed CCTV cameras and warning signs, and red flags to indicate when an explosion was imminent. They also recorded use of these footpaths, and the HSE’s security teams had sometimes asked people to leave. B Division response officers were occasionally despatched to make sure that suspicious individuals had actually departed the site.

Hurst had reached a fence and worked her way along to a stile that led over the hill towards the far side of the site.

‘I wonder where that track goes from here?’ she said.

There was no need to consult the map this time. Cooper knew the answer perfectly well. He could picture the funeral party picking their way carefully down this hill, a coffin shifting precariously on their shoulders as the slope became steeper. He was able to imagine the weary sighs as they halted at the gate a hundred yards below him on the hillside, resting the coffin on the large, flat stone until the relief bearers took it up again.

‘We know where it goes,’ he said. ‘It comes out at the Corpse Bridge.’

32

Villiers and Irvine had left Jason Shaw’s cottage in Bowden and were driving back towards Edendale.

‘Did you hear that?’ said Villiers. ‘He offered us a suspect in Sally Naden, then said himself how ridiculous an idea it was.’

‘Not very helpful.’

‘Deliberately unhelpful.’

When they got back to West Street, Ben Cooper was out of the office. He’d disappeared, taking Becky Hurst and Gavin Murfin along with him.

‘What do we do now?’ said Irvine, turning to Villiers.

Villiers grimaced and nodded across the office. ‘You know there’s only one thing we can do, Luke,’ she said. ‘We have to report to DS Fry.’

Molly Redfearn had returned from Paris that morning. Diane Fry had taken over the interviews with the victim’s wife and was writing up her report when Irvine and Villiers came in.

Mrs Redfearn had been just the sort of woman Fry disliked most – cold, middle class and materialistic. Exactly the kind of woman she was afraid of turning into herself, in fact.

The perfume Molly Redfearn was wearing had been almost overpowering. Fry had been glad that they weren’t talking to each other in one of the interview rooms at West Street, with their archaic lack of ventilation. They would all have been stifled and found dead in their chairs an hour or two later.

But the results of her interview were disappointing. Mrs Redfearn had been out of contact with her husband throughout the whole of her trip to Paris with her girlfriends.

When she saw Irvine and Villiers approaching she willingly put her half-finished report aside to listen to what they had to say.

‘So that’s his story,’ said Irvine when they’d finished. ‘He basically put the blame on everyone else.’

‘And there was no one on the bridge with Mrs Blair that night?’

‘Not according to Shaw. He admits taking her there with the effigy and all that stuff, but then he left her to it.’

‘And what do you think of that, Luke?’ asked Fry.

‘I think he’s telling only half the truth again.’

Fry looked at Villiers, who agreed.

‘His attempt to blame Sally Naden looks a bit weak, but you can never tell.’

‘No.’

Fry was interested in Jason Shaw’s job as a gamekeeper. She would have to get a check done on the firearms register.

She looked up at Irvine and Villiers.

‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Do you know where DS Cooper is?’

On the far side of the Harpur Hill testing grounds Cooper realised how close he was to Buxton Raceway. There was no race meeting today, but he could see the circuit and the stand where he’d talked to Brendan Kilner. It was Kilner who pointed him in the direction of the graveyard, yet here he was coming full circle within thirty-six hours.

He’d left Becky Hurst and Gavin Murfin checking their way through the old buildings, the former RAF bunkers that had been abandoned or even demolished. They would be grumbling to each other by now. They might not appear to get on, but they’d developed an understanding. Hurst respected Murfin’s experience, though she would never have said so, and Gavin wouldn’t have wanted her to.

Cooper parked the Toyota by a structure of rotting timbers like the skeleton of a beached ship. From the number of old car tyres lying around, he guessed it was the remains of a long-disused silage clamp.

Across the road a small group of ponies with long manes trotted eagerly to greet him as he climbed over the stile into their field. From here he had a view down a shallow valley to the HSE laboratories, with one building shaped like a flour mill gleaming a startling white in the sun. Beyond the buildings the little tower that people called Solomon’s Temple stood on the crest of a hill, overlooking the town of Buxton.

Further on a gate was fastened with a series of lengths of baler twine. It was probably a subtle deterrent for walkers, without quite making the path inaccessible.

A farmer appeared on a quad bike and entered the fields where sheep grazed on the fringes of the HSE testing grounds. When Cooper got closer the white building turned out to be a mysterious structure of scaffolding and pipes shrouded in white plastic sheeting, with a large tank standing next to it.

A few employees from the laboratories had taken the opportunity during their lunch break to stroll or jog along the roadway where a disused railway line had once run. They were still wearing their yellow high-vis jackets, as befitted employees of the Health and Safety Executive.

A few minutes ago he’d driven past a nursery in Harpur Hill village, where the children were out playing. They’d been wearing high-vis jackets identical to those the workers wore at the HSL. Health and safety got everywhere. Cooper could hear Gavin Murfin’s voice in his head. Elf ’n’ safety. You can’t argue with that. It was one of Murfin’s favourite sayings.

Just out of sight of the path a dead sheep had been dismembered on the hillside. He found severed leg bones, an almost intact spine and ribcage, a bloodied fleece and part of the skull. It could have been scavengers, arriving after the carcase had begun to soften and disarticulate. A fox perhaps, or a pair of crows. But you could never be sure.

Cooper passed a large concrete-lined watering hole for the cattle and sheep, formed into ledges to provide a safe footing for the animals when the water was low. And it was certainly low now. There were only a few inches lying below the final ledge. He could see glimpses of the muddy bottom, though most of the water was choked by weeds. A few chunks of limestone had fallen in, along with a rotting timber or two, and a rusted iron feeding trough.

And something else caught his eye. No more than a slight, flapping movement in the wind. It was a white plastic bag, one corner protruding above the muddy surface. If the water had been a fraction deeper, he would never have seen it.

Becky Hurst appeared at the top of the slope. Cooper signalled to her to join him and waited until she scrambled down.

‘What have you found?’ she said.

‘I’m not sure. Probably nothing.’ He looked up the slope. ‘Where’s Gavin?’

‘Having a quick sulk.’

‘And a snack?’

‘Probably. I didn’t wait to see. There’s only so much I can take.’

Cooper found a length of wood, hooked a handle of the plastic bag and fished it out of the water. When he prised it open he discovered some sodden clothing inside. Thrown away instead of being taken to a charity shop or disposed of properly?

He teased the clothing out and spread it on the ground. A crumpled shape turned out to be a woollen hat, with ear flaps and a Scandinavian design. He’d been right about the reindeer.

Something metallic rolled out of the hat on to the ground. It was a small LED torch. A tiny thing, but it would have provided a bright light, if its batteries hadn’t been submerged in water for the past four days.

‘Sandra Blair’s possessions,’ said Cooper.

‘Wow,’ said Hurst. ‘Why would someone take the trouble to dump them here? Why not leave them with the body?’

‘They probably handled them.’

‘So they were worried about fingerprints or DNA?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Do you reckon we’ll be able get anything from them?’

Cooper slipped the items into separate evidence bags. ‘Let’s hope so. It’s about our only break so far.’

‘You really think there’ll be another victim, Ben?’ asked Hurst.

He straightened up and looked out over the Harpur Hill testing grounds, with the remaining route of the old coffin road heading away across Axe Edge Moor. The breeze fluttered a scrap of wool on the dismembered body of the sheep. It seemed inevitable. As if there had to be a death before anyone could cross the Corpse Bridge.

‘I’m certain of it,’ he said.

Chris Thornton was shift supervisor at Deeplow Quarry that day, when the crusher jammed. He was standing outside the office, checking the time sheets and cursing one of the dump truck drivers who’d failed to turn up for work. As far as he was concerned the first sign of trouble was the screech of metal. It shrieked across the quarry above the rumble of engines and the crash of broken stone. Then an alarm sounded for a few seconds before somebody hit the button and stopped the motor.

‘What the hell was that?’

Thornton began to run up the roadway towards the quarry face, kicking up limestone dust and veering aside to avoid a truck manoeuvring to deposit its load in the bottom hopper. He could see a group of men in orange overalls and hard hats, who were slowly gathering around the crusher. Someone had climbed on to the inspection plate and was staring down into the belt mechanism. Then the worker straightened up and said something to the other men below, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

As Thornton covered the last hundred yards, the entire group turned to look at him. He read a mixture of shock and relief on their faces. He knew the reason for the relief – they’d just set eyes on the man who was going to take responsibility from their shoulders. He didn’t yet understand why they were looking so shocked.

In a moment, though, Chris Thornton would find out. Within the next few hours the whole of Derbyshire would know.