Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

35

Firefighters had chosen the evening before Bonfire Night for another strike over changes to their working conditions and cuts in their pension rights. The strike had started at 6.30 p.m. and was due to last until eleven. Contingency crews had been formed from half-trained volunteers, though strikers had agreed they would obey a recall if lives were at risk.

When vandals set the Bowden bonfire alight that Monday evening, there were judged to be no lives at risk. In fact, a small crowd of people gathered from the houses to watch it burn. The blaze could be seen right across the park and staff came out of the abbey itself to see what was happening. A security guard and a couple of gamekeepers were tasked with checking the parkland near Bowden for the intruders who’d started the fire, but they could find no one.

The stack of wood had been blazing into the night sky for almost an hour before a volunteer crew eventually arrived from Buxton. And it was already too late. The Buxton crew soon extinguished the remaining embers. But by then Bowden’s bonfire was dead and gone.

Sterndale Moor was an odd little collection of houses, like a chunk of an urban council estate sliced off and dumped in the countryside. It was handy for workers at the quarries, Cooper supposed – the entrance to Deeplow stood almost directly across the A515.

As he drove into it that evening Cooper found only one short street, with a branch off it to a patch of wasteland used for parking and the entrance to a social club. The club building matched the housing. It was low, grimy and pebble-dashed. To one side stood a corrugated-iron smokers’ shelter, open-fronted and containing half a dozen chairs and a couple of plastic bins. It looked a grim place to spend even part of an evening during a Derbyshire winter.

He wondered where Rob Beresford was planning to spend the night. There had still been no sightings of him the last time he checked, and Beresford’s parents had received no contact from him. The longer he was missing, the more worrying it would be.

Since there was nowhere to park on the street, Cooper turned the Toyota on to the waste ground. He parked next to a van attached to a trailer that was loaded with a battered stock car. Perhaps it was used for racing up the road at Axe Edge. On the back the vehicle was decorated with the slogans ‘Work to live, live to race’ and ‘If you can read this, I need more mud’. More bafflingly, the bonnet said, ‘Pennine Pikeys Runyagit’. Cooper shook his head over that. It was probably best not to ask.

The club was closed, but Cooper peered through one of the windows and caught sight of two porcelain figurines standing on the ledge inside. A cowboy and Indian. They seemed a strange pair for a social club in a Peak District village. But then Cooper had a memory, a flashback to that occasion years before. How many years was it? Fifteen? Or perhaps more? So the country and western club still met here.

This was one of those odd places the Peak District was full of. Above Sterndale Moor, on Red Hurst Hill, a fake stone circle called Wheeldon’s Folly had been built by a local farmer from random stones, lumps of concrete and even an old gatepost. In this area you never knew what sort of place you were arriving in or what might lie behind its façade.

Yet Sterndale Moor had one thing in common with Bowden. There were almost no people around. It was dark and the residents all seemed to be shut behind their own doors. All he could see was a young woman with a small child waiting in the bus shelter outside the social club. There was no sign of a bus.

Brendan Kilner lived in a small, pebble-dashed semi-detached house. The tiny front garden had been removed and concreted over to create just enough space to park a couple of cars off the road, a Ford Fiesta and a Peugeot.

Kilner looked surprised to see Ben Cooper standing on his doorstep. He’d been relaxing in front of the telly, judging by the sound of the Coronation Street theme tune drifting from an open door. Kilner was wearing jeans and an old checked shirt, and had come to the door in his socks, with a beer can clutched in one hand.

‘Something up?’ he said.

‘Just a couple of things I wanted to ask you,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re working late, aren’t you?’

‘You know what it’s like, Brendan. No rest for the wicked.’

‘Oh, er…’ Kilner glanced over his shoulder, as if calculating what might be on view inside the house that he wouldn’t want anyone to see. But his conclusion must have been on the positive side. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

As he entered the house Cooper thought he detected that whiff of fried onions again, but perhaps it was just a memory of their meeting at Buxton Raceway. Just a bit of bad déjà vu.

‘Come through to the back,’ said Kilner, with a wary glance through an open doorway.

Cooper took a peek too and saw the back of a woman’s head on a sofa in front of a large TV screen. He felt certain the Kilners had a couple of sons, and perhaps a daughter. But they would all be well grown-up by now and probably extending the clan in their turn.

‘Just you and the wife at home?’ said Cooper. ‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.’

‘Lisa.’

Kilner had lowered his voice, perhaps worried in case he attracted her attention.

‘Is she okay?’

‘Fine.’

There was a small room at the back of the house, adjoining the kitchen. Kilner seemed to have converted it into a workshop. There were air filters and boxes of suspension springs, a crankshaft and even a couple of tyres.

‘I do a bit of work on the stocks now and then,’ said Kilner.

‘On the side, I suppose?’

Kilner shrugged. ‘Everyone does it.’

‘And does Lisa not mind you bringing all this stuff into the house?’

‘As long as I clean up the oil, she doesn’t yell too much.’

Cooper was trying to recall exactly what Brendan Kilner said to him at the raceway on Sunday. It was Kilner who’d said: ‘They’ve all got an axe to grind.’ But there was something else. It’s all about family. Ancient history if you ask me. But that stuff means a lot to some people, doesn’t it? Me, I can never bring myself to visit the place where my mum and dad were buried.

He looked across the hall, glad of the noise coming from the sitting room, the TV turned up a bit too loud. It was such a different home from the expensive Georgian property rented by Marcus Everett and his friends near Pilsbury. Yet there was a similarity, which Cooper had suspected. It had been put into his mind by the sight of that drooping Mexican moustache, the fake Confederate soldier. That same man had offered him a joint outside the Sterndale Moor Social Club on the night he’d been dragged to the country and western evening.

And Gavin Murfin was right to remind him about Brendan Kilner’s background too. Cooper had checked the intelligence.

The items on view in Kilner’s kitchen were different from those he’d seen in the rental property at Pilsbury. There were no silver trays or plastic straws for sniffing lines of cocaine. Instead, he saw small cotton balls, a pile of bottle caps and a narrow leather belt with a series of teeth marks visible on the end, as if it had been chewed by the dog.

At least the Kilners disposed of their hypodermic needles, even if they were only in the pedal bin. That wasn’t the case in some houses Cooper had visited, where the floor might be covered in used needles and you had to be careful where you put your feet when you walked across a room. Some illegal drugs gave the user a sense of invulnerability. Individuals began to believe they would never be found out, that no one would ever notice their paraphernalia or suspect what they were up to when they took a spare belt into the toilet to tie off a vein.

Brendan Kilner probably felt he was safe when he took that moment at the door to reassure himself that his needles and his wraps of heroin were safely out of sight.

But perhaps it wasn’t Kilner himself who was the user. It might be his wife or one of his adult children. It wouldn’t make any difference. It was all about family, after all.

Kilner had stopped and was watching him resignedly. He was an old hand and he knew the score. Cooper didn’t have to explain it to him, the way he had to Everett. Some people grew up confident they would never have to deal with the law. Others expected it. And they were rarely mistaken.

‘So what do you want?’ said Kilner. ‘I dare say there’s something.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact,’ said Cooper. ‘There is.’

Diane Fry got a call-out in the middle of the night. She always hated that. Yet at the same time she experienced an immediate buzz of excitement when her phone rang. This was what she lived for, after all. All the hours of tedium and paperwork were worthwhile, just for this.

The drive through Derbyshire had been dark and wet, the transition from city streets back to muddy rural lanes almost too painful to bear. She needed her satnav just to guide her to the A610 and on to the A6 towards Matlock. After that it was like entering the twilight zone.

At Knowle Abbey she had only to follow the signs of activity. By the time she reached the outer cordon the crime-scene tents had been erected and the scene itself was lit by powerful arc lights.

With the dark outline of Knowle Abbey as a sinister backdrop, the whole effect was of a badly illuminated scene from a melodrama. It looked to Fry as though Earl Manby had decided to stage a modern, open-air version of Hamlet in the grounds of the abbey. A perfect setting for Ben Cooper’s ghosts haunting the mock battlements.

When she’d struggled into a scene suit and joined DCI Mackenzie inside the larger tent, Fry could see the gruesome reality. The earl’s body lay sprawled on the grass, a splatter of blood and shredded flesh in a wide arc round him. His head was unrecognisable from this angle. One bloodied pulp looked much like another.

‘Shotgun?’ she asked. Nothing else did that kind of damage to a human body at close quarters.

Mackenzie nodded. ‘He was shot twice. The second barrel was the one that killed him.’

Fry covered her mouth as she examined the injuries caused by the lead shot. The smell of raw meat rose from the ground under the hot lights.

‘And we’re sure it’s the earl himself?’ she said.

‘He was found by one of the staff, who called the family. There’s no doubt about it. I’m afraid there’s been a lot of trampling of the scene and contamination of the evidence already, before we got here.’

Gradually, Fry moved around to the other side of the tent. She could see now that the left side of the earl’s face was more or less intact. Most of the damage had been done to the back and side of his head. One ear had been shattered and the jawbone gleamed through oozing blood.

At least it looked as though the earl had tried to defend himself. The palms of his hands were also shredded by pellets, as if he’d made a defensive gesture at the last moment, trying to protect his face from the blast. But it had been futile. It was a pity he hadn’t taken one of his own weapons from the gunroom with him when he went out in the grounds. His attacker might have thought twice.

But why had the earl gone out into the grounds of the abbey last night at all? It seemed an odd question to be asking herself, really. Why shouldn’t any individual walk around his own property in perfect safety, whenever he wanted to? It ought not to matter who they were. But Walter Manby had been under threat. He’d been warned there might be an imminent danger to his life. And he’d still felt able to wander alone in the dark through the wooded parklands of Knowle.

In a way Fry had to admire the courage or self-assurance this man must have felt. Perhaps it was a quality that came with the position he’d been born into, like that air of affluence that had turned out to be such a façade. Maybe it was being on his own property that gave him confidence. The earl and Knowle Abbey had certainly seemed inseparable.

‘Do you think he came out here to meet someone he knew?’ she said.

‘We don’t know,’ said Mackenzie. ‘Let’s see what evidence Forensics can turn up.’

‘It’s a bad business.’

Mackenzie smiled grimly. ‘Tell me about it. We’ll need to start interviewing staff.’

‘Where are we going to get the help from?’

‘Why, how many are there?’

‘About three hundred,’ said Fry automatically.

‘Seriously?’

‘Guides, housekeepers, office staff, the maintenance team, shop assistants, kitchen and serving staff in the restaurant, gardeners, gamekeepers, farmers, river bailiffs, car park attendants … where do you want to start?’

Mackenzie frowned at her tone. ‘With those who were on duty here when the shooting occurred. That’s simple enough, Diane.’

Fry took one last look at the body before she left the tent and stripped off her scene suit.

‘When word gets round about this,’ she said, ‘I know someone who’ll say, “I told you so”.’

36

Tuesday 5 November

That morning Cooper was due to give evidence in a trial at Derby Crown Court. Luckily, he didn’t have to go all the way to Derby any more and waste an entire day sitting around waiting for his few minutes in court. The new video-link technology allowed him to give his evidence from a desk right there at the divisional headquarters in Edendale.

Other officers had been busy working on the George Redfearn murder inquiry. As he arrived at West Street, Cooper had seen Diane Fry’s boss DCI Alistair Mackenzie there from the Major Crime Unit. Mackenzie would no doubt be acting as senior investigating officer.

For a moment Cooper wondered if the MCU had considered the Sandra Blair case to be too unimportant to merit their full attention from the start, even before doubt was cast on its status as a murder inquiry by the post-mortem results. He would have to make the best of that. While everyone else’s attention was on the murder, he had the chance to resolve the situation at Knowle Abbey.

But when he came out of the video-link room later in the morning, Cooper began to hear people talking about Knowle Abbey in urgent tones. He had no idea what was going on. He felt as though he’d been locked into suspended animation for the past hour or so and emerged to find the world had moved on without him.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Luke Irvine, who was the only occupant of the CID room. ‘What’s all this about Knowle Abbey?’

‘It’s the earl.’

Cooper detected the air of disaster. ‘Is he dead?’

‘He died last night. He was fatally wounded with a shotgun while everyone’s attention was distracted by the fire at the estate village.’

‘And I don’t suppose it was an accident, or suicide.’

‘No chance.’

Cooper slowly gathered his team together from their various assignments. It seemed more important than ever that they concentrated on making connections that could explain the whole story, and not just a small part of it.

He’d asked for background enquiries on all the people involved in the protest group and there ought to be some results by now.

‘Talk to us about the quarry plan for Alderhill first, Luke,’ he said.

Irvine explained the position of Eden Valley Mineral Products and their plans for Alderhill Quarry.

‘George Redfearn was Development Director at the company,’ he said. ‘Mr Redfearn was responsible for winning the contract to bring the quarry back into operation. His name is signed on the dotted line. Along with the earl’s of course.’

‘So, the protest group,’ said Cooper. ‘The people we’re interested in include Jason Shaw, aged thirty-two, with an address in Bowden on the Knowle estate, where we’re told he works as a gamekeeper.’

‘Here’s an interesting thing, though,’ said Irvine. ‘At the end of last year Jason Shaw’s hours at Knowle Abbey were cut back. So he managed to find some part-time work at Deeplow Quarry. He’s been there a few months now.’

‘So he may have been the one who learned how to put an explosive charge together?’ asked Irvine.

‘With diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, you mean?’

‘Exactly.’

‘He wasn’t actually given any training in the use of explosives,’ said Irvine. ‘They were pretty clear on that. He had no authorisation or experience. But I suppose you can pick up a few things just by observing and asking questions.’

‘A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,’ said Cooper. ‘Especially when it comes to making explosives. Anything else?’

‘Well, before he got a job at the abbey, do you know Shaw worked at the cheese factory in Hartington?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘He was a warehouseman and forklift truck driver.’

‘A real jack of all trades.’

‘From some of the hints I’ve been given when I followed up on Shaw, gamekeeping is the job that’s most up his street, though.’

‘What do you mean, Luke?’

Irvine smiled. ‘It seems Jason Shaw is known for producing the occasional rabbit or pheasant in return for a favour. No questions asked about where they came from. You get the picture?’

‘He’s a poacher.’

‘And so was his father before him. They say that’s where his skill came from – he learned the tricks of the trade from his dad. In fact, Shaw has a conviction on file for an offence fourteen years ago, when he was a teenager. He was caught out with his father taking a deer. So whoever gave him the job as a gamekeeper probably made a smart move.’

‘The tricks of the trade,’ said Cooper. ‘He’ll have learned how to use a shotgun at an early age too.’

‘We don’t have any real evidence against Jason Shaw,’ pointed out Hurst. ‘It’s only speculation. All circumstantial.’

‘What do we know of his whereabouts now?’

‘He’s not due at the quarry today, but he has a late shift at the abbey. Apparently, they’re drafting in some of the estate staff to provide a bit of extra security at night-time.’

‘Wait a minute – who interviewed Shaw? Wasn’t it you, Luke?’

Irvine shifted uneasily. ‘Me – and Carol Villiers. When we came back, we reported to DS Fry.’

‘I see.’

‘You weren’t here, Ben.’

‘Right.’

Cooper found he couldn’t fault Irvine. Though the excuse he’d just relied on was the same one he’d used at the scene of George Redfearn’s murder, when it was the other way round and Fry had been absent. It sounded like a shift in loyalties. But he was probably imagining things.

‘It seems to me that Shaw developed a relationship with Sandra Blair after they met in the protest group,’ said Carol Villiers. ‘We know it was Jason Shaw she met up with in Longnor on the evening she died.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well, he does have a link with the Nadens,’ said Becky Hurst.

‘Does he?’

‘Yes.’ Hurst consulted her notes. ‘Geoff and Sally Naden were both made redundant from the cheese factory in Hartington. Mr Naden had been a cheese-maker for twenty-five years and his wife worked in the offices. When they lost their jobs he became a parking attendant at Knowle Abbey and she went to work in the kitchen making sandwiches for the café.’

‘Interesting.’

Cooper imagined those jobs weren’t as well paid as the Nadens had been used to, but they had probably felt they were secure working for the earl. With so many visitors, their services would always be needed. But then they must have found out that Lord Manby was planning to get rid of them – and the visitors too. He had no interest in the welfare of his staff, only in the money he could make from the estate’s assets.

‘We know about Rob Beresford,’ said Hurst. ‘He appears to be an open book. A bit hot-headed maybe, but he doesn’t seem the type to be violent.’

‘And Sandra Blair we know too,’ added Irvine.

‘There was the note in her diary about a meeting at the Grandfather Oak. What was that meeting all about?’

‘I’m not sure it ever took place,’ said Cooper.

It seemed to Cooper that the graveyard protest campaign had drawn attention away from the real issue. Among the protest group there must have been a more extreme faction, one or two individuals who wanted direct action. Well, more than direct action – they intended violence. They were very angry.

‘I think there were two factions, who had a disagreement,’ said Cooper. ‘And it all fell apart that Halloween night. Somebody wasn’t where they were supposed to be according to the plan. That person was out killing George Redfearn at Pilsbury Castle. Mr Redfearn’s murder was a message the earl couldn’t ignore.’

‘But who was that?’ asked Villiers.

‘Whoever Sandra Blair was supposed to meet at the bridge that night.’

‘We’ve talked to the members of the group we can identify. They all insist there were only five in the core group – the Nadens, Jason Shaw, Rob Beresford and Sandra Blair herself.’

‘It’s not true, though,’ said Cooper.

‘Why, Ben?’ said Villiers.

He indicated the group photo on his screen, the one taken at Harpur Hill with the Nadens, Shaw, Beresford and Sandra Blair.

‘Well, think about it,’ he said. ‘This photo was taken on Sandra’s phone. But she’s in the shot herself. So who took the picture?’

Ben Cooper was anxious to get an opportunity to see inside Jason Shaw’s house. But at the moment he didn’t have enough justification for a search warrant. As Irvine had said, it was all speculation and suspicion. It was a shame, though. A person’s home told you more about them than any amount of background checks you could do. No matter how many friends, colleagues and neighbours you talked to, you wouldn’t ever get a true picture of the person. Everyone created a public façade for themselves, sometimes several. You could be one person at work, a different one with the family, and another when you were down the pub with your friends. But inside the home was where the façade broke down. You could see the aspects of a person’s life that they didn’t want anyone to know about.

It was only inside Sandra Blair’s home that he’d got a proper feeling for the sort of person she was. And, though she had some unusual interests, he didn’t feel she was the fanatical type who would be willing to take violent direct action, as she’d been described by the Nadens.

And of course he’d seen inside Knowle Abbey too. That was an eye-opener. Yet he’d learned almost nothing about its present owner, while learning perhaps too much about some of his eccentric ancestors. Earl Manby remained an enigmatic figure, a sort of figurehead for the estate, like the eagle’s head emblem of the Manby family, representing something more than just itself.

Cooper would have liked to be able to see behind the façade being presented at Knowle on behalf of his lordship, if only for the sake of his own curiosity. But it probably wouldn’t happen now. He wondered if Detective Superintendent Branagh had ever managed to get a few words with the earl, as he’d suggested. That was a conversation he would love to have overheard. They were two people accustomed to exercising power.

In a way coffin roads represented the worst aspects of the hierarchical structures so many people had lived with. They weren’t legacies from an ancient past, but were deliberately brought into being during medieval times. They were an unintended side-effect of an old canon law on the rights of parishioners. As Bill Latham had said himself, they were just one more exercise in power and privilege.

Cooper put on his jacket and set off to visit Knowle Abbey for the final time.

Staff interviews were under way at Knowle. The Major Crime Unit had taken over the estate office, ousting Meredith Burns from her desk.

Cooper thought of that message they’d found: ‘Meet Grandfather, 1am’. But that must have been a different meeting, surely? It had been marked in Sandra Blair’s diary for 31 October. And this killing had happened earlier than one o’clock. It had been planned for the period when the bonfire was blazing away in Bowden, a time when many of the staff from the abbey were either at home themselves or distracted from their duties.

‘A shotgun,’ he said when he met Fry at the outer cordon. ‘That’s a totally different situation altogether from the other deaths, Diane.’

‘Absolutely.’

Of course, there were many legally held shotguns in the possession of ordinary individuals in an area like this. Farmers always had them. Cooper owned one himself, though he kept it in the gun cabinet at Bridge End Farm with Matt’s.

But right now he was thinking of the men he’d seen at that remote farmstead on Axe Edge Moor. Bagshaw Farm, the home of Daniel Grady. Had one of those men been sent on a different kind of rat hunt?

He hadn’t liked Grady and felt sure a bit of digging would turn up all kinds of dubious activities. But was Grady so closely involved with the protest group? Or did somebody simply have enough money to pay him for this kind of service?

Cooper told Fry about the plans for Alderhill Quarry and the link to George Redfearn’s company. Her mouth fell open when he mentioned the sum of two hundred million pounds.

‘Do you remember what Meredith Burns said that first time we visited Knowle Abbey?’ said Cooper. ‘When I offended her by asking for a photograph of the earl?’

‘Yes, she said he wasn’t a rock star. I thought that was stating the obvious myself.’

‘No, not that. She said he would much rather find some other way of paying for the upkeep of the abbey, instead of letting all these visitors in. Because it was his home.’

‘Oh, yes. I do remember,’ said Fry.

‘Well, this is it, isn’t it?’

‘This is what?’

‘The quarry scheme is his alternative way of funding the repair and maintenance of Knowle Abbey.’ Cooper waved a hand at the visitors being turned away at the gate, at the car parking area, and the buildings converted for use as a restaurant, a craft centre, a gift shop. ‘The revenue from the quarry would have enabled him to put a stop to all this. No more crowds of visitors coming in to gawp at his home.’

‘Well, it would be a shame, I suppose,’ said Fry, ‘if you’re interested in that sort of thing. But there are plenty of other historic houses in Derbyshire. Chatsworth is much grander, they tell me. And Haddon Hall is supposed to be better preserved.’

‘No, no, you’re missing the point,’ said Cooper. ‘Think about it for a minute. No paying visitors means no restaurant, no craft centre, no gift shop and no plant nursery. And without those there would be no guides, no car park attendants, no catering staff or shop assistants. A lot of people would lose their jobs.’

‘You’re right.’

Cooper sighed. He didn’t want to be right. Not all the time. Not when the truth seemed so tragic and so inevitable.

‘At the moment Knowle Abbey is putting a lot of money back into local communities through the wages paid to all these staff. That would stop if the quarry goes ahead. Eden Valley Mineral Products would have no interest in employing local people.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘It’s just like the cheese factory all over again.’

‘What?’ said Fry, puzzled.

‘Never mind.’

‘You know, that’s not what I expected you to say.’

‘What did you expect me to say, Diane?’

‘“I told you so.”’