Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

39

The lights of three police cars arriving in convoy created quite a stir, even in Bowden. They certainly attracted the attention of the residents who were at home that Tuesday evening, including Caroline Mellor, who appeared at her window across the green to observe the activity.

Two of the vehicles pulled up outside the home of Jason Shaw and officers piled out. The third car swerved across the road and blocked the access to the village. Two armed officers went to the front door, while another covered the back yard. Diane Fry waited at a safe distance with Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst, while uniformed officers were stationed to keep spectators away.

Fry had checked with the Knowle estate office whether Shaw would be working, but he wasn’t on the staff rota for this evening. And his blue Land Rover Discovery stood by the side of the house.

‘Don’t give him time to react,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget there are firearms kept on the premises.’

When there was no response to their hammering on the front door and shouts of ‘Police!’, the entry team produced a small battering ram and swung it at the lock. The door burst open after two strikes and they entered the house. Jason Shaw’s dog could be heard barking hysterically from the rear of the property.

After a few seconds one of the officers appeared in the doorway and signalled to Fry. The CID team moved into the house. But they were disappointed to find it empty.

‘All the rooms are clear, Sergeant.’

‘His Land Rover is here.’

‘Even so, there’s no one home.’

Fry went through the rooms herself and found the gun cabinet. It was securely locked, as it ought to be, so there was no way of telling whether both shotguns were still inside. Not without breaking it open, which would take time.

She looked round for Irvine and Hurst. ‘Get out there and start talking to the neighbours and find out if they know where he is. We don’t want him to get a warning, in case he decides to go to ground.’

‘We’d never find him in these woods, even in daylight.’

‘Exactly. We might need to request the air support unit.’

As Fry looked around the untidy sitting room, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake in trying to make the arrest after dusk. Perhaps she should have waited until morning and conducted the operation at first light. It was galling to think that Shaw had vanished into those dark woodlands. He would know the grounds of Knowle Abbey better than almost anyone. If she didn’t locate him quickly, she might never see Jason Shaw again.

While she waited she examined the items strewn across the surface of a small table. Shaw had gathered a lot of magazines about country sports. Shooting Times, The Field, Sporting Gun. Many of them had cover illustrations of men in ear defenders aiming shotguns at unidentified targets, or dogs with dead birds in their mouths. Fry recalled a failed attempt by an animal rights organisation to get this sort of magazine banished to the top shelf in newsagents, along with the soft porn.

She pushed some of the magazines aside. Underneath she found an object she couldn’t identify. It seemed to be a hoop of something like dried willow, wrapped with a thin band of leather. A web of white string filled the space inside the hoop, decorated with tiny beads, and someone had attached a couple of feathers to the bottom.

‘A dreamcatcher,’ said Luke Irvine, jolting Fry out of her distraction.

‘Is that what it is?’

‘They’re Native American originally. But they’re popular here now.’

Fry frowned. ‘Popular with who?’

Irvine shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, you know – people interested in spiritual things. There was one on the wall at Sandra Blair’s cottage. I think she probably made it herself. I bet she made this one for Mr Shaw.’

‘What is it supposed to do?’ asked Fry.

‘It stops you having bad dreams.’

Fry turned the dreamcatcher over and laid it back on the magazines. It looked incongruous lying against a picture of a slaughtered pheasant in the jaws of a Golden Retriever.

‘I wonder if that worked for Jason Shaw,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t look as though he ever used it.’

‘No.’

‘I came to tell you the dog unit has arrived,’ said Irvine. ‘They’ve brought the sniffer dog for the explosives.’

‘Oh, yes. Let’s get them in.’

An officer entered with a Springer Spaniel, which began to sniff its way enthusiastically around the house.

Fry checked the phone for messages, peered into the cupboards, walked out into the back yard, trying to ignore the barking dog. Becky Hurst appeared, with Mrs Mellor trailing behind her, looking alarmed but flushed with excitement.

‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw Fry, ‘isn’t Detective Sergeant Cooper here?’

‘No. But you remember me, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Mellor, though Fry suspected it wasn’t her memory she was dubious about.

‘You’re aware that we’re looking for Jason Shaw?’

‘Yes. I told your girl here. When I saw Jason half an hour ago, he said he was going down to the gift shop. They wanted him to help out with something.’

Inside the Hartington cheese factory Cooper found that the buildings hadn’t been entirely cleared of their contents. In a corridor he passed pairs of white wellies that looked as though they’d missed their last wash when the factory closed. A few ancient bits of broken equipment stood around, with a metal filing cabinet and a scatter of Stilton cheese leaflets still lying on the floor.

The modern part of the factory was quite different from the old stone buildings. He passed through large cheese storage areas with quarry-tiled floors, and one building like the lower level of a multi-storey car park, with a low ceiling, hefty pillars and shadowy alcoves.

‘Jason? Where are you?’ he called.

There was a muffled laugh somewhere in the darkness.

‘Come on. I know you’re there, Jason. We’re long past the time for playing the fool.’

Something metallic banged against a wall. Cooper wondered if there was a shotgun pointing at him from a dark corner of the building. He moved sideways, away from any residual light that might be creeping through the doorway behind him or from the skylights in the roof.

The fireworks display still showered the sky with cascades of colour and created a background din of bangs and crackles. The blast of a shotgun would hardly be noticed on Bonfire Night. It would be just one more distant explosion to frighten the pigeons. No one would bother to dial the emergency number or come to see what was happening in the old cheese factory.

Then he glimpsed something light-coloured, moving across an opening. The figure was ahead of him in one of the cavernous rooms, slipping through another doorway deeper into the abandoned factory.

The person moved with a lightness and agility that surprised him. He recalled Jason Shaw’s description of the woman he’d seen in the woods near the Corpse Bridge that Halloween night, the ghostly white flicker and swirl as a figure dodged through the trees. Was he seeing the same phantom that Shaw had described so convincingly? Could the same apparition be right here in the cheese factory? Even for the most impressionable mind, that didn’t make any sense.

But that pale shape reminded Cooper of something else. He could see an individual sitting across the table from him in Interview Room One at West Street.

40

After that it was easy. Even Jason Shaw wouldn’t have walked into the gift shop at Knowle Abbey with a shotgun.

Fry directed the police vehicles round to the back entrance, where their presence wouldn’t be noticed from the shop. With officers outside each entrance, she simply walked in with Irvine and Hurst, told Shaw he was being arrested and read him his rights while Irvine put the cuffs on.

‘You do not have to say anything,’ she recited. ‘However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

It felt odd saying it surrounded by tea towels and bookmarks with pictures of Knowle Abbey, and shelves of mugs saying ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.

‘What’s this all about?’ said Shaw.

‘I’m sure you know.’

‘Is it Sandra?’ said Shaw as he was led out to the car. ‘I think I was in love with her, in a way. It’s not often you meet a woman like that.’

‘Save it,’ said Fry.

‘She had so much life in her. I had to avenge her.’

‘Really?’ said Irvine as they put Shaw into the back of the car. ‘Weren’t you responsible for her death?’

‘No. It was Manby to blame for that.’

Hurst grasped Irvine’s arm. ‘We can’t question him now or take into account anything he says.’

‘I know.’

‘And if you mean the quarry man Redfearn,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

Fry stopped the car from driving away.

‘There’s one thing we have to ask him,’ she said.

‘But, Diane,’ protested Hurst.

‘If we believe there may be immediate danger to life.’

Hurst backed off then. ‘You’re right.’

Fry leaned into the car and stared hard at Shaw.

‘Where are the explosives, Jason?’ she said. ‘You took some explosives from Deeplow Quarry. Diesel and ammonium nitrate pellets.’

Shaw shook his head. ‘I took them. But I don’t have them now.’

Fry watched the car drive away across the parkland towards the gates of Knowle Abbey. She hadn’t taken much notice of the phone call she’d received from Ben Cooper. She knew that Jason Shaw would be under arrest long before Cooper was due to meet him at the cheese factory in Hartington.

Guiltily, she’d been imagining Cooper waiting at the derelict building for hours in the cold and the darkness, hoping for his coup, while she was busy doing the real work here at Bowden.

But if it was true that Shaw hadn’t killed George Redfearn, who had? And who was Cooper meeting in Hartington?

Though the tall, athletic figure was familiar to Cooper, she was no longer the young woman who’d sat nervously in Interview Room One staring at a cup of cold coffee. He couldn’t imagine this woman being intimidated by her surroundings. Her hands were steady now and the rings on her fingers glinted in the glare of a rocket as she stood in the darkness of the abandoned factory.

‘Poppy,’ said Cooper. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Cooper peered into the gloom, trying to make out her face. ‘What for?’

‘Everything, I suppose. It wasn’t meant to be like this. It all went wrong.’

There was no light in here, except for a few patches of greenish light from the fog-shrouded moon filtering through the skylights in the roof. Poppy Mellor stood on the edge of one of the rectangles of light, making the shadows around her seem so much darker.

‘Are the rest of the group here?’ asked Cooper.

He looked round, but could see nothing in the darkness. It was another of the large storage areas. The low ceiling and heavy pillars seemed to press in on him and made him feel claustrophobic, though he knew the room must be extensive.

Poppy didn’t answer him. It was as if she weren’t really listening, but just wanted the opportunity to talk.

‘The group have been like a family to me,’ she said. ‘Closer than my real parents or my brother. And just like a proper family, I didn’t really choose them.’

Was she armed with something? Her right arm was pressed too close to her side for him to be sure. Cooper realised he would have to let her talk. He needed her to stay calm and relaxed, and then he might find out what was going on. He also needed time for his back-up to arrive.

Cooper glanced nervously around again. If back-up was going to arrive.

‘Yes. We just came together for this one purpose. It was almost random. We talked to each other all the time on those walks. We talked like I’ve never been able to talk to my dad.’

‘They were loyal too,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re right. They were. None of them gave away the fact that I was there at the bridge, did they?’

‘No. We accepted your story completely.’

‘Thank you.’

She spoke as if it were a genuine compliment.

‘So what did happen at the bridge?’ asked Cooper.

‘It was bad luck. The fact is, Sandra was out of control that night. I don’t know what she was on exactly, but she was totally out of her head. She began to run around in the woods like a crazy woman. Then she came after me and chased me towards the bridge. She scared me. I thought she was going to do me some harm. God knows what she was thinking, but I’m sure she was hallucinating. The others had no idea what was going on, though. We were supposed to be quiet and not draw any attention to ourselves. When they heard all the commotion they didn’t know what to think.’

‘They imagined someone else must be there,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘And that would have ruined the plan.’

Cooper felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He reached for it slowly, but Poppy backed away again and he lost sight of her in the shadows.

‘Sandra caught me near the bridge,’ said Poppy. ‘I seriously thought she was going to do something bad to me, she was so nuts. I think I must have screamed. Jason says he heard a scream anyway. I suppose that must have been me. Though Sandra was making plenty of noise too, crashing about in the trees. But then she seemed to start coughing or choking and she fell on the ground. I had no idea what to do. I thought she was still messing around.’

‘And no one came to help you?’

‘Yes, Jason did.’ Poppy moved her head sideways so that he couldn’t see her eyes. Was she looking towards someone who stood in the darkness? Or was the gesture merely theatrical?

Cooper moved too, trying to maintain eye contact. Perhaps he ought to arrest her right now. But what had she admitted to, really? Perverting the course of justice? Conspiracy? There wasn’t much of a case against her. He needed to know more.

‘It was lucky I wasn’t relying on Rob,’ said Poppy. ‘He’s not the bravest of people.’

‘What happened to Sandra?’ persisted Cooper.

Poppy sighed. ‘She should never have come out with us on something like that. We didn’t know she had a heart condition.’

‘I don’t think she knew either.’

‘If she had a family history of heart disease, she ought to have gone to her GP for a review. I bet she was a prime candidate for heart disease. A bad diet, smoking, too little exercise, a family history…’

‘So. At some point on this particular evening she simply dropped down dead in front of you,’ said Cooper.

‘Pretty much.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I’ve got to admit, I had no idea what to do. I was about ready to panic, to be honest. But Jason said he’d done a bit of first-aid training. He tried CPR. You know, pressing on her chest, mouth-to-mouth, and all that.’

‘But no one called an ambulance, did they?’

‘No. Well … no, we didn’t.’

Cooper was silent for a moment. ‘No matter how long Mr Shaw performed CPR, it was pretty useless without defibrillation, which is what actually restarts the heart.’

‘That’s what I said to Jason. I mean, we both knew that Sandra was dead. It was so obvious. There was no way she was going to be brought back to life. Right in those first few seconds, she was dead. She was already a ghost.’

Cooper shivered at her choice of phrase. The factory had made him feel uneasy as soon as he’d entered it. If your imagination ran in that direction, you might think there were phantom presences here, the spirits of the former occupants imprinted in the walls. But his senses were warning him of whispers and movements in the darkness. He couldn’t tell yet whether they were real or illusory.

‘We both panicked a bit, then,’ said Poppy. ‘Jason had touched her hat and her torch, so he took those away with him, in case of fingerprints. Then we rolled her body off the bridge. Her head hit the rocks, which was a bit nasty. But she wasn’t feeling any pain by then, was she?’

She was actually appealing to him for reassurance.

‘No, Poppy,’ he said.

‘It was funny, but it was only when I got home that I thought about her mobile phone. But it must have been in the river, I suppose. I dropped my phone in water once. It didn’t work too well after that.’

Cooper took a cautious step towards her, but she noticed and backed out of the light. That was worse. Now she was almost invisible and he was the one standing directly beneath the opening, bathed in the odd light. He could see the green tinge on the skin of his hands, like the discoloration of flesh after death.

‘Poor Jason was upset,’ said Poppy. ‘He was quite keen on Sandra. He likes them a bit weird, I think.’

Cooper could have kicked himself as he listened to her story. He’d noticed all those people coming forward and telling him part of the truth, as if they’d been told to do that. The Nadens, Jason Shaw, even Brendan Kilner. But he’d never thought to himself: And what about Poppy Mellor? She’d come forward voluntarily and appeared to be a willing witness. But she’d only told part of the truth too.

Yes, she’d been clever in some ways. Yet she was so young, so inexperienced about life. And about people too.

‘And George Redfearn?’ he said.

‘Unfortunate. But it was just like Sandra’s death.’

‘No.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘You can see a heart attack coming. It’s there in the tests. It’s in the blood. But this is different. You don’t see a murder coming.’

‘Sometimes you can.’

‘But it wasn’t you who killed George Redfearn, Poppy. That’s something I can’t believe.’

‘Can’t you, really? But it’s so easy, isn’t it? To get someone up on a high place like that and shove them off. You don’t need much strength.’

‘No, that’s true.’

And he had to admit it was true. A quick push, a momentary loss of balance. He’d imagined it himself on the sharp ridge of Parkhouse Hill just yesterday.

But Poppy was still backing away from him as he crossed the walkway.

‘You are right, though,’ she said.

‘Right?’

‘It wasn’t me. I was back home by then. You can check with my dad, if you want. He’ll be only too happy to talk to you.’

Cooper held his breath, listening for a sound, any sound, in the darkness. He was beginning to feel disorientated by the blackness all around him. His eyes couldn’t adjust because of the light he was standing in. He felt like a character on a stage, pinned by the spotlights, and about to perform his big scene in front of an audience he couldn’t see.

‘You’re a different person from the one I met before, Poppy,’ he said.

‘I was in character before.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I took a joint honours in drama studies at De Montfort,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t great. But good enough.’

Poppy was backing away steadily and Cooper had to follow to keep her in view.

‘And you coached the rest of your group, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘They all played their parts well. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ said Poppy again. Then she paused. ‘But the final act isn’t over yet, I’m afraid.’

Cooper found himself at the foot of a flight of metal steps leading up on to an overhead walkway. It might once have passed over the cheese vats, but now there was nothing but a bare concrete floor below.

He thought he saw Poppy’s pale figure above and ahead of him, and he mounted the steps on to the walkway.

‘Where are you?’ he said.

But the voice came from behind him.

‘I’m here. Very close.’

Cooper stopped moving. He became certain that there was more than one other person in the factory with him. Someone had been here all the time. They’d been keeping very quiet in the darkness. But now he could hear their breathing and a footstep coming closer. So Jason Shaw had come after all. Or had he?

41

Diane Fry slammed her foot down on the accelerator pedal as her Audi hurtled down the A515 towards the Hartington turn-off.

Ben Cooper wasn’t answering his phone, which was typical. He’d probably got himself into a situation where he couldn’t answer it or had no signal. Or perhaps he’d simply turned it off.

Fry cursed him under her breath. Did he really need her help, after all? Had his call been a test: request her help knowing she wouldn’t come, just so he could point to a final betrayal? She couldn’t let him have that satisfaction.

There was a marked car behind her, but the other had taken Jason Shaw back to the custody suite in Edendale, where Becky Hurst would process him. With Luke Irvine in the car with her, she hoped there would be enough manpower. There was no one else available at such short notice, unless she sounded the alarm. And she couldn’t do that yet, without any clear idea about what was happening.

‘Turn here, Diane,’ said Irvine, pointing at the junction to the left.

He seemed to be as worried as she was herself. But then, Irvine knew as well as anyone that his DS was capable of doing something rash.

‘Try Ben’s phone again,’ she said. ‘And keep trying.’

Another face appeared from the darkness, lit for a second by a bursting firework, a blue-and-white flash and crackle through the broken skylights high in the roof of the old cheese factory.

‘Are you on your own?’ said a voice.

‘What do you think?’ replied Cooper.

‘I think you might just have made a mistake.’

Cooper experienced another disorientating memory. The thickset, middle-aged man who’d been raking leaves in the churchyard at Hartington vigorously. He was wearing the same baseball cap, forcing those same untidy clumps of grey hair to stick out at the sides. Cooper remembered that grimly determined expression as he’d lashed out with his rake at the weeds. A deep anger in his expression, an intense physical concentration.

‘Hello, Mr Naden,’ he said.

Naden didn’t reply. Cooper looked from him to Poppy and back again. These two made an unnerving team.

‘It should have been obvious you were the leader,’ said Cooper. ‘I could see it on that photo taken on the testing grounds at Harpur Hill. The one on the old coffin road. The photo that Poppy took, I imagine, since she wasn’t in the shot herself.’

Naden glowered at Poppy Mellor, who shrank a little further into the shadows.

‘What about it?’ he said.

‘We would have been able to identify all the members of the group from that photo anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose you guessed that. And you were right at the front, Mr Naden. As if you were conducting a guided walk. The others were looking to you. Nothing could disguise that.’

‘I told Sandra to delete that photo from her phone,’ said Naden grimly.

‘And she may have done. But she emailed it to herself first. She must have wanted a memento, I suppose. We found it on her laptop.’

‘Idiot woman. She was mad, you know.’

‘She is dead.’

‘Well, I didn’t kill her.’

‘No. But I know who you did kill, Mr Naden.’

Naden had moved closer without him noticing. He didn’t know which way to face now, which direction the threat might come from. The training manuals said you should make sure to have an escape route if you were likely to face a threat. But Cooper was aware only of the drop to the concrete beneath him, the low rail that wouldn’t stop anyone going over.

‘That night, when you were supposed to be at the bridge with the others,’ he said. ‘It didn’t all go wrong by accident, did it? You had a different plan from everyone else.’

He could sense Poppy stiffen and draw in a sharp breath.

‘You said it was the wrong day,’ said Cooper, ‘but your wife thought it was the right day. You knew who was actually wrong, didn’t you?’

With a smug smile, Naden leaned closer to stare into Cooper’s face. ‘She kept insisting it was the right day,’ he said. ‘She didn’t believe me, but kept on and on about it, even after we got home. That gave me the excuse to go out again later that evening, to check what was happening.’

‘But you went to meet George Redfearn instead.’

Naden nodded. ‘Well, he never suspected me. I looked too harmless, I suppose. But I’ve thought about it often enough over the years. Just not in relation to Redfearn.’

‘So how did you do it?’

‘I told him I knew his wife. I said I had some information to give him about her.’

‘Mrs Redfearn was in Paris at the time,’ said Cooper.

‘Exactly. One of her regular trips. She’s ten years younger than him, you know. He was bound to have a sneaking suspicion about what she was up to.’

‘But how did you know personal details about the Redfearns like that?’

Naden pursed his lips. ‘It’s general gossip.’

Cooper could tell Naden was lying.

‘Oh, I get it now,’ he said. ‘You employed Daniel Grady from Eden Valley Enquiries. He purported to be a property enquiry agent asking questions on behalf of a prospective house purchaser. His job is to pick up all the bits of gossip about the neighbours. I bet he’s very good at it, too. Even when money doesn’t change hands. He must be a godsend to potential blackmailers.’

Naden shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it? I had the information I needed. And it worked. Redfearn came to meet me at Pilsbury Castle. It’s a very quiet spot, you know. No witnesses.’

‘Except there were,’ said Cooper.

‘Were there? That’s a shame.’

‘Some tourists staying at Pilsbury saw your car.’

Naden shrugged. ‘It hardly matters. As long as you realise Sally had nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t have involved her in something like that.’

‘How did you know she would keep insisting it was the right day?’

Now Naden laughed. ‘I take it you’re not married, Detective Sergeant?’

Cooper swallowed. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘It was obvious. Well, take it from me, when you’ve been married for a few years, some things become all too predictable. You don’t need to be able to read minds to work out what your partner will say. Sally has become very easy to predict.’

His tone of voice seemed to contradict the sense of his words. Cooper detected something deeper that Naden wasn’t saying, some aspect of his relationship that wasn’t on the surface.

‘But why do something so drastic?’ he said. ‘Why take the risk? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Naden looked at the ground, as if contemplating the distance of the fall. ‘Sally is very sick, you know. She’s in a lot of pain most of the time.’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘We’ve been together for so many years. It’s funny how nothing else seems to matter when you know someone’s going to die very soon. You consider all the things you’ve ever wanted to do, that you ought to do but have never dared to because of the risk to your liberty and reputation. And you start to think, Well, why not?’

Cooper nodded. That was something he could definitely understand. For months after Liz had been killed in the fire, he’d driven around the steepest roads in the Peak District late at night thinking, Well, why not?

‘I think that’s why Sally thinks about murder a lot too,’ said Naden. ‘She once told me that the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to lure them on to a high place and push them off. As long as there are no eyewitnesses, it’s impossible to prove forensically whether they were pushed or just fell.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Cooper. ‘It depends on a lot of factors. For one thing, you’d need a good pretext to get someone into that position.’

Naden’s footsteps clanged on the metal walkway. The sound reverberated around the empty shed. And bounced off the hard concrete floor below.

‘Oh, it’s not that difficult,’ he said.

Diane Fry and Luke Irvine entered the factory through the same door Cooper had used. Outside in Hartington, the last few fireworks were spluttering to a halt after a spectacular finale.

Fry kicked against a pair of wellington boots standing by a doorway and crunched through a pile of dusty leaflets on the floor.

‘What a mess,’ said Irvine in a hushed tone.

‘Let’s hope we find nothing worse,’ said Fry.

They moved steadily through the rooms and were joined by two uniformed officers. The beams of their torches illuminated the darkest corners, alighting on old filing cabinets and mysterious heaps of abandoned equipment.

‘Ben?’ Fry called.

She moved ahead, passing through a doorway, then another, following some instinct she couldn’t explain. She knew Cooper was here, because his car was parked nearby. But she didn’t know who else was.

Ben Cooper hardly knew what happened next. He and Geoff Naden were staring into each other’s eyes. He was aware of Naden’s left hand reaching out to grasp his shoulder, and Naden’s right hand coming up with a length of steel pipe he must have picked up from the floor.

Cooper instinctively grabbed his wrist. He wasn’t as heavy as Naden. He could feel the difference as soon as they made physical contact. He didn’t want either of them to go over that rail. But he was also conscious of Poppy Mellor immediately behind him. Cooper needed to turn round to see what she was doing, but he was reluctant to take his eyes off the other man. He felt for his extendable baton, concealed in a pocket of his coat.

‘Be sensible, Mr Naden,’ he said. ‘This won’t help anyone. It will only make things worse for you.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me any more,’ said Naden grimly.

And then there was a chaos of people shouting and lights swinging across the ceiling, picking up the figures on the walkway, then passing on and reflecting off the skylights, flashing like the starbursts in the sky over Hartington. Cooper heard his own name called, boots clanging on the metal steps.

In an explosion of light he saw Naden raising the length of pipe. Then an impact from behind threw him off balance and he dropped his baton as he threw out a hand to clutch at the rail and save himself from falling.

He dropped to his knees with the breath knocked out of him, expecting a blow to fall at any second. He heard Naden cry out – one loud, angry yell that turned into a scream of fear. Then a sickening impact thudded through the empty shed.

Cooper raised his head. He saw Diane Fry standing at the top of the steps, white-faced and ghostly behind the light of her torch. And Geoff Naden had gone.