Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

14

Diane Fry smiled her ambiguous little smile when Cooper introduced her to the Reverend Latham. He had no idea what she was thinking, but he knew it wouldn’t be anything complimentary about either of them.

‘I thought I’d find you here, Ben,’ she said. ‘Despite the fact that you’re supposed to be off duty, according to your office.’

‘An informal visit. The Reverend Latham is just giving me some insight into the history.’

‘I can imagine,’ she said.

Fry looked round. ‘That’s your crime scene? The bridge.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper.

He looked for Carol Villiers.

‘Carol, would you give the Reverend Latham a lift back to Edendale?’

‘Certainly,’ said Villiers. ‘I can see you’ve got your hands full.’

‘Don’t, Carol,’ said Cooper quietly, unable to suppress a pleading note from his voice.

Villiers said nothing, but gave him a quizzical look. She knew all about Diane Fry. Possibly more than he could guess.

‘Under the bridge,’ said Latham, as he rose and supported himself on his stick to go with Villiers.

‘What, Bill?’ said Cooper.

‘The body. It was under the bridge.’

‘Yes, it was.’

But even as he answered, Cooper realised that Bill Latham hadn’t been asking him a question. His words had formed a statement. It was under the bridge. Latham already knew that. But how?

Latham nodded. ‘It fits,’ he said. ‘Under the bridge. Yes, it would have to be.’

Cooper was distracted by the sound of Fry’s voice.

‘I won’t be a minute,’ she called. ‘I’m just going to take a look at what’s on the other side of the bridge.’

‘Be careful,’ said Cooper automatically, as Villiers and Latham left.

‘Of course.’

There was a smaller stream on the Staffordshire side, with a footpath running alongside it. A few yards along, the stream was crossed by a very slippery wooden footbridge, consisting of nothing more than a single plank wedged into the mud on either side.

Cooper watched Diane Fry walk up the footpath to examine the spot where Staffordshire officers had found the coil of rope. Then with her eyes fixed on the water, she decided to cross the stream. He saw her step casually towards the makeshift footbridge with a horrified fascination.

Despite all her time in the Peak District, Fry had never learned how to choose appropriate footwear. She always seemed to wear the minimum she thought would be required. The flat shoes she was wearing now might have been fine for driving out here from Edendale, and they’d just about coped with the uneven setts on the trackway, as long as she went slowly and took care. But when she left a solid surface, she would be in difficulties. Her soles had no grip on them. The moment she set foot on that greasy plank, the outcome was inevitable.

Instinctively, Cooper stepped forward. He quickly came up behind Fry and was able to grasp her arm to support her just as she began to lose her balance. She hardly seemed to notice his assistance.

‘Where do we come to if we go this way?’ she asked.

‘We’re in Staffordshire now,’ said Cooper. ‘This track leads up towards a village called Hollinsclough.’

‘Staffordshire? Really?’

‘Of course.’

Cooper kept his eye on her. Even Fry didn’t have any jurisdiction in Staffordshire. It wasn’t in the East Midlands, so it was out of the EMSOU’s patch. They had to rely on mutual cooperation with a neighbouring force.

‘It’s strange really, to think that you’ve crossed a border,’ said Cooper, turning to look back at the Corpse Bridge. ‘It’s such a narrow stretch of water and such a small bridge. Yet it’s always meant so much to people because of its position and significance.’

‘A crossing from life to death?’ suggested Fry.

Cooper swung round sharply. ‘What made you say that?’

Fry smiled again. ‘I just thought it was something you would be thinking, Ben.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, wasn’t it?’

‘Something like that.’

Fry nodded, apparently pleased with herself. Just because she’d guessed at a notion flitting through his imagination. Was that what she regarded as insight?

‘And what about this way?’ she said, pointing to the main route of the trackway where it climbed through the trees.

‘That’s the coffin road,’ said Cooper. ‘It goes to Bowden.’

‘Derbyshire?’

‘Just about.’

Cooper explained the nature of the estate village and its relationship to Knowle Abbey.

‘And that’s where the coffin way leads to?’ she asked.

‘Yes, to Bowden. It’s where they had to take their bodies, for burial in the graveyard there.’

He could see the concept was difficult for Diane Fry to understand. And why wouldn’t it be, for someone who had grown up in a city like Birmingham? To Fry, the idea of trekking across the Peak District countryside carrying a coffin probably sounded like just another inexplicable rural tradition.

Cooper showed her the route of the coffin road on his map and carefully explained why people from the hamlets to the east had been forced to carry their dead all this way. It hadn’t been their choice, or a random whim. They were completely at the mercy of those who had all the money and power.

‘But this track crosses the bridge, then recrosses the river a few hundred yards further down,’ pointed out Fry. ‘Why would they do that? It doesn’t make sense. You just end up back on the same side of the river that you started from.’

He could see Fry frowning at the map in bafflement. What she said was accurate, of course. That was exactly what the coffin road did. And she was right, too, that there seemed no sense in it. No rhyme or reason, or apparent purpose.

Or at least, no reason in the purely logical, modern world that Diane Fry lived in.

‘Spirits,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘Spirits,’ he repeated, with that sinking feeling of resignation. He knew what her response would be when he tried to explain this. Derision and disbelief. But he was quite used to that now.

‘Do you really mean—’ she began.

‘Yes, spirits,’ he said. ‘Spirits can’t cross water.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Perhaps.’

Fry turned away and began to walk up the track and Cooper followed her. As they climbed away from the banks of the river, the trees soon began to close in again.

Cooper couldn’t escape the feeling that Diane Fry was observing him constantly. He supposed she was waiting for him to slip up and make a mistake. She’d be watching him for any sign of weakness or hesitation, an indication that his mind wasn’t fully focused on his work, that his powers of concentration still hadn’t fully returned. She’d be hoping that he wasn’t up to the job.

‘Shrieking in the woods, white figures moving through the trees,’ she said. ‘What would the folklore say, Ben?’

If he’d been talking to anyone else, Cooper might have mentioned corpse candles. It was the name given to a flame or ball of light seen travelling above the ground on the route from a cemetery to a dying person’s house and back again. For some reason the light was usually blue. A similar light appearing in a graveyard was believed to be an omen of approaching tragedy. Cooper seemed to recall that they appeared on the night before a death. The stories told about corpse lights were like those of the will-o’-the-wisps, mischievous spirits who attempted to lead travellers astray.

As Diane Fry would certainly have pointed out, there were always logical explanations for these things. Anyone observing a will-o’-the-wisp might be seeing nothing more than a luminescent barn owl. A wildlife officer had once told him that some barn owls possessed a form of bioluminescence caused by honey fungus. The white plumage of the birds could look eerie enough at night, if you glimpsed one in your torchlight. A luminescent barn owl flitting through the darkness would be enough to spook anyone. And corpse candles? Witnesses might just have been noticing the effect of methane gas, the product of decomposing organic material in marshes and peat bogs.

But even in the twenty-first century, the prosaic scientific explanations weren’t always what people wanted. Everyone liked a bit of mystery. Generation after generation, the more superstitious inhabitants of Derbyshire had preferred to believe in spirits.

‘Who told you that anyway?’ asked Cooper.

‘DC Villiers. I heard about the statements from your members of the public this morning.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have you got a problem with that? We’re colleagues, aren’t we? We should be working together.’

‘If you say so.’

Cooper stopped. He’d caught a glimpse of something blue glittering among the trees, a flash of light, as if from a piece of glass reflecting the sun. The sight was irresistible, a signal tempting him from the path. He had no option but to turn aside and investigate.

When he got closer he could see that what he’d seen was a ball of smoky blue glass, the kind of thing sold in craft centres and gift shops for use as a table ornament or a flower vase. His sister would have taken it home and placed a scented candle inside it.

But inside this one was a tangle of threads. There were lengths of cotton of every colour – not only white and black threads, but bright strands twisted among them in no discernible pattern. It was just a random hotch-potch of colour, all given an eerie glow by the blue of the glass. The neck of the ball was attached to a branch of a rowan tree by a pair of ribbons and it moved slightly in the breeze, spinning one way and then the other. It had been placed at a height just above Cooper’s head, but he could reach up to stop its movement. Then he saw the scraps of paper entangled among the threads, rolled into little tubes and thrust into the multicoloured mass.

‘What is it?’

Cooper turned at the sound of Fry’s voice. As happened so often, her words intruded like a cold dose of reality from the outside world at a moment when he was contemplating the mysteries of the rural imagination, feeling the centuries of belief in magic running disturbingly through his veins. There was something about these old superstitions that made him shiver, not only with apprehension, but with understanding too.

‘You don’t want to know, Diane,’ he said.

‘I suppose that means it’s something absurd and rustic.’

‘Well, it’s a witch bottle,’ said Cooper.

Fry snorted. ‘Exactly.’

Cooper looked at her, not at all surprised this time that she’d noticed him leaving the path and decided to follow him. It was like being under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He wondered what she would have done if he’d simply sneaked off to relieve himself behind a tree. Would she have stood there making notes?

‘It should probably be called a “watch ball” actually,’ he said. ‘It’s used to guard against evil spirits. Its purpose is to draw in and trap negative energy that might have been directed at its owner. It can counteract spells cast by witches or prevent spirits moving about at night. That’s why it’s placed here, by the coffin road, because it’s the route spirits would take. It’s a sort of diversion sign, to deflect evil and keep it away from something, or someone.’

Despite her initial reaction, Fry was peering more closely into the blue glass as Cooper held it still. ‘So the pieces of paper inside?’

‘Charms,’ said Cooper. ‘If we can get them out and interpret them, they might give us an idea what evil the witch bottle is designed to counteract and who the charms might be aimed at. And perhaps who put them here.’

‘Well, that sounds like a job for a superstitious country boy,’ said Fry. ‘I wonder where we’d find one of those.’

Carefully, Cooper began to untie the ribbons from the branch and reached out to grasp the ball.

‘Fingerprints,’ said Fry automatically.

‘You’re right, of course.’

Cooper found a fresh pair of latex gloves in his pocket and pulled them on before handling the ball. It was surprisingly light. The glass must be very thin, he supposed.

‘What’s in the ball?’ asked Fry. ‘What are all those bits of paper?’

Cooper couldn’t make out the language written on them or interpret the symbols. But he had a good idea what they would be.

‘Spells,’ he said. ‘Probably curses.’

‘Oh, right.’

And there was something else shoved right into the middle. A piece of clay, formed into a distinctive shape. Not human, though. A bird.

‘Now that I recognise,’ said Fry. ‘It’s an eagle’s head.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does it have some significance?’ she asked.

‘Around here it does.’

Cooper placed everything into evidence bags for the forensic examiner. As he turned the ball in his hand, he wondered how the colour was introduced into the glass when it was made. The swirls of blue looked so in– substantial and translucent. They could almost have been tiny evil spirits themselves, trapped in the surface of the bottle.

15

Ben Cooper parked his Toyota outside Earl Sterndale’s best-known landmark – its pub, the Quiet Woman. The swinging wooden sign outside was much photographed by tourists in the summer, because it showed an image of a headless woman. According to the story behind the pub’s name, that was a previous landlord’s solution to the problem of keeping his garrulous wife quiet.

There was a campsite next to the pub, though it was empty. Marston’s Burton Ales. Outside the door stood an old sink and a brush for boot washing, and plastic bags were kept in the porch for walkers to put over their dirty boots before entering the pub. It was the same principle as the one used at crime scenes, where forensic examiners and police officers wore plastic overshoes to avoid contaminating the scene with trace evidence and footwear marks.

The pub had milk delivered from a dairy in Hazel Grove. The bottles were still sitting in the porch, even though it was past midday. Of course, the Quiet Woman was closed. Many landlords in the more outlying villages found there was no point in opening their pubs during the day, especially in the winter months. There just wasn’t enough lunchtime trade to pay for the overheads.

Cooper looked across the road to locate the Beresfords’ house. Luke Irvine would be unhappy that his DS seemed to be covering the same ground, as if Irvine hadn’t done a good enough job the first time round. But that couldn’t be helped. Not today. It was bad enough having Diane Fry tagging along like a spare part. Didn’t she have anything better to do with her time? He supposed he could ask her, but he would only get a sarcastic answer.

‘Are you coming?’ he said.

‘No, I’ll wait here,’ said Fry. ‘I’ve got a few phone calls to make.’

‘Fair enough.’

Across the road he found Mrs Beresford was at home on her own, which was fine by Cooper.

‘One of your colleagues came the other day, you know,’ she said straight away when she answered the door.

‘I know. Just a couple more questions.’

She was a small woman with a chilled look, her ears and nose pink with cold as if she’d just come back from a brisk walk on the moors. Even as Cooper introduced himself, she was removing a quilted body warmer. Perhaps he was lucky to have caught her.

‘I don’t know what else I can tell you,’ she said.

‘It’s about Sandra Blair’s husband,’ said Cooper.

‘Gary? He died. I did tell—’

‘Yes. About five years ago?’

‘That would be about right.’

‘Do you happen to know where Mr Blair’s family are?’

‘His family? Well, I don’t think his parents are still around. They used to live at Bowden, of course.’

‘The estate village for Knowle Abbey.’

‘Yes. Sandra and Gary lived with his parents for a while after they got married. But there was no way they could ever have had children there, in one of those little houses. And they were planning a family. At least … Sandra said they were.’

‘And no other relatives in the area?’

‘Not that I know of. Some of the people at Bowden would have a better idea, perhaps.’

‘Thank you.’

Cooper went back to his car and drove through Earl Sterndale. Ahead he saw a distinctive hill called High Wheeldon. He glanced at Fry, but she was still busy with her phone, talking to someone at her office in St Ann’s.

‘Everything okay, Diane?’ he said, hoping she was being called back to Nottingham.

She nodded. ‘Absolutely fine.’

Cooper sighed and drove on. Fry hadn’t even asked where they were going next.

Viewed from the road out of the village, High Wheeldon looked like a Derbyshire pyramid, a transplant from Egypt, or something casually dropped by a passing alien. Artificial, certainly. Nature wasn’t capable of constructing such a regular, conical shape. Yet when you got closer and the road skirted its eastern side, you could see that it had been an optical illusion. High Wheeldon wasn’t shaped like a pyramid at all from here, but was just another irregular hump in the landscape, mysterious enough in its own enigmatic way, lending itself to leaps of the imagination, the way so much of the Peak District landscape did.

Once you turned off the main road to Longnor, it became obvious that Bowden was no ordinary village. To enter it you had to pass through a gateway and over a cattle grid, past the signs warning you that it was private property and part of the Knowle Abbey estate.

The houses were all well constructed from local stone, but in a surprisingly wide variety of architectural styles. It was as if the architect, or the earl who’d commissioned him, couldn’t quite make his mind up which design he preferred. There were Norman arches, Tudor-style chimneys, medieval turrets, Swiss roofs and Italianate windows. The paintwork on all the cottages was a collective Knowle Park green. But the houses with arched windows and balconies were larger and more ornate in style, distinguishing them from the plainer cottages. There had always been a social hierarchy, even among workers on the same estate.

It looked as though there had been a farmhouse here. But the house and its outbuildings had been converted. A barn had become a series of small apartments for staff. A lodge with castellations and imitation arrow slits guarded the entrance to Knowle Park itself. Cooper recalled seeing a matching lodge at the north entrance.

Sheep were grazing in an adjacent field and across the park he could see a small herd of cattle. Limousin cross, if he wasn’t mistaken. During the landscaping of the park, the course of the River Dove had been altered slightly and a new bridge had been built. Big landowners could do that in those days, if it improved the view. Planning permission was never a concern. Nor was consideration for your neighbours, probably.

Bowden had a small church with a disproportionately tall spire. But the doors were locked and weeds were growing in the porch. On two sides of it was the burial ground, with several untidy rows of headstones, many old enough to be worn and corroded by the weather, their inscriptions almost illegible.

This was where the mourners from those small hamlets to the east would have arrived after their arduous trek across the hills and over the Corpse Bridge. Many of the coffins mouldering under these headstones would have been carried for miles and allowed to rest for a while on the same coffin stone where they’d found the effigy on Friday. Cooper found it hard to grasp the fact that all those people had been brought here at the end of their lives and laid to rest on the earl’s property, as if they were a final tribute.

Though he could hear a few children playing somewhere, there seemed to be very few residents of Bowden actually at home. On a small field next to the graveyard he could see piles of wood heaped up in a large stack, ready for Bonfire Night on Tuesday. A short distance away from it a yellow bulldozer was parked behind the church. It must be handy to have that sort of equipment available.

They began to knock on doors and it was Diane Fry who found someone first. Cooper got a call from her on his phone and he walked back across the central green to meet her.

‘This is Mrs Mellor,’ said Fry. ‘Mrs Mellor, my colleague Detective Sergeant Cooper.’

She was a woman in her mid to late sixties, with a welcoming smile and a faint smell of pine disinfectant and toasted cheese. In the background Cooper could hear what sounded like daytime TV, perhaps an old episode of Lewis or Midsomer Murders.

‘Hello. Come in,’ she said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I don’t see many people during the day, even on a Saturday.’

Fry followed him into the house. Cooper wished he was alone in circumstances like this. He would find it easier to get on with people and encourage them to talk. But he seemed to be stuck with her for now.

They sat down in a cosy sitting room and the kettle was soon boiled for tea. Mrs Mellor produced a plate of biscuits and it occurred to Cooper that it must be around lunchtime. He felt hungry.

‘I gather you knew the Blairs,’ said Cooper. ‘They used to live in Bowden.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Mellor. ‘They were just across the way there. They lived here for many years.’

‘All these properties at Bowden still belong to Knowle Abbey, don’t they? The cottages were built for estate workers.’

Mrs Mellor poured the tea for them both. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘The earl himself is the landlord. Though I don’t think anybody sees much of him these days. Not this present one, anyway. We deal mostly with the estate manager or one of the office staff.’

‘So the people who live here are all workers at the abbey or on the estate?’

‘Knowle Abbey staff and pensioners.’

‘Pensioners?’ he asked.

‘You know, retired staff or estate workers. You don’t get kicked out of your house as soon as you retire. At least, that’s been the arrangement in the past.’

‘So Gary Blair’s father must have worked for the estate? Or he used to?’

‘He was a forester. Alan Blair was part of a team maintaining the woodlands around the estate. Mostly to keep the paths clear and remove any damaged trees. But they produce a bit of commercial timber too. He started working at that job a long time ago, under the old earl.’

‘The old earl,’ said Cooper. ‘He was popular, wasn’t he?’

Mrs Mellor sat down opposite him and sighed.

‘All the estate workers loved the old man,’ she said. ‘He was lovely. The old earl liked to ride round his land and see what was going on. Somehow he managed to know all the men personally and asked after their families by name. And he always gave them a big dinner at Christmas too as a “thank you”. The children of the estate were given two parties a year, one in the summer and one in December. Of course, Father Christmas always managed to make a surprise appearance. The earl used to love doing that job himself, until he got too old for it. I believe there was quite a lot of beer drunk in honour of the old man. But it doesn’t happen now.’

‘I see.’

Cooper felt torn over whether that was a good thing or not. Paternalistic employers had certainly disappeared. There might not be so many toasts in the present earl’s name, and he probably didn’t know all his staff personally, but the old-style landlords had exercised a kind of autocratic control over their workers. He bet that the previous earl would have had no hesitation in sacking a man on the spot if he misbehaved or was disrespectful. With workers living in these tied cottages in the estate villages, that meant a man would lose his home too, and his family would be evicted. At least the current earl would be expected to obey current employment legislation.

‘At one time there was even a school here for children of the estate workers,’ said Mrs Mellor. ‘It was set up by one of the Manbys who had a particular interest in his tenants. They say that school had as many as sixty pupils in its heyday. But it was demolished long ago. Children are picked up by bus to go to the local primary school now.’

‘So what happened to the Blairs?’ asked Cooper.

‘Oh, Alan dropped dead from a heart attack one day. It was quite a shock and Pat became very ill. She was in hospital for a long, long time. In fact, she never really recovered, poor woman. She died of pneumonia in the end.’

‘Gary and his wife Sandra lived with them for a while, I believe.’

‘Yes, they couldn’t get a house of their own. It’s difficult for young couples.’

‘I heard they wanted to start a family of their own. So they stayed here while trying to save up to buy their first house.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Mellor. ‘But I think they were hoping for a tenancy of their own here on the estate.’

‘Oh?’ Cooper hesitated, not sure he’d understood correctly what she meant. ‘Mrs Mellor, do you mean Gary Blair worked for Knowle Abbey too?’

‘Yes, of course. Didn’t you know that?’

‘No.’

For a moment Mrs Mellor looked as though she might regret having told him something he didn’t know. But it was just a fleeting confusion. Cooper must have given the impression he knew more than he actually did.

Diane Fry took up the opportunity presented by his silence.

‘What job did Gary do?’ she asked. ‘Was he a forester too?’

Mrs Mellor turned to her. ‘That’s right. He learned the work from his father and went into the job himself when he left school. He was very good at it, so I’ve heard. He knew how to manage a chainsaw.’

Cooper ate another digestive as he watched the two women in conversation. Fry hadn’t even touched her tea, let alone the biscuits. She was probably unaware of how rude it looked to people when she did this. Since Mrs Mellor had taken the trouble to make the tea, she ought at least take a sip or two out of politeness.

But Mrs Mellor didn’t seem to have noticed.

‘It was sad, but Gary got very depressed after his father died and his mother was so ill. I think they all went through a difficult time. And then there was the accident, of course…’

Fry’s ears almost visibly pricked up. ‘Accident?’

Mrs Mellor took a deep breath and shuddered. She leaned towards Fry and lowered her voice. ‘With the chainsaw. Horrible.’

‘They’re very dangerous things.’

‘I know. But Gary Blair, of all people. They all get the training and the safety equipment. But this particular day … well, no one knows what really happened. He was on his own at the time, working out of sight of the other men. I suppose he must have slipped.’ She shuddered again. ‘It’s too awful to think about.’

‘Was he badly hurt?’

‘Oh, yes. They had to remove his arm. Then he couldn’t work as a forester any more. He wasn’t qualified for anything else. They offered him a job in the car park, just a few hours a week. But he went downhill rapidly from then on. Well, you can imagine.’

‘Did Gary and Sandra have to leave Bowden after that?’

‘Oh, they knew they were going to have to leave,’ said Mrs Mellor. ‘They were told they wouldn’t be able to take over the tenancy of the cottage after Gary’s mother died. That was the biggest blow. I think that was what finished Gary off.’

Cooper brushed some crumbs from the table on to the now empty plate.

‘Mrs Mellor,’ he said, ‘how did Gary Blair die?’

‘You don’t know?’ she said, turning to Cooper. She looked at him as if he were the only one here who was ignorant.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to say that he took his own life,’ he said.

Mrs Mellor nodded. ‘Yes, he killed himself. He just couldn’t take it. It’s such a shame about that family.’

Outside Mrs Mellor’s cottage Fry stopped to ask a question.

‘Why do they need so many houses here,’ she said, ‘if they’re for workers at Knowle Abbey?’

‘Believe it or not, there are about three hundred people employed on the estate in various ways,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re joking. Doing what?’

‘They’re either in the abbey, working on maintenance and looking after the visitors, or they’re in the gardens, the restaurant, the shop. They’re on the farms, in the woodland, looking after the fisheries and game, or working in the offices. And probably lots of jobs I haven’t thought of.’

Cooper stood on the central green and looked around at the houses of Bowden. The Manby emblem was set into the gable end of the cottages and the larger properties featured stone carvings of the crest above their front doors.

Like the Devonshires, the Manbys had owned many of the local villages in their time. Their name wasn’t as ubiquitous, but it was certainly here at Bowden. It was on the church, the community hall and some of their workers’ properties. And so was their emblem. It was a profile turned to the right, with a hooked beak like a scimitar. An eagle’s head.

‘Where to next?’ asked Fry.

‘I think it’s time to go visiting the aristocracy,’ said Cooper.