Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

‘Really?’ Cooper couldn’t keep the tone of scepticism from his voice. ‘Was Mrs Blair particularly close to any of the other members of the group?’

‘Ah now,’ said Naden, ‘you’ll have to ask someone else about that.’

30

Cooper returned to his desk and pulled out his map again, with the routes of the coffin roads marked on it.

But as soon as he sat down Becky Hurst looked up from a call.

‘Ben? Ben?’ she said, an unmistakable note of urgency in her voice.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Cooper, still gazing at the map. ‘We’ve got another dead body.’

The conclusion seemed inevitable, a logical fit to the network of coffin ways converging on the bridge. Where there were two bodies, there must be a third.

‘No,’ said Hurst. ‘No dead body. Well, not yet. But the officers we sent to Earl Sterndale. They can’t locate Rob Beresford and his parents are reporting him missing.’

‘Put out an alert for him. He won’t have gone far.’

‘Okay.’

‘What about Jason Shaw?’

‘Carol and Luke are tracing him now.’

Cooper ran a hand through his hair, envisaging disaster. His initial witness, the person who found Sandra Blair’s body, had slipped through his fingers. Worse, Rob Beresford might end up as the next of those bodies.

He heard a cough and found Wayne Abbott standing at his shoulder.

‘I thought you’d like to know straight away,’ said Abbott. ‘Digital forensics have managed to retrieve some interesting images off Sandra Blair’s computer. It looks as though she took them on her smartphone, then emailed them to herself.’

‘Great. Let’s have a look.’

Abbott placed a laptop on his desk and flipped open the screen. A familiar image appeared, caught in a glare of sun.

‘As you can see, first we have some shots of the bridge,’ said Abbott. ‘Taken in daylight, of course.’

‘The Corpse Bridge, taken from west and east banks of the river. It must have been a planning visit. They were well organised.’

‘Right. And here are some of the dummy, but taken indoors.’

‘That’s Mrs Blair’s sitting room,’ said Cooper.

He was looking at a badly lit picture of the effigy of Earl Manby. It was sitting in one of the chintzy armchairs at Pilsbury Cottage with the African rug on the wall behind it.

‘Why would she take a photograph of it, do you think?’

‘She was very proud of her handiwork,’ said Cooper.

Abbott nodded. ‘This will interest you most. Digital forensics managed to retrieve an image from a few months earlier. The quality isn’t very good, but they’ve done their best to enhance this one. It might be important. It was taken in London, I think. Some kind of railway depot. Perhaps a repair yard or a sidings for old rolling stock.’

Cooper leaned forward eagerly. There they were in the photograph, all of them. Geoff Naden stood slightly in front, as if leading a guided walk, with Sally at his elbow. They were flanked by Rob Beresford, Jason Shaw and, lurking to one side, Sandra Blair herself.

The group were standing on a path with trees behind them. The background was fairly unremarkable and undistinguished, except for one thing. The most striking detail in the picture was a London Underground train on a track in a dip between the group and the belt of trees. The last carriage of another train could just be made out past Sandra Blair’s head. It looked as if the train were drawn up in a sidings.

There was one more photo. It was of Sandra herself, standing on her own. The shot was taken by flash at night, so her skin was washed out and pale, her eyes flared red, her figure stood out in unnatural detail from her surroundings as if she were an illusion or phantom. In that instant of the flash going off, Sandra Blair already looked like a ghost.

‘What’s the date stamp on this?’ asked Cooper.

‘October thirty-first.’

‘The night she died.’

Cooper peered more closely. Though the colours weren’t accurate, he could see Sandra was wearing the same clothes that her body had been found in, including the blue waterproof jacket and the walking boots. And he’d been right about the hat. It was woollen, with ear flaps and decorated in some kind of Scandinavian design. Sandra’s dark hair peeped out of it over her forehead. She was holding something in her hand, close to her body. Cooper couldn’t see what it was, but his bet was on a torch. That was missing from the scene too.

‘Can we zoom in a bit?’ he said.

‘Sure.’

In the background he could make out the distinctive arched outline, only just visible but recognisable, even in the darkness. Its wet, moss-covered stones glittered eerily in the light of the flash. Sandra Blair was standing right in front of the Corpse Bridge, no more than a few feet from where she died.

Cooper asked Abbott to go back to the group shot again.

‘Yes, strange, isn’t it?’ said Abbott. ‘A couple of Tube trains. It must be in the London area somewhere. There are no Tube trains in Derbyshire.’

‘Where do you live, Wayne?’ asked Cooper.

‘Me? In Sheffield.’

‘That explains it.’

Abbott stared at him in puzzlement. But Cooper was remembering what Poppy Mellor had said. They walked all the old coffin roads. Of course they did. And this was one of them.

‘No Tube trains in Derbyshire?’ he said. ‘Actually, I think you’ll find there are. Or at least, there were when this photograph was taken.’

DC Luke Irvine had been sent to Bowden with Carol Villiers. They parked near the church and walked across to Jason Shaw’s address.

Villiers had seen Shaw before, but it was the first time Irvine had set eyes on him. He was recorded as being in his early thirties. Irvine noted the dark stubble. He envied the silver ear stud – he would have one himself, if he could.

They’d found Shaw in a small backyard behind his cottage. It was paved and only large enough to contain a couple of wheelie bins and a dog run. A blue Land Rover Discovery was drawn up by the side wall.

The dog began barking before they went round the corner of the house, so Shaw knew someone was coming. He’d put down a bowl of dog food and some water in the run and was just closing the door. The dog was a collie cross of some kind. Irvine couldn’t have been more accurate, though he was sure Ben Cooper would have known.

Shaw knew who they were straight away. He didn’t seem at all surprised.

‘I thought you lot would be here before long,’ he said.

They showed him their IDs anyway. The dog began barking again, but Shaw yelled at it and it cowered away from the fence.

‘You know why we’ve come, then,’ said Villiers. ‘You didn’t tell us the truth when you came in to make a statement in Edendale on Saturday morning.’

‘I didn’t lie,’ said Shaw. ‘I told you some of the truth. The part that mattered.’

‘Well, we don’t agree with that attitude, sir. It all matters to us.’

Shaw wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘I don’t see that it’s relevant. I came forward like a good citizen when I heard the appeals. That’s the end of it.’

‘Obviously we have to ask you about the protest group you’re a member of. We need to know what was going on last Thursday night at the bridge.’

‘I honestly don’t know what I can tell you about the group,’ said Shaw.

‘You didn’t tell us anything before.’

‘Okay, but – you’ve talked to some of the others already, haven’t you? So you’ll know all about it by now. More than I could tell you, anyway. I’m just a humble foot soldier. The others are the ones with the brains. They did all the talking and I just trailed along behind, if you get my meaning.’

‘So who sent the threatening letter to the Manbys and wrote graffiti on the wall of the chapel at Knowle Abbey?’

Shaw shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that was ever part of the plan. Somebody taking a bit of individual action, by the sound of it. Graffiti? Ask Rob Beresford, that would be my suggestion. It sounds like his sort of trick.’

‘And what about Sandra Blair?’

He stalled for the first time and looked genuinely upset for a few moments. But the expression passed. ‘That was a real shame. She was okay, Sandra. I bet the others told you she was a nutcase. Well, she was a bit wacky in some ways, I suppose. But she meant well.’

‘You were with her that night at the bridge, weren’t you?’

‘Only up to a point,’ said Shaw.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I had her stuff in my Land Rover – you know, the effigy thing and the other bits and pieces.’

‘A noose? A witch ball?’

‘I think that was it. I’d collected the stuff from her earlier in the week. Then that afternoon, when she finished work, she walked across from Crowdecote and I met her in Longnor, in front of the general stores. She wouldn’t have got her own car anywhere near the bridge, you see. But with the Land Rover, I got right down to the last few yards, until the track was too broken up. I mean, she wouldn’t have wanted to walk down to the bridge with those things. If anybody had seen her, that would definitely have looked weird.’

‘Then what did you do?’

‘I left her to it,’ said Shaw.

‘You left her there on her own?’

‘Yes. Well, she was on her own when I drove back up the track. I had to get the Land Rover clear. If anybody saw it going down, they would just think I was another off-roader. But if it was parked by the bridge for a couple of hours, well – that looks suspicious.’

‘Who worked all this out?’ asked Irvine.

Shaw laughed. ‘Not me, anyway. I just did what I was told.’

‘So why were you there on the track again later?’

‘Once I shifted the Land Rover, I was supposed to go back. That was the plan. We were going to get photos when it was all set up. The group standing round the noose. We’d have our faces covered by hoods and scarves. It was going to be like a terrorist video – you know, when they kidnap some tourist and put pictures on the internet standing round him with their Kalashnikovs. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes. But it didn’t happen, did it?’

‘No,’ said Shaw. ‘Well, I told you the rest, when I came in the first time. I don’t know any more than that.’

‘You’re saying you have no idea what happened to Sandra Blair at the bridge?’

‘Not a clue. Did … did someone do that to her? They killed her?’

‘Who do you think might have done that, Mr Shaw?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘One of the group?’

‘Like who?’

‘You tell me.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘I honestly can’t imagine. I mean, they didn’t always see eye to eye. They argued sometimes. Particularly…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, Sally Naden. She didn’t think much of Sandra. I heard her say once that Sandra was a liability. But it wasn’t serious. She would never kill her. Why would she do that? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It was your suggestion.’

‘I’m just trying to help.’

‘As it happens,’ said Villiers, ‘the post-mortem examination suggests that Mrs Blair wasn’t deliberately killed. She may just have had an accident.’

Shaw looked faintly relieved. ‘Well, even so – it’s still a real shame.’

Irvine cast around for any questions that Villiers hadn’t asked. As usual he found himself wondering what Ben Cooper would do or say. Something a bit unexpected, which might catch their interviewee.

‘You work here at Knowle Abbey, don’t you, sir?’ he said.

Shaw looked at him. ‘I’m on the estate staff. Gamekeeping mostly.’

‘Have you always worked on the estate?’

‘No. I used to have a job in Hartington. It was good work too. But that went belly up.’

Villiers frowned. But Irvine had picked up a thing or two while he was with Cooper.

‘Did you have a job at the cheese factory?’ he said.

Shaw’s entire attention was on him now and it made Irvine smile.

‘Yes, I was in the warehouse,’ said Shaw. ‘I did a bit of forklift work too. You know what happened to the factory, then?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Irvine, feeling smug. ‘It was sold and you were all made redundant.’

Shaw scowled. ‘That’s the truth. And it’s the same story everywhere you go.’

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.’