Текст книги "The Corpse Bridge"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

‘Is there an estimate?’

Irvine nodded. ‘A ballpark figure. If the quarry development goes ahead at Alderhill, the Knowle estate stands to earn more than two hundred million pounds.’

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

37

‘So it’s a smokescreen, isn’t it?’ said Fry.

‘What is?’

‘This business about the Corpse Bridge. It was all designed to distract our attention, to make us think the deaths were connected with the redevelopment of the graveyard. I have to say that if I’d been the investigating officer myself in those initial stages, the idea would never have occurred to me.’

‘That’s because of your local ignorance,’ protested Cooper. ‘You’d never heard of the Corpse Bridge or a coffin road.’

‘Exactly,’ said Fry. ‘Except that I wouldn’t describe it as ignorance. I’d call it the advantage of an unbiased mind.’

Cooper thought about it for a moment. Could she be right about this? To be fair, she sometimes was right. That cold objectivity of hers had its place.

‘But if it was a deliberate distraction,’ he said slowly, ‘that would mean…’

‘Yes, Ben. That whoever was responsible expected to be dealing with a local person, who knew the history of the Corpse Bridge. They anticipated it would be someone like you, in fact.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘Surely anyone would have made the connection eventually, once they started asking a few questions.’

‘Eventually, perhaps. But we’d have picked up more useful lines of inquiry by then. And we’d have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort. And perhaps some lives.’

‘So you’re fixing your mind on the quarry protests.’

‘And you’re still fixated with the Corpse Bridge and the Bowden protest group.’

‘Someone planned all this,’ said Cooper. ‘An individual who knows all about lying and when to tell the truth – or, at least, a partial truth. They all followed the same strategy. They gave us the truth when there was no point in trying to conceal it. Rob Beresford admitted straight away that he knew Sandra Blair. Both the Nadens and Jason Shaw came forward to admit they were in the area at the time she died. It made them look innocent and willing to cooperate. And Brendan Kilner pointed me in the direction of the burial ground at Bowden when I enquired about a connection between the names. Once I’d asked him that question, he knew I’d find out the answer some other way. So he told me. But even Kilner only gave me as little as he needed to and no more.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I think there was a policy at work here. Rules of engagement, if you like. It’s a bit too neat for each of them to have thought of doing that separately. People just don’t react in that way without some advance preparation. The instinct of the guilty is to tell a lie.’

‘There’s still a big question for you to think about, though, isn’t there? Who was with Sandra Blair at the bridge that night?’

Cooper couldn’t answer that question, no matter how much he would have liked to. He had to let it pass. Instead, he considered the crime scene, with its tents and arc lights and figures in white scene suits going backwards and forwards to the forensic vans.

‘So the earl was attacked at the Grandfather Oak?’ he said.

‘His attacker was standing under the tree,’ said Fry. ‘The earl was shot at close range the first time. He probably saw his attacker and turned away to escape. The first blast caught him in the back of the right shoulder.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Then the earl had run. He almost reached the back of the abbey, the west wing where the family apartments were located. The killer must have pursued him before firing the second and fatal shot.

Cooper walked past the crime-scene tent to look at the abbey. While he was alive the earl himself had come and gone from this side of the house, probably to avoid meeting the public. This section of parkland was fenced off and gated to prevent access. He could see a stable block and a building with a glass roof like a conservatory. An orangery? Was that what they called it?

Cooper hadn’t seen the back of the abbey buildings on his previous visits. From here the place looked totally different. He was no longer seeing the over-elaborate façade that made Knowle Abbey look like a tourist postcard from the east. On the west side the buildings were random and grimy, almost ramshackle. Weeds were growing in the orangery, but no oranges. The stables were abandoned and derelict. They might have housed a few rats, but no horses.

The woodland was neglected too. Trees were diseased and damaged. Brambles and bracken had infested the woodland floor where once there might have been swathes of bluebells. There were no visible trails. A bridlepath from the stables had become choked by birch saplings and blocked by fallen branches.

Closer to hand, he could see that the wilderness was encroaching on to the gravel drive. In fact, it had probably crept closer to the abbey than it should have done by several yards. The gravel itself sprouted weeds, and heaps of rubbish had built up against the rear walls – rusting metal, broken plastic, a crumbling mess of wet plasterboard. The windows here were dirty and cobwebbed, some of them actually broken. Cooper thought back to the discussion with Meredith Burns about security measures. Did the insurance company know about this part of the abbey?

One of the opening lines from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca came into his mind. The woods crowded dark and uncontrolled to the drive. Well, Knowle Abbey was no Manderley, but Rebecca would have noticed the same phenomenon here. All the estate work seemed to have been concentrated on the front of the abbey, the façade that visitors saw. Here the trees had been left unmanaged for years, by the look of them. It was a criminal neglect of valuable woodland. Not to mention the damage it must have done to the view from the west wing.

It seemed that all the time and effort the earl had talked about had been put into those parts of the estate that were on show to the public. He’d created a façade of elegance, with a ramshackle dereliction behind it, like a Hollywood film set. All appearance and no substance. A hollow charade.

Cooper turned to look at the house. He pictured Lord Manby at his desk in the library. The window was right there, on the first floor. The earl would have glanced up now and then from his paperwork and seen the evidence of neglect for himself. Had this untamed undergrowth seemed like the portents of inevitable ruin, creeping ever closer to his walls?

Meredith Burns looked a bit lost, like a woman who no longer knew what her purpose was. She’d been standing watching Cooper as he examined the abbey. She said nothing, until he turned and found her there.

‘We took your advice and called in the security company,’ she said.

‘But too late, it seems.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Burns flapped her arms helplessly. ‘We’ve found something else,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant or not.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll show you.’

An intruder had tried to force open a Manby family tomb in the Lady Chapel. It was a marble sarcophagus with a cut-glass lid, but coated in grey mould from the damp of generations. Now a corner was broken off, as if someone had prised at it with a crowbar.

‘Could this have been what brought the earl out into the grounds last night?’ asked Cooper.

‘That’s what I wondered. If Walter heard a noise or saw someone near the chapel.’

‘It’s a possibility. I’ll get a crime-scene examiner to check it for fingerprints.’

Burns gazed round the crumbling walls and eroded statues of the chapel. ‘What do you think anyone would be looking for in here?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘I think they were probably intending to cause some damage.’

‘Like the graffiti?’

‘Yes, but a step further.’

‘It’s awful to think they would come here with the intention of causing damage to a tomb.’

‘Or to the occupant.’

Cooper saw the shocked expression on Burns’s face. But what Brendan Kilner had said still held good. It was all about family.

‘Your superintendent has arrived, by the way,’ said Burns as they left the chapel.

‘Detective Superintendent Branagh is here?’

‘Yes. She’s meeting with the earl.’

‘The earl? Lord Manby?’

‘I mean Peter Manby,’ said Burns. ‘He’s the new earl, of course. With the death of his father, he’s just inherited the Knowle estate.’

‘Of course he has.’

Cooper looked out over the parkland towards the front of the abbey. What would the arrival of a new owner mean to the master plan for the development of Knowle? Would the latest Lord Manby steer the estate in a different direction or would he be too much under the influence of the Dowager Countess? Would the quarrying plan still go ahead? And might the bulldozers still move into the old graveyard, despite everything? Time would tell. But now at least there was a chance that someone could make a difference.