Текст книги "Dead and Buried"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

26

The two bodies had been tightly rolled in heavy-duty black bin liners. The plastic wrapping meant that some areas of flesh had been protected from exposure to the air. If there was any good news, that was it. The uneven pattern of decomposition would increase the chances of a positive identification.

Fry shuddered as she joined the small group of people gathered on the edge of the hole. For her, the blackened heather further up the hill heightened the nightmarish nature of the location on the shoulder of Oxlow Moor.

The sight of the yokels playing open-air charades with their sheep down in the fields below didn’t make things any better. It must be some kind of rural festival taking place. When she looked around, Fry felt as though she was trapped between two different kinds of hell.

‘Wasn’t this one of the mine shafts searched during the original missing persons inquiry?’ asked DCI Mackenzie.

‘It must have been. They all were.’

‘So how is it we have this?’

‘A secondary crime scene,’ said Fry.

Wayne Abbott looked up from where he was crouching in the shaft.

‘Well I can tell you one thing for certain,’ he said. ‘They haven’t been here for two and a half years. The condition of the plastic is too good. In fact, the bodies look generally too well preserved. The pathologist will be able to tell you a lot more. She should get plenty of information from the post-mortem, given the state of the remains.’

Mackenzie looked at Fry, who allowed herself a smile. Where’s the best place to hide something so that it won’t be found? Where it’s already been looked for. She wished she could remember who’d told her that, so she could thank them. It had been well worth repeating.

‘So Henry Pearson wasn’t expecting this outcome after all?’ said Mackenzie.

‘Not at all. It knocked the ground from under him completely. He won’t be doing any more media interviews for a while.’

‘Interesting.’

‘More sad than interesting. He was still clinging to the belief that David and Trisha had managed to get out of the country and change their identities. Somehow he’d convinced himself that they’d covered their tracks so well that no one could make contact with them, not even him. So he just carried on playing his part regardless.’

‘And yet his son and daughter-in-law have been dead for … well, how long would we say?’

‘Shall we say about two years, four months, at a guess?’ said Fry.

‘From the moment they disappeared, then.’

‘Yes.’

Mackenzie looked at the remains in their makeshift grave. The edges were crumbling, and the thick plastic was scattered with debris, stones and lumps of peat. The damage had been done by the fell runners. The impact of scores of feet pounding over the cover had shaken it loose and broken it into two pieces, which lay just inside the shaft. According to the initial reports from witnesses, one of the back markers had almost fallen right through.

‘Is it possible,’ said Mackenzie, ‘that someone knew David Pearson was planning to do a bunk and followed him up here to stop him?’

‘To make sure he didn’t escape justice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s possible,’ said Fry. ‘We’d have to go through his business records again, follow up on everyone affected by his activities. But …’

‘What?’

‘Well, if the bodies haven’t been buried here the whole time since the Pearsons disappeared, where were they until now?’

A short while later, Liz Petty arrived at the Light House with her crime-scene kit, looking a bit disgruntled at the call-out.

‘There’s a much better crime scene than this across the moor there,’ she said. ‘Two nice bodies, and all I get is a smelly cellar. I bet it’s full of spiders, too.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Villiers.

Cooper heard her voice from the bottom of the steps.

‘Liz?’ he called.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s all right. It’s me. Come on down.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In the cellar, of course.’

Liz’s face lit up when she saw Cooper.

‘Ah. Did you do this just so you could see me before tonight?’

‘Obviously,’ he said.

‘I think I’d better get out of the way,’ said Villiers. ‘I’ll be upstairs if you need me.’

As soon as she looked at Cooper properly, Liz drew in a sharp breath at the sight of the bruise on his temple. He’d almost forgotten it himself, though his arm and shoulder were painful when he moved suddenly. But this was the first time Liz had seen him since it happened. He’d forgotten that, too.

‘Oh, that looks sore,’ she said.

‘It’s not too bad.’

She touched the side of his head gently with the tips of her fingers. Luckily she’d removed her latex gloves, and the touch was quite soothing.

‘What on earth were you doing, going there on your own without backup?’ she said.

‘Oh, don’t. It’s just something that happens now and then.’

‘Not to my husband.’

‘Future husband.’

‘Well, I want to make sure you’re still around by then.’

She looked at the bruise again, and winced as if she felt his pain. But he wouldn’t ever want her to do that.

Liz smiled and took Cooper’s arm – a firm, affectionate touch that made him forget for a while that he was on duty and working.

‘We shouldn’t,’ he said.

‘I know. But it’s a cellar, and no one else is around.’

‘Even so.’

She squeezed his arm again. ‘You’re so well behaved. You could relax a bit more sometimes, you know.’

Cooper felt the temptation, but pulled himself together. It was a shame, but there were more urgent things to deal with.

‘What was that you were saying to Carol just now about another crime scene?’ he said.

‘They’ve found two bodies. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Damn it. No, I hadn’t.’

Cooper looked at his phone, and saw Network lost. They were below ground level, of course. Even if there was mobile phone reception on this part of the moor, the signal would be blocked by the cellar walls and the depth of peat lying around them.

He hated being out of touch. It was bad enough at the best of times, but now there seemed to be a major development, and he was unreachable. But someone could have called the officer outside on his radio. Airwave worked here, surely.

That led him inevitably to the suspicion that he was being deliberately kept out of the loop. The thought made him unreasonably angry.

‘The bodies,’ he said. ‘Is it the Pearsons?’

Liz looked at him in concern at the change in his tone. ‘Oh, I couldn’t say. But that seems to be the assumption being made right now. Two bodies, dead for some time. They were found in an abandoned mine shaft up on the moor.’

Cooper gritted his teeth. ‘A mine shaft? Really.’

‘You don’t sound too surprised.’

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I suppose the bodies haven’t been there for two and a half years, though. Not likely.’

‘Again, I couldn’t say. You’ll have to ask someone else for information, Ben. I’m just a crime-scene examiner.’

He tried to calm himself. Of course it wasn’t Liz’s fault. Far from it. He shouldn’t be speaking to her as though it was.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ She looked round the cellar. ‘But we have our own scene, such as it is. So what’s here?’

‘It’s more what’s not here,’ said Cooper.

‘Such as?’

‘Chest freezers.’

‘What?’

‘There are no chest freezers. They must have had big freezers here. They left all this equipment in the pub when they went – the kitchens are full of stuff. But no freezers.’

‘Okay.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s a space against this wall where something of that size has been standing. You can see still the shape of it on the floor.’

‘Stay back,’ said Liz. ‘There are shoe marks in the dust right in front of you. And if someone carried a freezer out, there might be prints on the wall.’

Cooper took a step backwards. ‘And I think we should check the whole cellar for traces of blood.’

‘Oh Lord, that means turning the lights out.’ She sighed. ‘Your theory being that this might be a primary crime scene?’

‘Yes, possibly.’

‘In that case, I’ll need to call in and get a full team,’ she said.

‘But I’m guessing everyone is fully committed already.’

‘Yes, we’d have to wait some time.’

‘Come on, Liz …’

‘Oh, now you’re turning on the charm. You know I can’t resist. Okay, you can leave me to it.’

‘Thanks. I owe you a favour.’

‘I’ll think of something, don’t worry.’

Cooper ran up the steps, and Villiers met him at the top.

‘Have you heard, Ben?’ she said.

‘Yes, just now. Two bodies.’

‘That stinks, doesn’t it?’

‘To high heaven.’

Villiers gave him a hand up out of the hatch. The space behind the bar counter was awkward and narrow. It couldn’t have been easy for a man of Maurice Wharton’s size to get through.

‘If it is the Pearsons,’ said Villiers, ‘they should be able to ID them pretty quickly. There are DNA profiles on record. And of course there’s a family member on hand. It depends what condition the bodies are in, I suppose.’

‘It would be very useful to know that. I mean, what stage the decomposition is at. I wonder when anyone will bother to tell us.’

‘Briefing tomorrow, at a guess?’

‘That’s no good.’

Villiers looked thoughtful as they walked out of the pub, past the rattling tape.

‘Ben, what was that stuff you were saying earlier about the circles of hell?’

‘The ninth circle, to be exact.’

‘Isn’t that what Aidan Merritt was rambling about when he called his wife, just before he was killed?’

‘That’s right. Everyone thought it was to do with the fires on the moor. He must have gone right through the smoke to get to the Light House. But there was something Betty Wheatcroft said to me. She pointed out that it was from Dante’s Inferno.’

‘The old biddy’s not as daft as she looks, then?’

‘No, not at all. I don’t know where she gets her information from, but she knows more than she lets on. She’s stubborn, though. Likes to play her own game. There was some detail she would have given me, if I’d asked the right question. I just didn’t know what the question was.’

‘Perhaps she just needs you to show a bit more interest,’ said Villiers.

Cooper stopped by his car. ‘You think so, Carol?’

‘A lonely old lady, isn’t she? I bet she really took to you, and enjoyed having a chat. So instead of telling you everything, she thought of a way of making you come back to see her again.’

He stared at her, astonished by the clarity of the insight. To him, it seemed a devious way of thinking. But in Mrs Wheatcroft’s case, it rang so true.

They got in the car, and Cooper started the engine. He had Betty Wheatcroft’s phone number in his notebook, but he had to wait until they were well down the road and on to Batham Gate before he could get a signal. The old lady’s phone rang and rang, without even an answering machine or call minder cutting in.

‘No answer,’ he said. ‘She must be out.’

‘Where does Mrs Wheatcroft go now?’ asked Villiers, as they approached the sharp bend on Batham Gate.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What pub does she go to? She can’t have stopped going for a drink just because the Light House closed.’

‘Well, as I said before, she went to the Light House for the company, because she knew people there.’

‘Okay, so where did the people that she knew start going when it closed?’

‘I don’t know.’ But then Cooper stopped, and corrected himself. ‘Yes I do. Ian Gullick told me. He said they drink at the Badger, near Bradwell.’

‘Could Mrs Wheatcroft get there easily?’

‘It’s on the same bus route as the Light House, and a good bit closer to where she lives.’

‘It’s worth a try, if we have time.’

‘We’re almost there,’ said Cooper. ‘Another two minutes, and we’ll pass it.’

Betty Wheatcroft had found a corner for herself in the bar of the Badger, and was sitting with her glass and her plastic carrier bag, trying to ignore the loud background music and the beeps and buzzes of the fruit machines. This was a different kind of place, not what she’d been used to at the Light House.

Cooper saw her as soon as he came through the door. He noticed that her glass was almost empty, so he went first to the bar and bought her a half-pint of Guinness. She smiled when she spotted him, losing for a moment that slightly mad, desperate look. There was no surprise on her face. She gave the impression that she’d been expecting him, that he could even be slightly late. She might be putting a black mark next to his name in an imaginary attendance register.

‘How nice,’ she said. ‘And what a good idea not to come to my house. People would start to talk.’

‘I’m very glad I caught you, Mrs Wheatcroft,’ said Cooper. ‘There’s something I need to ask you.’

She looked anxiously round the bar, then buried her face in her glass. She seemed somehow reassured by the slosh of the black liquid.

‘What is it?’

‘Last time I visited you, I mentioned the ninth circle of hell, and you said it was—’

‘The Inferno. It’s by the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The first part of his Divine Comedy. All about the medieval concept of hell. Lovely, isn’t it?’

Cooper wasn’t quite sure what she was referring to. At first he thought it might be the Guinness, or the music now playing in the background. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’, if he wasn’t mistaken. Not really Mrs Wheatcroft’s cup of tea, he imagined. So she must be referring to Dante’s vision of hell.

‘There’s something particular about the ninth circle,’ he said.

‘Judas, Brutus and Cassius.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Judas, Brutus and Cassius,’ she repeated more slowly, as if remembering that he was one of her slower pupils. ‘The ninth circle of hell. It’s all about treachery.’

‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking.’

She took another gulp of her drink. ‘In Dante’s Inferno, each of the nine circles is reserved for a particular sin. They get more and more wicked as they move towards the middle. The ninth circle was reserved for the very worst sinners – the traitors. Judas, who betrayed Jesus. And Brutus and Cassius who stabbed Julius Caesar in the back. Do you remember this at all?’

Cooper nodded, hoping not to have to reveal the true depths of his ignorance.

‘Is that what Aidan Merritt was talking about?’

‘Yes, I think it must have been.’

She seemed to lose track of the conversation, gazing across the bar at no one in particular, then poking in her carrier bag as if she’d lost something.

Cooper tried to curb his impatience. He had faith in Carol’s assessment. He had to let Betty Wheatcroft play her own game, at her own pace, if he wanted to get everything she knew out of her.

‘The traitors,’ he said slowly.

‘Oh.’ She licked her lips thoughtfully. ‘Thank you. Well, in the ninth circle there were three different grades of treachery. Betrayal of family, betrayal of community, betrayal of … guests.’

‘Guests?’

‘Yes. A breach of the unwritten laws. The ancient code of hospitality.’

Cooper sat back in his chair, and looked at the old lady, with her wild hair and her plastic carrier bag. Many people would pass her by without a second glance.

‘Mrs Wheatcroft, where do you get your information from?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I know it all,’ she said.

‘People tell you what they’re doing?’

‘No, not them,’ she said, with a flash of contempt. ‘Nobody ever spoke to me at the Light House, except for Aidan. As far as they were concerned, I was just the daft old trout in the corner. It’s the same here at the Badger. And because they don’t talk to me, they think I don’t hear anything. I suppose they reckon I must be deaf. But I do hear. I hear everything.’

‘And what did you hear in this case, Mrs Wheatcroft?’

She put a finger to the side of her nose. ‘They thought Aidan was going to betray them. But he was a decent man. Weak, but decent.’

Betty Wheatcroft suddenly looked very sad. Cooper knew she’d liked Aidan Merritt, and he’d wondered how long she could hold that back and pretend she wasn’t too disturbed by his death. Her charade of secrecy was just part of the game. Underneath, she was a frightened woman.

‘Who are they? Who thought he was going to betray them?’ he asked.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she said.

‘Mrs Wheatcroft …’

‘No,’ she snapped firmly. ‘Be told.’

He shut up immediately, hearing the exact same words and tone of voice that his grandmother had used to him when he was a child, pestering for an ice cream.

In another moment, she’d changed the subject back to safer ground. The past, the theoretical – so much less dangerous than the real, physical present. He wondered if she was scared by a genuine threat from some specific source, or whether she feared to make herself one more soul who was guilty of the sin of betrayal.

‘Do you happen to have a copy of this book, Mrs Wheatcroft?’ asked Cooper.

‘The Inferno? No, why would I? Look it up, if you want.’

‘I’ll google it,’ he said.

‘Yes, you do that.’

She laughed then. It wasn’t quite a cackle, but a chortle with an edge of unhealthy glee. Cooper thought perhaps he shouldn’t have bought her that extra Guinness.

‘Would you like me to give you a lift home, Mrs Wheatcroft?’

‘That would be delightful,’ she said.

Outside the pub, Mrs Wheatcroft greeted Carol Villiers like an old friend, though they’d never met.

‘Hello, dear. Are we travelling together?’

‘Give me your arm,’ said Villiers. ‘And let me take your bag.’

‘No, no.’

Mrs Wheatcroft sounded suddenly distressed. She pulled her plastic bag out of reach, and clutched it to her bosom. Cooper heard the chink of glass. Full bottles, from the sound of it.

She settled in the back seat of his car. Villiers got in, looked at him, raised an eyebrow. Cooper shrugged. He fastened his seat belt, and they pulled out on to the road to head into Edendale.

‘Yes, I remember it very well,’ said Mrs Wheatcroft’s voice drowsily from behind him. ‘Right in the middle, hell wasn’t fiery, you know – the sinners were frozen up to their necks in a lake of ice.’

‘Ice?’ said Villiers.

‘Ice,’ she repeated. ‘And sometimes, they say, a soul falls into the ninth circle before the thread of life has been cut.’

‘Before they’ve died, you mean?’

‘Mmm. And the body left behind on earth is possessed by a demon, so what seems to be a living man is actually already dead, and has reached a stage beyond … repentance.’

On the last word, her voice faded away. Cooper looked in his rear-view mirror, and saw that the old lady was fast asleep.

An hour earlier, Diane Fry had taken a call from Nancy Wharton, the former landlady of the Light House.

Of course Mrs Wharton had really wanted to speak to Detective Sergeant Cooper, but he wasn’t around. In fact no one seemed to know how to get hold of him, so the call had been put through to Fry as the next best thing. How nice to be a more or less acceptable substitute for Ben Cooper.

Fry could have phoned Cooper to pass on the message, she supposed. But why should she? All bets were off since Cooper had gone rogue and carried out those arrests, pulling in Ian Gullick and Vince Naylor for questioning. As far as she was concerned, there was no trust left to be broken.

When she’d parked her Audi in the street on the Devonshire Estate, Nancy Wharton met her at the door of her home, with Eliot and Kirsten standing close behind her, crowding the hallway with hostile expressions on their faces. Fry saw that she wasn’t even going to get inside the house this time. Definitely second best, then.

‘We heard the news just now,’ said Mrs Wharton stiffly, speaking as though she’d rehearsed some lines to deliver.

‘Oh? You’ve heard about the bodies that were found,’ guessed Fry, though it didn’t need much guessing. The media had arrived at Oxlow Moor before she’d got there herself.

‘Yes, they’re saying it’s the Pearsons.’

‘We can’t be a hundred per cent sure at the moment, but …’

Even to Fry herself it no longer sounded convincing. Mrs Wharton treated the stock phrase with the contempt it deserved.

‘Well I’m sure,’ she said.

‘May I come in? And then we can talk about it properly, perhaps.’

Nancy shook her head. Instead she handed Fry an envelope. Then she began to back away into the hallway, as if she’d performed her role and was about to leave the stage.

‘What’s this?’ asked Fry.

‘It’s for you. Or rather, for Detective Sergeant Cooper – but they told me he isn’t available. So …’

‘Yes, but what is it?’

‘That,’ said Mrs Wharton, before she closed the door, ‘is my husband’s confession.’

27

There was a welcome awaiting Cooper when he and Villiers returned to West Street. Diane Fry was pacing the corridor impatiently, and pounced on Cooper as soon as he appeared.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Where have you been? She’ll only talk to you.’

‘Who will?’

‘Nancy Wharton, of course.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In an interview room.’

‘Why?’

‘She gave us her husband’s statement, but obviously we have to question her. We need details, a full account of what happened.’

She was talking too fast, and Cooper wasn’t able to take it in.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You’d better rewind a bit, Diane. You’re losing me.’

Fry stopped, took a deep breath. ‘Of course, you don’t know about it. You’re out of touch.’

‘I wonder whose fault that is?’

‘Okay, let’s take a few minutes.’

Cooper sat down in her tiny office and read through the letter handed over by Mrs Wharton. It was signed by her husband in a slightly shaky hand, and dated Wednesday – the day that Cooper had talked to him in the hospice. He remembered listening to Wharton tell his story about the Light House closing, seeing the windows of the pub going dark one by one.

It was a very brief letter. More of a note, really. It merely stated that Maurice Wharton admitted full responsibility for the deaths of David and Patricia Pearson in December 2009, while they were guests on his licensed premises at the Light House, Oxlow Moor, Derbyshire. Wharton referred to himself as ‘the undersigned’, as if the formal language might give his statement some kind of legal authority.

‘It’s useless without evidence, of course,’ said Fry, tapping her fingers impatiently as she watched Cooper read.

‘Of course.’

‘But there’s one other thing you should know. David Pearson’s financial activities were gone into at the time, during the original inquiry. But not thoroughly enough, it seems.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mr Mackenzie tasked one of the incident room teams to run a new analysis of Pearson’s business dealings. And guess what popped up? Among the people who suffered serious losses when the embezzlement was discovered and the company went into receivership, we found M. and N. Wharton, owners of the Light House Hotel.’

Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘You’re right, it should have been picked up.’

‘Well, I suppose it was just one of hundreds of cases in the files of Diamond Hybrid Securities. There was nothing actually fraudulent about their dealings with the Light House. The Whartons were just unfortunate victims. Collateral damage.’

‘So you’ve brought Nancy in?’ said Cooper.

‘She didn’t want to come. She seemed to think the letter would be enough – that we’d just accept it and go away, without asking any more questions. She’s in for a surprise, though. We need to know exactly what happened. And we need some proof – witness statements, forensic evidence. Someone will have to interview the children. Eliot is seventeen. He’s old enough to put in the witness box.’

‘It won’t ever come to court,’ said Cooper.

‘What? Why not?’

‘Maurice Wharton is dying. He can’t have more than a few days left to live, weeks at most. I bet Nancy would be at the hospice now, sitting at his bedside, if you hadn’t pulled her in.’

‘Well, yes – that is what she told me,’ admitted Fry.

Cooper nodded. ‘But you took no notice, did you, Diane?’

‘Well what would you have done?’ she snapped. ‘I had to bring her in. It’s all very well this caring and sensitive stuff, but there comes a point where even you have to follow procedure and do your job properly, no matter how many sob stories people tell you.’

With an effort, Cooper tried not to smile too much. He felt unduly pleased with himself for having provoked a response from her. Despite the impression she tried to give, Fry was very much on edge. Something had unsettled her, and he was content to think that it might have been him.

He stood up, still holding on to the evidence bag containing Maurice Wharton’s letter.

‘I’ll go and talk to her then, shall I?’ he said.

‘Obviously, I’ll have to sit in,’ said Fry.

‘Fine. But try not to upset her too much.’

Nancy Wharton was huddled close to the table, hunched in an awkward position, as if cowering away from the walls of the room. The interview rooms at West Street weren’t very attractive, but her reaction was extreme.

Cooper recalled the furniture crammed into the Whartons’ council house on the Devonshire Estate. He wondered if she’d already become constrained by her new life there, and now no longer knew how to relax and stretch herself out into the available space.

‘Maurice has always had his faults,’ said Nancy, before Fry had even started the tapes. ‘No one knows that better than me. But he’s not really a murderer.’

Fry shrugged. ‘Oh, no one’s a murderer,’ she said. ‘Not until they kill someone.’

Nancy tried to ignore her, though Cooper could see she found it difficult. So do we all, he thought.

The tapes began to turn, and Mrs Wharton was advised of her rights by Fry in a practised monotone that the older woman seemed to take no notice of.

‘The thing is, we thought the Pearsons had been forgotten,’ she said. ‘No one seemed to be asking questions about them any more. So we relaxed a bit. It was a mistake, I suppose.’

‘Not your first mistake,’ said Fry.

Nancy turned towards Cooper. Though she’d been reluctant to come in and answer questions, she began to talk almost without prompting.

‘You have to understand the position we’d come to,’ she said. ‘Just that day, we’d told Eliot and Kirsten it might be the last Christmas we spent at the Light House. We had to explain to them why it had happened, about the people who said they’d invest money in the pub and be our business partners, about the big loan we’d taken out for the improvements they insisted on. And we told them that they’d pulled out, and left us with a pub that was losing money, with debts we couldn’t pay back.’

Nancy ran her hands over her hair and clutched her head tightly, as if to hold in the thoughts that were trying to escape.

‘The children needed to know that,’ she said. ‘They were old enough by then. Well, we thought they were.’

‘This would have been your arrangement with Diamond Hybrid Securities,’ said Cooper. ‘The company David Pearson worked for.’

‘Not just that. It was him we dealt with. Him who sweet-talked us into committing ourselves beyond our means. But we never met him. So of course we had no idea who he was when he came into the pub. Not a clue.’

‘Go on, Mrs Wharton.’

She paused for a while to collect herself.

‘Anyway, the children were very upset,’ she said. ‘Kirsten cried, and Eliot went really quiet, the way he does sometimes. I think that’s what hurt Maurice most. He loves his children. He’d do absolutely anything for them. And there he was, looking at the prospect of being unable to make a living and keep them in their home. It made him feel useless, a failure. Maurice was already a man on the brink. He’d tell you that himself, if he was able.’

‘And you kept quiet about it all this time,’ put in Fry.

Nancy looked up at her. ‘You can’t blame us for trying to protect our family. Anybody would have done it. Yes, we covered it up for nearly two years, never said a word. But then the bank called in our loan and the pub was closed. Even then, it was weeks afterwards before it occurred to us that there might be a problem. We imagined someone buying the pub and finding something we’d missed. And then …’

She shook her head. ‘But it was too late. We’d given up the keys, and we couldn’t get back in. We felt helpless. As the auction got nearer and nearer, we started to panic. We had crazy ideas about how to prevent anyone from wanting to buy the place.’

‘Hence all the stories going round about junkies and squatters, and the dangers of subsidence?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes,’ she said.

But she said it so quietly that Cooper’s ears pricked up. She had hung her head to avoid meeting his eye. She was ashamed, perhaps. That was understandable. But suddenly he realised that she was mostly ashamed of something she wasn’t telling them.

‘It’s easy to spread rumours around here,’ said Nancy. ‘It only takes one person to start talking about it in a pub, and it goes round like wildfire. No one knew that better than us.’

It was true, but Cooper wasn’t letting it distract from the sudden weight of certainty that had formed in his mind.

‘It was you,’ he said, with a growing feeling of shock and anger. ‘It was you who started the moorland fires. You actually hoped the fire would reach the pub. You planned to damage it beyond repair, so that no one would buy it. You wanted to see the death of the Light House.’

‘It seemed the only way left to us. We thought we’d run out of options, but when the wildfires started, it was like a sign. We heard someone on the news saying that the fires were threatening farm buildings and isolated properties. I remember it now. We looked at each other, and we didn’t have to say a word.’

Cooper stared at her, horrified. It was almost beyond comprehension that the Whartons could have tried to destroy the place they’d worked so hard to save. But that was what they’d been brought to, in the end.

Fry glanced at him, but said nothing. He could sense her unspoken message. He was getting off topic. They had to focus Nancy Wharton on the central issue.

‘We need to take you back to that night in December,’ said Fry. ‘Tell us exactly what happened.’

Cooper watched Nancy fold her arms and lean on them, rocking her body against the table as she relived the memories. How had she imagined she could escape this process? Did she really think she could just hand over a letter and it would all be done with? Wishful thinking? Or had she completely lost touch with reality? Living with such a huge secret for so long might warp your perspective, he supposed. The biggest challenge she’d faced was deciding when the moment had come to let that secret go.

‘The Light House was shut,’ she said. ‘We always closed the pub for a few days over Christmas.’

‘We know that. So how did the Pearsons come to be there?’

‘They came banging on the door late that night, and we recognised them from the evening before. So we let them in. We didn’t want to. Well, Maurice particularly – he hated the idea of strangers being there in the pub, when it was a family time. It was worse than that, though. Maurice had been looking at the business accounts. Like I said, we truly thought it was going to be the last Christmas we’d be able to spend at the Light House. The children knew it by then, too.’