Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  He passed the sheep wash at the hamlet of Booth, which would still have been in use when the mass trespassers came by in 1932, with hundreds of sheep collected from the western slopes of Kinder. Washing the sheep was regarded as a great social occasion in those decades, with shepherds standing waist-deep in the water as sheep were tossed in one by one for their fleeces to be scrubbed clean of peat before shearing, and farmers mixing their own sheep dip from soap and creosote to kill lice and ticks in the dense wool.

  Cooper soon realised that he should have brought a stick or a hiking pole like the Warburtons. As soon as he stepped on the steepest stretch of cobbles beyond the entrance to the old water-treatment works, his feet slipped from underneath him. He hit the wet stones with a painful crash. For a moment, he was dazed. He sat up and rubbed his elbow where he’d scraped it on the ground. Then he got back to his feet and carried on upwards.

  He passed along the edge of Kinder Reservoir, with the abandoned water-treatment works below him. The rows of arched windows on the filter house had been blocked up, and many of the skylights were smashed. The path here was scattered with dead leaves and the empty husks of acorns. A jay darted between a stand of oak trees growing along the brow.

  Then the peace was shattered as an Emirates 747 roared low overhead, coming in to land at Manchester Airport, a white shape skimming in and out of the cloud. Flights passed constantly over the Kinder plateau. Where Manchester people had once fought for the right to ramble across these moors, now they flew over every week, ignoring Kinder on their way to holidays in Ibiza or Magaluf.

  Above him, Cooper could see the Downfall ravine, the rocks around it like bastions and towers, broken and shattered. Water was spraying off the edge today. After heavy rain, it foamed and steamed as it cascaded off the plateau.

  It was because Kinder held so much water that it was impossible to find a dry route across it. He’d heard that those streams of water removed ten thousand tons of the mountain’s bulk every year. Eventually, the plateau would be flattened to the level of the surrounding river valleys. But not in his lifetime.

  The whole fourteen square miles of Kinder Scout were criss-crossed with deep groughs, carved by water between the hags. Their sides were steep, spongy slopes, their bottoms filled with water that fed the Downfall. It was only by continually crossing them that it was possible to maintain a steady direction.

  Some people thought this place was pretty grim, especially in the winter. The unrelenting blackness of the peat could be a bit overwhelming. It wasn’t a place to wander alone if you were already depressed, or feeling despair about the futility of life. Nature could reflect your mood and exaggerate it. Half an hour of floundering through grough and bog would drain your energy and sap your will to live. And in fog? Damp, close air and reduced visibility could soon evoke sensations of isolation and fear.

  So what made Kinder Scout so attractive to walkers? Well, the views were certainly extensive – Yorkshire to the north and Cheshire in the west, with the mountains of Wales visible in the distance on a clear day. This vista might not have been so clear at the time of the Mass Trespass, thanks to the smoke from mill chimneys and the coal fires of inner-city workers’ homes.

  For centuries the sphagnum moss binding the surface had been steadily killed off by industrial pollution, all that acid rain falling from factories in Manchester. The sphagnum was being reintroduced now, thanks to the Moors for the Future project.

  After seeing its fourteen square miles of bare peat steaming with moisture, someone had once called the Kinder plateau ‘land at the end of its tether, entirely covered in the droppings of dinosaurs’. It had certainly been an uncompromising landscape for generations. But now Kinder was in the throes of change. Out here on the edge of the world, two thousand feet above sea level, life was returning to this once bleak moonscape.

  A grouse jumped up from the heather with a harsh cry – Go back! Go back, back, back, back! But Cooper continued to move onwards.

  On a flattened edge of the slope below, he glimpsed the Mermaid’s Pool. On the plateau itself, the rock formations were the best-known landmarks. Pym Chair, the Druid Stone, the Boxing Gloves, Madwoman’s Stones, Punch’s Nose, Ringing Roger.

  The Woolpacks and the Mushroom Garden were names describing the appearance of many of the gritstone rocks. The Pagoda was a collection of huge flat stones laid on top of each other. The Moat Stone was named because of the shallow pool surrounding it. Some rocks resembled a frog, a fossilised giant snail or an upturned tooth.

  For a moment, Cooper wondered what it was like to live in a part of the country where individual rocks weren’t named on the Ordnance Survey map. Were people still as conscious of their own history, the presence of those ancestors with their dark, superstitious imaginations?

  All these legends brought his thoughts back to the New Trespassers Walking Club. Their entire existence was based on a legend. Yet as a group, they seemed to have been stitched together like a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.

  The more Cooper thought about it, the more the Kinder Mass Trespass seemed a tenuous connection between these people. And some of them cared nothing for the significance of the 1932 trespass. One believed it was a Communist plot. So what had brought them together in the first place? Could these people be linked by something completely different?

  The Mass Trespass had taken place in April. The 24th to be exact. Why was that a ‘bad time’ for members of the group, as Darius Roth had described it a few days ago? Cooper had assumed it was something to do with work, or school holidays: 24 April could sometimes fall during the Easter break, but not always. So was there some other significance to the choice of October? Who had chosen the date for the walk? Darius, of course.

  Cooper stopped walking suddenly. He felt as though his feet had hit hidden obstacles in the wet peat; those familiar tentacles had reached out and grabbed his ankles. He was recalling his conversation with Elsa Roth about the fate of Darius’s brother, Magnus, the rock climber. Didn’t she say that he died six years ago? Surely that was just about the time the date of the New Trespassers’ annual walk was changed. Did Darius move the date to October to mark his brother’s death? Could there be some significance to that? Were they all connected through that fatal incident?

  Ahead, the Swine’s Back led along the southern edge of the plateau towards Grindsbrook, and Kinder itself stretched before him.

  Ironically, the original trespassers had got lost on Kinder. In fact, they’d never reached the top of the hill at all but had turned left and descended to Ashop Head instead of right towards the Downfall and onto the plateau. A Sheffield group who ascended Jacob’s Ladder on the other side of the moor to meet them must have been baffled to see the main party turning away and heading in the opposite direction. Like so many ramblers since, the Kinder mass trespassers had no idea where they were.

  Where the restoration work was taking place, some areas of the plateau had been transformed from dark menace to a bright benevolence as the black, eroded morass was seeded over and turned green.

  But here was the Kinder that he’d always known. Desolate and dangerous. A place where unwary walkers wandered lost for hours and could sink up to their waists in the bog. A path of stone slabs had been laid across a stretch of badly eroded moorland, like a causeway across a black, peaty ocean.

  Cooper reached Crowden Head and for a while he sat out of the wind behind a rock, watching the clouds roll in from the south-west and taking in the silence at the summit.

  To the north across the Snake Pass lay the high moors of Bleaklow and Black Hill. Along the eastern edge of the plateau, a soggy line across high ground from the Madwoman’s Stones to the cairn of Ringing Roger. The plateau today looked bleak, and dangerous.

  If you were lost on Kinder, there was no safe way down unless you managed to hit one of the two main paths. Without a compass and the ability to use it, you might walk round in circles for hours. The best advice was to stay where you were until help arrived.
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  But the New Trespassers Walking Club hadn’t done that. Why not? What had caused that division within the group and made them head off in separate directions?

  Well, perhaps because they had no clear leadership. Without firm direction from Darius, there was no one able to make a decision that would be accepted by the others. That was why the group had split up. No unity, no solidarity, no commitment to each other. They’d put their trust in Darius Roth, and he’d failed them when it came to a crisis.

  That morning, Diane Fry drove under Clifton Bridge and pulled into the BP service station as usual. Another text message had arrived on her phone from InPost to alert her to a delivery, with a code to access her locker. That was odd. She wasn’t expecting anything. She wracked her memory to remember what she might have ordered that hadn’t already arrived, but couldn’t think what it might be.

  Well, she could only go and find out. All she had to do was scan the QR code or enter the number on the touch screen to open a locker. But she remembered what Angie had said in that call yesterday: Don’t use your locker.

  There was no one around the collection point. She filled up her car, bought her coffee and a packet of mints, and withdrew some money from the cash machine outside, taking her time. Then she stayed in her car for a few moments on the side of the forecourt, pretending to use her mobile phone.

  A black BMW was parked across the road in the entrance to the river walk. It would be quite normal at this time of the morning. People took their dogs for exercise along the riverbank, though they rarely arrived in BMWs.

  In this case, two men were sitting in the car, apparently doing nothing except admiring the scenery. They were parked so that their rear-view mirrors were angled towards the service station. Fry felt sure she was being watched. Had they been expecting her to check her locker? What would she have found inside it, if she had? Perhaps Angie’s warning had meant something, after all.

  Fry smiled as she put her phone away. She had at least one shot on the phone that might show up the number plate of the BMW. She wondered if it would be there again tomorrow morning, or whether they would bother to use a different car. They would have a frustrating time. She had no intention of using her locker for the foreseeable future.

  As she drove northwards, Fry felt as though she’d achieved a small victory. She even smiled at the prospect of her next interview with Martin Jackson, which was scheduled for tomorrow.

  Today, though, she was back at her desk at EMSOU. Fry pulled into the car park behind a building just off a junction of the M1 and keyed in the security code. She half expected the code to have been changed so that she couldn’t get in. But the door opened and she walked through to her office, wondering whether she’d be able to give the appearance that everything was normal.

  Everyone must know what was going on: all her colleagues would be aware of the disciplinary hearing. If not, they would naturally ask her where she’d been. But when she arrived at her desk, no one asked. She just got the usual casual greetings and a few brief nods.

  Jamie Callaghan swung his chair over to speak to her.

  ‘You OK, Diane?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.’

  Callaghan smiled, but didn’t say anything more.

  Reports had piled up on Fry’s desk during the short time she’d been gone. She checked on the progress of the Danielle Atherton murder inquiry in Edendale and frowned over an MG11 witness statement from one of the Athertons’ neighbours. She made a note, wondering if DCI Mackenzie would be available to speak to her.

  Then she turned to the latest briefings.

  ‘Jamie, what’s this about an unexplained death on Kinder Scout?’ she said.

  ‘Could be suspicious,’ said Callaghan. ‘Or maybe not. Your friend DI Cooper is dealing with it at the moment, North Division CID.’

  ‘He won’t want to pass it on to us,’ said Fry.

  ‘He’ll have to, if it’s confirmed as homicide.’

  ‘Mmm. There’s always a possibility that it’s confirmed too late, when there’s nothing left for us to do.’

  Callaghan laughed. ‘Well, you know him best. To be honest, I think I’d probably be the same, unless it was a high-profile case.’

  Fry looked around the office to see who was missing today, who might perhaps be at Ripley being interviewed by Professional Standards. She thought Mackenzie might have wanted to welcome her back to the team, but there was no sign of him.

  ‘Is the boss in, Jamie?’ she said.

  ‘I think he’s in a meeting,’ said Callaghan vaguely.

  ‘Maybe I’ll catch him later.’

  Fry decided to keep her head down. DCI Mackenzie’s absence from the office could be suspicious. Or maybe not.

  Ben Cooper looked at his phone. There had been no signal for some time as he made his way across the plateau. But now two bars were showing on his screen, and he could see that he’d missed a call from Carol Villiers.

  ‘I couldn’t shake Liam Sharpe,’ Villiers said when he called her back. ‘He’s at home, still with his foot up, and he can only walk with a limp. It looks genuine to me, and his account is totally consistent. He says he pleaded with Faith Matthew not to leave him alone on Kinder. Ben, he even started to look scared as he was talking about it. The memory was painful for him. I don’t think he’s that good an actor.’

  ‘Did you ask him any more about Faith?’

  ‘He says he liked her. More than he did some of the others in the group, anyway. He was glad she was the one who stayed behind. It made him feel reassured, he said. But then she left him . . . You should have heard him talking about it, Ben – it was like he’d been abandoned by his mother.’

  ‘But why did she leave him alone?’

  ‘She told him she’d noticed something, lights in the fog. She went up onto higher ground to see if it was a rescue party coming. It makes sense, I suppose.’

  ‘So you don’t think Mr Sharpe could have faked his injury.’

  ‘That’s my feeling.’

  Cooper nodded as he listened to her account of the interview.

  ‘Oh well. It shouldn’t be possible anyway,’ he said. ‘Not just like that. It shouldn’t have been such a simple solution, a blatant deception that no one bothered to question. Someone would have noticed something.’

  ‘Especially when there are twelve witnesses.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that’s too many,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes the more witnesses you have, the more difficult it is to get at the facts. Every witness sees and hears something different. We’re taught that in basic training, aren’t we? The skill is to look for the consistencies and inconsistencies to get at the truth hidden among all the witness statements. It can be hard, though.’

  ‘Yes, it can.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘don’t forget – one of those twelve people wasn’t just a witness.’

  ‘We’re still struggling for a motive.’

  ‘Speaking of which, see if someone can find out exactly when Darius Roth’s brother died.’

  ‘What was his first name?’

  ‘Magnus. He was a rock climber. According to Elsa, he died in a fall.’

  He ended the call and looked at his surroundings. He’d carried on walking while he was listening to Villiers. Now he seemed to have lost his bearings. He looked downhill and frowned at the sense of unfamiliarity as he looked in vain for signs of the River Kinder. There were two main watercourses on the plateau, fed by those thousands of small streams. The Kinder drained west to the Irish Sea, while water from Fairbrook flowed eastwards and ended up in the North Sea.

  The sun was behind the clouds, but he could see from a brighter patch where the west lay and which was east. And he was facing in the wrong direction.

  Cooper muttered a curse. At some point in the last few minutes, he’d unintentionally crossed the watershed in the middle of England and was heading eastwards. Kinder had performed its dangerous magic again. It had tur
ned him round three hundred and sixty degrees, without him being aware of it. He was a long way from where he should have been. He was looking down into the valley of the Noe at Grindsbrook instead of westwards towards Hayfield.

  Cooper knew he should have navigated by compass rather than relying on landscape features and his sense of direction. Because this was Kinder, and the landscape seemed to change at will, stones constantly shifting position, the groughs growing deeper, streams changing direction, paths appearing and disappearing as they petered out into nowhere. That was why Kinder Scout was impossible to map. It never stayed the same long enough. For Cooper, this mountain was a living thing.

  And this must have been what happened to the New Trespassers Walking Club. In the end, none of them would have had any idea where they were, no matter what they claimed in their witness statements. Faith Matthew probably wouldn’t have known she was perched on the edge of a precipice at Dead Woman’s Drop.

  But what about the person who pushed her over? How could he or she have known? Was there just one among the group who knew their exact position? One person who saw an opportunity to take advantage of the fear and confusion?

  Cooper pictured the map showing the relative movements of the walking group that fateful day. He was remembering his interview with Jonathan Matthew. In his mind, he could hear Jonathan talking about how guilty he felt not to have been there to protect his sister when she died. Cooper had sympathised with him then, had fully understood the guilt he was experiencing.

  But surely the map had been telling him quite a different story, which he’d been refusing to see. According to the MRT, only Dolly the search dog knew Jonathan’s exact position when he was found. There was no evidence of where he was at the moment his sister was attacked and killed, no clear picture of where he’d gone when the party split up.