by J. R. Ellis
‘Be careful!’ shouted Steph. She knew this was not professional, but Oldroyd ignored it and turned back to the house.
‘They obviously know the game’s up. No point standing on ceremony.’
He went back up to the door and tried the handle. The door swung open.
Carter and DC Robinson struggled to get their seat belts on as the police car tore down the drive leaving a cloud of dust behind. Carter had done training in vehicle pursuit and quite relished the challenge. He was less clear about what they would do if they managed to catch up with Hardiman. This was a dangerous man.
‘He turned left out of the drive, Sarge,’ said the DC.
‘Yes, I saw him. Any idea where he might be heading?’
‘Not a clue, Sarge.’
The van had a reasonably good start, but Carter was confident he could catch it up. He turned left and accelerated up the road.
‘Where does this go?’
‘Over to Ribblesdale, I think. It goes right over the moors and comes out at Selside.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s just a little village on the road between Settle and Ribblehead.’
‘Right.’ Carter turned on the sirens and the flashing lights and settled in for a long pursuit.
Oldroyd, Steph and DC Carol Jones burst into the entrance hall just as Caroline Hardiman emerged sobbing from the rear of the house. Her face was distorted with anguish. When she saw Oldroyd, she called to him in desperation.
‘Inspector, oh my God! Inspector, stop him, please! He’ll do something to himself.’
‘My detective sergeant’s gone after him.’
Oldroyd turned to Steph and DC Jones.
‘Take her in there.’
The two detectives, supporting the distraught figure at either side, led her into the shabby living room and sat down on either side of her on the big sofa. Oldroyd waited a long time for her to calm down.
‘You know why we’re here?’ he eventually said gently.
She nodded.
‘I have to arrest you for the murders of David Atkins and John Baxter.’
She nodded again, but seemed incapable of speech. She was shaking badly.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’ She managed the words between sobs.
‘You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’
She nodded, and finally the sobs stopped and she looked up at Oldroyd, realising that he wasn’t hostile to her; just a man doing his job. She took a deep breath and, for a moment, a look of relief passed across her face. She was glad to be letting go of this guilty secret at last.
‘It was all a terrible mistake. I let Simon talk me into it, but I’m not blaming him. I played my part.’
‘Was it to do with this?’
Steph produced a printout of a newspaper cutting. The date was some two and a half years before:
Narrow Escape for Schoolgirls
Two schoolgirls from Manchester narrowly escaped being swept away by floodwaters on the River Ribble yesterday.
The girls were walking up the river on a stretch which is normally shallow, when a sudden increase in water levels caused them to lose their footing and fall. They were carried downstream a hundred yards before adults leading the party were able to pull them to safety.
The girls were on an Outdoor Pursuits holiday at Garthwaite Hall Outdoor Pursuits Centre. The owner of the centre, Mr Simon Hardiman said, ‘It was a freak accident; we have taken lots of parties of schoolchildren into the river at that point. We call it river walking. The kids love it. It’s usually very shallow. Clearly, we will have to review our policies and practices.’
The girls were suffering from shock, but were otherwise unharmed. They have returned home to Manchester.
Caroline glanced at the article and a spasm of anger crossed her face.
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Dave Atkins was blackmailing you about something, wasn’t he?’ asked Oldroyd.
She nodded and pointed to the article. ‘It happened while he was working for us. We were terrified of the bad publicity, how it might damage our business, but we managed to contain it. The girls weren’t injured, so there was nothing the press could get their teeth into. We even changed the name of our centre to avoid the link in people’s minds with the incident.’
Steph turned to Oldroyd.
‘That’s why it took me so long to find this. I kept searching under Wharfedale Outdoor Pursuits, but the name at that time was Garthwaite Hall Outdoor Pursuits.’
Caroline’s eyes were wet, her face strained beyond recognition. She twisted a handkerchief as she struggled to tell the story.
‘You’re right, and then . . .’ She broke down into tears again. ‘If it hadn’t been for that bastard everything would have been all right.’
Oldroyd waited for her to regain some control. ‘What did he do?’
‘At the time we had two students working for us, you know, just temporarily. They were out on that expedition with the school party. They helped to drag the girls out by the river only . . .’ She paused to blow her nose. ‘One of them wasn’t properly qualified. Oh my God!’ She broke down again. ‘It was so unfair. I swear to you it was just an oversight. There’s this supervisory qualification and he only had Level 1. To go out with a party of children like that you have to have Level 2.’
‘And Atkins found out?’
‘Yes. I don’t know whether the student told him at the pub or something but he went into the office and pulled out the staff records. Then he confronted us with it.’
‘He threatened to report it.’
‘Yes, said he’d go to the press. What could we do? The press would have loved that: “Girls in river supervised by unqualified student”. We’d have been finished overnight, no one would have come here; our dream would have been ruined.’ Her face crumpled again. ‘Now it’s ruined anyway.’
Carter gripped the steering wheel and kept his foot down on the throttle. They were chasing the van on a narrow road that climbed over the fell. There were no walls or hedges and occasionally they rattled over a cattle grid.
‘He’s driving like a lunatic,’ said DC Robinson as there was a blare of horns and the van, which was not far ahead of them now, forced a car coming in the opposite direction off the road.
‘He’s driving like a man who doesn’t care if he lives or not,’ replied Carter grimly.
The road dipped down again with drystone walls at either side. It twisted and turned down the fell, approaching vivid green fields grazed by cows as the wide expanse of Ingleborough, dark and majestic against a distant bank of cloud, came into sight.
They were right behind the van now. Carter banged his fist repeatedly on the horn. Suddenly they went under a bridge, turned a corner and were at a T-junction with a main road. The van hardly slowed but screeched and swerved out and turned right just in front of a lorry, which braked and skidded, the horn sounding angrily. The collision just avoided, lorry and van continued, leaving the police car behind.
‘Bugger it!’ shouted Carter, blasting the horn again. Valuable seconds were wasted until he managed to overtake.
The van had drawn ahead but Carter was making progress again as they entered a small cluster of old limestone buildings. The name ‘Selside’ on a wooden board was attached to a gable end. Luckily, there was no one walking on the narrow road as the van hurtled to the left with a screech of tyres followed by the police car, siren still blaring. The van bounced up a track for several hundred yards and then stopped. The two policemen saw Simon Hardiman jump out, climb over a gate and run up a path which crossed a field. Carter switched off the engine and was out of the car almost before it came to a halt.
He ran to the gate and shouted, ‘Mr Hardiman, stop; you can’t escape.’
But it was futile. There was a te
rrible determination about the figure running across the field. It seemed to be heading towards an isolated clump of trees on the lower slopes of the fell.
‘Where’s he going? What’s over there where those trees are?’
‘It’s Alum Pot, Sarge.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a nasty deep pothole, a two hundred and fifty foot drop, one of the deepest in the Dales.’ DC Robinson looked at Carter.
‘If he’s thinking of doing himself in there’s no better place to do it.’
Carter responded by climbing the gate.
‘We’d better get after him then.’
‘What did Atkins want from you?’
Caroline had calmed down again. ‘Not much to begin with. An occasional payment of a few hundred pounds; but then about six months ago he started to demand bigger sums, said he’d lost money on some property investments.’
‘We know all about that,’ said Oldroyd. ‘It was all illegal stuff.’
‘We just couldn’t pay. We’re struggling enough as it is, but he wouldn’t listen; kept saying this place was a little gold mine and we must have plenty stashed away.’
‘We were desperate, but particularly Simon. He just couldn’t bear to go back to the city, lose this place.’
She was becoming agitated again.
‘My detective sergeant is following him,’ repeated Oldroyd.
DC Jones brought a glass of water. Caroline sipped at it before continuing.
‘One day Simon came back from one of his potholing expeditions with John Baxter. He was very excited; said he’d been reading an old book he’d found here in the hall about a lost passage from Winter’s Gill Hole to the Jingling Pot system. They’d found the passage; it was narrow and dangerous but Simon thought it would be a great place to hide a body. He’d agreed with John that they wouldn’t announce their find until the next meeting of the cave group – you know, to make it more dramatic. He looked at me strangely and I knew straight away what was on his mind.’
‘It was his idea.’
‘Yes, but I agreed. I know it was wrong but we were so harassed by this . . . this terrible man. We’d got to the point where we’d do anything to get rid of him. He was ruining our lives.’ She paused as the anger welled up in her.
‘So we made up a plan together. I got Atkins to come up to the hall saying I wanted to ask him about something and I came on to him, pretended I fancied him and was willing to have an affair, but we’d have to be careful.’
‘He didn’t suspect anything?’
‘No, of course not; he was a womaniser, thought he was God’s gift. It was too flattering to his pathetic ego. This particular night I agreed to meet him in Burnthwaite, near the Red Horse.’
Oldroyd glanced at Steph and nodded. Sam Cartwright was right: he had seen her waiting near the pub.
‘I told him that Simon was away. I parked the van down a back lane; told Atkins this was so we wouldn’t be seen. Simon was hiding nearby; when we got to the van he came up behind Atkins and smashed him over the head with a hammer.’ She grimaced as she recalled the scene.
‘It sounds terrible, but all I felt was relief that our tormenter was gone. I couldn’t feel sorry for him.’
‘What did you do next?’
‘Loaded the body into the van and drove back here. It was completely dark by then. We waited until the early hours, then got our caving gear on and drove to Winter’s Gill. I kept asking Simon why we had to hide the body down there; why we couldn’t bury it. He said bodies always turned up. There was even a bloke who threw a body into a lake in the Lake District but it was found over twenty years later. He said no one would ever find it down there, though. Turned out he was wrong.’
‘Go on,’ encouraged Oldroyd.
‘It was pitch black. We carried the body over to the Winter’s Gill entrance and dragged it down the cave and into that Devil’s Passage. We had a difficult job getting it up from the chamber, but Simon’s tremendously strong and he rigged up a harness using anchor bolts. We were absolutely exhausted when we got back. He wanted to take the body to the far end so that he could get to it from the Jingling Pot side if he needed to; check it was still there, I suppose.’
It was a familiar pattern, thought Oldroyd: the murderer hides the body but feels a compulsion to return to check it. And what a strange and gruesome irony that they were unaware that other bodies were hidden there, bodies from the distant past.
‘That was another mistake, if we’d left it further towards the Winter’s Gill end, the water might not have moved it out into Sump Passage. After you’d gone that day we worked out that it must have been the water that moved it.’
‘Wasn’t he worried that John Baxter would go back to the Devil’s Passage?’
‘His plan was to start a rock fall and block the entrance at the Winter’s Gill end, then tell John he’d been back but the entrance was blocked. It all went smoothly until you came that day and told us the body had been discovered. Simon had been out in Skipton, otherwise he might have been called out to bring the body up. I don’t know how he would have managed that.’
Oldroyd reflected on how those caves were always capable of springing surprises, even on the experts. He said, ‘I knew it was a shock when I told you. You tried hard but I’m afraid I wasn’t fooled. You never asked me how Atkins was killed because, of course, you knew.’
Caroline laughed harshly. ‘And I thought we did well to conceal it all.’
Oldroyd continued, ‘After that you soon realised that you had a problem with John Baxter, the only other person who knew about the Devil’s Passage.’
Caroline bowed her head. ‘We had a terrible row about it. I said we couldn’t kill an innocent man and it was all Simon’s fault for hiding the body there. He said, what else could we do? We’d lose everything . . . I . . . just gave in in the end, but I refused to have anything to do with it. Simon went round and killed John himself. It didn’t make us feel any better, of course, because we saw your press conference and we weren’t sure what John had said to you. Simon went down a few times to the Red Horse to see if he could find out anything from the locals.’
‘Even if the body hadn’t appeared, didn’t he think people would want to open the passageway up again, like we’ve done, once they knew about it?’
She looked at Oldroyd.
‘He never mentioned it but now you’ve said that, I think he must have been planning to kill John anyway to make sure no one else ever knew about the passage. He was waiting for a good time to tell me because he knew I wouldn’t approve. When the body turned up, it just brought everything forward and he had to kill him quickly.’
She put her head in her hands.
‘Why did I ever agree to it? I wasn’t thinking clearly.’
She looked up.
‘That was why we didn’t deserve to get away with it: killing John Baxter. I still don’t feel sorry about Atkins, but John Baxter is different.’
Carter ran up the path towards the clump of trees but he had no chance of catching the fit Simon Hardiman. DC Robinson was close behind.
They reached a wall surrounding the trees and Carter began to climb over a stile.
‘Careful, Sarge, it’s steep, a sheer drop.’
Both detectives climbed over and then stopped, panting for breath. Carter looked around. He couldn’t see anything beyond the foliage but, as he listened, there was the tinkling sound of water falling away in a manner that was somehow sinister. A preternatural instinct sent a shiver through him. Some menacing change in the acoustic gave him an apprehension of a void, a terrible danger that turned his legs weak. He crouched down and grasped a branch on the nearest tree.
‘Did you see where he went?’ He found he was whispering to DC Robinson.
‘No, Sarge. I think we’ll just have to walk around the edge.’
Carter got up and walked gingerly along a narrow path that wound between some trees. Then he saw it. The jolt made his legs collapse again and he grab
bed for another branch. The ground fell away quickly into an appalling black void, a horrifying, wide chasm to which no bottom was visible. At one end, a small stream flowed to the edge and disappeared down into drops and spray. He felt a powerful desire to lean over and look down, but DC Robinson put a firm hand on his shoulder.
‘Keep back, Sarge.’ He looked down himself from his safe position. ‘Mesmerising. You want to lean over and look into it; it’s deadly. My dad was a sailor. He said some people look over the side of the ship at the sea so long, they feel a compulsion to jump in and sometimes they do.’
Carter dragged his gaze away and looked up at the grassy fell rising away from them for a few moments. Then he allowed himself to look just at the edge again. Ferns were growing on the damp limestone and a bird fluttered across the chasm, its gift of flight totally removing the terror of the drop.
Suddenly DC Robinson pointed across.
‘He’s there, Sarge!’
Carter saw a grassy bank at the other side. It sloped down steeply to the very edge of the chasm. Near the bottom was the figure of a man lying on the bank, head facing away from the drop.
‘Let’s get over there,’ said Carter.
They edged their way carefully round, glancing frequently at the figure, which remained still.
Eventually they were standing at the top of the bank, several feet directly above Hardiman. Carter crouched down again and leaned forward.
‘Mr Hardiman!’ he called out. ‘Mr Hardiman, can you hear me?’
The figure turned its head. ‘Leave me!’
Carter lay flat on the bank and inched further down head first towards Hardiman.
‘Watch it, Sarge!’ Robinson clutched Carter’s foot.
‘Mr Hardiman,’ Carter called again. The two men were facing each other twelve feet apart. It was close enough for Carter to see an expression of the most intense anguish on the other man’s face.
‘I told you, go. You can’t do anything. I’m not trying to escape.’
‘Mr Hardiman, don’t do it. Atkins had some hold over you, didn’t he? Was it something to do with those schoolgirls who were swept down the river? Come back with us. Put your case to the court.’