Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘So it belongs to the bank?’

  ‘Well … mostly to the creditors, yes. It seems the Whartons were obliged to sell when the incomings no longer matched the outgoings.’

  ‘They went bust.’

  ‘It’s rather a crude term. More of a tabloid journalist’s expression.’

  ‘But still …?’

  ‘That’s the gist of it, yes,’ admitted Pilkington.

  ‘And now it’s a dead duck. Who would buy a failed pub?’

  ‘It’s an opportunity to regenerate an underperforming business,’ said Pilkington stiffly. ‘An adjustment of the food and drink split, a shift to a more dry-led trading model. The potential incomings—’

  ‘Save it,’ said Fry.

  ‘It could be a unique destination food house. We expect to get a good price at auction.’

  Fry looked at Pilkington as if she was going to hit him. Cooper was more reluctant to upset anyone in the property business. You never knew how word might get around in a place like Edendale. But Fry didn’t care, clearly. She had no intention of ever buying property in this area. She’d never made any secret of it. Property ownership meant roots. It certainly involved financial ties. All the things Diane Fry didn’t want.

  ‘This is a landmark property, freehold and free of tie, with function room and guest accommodation. It ought to be an easy sell.’ Pilkington looked faintly apologetic at his use of the phrase. ‘Well, that’s what my son says. A full commercial kitchen, with glass wash and preparation room. Three-bedroom self-contained owner’s accommodation, with four en suite guest bedrooms. Goodwill, plus stock at valuation.’

  Cooper recalled reading in the local newspaper that the freehold for another famous landmark inn in the Peak District had sold recently for one and a half million pounds. Who would have that kind of money available to rescue the Light House from its fate?

  Pilkington eyed Fry nervously as she walked away. Then he turned to Cooper as if to share a confidence.

  ‘To be honest, the turnover doesn’t look too good on paper,’ he said. ‘We’re advised by our clients that business was more than acceptable a few years ago, but it began to decline. Potential buyers don’t like to see a downturn on gross profits when they examine the financial records.’

  ‘No, of course.’

  ‘There were particular problems here, though.’

  ‘Oh, were there?’

  ‘Well, for example – a lot of businesses in the hospitality sector rely on making a profit over the holiday period. It can compensate for flat trading during the rest of the year. But the Light House had developed the practice of closing over Christmas. You can understand it on a personal level, I suppose. We all like to spend time with our families. But from a business point of view, it didn’t help the bottom line at all.’

  A scatter of soot on the wind and the acrid smell of burning heather reminded them that a wildfire was burning on the moor not too far away.

  ‘They need to put that fire out,’ said Pilkington nervously.

  ‘They’re doing their best, sir.’

  ‘They need to put it out. It mustn’t be allowed to get any closer to the property.’

  ‘I’m sure the firefighters will have it under control in a day or two.’

  ‘A day or two? Are you serious?’

  ‘These moorland fires can burn for weeks. The fire gets right down into the peat, you see, and then there’s no way of putting it out. It just keeps smouldering away down there, and burning back up to the surface again. That could go on all summer. Or until we get some decent rain, anyway.’

  ‘That can’t be possible surely.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. But the firefighting teams will make it a priority to prevent the blaze spreading this way so as to protect your property.’

  He turned and looked at the derelict inn as he spoke, the shuttered windows and boarded-up door, the grass growing on the car park, the weeds sprouting from the roof. And he wondered what there was to protect, really.

  ‘They should have had protection by occupation,’ said Pilkington. ‘My son advised it, but they didn’t take up the option.’

  ‘A live-in guardian, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly. Someone who lives on site temporarily for a small rent. It would have worked here, I’m sure. There’s separate owner’s accommodation already in place. A guardian could have looked after the property a bit better, and prevented it from becoming such an eyesore. Not that the right buyer won’t see the potential …’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘There have been a lot of rumours about problems with the pub since it closed. Reports of squatters and drug users, but they turned out not to be true. And word has been going round Edendale that there were major subsidence issues, due to the old mine workings.’

  ‘Yes, I heard that rumour myself.’

  ‘Well that isn’t true either,’ said Pilkington. ‘It’s all very unhelpful. That type of story tends to put off a lot of buyers.’

  Cooper thought about where the Light House stood. He supposed its original builders hadn’t chosen its position for the views. Until the arrival of the Romantic movement, this landscape would have been considered wild and barbaric, so lacking in civilisation as to be devoid of interest. After all, the eighteenth-century novelist Daniel Defoe had called the Peak District ‘a houling wilderness’. The heather itself had been despised as a symbol of rural poverty.

  No, this had been a practical choice of location. Travellers passing over the moors needed somewhere to stop for the night, a place to change or rest their horses. The inn’s lights appearing in the dusk must have been a welcome sight to many thousands of people over the years. It was only much later that they came here for the view.

  Thomas Pilkington left after handing over the keys to the pub. As his Volvo estate drove away, another vehicle was pulling up to the outer cordon. An unmarked Vauxhall Corsa CID pool car. And surely that was Gavin Murfin at the wheel? Not many officers drove with one hand while eating a sausage roll from the other.

  Cooper shook his head. Murfin was probably just curious about what was going on. He couldn’t blame him for that. It was why he was here himself. But Gavin’s presence at the Light House was the last thing he needed right now. It was like tossing a burning rag into a pool of oil.

  He tried making gestures at the Corsa. Go away, Gavin. But Murfin had wound the driver’s window down and was having a chat with the uniformed officer on duty. Everyone knew DC Murfin. He’d been in E Division for ever. Within a few minutes, he would know far more about the crime scene than Cooper did himself.

  Cooper wasn’t the only person who’d noticed the pool car arrive, either. Fry was stomping about like an angry wasp.

  ‘Shouldn’t you and your team be somewhere?’ she said, approaching Cooper. ‘Going over the Pearsons’ movements, perhaps? Wasn’t that what we all agreed at the briefing this morning?’

  ‘I’m just on my way,’ said Cooper, but he didn’t move.

  ‘So …?’

  ‘Well the thing is – I’m not sure about the route,’ he said.

  ‘The route?’

  ‘The one the Pearsons took on their way back to the cottage from Castleton. It seems to have been assumed that they just followed the Limestone Way.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But according to the statements in the case file, some customers waiting outside the fish and chip shop reported seeing them on The Stones.’

  ‘That was when the Pearsons were on their way down in to Castleton earlier in the evening.’

  Cooper knew he shouldn’t have been surprised that she had the smallest details of the couple’s movements off by heart. It was one of Fry’s skills, along with the knack of making him feel useless. Well, superfluous at least.

  ‘Yes, but …?’ he said.

  ‘Ben, all that sighting does is confirm that David and Trisha Pearson went into Castleton for the evening. And we know that already from the staff at the George.’

  ‘B
ut don’t you see …?’

  ‘Just go over the ground,’ she said slowly, as if to an idiot. ‘Check everything from the original inquiry. And we’ll take it from there. Okay?’

  Cooper swallowed his words in frustration. There were none so blind as those who refused to see, and Diane Fry was one of the most stubborn.

  When he’d looked at the reports and witness statements from the night David and Trisha Pearson disappeared, an idea had occurred to him. He needed to explain it to someone, but Diane Fry had been the wrong person.

  9

  Fry supposed this was what would have been called an old-fashioned pub. She pictured an open hearth and log fires in the winter, a place where dogs were welcome – sometimes more welcome than human patrons. What had the old man from the auctioneer’s called it? A unique destination food house? It wasn’t her idea of a destination. She wouldn’t waste petrol coming up here if she didn’t have to.

  The pub had a stone slate roof, with a satellite dish high on the wall, and spotlights that must once have lit the facade of the pub and made it visible for miles. A sign was faintly chalked on an A-board left lying on the ground outside: We serve REAL chips.

  A smokers’ shelter had been built against one wall. Ironically, there were plenty of butt bins provided, so it was probably the one place where cigarette ends could be disposed of safely anywhere on Oxlow Moor, where she could see the wildfires burning.

  Sometimes Fry liked to see a fire. For her, flames could be cleansing, a means of getting rid of the old and clearing the way for something better. But she supposed Cooper and those like him wouldn’t see it that way. No doubt they would be panicking right now about the damage to their precious landscape, as if was a fossil that ought to be preserved in aspic and never altered.

  It was nonsense, of course. Everyone knew that places like the Peak District looked the way they did because of centuries of human interference. Moorland landscapes had been shaped by deforestation and changes in farming methods. Yes, the credit for maintaining the moors went to all those damn sheep.

  Fry stepped over the low boundary wall on to the terrace of the pub. The wall was lined with terracotta pots full of dead plants. Someone had made an attempt at decorating the main entrance with hanging baskets. They might have been full of petunias and trailing lobelias once. Now they hung from their rusting brackets, bare of flowers, spilling torn shreds of coconut-fibre liner.

  She couldn’t see into the bar because of the boarding over the windows. But she didn’t really need to. The interior of a place like this was too predictable. She pictured flagstones, oak settles and low doorways. She imagined an aged local sitting with a pint of Old Moorland Original in front of him on a wobbly table, a bored landlord reading a copy of the Daily Mail at the bar, a deathly silence broken only by a clock ticking away the seconds until closing time.

  ‘Sergeant, I think we need Gavin Murfin here,’ said Hurst tentatively.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Local knowledge. Gavin has it.’

  ‘Oh God. See if he’s still outside, then.’

  ‘Will do.’

  The interior of the Light House was a strange dichotomy. Part of it was a major crime scene, brightly illuminated and tightly controlled, busy with SOCOs in scene suits, rich with the familiar smells of a forensic examination. But the rest was exactly as it had been left when it closed for business six months ago.

  The main rooms on the ground floor had been securely locked, so were available to Fry with the help of the set of keys handed over by Thomas Pilkington.

  Here in the bar, the atmosphere was stale and dusty. Although scenes of crime had found the main switch for the electricity supply and turned on the lights, the boarding over the windows kept the room as gloomy as if it was permanently night.

  A few tables stood around, chairs stacked haphazardly, empty shelves and optics behind the long counter. Brass fittings that might once have gleamed with polish were now dull with accumulated grime. The big fireplace where the log fire would have burned during the winter was filled with scraps of old newspaper, fragments of a bird’s nest and the remains of a soot fall.

  Fry watched Becky Hurst walk back into the bar. She was pleased that she’d been given Hurst. Of all the members of the CID team in Edendale, this was the officer she might have hopes for. Hurst was smart and tenacious, and Fry had seen how she dealt with Murfin, and even with Luke Irvine, who had about the same length of service.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ said Hurst. ‘This place would make a good youth hostel or something.’

  Gavin Murfin was standing behind her in the doorway.

  ‘It’d make a better pub,’ he said grumpily. ‘Oh, I forgot – that’s exactly what it was, until the bean counters put the boot in.’

  ‘Didn’t you used to drink here, Gavin?’ asked Hurst.

  ‘Drink here? I was practically brought up in this pub. My old man used to leave me outside in the car with a packet of cheese and onion crisps, while he played snooker in the public.’

  ‘A packet of crisps?’ said Hurst. ‘And a bottle of dandelion and burdock, surely?’

  ‘Coke. We were quite a trendy family, for plebs.’

  ‘It’s haunted, I suppose?’

  Fry snorted. ‘Aren’t they all? I thought it was an essential feature to get a listing in the tourist guides, like having toilets and satellite TV.’

  ‘No, this one is genuinely haunted,’ said Murfin. ‘They say it’s the ghost of some servant girl who burned to death in a kitchen accident. Set her clothes alight when she was cooking or something. Now and then she still walks the corridors, giving off a horrible fiery glow.’

  ‘Yeah, right. They tell those stories because they think it’ll bring gullible American tourists in.’

  ‘No,’ said Murfin solemnly. ‘I saw her once.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘I did. I was about to leave here one night, and had to go to the gents. They’re down a corridor round the back of the bar there, you know. And that was when I saw her, all glowing. Gave me the shock of my life, it did.’

  ‘Glowing?’

  ‘Yeah, glowing. Like she was on fire.

  ‘You were drunk, Gavin.’

  ‘Believe what you want, I don’t care.’

  Fry looked at Murfin closely, sure that he must be joking. She’d known him for a long time, and he wasn’t the kind to believe in ghosts and all that stuff. But his face never slipped. He appeared to be serious.

  She looked out across the moor, where the smoke and flames seemed to be getting ever nearer to the pub.

  ‘If that wind changes direction,’ she said, ‘your flaming kitchen maid could be in danger of burning to death all over again.’

  The pub was accessed directly from the car park, and was essentially a one-room open-plan layout, although in visually distinct sections. A games room featured a pool table, darts board and plasma-screen TV. At one end, a dark-panelled snug with pew benches had been left as a reminder of days gone by. It had been heated by a small wood-burning stove.

  In this part of the pub, some of the old pictures had been left on the walls. A few portraits, hunting groups, dukes and squires posing with their dogs and horses. In the dim light, there were too many eyes in the room for Fry’s comfort, squinting at her beneath their layers of dust.

  And what was that smell? She made her way along a short passage and found herself in a galley-style catering kitchen with tiled walls and overhead stainless-steel extractor hoods. Yes, this was where the smell was coming from. The odour of scampi and chips seemed to have been absorbed into the walls and ventilation ducts, and was now being released back into the air.

  Fry was reminded of the theory that ghosts were the lingering echoes of people whose lives and deaths were imprinted indelibly in the stone. This smell seemed to bring a sense of life back to the stale air, peopling the abandoned kitchens with the shadowy spirits of those who’d worked there over the years.

  But that was Gavin Murfin who’d
put the idea of ghosts into her head. She ought to know better than to listen to him, even for a moment.

  ‘Owner’s accommodation?’ she said.

  Murfin jerked his head. ‘Upstairs.’

  She found the access to the stairs just past a series of doors marked as ladies, gents and disabled toilet facilities, and another door giving access to the rear yard area.

  Upstairs, a room had been turned into a small function suite, with its own corner bar for private parties. It was the brightest room in the pub, thanks to four large sash and case windows looking out over the moor. It was laid with a dark blue carpet, leaving a tiny wooden dance floor area in the middle. It would never have hosted any major events. Thirty or forty people would have filled it to capacity. A small wedding, perhaps. An office party. Groups of laughing workers deposited by minibus. No chance of walking home from here.

  The guest rooms were also on the first floor. Just three of them. According to the name plaques on their doors, they were called the Bakewell, Buxton and Bradwell rooms.

  There was another, narrower set of stairs leading to the top floor, where the pub’s owner had lived. But the owner’s accommodation was completely bare. In every room, the furniture had been removed, the carpets stripped from the floor, the curtains pulled down from the windows. There were clear marks against the walls where a picture had hung or a chest of drawers had stood. The former occupants had removed themselves completely.

  A few minutes later, Fry found herself looking down two flights of stairs into the rear corridor, the gloom in the doorways barely relieved by the light from the huge sash window on the landing. For a moment she was puzzled and disturbed by the way the shadows seemed to move below her, as if the darkness was writhing around itself, invisible snakes stirring the dust on the floor.

  It was only when her eyes adjusted to the light that she realised what she was seeing. Smoke and flames from the hillside, casting their distant outlines through the window, thrusting their ominous presence right into the heart of the building.