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.’
‘So if you and Mr Wharton really didn’t want strangers in the pub over Christmas, then why …?’
‘They were both exhausted when they arrived,’ said Nancy. ‘The woman was on her last legs. They must have been wandering around the moor for hours by then. They’d been to the George in Castleton, and tried to walk back. Over the moor in the snow? Stupid. They were stupid to do that.’
It was a tendency that so many people showed when they were interviewed, the attempt to blame everything on the victims. If they hadn’t done this, if they hadn’t behaved like that … The sound of self-justification was so familiar in these interview rooms that Cooper could probably have heard it echoing back to him if he put his ear to the wall.
‘Did they say which way they’d come from Castleton?’ he asked.
Nancy looked surprised. ‘Yes, they said they’d walked up The Stones. They must have come out on the hill at the top there.’
‘Hurd Low.’
‘Yes. Why?’
Why? Cooper had retraced their exact steps himself earlier in the week. He’d pictured very clearly David and Trisha Pearson choosing to take a route back to their cottage via The Stones and Goose Hill, leaving the street lamps of Castleton behind and climbing Hurd Low, hoping to follow the path that linked up with the Limestone Way. He’d imagined the light flurries of sleet turning to snow by the time they left the town. He saw them, within minutes, struggling through a blizzard, their torches useless in zero visibility, their track disappearing under drifting snow. He’d almost been able to feel the cold, to hear that wind moaning and whining like an animal.
Zero visibility? When Cooper had been up on Oxlow Moor this week, the prominent landmark he’d once known had been missing. The Light House had been dark and abandoned, windowless and dead. Though its roof line was still there, its characteristic presence was missing from the skyline.
But when the Pearsons had set off to walk from the George to their cottage at Brecks Farm, the Light House had still been occupied. The Whartons were at home, getting ready to celebrate Christmas with their family. All the windows would have been lit up, the decorations glittering, the Christmas tree sparkling like a beacon in the darkness.
Freezing cold and disorientated, they must have seen those lights in the distance and decided to seek sanctuary.
‘They were frozen stiff and white all over, like a couple of snowmen,’ said Nancy. ‘If they hadn’t been wearing warm clothes, I don’t think they would have made it. When you live up that way, you have more sense. The road was covered in no time, and the car park was drifting over. The wind drives the snow over the moor, you see, and the Light House is the first place it finds to dump it on. We were ready for it, though. We were well stocked up with food, and we’d got everything in for our own celebrations. Only fools or tourists would have been out on the moor in that weather.’
‘But the Pearsons were never completely lost, were they?’ said Cooper.
‘I don’t know what you mean. Why not?’
‘Because,’ said Cooper, ‘they were never out sight of the Light House.’
Yes, it was true that no one lost on the moors would stand a chance unless they found shelter. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Unless they found shelter.
‘Well, there we were with these two people on the doorstep,’ said Nancy. ‘No one had a hope of getting through that night. There wasn’t much point in calling a taxi. What else could we do? Besides, there was an obligation on us. It came with being licensees of a place like the Light House. Those hundreds of years serving as an inn for travellers. All that history.’
‘The unwritten law,’ said Cooper. ‘The ancient code of hospitality.’
‘Yes, if you like.’
And right in the middle, hell wasn’t fiery. The sinners were frozen up to their necks in a lake of ice.
‘Which room did the Pearsons stay in?’ asked Fry.
‘Room One. We called it the Bakewell Room. It was the only one we could get ready quickly for guests.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘Maurice looked at the register after they’d signed in. Then he checked the credit card transaction. A few minutes later I heard him go down into the cellar, where we kept the old records. There are a couple of filing cabinets down there.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’
‘I followed him down, but he was in a bit of a state by then. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. And I can’t say I blamed him. You can imagine how Maurice felt about finding them under his roof as guests – even as paying guests. And he’d let them stay himself, gone out of his way to make a room available for them.’
‘Well, how did he feel?’
‘He thought he’d invited vampires in. He’d always called them “the bloodsuckers”. And there they were, under his own roof.’
Cooper nodded. It was odd that he’d been thinking about Count Dracula ea
rlier in the day, when he’d opened the hatch into the cellar at the Light House. According to vampire legends, undead creatures like Dracula could only enter your house if they were invited in. He recollected fanged actors in horror films trying all kinds of tricks to fool a victim into issuing an invitation. But the Pearsons hadn’t needed to trick Maurice Wharton, had they? Maurice had met with disaster because of his own moment of weakness, his uncharacteristic gesture of generosity.
It had been Christmas, after all. In the end, not even Mad Maurice Wharton wanted to be the man who said ‘no room at the inn’.
‘He sat in his own bar, drinking whisky,’ said Nancy. ‘Poor Maurice. He was consumed by bitterness. The hunger for revenge. Eventually, it, and the whisky, got too strong for him. Maurice took the baseball bat that he kept behind the bar. And then he let the dogs in.’
28
Fry gave Cooper a meaningful look, and he nodded. She switched off the tapes, and they took a break. It was time to let Nancy Wharton think about things for a while.
In the corridor outside the interview room, Carol Villiers took the chance to catch Cooper with a message.
‘Ben, there’s been a call for you. You’re expected up at the Light House. You arranged to meet someone there?’
‘Oh damn, I’d forgotten that. It’s Josh Lane.’ He looked at Fry. ‘I really ought to go. In the circumstances, I think this might be extremely useful to us.’
‘You think you can produce some evidence that relates to Mrs Wharton’s story?’
‘One way or another, yes.’
‘Then go for it. We’ll manage here.’
She was too eager for him to leave, of course. But it couldn’t be helped. Cooper felt he had to leave some reminders with her before he went.
‘You’ll have to question Mrs Wharton about who was involved with the cover-up, who moved the bodies, who broke into the Light House. The Whartons had accomplices who were responsible for all that. And Aidan Merritt …’
‘Yes, I do realise,’ said Fry.
‘So … why do you think Aidan Merritt got himself killed?’
Fry shrugged. ‘Maybe the Whartons thought he was going to betray them. He must have realised the whole thing was going to come out. Perhaps he decided to get in first with his confession. But someone else had their own plan. It was pretty desperate, and they couldn’t allow Merritt to throw a spanner in the works. They were never going to let him start talking, not to anyone.’
‘He looked like a weak link, I suppose,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes. So they got him to the Light House on some pretext, and made sure he didn’t talk. The question is, who betrayed whom?’
Cooper shook his head sadly. ‘That’s the wrong question. In the end, they all betrayed themselves.’
Fry looked at him. ‘You were lucky,’ she said. ‘Lucky that you survived the attack on Wednesday night. Or perhaps they just wanted to put you in hospital and stop you asking the wrong questions.’
‘You mean the right questions.’
‘I suppose.’
Fry turned away.
‘Feel like picking up Ian Gullick and Vince Naylor again?’ called Cooper as she left, but she didn’t respond.
Even as he said it, he wondered whether he was in danger of rubbing it in too much. His decision to arrest and question Gullick and Naylor had been correct, though not perhaps for the right reasons.
Cooper went to collect his jacket and car keys from his desk in the CID room. He found Gavin Murfin filling a waste-paper bin with the contents of his drawers, and Becky Hurst looking at him expectantly, waiting for news of progress.
‘It seems you were wrong after all, Gavin,’ said Cooper.
‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Murfin casually.
‘So Maurice Wharton killed the Pearsons, is that right?’ said Hurst. ‘But he must have had some help afterwards.’
‘Some of his regulars, we think.’
‘They helped to cover up for him?’
‘So it seems.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Hurst. ‘How did Wharton inspire such loyalty? I mean, by all accounts he was a complete pain in the backside, who liked nothing better than insulting and abusing his customers.’
‘True. And anyone who didn’t know him took offence and never came back. But those others, the regulars – they must have seen through all that nonsense and recognised a different Maurice.’
‘If you ask me, they just didn’t want to see the pub closed down,’ said Murfin. ‘One thing you have to say about Mad Maurice – he kept a very good cellar. His beer was always top-notch. You can’t say that about any of these keg places you see all over the shop now. Besides, he wasn’t averse to a good lock-in when he was in the mood.’
‘Not that you ever went to one, Gavin, considering it’s illegal.’
‘Course not. I just heard.’
‘Well, it’s right that his regulars were the people who kept him in business all those years,’ said Cooper. ‘They were the ones who kept coming back month after month, who spread his reputation far and wide. He owed a lot to those customers. Without them, he was nothing. And I don’t suppose he wanted to let them down by closing the pub.’
‘Is this all a question of loyalty, then?’ asked Hurst, still puzzled. ‘Maurice Wharton being loyal to his customers, and his regulars being loyal to him?’
‘Yes, but loyalty is where it went wrong,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s always a mistake involving someone else in an act like that. Most people can’t even rely on themselves to keep a secret. But the suspicion that you can’t trust a person who shares your guilty knowledge will really eat away at you over time. These people had more than two years of it. Frankly, it’s a wonder they didn’t try to kill each other long before now.’
DI Hitchens strolled into the room and put his arm on Cooper’s shoulder as he listened to the end of the conversation.
‘And the fires?’ he said. ‘The same people are responsible for those, I gather.’
‘There’s been a coordinated campaign going on,’ said Cooper. ‘The fires on Kinder were started deliberately and the temporary reservoir was sabotaged, but only as part of a diversion – to draw away firefighting resources. The real target was always on Oxlow Moor. Specifically, the Light House.’
‘The chief fire officer is happy anyway,’ said Hitchens. ‘They like to identify people who start wildfires on the moors. Normally it’s far too difficult for them to prove a fire was started deliberately, even when there’s no doubt in their own minds. Even if there’s no prosecution, they’re glad to get a confirmed arson.’
Cooper nodded. He wondered if he should mention the irony that it was the chief fire officer himself who’d given the Whartons the idea of starting the fires. His comments in that TV interview had been well intentioned, but had fallen on the wrong ears. He might have thought he was doing good PR for the fire service, but mentioning the threat to isolated buildings had been a fatal suggestion to insert into the minds of desperate people.
He rattled his car keys as he was about to leave the office with Villiers, but turned back for a moment.
‘Gavin …’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Why is it that you never mentioned the word “cellar” until now? It could have saved a lot of trouble.’
Murfin shook his head. ‘It’s funny how that goes, like. It only came into my memory just now, when I started thinking about beer. I mean, you don’t have any other reason to think about the cellar in a pub, do you? Not when you’re just a customer. It’s there under your feet, but you don’t need to know about it.’
‘A wonderful thing, the memory,’ said Villiers. ‘It can trawl up the most unexpected things. Details you were convinced you’d forgotten just pop into your mind from somewhere. And no one really understands how it works.’
‘Don’t they?’
‘Nope. It’s one of the great mysteries of the human mind.’
‘I can’t even remember
what I had for dinner last night,’ said Murfin.
‘That’s old age, Gavin,’ put in Hurst. ‘I bet you remember every day of the Blitz, though.’
Still Cooper hesitated. He’d known Murfin for quite a few years now, and he thought he could read below the surface of his words.
‘Gavin, you didn’t really believe that the Pearsons had skipped the country, did you? Not as much as you made Diane Fry think you did.’
Murfin smiled. ‘You can’t let someone like that have it all her own way, Ben. She needs someone to take the opposite view. It focuses her mind, see. After I’d said all that, she was dead set on proving me wrong and showing everyone that the Pearsons were victims of a violent crime. And so she did.’
‘I told her I thought you might be right,’ said Cooper. ‘I was standing up for you, Gavin.’
With his smile developing into a satisfied smirk, Murfin leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, like I said before, we’ve all learned something, then.’
‘So – Mad Maurice,’ said Villiers a little while later, as Cooper’s Toyota headed out of Edendale. ‘It seems he wasn’t a lovable eccentric after all. He actually was a psychopath.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Cooper.
‘You’re not sure? But he killed two perfectly innocent tourists.’
‘It’s a bit too convenient, Carol.’
‘What is?’
‘The fact that he’s dying. It’s too convenient that Maurice Wharton will soon be dead and buried himself. It seems to me that that’s what everyone has wanted all along – to be able to sweep the whole thing under the carpet and forget about it. And it’s not going to happen.’
Villiers gave him a quizzical look. ‘What’s made you take this attitude?’
‘I was thinking about Maurice Wharton, when he talked about how painful it was watching his pub closed down for the last time. Seeing the windows go dark one by one.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, it’s no wonder he found it painful, knowing what he did, and what had been hidden there. He must have realised the truth would be uncovered eventually. And there was nothing he could do about it by then, when he was sitting in that car in the dusk. It must have been like watching his own future being slowly snuffed out.’
Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) Page 29