Ben Cooper and Diane Fry 11 - The Devil’s Edge

by Stephen Booth

  ‘So Mr Gamble ran to your house first,’ said Cooper, ‘before he called the police or an ambulance?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Edson.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Edson shrugged. ‘Why do people do anything? In his case, I’d suggest insanity.’

  ‘I don’t think he mentioned that he came here – either to me, or to the officers who took his initial statement.’

  ‘Well, Sergeant,’ said Edson. ‘If you’re going to spend much time in Riddings, you’ll find that people never tell you more than they think you need to know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Edson seemed to look at him properly for the first time, perhaps detecting something in his tone of voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, would you like a drink?’ he said. ‘My housekeeper will—’

  ‘No thank you, sir. I have some more visits to make.’

  Cooper could have drunk a coffee right now. But he would have been afraid to put his cup down on that glass table. It must take someone hours to polish it to such an immaculate shine, without a streak or a smear. Even with a coaster, the danger of spilling just a drop of liquid on the table was too great. It would be like splashing acid on the Mona Lisa and expecting da Vinci to paint it all over again tomorrow.

  ‘In that case, if I can’t help you any further …’

  ‘Do you have many staff at Riddings Lodge, sir?’

  ‘The housekeeper, Mrs Davis, and a girl who helps her in the kitchen. A couple of cleaners. And an odd-job man I get in to maintain the property – there’s quite a lot of work, as you can imagine. Why do you ask?’

  ‘We’ll need to speak to them too.’

  ‘I’ll make sure they’re available.’

  Cooper gazed out of the window of the lounge. He was looking at a vast expanse of garden, sloping lawns leading down to a pond so large that it might have been described as a lake. The monkey puzzle tree stood in a prominent position, dominating the foreground.

  ‘The tree is splendid,’ he said.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Edson. ‘There are male and female trees, I’m told. You need both sexes for the seeds to be fertile, but there isn’t another one of this species for miles.’

  Beyond the tree, a long bank of rhododendrons formed a backdrop and blocked out any sign of the neighbouring properties. To Cooper’s eye, the flower beds on either side looked regimented and weed-free.

  ‘Are you a keen gardener, sir?’ he said.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Edson. ‘I get a man in to do that, too.’

  6

  Gavin Murfin was humming to himself when Cooper met him on the corner of Curbar Lane and The Green. When he got closer, he recognised the tune. Neighbours. Everybody needs good neighbours.

  ‘You’re not going to sing, are you, Gavin?’ he said.

  ‘Not in this life.’

  ‘Thank heavens for that.’

  ‘Right,’ said Murfin, settling down on the horse trough with his notebook. ‘I thought you might like to share my insights, honed to perfection over many years as an experienced detective.’

  ‘Who have you talked to?’

  ‘I’ve been on the back lane there, behind Valley View.’

  ‘Croft Lane.’

  ‘There’s no street sign, but if you say that’s the name …’

  ‘It’s a private road, I think. But that’s how it’s known locally.’

  ‘Okay, Croft Lane. I spoke to Mrs Slattery at South Croft. She’s the widow of a local GP, Doctor Slattery, and she lives alone now, though there seems to be a son in the background. Then there’s Mr and Mrs Nowak at Lane End. I got nothing from either of them. They can barely see the Barrons’ property from their houses, you know.’

  ‘No. Too many trees, too many walls, too much distance.’

  ‘The women were nice,’ said Murfin. ‘Very helpful. Or at least, they seemed to want to help, and were sorry they didn’t know anything.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘Mr Nowak. Not the helpful type. If I was a cynical person, I’d say he was quite pleased about what had happened to the Barrons.’

  ‘You are a cynical person, Gavin.’

  ‘But I’m usually right, all the same.’

  ‘So you think he has some grudge against the Barron family?’

  ‘If he does, he wasn’t telling. You might want to check him out for yourself. Get a less cynical view, like.’

  ‘I will, Gavin.’

  ‘He’s Polish, by the way. In his origins, at least.’

  Murfin turned a page. ‘You did Riddings Lodge yourself, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, the Edsons.’

  ‘I get the impression nobody likes the Edsons very much. Nothing was said out loud, like, but my nose was twitching like mad.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Luke and Becky are still wearing out the shoe leather. I made them go up the hill.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘It’s the privilege of my great age.’

  Cooper watched a couple of cars go slowly through the village. A huge four by four, a sporty Mercedes.

  ‘So what do you make of the people round here, Gavin?’ he asked.

  ‘Everyone’s so middle class,’ said Murfin. ‘They’ve got middle-class houses, middle-class kids and middle-class attitudes. Even their dogs are middle class. I thought the poodle at Hill Croft was going to ask me where I went to school.’

  Cooper tried hard to stifle a laugh. He shouldn’t encourage Murfin. He was a bad example to the youngsters.

  ‘Wait a minute. Are you eating, Gavin?’

  ‘No.’

  Cooper glanced at him; his mouth was still, though his eyes were bulging slightly with the effort not to chew.

  ‘It’s only a chocolate truffle.’

  ‘I hope you weren’t eating while you were doing interviews.’

  ‘I might have been.’

  ‘Gavin, show a bit of respect.’

  ‘They don’t mind. But if they ask, I’ll tell them it’s organic Fairtrade chocolate from Waitrose.’

  Cooper sighed as he looked round Riddings. The Union Jacks fluttered, a dog barked, the hens in the orchard clucked quietly. A trio of horses clopped down the hill to their stables. The smell of manure drifted on the breeze again.

  ‘There’s still a lot to do,’ he said. ‘So many doors we haven’t knocked on, for a start. Even in a village this size.’

  ‘I can’t do overtime tonight,’ said Murfin. ‘I’ve only just told Jean that I’m going to the football on Saturday, and I have to get home in time for the row.’

  ‘Okay. Well, there’s no money for overtime anyway. It just means more for us to do tomorrow, and the day after.’

  Murfin offered him a chocolate.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Suit yourself. So what about you, Ben? Are you doing anything tonight?’

  Cooper hesitated. ‘Nothing special.’

  Murfin gave him a sceptical look. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Years of experience have honed my skills of detection. I can sense when someone is telling me a porky. Especially you. You’re as transparent as my new double-glazing.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘So … how are things going with that nice dark-haired little SOCO?’

  ‘She’s a crime-scene examiner.’

  ‘Civilian all the same,’ sniffed Murfin.

  ‘Her name’s Liz. And things are fine.’

  ‘I like her, actually. I think you’ve made a good bargain there. Better than I ever did.’

  ‘One of these days I’m going to tell Jean what you say about her.’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’m feeling suicidal.’

  Below Riddings lay the theological college and the hamlet of Stanton Ford, where the Baslow road skirted the banks of the Derwent.

  Cooper saw a car with a window sticker: Christ for all – all for Christ. A student or memb
er of staff from the bible college at Curbar? He could just see the buildings from here, where students would be wrestling with their bibles right now.

  Or would they? The college ran residential courses, he was fairly sure. They took students from all over the world, trainee evangelists from Africa and South America. But most institutions were on holiday in August. Students went home for the summer, or did vacation work to raise money. Was Cliff College closed this month, or did they run summer courses?

  ‘When does their term start down there?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we can find out.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘There is a God in Heaven that revealeth all secrets. Who said that, Gavin?’

  ‘It’s in the Bible, isn’t it? It sounds biblical anyway.’

  ‘Yes, but who said it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Matthew, or Mark. Or Malcolm. One of those.’

  ‘Oh, of course – the Gospel according to St Malcolm. I know it well.’

  ‘Well … right. Last time I went to church, it was all in Latin.’

  On the road below Curbar Gap, there were three stones close to the roadside, with biblical references carved on them. Visitors often parked with their car wheels right up to the stones without even noticing them. He’d heard it claimed that zealous students at Cliff College had made the inscriptions at some time. In another version of the story, they were carved in the nineteenth century by a mole-catcher who worked for the old duke. He was said to have been a devout Wesleyan, and inscribed the biblical quotations as a thanksgiving for recovering from a serious illness.

  On his way down the road, Cooper pulled over on to the verge and looked at the nearest stone. He must have remembered the story wrong. He’d thought there was actually a quotation carved on the stone, and had even hoped it might have sent him some useful message. But all it said was: Isaiah 1:18. That meant he would have to find someone with a Bible.

  Another woman was passing with her dog, this time an arthritic black Labrador. She stopped and stared at them for a moment, then seemed to lose some kind of internal battle.

  ‘I don’t mean any disrespect,’ she called. ‘But the police need to get a grip.’

  Cooper sighed as she stamped away.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Back at Valley View, Cooper skirted the crime-scene examiner’s tent and walked round the back of the house. He wanted to get an idea of the layout on this side of the property.

  When he reached the back garden, he realised how easy it was to be distracted by the edge. It was a great looming presence that cut off the light from the east. Its high rock faces dwarfed everything nearer to hand, made the trees look smaller, the fences less solid. The distance from here to the edge was compressed, a trick of perspective caused by the sheer difference in scale.

  He felt a cold shudder. His mother would have described that feeling as like someone walking over your grave. As a saying, it had never made much sense to Cooper. For someone to walk over your grave, you would have to be dead. So it could only be said by a ghost. And ghosts didn’t shudder with cold. On the contrary, that was supposed to be the effect they had on the living. So it was another of those baffling aphorisms with which his life seemed to be filled when he was growing up. They were passed on as mystical wisdom, but they were meaningless when you stopped to think about them even for a moment.

  He turned and studied the garden. The intruders must have come this way. They had surely entered from the back, from the direction of the edge, rather than approaching through the village.

  He bent to inspect the lawn. The grass was cut too short to show any sign of footprints. In fact, it was very neatly trimmed. He made a note to find out who mowed the lawns, whether Jake Barron preferred to do it himself, or if one of those gardening contractors was employed here. And if so, when they had tended to the garden last.

  As he crouched in the garden, Cooper noticed something strange. It stood out on the perfectly trimmed grass. It was only a fragment of stone. But if it had lain here for long, it would have been thrown up by the mower.

  He worked his way carefully across the lawn to the drive. There was another bit of stone, and another. A small trail of them, leading from the back fence towards the house. It was as if the Devil’s Edge itself had been here, and left its tracks behind. Only small chips and splinters, a mere scattering of gritstone dust. But it seemed out of place amid the neatness of the trimmed grass and swept gravel.

  Cooper looked up. The edge looked much the same. Ragged and broken, split into cracks and fissures, still dotted with the figures of climbers drawn to their favourite playground. He assumed that it looked the same from one day to the next, but it was impossible to be sure.

  He shook himself, trying to shrug off the feeling that something had passed through the garden even as he stood there. A presence both invisible and cold. Like someone walking over his grave.

  Last night, the Barrons had met everyone’s worst nightmare, the fiends who invaded their home and destroyed their lives. No wonder these offenders were being referred to as the Savages. They seemed to come from outside civilised society, and were ruthless in their use of violence. No home was safe any more.

  Cooper bagged the fragments of gravel and began to walk back towards the house, unsettled by the same dread that everyone had, the fear of never being safe in your own home.

  At the gate, he stopped and looked up at the edge again. This time he saw it not as a playground for rock climbers, but as the battered wall of a stone fortress. The Devil’s Edge had the air of a battlement that had withstood centuries of siege. Cracked and broken, but still standing firm, holding the invaders at bay. Or was it?

  That afternoon, after the working-group session had ended, Fry had to make her way through the northern outskirts of Nottingham to reach the M1. Then it was three junctions north up the motorway before heading across Derbyshire via Chesterfield. It was the most direct route, and she preferred driving through the town. The only alternative was a tortuous crawl through country lanes, which was fine if you enjoyed scenery.

  It was the sense of dislocation that was bothering her. One minute she’d been in inner-city Birmingham, confronting violence and dealing with gang members, recalling all too vividly her time with West Midlands Police, in the days before she transferred to yokel land. Then suddenly she’d been back here, in the midst of the rural idyll, bird shit on her car and straw sticking to her shoes. And not only that, but sidelined too. Somehow she’d found herself in this horrendous limbo, a world of business speak, living in sheer torture. What had she ever done to deserve this?

  At least she had learned a few figures to use. Sixteen thousand officers and police staff were employed across the East Midlands region, serving over five and a half million people in an area of sixteen thousand square kilometres, half the size of Belgium. She had no concept of how big Belgium was, but it made a change from measuring size in comparison to Wales or a football pitch, which also meant nothing to her. Statistics were good. They had a nice, clean feel, free of the messy ambiguities and uncertainties that came with the package when you were dealing with human beings. If you trotted statistics out at the right moment, they impressed people. And they were grateful, because you gave them something they could write down and memorise. It allowed them to convince themselves that they hadn’t just wasted the last two hours of their life. Just as Fry was trying to convince herself now, in fact.

  During the course of the day, someone had also claimed that the population of the East Midlands region was growing thirty-three per cent faster than elsewhere in England. That ‘elsewhere’ had worried her. It didn’t seem to mean anything. It wasn’t the same as ‘thirty-three per cent faster than anywhere else in England’. That would be more specific, a claim that could be checked against the official figures. But ‘elsewhere’? Where was that, for heaven’s sake? Elsewhere was nowhere. Elsewhere might be some place, but it was nowhere definite. So the region was growing faster than the Isles of Scilly, maybe? Or the Ou
ter Hebrides?

  It was a vagueness that bothered her as she drove back towards Derbyshire, crossing the M1 junction at Heath. She couldn’t make use of a fuzzy claim like that. She would be challenged on it immediately. Now she was starting to feel cheated. Who had perpetrated that fraud? Which member of the Implementing Strategic Change working group? She had the urge to go back and grab whoever it was by the lapels and make them justify the statement. By the lapels? Yes, she was sure it must have been a man. A man wearing a suit and a brightly coloured tie. Tomorrow she would identify them and sort them out.

  Her heart sank at the thought. Tomorrow. Another day of brown-paper workshop. And it was still only the middle of the week.

  Next week she had to organise a Challenge Day to examine the various options. Damn it, she could hear the comments now. She could imagine the derision that would be flying around the CID room in Edendale, feel the buckets of scorn dripping on her head as she invited her former colleagues to her Challenge Day. Gavin Murfin would laugh so much he’d choke on a pork pie or have a heart attack.

  Fry stared ahead at the approaching Derbyshire signs. How on earth had she got herself into this mess? Her dreams and ambitions in the police service had never involved becoming mired in jargon, or trapped in working-group meetings. Right now, she felt as though her career was already in its grave and being buried under an avalanche of consultation documents.

  By the end of the day, a mantra had been drummed into her. Joint thinking, joint working. It echoed around her skull right now, as she drove towards Derbyshire.

  Of all the phrases she might want in her head, that wasn’t the one. During her time in E division, there were so many things that hadn’t been said, relationships left unexplained. She wondered if anyone would bother about her, now that she’d been sidelined. Or would they just forget her as quickly as they could, let someone slip in and replace her quietly and completely, as if she’d never been there?

  If only she knew what they really thought of her. If only once someone in Edendale had said: We’ll be sorry to see you go.

  7

  Things were changing at Bridge End Farm. Well, that was nothing new. The farming industry had been in a state of change for decades. But now the pace was speeding up so much that it had become a revolution, instead of evolution.