Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  ‘K2. Alcester Road,’ said Angie at last.

  ‘Okay, then.’

  ‘I’ll get a taxi.’

  Diane stood in the middle of the pavement, while people dodged around.

  ‘Sis?’ she said. ‘Will you help me?’

  Angie hesitated, with her hand in the air in an effort to attract a passing cab. She looked back at her sister.

  ‘You know I will.’

  At that time of the evening, Cooper had reached the Dog and Partridge crossroads, where he turned past the Dovedale Garage towards Peveril of the Peak Hotel in the village of Thorpe.

  From the car showroom boomed the unmistakable sound of a cinema organ, someone playing an Irving Berlin medley. Posters announced the Mighty Compton Organ at Pipes in the Peaks. Of course, this was where the organ from the Regal in Derby had ended up, bought and restored by the garage owner, complete with turntable lift and vibraphone effects. The Compton and the cars shared the showroom space.

  Even in the dusk, the conical outline of Thorpe Cloud rose beyond the hotel. It always reminded him of a pyramid, there was something so unnatural about its shape. Anywhere else, it would have been taken as man made. But here in the White Peak, among the ancient remnants of the limestone reefs, it was just another eccentric formation in the landscape.

  Walking upriver from the Dovedale car park, he soon reached the stepping stones, opposite the outcrop named the Rocky Bunster. Beyond here, a series of weirs broke up the flow of the river, with a small island sitting just upstream of the first weir. Many visitors walked only as far as the stepping stones, while some ventured further on, towards the Twelve Apostles, but they’d start to flag when they reached the top of the long stretch of stone steps and after a rest on Lovers’ Leap most would turn back. Only the more active or determined walked the full length of Dovedale, or even reached as far as the packhorse bridge at Milldale.

  So this stretch of the river was the most populated — the walk up towards Lovers’ Leap, past Tissington Spires and the Twelve Apostles, the Natural Arch and Reynard’s Cave, the Lions’ Face Rock and Pickering Tor. All familiar landmarks to the tourist.

  Hundreds of thousands of visitors came to the dale on summer weekends and at bank holidays. They wobbled backwards and forwards on the stepping stones, picnicked on the grass, took photographs of each other on the edge of the water. At these times, with its manicured slopes and well-worn paths, Dovedale seemed to have been loved into tameness.

  But at night, it was a totally different place. Its natural wildness re-asserting itself in the darkness, creeping out of the undergrowth like a shy, nocturnal animal. Sounds that had been only a background to the screaming of children and barking of dogs now grew louder, more dominant, more menacing. The river itself was a roaring, dangerous monster that thundered endlessly down the valley, and could snatch you away at one false step. The crags became looming giants, their white shanks sporadically visible through the trees. Across the water, the Apostles were motionless ghosts, a cluster of jagged teeth against the darkened hillside.

  Cooper wondered what exactly Alex Nield had been taking photographs of in Dovedale yesterday. Perhaps one of the money trees. He would have liked the pattern of the copper coins in the grain of the trunk, their shadows on the wood, the glint of sun on their hammered edges.

  But surely he would have taken photographs of the stepping stones too? For anyone even remotely interested in photography, it was impossible to visit Dovedale and not capture a shot of the stepping stones. The stones had an irresistible contract between their almost accidental symmetry and the random variation in the angle at which they lay in the water. In sun, each stone produced a slightly different tone — light and shade, light and shade, all the way across the river, with the water forced between them in dark streams.

  And any photograph of the stepping stones on a bank holiday had to include people. Would Alex have avoided them for that reason?

  On the western bank, the path ended at a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates, blocking the way into the woods beneath the Rocky Bunster. Here, you had to cross the river by the stepping stones, or turn back. Cooper stumbled over mole hills on a muddy bank before reaching Lovers’ Leap and climbing the steps that had originally been cut into the bank by Italian prisoners of war. It formed a vantage point opposite the Twelve Apostles. A vantage point, but it had been too far from the water to be any use on Monday.

  In Dovedale, even in the daytime, people often spoke in hushed tones, influenced by some kind of reverence for a special place. Tonight, an owl called in the woods on the opposite bank. But that was the only sound, apart from the water.

  He thought again about the witness statements taken by Sergeant Wragg and his team. He was trying to imagine where those bystanders would have been placed in relation to the Nield family. It immediately became obvious that some of them must have been screened from the incident by the slope of Lovers’ Leap, or by the trees overhanging the bank, dense with summer foliage.

  They might have been able to see the middle of the river, where the water rushed over a weir at the angle of a bend. So they might have seen the dog, Buster. He was a golden retriever, a big dog, and he would have caused a lot of splashing. Had anyone really seen the girl, entering the water more slowly, perhaps hesitating near the bank, unsure of the depth? Or had they imagined the rest?

  The slabs of limestone lying below the surface were clear even in this light. They gleamed in a sort of luminescence imparted by the foaming water. The water, the stones…it was easy for Cooper, even now, to imagine that he saw the little girl, trying to shield herself from the spray, wobbling, falling, vanishing among the submerged stones.

  But he hadn’t seen that. He’d just been told that was what happened.

  ‘Yes, I saw the little girl fall and bang her head.’ ‘She was knocked over by the dog. The rock struck her on the side of the head.’ ‘She couldn’t catch the dog. I saw her slip and float downstream towards the rocks.’

  Surely all those members of the public had already heard people talking about the incident before they were interviewed by Wragg’s PCs? They could simply be passing on their impressions, saying what they thought they were expected to say.

  The only facts he felt sure about were that Emily and her brother had been playing on the bank, throwing sticks for Buster. Their parents must have been with them or nearby. Had they taken their eyes off the children for a while, thinking they were safe?

  And had somebody been waiting for exactly that moment, the second when a small girl was unobserved by her parents, by her older brother — a girl in a green summer dress, running after her dog?

  Or had it been only one parent who had been distracted? It still wasn’t clear where Dawn Nield had been. Was she guiltily staying quiet? Had she, too, seen something? Had she seen the man standing on the bank, his hands raised, fingers dripping water? Her own husband. Or had she seen something else?

  Cooper moved further on. The remains of a ram pump still stood on the eastern bank at the foot of Tissington Spires. It had once raised water to the farm above. And here, by the side of the path, hundreds of copper coins had been hammered into a dead tree trunk. More coins covered the surface of stump-like metal spikes. Many of the coins looked very old, others were clearly more recent, certainly since decimalization. A few had been forced into the wood within the past few months — their copper still showed bright and new where they’d bent under the blows. The stump wasn’t rotten. It had been a healthy tree when it was cut down, so the wood was solid and hard. It took quite a bit of effort to hammer a coin into solid wood. This was no casual whim, like tossing a coin into water, the way people did at wells and fountains. You had to want luck badly to go to that effort.

  Cooper looked up the path. Three more tree stumps ahead bore the same prickly forest of half-buried coins. A lot of people felt they needed luck in their lives.

  A movement in the undergrowth made him start. Wasn’t he alone, even now?

 
But it was a fox. Its eyes glowed red in the light of his torch. A narrow, pointed face, and suspicious eyes. After a moment, it slunk away into the darkness and was gone. Off to hunt somewhere else for its next meal.

  As the water flowed towards Thorpe, it surged around a fallen tree marooned in the middle of the river like an old shipwreck. He listened to the noise of water rushing over the weir.

  Half-submerged objects floated by in the stream of his memory, too. Sometimes he recognized the flotsam, sometimes it swept past his awareness before he could make it out. Every time he thought about the incident, he came back to an image of Robert Nield, hands raised, droplets of water falling from his fingers.

  Cooper felt he had to get away from the banks of the river. The water was flowing too close in the darkness. He shivered as he remembered the iciness of it on his body the day before, shuddered at the thought of it creeping towards him now, eager to suck him into its currents and drag his body away on to the rocks. Water and more water, closing over him, entering his mouth, filling his lungs…He had to get away from it.

  It was a sharp, steep climb up to the Natural Arch. It was here that he’d seen a figure crouched high on the rock. Hunched up, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey. Had this been Sean Deacon, scrambling to escape from the scene of the activity, but reluctant to miss what was going on?

  Hidden behind the arch was a shallow, mud-filled cave with a small chamber at the back. The cave was approached through a rocky cleft hung with thick jungles of ivy. Streams of water had formed patches of bright green moss on the rock.

  Inside the cave, Cooper shone his torch on to the ground looking for traces of recent activity. He found a few footprints in the mud, graffiti scratched on the wall, and a scrap of cloth, which he bagged.

  From the entrance to the cave, he had a narrow view through the arch down to the river. The water gleamed with movement in the darkness, surging endlessly through the night. Despite the distance, he could hear its noise. It reached him clearly on the night air, a murmuring, rushing, roaring sound that seemed to grow louder and louder until it filled the cave, bouncing off the walls and echoing all around him until it swallowed him up in roar.

  Cooper felt suddenly dizzy, put his hand to the rock wall to steady himself, and touched a patch of soft, cool moss that squashed and slithered under his fingers.

  Immediately he was back again in that moment, standing in the rushing water, holding the cold, limp body of Emily Nield in his arms, calling desperately for help but knowing that she was already dead. And all the time the river kept rushing, rushing over the stones, its chill striking deep into his bones and making him tremble uncontrollably.

  And finally Cooper let out a long, painful scream. He wanted to hear it bounce off the pinnacles and the limestone cliffs, he needed it to fill the gorge, to drown out the noise of that cold, rushing water. The scream had been inside him for hours, and it had to come out.

  Late that night in her hotel room in Birmingham, Diane Fry woke with a jolt, sweating. Another nightmare.

  It wasn’t the balti, but the presence of her sister that had caused the nightmare, and Rachel Murchison’s insistence on talking about her childhood. It had been a big risk, she knew. Just one sound, a single movement or a smell, could trigger the train of memory that stimulated her fear.

  Once again, she had been dreaming of the sound of a footstep on a creaking floorboard, a door opening in the darkness. Opening and closing continually, but nothing coming through. She’d been dreaming that she was frightened, yet had no clear focus for her fear. She heard the footstep, and the door opening, saw shadows sliding across the wall. Still nobody came in. She woke with a wail in her throat and the smell of shaving foam in her nostrils — a smell that always made her nauseous, even now.

  Fry lay awake, trying to orientate herself in unfamiliar surroundings. Above her, someone was walking around the room upstairs. Perhaps that was what had intruded into her dreams, some guest returning late to the hotel. The closing of a door, the sound of random footsteps.

  She got out of bed, made sure the door of her room was securely locked, the catch down, the safety chain on. It was an essential routine if she was going to get some sleep. The voices were right inside her head now.

  But as soon as sleep came again, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she’d pushed deep into the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.

  First, she sensed their presence, back there in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper’

  The memories churned and bubbled. There were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into segments by the streetlights, the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear one particular voice — that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.

  Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And then came the groping and the prodding and the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs. ‘How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?’ Animal noises and more laughter. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.

  But then it happened again.

  And again.

  10

  Wednesday

  Next morning, Ben Cooper received the first anonymous letter of his career. It was addressed to ‘Police Officer Cooper’, and it had been pushed through the door at Ashbourne section station. It wasn’t actually written in green ink, but the writing was difficult to decipher. After a few minutes, Cooper thought he made it out:

  You should look into Mr Robert Nield. He’s not all he seems. The man is a sinful beast, and the Lord will punish his ways.

  Well, the spelling and punctuation were good, anyway. That wasn’t what he expected from an anonymous letter. It suggested someone with a decent schooling in English grammar, which wasn’t easy to come by these days. An older person, he guessed. Educated in English and familiar with the Bible, if not entirely well balanced.

  A shame there wasn’t much information in the letter. Cooper wasn’t personally familiar with anonymous allegations, but he’d imagined there would be more to go on — a few lurid details of what the accused person was supposed to have done. But here, he had to use his own imagination. And that could sometimes be worse.

  Taken together with his unease about the vagueness of the witness statements from Dovedale, and his own instinctive feelings towards the Nields, Cooper had something that he didn’t feel able to ignore. He might not have enough to put a case together on paper, but there was sufficient to raise concern, surely?

  After a few minutes’ thought, he decided to take those concerns to his DI, Paul Hitc
hens, who was now his immediate line manager.

  In his office, Hitchens smoothed his tie anxiously as he looked at the anonymous letter.

  ‘A nutter,’ he said. ‘We get them all the time. You know that, Ben.’

  ‘I think it might be worth following up, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was a convicted sex offender among the bystanders in Dovedale,’ said Cooper.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I recognized him. His name is Sean Deacon.’

  ‘Was he near any children?’

  Cooper hesitated. ‘I couldn’t say for sure.’

  ‘Do any of the witness statements mention him? Or the parents?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any reason to suppose that Mr Nield is connected with Deacon in some way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if you want to give this Deacon a warning, do that. But the witness statements agree on what happened to Emily Nield.’

  ‘I don’t think they do,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re inconsistent. No two statements give exactly the same sequence of events.’

  ‘That’s always the way with multiple witnesses,’ said Hitchens. ‘You know that, Ben.’

  Cooper did know that. But he was discovering a stubborn streak in himself. The inconsistencies in the statements felt like a personal failure. He needed to know exactly what had happened to Emily Nield. Exactly. Vague and contradictory statements from confused eyewitnesses weren’t good enough.

  Hitchens glowered at his intransigence.

  ‘There’s no mystery about the death of Emily Nield,’ he said. ‘It was an accident. The inquest was straightforward, the body has been released by the coroner, and the family will be able to hold the funeral this week.’

  ‘Yes, it’s tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Well, there you are. By tomorrow, it will all be over and done with. The family can get on with their lives. Isn’t that what we all want?’