Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  Fry watched the blood trickle from Leeson’s nose and coil into his mouth, forming a slow, glistening spiral.

  She had seen a lot of blood in her life. She knew it could run in unpredictable ways. It spurted and glistened, darkened and congealed, formed pools and jagged rivulets. A bubble of fresh blood would burst and collapse, a gush split into scores of crimson trickles. Your body’s fluid spread much further than you’d imagine. It could turn into an ever-expanding stain, a creeping edge that reddened everything it touched.

  And your family could be a stain, too. Damaged genes spread through generations, darkening everything they came into contact with. Like death and taxes, your lineage was inescapable. It was bred in the bone, and it poisoned the blood. Some strains could run pure and free. But others formed thickening pools that soured and congealed, releasing the stink of heredity.

  Fry had often thought about the genes she’d inherited. She’d wondered time and again what heredity had been inflicted on her, whose poisonous nature ran in her blood. She could feel that blood pump through her veins now. It was cold and alien, eating her flesh with its acid. She fought a momentary urge to slash open her wrists and let the blood drain away, to cleanse her body finally of the venom.

  Leeson watched her calmly, his face giving nothing away. There was no suggestion in his expression that he was even aware of the feelings that were going through her.

  Cold and insensitive, that’s what he was. A cruel, unfeeling, twisted bastard.

  And he was her father.

  27

  Well, it was summer. Below ground, limestone sucked the water down like a thirsty giant, leaving the river bed dry and choked with dead weeds. Here, the river had vanished, gone from the face of the earth.

  This was what they called a karst landscape, shaped by the dissolution of layers of rock. The geology meant that rivers responded rapidly to rainfall variations. In dry weather, water sank into the ground via swallets, and the surface rivers ran dry. During wet weather, water often burst back through resurgences, as the subterranean passages filled up. Then rivers flowed at the surface again.

  Here, only a solitary stagnant pool was left in the shade of a sycamore, swarming with midges and mosquitoes. A crow picked its way between the rocks on the dry river bed. The big rhubarb-like leaves of gunnera were encroaching gradually from the banks. A weir stood bare and useless a few yards from the bridge.

  Cooper pulled out his iPhone, and called up Google Maps. He zoomed into the Ashbourne area and scrolled across to Wetton. On the satellite image, the bends of the River Manifold formed an outline like a giant face superimposed on the landscape. The curve of a cheek, the jutting angle of a nose, trees fringing the shape like hair.

  The Manifold had only one tributary, the Hamps. In summer, the Hamps also disappeared. It re-appeared, like the Manifold, at Ilam Risings four and a half miles to the southeast. And just downstream from there, in Ilam village, the Manifold met the Dove.

  On the way to Ilam, Cooper stopped briefly to pass Carol Parry’s information on to Diane Fry, though Fry had hardly seemed to be concentrating on what he told her. Maybe he was just out of step now and she had moved on to something new. She might tell him eventually. Or, of course, she might not.

  So that was what he was thinking about as he walked down into the grounds of Ilam Hall and across the Italian Gardens to St Bertram’s Bridge, once the main crossing of the River Manifold. Upstream of the bridge there were two weirs, and just above the second were the boil holes, where the water from the Manifold and Hamps surged back to the surface. Further upstream, there was nothing but a few stagnant pools.

  A path emerged from the trees and moved away from the river bank. Paradise Walk, created for hall guests to take their exercise. In these surroundings, an obscure hole in the rock on the riverside walk probably went mostly unnoticed. Here, the rivers that had flowed underground through a series of caves and passages burst up to the surface in their boil holes. The Manifold had travelled out of sight for four and a half miles from Wetton Mill to re-emerge in a small grated grotto.

  Currents spread outwards into the river as the Manifold and Hamps re-emerged into the daylight and gushed downstream towards their meeting with the Dove. Cooper noticed that the water in the rock pool was full of coins. Everywhere he saw that old superstition, the longing that something, anything, might bring a bit of luck. And again he had the sound of the water in his head.

  He watched the bubbling currents, listened to the sound of gushing water. That sound took him back to the morning in Dovedale so clearly. A white face, hair floating, the blood washed clear by the stream, a green summer dress tangled on the body like weeds. Limbs flopping, a head lolling back, water cascading from her dress and oozing from the sides of her mouth.

  Cooper closed his eyes, and saw another image. Robert Nield standing on the bank, his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers. Like a priest, performing a blessing. Or a funeral rite. But the scene only seemed to exist there, in the space behind his eyes. Had it never happened in reality? Was his memory so unreliable that his experience in Dovedale had created a false image? He supposed it was possible. The mind was a mysteriously murky pool.

  So how had a river affected Alex Nield? Cooper felt sure there was a river involved in Alex’s real life story. And not just any river — a lost river.

  The sound of the water was driving him away from this spot. And it was more than just a memory, an echo of the River Dove. This location just wasn’t right. Here was where the rivers re-emerged, where the Manifold and Hamps came back from the lost, bursting up to the surface. Ilam Risings were about rebirth, not loss. He was in totally the wrong place.

  Getting his bearings, Cooper remembered that the bridge he’d stopped at was Redhurst Crossing, at the bottom of Leek Road. A short distance away, the first bridge south from Wetton Mill was Dafar Bridge. According to the map, the swallets lay on the section between the bridges. Wetton Mill Swallet, and Redhurst Swallet.

  To the north, the Manifold Way diverged on to the River Hamps at Beeston Tor and ran upstream towards Waterhouses. To the south, the Manifold headed into Ilam to join the Dove at St Mary’s Bridge, close to the Izaak Walton Hotel.

  Cooper drove back up the road towards Wetton Mill, part of the route merging into the Manifold Trail. The light railway had run for more than eight miles down the valley of the Hamps as far as Beeston Tor, before turning up the gorge of the Manifold, and through to Hulme End. The line had a large number of stations in its short distance. Even Thor’s Cave was said to have had its own station, with a waiting room and refreshment room. Today, it was obvious from a walk along the path that the line had crossed the Manifold dozens of times — including nine bridges in the short section between Sparrowlee and Beeston Tor.

  Wetton Mill was a focal point for visitors to the Manifold Valley. The mill house itself was owned by the National Trust, with a tea room, shop and toilets. The bridge here was built by the Duke of Devonshire for packhorses carrying his copper from Ecton before the arrival of the railway.

  If the Nields had spent their leisure time here as a family, he imagined they would have visited the tea rooms, walked across the stone bridge, maybe had their photographs taken in front of the stone arches. They’d have sat eating their picnic on the shelves of rock by the water, tried out the rock that had been carved to look like a throne. Those were the sorts of things families did.

  Or had the children come here on their own, walking or riding their bikes, getting away from their parents for an afternoon? When he was ten or eleven years old, Alex Nield had gone through an experience that changed him so much his next-door neighbour had noticed. That was such a critical age. A traumatic event could affect his psychology for ever, if it was never dealt with.

  Here at the mill, the river was flowing well, its water as clear as the Dove where it rattled over stones and foamed into pools under the limestone cliff. Yet within a few yards it had vanished. Just downstream, on the next bend,
the bed was completely dry.

  So somewhere near here were the actual swallets, the holes in the earth where the river disappeared, sucked up by the thirsty limestone.

  Looking at the river, Cooper recalled standing with Diane Fry in Digbeth the day before, staring at the muddy River Rea. The Rea was hidden from sight, too — though not as a result of natural forces, like the Manifold. It had been channelled by human beings, who always wanted to control the flow of water, the way they controlled everything else.

  But that wasn’t the most important thing. Cooper was remembering Fry’s comment as they stood above the Rea. It had seemed to mean very little at the time, a reference to Digbeth’s industrial past.

  So what was it she’d said exactly?

  ‘But it’s not the river itself that’s important. It’s what’s on the banks of the river that matters.’

  Cooper parked at Wetton Mill and hurried back down the Manifold Trail on foot. Almost opposite a field barn, he came to a crumbling, dilapidated gate. If he hadn’t been looking, he would never have noticed a tiny sign on the gate post, marking a Staffordshire RIGS geotrail. So there was a regionally important geological site here.

  As far as he could see, only an empty pasture stood beyond the gate. Through the deep, lush grass, someone had left a clear trail, the long stalks of grass flattened in the direction of the river. But there was no sign of a trail coming back.

  He crossed the field, pushed his way through the deep banks of gunnera and cow parsley, and found himself standing on the bank of a dry river bed. At certain times of year, the River Manifold flowed through here, but the limestone had swallowed it up. A single shoe, an orange Croc, lay abandoned on a pile of stones in the middle.

  Carefully, Cooper stepped down on to the river bed. Dry rocks clattered under his feet like broken pottery. A faint smell reminded him of seaweed left on a beach by the ebbing tide. It suggested vegetation that had once grown in water, now decomposing in the open air. Within a few yards, he found a spot under a beech tree on the far bank, where water gurgled down a hole in the rocks, rushing below ground as if to escape from the daylight. Nearby, a smear of brown scum had gathered where a smaller rivulet slowly swirled and vanished.

  Standing on the river bed, he realized he was out of sight of the road, and of the mill too. No sound reached him of the children playing on the bridge. Here, there was only the murmuring river in one direction, and dry, silent stones in the other. In front of him was a sheer, unclimbable limestone cliff, with jackdaws calling and circling overhead. And below the cliff, a steep slope dense with ivy ran right down to the edge of the river.

  He followed the last trickles of water until he found a swirl like the suction of a plug hole under a wedge of stone near the opposite bank. He had to balance carefully to be able to step right on the spot where the water vanished beneath his feet. Then he leaned over to the bank, pulled back a branch of the beech tree and peered up into the ivy.

  The earth had been scraped away from the roots of the tree. The soil was too thin here to conceal anything from a fox scavenging for carrion. The scent of a dead carcase would be strong enough to draw wild creatures down from the woods above the river.

  There were just a few bones left, scattered on the surface among the twisted roots and white tendrils of ivy. At first, Cooper thought someone had buried a dog or a cat. He’d never asked whether Alex Nield had owned a pet when the family lived at Wetton, a predecessor to Buster. Could his father have drowned a puppy in the river and disposed of the body on the bank? Was that what Alex had been so upset about, the incident that had traumatized him and turned him against his father?

  Cooper knew that some children could become obsessively attached to a pet, and might make an animal the focus of all the affection they ought to be sharing with other human beings, particularly with their family. Had Robert Nield forced Alex to watch the execution, ensuring that the awful memory would be etched into his son’s mind for ever? It would explain a lot.

  Balancing with one knee on the bank, Cooper tugged back a clump of ivy to clear the earth around the bones. He found the skull, shrouded with mould, ran a hand over the dome of the cranium, brushed soil and dead leaves out of the eye sockets.

  And then he knew for certain that he wasn’t looking at the bones of a dog.

  28

  Strain, line, breeding, blood. It was strange how those words could sound like a curse. Fry trembled with unreleased emotion as she made her way back to her car.

  There had been little left to say to William Leeson once she’d realized the truth. Oh, there were plenty of questions she could have asked him. But there were no answers he could have given her that she would have believed. This was the man she and Angie had been taken away from as children, the man who had abused her sister. His name was the one missing from her birth certificate, the reason she carried her mother’s surname. And this was the same man who was now setting about wrecking her life in some way that she didn’t even understand.

  ‘I thought I’d better tell you all this, Diane,’ he’d said. ‘It’s time to be honest about things.’

  ‘You’re telling me because you know the truth is going to come out anyway. That’s not a conscience you’ve suddenly developed — it’s a defence mechanism. It’s the response of a cornered animal.’

  ‘Everything you’ve ever done is wrong. You never had any concern for other people.’

  ‘So you’re moralizing now? Spare me. I know lots of ways to kill you. It would just be a question of whether to make it quick…or whether I want you to suffer.’

  He smiled, a slightly nervous smile. He was trying to show that he knew she was joking, while deep down he wasn’t quite sure if she was serious.

  ‘You don’t understand a thing,’ he said.

  ‘I wish people would stop telling me that.’

  There was only one feeling that Fry was left with as she climbed back into her car and drove away from Leeson’s house. Hatred. It was the most corrosive of emotions. If it found no outlet, hatred would eat you up, bit by bit. It could drip acid into your heart and gnaw your brain to useless wreckage, like a self-inflicted cancer. Hatred would kill you in the end. Now and then, it killed someone else along the way.

  Within a couple of miles, she began thinking of some of the things Leeson had said to her during the time in his house.

  ‘You know what they say, Diane. Blood is thicker than water. You might not believe it right at this moment. But you’ll learn the truth soon enough.’

  And there had been something else.

  ‘Everyone thinks what they want to think. That’s the reason we so often put our trust in the wrong people.’

  She called Angie, who had taken the case file away from her hotel room for safety.

  ‘Can you bring the file and meet me? I’ll be back in the city in half an hour.’

  ‘Yes, no problem.’

  Diane swept into the hotel lobby in a hurry. Angie jumped up from a chair, sensing her urgency. She had the file clutched under her arm.

  ‘Di, what’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘Are the PNC print-outs there that Ben brought?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Read the details of Darren Barnes to me again.’

  Angie began to read hesitantly.

  Darren Joseph Barnes, also known as ‘Doors’. She went though his address, date of birth, and ethnicity codes, and got to his conviction record.

  ‘Stop. Go back.’

  ‘To which bit?’

  ‘The ethnicity codes,’ said Diane.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, go back and read them again.’

  ‘This is for Darren Barnes. Ethnicity Code. PNC: IC1. Sixteen point self-determined system: Ml. That’s mixed race, White and Black Caribbean.’

  ‘I knew that,’ said Fry. ‘Damn it, I knew that. And Marcus Shepherd? Is he the same category?’

  ‘Ethnicity Code. PNC: IC3.’

  ‘So he’s black?’

  �
�No, wait. Under the self-determined system, he’s m1 too. They’re both classified as mixed race, Diane.’

  ‘They class themselves as mixed race. Although, to the arresting officer, one looks white, and one looks black.’

  ‘I guess we’re talking shades of colour here.’

  ‘Shades of colour, right.’ Diane jumped up. ‘Oh, Christ. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The m1 Crew.’

  ‘What about them? Where are you going?’ But Diane was already on her way out of the door, not even looking back to see if her sister was following.

  ‘Diane, where are you — ’

  Tower blocks looked even worse in the day time. At night, they had a certain mystery, a brooding presence, the curtained windows of their flats forming a pattern of light against the sky. Now, in the daylight, the Chamberlain Tower looked grubby and forlorn, the cracked concrete and graffiti’d walkways oozing despair, all its flaws exposed by the sun.

  Vincent Bowskill was alone this afternoon. He was unshaven and bleary eyed, as if he wasn’t long awake. His flat smelled like a derelict laundry, full of unwashed clothes. But underneath it was that sweet, faint chemical odour of recently smoked crack.

  ‘Diane,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need to talk.’

  ‘I did what you asked me to. There was no need to send Angie round. She’s mad, that one. Dangerous, you know? I don’t want her coming to mine again. Keep her away. I could get in deep shit here, you understand. Some of these guys don’t mess around.’

  ‘Vince, shut up.’

  He ran his fingers nervously across his mouth as he looked at her face.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘The m1 Crew.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘The name is nothing to do with motorways or rappers, is it? It refers to the sixteen-point ethnicity code, the self-determined system. It’s what you describe yourself as when you’re stopped by the police. You say you’re mixed race, White and Black Caribbean. They put you down on their stop-and-search forms as Ml.’