Blind to the Bones (27 page)

PC Udall pulled up as close as she could to the café. A huge twelve-wheeler Mercedes articulated lorry rumbled into the lay-by behind them. If it had been a small lay-by, like the one where the VW was parked, the truck would almost have filled it on its own. The grill, with its three-pointed star, was right behind their rear bumper, while the driver's cab was somewhere above them, out of sight. The driver could see down into the car, without being seen himself – until Cooper got out.

There were two women serving inside the café, surrounded by smells of frying bacon and clouds of steam that the ventilator could hardly cope with. They were busy, and they shook their heads briskly when Cooper and Udall began asking questions. They didn't remember any customers, except a few of their regular truckers. They didn't see anything in the lay-by, unless it parked right up by their door.

Even after a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get out of the stuffy atmosphere. He found he was sweating, and took his jacket off. Then he looked at the sky and saw the clouds dragging more showers towards his end of the valley. Above Torside Reservoir, the rain and sunlight were chasing each other across the face of the hillside so fast that it was as if somebody had just turned up the speed on a film.

He sighed, and put his jacket back on before leaving Udall in the lay-by and cautiously dodging the traffic to cross the road. He had noticed a rip in the steel crash barriers where a vehicle had gone through and over the edge towards the River Etherow.

The five Longdendale reservoirs were surrounded by a whole system of channels, weirs and culverts built from square sandstone blocks. They controlled the flow of water to and from the reservoirs, some of them coming into use only for overspill, when the water levels were too high.

Cooper descended a couple of flights of steps from the side of the A628. He could see that very few people walked here now. The steps were almost overgrown with brambles and ferns in places, and the stone was slippery with moss. Dampness hung in the air, and he had to cling on to the iron railings to keep his footing as he turned a corner halfway down the slope.

He found he was looking down into a smaller reservoir or holding basin, with water cascading over a weir right beneath his feet. The water ran into a channel and away through a culvert under massive stone buttresses towards the main reservoir. There was a straight drop of about twenty feet into the channel from the steps where he was standing, and the slopes on either side of him were covered in wire mesh to prevent the loose stone from slipping down and blocking the channel. The mesh didn't hinder the vegetation, which was flourishing in the damp air and the sun on the south-facing slope.

The mesh had held back the stones, but something else was blocking the channel. The carcass of a dead sheep lay in the water, with white foam bubbling through its ragged fleece, and one of its black ears waving slowly backwards and forwards in the current. The animal had obviously been there for some time. Its body was swollen with gas, and the wool had gradually loosened from its head and shoulders, so that patches of mottled skin were visible through the water.

Cooper went back to the car and Udall drove round the bend, where they saw Michael Dearden in the next lay-by, arguing with a uniformed officer guarding the tape around Neil Granger's Volkswagen. They stopped to see what the trouble was.

‘Ah, there you are – what's your name,' said Dearden when he saw Cooper. ‘How long are you going to keep the track blocked?'

‘As long as necessary, sir. We need to preserve any forensic evidence. It can be a long process, I'm afraid.'

‘Surely you can leave the track open?'

‘No, sir. And I don't understand what the problem is in using the road through Withens.'

‘Oh, forget it.'

Cooper exchanged looks with the uniformed officer and got back in the car.

‘Can we get a look at the old railway tunnel entrances, Tracy?' he said.

‘Of course. At this end, they're right by where the Woodhead station used to be.'

She drove a few yards and turned sharply into a narrow roadway that had no signs indicating where it went. At the bottom, some of the station's platforms were still visible, but the track, sleepers and ballast had all long since been removed.

It was the tunnels that caught the eye, of course. There were three of them, their entrances driven into a rock face that still bore the marks of the navvies' pickaxes. The 1950s tunnel was much larger than the other two. It had been made wide enough to take two lines, and it was a lot higher, too. The two smaller tunnels huddled close together, and the three of them made Cooper think of the ewe and its twin lambs, attached to the same hill in their own way.

To his surprise, he found Gavin Murfin in front of the tunnels talking to one of the maintenance men, who he introduced as Sandy Norton.

‘Hey, Ben,' said Murfin, ‘did you know you can still travel between Woodhead and Dunford Bridge by rail through one of these tunnels?'

‘Really?'

‘There's a little railway line in this tunnel for maintenance work.'

‘It's just a two-foot gauge,' said Norton. ‘It's the quickest way for the engineers to get access to the middle of the tunnel. They have a battery electric locomotive shedded here.'

‘My brother-in-law would be down here like a shot, if he knew,' said Murfin. ‘He's a big railway nut.'

‘Don't tell me that,' said Norton. ‘They're always coming here, trying to find some way of getting in.'

Cooper drew Murfin aside. ‘What are you doing here, Gavin?'

‘I've been given an hour off jankers.'

‘How come?'

‘For some reason, Miss has gone to the PM.'

‘The Neil Granger postmortem?'

‘That's right.'

‘But I didn't think she was working on that enquiry. I mean – you
are
talking about Diane Fry, Gavin?'

‘'Course I am. Who else? We're working on the Emma Renshaw case, but Diane is proper put out that she lost a witness before she could get to him. There's no way she's going to accept anybody else's opinion about whether there's a connection or not.'

‘She wants to prove it one way or the other for herself.'

‘Exactly.'

‘Well, I can understand that.'

‘So I've been catching up on some other enquiries at the office, and now I'm supposed to meet her at the Renshaws. I noticed the guys working down here and thought I'd take a look at the tunnels.'

‘The air shaft where Neil Granger was killed must lead down into here somewhere.'

‘I suppose so.'

Cooper turned back to the maintenance man.

‘I've just come down from Withens,' he said. ‘Do you know it?'

‘Oh, yeah.'

‘Do you ever get the kids from the village hanging around down here?'

‘I know the ones you mean. They ride around here on their bikes sometimes. They're a bit cheeky, but I've not had any real bother with them personally.'

‘What are the chances of anyone getting into the tunnels?' said Cooper.

‘We never let anyone in,' said Norton. ‘Safety reasons.'

Cooper could see the National Grid had been careful with their security. He stood in front of the 1950s tunnel and looked up at the top of the steel-mesh fencing. There wasn't even enough of a gap for a small child to get through.

The reason for the security was obvious. The Longdendale Trail was right behind him. It ended at the old station platforms, and would be thronged with walkers and cyclists at the weekends, and in the summer. All kinds of people would get into the tunnels, if they could.

The surface of the trail had been created by pouring smooth sand over the line of the railway tracks. The sand probably made the going quite difficult when it was wet – in fact, Cooper thought it would be a trail to avoid in bad weather, because it was so open to the elements. A few yards away, in the middle of the trail, lay a dead hare. The skin of its head had been eaten down to the skull, and long, black insects were swarming around its throat, where a wound had been inflicted by a larger animal.

Norton followed his gaze. ‘Rats are getting a big problem,' he said. ‘Especially in this middle tunnel.'

‘But it isn't used for anything now, is it?'

‘Not at all. Not for a long time.'

‘I can see that rats must have thrived in the tunnels when they were being built. With a lot of workmen around, there must have been a plentiful food supply.'

‘I should say. They say there were nearly fifteen hundred men working here at the height of the tunnel project. They would have taken food in with them to where they were working. I expect there would have been plenty left on the floor for the rats.'

‘It reminds me of a story that a coal miner told me after the strike back in '84–85,' said Cooper. ‘He said there had always been lots of mice underground in the mines. He saw them all the time, hundreds of them, right down at the coalface. But the men were on strike for a year. And when they went back to work, there were no mice at all. They had all died. That was because they had relied on the presence of the miners for their food supply – without the crumbs of bread and pastry, and bits of fruit and chocolate that had dropped from the miners' snap boxes, the mice starved.'

‘Arthur Scargill killed our mice,' said Murfin. ‘Bastard.'

Cooper remembered Scargill, too. He had been the miners' leader during their turbulent strike in the 1980s. The strike had resulted in many bloody pitched battles between police and pickets, and it wouldn't be easily forgotten in Derbyshire.

‘I think he's retired now.'

‘Damn, I forgot to send him a card,' said Murfin.

‘But the thing is,' said Cooper, ‘I would have thought all the rats would die out when the tunnels were finished and the trains began running. Surely the navvies would move on to another job somewhere, and their shanty towns would be demolished? The rats' food source would have dried up.'

‘Maybe they did die out,' said Norton. ‘But they're back again now. They seem to eat as much poison as I can put down, and thrive on it.'

‘Super rats?'

‘If you want to call them that.'

Thanks to mild winters, the rat population had been rising fast, and they were getting bigger year by year. They could grow to the size of a small dog where they fed on the leftovers from fast-food outlets. In the country, rats normally ate crops out of the fields and were supposed to be smaller, and easier for a terrier or a cat to deal with. But an increasing volume of human visitors had made a big difference to country rats.

‘How often are the tunnels checked?' said Cooper.

‘The cableway is inspected regularly. The others not so often. Why?'

‘If feasible, it might be an idea for someone to check inside the old tunnels. At least as far as the first air shaft.'

Norton looked at him, but for some reason he didn't ask the obvious question. Perhaps it was the expression on Cooper's face that told him the answer would be something he didn't want to know.

‘How long have the high-voltage cables run through the other tunnel?'

‘A long time. Since 1969, well before the line was closed in the new tunnel.'

So four hundred thousand volts had been buzzing below the hill for the last thirty-four years. Maybe that was what had re-energized the rat population.

‘Of course, it'll be different if they re-open the railway line,' said Norton.

‘Do what?'

‘Through the newer tunnel, of course, not these old ones. They'll have to re-electrify it. Twenty-five thousand volts, they say. Because the Channel Tunnel won't take diesels.'

‘Channel Tunnel? What on earth are you talking about?'

‘I suppose it might not come off,' said Norton. ‘But that's the plan. A rail link all the way from Liverpool to Lille in France, through one of these tunnels here. Nine trains an hour in each direction. They reckon it could take two million lorries a year off the motorways. Imagine driving your lorry on to a train in Liverpool and driving off in France. And all thanks to these tunnels. Just think about the men who blasted their way with gunpowder through these hills for three miles to make them.'

‘They were navvies, like the men who built the canals?'

‘That's right. Not Irish, though. For some reason, almost all of the navvies on the Woodhead tunnels were English. The conditions must have been pretty awful for them up here.'

‘You're not kidding,' said Murfin. ‘It isn't exactly the Riviera now, is it?'

‘No. Actually, a lot of the men died, in one way or another. Accidents of various kinds, and illness. The first tunnel killed thirty or forty men, and injured over six hundred. They built the second tunnel from arches in first bore, and that killed dozens more. Woodhead was known for death and disease in those days. They called it the Railwaymen's Graveyard.'