Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry)
Read Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) Online
Authors: Stephen Booth
Stephen Booth is the internationally bestselling, CWA Dagger-winning author of eleven acclaimed thrillers featuring Cooper and Fry. The series is in development as a TV programme. Booth lives in Nottingham.
Black Dog
Dancing With the Virgins
Blood on the Tongue
Blind to the Bones
One Last Breath
The Dead Place
Scared to Live
Dying to Sin
The Kill Call
Lost River
The Devil’s Edge
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-074812-486-2
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Stephen Booth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
To the most important people of all – the readers
Thanks go to all the police officers, crime scene examiners, fire investigators and Peak Park rangers who have willingly talked to me about moorland fires and many other subjects. Special thanks to everyone at Chesterfield Police Station for their hospitality, and to (now retired) Chief Superintendent Roger Flint for giving so generously of his time, knowledge and experience. Always appreciated!
From a distance, it looked solid – a black wall lying across his path, dense and impenetrable. But as Aidan Merritt drew closer, he could look into its depths. He was able to watch it coil and seethe as the wind drove it across the heather. It was like a vast sooty snake crawling relentlessly over the moor. But he didn’t need to watch it for long to realise it was an illusion. This thing didn’t crawl. Its speed was frightening.
Further up the hill, Merritt saw more dark spirals, drifting low to the ground. Two, three or maybe more of them, disappearing over the moor. He could smell their acrid stink, feel their heat on his skin, taste the millions of burnt fragments choking the air as they passed.
Smoke. Acres and acres of smoke. The world was full of it.
A sudden awareness of danger made him pause. That smoke was poisonous, lethal. It could kill him if he let too much of it get into his lungs. And the blaze behind it would scorch his flesh in a second. Yet today this smoke might actually be his friend. That fire could save his life.
But still Merritt hesitated before he left the path. A strange foreboding froze his limbs. He felt as though he was about to step into a great inferno. He would be a solitary human figure walking out on to a fire-ravaged wasteland.
‘My
God, what am I doing?’ he said aloud to himself. ‘Who in his right mind would be out here?’
Within the space of twenty-four hours, this part of Derbyshire that he’d known so well had turned into a landscape resembling one of the nine circles of hell. Merritt imagined there ought to be a guide to take his arm and point out the glimpses of tormented souls writhing in the flames.
It was something he’d read in the sixth form at school. The guide was some Roman poet, surely. Virgil, was it? Yes, Dante’s
Inferno
from
The Divine Comedy.
It wasn’t taught any more. Not in his school, anyway. The kids he dealt with would think he’d gone mad if he even mentioned it. But years ago he’d used it himself in an essay on the use of allegory in European literature. The
Inferno
was all about the symbolism of poetic justice. Fortune-tellers walking with their heads on backwards, violent criminals trapped in a river of boiling blood. Each circle reserved for a specific sin, until the ninth circle centred on Satan himself.
Merritt recalled that the narrator of the
Inferno
had fallen into a deep place where the sun was silent, and found himself on the edge of hell. He’d never had any use for the knowledge until now. Yet it had stuck in some corner of his mind. And now he was thinking only of the ninth circle. The devil was in that detail.
Merritt looked up. He supposed the sun was still up there somewhere, hanging over the Peak District moors. But it was clogged and blackened with smoke, as silent as it would ever be.
He pulled out his phone, and saw that for once he had a signal. There were only a few places on Oxlow Moor where you were out of the dead spots. He dialled his wife’s number, and got her recorded message, her voice sounding much too jaunty and cheerful.
‘Sam,
it’s me,’ he said.
Then he stopped, his mind suddenly empty. He couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say. Instead, he told her about the ninth circle of hell, trying to explain what was in his thoughts. But he knew he was becoming incoherent, and he ended the call abruptly.
‘That was stupid,’ he said. ‘Stupid.’
Merritt wiped the sweat from his forehead, took a deep breath and coughed at the dryness in his throat. Poetic justice? Yes – and that meant not just divine revenge, but a destiny chosen freely by a soul during life, and fulfilled in death. The inevitability was the most terrifying thing of all. It was what had struck him deeply as a seventeen-year-old, just starting to think about the future and what life might hold. The idea that he might already have chosen his own destiny weighed on his mind like a millstone. His place in the inferno was pretty much guaranteed. Well, that was the way it had seemed back then.
And now here was the physical manifestation of hell, almost exactly as Dante had described it. Those indistinct figures flailing in the smoke could only be the demons of his imagination – inhuman forms with the heads of beasts, their bodies glittering and suffused with bright artificial colours, their movements lumbering, their hands filled with strange instruments of torment. God, yes – they were there. All the creatures from his nightmares. He could see them in the smoke. See them, hear them, smell them. They were so close that he could practically touch them.
Yes, that was one other thing that Merritt remembered. According to Dante, the nine circles of hell weren’t located in some mythical universe, detached from the real world. All that torture and suffering was taking place among us now. This minute, this second. Hell was right here on earth.
‘Damn it, man – get a grip.’
He
found that the sound of his own voice reassured him a little. There was a job to finish, and he didn’t have much time. Focus. He must focus.
Merritt looked to his left. No, not that way. The angry red of flames flickered deep in the banks of smoke. The fire was burning at ground level, consuming the heather, surging across the miles of dry peat. With the wind behind it, a wildfire could advance faster than any human being could run. He mustn’t get himself trapped where the flames could cut him off. That would be suicide.
To the right, then. That way he could just see a stretch of post-and-rail fence, a dry-stone wall. Beyond it, scrubby grass and patches of bare soil. A field. The wall marked the point where the moor ended and rough grazing began. That was the direction he wanted.
‘Hey!’
A voice calling out of the smoke. Not a demon after all, but a human being, living and angry. One of the firefighters, he guessed. Small teams of them were scattered across the burning moor, thrashing at the flames with their beaters or spraying mists of water from backpacks. They’d been on duty fighting the moorland fire for hours already, and would be weary and irritable.
Merritt kept moving, trying to get up speed over the rough ground, regretting that he’d never tried to stay fit the way some of the others had. Now that he’d reached his mid-forties, it was really starting to tell on his body. His breath was soon rasping and his lungs began to burn.
‘Hey, you there! Stop!’
Well, they were too far away to see him clearly, and he was sure they wouldn’t bother trying to chase him. They had enough on their hands already.
Oh, but wait. There’d be a police presence somewhere, though. As he jogged over the heather, Merritt imagined a
couple of bored coppers not too far away, given the job of closing the road and stopping traffic. He needed to be more careful. It was important not to draw attention to himself. No more than necessary, anyway. Let them think he was just some rambler who’d strayed too near the fire, and had turned back to leave the area the way he came.
Yes, this was the right direction. The line of the roof was visible now. He recognised those high chimneys, cowled against the moorland gales. He could picture them the way they once were, trickling smoke in the winter, with log fires roaring in the rooms below. The scent of woodsmoke was in his nostrils for a moment. He thought it was just another memory, until he realised his eyes were stinging and the back of his throat was sore with the acid taste of charred vegetation.
The smoke had caught up with him. It billowed around his legs and swirled into his face. It rapidly became thicker and thicker.
Frightened now, Merritt began to run, stumbling as the woody stems of heather and bracken caught at his feet. His boots felt heavy, and his corduroy trousers were sticky with insects and clinging burrs. The fabric of his shirt grew damp with sweat under the armpits of his jacket. He was wearing the wrong clothes for running. That was so typical. He was always doing the wrong thing. Always making the worst decisions. Always, always, always. Was there time to put it right? At least to put
something
right?
Startled, Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper hit the brakes of his Toyota. For a moment the wheels skidded on loose dirt before the car came to stop halfway on to the grass verge.
‘What the devil …?’
Cooper winced as a muscle strain from a game of squash
earlier in the week sent spasms of pain through his lower back. Sitting alongside him in the passenger seat, Detective Constable Carol Villiers had been busy reading a file. She was thrown against her seat belt, scattering papers on the floor. They both stared ahead through the windscreen.
‘Well, that looks bad,’ she said.
Automatically, Cooper glanced in his rear-view mirror to check there was no traffic behind him. But the road was quiet at this time of day. That was lucky, because there was hardly enough room for two cars to pass, and those dry-stone walls on either side were pretty unyielding. That was normal for minor roads in this part of the Peak District, as the scrapes on his bodywork often testified.
Cooper shook his head. ‘Another one. That’s the fourth this month. The sixth so far this year.’
‘And it’s a big one, too.’
The sight of wildfires sweeping across the moors was always worrying. Once those fires got out of control, they threatened every type of wildlife, as well as the homes of people who lived in the national park. In serious incidents, human lives could be put at risk.
But for Cooper, there was an extra stab of personal distress. He knew these hills so well. He’d been born in this part of the Peaks, had grown up on a farm surrounded by moorland in every direction. Those vast expanses of rock and heather had been his playground. They still were, when he had time. The sense of peace, the closeness to nature, the sheer exhilaration of feeling the wind and breathing pure air – they were part of his own being. He could hardly bear to watch these fires destroying everything he loved.
His move away from Bridge End Farm to his flat in Edendale had partly broken that connection. The town had become his new home, and the police service his life. Yet it had also made the landscape more precious to him. Ben feared that one day
he would no longer see the Peak District in the same way – not as he once had, with every bend in the road providing a glimpse of an enchanted land. In a few years, the countryside around him might seem like an endless series of crime scenes – some of them fresh in his memory, others still waiting to happen.