Secrets of Death (18 page)

Cooper
straightened up. ‘I’m going back to my desk. Let me know when they reach Heeley Bank,’ he said.

It seemed a long time before Irvine came to fetch him again.

‘They got to Owler Bar and stopped for lunch,’ he said apologetically. ‘And they seem to have taken the scenic route to Heeley Bank.’

Irvine restarted the video. Cooper saw the familiar view of the hill on the approach to Heeley Bank and watched as the Cooks’ car slowed and turned into the car park. The place was full when they arrived and it was hard to make out any individual vehicles, except a green VW camper van they parked opposite, which was captured in beautiful detail for a few moments before the dashcam stopped when the engine went off.

‘I think they left the car here,’ said Irvine.

‘They went for a walk in the woods.’

‘Right. But here they come back again.’

A different vehicle was facing the Cooks’ car when the dashcam came back on. A small blue car, a Vauxhall from the look of the badge on the radiator grille. The car park was beginning to empty. Two vehicles passed in front of the camera on their way out. And then Cooper realised there was now a view up the car park towards the information centre. He couldn’t see the door of the centre, but he could see the toilet block clearly. A couple of figures stood talking nearby, but he couldn’t make out any details. There was no way he would be able to recognise anyone, let alone Roger Farrell, whom he had never seen alive.

‘Well,
that’s a washout,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

‘Not your fault, Luke.’

Then Cooper looked more closely at the last bit of footage from the dashboard camera. There was a vehicle parked close to the corner of the building. He could catch just a glimpse of a wing, dark and half obscured. But there was something distinctive about the shape of it. Surely there was only one type of vehicle that still had that shape of wing?

It was the familiar boxy outline of a Land Rover.

Marnie Letts had an address on the Woodlands Estate. It was way up in the north of Edendale, an area that was hardly part of the town itself, as far as Cooper was concerned. Their natures were certainly very different.

Victoria Park was the point where the character of Edendale changed. On one side of the park stood the Royal Theatre, just off Hulley Road, with the new courthouse development across Park Street. To the north of Victoria Park, Edendale’s largest housing estates began. They’d spread way out of town that way now. Passing the park gates, he could see the Devonshire and Cavendish Estates, but he knew there was much more housing creeping up the hillsides behind them.

Cooper had patrolled the beat on the Devonshire Estate when he was a young bobby, watching out for stolen cars being raced round the streets or gathering information on local drug dealers who operated from the sprawl of prefabricated concrete houses slung up in the 1960s.

The
estate occupied low-lying land in the valley floor that had once been water meadows until they were drained for the housing scheme. For decades the damp had been creeping back into the foundations of the houses, staining the walls with mould and rotting the doors and windows. When some of the houses became virtually uninhabitable, with fungus growing through the floorboards and water pouring through the roofs, the council decided to act and had carried out a major remedial scheme on the entire estate, redecorating, replastering and re-roofing. They’d spent millions of pounds on the project and it had taken three years. But it hadn’t stopped the damp creeping back in.

The Woodlands Estate was more modern and bigger, stretching all the way across to the Manchester Road. Addresses on the estate were instantly recognisable: Elm Street, Sycamore Crescent, Chestnut Avenue, Lime Tree Close. It seemed as though the house-building had only stopped when the developers ran out of tree names.

He recalled Gavin Murfin talking about working on the Woodlands Estate. He had some sympathy with Murfin. Residents were known universally as Woodies. The name had taken on connotations that summed up all kinds of prejudices and preconceptions.

Cooper drove up into the estate with his windows open. He passed a shopping parade in the middle of it. Most of the shops had steel shutters pulled down over their windows and doors, as if preparing for a riot.

The local supermarket was about to close for the
evening and teenagers had begun to gather in the car park. They clustered round a yellow hatchback with its doors and windows open and loud grime music banging out into the summer air. Cooper didn’t need to get any nearer to guess what the kids were smoking. He could smell it from here, its distinctive odour mixing with the tang of lager.

At her address on Sycamore Crescent, Marnie Letts looked as though she had been doing some baking. She was wearing an apron and there was a smudge of white flour on her face. She looked uneasy at getting a visit. Cooper remembered her at Heeley Bank. She’d been calm and composed after the initial shock and once she knew what was happening.

‘I’m taking the chance to catch up on some jobs,’ she said. ‘Pete is working and it’s much easier when he’s out of the house.’

‘Your husband?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, he’s a tree surgeon.’

‘We’ve had a couple of witnesses who responded to our appeals,’ said Cooper when she let him into the house. ‘They say they remember the man in the BMW – Mr Farrell. They saw him come into the information centre that afternoon. It would have been about four p.m.’

‘I don’t recall him,’ said Marnie. ‘But then – what did he actually look like?’

Cooper realised that Marnie Letts would not have seen Roger Farrell’s face, except when it was obscured by the exit bag after his death.

‘Haven’t you seen the story in the papers?’ he asked.

‘No.
I didn’t want to read about it. Not after that morning …’

‘I see. Well, here. This is Mr Farrell.’

Cooper showed her the photograph of Roger Farrell they’d been using. She ought to have been shown it earlier, if he’d thought about it. Too much else had been happening.

Marnie looked at the photo, squinting her eyes as if seeing Farrell against a burst of sunlight, then shook her head.

‘No. I still don’t remember him,’ she said. ‘That’s not to say he didn’t come in. We were quite busy that day. I don’t remember people very well, to be honest. Some of them don’t actually buy anything, you know. They just browse the books and postcards, then pick up a few free leaflets before they go out again. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you anyway.’ Cooper took the photo back. ‘According to our witnesses, when Mr Farrell came out of the information centre he spoke to someone near the toilet block.’

‘I definitely can’t help you there,’ she said. ‘I can’t see in that direction, not when I’m working behind the counter. If I happen to be standing near the door, I can. But, like I say, we were busy. So I was probably serving a customer at the counter.’

‘I understand. It might not be important, but we have to check these details. The evidence from our witnesses does confirm the presence of a dark-coloured Land Rover, by the way.’

‘If that’s what it was,’ said Marnie.

‘Yes.’

She
could see that Cooper was disappointed.

‘I’m really sorry I can’t be more help,’ she said.

Cooper smiled. ‘Everyone says that.’

As he was leaving the Woodlands Estate, Cooper noticed a crowd of Woodies gathered at the corner of Sycamore Crescent. They were probably building up to a fight between the Sycos and the Elmers. It was the normal evening entertainment around here.

Luke
Irvine had left the office promptly at the end of his shift that day. There was no overtime on this inquiry. In fact, it was as rare as hen’s teeth these days, unfortunately.

Irvine had been living in Bamford for a couple of years now. It suited him nicely – a village location that reminded him of his family home back in West Yorkshire, a good community atmosphere and a fantastic pub. What more could he ask? It even had a little railway station on the Hope Valley line, so he could get to Manchester or Sheffield without driving – though the nature of the Peak District landscape meant he couldn’t get to Edendale, which lay over the hill in a different valley.

Since he’d arrived in Bamford, Irvine had been sharing a house on Old Post Office Row with two web designers. He had a room overlooking the fields between The Hollow and South View. When he opened his window in the morning he smelled fresh horse manure.

When he got home that evening, he parked his Kia half on the pavement. He wasn’t stopping long and
parking was a problem, of course. These villages were built before people had cars. The older properties had no off-street parking and the roads were narrow, so there was always a bit of competition for spaces. That was one of the compromises you had to accept.

Irvine let himself into the house, went up to his room and changed into a T-shirt, jogging bottoms and trainers, then went straight out again. On the pavement, he paused and looked around the village.

The house was positioned halfway up the long hill that Bamford had been built on. One Sunday morning at about half-past ten, not long after he’d moved in, Irvine had walked down the hill and into the village church, St John the Baptist, attracted by the smell of fresh coffee. He’d spent the previous evening in the Angler’s Rest and wasn’t quite awake. He discovered that the service on the first Sunday of the month began with coffee and cake.

Irvine hadn’t been to church much since he’d left Denby Dale, where he grew up. His mother had been a church warden and was very serious about the role, which had probably made him react against anything with a whiff of C of E ever since. St John’s had a curiously tall, thin tower with bells that he heard being rung for practice every Wednesday evening when he was at home. He’d been told that bodies exhumed from the village of Derwent had been brought here for reburial after it was submerged during the construction of Ladybower Reservoir.

And, while he was drinking coffee and eating cake there, he’d met the female vicar for Bamford, who
covered three parishes and lived down the line in Hathersage. And somehow, he’d found himself being roped in to help with the village carnival, climbing ladders to put up bunting and acting as a marshal for the parade. He found it oddly satisfying. He was starting to be absorbed into the community.

But today when Irvine got back in the Kia he headed uphill. Not far above Bamford, he hit the lower end of Ladybower Reservoir, where the dam held back twenty-eight million gallons of water from flooding Bamford and the famous eighty-foot-wide plugholes created swirling vortexes on the surface of the water, as if Ladybower was draining away into another dimension. Most of the water flowed southwards from here along the Derwent Aqueduct to be distributed to the populations of Derby and Leicester.

He crossed the bridge, turned left at the lights and drove on to the narrow road that ran up the northern arm of Ladybower. The reservoir formed an enormous stylised letter ‘Y’ in the landscape. The Fairholmes Visitor Centre lay right at the tip of Ladybower’s northern arm, where it was separated from Derwent Reservoir by another dam with castellated twin towers. Though Fairholmes was run by Severn Trent Water, there was a ranger service station here, as well as a cycle hire centre. A bus service ran all the way between Fairholmes and Fearfall Wood on the side of the A57.

As Irvine was parking, his phone rang. He saw straight away that it was his parents, calling from Denby Dale because they knew he ought to have finished work by now. They worried that he’d get too obsessed with
the job and be working all hours of the day and night, with no social life, no proper meals and far too much alcohol. They’d watched so many TV crime dramas that they had a distorted view of police work which he couldn’t get out of their minds, no matter how often he tried to explain the reality to them.

‘Hello? Mum?’ he said.

It was usually his mother who made the call. Sometimes she passed him on to his dad, but she was the one who waited impatiently by the phone until the clock said it was okay to ring.

‘I’m just out for a run,’ he said. ‘Ladybower. No,
Lady
bower. The big reservoir. You know, I showed it to you and Dad when you came down. Yes, like Ingbirchworth but a lot bigger.’

He put his money into the parking machine and stuck the ticket on his car, shooing away a Mallard duck pecking at his trainers. An enormous flock of ducks owned the car park at Fairholmes. When you drove in, you had to wait for dozens of them to waddle slowly across the tarmac to make way for your car. When you walked towards the café, they followed you. When you came out, they clustered round your legs, making hopeful little quacking noises. If you sat at a picnic table, they gradually surrounded you, until you were sitting in a sea of gently undulating feathers.

‘No, I haven’t started going to church regularly, Mum,’ he said. ‘Don’t start asking me why not. I don’t have to say why not. I’ll go if I want to.’

Irvine rolled his eyes. Near the far wall of the car park, an elderly woman was ripping up chunks of
bread and scattering the pieces on the ground. It prompted a surge of movement around the site and a waddling tide converged on her.

‘No, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m eating properly. Busy at work, but …’

He began to do his warm-ups. A group of walkers were picnicking at a table. A man sat smoking a cigarette. A minibus pulled away, carrying a group of people home from a day out. Two exhausted-looking cyclists unfastened their helmets. A motorcyclist checked over his bike.

A dog was barking. And, while two women chatted at a table, their pre-school children ran around the grass throwing sticks at the ducks. The ducks didn’t seem unduly worried, though. They outnumbered everything at Fairholmes.

‘No news, then?’ he said. ‘Just calling to check up on me? Yes, I’m eating properly – I just said that. I’m off for my run now, Mum. Okay? See you, then.’

Irvine tucked his phone in a pocket and headed off on the trail away from the visitor centre. He noticed that the water levels were low in Ladybower for the time of year. In a dry summer, the water could get even lower, exposing the sandy shallows at the edges. And sometimes other things appeared if the reservoir was low enough. Though Irvine had never seen it himself, he’d heard people talk about the long hot summer of 1976 when the walls of houses and a church had been visible, the submerged remains of Derwent village, which had been lost when the valley was flooded. An old man he’d met leaning on the bar in
the Angler’s Rest had claimed to have seen the church spire still rising out of the water before it was blown up in 1947.