Secrets of Death (9 page)

So here he was, the owner of a house, a limestone cottage half covered in ivy. He’d looked at many other properties before this. In the end, it was the way the front garden was advertised that swung his decision. The estate agent’s details described it as having a pleasant outlook over the surrounding village and rolling hills, with ample room to sit out, read a book and enjoy a glass of wine. If it made even an estate agent feel that way, he knew he would probably like it.

Its name was Tollhouse Cottage. Like all the others in the row, it was nearly three hundred years old, built for farm labourers or estate workers at a time when houses were intended to last several lifetimes. The walls were solid, not those timber and plasterboard things
you could put your fist through. Without the door or a window open, he could hear nothing from outside.

It also had a cellar. Just a small one – what they would have called a keeping cellar in the old days, for the storage of items that needed keeping cool in the days before fridges. It
was
cool down there too. He shivered as he stood at the bottom of the short flight of stone steps. The walls were bare, with a slab raised a few inches off the floor. It wasn’t just the cold that made him shiver, though. There was damp in the walls. He could see it in patches and feel it seeping into his bones. He was a few feet below ground here, so it was inevitable that it would feel this way, like standing in his own grave.

He went back up the steps, closed the hatch and dragged a rug back over it. He couldn’t think what use he would have for a cellar. It wasn’t as if he’d brought so many belongings with him from the flat in Welbeck Street. His stuff would fit into this house with room to spare.

‘So what do you think, Hopes?’ he said. ‘I suppose a cat flap is the first priority.’

The cat didn’t answer. She was too busy exploring all the corners of the house, making sure she’d claimed every room as her territory. She’d be back to the kitchen soon when she got hungry.

One of the other attractions of the cottage for Cooper was the wood-burning stove. It was a smaller version of the one at Bridge End Farm and he’d already ordered in a stack of logs. He was determined it would be cosy in here during the winter.

He
would miss his local in Edendale, of course. The Hanging Gate had been his refuge for the past few years with its scenic Peak District views on the walls, the same old sixties and seventies pop classics playing, the Banks’s Bitter and Mansfield Cask Ale. It had been a familiar and unthreatening place to retreat to of an evening, where he could enjoy an hour or two of anonymity.

Foolow had its own pub, the Bull’s Head. But this was a small village. They would soon get to know who he was here.

He turned as his brother Matt came through the front door carrying a huge cardboard box.

‘It’s almost as bad as those caravan people,’ said Matt. ‘You should see the amount of stuff some of them arrive with. You’d think they were heading out on a polar expedition.’

‘They must have heard you have a reputation for being primitive.’

‘Don’t let Kate hear you saying that. She’s in charge of facilities for the site, not me.’

Against his better instincts, Matt Cooper had put one field of Bridge End Farm aside for use as a caravan site. Most farms in the national park were small, less than a hundred acres. That size of farm could only be run as a part-time enterprise, with the farmer and his family taking second jobs or diversifying into the area’s biggest industry – tourism.

Tourists were the only reliable source of income for a Derbyshire hill farmer. As well as a small number of static caravans, Bridge End had a few pitches for
touring caravans and camper vans. From Easter onwards, there had been a steady flow in and out of the site. Matt had watched each one arrive with a scowl of contempt, until Kate made him stay in the cowshed out of the way.

‘You’ve to get used to having the caravanners, Matt,’ said Ben. ‘Think of the money they’re bringing in.’

Matt grunted as he put the box down on the sitting room floor. ‘I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle,’ he said. ‘They’re all townies.’

Ben smiled. Of course, most of the visitors were fine – quiet, friendly, undemanding and no trouble to their hosts at all – but occasionally a family lived down to all of Matt’s expectations. He muttered the word
townies
so often now that it had started to lose any meaning. After a while, he had begun to do it unconsciously, as if he had a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome.

Matt saw his smile and scowled. ‘Well, you know what it’s like. They come down the lane towing one of those massive things behind an underpowered car and they block the whole place up for miles around. Some of us are trying to make a living at farming, you know.’

‘And not doing very well at it. That’s why you need another source of income, isn’t it?’

His brother didn’t answer. He squatted on the floor to unpack the box, distributing the contents at random around the room without even looking to see what they were. Ben wished his sister-in-law Kate could have been here. She was the organised one. Kate would have this place in perfect order in no time. With Matt’s
involvement, it would take months to get things right. There would probably be essential items he would never find again.

‘The girls seem to like the caravanners, though,’ said Ben, remembering seeing his two nieces chatting happily to the visitors on his last call at Bridge End.

Matt shook his head. ‘I don’t know why. It’s not as if they’re going to meet any young people of their own age. What self-respecting teenager would want to go on a caravan holiday with their parents?’

He held up an electric toaster as if he’d never seen one before and had no idea what its function was. He put it down on an armchair. Then he straightened up and looked round the room, seeming satisfied with his efforts.

Ben thought he and Matt had little in common physically, except perhaps a look of their father around the eyes and nose. Their mother had been blue-eyed, but the eyes of both her sons were brown, their hair dark where she was fair. Matt had also inherited their father’s size, the wide shoulders, the enormous hands – and the uncertain temper.

As he aged, Matt was beginning to look more and more like their father. In years to come, he would look exactly the way their father would have, if he’d lived.

His character was different, though. A rebellious side of his personality was gradually being revealed, which could only have come from their mother. Recently, Matt had joined protests against milk prices, angry at the way he and other milk producers were being
prevented from earning a proper living by the pressure to drive down costs for consumers. Farmers had been emptying supermarket shelves of milk, blocking roads outside dairies with their tractors and even taking cows into stores. And Matt had been present at several demonstrations in and around Derbyshire.

Ben had watched with surprise and a certain amount of admiration. Once a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, his brother was in danger of turning into a hot-headed radical. Something had finally pushed him over the edge.

‘You’ve got plenty of space here, anyway,’ said Matt, pacing the room to gaze out of the window.

‘You mean it looks a bit empty, don’t you?’

Matt shrugged. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a bit of space.’

‘I’ll get some more stuff when I’ve finished decorating.’

Matt looked at the pile of paint tins and rolls of wallpaper that had been accumulating in the hallway.

‘Are you planning to redecorate the place completely, Ben?’

‘Why not?’

‘It will take a while if you’re doing it on your own.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Ben. ‘It will give me something to do in the evenings.’

‘Rather you than me.’

Matt paused. Ben could hear him breathing heavily and fidgeting with some coins in the pocket of his jeans. It was a habit he recognised, one he’d noticed
in his brother before. Not that often. Just when he was building up to saying something important.

‘Have you thought,’ said Matt finally, ‘that you might be doing all this as a sort of displacement activity?’

Ben laughed, then looked at his brother with a burst of affection and understanding.
Displacement activity
? That wasn’t a phrase Matt would have thought of himself. He probably had no idea what it meant. His reading matter was confined to
Farmers Weekly
and
Classic Tractor
. There were no psychology textbooks on the shelf in his office, just box files full of movement records and cattle passports. Ben knew it must have come from Kate. Matt had come primed with the right questions to ask.

‘Displacement activity?’ said Ben. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

Matt sucked in his breath as if someone had just stuck a needle into his finger. He’d been afraid his brother would ask him to explain.

‘All this,’ he said, with a vague wave of his arm around the room. ‘Taking on this house. Deciding to redecorate the whole thing yourself when it doesn’t really need it. You’re keeping yourself busy all the time. To avoid having to think about anything else.’

‘Is that so wrong?’ said Ben gently, feeling sorry for his brother.

Matt looked at him, a puzzled and slightly pleading look in his eye. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think it’s what I would do too.’

‘Then there’s no problem, is there?’

With a deep sigh, Matt went back to moving the paint tins. ‘None at all.’

Ben
watched him for a while. ‘I’m fine, Matt,’ he said. ‘Really I am.’

After his brother had gone, Ben took the opportunity to enjoy a few moments of peace. He opened a bottle of beer and sat out on the patio to take in the view and the evening air.

After a wet spring in Derbyshire, summer had burst into life with a vengeance. The brightest greens were blinding in their brightness; the darker shades looked damp and cool.

People in other countries, or even in the cities, didn’t realise how green England was until they flew over it. He felt so lucky to be living in one of the most beautiful parts of it. And the Peak District was certainly beautiful. Though it could also be dangerous.

Small puffs of cloud drifted across the blue sky. When he looked out from here over the patchwork of fields, the sun broke through the clouds sporadically, high-lighting one field and then another, changing the colours in the landscape as it went, catching a white-painted farmhouse here, casting shadows from a copse of trees over there.

The tracery of white limestone walls was like a map laid over the landscape, so painstakingly constructed that it seemed to hold the countryside together. He sometimes thought that if you followed the right lines on that map you could discover any story, find the clues to any mystery. All the answers might lie caught in this gleaming web.

Ben found himself thinking about his father, Sergeant
Joe Cooper, and wondering what he would have thought of the new house. He would probably have scowled and kicked the plaster and muttered something about rising damp and the electricity bill.

He and Matt had never talked about their father properly. Not ever, in the whole of their lives. And when Joe Cooper died, it was too late to start. The subject had become far too big even to grasp at. So Ben had never told his brother how much he’d come to resent the memories he had, the fact that so few of them were positive. He suspected that their father was still an idol for Matt, in a way. The older brother always had a different experience. And Matt still blamed the police for their father’s death. That was an unspoken, but unavoidable fact.

Ben shook himself and took a drink of beer. He had to relax. But having Matt in the new house didn’t have that effect on him.

He gazed out at the countryside, wondering who his second visitor to Tollhouse Cottage might be and hoping it wouldn’t be too much of a shock.

For
Gordon Burgess, Surprise View was no longer a surprise. He still remembered the first time he’d seen it, though.

He’d been driving over from Sheffield past the Fox House towards Hathersage. As he crossed over Burbage Bridge, he’d been distracted by the dramatic sight of Carl Wark, the Iron Age hill fort brooding on the northern skyline like a shattered stone reminder of the past. It had been set against a foreground of purple heather, acres and acres of it sweeping up the hillside.

A few hundred yards later, he’d passed a roadside car park hacked out of the heather and bracken, and he’d wondered why it had been placed just there. Then came white chevrons indicating a sharp right-hand bend as the A6187 blasted through the gritstone. A battered lump of rock was in front him as he swung the wheel to the right.

And bang – there it was. A huge, astonishing vista had opened up. He found himself looking down across Hathersage to the whole of the Hope Valley as it snaked its way up through Hope and Bamford to Castleton. The
distinctive bare face of Mam Tor, the Shivering Mountain, stood at the head of the valley, with a glimpse of the dark plateau of Kinder Scout on the horizon. The rolling White Peak hills swept in from the south, lapping gently against the hard gritstone tors of the Dark Peak. Dense woodland formed clumps and swirls across the landscape. The view was lit by a hazy summer sun that made the scene look magical, something idealised and unreal from a dreamscape.

It was impossible to stop at that point on the road as it began its descent towards Hathersage. In the year since, doing that same journey, Burgess had seen many brake lights come on as he followed visitors’ cars into the Hope Valley, with drivers hitting the pedal in that instinctive reaction to an astonishing panorama suddenly opening up in front of them. He could see them looking for a pull-in where they could reach for the camera to capture the vista. But there was nowhere safe to stop. Surprise View was so beautiful that it was dangerous.

So that was the reason for the car park. It was located a hundred yards or so before the bend, tucked into the hillside below the twisted rock tors of Mother Cap and Over Owler, where the broken slopes marked the site of an abandoned millstone quarry. Its location meant you had to know what you were approaching, otherwise you were past the bend on the descent into Hathersage and you had to circle all the way back.