He noticed her cup was practically empty.
‘Do you have time for another coffee?’ he said.
Fry shook her head. ‘Sorry, we’re busy here. The inquiry has become urgent.’
‘You always try to be one up on me,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s the crisis?’
‘A murder case. We’ve got a body.’
Cooper sighed. ‘Well, that’s two up on me, then.’
‘The victim is Polish. I dare say you’ll get an email about that too.’
‘Probably.’
Cooper watched Fry as she drained her cup. Was she the right person to be dealing with sensitive issues like a conflict between communities? He doubted it. She wasn’t a community person. Surely there must be something else going on to justify the presence of DS Diane Fry and her colleagues. Had the murder happened at this time by chance?
‘And what have you got on at the moment?’ asked Fry.
‘A missing person case linked to a previous murder inquiry. A possible manslaughter in an arson incident. A spate of armed robberies.’
But Fry wasn’t really interested. He saw her eyes glaze over and she gazed around the room.
‘Oh, there’s Jamie,’ she said, pushing back her chair.
Cooper remember DC Callaghan from his visit to Fry’s new base at St Ann’s police station in Nottingham, but he was surprised by Fry’s eagerness to get up and greet him. She’d hardly ever let her coolness slip like that with him. Well, perhaps on one or two notable occasions. But it had taken a long time.
Jamie Callaghan nodded at Cooper without a word as he waited for Fry.
‘No doubt I’ll see you around, Ben,’ she said. ‘Good luck with the case.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ said Callaghan.
Well, at least he could speak. Cooper watched the two of them walk away, leaving him alone to stare at his coffee. Not for the first time, he felt he had no idea what was really going on.
When he managed to get away from Chesterfield, Ben Cooper headed west, out beyond Bakewell. He needed to escape, and there was one place he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Half an hour later Cooper parked his car by the side of the road just outside the village of Monyash. A few hikers were making their way back across the fields to their vehicles or visiting the public toilets across the road.
He opened the tailgate of the Toyota, changed into his walking boots and put on his waterproof, then went through the gate, following a wide, flattened path across the grass. The walking didn’t stay easy for very long, he knew.
Brown dung flies rising from a cowpat warned him there was livestock ahead. A small herd of black-and-white cattle lay cudding, their hides covered in flies, flicking their tails and twitching their yellow ear tags. He expected them to move aside from the path as he approached. But these were Lathkill Dale cattle. They were used to noisier visitors than him. They barely blinked as he passed within touching distance of their damp noses.
There were reports on file of stock fencing being cut here in several places. Cooper found it hard to imagine the reason for it, except sheer vandalism. The upper part of this dale was a national nature reserve and famous for its rare wild flowers — purple orchids and Jacob’s ladder.
Soon he was approaching the remains of Ricklow Quarry, where Derbyshire Grey Marble had been worked, the stone used to make fireplaces at Chatsworth House. These slopes were said to contain fossils up to three hundred and sixty million years old.
Enormous cascades of rock covered the hillside as he picked his way through the old quarry. This was some of the roughest going he knew of in the Peak District, a slow scramble over muddy boulders made slippery by rain and mud.
Beyond the spoil heaps of Ricklow Quarry, the valley narrowed dramatically. This part of the dale had an eerie atmosphere, with moss-covered rocks amid dank, dripping trees twisted into unnatural shapes. Cooper thought of The Lord of the Rings — not the films, but the books he’d read as a teenager, the image he had of the hobbits’ Shire. A magical place where anything could happen, good or bad.
At this point the river that gave the dale its name wasn’t even visible. Limestone buttresses towered over each side of the valley. Rocks lay around, as if thrown by giants. It was a strange, mythical landscape. One dark and stormy night in the eighteenth century a vicar of Monyash had ridden his horse right over the cliff after an evening spent drinking in Bakewell. The horse survived, but he didn’t. The church in Monyash had kept a glass jar on display containing a tuft of grass that was said to have been taken from the clergyman’s clenched fist when his body was found.
Why were local legends like that still remembered and shared? Cooper guessed he must have been told it by his mother, or his grandmother, or some other relative. Perhaps he’d read it in a book. But were those stories still being passed on? Or would his be the last generation to look up at these crags and know about the drunken vicar and his horse and the tuft of grass?
Through a squeeze stile, a view finally opened up into the dale, with its elegantly curved limestone cliffs. He passed a fenced-off area where Jacob’s ladder covered the ground in violet-blue flowers in May and June. The sheep found it tasty, so they had to be kept off in the summer. A gate would be opened later in the year to let them graze the coarse grass.
He turned a bend on the path, and there was Lathkill Head Cave. This was where the River Lathkill emerged. Well, it did some of the time. The cave had an imposing entrance, a large square opening with a rock roof like a vast lintel, and moss-covered rocks tumbled on the floor below. The vivid green of the moss was a startling contrast with the silver-grey of the weathered limestone.
Today, the cave was bone dry. There hadn’t been enough rain recently. But in winter it could pour out a vast torrent of water that came from the mine workings. In the summer it was no more than a trickle and often disappeared completely in dry weather.
Lathkill. Yet another Scandinavian name. Derbyshire was thick with them. This one was said to be from Old East Norse, a legacy of the Danish invaders a thousand years ago. Hlada-kill. It sounded strange and exotic in the mouth now. But all it meant was ‘narrow valley’.
The Lathkill was unique even in the Peak District. It was the only river that ran over limestone for the whole of its length. That gave it a distinctive characteristic. And in this case, it was an important difference.
As he stood there, Cooper noticed a nest on a narrow ledge just above his head. A neat bowl shaped from leaves and dry grass, insulated on a bed of moss. So even here in this dried-up cave, something was able to survive.
Below Lathkill Head, the valley widened as it was joined from the south by Cales Dale. Halfway along Lathkill Dale was a tufa waterfall. He thought of tufa as something specific to the Peak District, though he supposed it must occur in other parts of the world where limestone was predominant. The soft, porous rock was formed from calcium carbonate precipitated by water that had run through limestone. It looked unnatural, and in a way it was.
In the aquarium at Matlock Bath there were displays of objects left in the water that had turned almost literally to stone as they calcified. It was the sort of thing the Victorians had loved. Such oddities had appealed to them. Here in Lathkill Dale, the tufa cascade was just an indication of the nature of the landscape he was walking through. This was a place where strange things happened.
A footbridge over the Lathkill led to the Limestone Way a few hundred yards south, but it was a steep ascent up the side of the dale, with stone steps built into the hillside to help the climb. At the top, he knew there would be a wide open stretch of White Peak farmland towards Youlgrave, a landscape very different from the dale, which had begun to feel too dark, too enclosed. Too claustrophobic.