He recalled a swimming area in the River Bradford near Youlgrave. He’d been there a couple of times as a teenager with a group of friends, taking the opportunity of some rare summer sun during the school holidays. But there had been something unappealing about the fact that they were officially allowed to swim there, even if the signs spelled out that it was ‘at your own risk’. The most attractive sites were the ones that were forbidden — the reservoirs and flooded quarries. They’d all needed that sense of adventure back then. Now, he was too aware of the people who’d died or got into serious trouble swimming in the wrong place. It wasn’t that the world that had changed, he supposed. It was him. He’d grown up.
Cooper pulled out an OS map from his waterproof. A rock shelter was marked on the map here at the bottom of Calling Low Dale. A natural overhang in the cliff created a roof, and the shelter had been enclosed by a dry stone wall. The space was no more than six feet long and perhaps four feet wide. The vertical strata of the limestone meant water continually dripped from the roof. You wouldn’t want to use it as a shelter for long.
A hill fort had stood on the long limestone ridge, enclosing an area of about ten acres inside a rampart of limestone blocks and rubble. Like many other ancient sites, it had been badly damaged by stone robbing and years of ploughing. To the north was One Ash Grange, which he’d been told was once a reformatory for misbehaving monks. Up ahead, the eastern half of the dale had been extensively mined for lead ore right up until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Cooper put away his map. Yes, he’d been to all these places before, though the details were a bit vague and confused. Before he came today, he couldn’t have recalled the order he would pass them on the trail into Lathkill Dale from the Monyash road, or where they stood in relation to each other. He wouldn’t even have been able to say why or even when he’d come, or how old he was at the time. He just knew he’d been here before.
Lathkill Dale was a part of his life, the way it was for many people. It had a manner of creeping into your consciousness, as if you’d always known it.
He opened another pocket and took out the photograph of Annette Bower he’d been carrying with him. He felt an odd sort of connection between them. This place had been part of Annette’s life too.
But was it also the place of her death?
Diane Fry left Shirebrook and got on to the M1 at Heath. Twenty miles south, she pulled into Trowell Services.
She preferred the services on the southbound side, because it had a Burger King rather than a McDonalds. For half an hour she sat at a table in Burger King eating a veggie bean burger with apple fries on the side and drinking a tropical mango smoothie.
People ebbed and flowed around her, staying a few minutes and getting back on the road to wherever they were heading. Two customers came and sat at a table next to her, a large woman in a baggy denim trouser suit, with steel grey hair cut into a severe bob and a girl of about fifteen, in a lime green jumpsuit and a baseball cap, like a contestant in The X Factor. They might have been mother and daughter — but, if so, they bore no physical resemblance to one another.
Halfway through her burger, Fry’s phone rang and she saw from the display that it was Angie.
‘Sis.’
‘Hi. What are you doing?’
‘Eating. Why?’
‘You sound as though you’re in a railway station.’
‘Something like that. What do you want?’
‘Just to say, you know... keep it to yourself what I told you last night.’
‘You know you’re putting me in a difficult position,’ said Diane.
‘Well, that’s up to you.’
Diane pulled the lettuce out of her sesame seed bun and left it on the side of her tray.
‘Is this some kind of test?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You shouldn’t have told me, you know you shouldn’t. Why didn’t you just hold on to your own secrets?’
‘We’re sisters, aren’t we? Family. We ought not to have secrets from each other, Di. We never did when we were growing up in Warley.’
‘Oh, that’s right. Until you left.’
She wished she could see Angie’s face. She could never really tell what she was thinking, unless she could look her sister right in the eyes.
‘I didn’t want to leave. It was something I had to do.’
‘But you didn’t tell me where you were going. You let me think I’d never see you again. You became very good at keeping secrets, Angie.’
‘Things have changed. I’m a different person now.’
‘Not all that different,’ said Diane, ‘if what you told me last night is true.’
She heard the baby screaming the background. Zack. Now, that was something that had definitely changed about her sister.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Angie. ‘We can talk about this some other time, if you want. But, Sis — remember. Keep it to yourself.’
Fry dropped her phone on the table in exasperation. Last night’s conversation with her sister was one she’d been hoping to forget. She’d shared her Yuk Sung Chicken and vegetarian spring rolls with Angie, conscious at first of an unusual silence. Then Angie had sat back and taken a deep breath.
‘There’s something I should have told you a long time ago,’ she’d said. ‘About a part of my life I’ve always kept from you.’
Diane had immediately experienced the sinking feeling in her stomach that her sister was uniquely able to provoke.
‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.’
But Angie had shaken her head firmly. ‘You have to listen, Sis. It’s too late to do any harm now.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
She had been convinced her sister was about to tell her some shady truths about her previous boyfriend Craig, the father of Zack. She’d always had suspicions about him, but there were times when it was best not to know.
But that wasn’t what Angie had in mind.
‘It goes back a long way,’ she’d said, ‘to when you first found me — or rather, when your friend Ben first found me.’
‘What?’
That had been a painful part of their history. Diane had been trying to trace her sister for years after she ran away from their foster home in the West Midlands. It was why she’d transferred to Derbyshire Constabulary in the first place, following a trail that suggested Angie had ended up in nearby Sheffield. Yet it had been Ben Cooper, interfering with his usual naïve and clumsy style, who had tracked Angie down and arranged their meeting. It had changed her life, and not always in a good way.
‘You don’t need to remind me of that,’ she said.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ said Angie. ‘In all this time, you’ve never asked me what I was doing in Sheffield. I know you wanted to skate over all that and go back to the way things were in Warley. But that just wasn’t possible, Sis. Not after everything that had happened to me in the meantime. Didn’t you ever wonder?’
Of course she’d wondered. Yet Angie was right — it was an aspect of her sister’s life that she’d pushed determinedly to the back of her mind. She’d tried to pretend that Angie was the same person she’d lost sight of years ago, even though the truth was staring her in the face.
‘It didn’t seem important,’ she said.
Angie had laughed then. ‘Liar. You just didn’t want to know, in case it compromised your principles. I kept quiet then, but it had to come out. And there are reasons I have to tell you now.’