Strangely, St Hugh’s Mission Church in the village was named after some French saint, depicted with a swan. There were no swans in Foolow, but visitors passed a duck warning sign before they caught sight of the village pond.
After years spent in Edendale, this was home for Cooper now. Once he was behind the centuries-old walls of his cottage, he was insulated from the rest of the world. It was a house intended to last several lifetimes, and it already had. It was built of solid stone, not timber and plasterboard. With the doors and windows closed, he could hear nothing from outside.
Tollhouse Cottage sat on the hillside as if it had grown there organically. Beneath the house was a keeping cellar, a damp and chilly reminder of the earth the house was built on, a place where he could experience a connection with the landscape without even going outside.
Mobile-phone reception in Foolow was unpredictable, though, especially behind the thick stone walls of his cottage. So Cooper stopped for a few minutes by the pond on the village green to phone Chloe Young.
‘Hi. What are you up to?’ she said.
‘Just arriving home. What about you?’
‘Working late again.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘That’s the life of a pathologist. People will keep on dying.’
‘So I won’t get chance to see you, then?’
‘Not tonight.’
Cooper sighed. He looked forward to speaking to her every evening, but it was so much better to actually see her face to face. There was something missing from his life when he couldn’t be with her. But he was in no position to question Chloe Young’s workload. He’d been forced to skip dates himself when he was called out to a crime scene. Some weeks they were in danger of becoming strangers.
Chloe heard his sigh.
‘I know, Ben,’ she said. ‘But it will get better. I’m free later in the week.’
‘That will have to do, I suppose.’
‘Come on, look on the bright side,’ she said cheerily.
He knew she was probably in her office, but he always pictured Chloe in the mortuary, with a dead body on the stainless-steel table and a scalpel in her hand as she smiled at him from behind a surgical mask. That was the way she’d looked when they’d first met. It was a difficult image to get out of his mind, even now.
‘Oh yes, the bright side,’ he said. ‘I guess there must be one.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I mean, you are the man who owns a cat called Hope.’
Cooper laughed. ‘It was probably a bad choice,’ he said. ‘It’s just, when I picked her up from the rescue centre...’ He trailed off.
‘Yes, she must have been given a name at the centre. You could have kept that if you really weren’t able to think of anything else.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t.’
Then he heard someone speaking to Chloe in the background, a colleague calling her away from the phone.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said hastily.
‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow, then?’
‘Of course.’
Cooper stood for a moment on the village green. He saw that some of the notices behind the glass in the village noticeboard had faded completely. What might they have been announcing? He could see a date for a parish meeting at Burdekin Hall, a planning application for a caravan park, an advert for the Silence heritage site on the old lead workings at Hucklow Edge. The rest were... well, a mystery.
He unlocked the front door of his house and waited for the familiar bang of the cat flap as Hope came home. He didn’t know where her vantage point was, but she always spotted his car returning.
She fussed around his legs while he opened a tin and changed her water. Then he watched her eating for a while. It was strangely calming and reassuring after a day at work. It was nice to stand in a kitchen where the floor wasn’t splattered with blood.
‘Hi, Hopes. We were talking about you just now.’
The cat didn’t look impressed. But then, she never did. His life outside the house was totally irrelevant to her. As far as she was concerned, he ceased to exist once he walked out of the front door. And yet he always found her waiting patiently for him to reappear each evening. Was it just the prospect of food that kept her interested, or did she feel more affection than she was able to show, because she was a cat?
Cooper glanced out of the window and saw all his neighbours had their wheelie bins out for collection next day. That was how he remembered to do it. He wondered if it was how everyone else remembered too. Perhaps there was someone in the village who was frighteningly efficient and always put their bin out first, with everyone else following their example. It only needed one person to get it wrong and the system would fall apart.
He wasn’t going to cook anything for himself tonight, and he had nowhere else he needed to go. The Bull’s Head in Foolow was often full of dogs at lunchtime, but in the early evening he could nip in for a Peak Ales Bakewell Bitter and a bully burger with Stilton and sweet potato fries on the side.
In Foolow, the pub was also the place to buy fresh eggs, bacon, milk and postage stamps. The first time he went into the Bull’s Head, Cooper remembered noticing a lethal-looking carving knife set that had been hung in a leather scabbard over the log fire as decoration. Probably no one else thought of it as a dangerous weapon. His job gave him a perspective that he couldn’t always put aside. And that was especially true today, after standing in the Athertons’ bloodstained kitchen in Edendale, examining the consequences of a handily placed knife.
The image of that log fire made Cooper think about the woman still out alone on Kinder Scout. The last news he’d heard from Carol Villiers was that one walker was still missing and unaccounted for. The Mountain Rescue teams and the SARDA dogs would have been stood down for the night by now. Tired team members would eventually manage to get to bed in the early hours of the morning after returning the MRT vehicles to their bases.
Cooper could think of very few places that were worse to spend a night alone than on Kinder Scout.
That decided him to make one last call to Carol Villiers.
‘Sorry, Ben,’ she said. ‘They’ve had the search dogs out on Kinder for hours now.’
‘And there’s no sign of the missing woman?’
‘No. And it’s getting dark. They’ll be calling off the search for tonight.’
‘Let’s hope she was properly equipped and had the sense to take shelter.’
‘It’s odd, though,’ said Villiers.
‘What is?’
‘The casualty, Mr Sharpe, was on his own when the dog found him.’
‘You mean the others left him there injured and alone?’
‘That’s just it. They say they didn’t. The missing woman was supposed to have stayed with him. Her name is Faith Matthew.’
Cooper could picture Villiers looking up at the bulk of Kinder in the failing light. There was very little shelter up on the plateau. A night spent on Kinder in the cold could be fatal, and everyone knew it.
Diane Fry felt numb by the time she arrived at her flat in Wilford, on the southern outskirts of Nottingham. She’d been told she was due for a meeting with a police staff investigator tomorrow. ‘Meeting’ probably wasn’t the right word, from her point of view. She was due to be interviewed, perhaps even interrogated.
The Professional Standards Department dealt with matters of gross misconduct. That meant there had either been a complaint from a member of the public or an allegation had come to them internally. Most worrying was that the PSD was able to conduct covert investigations into complaints of misconduct and corruption against police officers. The thought that someone she’d been working with might have been investigating her already was very unsettling.