Stepping plates also looked a bit futile. But Cooper followed the designated route to the edge and looked down, experiencing a momentary wave of vertigo at the sudden shift in perspective. A splash of bright red seemed to leap at him out of the fog, and he almost ducked at the sensation of something hurtling towards him.
But it was an illusion. That splash of red wasn’t moving. It was Faith Matthew’s body, lying spreadeagled at the foot of the Downfall, broken on the jagged and unforgiving rock. She’d fallen fifty feet from a vertical drop into the ravine. Her red jacket was spread out around her as if it had ballooned like a parachute as she fell. Her left arm and leg were thrown out at an odd angle, the bones shattered by the impact on the rock. Her right arm and leg were concealed beneath her body.
Cooper frowned. That seemed an odd way to fall. The natural instinct when you felt yourself falling face forward was to throw both your arms out to protect yourself. This looked as though Faith had been twisting her body as she fell, like a cat adjusting its position in mid-air. Could she have bounced off the side of the Downfall on the way down?
He kneeled and peered cautiously over the edge. No, the drop was sheer. There was nothing Faith could have hit before she impacted on the rock where she lay.
Thoughtfully, Cooper stood up and brushed off his knees. Damp had soaked into his trousers just in those few seconds of contact with the surface of the gritstone.
He walked back to the cordon and examined the spot Faith Matthew had fallen from. A CSI was crouched over the ground with a camera.
‘What have you got there?’ Cooper called.
‘A few shoe marks in a layer of mud. They’re not very clear.’
‘Just one set of boots? Or more?’
‘Just one, so far as we can tell.’
Cooper pointed at a print, set at a different angle to the others.
‘Have you recorded that one?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘I’d like someone to focus on analysing which direction that print is facing.’
‘Will do.’
Cooper took another look at the corpse. It glittered with moisture, and the gritstone was dark and wet all around it. A few trickles of water still dripped from the overhang onto the body. Faith’s hat had fallen a few yards away and teetered on the brink of the waterfall.
But he couldn’t see Faith Matthew’s face from here. And that was what he needed most of all.
After a moment’s hesitation, he called Chloe Young’s number at the hospital in Edendale.
‘Ben? What’s up?’ she said.
‘I’d like you to take a look at a body in situ,’ he said. ‘Are you free?’
‘Now? Yes, OK, if you want my opinion. Where is it?’
Cooper told her.
‘Oh my goodness. I’d better make sure I’ve got the right gear.’
‘I’m sure you’ll have something that will do. I’ll get someone to watch out for you and drive you up onto the moor.’
‘Wait... Is this the missing hiker?’ said Young.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Not an accident, then? She was pushed?’
‘That,’ said Cooper, ‘is what I need your opinion on.’
10
Detective Constable Luke Irvine looked as though he felt out of place in the Bowden Bridge car park, surrounded by the cars of walkers getting ready for an afternoon in the hills. He joined Ben Cooper and Carol Villiers in Cooper’s car, leaned over from the back seat and flipped open his notebook.
‘So,’ said Irvine. ‘This is what I’ve got so far. They were a party of thirteen hikers in total. They call themselves the New Trespassers Walking Club. I have no idea why.’
Cooper looked up at the looming mass of Kinder Scout. ‘Well, I think I might have a good idea. You don’t know the history of Kinder, Luke?’
Irvine shrugged. ‘It’s just a hill, isn’t it? And not a very interesting one, if you ask me. It’s too flat. We have better-looking hills in Yorkshire.’
‘It’s over two thousand feet, so strictly speaking it qualifies as a mountain.’
‘It’s still kind of dull.’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not dull at all.’
Cooper had been on Kinder Scout many times over the years. He’d struggled up and down its slopes and walked across the plateau at all seasons of the year, in all kinds of weather. There had been times when he could hardly move because of the heavy peat clinging to his boots, when every step he took was an enormous effort against the grip of the sticky morass, as if Kinder was the surface of an alien planet with twice the mass of Earth.
And there had been walks in the summer, when the top few inches were dry and bouncy like a trampoline, turning his steps into an exhilarating leap as the pull of gravity suddenly halved.
At any time, stepping out onto Kinder was leaving the real world behind. And yes, there had been times when the weather changed while he was on the mountain. The cloud level came down, a mist or fog rolled in, snow began to fall, or the light began to fail. Then you weren’t just in an alien landscape. You were in great danger.
‘It’s obvious,’ said Cooper. ‘They named themselves after the Kinder Mass Trespass.’
‘The what?’
Cooper tapped his steering wheel impatiently.
‘The Mass Trespass. It was in 1932.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Irvine. ‘Before my time.’
‘Mine too,’ said Cooper. ‘But still...’
The Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout had been a famous act of civil disobedience that had given impetus to the campaign for access to the moors and eventually led to the Peak District becoming Britain’s first national park.
That day, a large party of ramblers had clashed violently with gamekeepers and bailiffs employed by local landowners. Several had been arrested and sent to prison. They’d become martyrs in a symbolic battle between the working classes and wealthy landowners, and Kinder Scout had been their battleground. It was a story that was taught to schoolchildren in Derbyshire, celebrated in books and TV programmes, marked by commemorative plaques.
Cooper had seen photographs of the Mass Trespass, showing troops of laughing young men with Brylcreemed hair, wearing tweed jackets and shorts, like a bunch of 1930s schoolboys on an outing.
‘The trespass was eighty-six years ago,’ said Villiers.
‘But it never lost its symbolism, did it? It was all about the exercise of freedom, and resistance to the status quo.’
‘It sounds like something I ought to know about,’ said Irvine.
‘Yes, you should.’ Cooper looked at him, surprised at Irvine’s ignorance on the subject. ‘Some time. So who are the leaders of this walking group?’
‘One leader,’ said Irvine. ‘Well, leader or founder, I don’t know which — the other members of the group refer to him in both ways. A gentleman by the name of Darius Roth.’
‘Gentleman?’
‘That’s the impression he gives,’ said Irvine with a wry smile. ‘He describes himself as a property developer.’
‘I’ll look forward to meeting him.’
‘Mr Roth is aged thirty-five. I gather he’s pretty well-off. Apparently he inherited a business empire built up by his father in Manchester.’ Irvine checked his notebook. ‘Mr Roth was accompanied by his wife, Mrs Elsa Roth. They live here in Hayfield, where the walk started from. They call their house Trespass Lodge. I guess that’s also because of—’
‘The Mass Trespass, yes. And the rest of them?’
‘Also in the group were Sam and Pat Warburton, a retired couple from Manchester, and two brothers who run a garden centre near Chinley, Theo and Duncan Gould. The casualty is a Mr Liam Sharpe. He’s a check-in supervisor at Manchester Airport. There are two students from Manchester Metropolitan University, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott, both aged nineteen. There’s a Nick Haslam, an IT consultant who lives near New Mills, and his girlfriend, Sophie Pullen, a teacher in Buxton. She lives at Chapel-en-le-Frith. And that just leaves Jonathan Matthew, the dead woman’s brother.’