Fry reflected on the moment Mrs Brentnall had reached for her phone. This was a house full of guns. It could have ended much worse.
She turned to make a comment to the Nottinghamshire DS, who was also in the workshop examining a handgun. But he turned away again and wouldn’t meet her eye as he replaced the handgun in the cabinet.
Something was going on. Fry was sure about it now.
5
And then the walking group had reached the Downfall. Sophie Pullen shuddered as the air began to grow chill on Kinder Scout, the atmosphere even colder, the sense of foreboding stronger and stronger.
The Downfall was the tallest waterfall in the Peak District, with a hundred-foot drop where the River Kinder tumbled off the edge of the plateau. The rocks below looked like the debris of a massive explosion, hurled across a cleft in the hillside. The path had become a long streak of exposed ground scoured by rainfall. Pools of water lay stained red by the peat.
Yet this was part of the Pennine Way, the national walking trail that ran two hundred and sixty-seven miles all the way to the Scottish border, rerouted from its original path across the plateau because of the erosion from thousands of hiking boots.
On a clear day, the outline of Madwoman’s Stones would stand out clear on the horizon at the eastern edge of the plateau. But it wasn’t clear today. There were no landmarks, no points of reference on the plateau and no way of navigating a route across the featureless moor without a compass.
The track they’d been following seemed to have disappeared, too, and was no more than a flattened trail of soggy ground, barely a sheep track. Everyone’s feet would be wet now.
Sophie broke into a trot and overtook Liam, who grumbled in protest. She was determined to catch up with Nick and the others before she lost contact completely. The burly shoulders of the Goulds came into view, but there was no sign of Faith or Jonathan. Faith was sensible, though. She wouldn’t stray too far. She’d probably only veered away to shepherd her younger brother back to the route. He had a tendency to wander off, as if following a route and destination of his own.
She could hear Darius again now. He was laughing at the fog and calling to Elsa as if he couldn’t see her. The poor woman would be distraught. She stuck to Darius like glue and hated to be parted from him. His joke wouldn’t go down well.
Then she saw Darius and Nick. They’d stopped and were looking vaguely around them.
‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’ she said.
‘Completely,’ agreed Nick.
‘Well, that’s just great.’
‘If we keep walking, we’ll find our way eventually,’ said Darius.
‘Eventually?’ said Sophie. ‘I’d like to get off this mountain today, if you don’t mind.’
Faith Matthew’s red hat and jacket appeared again through the fog. Nick peered over his shoulder towards Sophie and waited for her to reach him. Faith stopped too, and they were both watching her as she stumbled over a rock and splashed into a patch of boggy ground, the peaty water leaking instantly into her boots and soaking her socks.
‘Damn,’ she said.
Sophie felt her cheeks burn, even as her feet became cold and wet. Nick said nothing about her stumble as she shook a clump of mud off her boot.
‘What do you think?’ said Faith, gesturing at the surrounding plateau.
She was speaking to Nick, but he turned away as if he hadn’t heard her.
‘I think there could be anything out there in this fog,’ said Sophie. ‘Or anyone.’
‘I know. It’s a bit scary, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to be up here on my own.’
‘Sometimes there are worse things than being on your own,’ said Sophie.
They were silent for a moment, listening. The only sound Sophie could hear was the distant crash of water at Kinder Downfall.
Faith had heard it too.
‘If we follow the sound and make our way to the waterfall, surely we’ll know where we are,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Sophie.
‘Have you seen those rocks?’ broke in Nick. ‘Did you notice the drop? Do you want to risk wandering off the edge? You’d only need to get a couple of feet too close and you’d be gone.’
Sophie looked at him in surprise. He seemed to be genuinely worried.
‘It’s hard to tell the direction of sound in these conditions anyway,’ he said more calmly. ‘You get an echo. We could be completely misled.’
‘I suppose we could just keep going, then,’ said Faith, and walked away with a glance back over her shoulder.
A few moments later, Sophie heard a distant, echoing yelp and pictured a fox somewhere out there on the desolate moor. Or perhaps it was a pheasant, calling to its mate.
She’d stopped again for a minute to try to get her bearings and suddenly she found herself alone. She looked around, straining her eyes to see through the mist. It swirled around her, forming unrecognisable shapes from the rocks, suggesting movements that didn’t exist, breaking to allow the occasional shaft of sunlight through, then closing into an impenetrable wall again.
Sophie made out a tall figure. Was that Jonathan Matthew? Jonathan was unsuitably dressed for the moors. He was wearing black jeans and a grey jacket with a hood pulled close around his face, almost concealing his blue slouch beanie. They were the wrong colours for these conditions. When he was only a few yards away from her, he merged into the fog and became invisible. But she could see a red jacket standing out brightly in the fog. Who was wearing red? Faith Matthew, of course.
The silence was eerie now, every sound deadened by the blanketing mist. But it wasn’t peaceful. It was a threatening silence.
When Darius appeared from the fog ahead, he was followed closely by Elsa and the two students, Millie and Karina, gleaming ghosts in their white Eco jackets.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Where are the others? Liam Sharpe and the Warburtons. And Jonathan too.’
‘Jonathan went that way.’ Sophie pointed, but Jonathan had vanished from sight. ‘And the rest were just behind us.’
‘No, they weren’t. They dropped back.’
‘They’ll catch up in a minute.’
The group of walkers clustered together now for the first time. Nick and Faith and the Goulds stood around Sophie, while Millie and Karina fidgeted anxiously in the background as they waited behind Darius and Elsa. Even Jonathan had emerged from the mist, watching with a wry smile. But there were still three members missing.
‘They must have got separated. Go back and look for them,’ said Darius finally, looking at Nick.
‘Oh yeah. Then I’ll get lost too. Is that what you want?’
‘Shout for them, then.’
‘We should all shout,’ said Nick. ‘Then they can follow our voices.’
‘Right.’
For a long moment, no one shouted. Sophie could see that none of them wanted to be the first person to break that eerie quietness. It felt like a sacrilege, a violation of the silence that nature had imposed on them.
Sophie took a deep breath and felt a draught of cold, moist air enter her lungs as if she was drowning in a raincloud. Some of the others turned to look at her, Darius with a smile, Nick with an expression of shock or perhaps admiration.
‘Liam!’ she called, her voice cracking on the second syllable. ‘Pat! Sam! This way! We’re over here!’