For a moment, a break in the fog let through a burst of sunlight. And it was then she saw it. Below her on the hillside, a huge grey figure was silhouetted, far bigger than anything human. A rainbow of coloured light seemed to hover round its head like a halo.
Its appearance made Sophie’s breath catch in her throat.
‘What the...?’
But no one else seemed to have noticed it. And the figure was there only for a few seconds before it disappeared in a blur of motion and was gone.
6
Ben Cooper called back at his office in Edendale Police Station on West Street. He checked the latest bulletins and noticed a report of a group of walkers lost on Kinder Scout.
Everyone’s heart sank when there was news of people missing on the wildest moors of the Dark Peak. There had already been too many deaths. Only a couple of years previously, a leading Mountain Rescue volunteer had died on a call-out to help a teenage girl in distress on Kinder, and a mountain biker had been killed after falling eighty feet at Laddow Rocks.
So another incident was no great surprise. Even from Edendale, Cooper could see the weather deteriorating over the moors, the cloud layer getting lower and heavier.
Kinder was the highest point in the Peak District at more than two thousand feet, a windswept gritstone plateau rising steeply from the surrounding landscape, its edges punctuated with crags and rocky outcrops. The visibility would be poor up there, the conditions cold and damp.
It was an easy place to get lost at the best of times. The surface had been suffering serious erosion from overgrazing by sheep and the boots of so many walkers, particularly along the Pennine Way. Many people had no idea about the lethal bogs they might be facing, where they could find themselves stuck in mud up to the knees.
Stranded walkers having to be rescued was a familiar story. One of the Peak District Mountain Rescue Organisation teams would be dealing with it, probably more than one if the location of the party was unclear. The reports said that the walkers had set off from the direction of Hayfield. Kinder MRT was the Mountain Rescue team based on that side of the moor.
Cooper reached for his phone. One of his DCs, Carol Villiers, had recently volunteered as a member of Kinder MRT. Surely Carol had mentioned that she was on exercise with them this weekend? She might be out there right now. It was always good to have someone on the ground.
‘Carol?’ he said when he got through. ‘Where are you right now?’
‘On the edge of Kinder, near the reservoir.’
‘You’re with the MRT?’
‘Right.’
‘Do we know any more about the missing walkers?’
‘Not at the moment, Ben. The team are on the job, though. They were already in the area when the call-out came and deployed straight away. The first report was of an injured walker. His party had walked up towards the Downfall but got lost in the fog after straying from the path on the plateau. Visibility is really poor up there. Too bad for a helicopter to operate.’
‘What about SARLOC?’ asked Cooper.
‘No luck so far,’ said Villiers. ‘A SARLOC text was sent but failed to reach them. The phone signal is very poor. The controller has just said they’re going to activate the Kinder Plan.’
‘OK. Can you keep me informed?’
‘It’s not a CID job, Ben. It’s a bunch of lost walkers. I just happened to be here.’
‘I know. But Kinder... well, it’s a special case.’
‘Will do, then. As soon as I know anything.’
Cooper ended the call. He knew the MRT would do a good job. They did it week after week. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and entirely on a voluntary basis. It was a task that called for skill and dedication. But Kinder — that mountain carried its own legends.
The formation of the Peak District Mountain Rescue Organisation itself had happened after a tragedy in the 1960s when three young Rover Scouts had lost their lives on Kinder Scout during the gruelling Four Inns Walk. Their forty-mile hike had started in West Yorkshire, hitting checkpoints at the Snake Pass Inn, the Nag’s Head and the Cat and Fiddle — a route that could take more than twenty hours to complete. The weather had deteriorated rapidly during the day, and eventually volunteers had gone out in blizzard conditions armed only with torches and whistles to search for the missing youngsters. But by then the mountain and treacherous weather had already claimed their lives.
That incident came only a short time after the deaths of two children from Glossop who went missing on the hills, and two climbers’ deaths in an avalanche in Wilderness Gully.
Cooper gazed out of his office window at the distant hills. It seemed wrong to him that lives should be left in the hands of volunteers, no matter how skilled and dedicated they were. This morning, he and his officers had arrived at the Athertons’ home in Edendale too late to prevent a death. All he seemed to do was clean up the consequences. It was the most frustrating part of his job.
Right now, he didn’t want to hear about another death. He envied Carol Villiers for being involved in the rescue operation. She was part of a team out there on Kinder doing their best to save someone’s life.
At a rendezvous point near Hayfield, Kinder MRT had called in three other Mountain Rescue teams to divide the search area between them. Triggering the Kinder Plan carved up the plateau into four areas, each allocated to one of the teams. It was a well-proven method for managing a search on the almost featureless expanse of Kinder.
Carol Villiers went back to the mobile control vehicle and found the MRT’s duty controller. When the location of the missing walkers couldn’t be accurately determined, a link to the SARLOC website had been sent to the phone of the person who’d called 999. If they were able to click on the link, their location would be transmitted with an accuracy of twelve metres, allowing the rescue team to log the grid reference on their GPS and walk straight to the spot.
But in this case they were only able to make outgoing 999 calls via another network. They had no idea where they were, and SARLOC had failed to reach them.
‘We’ve had a description of a rock formation,’ said the controller. ‘They say it looks like an upside-down ice cream. Some of the blokes reckon they’re near Fairbrook Naze. The trouble is, the party seems to have split up. There are at least three separate groups now in different locations, including one known injury.’
With minimal details received and being unable to re-contact the group, teams were being mobilised in the pre-planned search patterns. Colleagues from Glossop Mountain Rescue Team were already deployed following a couple having reported themselves lost on the hills to the north. With visibility down to fifty feet on the plateau, the decision was taken to call in the other teams in order to cover the whole area more quickly.
Villiers knew that the longer the search took, the more anxious the searchers would become. It was October and the days were getting shorter. Darkness was only a couple of hours away. Even in the summer, hypothermia could be a real danger on these hills. Mountain Rescue teams had been called out to assist hypothermic casualties on a rainy weekend in August.
‘The SARDA dogs have arrived,’ said the controller. ‘They’re our best chance now.’
Villiers peered at the patchy fog on the slopes of Kinder. The Search and Rescue dogs were making their way up the hillside to the plateau. They didn’t need an item of clothing from a missing person but worked on air scent to locate a casualty. They could cover much more ground than human search teams. And it didn’t matter if visibility was poor — a dog could search as well as on a clear day.