Poppy gazed down the slope at the dripping trees and bare fields. The Atlas Mountains were a bit different from the borders of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, she imagined.
She’d been sitting in her car for a few minutes thinking about the noise. She was in the middle of reading a text message from Imogen, one of her friends from the drama studies course at uni. Her dad would raise his eyebrows at the idea of her texting someone she’d seen only a few hours before. He would say it was a kind of compulsion. But she always felt this need to be in touch.
Those monkeys at Trentham lived in close family groups. She loved them for that. Whenever you saw them, they were either physically touching or talking to each other, sometimes both. Their hierarchy was complex too, though she supposed one always had to be the leader. Every macaque knew its role, and they could rely on each other totally for loyalty and support.
Poppy sighed. Humans had a lot to learn from other primates. She ought to tell her dad that. She could just picture his face now. Some people’s reactions were so predictable. For months she’d longed for something to happen that would make her life more interesting.
She turned up her CD player and wondered if anyone had heard that scream. There were lots of strange noises out in the country at night. It could have been a fox, perhaps? It was mating season and vixens called like that sometimes.
But Poppy knew it hadn’t been a fox. Even from a distance, it had unmistakably been a primate. Or more specifically, human.
Further down the slope, on either side of the bridge, Jason Shaw and the Nadens were unaware of Poppy’s presence. Jason peered cautiously into the trees as he climbed the slope, stopped, walked a few yards into the undergrowth, then changed his mind and came back again.
Three hundred yards away, Poppy had got out of her car. She glanced for a moment at the clouds scudding overhead, revealing brief glimpses of the moon, still pale against the twilight blue sky. Then she leaned on the stone wall and gazed down into the valley where the river ran through the darkening woods. Her eyesight was good, but she could see no movement, no sign of any human presence among the trees. Poppy thought of making a phone call, but knew it would be pointless. So she got back in her car, switched on the headlights and accelerated away down the road towards Hartington. The Nadens took longer to reach their home, after stopping to argue about the best route to take.
None of them would forget that night for a long time. Though, in the end, it was someone else who found the body.
2
Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper was still sleeping badly. He’d been relying on the help of tablets for months now, switching from herbal aids to chemicals and back again, fearing that he’d get too reliant on some particular substance and would never be able to sleep without it again.
But this particular night had been full of demons and ghosts. And many other creatures too. Vampires, witches, skeletons. And hordes of stumbling, bloodied zombies like the entire cast of extras from The Walking Dead.
Well, it was always like this on Halloween. By twilight the streets of Edendale had been full of groups of children in home-made costumes fashioned from plastic bin liners and toilet rolls. After them came the teenagers with their supermarket horror masks and pumpkin lanterns. Later the atmosphere changed as the pubs filled with flesh-eating monsters, their prosthetic fangs dripping with gore. All in the name of harmless fun.
So Cooper was awake at 2 a.m. From his ground-floor flat in Welbeck Street, he could hear the distant sounds of revelry from the pubs in Edendale town centre, just across the river. Though revelry was a kind word for it.
‘Harmless fun,’ he said with a sardonic laugh, breaking the silence of his flat.
There were police officers on duty out there, some of his E Division uniformed colleagues from West Street, assigned to the drunk shift. They would have been shivering in their vans for the past couple of hours, waiting for the bars to empty and the fights to start.
In the old days, before the formation of professional police forces, the duties of watchmen had included firefighting and sweeping the excrement from the street. Many officers would say they were still doing the same thing now.
Edendale wasn’t much different on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night from any other town up and down Britain. Halloween just meant the prisoner cages would be full of battered Draculas and legless Egyptian mummies. Fake blood would be mingling with the real stuff. And the pavements would be littered with the dead, staggering towards home.
‘And do it quietly, please,’ said Cooper. ‘Like a good zombie.’
He was glad no one could hear him. He’d always thought people who talked to themselves were definitely a bit weird.
Cooper looked around for the cat, but found her asleep, curled up by a radiator. She was probably aware of his presence, but too wise to think it might be breakfast time so early. She’d grown used to his erratic hours over the last few months and refused to let his unpredictable behaviour affect her routine. Lucky animal. She seemed oblivious to the noise outside too, except for a twitch of an ear if someone passed too close in the street. Occasionally, there was a wandering ghoul, lost and drunk, clattering down the road and vomiting in the gutter.
What could you expect from a celebration based on fear? This was the time of year when graves opened and the spirits of the dead returned to the world. In traditional belief, these few hours of darkness saw the doors between life and death standing ajar.
But just these few hours. For some of his ancestors, the concept of the dead returning had been too much to bear. For them, Halloween was a time to shut themselves inside their homes and protect their families with prayers and charms.
For others, though, the time was all too short. There were so few hours until daylight came. Halloween just didn’t last long enough. If it came to the crunch, Cooper knew he’d be counted among their number himself. It was the reality that he couldn’t escape, the one fact that never left his mind all night. The dead never really got a chance to return to the world.
‘No, never. Never.’
Cooper threw a tired glance round the familiar walls of his flat. The dead who would never return — they were here, too. Their photographs were lurking in the darkness. His father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, killed in the execution of his duty. His mother, Isabel Cooper, dead of natural causes. And civilian scenes of crime officer Elizabeth Petty, who died…
Well, she’d died anyway. And that was an end to it.
Just outside, in Welbeck Street, he heard banging and laughter, followed by the shriek of a car alarm.
‘For heaven’s sake, go away,’ he said, more loudly.
Behind him, the cat made a small questioning noise. Cooper turned.
‘Not you, obviously. I was talking to … well, who was I talking to?’
The cat gave him a despairing look and went back to sleep.
‘No, I don’t know either,’ said Cooper.
He thought of putting the lights on, but there didn’t seem much point. At this time of the morning artificial light only made the flat look ghastly and unreal. He felt like a character in a film, hiding away in precarious isolation, fighting desperately for survival while the world outside disintegrated into chaos, as the dead walked and cities burned.
With a vague sense of surprise, Cooper looked down at the mug clutched in his hand. He’d forgotten that he’d been making himself a drink. Camomile tea, by the smell of it. His sister Claire had insisted he tried it to help him sleep. But it had gone almost cold in his hand as he stood here near the window, listening to the sounds of the night.