Life shouldn’t feel so cold and wasted. Not at his age. He was only in his thirties, after all. It was too young for everyone he cared about most to be dead and in the ground. He shouldn’t have to spend half his life visiting graveyards.
Cooper shuddered as a cold certainty ran through his limbs. There would be people out tonight who gravitated to cemeteries and graveyards. Halloween was their night. And cemeteries were their playground.
He sighed again. All Hallows’ Eve. That was where it all started. It was supposed to be dedicated to remembering dead saints and the faithful departed. Souls wandered the earth, looking for one last chance to gain vengeance on the living. People would wear masks or costumes to disguise their identities and avoid being recognised by vengeful souls.
People often complained that Halloween was an imported American tradition. But surely it was only because Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night had poached some of the customs of Halloween. For centuries English people had preferred burning effigies of Catholics, rather than remembering dead saints. Halloween had become a focus of superstitions about witches and ghosts.
Just last week the Eden Valley Times had published a letter written by a local vicar complaining that the newspaper was encouraging Satanism and witchcraft by reporting Halloween events and publishing pictures of children dressed as ghosts and vampires. He’d done it every year, for as long as Cooper could remember. Like everyone else, the clergyman had probably forgotten the origins of the festivities.
‘Not that anybody really believes in anything any more.’
He realised that he was mumbling a bit now. He wasn’t even sure what words were coming out of his mouth. The last sentence had sounded like a meaningless jumble, even to his own ears.
With a weary stretch of his limbs, Cooper went to lie back down on his bed, though he knew he wouldn’t sleep.
There must be so many people who’d lost loved ones during the past twelve months. Some of them must have been wishing that the dead really could return. How did they react to ghosts and corpses banging on their door all evening? What were you supposed to do, except offer a treat from a tub of miniature chocolate bars? A modern ritual to keep the spirits away.
But if he slept tonight at all, Cooper knew the dead would walk in his dreams.
Fifteen miles from Edendale, Rob Beresford cursed to himself in the darkness. It wouldn’t happen tonight. Something had gone wrong.
He pulled out his phone, tried to dial the number again, but could get no signal. Down here by the river, with dense trees around him and hills rising on either side, he was bound to be in a dead spot.
But they’d known this was likely to happen and they’d planned for it. That was why the timing had been so carefully worked out. So what had gone wrong? Why was he on his own out here?
Rob waited. He didn’t have much patience, but what else could he do? Turn round and go home? He didn’t want to be the one who did that. At least, when tomorrow came, he’d be able to blame the others for wrecking the plan. He wondered who had actually got cold feet. It could be any of them, of course. They were a bunch of wimps, mostly. And worse — they’d left him out here on his own, in the dark, with no idea what was going on.
He was beginning to get angry. Rob paced up and down, swinging his torch along the track, its bright LED beam flicking from stone wall to hanging branch, from a splash of water stirring a muddy pool to the flutter of a dead leaf in the breeze. He was oblivious now to their agreement not to make too much noise or show any more light than was necessary. It was obvious he was on his own. Abandoned, and made to look an idiot. And what a place to be in at this time of night. It was lucky he wasn’t a nervous bloke or he could start imagining things.
But where was he exactly? There had been no map. He only followed the directions he’d been given. Nowhere looked the same in the dark anyway. People who lived in towns didn’t realise how black it was out in the proper country at night. They never saw total darkness like this. So a map would have been useless.
A noise made Rob whirl round suddenly. It sounded like a voice — a garbled word spoken from the darkness, a liquid gabbling from a throat that surely wasn’t human. But then the noise came again and he saw the river. He could see the surges of water bubbling over the rocks, sucking and gurgling through gaps and crevices in the riverbed. He saw the muddy bank and the skeletal outline of a stunted tree growing on the water’s edge.
And something else.
Rob realised with a shock that he could see a pale face caught in the light. It was the mask of a ghoul, white and ghostly, with the unnatural gleam of cheap plastic. He had a glimpse of a profile pulled into a grotesque shape — a gaping mouth, a blank eye, a trickle of blood. It was surely a Halloween joke to scare the children. Just some bad taste prank.
The hairs on the back of Rob’s neck stirred, and he swung his torch wildly across the trees until its beam lit the glittering water rushing between the banks and highlighted the arch of the bridge. His trembling hand swept the light backwards and forwards along the parapet looming above him and probed into the gap between the stones to pick out the ancient trackway. It was half in shadow and half illuminated by his wavering torchlight. It looked like an empty stage, garishly lit, awaiting the next scene of a drama.
Rob had lived in this area all his life and he knew what this place was. Everyone called it the Corpse Bridge.
3
Friday 1 November
And yet there was so little blood.
Ben Cooper crouched and leaned forward to look more closely. For a moment he felt light-headed from tiredness and almost slipped in the mud on the bank of the river as his head swam. But he recovered himself in time, a hand poised in mid-air almost touching the body. He hoped no one had noticed.
There was certainly a lack of blood. Sometimes a corpse could surprise you like that. At first glance it didn’t seem possible that anyone could be dead, when they’d hardly bled at all. Here there were no more than a few drops on the corner of the stone, a narrow trickle that might just as easily have been a splash of muddy water or a leak from a damaged bottle. Not blood, but a spilled energy drink.
Cooper straightened up again, easing the discomfort in his back. Either way, the body had been drained of its vitality. The life force had departed hours ago.
An upper stretch of the River Dove was rushing under the bridge here. Though barely the width of a stream, the water was running fast as the earlier rain syphoned down off the hills on both sides. The body was trapped in the branches of a sycamore lying close to the surface. To Cooper’s weary eyes, those dark, wet boulders all around it could have been a dozen bodies lying half-submerged. The roaring of the water might have been their cries of pain, that gurgle under a rock a victim’s last, dying breath.
The north side of the bridge was green with mould and fungus. Uneven stone setts on the bridge were lined with dying brambles. Here the river had slippery edges, with no safe footing in the mud, and the body was only accessible on foot through the water. Divers had waded into the river and were now under the bridge attempting to recover the body. The victim had fallen into an awkward, tangled position, and the body was already partially rigid from the onset of rigor mortis.
The initial police response had accessed the bridge using four-wheel-drive vehicles from the Derbyshire side, right down to where a large lump of rock blocked the crossing. The water was shallow enough to have been a ford at one time, but the idea of driving across it had been effectively discouraged.