Cooper produced a print of the photograph of the group taken on Sandra Blair’s phone.
‘About here, perhaps?’ he said.
Hurst squinted at the picture and the landscape in front of them. ‘Could be.’
Somewhere over there to the west the HSE had brought in some disused London Underground trains for testing after the 7 July bombings in the capital, when forty-two people were killed by bombs on the Tube in 2005. The carriages had been subjected to test explosions in a makeshift tunnel. As a result of the testing a series of burned-out Jubilee Line units with their windows and doors blown off had stood around the site for years, only a couple of hundred yards from a public footpath through the old RAF base.
They were on one of the public footpaths now, probably the one walked by Sandra Blair’s group. Becky Hurst pushed open the broken door of a concrete shed, which revealed a stack of old drums of Shell Tellus Oil.
‘What is that?’ she said.
‘Hydraulic fluid. That’s all.’
It was strange that the HSE had made no attempt to divert the footpaths, the way Deeplow Quarry had done. Instead, they had installed CCTV cameras and warning signs, and red flags to indicate when an explosion was imminent. They also recorded use of these footpaths, and the HSE’s security teams had sometimes asked people to leave. B Division response officers were occasionally despatched to make sure that suspicious individuals had actually departed the site.
Hurst had reached a fence and worked her way along to a stile that led over the hill towards the far side of the site.
‘I wonder where that track goes from here?’ she said.
There was no need to consult the map this time. Cooper knew the answer perfectly well. He could picture the funeral party picking their way carefully down this hill, a coffin shifting precariously on their shoulders as the slope became steeper. He was able to imagine the weary sighs as they halted at the gate a hundred yards below him on the hillside, resting the coffin on the large, flat stone until the relief bearers took it up again.
‘We know where it goes,’ he said. ‘It comes out at the Corpse Bridge.’
32
Villiers and Irvine had left Jason Shaw’s cottage in Bowden and were driving back towards Edendale.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Villiers. ‘He offered us a suspect in Sally Naden, then said himself how ridiculous an idea it was.’
‘Not very helpful.’
‘Deliberately unhelpful.’
When they got back to West Street, Ben Cooper was out of the office. He’d disappeared, taking Becky Hurst and Gavin Murfin along with him.
‘What do we do now?’ said Irvine, turning to Villiers.
Villiers grimaced and nodded across the office. ‘You know there’s only one thing we can do, Luke,’ she said. ‘We have to report to DS Fry.’
Molly Redfearn had returned from Paris that morning. Diane Fry had taken over the interviews with the victim’s wife and was writing up her report when Irvine and Villiers came in.
Mrs Redfearn had been just the sort of woman Fry disliked most — cold, middle class and materialistic. Exactly the kind of woman she was afraid of turning into herself, in fact.
The perfume Molly Redfearn was wearing had been almost overpowering. Fry had been glad that they weren’t talking to each other in one of the interview rooms at West Street, with their archaic lack of ventilation. They would all have been stifled and found dead in their chairs an hour or two later.
But the results of her interview were disappointing. Mrs Redfearn had been out of contact with her husband throughout the whole of her trip to Paris with her girlfriends.
When she saw Irvine and Villiers approaching she willingly put her half-finished report aside to listen to what they had to say.
‘So that’s his story,’ said Irvine when they’d finished. ‘He basically put the blame on everyone else.’
‘And there was no one on the bridge with Mrs Blair that night?’
‘Not according to Shaw. He admits taking her there with the effigy and all that stuff, but then he left her to it.’
‘And what do you think of that, Luke?’ asked Fry.
‘I think he’s telling only half the truth again.’
Fry looked at Villiers, who agreed.
‘His attempt to blame Sally Naden looks a bit weak, but you can never tell.’
‘No.’
Fry was interested in Jason Shaw’s job as a gamekeeper. She would have to get a check done on the firearms register.
She looked up at Irvine and Villiers.
‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Do you know where DS Cooper is?’
On the far side of the Harpur Hill testing grounds Cooper realised how close he was to Buxton Raceway. There was no race meeting today, but he could see the circuit and the stand where he’d talked to Brendan Kilner. It was Kilner who pointed him in the direction of the graveyard, yet here he was coming full circle within thirty-six hours.
He’d left Becky Hurst and Gavin Murfin checking their way through the old buildings, the former RAF bunkers that had been abandoned or even demolished. They would be grumbling to each other by now. They might not appear to get on, but they’d developed an understanding. Hurst respected Murfin’s experience, though she would never have said so, and Gavin wouldn’t have wanted her to.
Cooper parked the Toyota by a structure of rotting timbers like the skeleton of a beached ship. From the number of old car tyres lying around, he guessed it was the remains of a long-disused silage clamp.
Across the road a small group of ponies with long manes trotted eagerly to greet him as he climbed over the stile into their field. From here he had a view down a shallow valley to the HSE laboratories, with one building shaped like a flour mill gleaming a startling white in the sun. Beyond the buildings the little tower that people called Solomon’s Temple stood on the crest of a hill, overlooking the town of Buxton.
Further on a gate was fastened with a series of lengths of baler twine. It was probably a subtle deterrent for walkers, without quite making the path inaccessible.
A farmer appeared on a quad bike and entered the fields where sheep grazed on the fringes of the HSE testing grounds. When Cooper got closer the white building turned out to be a mysterious structure of scaffolding and pipes shrouded in white plastic sheeting, with a large tank standing next to it.
A few employees from the laboratories had taken the opportunity during their lunch break to stroll or jog along the roadway where a disused railway line had once run. They were still wearing their yellow high-vis jackets, as befitted employees of the Health and Safety Executive.
A few minutes ago he’d driven past a nursery in Harpur Hill village, where the children were out playing. They’d been wearing high-vis jackets identical to those the workers wore at the HSL. Health and safety got everywhere. Cooper could hear Gavin Murfin’s voice in his head. Elf ’n’ safety. You can’t argue with that. It was one of Murfin’s favourite sayings.
Just out of sight of the path a dead sheep had been dismembered on the hillside. He found severed leg bones, an almost intact spine and ribcage, a bloodied fleece and part of the skull. It could have been scavengers, arriving after the carcase had begun to soften and disarticulate. A fox perhaps, or a pair of crows. But you could never be sure.
Cooper passed a large concrete-lined watering hole for the cattle and sheep, formed into ledges to provide a safe footing for the animals when the water was low. And it was certainly low now. There were only a few inches lying below the final ledge. He could see glimpses of the muddy bottom, though most of the water was choked by weeds. A few chunks of limestone had fallen in, along with a rotting timber or two, and a rusted iron feeding trough.