‘Seriously?’
‘And what about the protests?’
‘I don’t know anything about any protests,’ said Irvine.
‘Well, make sure you do by the time we get back to West Street,’ said Cooper as he ended the call.
He sensed Fry smiling. But when he turned to look at her, she was staring out of the window. And he’d never been able to read her mind.
Luke Irvine was waiting eagerly when Ben Cooper and Diane Fry arrived in the CID room. Cooper didn’t even bother to take off his jacket.
‘Those protestors,’ he said. ‘The quarry plan. What do we know about it?’
‘It seems the environmentalist crowd are protesting against the destruction of a protected area through opencast quarrying,’ said Irvine. ‘The site of Alderhill Quarry is on land owned by the Knowle estate and the contract has been signed by Lord Manby himself. As part of the lease agreement, the landowner will receive thirty pounds for each ton of rock extracted from the site.’
‘It doesn’t sound that much.’
‘Well, the quarry has vast potential apparently. The reserves of limestone go right back into the hillside. In fact, it sounds as though there won’t be much of the hill left by the time they’ve finished digging. They’ll be quarrying out there for decades to come.’ Irvine looked up from his notes. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of rock, Ben.’
‘Is there an estimate?’
Irvine nodded. ‘A ballpark figure. If the quarry development goes ahead at Alderhill, the Knowle estate stands to earn more than two hundred million pounds.’
35
Firefighters had chosen the evening before Bonfire Night for another strike over changes to their working conditions and cuts in their pension rights. The strike had started at 6.30 p.m. and was due to last until eleven. Contingency crews had been formed from half-trained volunteers, though strikers had agreed they would obey a recall if lives were at risk.
When vandals set the Bowden bonfire alight that Monday evening, there were judged to be no lives at risk. In fact, a small crowd of people gathered from the houses to watch it burn. The blaze could be seen right across the park and staff came out of the abbey itself to see what was happening. A security guard and a couple of gamekeepers were tasked with checking the parkland near Bowden for the intruders who’d started the fire, but they could find no one.
The stack of wood had been blazing into the night sky for almost an hour before a volunteer crew eventually arrived from Buxton. And it was already too late. The Buxton crew soon extinguished the remaining embers. But by then Bowden’s bonfire was dead and gone.
Sterndale Moor was an odd little collection of houses, like a chunk of an urban council estate sliced off and dumped in the countryside. It was handy for workers at the quarries, Cooper supposed — the entrance to Deeplow stood almost directly across the A515.
As he drove into it that evening Cooper found only one short street, with a branch off it to a patch of wasteland used for parking and the entrance to a social club. The club building matched the housing. It was low, grimy and pebble-dashed. To one side stood a corrugated-iron smokers’ shelter, open-fronted and containing half a dozen chairs and a couple of plastic bins. It looked a grim place to spend even part of an evening during a Derbyshire winter.
He wondered where Rob Beresford was planning to spend the night. There had still been no sightings of him the last time he checked, and Beresford’s parents had received no contact from him. The longer he was missing, the more worrying it would be.
Since there was nowhere to park on the street, Cooper turned the Toyota on to the waste ground. He parked next to a van attached to a trailer that was loaded with a battered stock car. Perhaps it was used for racing up the road at Axe Edge. On the back the vehicle was decorated with the slogans ‘Work to live, live to race’ and ‘If you can read this, I need more mud’. More bafflingly, the bonnet said, ‘Pennine Pikeys Runyagit’. Cooper shook his head over that. It was probably best not to ask.
The club was closed, but Cooper peered through one of the windows and caught sight of two porcelain figurines standing on the ledge inside. A cowboy and Indian. They seemed a strange pair for a social club in a Peak District village. But then Cooper had a memory, a flashback to that occasion years before. How many years was it? Fifteen? Or perhaps more? So the country and western club still met here.
This was one of those odd places the Peak District was full of. Above Sterndale Moor, on Red Hurst Hill, a fake stone circle called Wheeldon’s Folly had been built by a local farmer from random stones, lumps of concrete and even an old gatepost. In this area you never knew what sort of place you were arriving in or what might lie behind its façade.
Yet Sterndale Moor had one thing in common with Bowden. There were almost no people around. It was dark and the residents all seemed to be shut behind their own doors. All he could see was a young woman with a small child waiting in the bus shelter outside the social club. There was no sign of a bus.
Brendan Kilner lived in a small, pebble-dashed semi-detached house. The tiny front garden had been removed and concreted over to create just enough space to park a couple of cars off the road, a Ford Fiesta and a Peugeot.
Kilner looked surprised to see Ben Cooper standing on his doorstep. He’d been relaxing in front of the telly, judging by the sound of the Coronation Street theme tune drifting from an open door. Kilner was wearing jeans and an old checked shirt, and had come to the door in his socks, with a beer can clutched in one hand.
‘Something up?’ he said.
‘Just a couple of things I wanted to ask you,’ said Cooper.
‘You’re working late, aren’t you?’
‘You know what it’s like, Brendan. No rest for the wicked.’
‘Oh, er…’ Kilner glanced over his shoulder, as if calculating what might be on view inside the house that he wouldn’t want anyone to see. But his conclusion must have been on the positive side. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
As he entered the house Cooper thought he detected that whiff of fried onions again, but perhaps it was just a memory of their meeting at Buxton Raceway. Just a bit of bad déjà vu.
‘Come through to the back,’ said Kilner, with a wary glance through an open doorway.
Cooper took a peek too and saw the back of a woman’s head on a sofa in front of a large TV screen. He felt certain the Kilners had a couple of sons, and perhaps a daughter. But they would all be well grown-up by now and probably extending the clan in their turn.
‘Just you and the wife at home?’ said Cooper. ‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.’
‘Lisa.’
Kilner had lowered his voice, perhaps worried in case he attracted her attention.
‘Is she okay?’
‘Fine.’
There was a small room at the back of the house, adjoining the kitchen. Kilner seemed to have converted it into a workshop. There were air filters and boxes of suspension springs, a crankshaft and even a couple of tyres.
‘I do a bit of work on the stocks now and then,’ said Kilner.
‘On the side, I suppose?’
Kilner shrugged. ‘Everyone does it.’
‘And does Lisa not mind you bringing all this stuff into the house?’
‘As long as I clean up the oil, she doesn’t yell too much.’
Cooper was trying to recall exactly what Brendan Kilner said to him at the raceway on Sunday. It was Kilner who’d said: ‘They’ve all got an axe to grind.’ But there was something else. It’s all about family. Ancient history if you ask me. But that stuff means a lot to some people, doesn’t it? Me, I can never bring myself to visit the place where my mum and dad were buried.
He looked across the hall, glad of the noise coming from the sitting room, the TV turned up a bit too loud. It was such a different home from the expensive Georgian property rented by Marcus Everett and his friends near Pilsbury. Yet there was a similarity, which Cooper had suspected. It had been put into his mind by the sight of that drooping Mexican moustache, the fake Confederate soldier. That same man had offered him a joint outside the Sterndale Moor Social Club on the night he’d been dragged to the country and western evening.