‘If I’m right, it’ll be worth it.’
She nodded, smiling quietly to herself. Cooper waited for another comment, a challenge or a cautionary word. He expected her to question what he was doing. She was quite right to do so.
But he waited, and she said only one more word.
‘Interesting.’
It was then that Cooper saw AJS Gardening Services again. Their van was white, and looked a bit older and more battered than the vehicle belonging to the landscape contractor down the road, Mr Monk. The signage on the sides of this one had probably been done by hand from a DIY kit.
Cooper got out of his car and walked up to the van. Two men were in deep conversation at the back doors, discussing something about their equipment. A preference for a petrol or electric mower, perhaps. Comparing the size of their dibbers.
Cooper identified himself. One of them was the blond young man he’d seen the previous day, while the other was a bit older, and darker, with a few days’ growth of beard.
‘Did I speak to you before?’ asked the younger of the two.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.
‘You’re police, right?’
‘Yes. Detective Sergeant Cooper.’
‘I spoke to one of your pals, then.’
‘Is this your company, AJS?’
‘That’s me. AJS Gardening Services. Adrian J. Summers, see. Great name for a gardener, isn’t it? Summers? Gives just the right image. This is my mate Dave.’
The other man nodded awkwardly. Cooper studied him for a moment, feeling a flicker of recognition. If he was local, there was a chance he’d encountered the man during the course of his duties. Perhaps not an arrest – he usually had a good memory for the faces of people he’d nicked. He was more likely a witness, or even a victim.
‘Just routine, but I’d like a list of names from you. Yours, and all the staff you might have had working for you in Riddings during the past week or so.’
‘There’s not many of us,’ said Summers. ‘I’m only a small outfit. But, yeah – no problem.’
‘If you could do that list for me now, I’ll send an officer along to collect it shortly.’
‘Sure.’
‘You might also note which houses you work on in this area.’
He left them to it and went back to his car. Their names could be put through the HOLMES indexes, along with AJS Gardening Services, to see if there was any common link with earlier attacks. That was what HOLMES was good at, sifting through mountains of data for connections. It wasn’t beyond imagining that these same gardeners had worked at properties in Hathersage, Baslow and Padley. If they had, it would be flagged up as something rather more than a coincidence.
‘Want me to collect that list?’ asked Villiers.
‘No, it’s okay. I’ll get Luke or Becky to do it when they’re free.’
‘It’s not about gravel again, then?’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s about knowledge.’
A movement caught his eye, and he looked up. A red hang-glider was sweeping down from Riddings Edge, banking as it caught a thermal and rising high into the air again.
Hang-gliding and paragliding had become increasingly popular over the last ten years or so, and on summer weekends the skies seemed full of them, buzzing around like enormous flies.
The sport needed a breeze and an updraught, so Mam Tor near Castleton was generally considered the ideal spot – the ridge caught the wind from all directions. But some of these eastern edges were popular too. Like most flying, the hardest parts were said to be taking off and landing. Once in the air, they could glide for ages on a good day, and if they caught a thermal it was possible for experienced pilots to travel as far as the coast. Though they didn’t look it, hang-gliders were claimed to be capable of flight speeds up to seventy miles an hour.
There were licensed training schools in the Peak District, but Cooper knew it wasn’t a cheap sport. He’d heard that the training cost eight hundred pounds or more, on top of the two to four thousand you would pay for a hang-glider or paraglider canopy, and a few hundred more for personal equipment. If you could afford to live in a place like Riddings, that probably wouldn’t be a problem. But he couldn’t imagine any of the inhabitants he’d met so far being tempted to launch themselves out into space from the edge with nothing but carbon-fibre spars and a few feet of polyester cloth to support them.
He thought of the theories being bandied about in the media and on the internet about thieves who flew down on their targets by hang-glider. It was complete madness. For a start, those things must weigh around thirty kilos, even when they were packed in a bag for carrying.
Cooper watched the trajectory of the hang-glider as it swooped over the valley and passed in front of the edge. Totally impractical as a means of transport. Still, you would get a really good view of what lay below, even better than from an outcrop on the edge. You would be able to look directly down on the climbers who were still clinging precariously to the rock faces as the afternoon drew to a close.
He looked back at the climbers again. Watching them inching their way up the rock one hold at a time, he felt like slapping himself on the forehead. He’d been a complete idiot. But at least he knew now where those white handprints had come from.
Remnants of quarrying activity were scattered all over this area. Half-formed millstones lay below Riddings Edge, some of them covered in lichen as if slowly being reabsorbed into the landscape. Quarrymen had come to the eastern edges looking for the coarse sedimentary rock known as gritstone.
Now, for climbers, gritstone possessed friction properties that compensated for a lack of holds on the sheer faces. It was best climbed in the autumn or spring, when the sun was out, the midges were on holiday, and the moisture had seeped off the rock. Like at Stanage Edge, on a fine weekend there were cars parked along the side of every road, and so many people climbing that the only sound was the cacophony of karabiners.
Cooper had no trouble finding what he needed. Near the car park at the top of The Hill, a foam crash pad had been left at the foot of a boulder – the sort of thing a climber placed on the ground in case of a fall, to reduce the risk of serious injury. A man was standing at the foot of the rock face coiling a length of rope, and Cooper interrupted him to ask him about the equipment that was used on the edges.
‘We’re trads,’ said the climber. ‘Traditional rock climbers. We don’t use bolts on gritstone. We respect the rock.’
He was wearing a helmet and rock boots, and was hung about with a full rack of gear – rope, harness, karabiners, belay devices, wires, hexes, cams. And there on his harness was the item Cooper was most interested in – a chalk bag.
‘Our aim is to leave the rock as we found it. There’s been a spate of chipping on these faces recently – where people create a hold artificially, you know? When we see that, we report it to the Access and Conservation Team at the British Mountaineering Council. It has no place on gritstone.’
‘But what about the white handprints?’ asked Cooper, looking up at the rock. ‘They’re all over the place.’
‘Yes, it is rather a lasting visual sign. But we only use what we need, and we clean up any spillage.’
And they were certainly visible from here. White marks showed up in every spot where a climber had sought a hold. Some of the chalk had faded as it weathered; some marks were still clear and fresh.
‘The chalk is used on the hands to combat sweat and improve grip, right?’
‘That’s it. Some of these faces barely have even crimps, small fingerholds. If your hands are sweating…’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘It helps if you happen to do a highball off the face.’
‘A what?’
‘A highball. A fall.’
Cooper looked at the sheer face of the edge.
‘If you were far enough up the face when you did a highball, you’d be killed.’