He knew that Chatsworth was literally packed to the rafters with priceless antiques. Old Masters and oriental porcelain had been collected by dukes over the centuries. Da Vincis and Rembrandts hung on its walls. Delft vases and Blue John bowls mingled with Roman statues and precious silver. But security on the estate was top notch. Most of the thefts they experienced at Chatsworth were the result of tourists taking plants from the gardens.
‘This track was a millstone road, made by seventeenth-century quarrymen,’ said Cooper. ‘Then it was owned by one of the dukes, and he set gamekeepers to guard it against pesky ramblers. Now the public has access. It must be one of the best stretches of scenery in the country.’
‘No argument there.’ Villiers took a deep breath. ‘No matter how often I came home on leave, I never really felt I was back properly.’
‘It gets in the blood, doesn’t it?’
‘Like a virus. But in a good way.’
From the edge, they could see the steep, wooded slopes below, with a dense covering of rotting silver birch. You could make your way down to the woods, but only if you had good stability and the right footwear.
Riddings Edge was also littered with prehistoric sites. Ancient settlements, burials, field systems. To the north, the Stoke Flat stone circle was only a few yards from the main path. And old maps showed a network of packhorse trails crossing the moors, from a time when they provided the only route from north Derbyshire to the towns and cities in the east. It must have been a wild and lonely place for packhorse men and traders to navigate across in safety.
Yet these moors were within such easy reach of Sheffield, Chesterfield, Derby and the M1 motorway that they were possibly the easiest wild place in Britain to access from a major city. There were good footpaths too, and parking close to the top so that people could enjoy the views without a long walk.
The moors had originally been shaped by farming, tree clearance and grouse shooting. There was the purple haze of heather, and the strange, cackling call of the red grouse. And maybe a fleeting glimpse of a common lizard basking on weather-worn rocks. Here and there, under a tree, Cooper saw little mounds writhing with brown ants. There were hairy wood ants, fearsome creatures that squirted formic acid at you if you came too close. The smell of vinegar was the warning sign. There were adders here too. The snakes hibernated for winter. But in May, as the weather warmed up, they came out on to the moor to sun themselves.
No adders or lizards were out at this time of day, not even a deer. Cooper saw only a Coke can lying in the bracken. An aluminium can outlived most people. If it wasn’t picked up, this one would still be lying here in sixty years’ time. Maybe seventy or eighty. It wouldn’t have rotted or decomposed. There was nothing biodegradable about it. By the end of the century, this can would still be weathering slowly, its bright red surface faded to a dirty brown that matched the dead bracken. Yet the entire population of Riddings would be dead and gone. The human body was different. In the High Peak mortuary, Zoe Barron’s body was doing more than just fading.
He jumped as a pheasant burst from under his feet in an explosion of noise and feathers. He had failed to see it, been completely unaware of its presence as it lay motionless in the heather.
On other moors, the shooting season had started on the Glorious Twelfth. But Big Moor was owned by the National Park authority and designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its rare plants and wildlife. Despite the ease of access, this moorland had been left pretty much undisturbed since prehistoric times.
‘You think a lot, don’t you?’ said Villiers. ‘You’d forgotten I was here for a while – I could tell by your face. I don’t remember that about you, Ben.’
‘Sorry,’ said Cooper.
But she was right. He’d started to feel so relaxed with her that he hadn’t felt it necessary to concentrate on acknowledging her presence, the way courtesy demanded you had to do with strangers.
‘How long is it, then?’ he said.
‘Since we saw each other?’ she guessed.
‘Yes, sorry. That’s what I mean.’
‘When I was home on leave once, visiting the old folks. Maybe five years.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would be about that. So… five years ago. Does that mean you’ve not been given any leave in the last five years?’
‘Well, you know…’
‘You had more interesting things to do.’
‘We move on, don’t we?’
‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘Just not always in a good way, I suppose.’
‘No.’
‘So which was it for you?
He watched her eyes as she thought about the question, saw the doubt and pain pass across her face, the conflicting memories of love and grief written as clear as any words could express.
‘Both, perhaps,’ she said. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t know.’
Villiers was silent for a moment, and Cooper thought he’d said the wrong thing, hurt her by poking into all those darkest corners of her life that she was trying so hard not to remember.
‘What about you, Ben?’ she said finally. ‘Moving on in a good way?’
Cooper hesitated. His first instinct was to tell her everything, to spill out all his feelings, explain exactly what he felt about his family, about his job, about Liz. Everything, for good or bad.
But then he looked at her again, noticing once more how changed she was. No, the time wasn’t right. Not quite yet. He needed to be sure that he still knew her as well as he’d always thought he did.
He pointed away from the edge towards the flats. Large expanses of these would be covered in bright red reeds in the autumn. The colour would merge with the purple of the flowering heather like a swathe of dramatic fabric. The furthest hills were already carpeted in heather. To stand on a rocky outcrop on the edge and look westwards was like gazing out over a red sea, crimson and magenta waves moving gently in the breeze like an ocean of blood.
‘Let’s walk that way for a while, across the moor towards White Edge. There’s a Neolithic settlement called Swine Sty. We should be able to reach that and get back again before the light goes.’
‘Okay. You’re the boss.’
‘Watch out for the hob holes,’ said Cooper.
Villiers laughed. ‘Hob? Are you kidding.’
‘You know about hobs?’
‘Yes, from my childhood fairy stories.’
The footpath towards White Edge crossed an area of grassland that gleamed gold even on a day of mist and rain. They headed towards a solitary tree standing in forlorn isolation on the moor.
‘I spend most of my time in this country, of course,’ said Villiers. ‘I served with an RAFP flight at a station in Cambridgeshire after I came back from Afghanistan. Mostly community policing, but you’d be surprised how much drug detection work we did, not to mention more recently breathalysing military personnel suspected of drink-driving.’
Cooper noted that her breathing was getting a bit ragged now. But the strenuous activity didn’t stop her talking. It was as if these wide-open spaces, the empty landscapes above the Devil’s Edge, had given her the freedom to express what she might not have said down in the valley, among strangers.
‘My last posting was with Number Five Squadron at RAF Waddington,’ she said. ‘In April last year, my unit was deployed to Santander after the Icelandic volcano closed air space. We were assisting stranded British troops from Afghanistan, and some UK civilians. They came back to the UK on board HMS Albion.’
‘I remember that in the news.’
‘Outside unit level, I had a spell in the investigations branch, the Specialist Police Wing. That’s plain clothes, the investigation of serious crime. CID work, in fact. Some of that time with the SPW was spent in Germany. I even liaised with the Forensic Science Flight on forensic investigations.’
‘Your CV must have read like a dream for the interview panel,’ said Cooper.