After a few minutes, his feet hit rock, and he knew he was near the edge. Stepping more carefully now, he felt his way between the boulders until a view opened up in front of him. It was a panorama across the Derwent Valley, deep pits of blackness with the lights of villages here and there like clusters of beads strung up the hillsides. From here, he could see right up to the ghostly gleam of the limestone quarries in Middleton Dale.
For a moment he experienced a surge of panic as a wave of dizziness swept over him. He didn’t normally suffer from vertigo. But the sudden drop appearing beneath his feet had thrown him off balance, mentally as well as physically. He swayed a little on the balls of his feet, held out his arms to steady himself. The sensation was like solid ground lurching beneath his boots, as if the horizontal rock shelf had tilted towards forty-five degrees in an effort to tip him off the edge into the valley. For that second, he’d thought he was about to join the dead sheep, broken and bloodied amid the wreckage of millstones. But gradually the world was righting itself, his balance steadied and he knew he wasn’t going to fall.
Cooper felt the sweat dampening his forehead as he took a deep breath. That was definitely a primal fear, the terror of falling from a great height. The edge was a place that seemed to exploit that fear. His footsteps had been led to the drop as if by some unseen temptation.
The moor might look bare and empty in the cold light of reality. But in the minds of the people who’d travelled across it, there must have existed a dark forest of superstition, a psychological world inhabited by trolls and demons, crowded with all kinds of dangers that lurked in the darkness. Their consciousness would have been full of stories of death and madness, tales of ghosts and cut-throats, fear of storms and fog and sucking bogs. Above all, this would have become a mythical landscape where you might encounter terrible beasts.
Yet if there were demons on Big Moor, he hadn’t seen them. The Savages had become as mythical as hobs. But what about the evil at work down there in Riddings? Were those devils human? Or just a part of the landscape?
His mobile phone rang. Just one ring, then silence. Cooper looked at the display, and recognised the number he’d dialled only a few minutes ago. That was clever. Edson had called his phone to establish his position in the darkness. Now he knew exactly how close Cooper was.
‘Don’t come any nearer, Sergeant.’
Cooper stopped, peering into the night.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir. I just need you to come with me.’
‘I’m fine here, thank you.’
‘Mr Edson…’
‘No. Stay where you are.’
As his eyes adjusted, Cooper began to make out the shape of the man a few yards away. He couldn’t be sure from here, but it looked as though Edson was standing right on the edge, on the very rim of a flat, rocky outcrop jutting out into space. His figure was outlined against the distant lights somewhere up the valley. Around him was nothing but empty air.
Cooper wiped the rain out of his eyes, and pulled his jacket closer around him. He was starting to get very cold, and the throbbing headache was returning. He knew that if he stayed motionless too long in this wind and rain, exhaustion would begin to get the better of him. He could feel it now, surging in waves through his veins.
This mustn’t take too long. The only thing he could do was distract Edson’s attention, or try to get him to talk.
‘Mr Edson, you’re not a rock climber, are you?’ he said.
‘Me? Good heavens, no.’
‘Much too dangerous for you, I suppose?’
‘I can’t see the point of it. Why do you ask?’
‘We found magnesium carbonate in your car.’
‘Magnesium…?’
‘It’s used sometimes in taxidermy, for whitening skulls. You don’t go in for taxidermy, do you?’
‘No, of course not. Stuffing dead animals?’ Edson stared at him. ‘Sergeant, have you lost your mind? What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The other most common use for magnesium carbonate is in the form of a chalk. It’s useful as a drying agent for the hands. To help the grip, you know. It’s used by most often by gymnasts and weightlifters. And by rock climbers, of course.’
‘I don’t know how it could have got into my car. That’s a bit of a mystery.’
‘Well, perhaps,’ said Cooper.
Through the rain, he saw another figure approaching along the edge. Not from the direction of the car park, but from the packhorse route. Villiers had worked her way round, finding her direction across the moor, even in the dark.
A blast of wind buffeted the edge, and Cooper had difficulty keeping his feet. Edson swayed and held out his arms to balance himself. He was wearing a long black coat, which flapped angrily in the wind. The downpour was becoming torrential now. It pounded on the rocks and cascaded over the edge, forming instant waterfalls.
This had to be done more quickly. Cooper knew he had to try to keep Edson talking, giving Villiers the chance to get into position.
‘We found Barry Gamble’s body,’ he said. ‘Was Mr Gamble trying to blackmail you, sir. Is that what it was?’
Edson laughed. ‘Oh, he tried. In a very roundabout way. He was wasting his time with me, though.’
‘Because of the money, you mean?’
‘The lottery money? It’s all vanished. Extravagant expenditure, a series of bad investments. I had to mortgage the house to release some capital, and now I can’t make the payments on it. Everything will have to go. No, there’s no money left, not a penny. I’m up to my neck in debt.’
‘So the big lottery winner is broke?’
‘Absolutely stony, I’m afraid.’
‘A whole series of mistakes, Mr Edson.’
‘Mistakes? Yes. Too many to count.’
Shivering, Cooper moved a few paces closer, feeling the rock carefully underfoot with each step. He saw Edson turn, and could sense the man looking at him through the rain.
‘It’s a pity I told you that Barry Gamble came to Riddings Lodge that night,’ said Edson. ‘You didn’t know about that until I mentioned it, did you? Gamble hadn’t let on.’
‘No, sir, he hadn’t.’
Edson shook his head. ‘Strange man. I didn’t expect him to be the sort of person to keep a secret. Just one more mistake.’
Finally, Cooper felt close enough to hold a proper conversation, instead of shouting against the noise of the wind and rain. He could almost see Edson’s eyes, just a glimmer of white in the darkness.
‘So what happened, Mr Edson? Why did it go so wrong?’
‘I’m not sure where it all went wrong. Oh, I didn’t know enough about money from the beginning, I suppose. I certainly didn’t realise how quickly it would disappear. And I was a fool to trust Jake Barron. But after that…’
A few more steps, and Cooper was close now. He could see Edson smiling sadly. Yet his expression also seemed to reflect a sort of satisfaction, as if somehow things had actually gone the way he expected.
‘After that was when everything really started to fall apart, surely?’ said Cooper. ‘The death of Zoe Barron wasn’t part of the plan, was it?’
‘What?’
‘I think you just wanted to punish the Barrons. But you hired the wrong people. You’d heard about the Savages and how they got away with their crimes. You figured another attack would just be put down to them. But the people you hired weren’t professionals like the Savages. These boys were complete amateurs. They had no idea how to do the job right. They didn’t know the way to hurt someone without killing them. They didn’t know what to do to make it look like a genuine robbery. A mobile phone and a purse? What sort of haul is that? Right there, when you made that decision – that was your worst mistake.’
Edson took a step closer to the edge, wiping the rain from his face. The wind whipped round him, lashing his hair, flapping his coat open like the wings of a bird.