Already Dead

14

Ben Cooper peered into the distance to pick out the distinctive shape of Mam Tor. The mountain couldn’t be seen from Carl Wark until you walked through the entrance and up on to the banks behind the walling. Then the dark, brooding silhouette suddenly appeared on the horizon. Mam Tor, the Mother Heights, the Shivering Mountain. And the destroyer of the old A625 too, the road which was swept away in the 1970s by tons of shale cascading from its fragile slopes.

Mam Tor was the site of another hill fort, and a Bronze Age settlement. It was strange to think of people looking out over this same valley two thousand years ago and perhaps seeing each other’s fires in the distance. What would they have been signalling? A friendly communication? Or a warning?

‘I’m worried about you, Ben,’ said Matt behind him.

Ben didn’t turn round to look at him. He knew what expression he would see on his brother’s face.

‘There’s no need,’ he said.

‘There is. I’m really bothered.’

‘And there’s really no need for you to be.’

‘I’m concerned that you’re still eaten up with guilt,’ said Matt. ‘There’s no reason for you to feel guilty, Ben. None at all.’

‘So you’ve said.’

‘And I’ll say it again and again, until you get the message.’

Ben didn’t feel like arguing with his brother today, no matter how wrong Matt was. And Matt had definitely got it wrong. Wherever there was death, there was always guilt.

He recalled that although everything he could see from here was part of Derbyshire, Carl Wark itself had the distinction of being outside the county. It had been moved into South Yorkshire some time in the 1970s when local government boundaries were reorganised. The county border ran below him, past the remains of an old rain gauge and along the bottom of Millstone Edge to Surprise View. In a way, it felt even more like a refuge because of that. When he was on Carl Wark, he was outside his own territory, standing beyond the edge, existing for a while in the safer fringes of his world.

And safety was hard to find these days. Hard for anyone, it seemed. But perhaps he’d just been in the job too long. He’d seen all kinds of human cruelty.

‘It’s fine, Matt,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not fine. None of this is fine at all!’

Ben looked up, startled by his brother’s angry reaction. It took a lot to get an emotional response from Matt. He wondered what he’d done to provoke it. All he’d said was ‘It’s fine.’

Right now, he was standing in the Dark Peak, looking south towards the more gentle hills of the White Peak. Those two distinct geological halves of the Peak District had always represented good and evil to him, one of those over-imaginative thoughts that he tried to keep to himself when he was among his colleagues. Dark and white, good and evil. It was obvious, really. Good and evil were right there in the landscape, laid out in front of him. He only had to make a decision. He had to decide which direction to head in from here. It was as simple as that.

‘Will you help me, Matt?’ he said. ‘To put things right?’

‘No. Not if you mean what I think you do.’

‘But you’re my brother.’

‘No. I won’t help you to destroy yourself, Ben.’

‘Matt, please-’

‘Find someone else.’

Matt stamped off towards the top of the path, and a few moments later Ben heard him clattering over the loose stones like a herd of clumsy cattle.

He didn’t watch his brother leave, but remained gazing at the hills on the north side of the valley. The heather was coming into flower on the moors all across the Peak District. In late summer, many visitors came just to see the distinctive swathes of colour, the unending blanket of reddish-purple that had appeared on thousands of postcards and holiday snaps. But it needed sun to bring out the colour, and it looked doubtful whether Derbyshire would get any this year. The heather flowers would stay wet and dull under these overcast skies.

Ben found he was experiencing a sensation he sometimes had as a teenager — that he was the only real person in the world and everyone else was just playing a part, a bunch of extras acting out an elaborate pantomime around him. He couldn’t imagine these people having separate lives once they went out of the door and disappeared from sight. It seemed as though they existed only to perform a function, to be mere props on his stage, accessories to his needs and desires. He was the centre of the universe, its reason and purpose. All the thoughts and feelings in the world went on inside his head, and no one else could understand what it was like. How could they, when he was unique?

He supposed it was a failure of empathy. The part of his brain that made connections with other human beings was currently unavailable. He was unable to see the world from any point of view but his own.

Ben frowned, realising he was quoting to himself from a textbook on criminal psychology. That lack of empathy? It sounded like the classic definition of a psychopath.

Finally, he turned and looked down. He could make out his brother, hunched in a blue cagoule and a woollen hat as he stumbled down the slope and kicked angrily at a loose stone that went tumbling towards the road.

As he stood on the edge of Carl Wark, Ben seemed to hear a voice over his shoulder. It was probably just the trickle of water over rocks, the sigh of wind through the ancient ramparts, the muttering of a solitary ewe, damp and lost as it clattered on the scree slope. But for a moment he believed it was a ghostly communication, the echo of some tribal holy man whose spirit had been trapped for ever in these stones. He tilted his head and listened, trying to distinguish the words, or at least some recognisable sound that would reassure him it was just his imagination. But all the voice seemed to talk about was vengeance.

When people spoke about closure and moving on they hadn’t a clue what they were saying. They didn’t know what it was like to have this devil riding on your back, a fiend that you couldn’t throw off. He was possessed by this idea, as much as by any demon.

But his voice was hoarse, and he burst into a spasm of painful coughing. In the bar, smoke travelling across the ceiling hit a wall and rolled down to floor level. His mouth was parched, his throat sore from the smoke penetrating his mask. His eyes streamed with tears so that he could barely see, even if the smoke hadn’t plunged the pub into unfathomable darkness.

He fumbled blindly along the wall, found a steel bar under his fingers, and a door behind it. The fire exit. At first, the bar wouldn’t move. Crying out in frustration, he banged at it with his fists, kicked out at it, thumped it again. Finally, he spun round and grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, swung it hard against the bar and felt it give way.

But he must have inhaled too much smoke. He was getting confused. He didn’t know where right or left was, didn’t know where the doors were, felt as though he couldn’t breathe at all.

Irritants hit his eyes and the back of his throat. He could barely open his eyelids. He retched and took a deep breath, in involuntary reaction. The smoke he inhaled was disorientating, dizzying. He went down on his knees. He knew he was giving way to the carbon monoxide, but he was unable to fight.

Now he saw shadows in the smoke, flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out. Was that a figure outlined against the flames? The smoke was black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning.

Glass shattered, and a blast of air exploded the flames into a great, roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling and engulfed the room.

‘Liz!’

His voice came as a feeble croak, and there was no answer.

Cooper thought he glimpsed a movement near him in the smoke. He reached out for an indistinct shape like a hand, but grasped at empty space and found himself falling forward into darkness, until his face hit the floor and his mind swam into swirling oblivion as he lost that last shred of consciousness.

All around him was shouting and screaming, a muffled roaring noise. The crash of falling stone. And the screaming.

Then silence.