Dead and Buried

27

There was a welcome awaiting Cooper when he and Villiers returned to West Street. Diane Fry was pacing the corridor impatiently, and pounced on Cooper as soon as he appeared.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Where have you been? She’ll only talk to you.’

‘Who will?’

‘Nancy Wharton, of course.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In an interview room.’

‘Why?’

‘She gave us her husband’s statement, but obviously we have to question her. We need details, a full account of what happened.’

She was talking too fast, and Cooper wasn’t able to take it in.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You’d better rewind a bit, Diane. You’re losing me.’

Fry stopped, took a deep breath. ‘Of course, you don’t know about it. You’re out of touch.’

‘I wonder whose fault that is?’

‘Okay, let’s take a few minutes.’

Cooper sat down in her tiny office and read through the letter handed over by Mrs Wharton. It was signed by her husband in a slightly shaky hand, and dated Wednesday — the day that Cooper had talked to him in the hospice. He remembered listening to Wharton tell his story about the Light House closing, seeing the windows of the pub going dark one by one.

It was a very brief letter. More of a note, really. It merely stated that Maurice Wharton admitted full responsibility for the deaths of David and Patricia Pearson in December 2009, while they were guests on his licensed premises at the Light House, Oxlow Moor, Derbyshire. Wharton referred to himself as ‘the undersigned’, as if the formal language might give his statement some kind of legal authority.

‘It’s useless without evidence, of course,’ said Fry, tapping her fingers impatiently as she watched Cooper read.

‘Of course.’

‘But there’s one other thing you should know. David Pearson’s financial activities were gone into at the time, during the original inquiry. But not thoroughly enough, it seems.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mr Mackenzie tasked one of the incident room teams to run a new analysis of Pearson’s business dealings. And guess what popped up? Among the people who suffered serious losses when the embezzlement was discovered and the company went into receivership, we found M. and N. Wharton, owners of the Light House Hotel.’

Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘You’re right, it should have been picked up.’

‘Well, I suppose it was just one of hundreds of cases in the files of Diamond Hybrid Securities. There was nothing actually fraudulent about their dealings with the Light House. The Whartons were just unfortunate victims. Collateral damage.’

‘So you’ve brought Nancy in?’ said Cooper.

‘She didn’t want to come. She seemed to think the letter would be enough — that we’d just accept it and go away, without asking any more questions. She’s in for a surprise, though. We need to know exactly what happened. And we need some proof — witness statements, forensic evidence. Someone will have to interview the children. Eliot is seventeen. He’s old enough to put in the witness box.’

‘It won’t ever come to court,’ said Cooper.

‘What? Why not?’

‘Maurice Wharton is dying. He can’t have more than a few days left to live, weeks at most. I bet Nancy would be at the hospice now, sitting at his bedside, if you hadn’t pulled her in.’

‘Well, yes — that is what she told me,’ admitted Fry.

Cooper nodded. ‘But you took no notice, did you, Diane?’

‘Well what would you have done?’ she snapped. ‘I had to bring her in. It’s all very well this caring and sensitive stuff, but there comes a point where even you have to follow procedure and do your job properly, no matter how many sob stories people tell you.’

With an effort, Cooper tried not to smile too much. He felt unduly pleased with himself for having provoked a response from her. Despite the impression she tried to give, Fry was very much on edge. Something had unsettled her, and he was content to think that it might have been him.

He stood up, still holding on to the evidence bag containing Maurice Wharton’s letter.

‘I’ll go and talk to her then, shall I?’ he said.

‘Obviously, I’ll have to sit in,’ said Fry.

‘Fine. But try not to upset her too much.’

Nancy Wharton was huddled close to the table, hunched in an awkward position, as if cowering away from the walls of the room. The interview rooms at West Street weren’t very attractive, but her reaction was extreme.

Cooper recalled the furniture crammed into the Whartons’ council house on the Devonshire Estate. He wondered if she’d already become constrained by her new life there, and now no longer knew how to relax and stretch herself out into the available space.

‘Maurice has always had his faults,’ said Nancy, before Fry had even started the tapes. ‘No one knows that better than me. But he’s not really a murderer.’

Fry shrugged. ‘Oh, no one’s a murderer,’ she said. ‘Not until they kill someone.’

Nancy tried to ignore her, though Cooper could see she found it difficult. So do we all, he thought.

The tapes began to turn, and Mrs Wharton was advised of her rights by Fry in a practised monotone that the older woman seemed to take no notice of.

‘The thing is, we thought the Pearsons had been forgotten,’ she said. ‘No one seemed to be asking questions about them any more. So we relaxed a bit. It was a mistake, I suppose.’

‘Not your first mistake,’ said Fry.

Nancy turned towards Cooper. Though she’d been reluctant to come in and answer questions, she began to talk almost without prompting.

‘You have to understand the position we’d come to,’ she said. ‘Just that day, we’d told Eliot and Kirsten it might be the last Christmas we spent at the Light House. We had to explain to them why it had happened, about the people who said they’d invest money in the pub and be our business partners, about the big loan we’d taken out for the improvements they insisted on. And we told them that they’d pulled out, and left us with a pub that was losing money, with debts we couldn’t pay back.’

Nancy ran her hands over her hair and clutched her head tightly, as if to hold in the thoughts that were trying to escape.

‘The children needed to know that,’ she said. ‘They were old enough by then. Well, we thought they were.’

‘This would have been your arrangement with Diamond Hybrid Securities,’ said Cooper. ‘The company David Pearson worked for.’

‘Not just that. It was him we dealt with. Him who sweet-talked us into committing ourselves beyond our means. But we never met him. So of course we had no idea who he was when he came into the pub. Not a clue.’

‘Go on, Mrs Wharton.’

She paused for a while to collect herself.

‘Anyway, the children were very upset,’ she said. ‘Kirsten cried, and Eliot went really quiet, the way he does sometimes. I think that’s what hurt Maurice most. He loves his children. He’d do absolutely anything for them. And there he was, looking at the prospect of being unable to make a living and keep them in their home. It made him feel useless, a failure. Maurice was already a man on the brink. He’d tell you that himself, if he was able.’

‘And you kept quiet about it all this time,’ put in Fry.

Nancy looked up at her. ‘You can’t blame us for trying to protect our family. Anybody would have done it. Yes, we covered it up for nearly two years, never said a word. But then the bank called in our loan and the pub was closed. Even then, it was weeks afterwards before it occurred to us that there might be a problem. We imagined someone buying the pub and finding something we’d missed. And then …’

She shook her head. ‘But it was too late. We’d given up the keys, and we couldn’t get back in. We felt helpless. As the auction got nearer and nearer, we started to panic. We had crazy ideas about how to prevent anyone from wanting to buy the place.’

‘Hence all the stories going round about junkies and squatters, and the dangers of subsidence?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes,’ she said.

But she said it so quietly that Cooper’s ears pricked up. She had hung her head to avoid meeting his eye. She was ashamed, perhaps. That was understandable. But suddenly he realised that she was mostly ashamed of something she wasn’t telling them.

‘It’s easy to spread rumours around here,’ said Nancy. ‘It only takes one person to start talking about it in a pub, and it goes round like wildfire. No one knew that better than us.’

It was true, but Cooper wasn’t letting it distract from the sudden weight of certainty that had formed in his mind.

‘It was you,’ he said, with a growing feeling of shock and anger. ‘It was you who started the moorland fires. You actually hoped the fire would reach the pub. You planned to damage it beyond repair, so that no one would buy it. You wanted to see the death of the Light House.’

‘It seemed the only way left to us. We thought we’d run out of options, but when the wildfires started, it was like a sign. We heard someone on the news saying that the fires were threatening farm buildings and isolated properties. I remember it now. We looked at each other, and we didn’t have to say a word.’

Cooper stared at her, horrified. It was almost beyond comprehension that the Whartons could have tried to destroy the place they’d worked so hard to save. But that was what they’d been brought to, in the end.

Fry glanced at him, but said nothing. He could sense her unspoken message. He was getting off topic. They had to focus Nancy Wharton on the central issue.

‘We need to take you back to that night in December,’ said Fry. ‘Tell us exactly what happened.’

Cooper watched Nancy fold her arms and lean on them, rocking her body against the table as she relived the memories. How had she imagined she could escape this process? Did she really think she could just hand over a letter and it would all be done with? Wishful thinking? Or had she completely lost touch with reality? Living with such a huge secret for so long might warp your perspective, he supposed. The biggest challenge she’d faced was deciding when the moment had come to let that secret go.

‘The Light House was shut,’ she said. ‘We always closed the pub for a few days over Christmas.’

‘We know that. So how did the Pearsons come to be there?’

‘They came banging on the door late that night, and we recognised them from the evening before. So we let them in. We didn’t want to. Well, Maurice particularly — he hated the idea of strangers being there in the pub, when it was a family time. It was worse than that, though. Maurice had been looking at the business accounts. Like I said, we truly thought it was going to be the last Christmas we’d be able to spend at the Light House. The children knew it by then, too.’

‘So if you and Mr Wharton really didn’t want strangers in the pub over Christmas, then why …?’

‘They were both exhausted when they arrived,’ said Nancy. ‘The woman was on her last legs. They must have been wandering around the moor for hours by then. They’d been to the George in Castleton, and tried to walk back. Over the moor in the snow? Stupid. They were stupid to do that.’

It was a tendency that so many people showed when they were interviewed, the attempt to blame everything on the victims. If they hadn’t done this, if they hadn’t behaved like that … The sound of self-justification was so familiar in these interview rooms that Cooper could probably have heard it echoing back to him if he put his ear to the wall.

‘Did they say which way they’d come from Castleton?’ he asked.

Nancy looked surprised. ‘Yes, they said they’d walked up The Stones. They must have come out on the hill at the top there.’

‘Hurd Low.’

‘Yes. Why?’

Why? Cooper had retraced their exact steps himself earlier in the week. He’d pictured very clearly David and Trisha Pearson choosing to take a route back to their cottage via The Stones and Goose Hill, leaving the street lamps of Castleton behind and climbing Hurd Low, hoping to follow the path that linked up with the Limestone Way. He’d imagined the light flurries of sleet turning to snow by the time they left the town. He saw them, within minutes, struggling through a blizzard, their torches useless in zero visibility, their track disappearing under drifting snow. He’d almost been able to feel the cold, to hear that wind moaning and whining like an animal.

Zero visibility? When Cooper had been up on Oxlow Moor this week, the prominent landmark he’d once known had been missing. The Light House had been dark and abandoned, windowless and dead. Though its roof line was still there, its characteristic presence was missing from the skyline.

But when the Pearsons had set off to walk from the George to their cottage at Brecks Farm, the Light House had still been occupied. The Whartons were at home, getting ready to celebrate Christmas with their family. All the windows would have been lit up, the decorations glittering, the Christmas tree sparkling like a beacon in the darkness.

Freezing cold and disorientated, they must have seen those lights in the distance and decided to seek sanctuary.

‘They were frozen stiff and white all over, like a couple of snowmen,’ said Nancy. ‘If they hadn’t been wearing warm clothes, I don’t think they would have made it. When you live up that way, you have more sense. The road was covered in no time, and the car park was drifting over. The wind drives the snow over the moor, you see, and the Light House is the first place it finds to dump it on. We were ready for it, though. We were well stocked up with food, and we’d got everything in for our own celebrations. Only fools or tourists would have been out on the moor in that weather.’

‘But the Pearsons were never completely lost, were they?’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t know what you mean. Why not?’

‘Because,’ said Cooper, ‘they were never out sight of the Light House.’

Yes, it was true that no one lost on the moors would stand a chance unless they found shelter. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Unless they found shelter.

‘Well, there we were with these two people on the doorstep,’ said Nancy. ‘No one had a hope of getting through that night. There wasn’t much point in calling a taxi. What else could we do? Besides, there was an obligation on us. It came with being licensees of a place like the Light House. Those hundreds of years serving as an inn for travellers. All that history.’

‘The unwritten law,’ said Cooper. ‘The ancient code of hospitality.’

‘Yes, if you like.’

And right in the middle, hell wasn’t fiery. The sinners were frozen up to their necks in a lake of ice.

‘Which room did the Pearsons stay in?’ asked Fry.

‘Room One. We called it the Bakewell Room. It was the only one we could get ready quickly for guests.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘Maurice looked at the register after they’d signed in. Then he checked the credit card transaction. A few minutes later I heard him go down into the cellar, where we kept the old records. There are a couple of filing cabinets down there.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’

‘I followed him down, but he was in a bit of a state by then. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. And I can’t say I blamed him. You can imagine how Maurice felt about finding them under his roof as guests — even as paying guests. And he’d let them stay himself, gone out of his way to make a room available for them.’

‘Well, how did he feel?’

‘He thought he’d invited vampires in. He’d always called them “the bloodsuckers”. And there they were, under his own roof.’

Cooper nodded. It was odd that he’d been thinking about Count Dracula earlier in the day, when he’d opened the hatch into the cellar at the Light House. According to vampire legends, undead creatures like Dracula could only enter your house if they were invited in. He recollected fanged actors in horror films trying all kinds of tricks to fool a victim into issuing an invitation. But the Pearsons hadn’t needed to trick Maurice Wharton, had they? Maurice had met with disaster because of his own moment of weakness, his uncharacteristic gesture of generosity.

It had been Christmas, after all. In the end, not even Mad Maurice Wharton wanted to be the man who said ‘no room at the inn’.

‘He sat in his own bar, drinking whisky,’ said Nancy. ‘Poor Maurice. He was consumed by bitterness. The hunger for revenge. Eventually, it, and the whisky, got too strong for him. Maurice took the baseball bat that he kept behind the bar. And then he let the dogs in.’