Fall Down Dead

17

At Slackhall, a small village green lay at a crossroads near the entrance to the Chestnut Centre. The remnants of an ancient chestnut tree looked as though they had been blasted by lightning, three bare, stumpy trunks stripped of bark like broken torsos. Only one side of the tree was still alive, its leaves starting to turn golden in the autumn sun.

At busy times for the wildlife park, there would be cars parked along the roadside all around this junction. But the Chestnut Centre closed at dusk during the winter months, so visitors tended to come early.

Cooper walked past the restaurant and gift shop, and crossed a deer meadow towards the aviaries, with a herd of fallow deer watching him from the hillside. There was a good view of Kinder Scout from here. He wondered if that was why Elsa had chosen it.

Signposts pointed towards polecats, pine martens and Scottish wildcats, or to the badger rehabilitation pen. There were a lot of owls here too. Barn owls, spectacled owls, snowy owls, burrowing owls and a great grey owl. He walked past the pine martens and polecats on the lower trail, sniffing the musky smell of foxes and catching the high-pitched yowl of a wildcat, until he reached the otter pools.

And there she was. He saw Elsa Roth waiting for him by a pen full of European otters, a splash of glistening bodies and inquisitive whiskery faces behind the glass as he approached. Elsa looked as out of place as he’d imagined in her Gucci windbreaker, like a model from a mail-order catalogue.

When she saw him, she pointed away from the otters towards a large cage across the pathway.

‘Look, a Eurasian eagle owl,’ she said. ‘Bubo bubo.’

‘I know.’

Cooper recalled his first sight of an eagle owl. He’d been a child, visiting an agricultural show with his family somewhere — probably Bakewell. He wasn’t sure how old he would have been at the time, but the owl had stood as tall as him on its perch, and was so striking with its barred wings and ear tufts. Its amazing orange eyes had been staring directly into his, totally unblinking. The young Ben had been mesmerised by the bird, and eventually he had to be dragged away by his mother to look at the exhibits in the produce tent. The way this one gazed back at him so knowingly, it could almost be the same one.

‘It says here the females can have a wingspan of more than six feet,’ said Elsa. ‘That’s impressive.’

‘Very.’

By unspoken agreement, they began to walk along the bottom path past a series of animal enclosures. Cooper turned to look at Elsa a bit more closely.

‘You weren’t always a waitress, were you?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I was doing the waitressing to earn a bit of money. I wanted to study veterinary science. But it’s a five-year course, and it’s far too expensive. I was never going to achieve that, no matter how many tips I got from customers.’

‘So you married Darius instead.’

‘It seemed the best option. I put that ambition behind me.’

Cooper could tell from the distant look in her eyes that she hadn’t put it all that far behind her. What a pity that it was an ambition Darius hadn’t been willing to finance. He could certainly have afforded it, even if Elsa couldn’t.

‘Darius and I got married eight years ago,’ she said. ‘It was funny, actually. We had to postpone the wedding for six months because Darius suffered a burst appendix and was admitted for surgery.’

‘Six months? That seems a long time. What hospital was he in?’

‘Hospital? Oh, not on the NHS. He has private medical insurance. He went to Meadow Park in Manchester. It was his choice to go there. Treatment at a private hospital was covered by his insurance, and it’s the nearest private hospital to where we live.’

Cooper waited for Elsa to get round to the subject of their meeting, but she seemed content to be quiet, a role she’d probably practised during her time with Darius Roth.

‘What exactly did you want to talk to me about, Mrs Roth?’ he asked eventually.

‘Well, I’m not sure if it’s important,’ she said. ‘But I know Darius was concerned about the make-up of the group on this last walk.’

‘Oh? Was there something in particular he was concerned about?’

‘Well, he hates the idea of illegal drugs.’

Cooper stopped in mid-stride near an aviary containing barn owls. ‘Drugs? What do you mean?’

‘Faith’s brother, Jonathan, is an addict of some kind.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘The signs are all there. And Faith was a nurse.’

‘What does that have to do with it?’

‘She’s worked as a staff nurse in a surgical ward. She knows how to treat wounds, to deal with infections, to control pain. That means she must have had access to prescription medications. Strong painkillers like morphine. Even in the best regulated of hospitals there can be opportunities.’

Cooper was astonished. It was an accusation completely out of the blue. What had prompted Elsa Roth to come forward with this? The quiet woman who preferred to stay in the background and hardly spoke — yet she’d called him here to blurt this out.

‘Do you have any evidence for what you’re saying?’

‘No, none at all.’

‘Then it’s baseless speculation.’

Elsa brushed back a strand of hair. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ She turned to walk away from the aviary. ‘It’s just something that’s been bothering Darius. He’s very sensitive, you know.’

‘Really?’

She smiled. ‘I know it doesn’t always show, but I understand him very well.’

‘I’m sure you do, Mrs Roth. You seem extremely close.’

‘Oh, we are. So I’m very aware that Darius has a horror of blood and disease. You know, Faith Matthew once told us that among all the patients with gallstones and appendixes and bladder infections on her surgical ward there was one man suffering from necrotising fasciitis. Darius was almost ill when she described it.’

‘The so-called flesh-eating disease. It causes the death of the body’s soft tissues. Horrible.’

They crossed a series of wooden bridges over a stream. A keeper in a green sweater passed them, riding a vehicle like a converted golf buggy.

‘And now Mr Roth seems to be obsessed with the Kinder Mass Trespass,’ said Cooper.

‘It might seem odd to an outsider,’ she said. ‘But there are worse things to have as an obsession. It was a significant historical event.’

‘Nick Haslam says that the ramblers who took part in the Mass Trespass were all Communists.’

‘Oh yes. He never stops telling us that. He knows it infuriates Darius.’

‘I don’t understand why it would anger your husband.’

‘Darius is quite conservative on the quiet. He worships tradition, you know. His grandfather and all those other men who took part in the Mass Trespass have become heroes in his mind. The embodiment of British-bulldog spirit, like the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Welsh Guards at Rorke’s Drift.’

Cooper smiled, faintly puzzled. Both of those episodes from British history had been disastrous defeats, surely? Brave perhaps, but ultimately a lost cause.

He wondered if Elsa was mocking her husband’s beliefs. If so, did she do that to his face? Was it only Nick Haslam who’d infuriated Darius Roth with his contemptuous references to the original trespassers?

With a sigh, Cooper turned back towards the exit. Supposedly, Elsa Roth had called him because she wanted to talk. But she hadn’t told him anything so far, had she? Nothing useful anyway. Apart from the wild allegation against the Matthews, all she’d talked about was her husband. It seemed nothing else mattered to her except Darius.

‘I talked to Faith on the Saturday, you know,’ said Elsa suddenly. ‘The day before the walk.’

‘How was she then?’

‘She was upset by the note.’

‘Note?’

‘Didn’t you know? She’d had a note a few days before the walk. Some crank letter.’

Again she’d taken him by surprise, made him look at her differently. Was she doing this deliberately? It was as if she was playing a game, toying with him like an otter with a fish.

‘What did the note say?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember exactly,’ she said. ‘Some kind of threat, I think.’

Cooper bit his lip. A threat? Why was he only finding out about it now? Hadn’t Faith’s mother known about this, or her brother? It was bizarre that it had been left to Elsa Roth to volunteer information that could be vital to his inquiry.

‘Did Faith tell you anything else?’

‘That’s all I can remember. I hope I’ve helped.’

He sighed. ‘It could be very important.’

‘I’m glad.’

Was she really? Cooper couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t been able to figure out her motive yet. It might be a deliberate distraction, not an effort to help at all.

Cooper said goodbye to Elsa Roth in the car park. She’d arrived in a Mini convertible in metallic electric blue. Cooper felt sure there was probably a whole selection of other vehicles available for her to use in the range of garages at Trespass Lodge.

When Elsa had gone, he called Carol Villiers and asked her to collect the key for Faith Matthew’s house from her mother and meet him there.

‘What are we looking for?’ she said.

‘A threatening note of some kind.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I think so.’

Cooper could smell hot soup and jacket potatoes from the Chestnut Centre café. He peered through the window of the gift shop at the books and cuddly-toy otters.

As he was about to leave the centre, he heard a noise. A wild creature calling to him from a distance. Cooper turned and looked back but saw only the orange eyes of the eagle owl in the distance. It was staring back at him, totally unblinking.

An hour later, Ben Cooper stood looking around the sitting room of Faith Matthew’s house in Hayfield with Carol Villiers. There were no open fires here — not even a log burner, as there might have been in many homes in the Peak District. There was only central heating. Nowhere to dispose of a threatening note by the traditional method of burning it.

‘We need to search the bins,’ he said.

Cooper checked among the plants and lamps on all the surfaces, opened the drawers of a dresser, pulled out the volumes on a bookshelf, inspected a desk with a laptop computer and printer. Nothing.

‘How was Liam Sharpe, Carol?’ he said. ‘Did you get anything useful from him?’

‘No. He was too taken up with himself. Rather overplaying the injured victim, if you ask me. As a result, he’s pretty vague about what happened on Kinder that day, apart from his own accident. He seems to have lain there nursing his bruises oblivious to what was going on around him.’

‘He must have been aware of Faith Matthew. She stayed with him when the others went off to find help.’

‘Yes, he remembers that. And he knows she left him alone at some point. He didn’t see anyone else until the search dog found him. That was quite a long while, you know. I got the impression he was starting to panic by then.’

‘But thinking only about his own situation.’

‘He wasn’t concerning himself about what had happened to Faith, anyway.’

‘I suppose it’s understandable.’

Upstairs, Cooper found the smallest bedroom of Faith’s house had been used as a large walk-in wardrobe, with clothes hung from the picture rails and piled on the bed. In the other, a dresser top was scattered with hairbrushes and cosmetics, while a dozen teddy bears and other soft toys were arranged on a chair in the corner. Faith would probably have liked one of those stuffed otters from the Chestnut Centre for her collection.

The bathroom gleamed with white tiles, so that a pink back scrub hanging over the showerhead stood out like a splash of blood.

Villiers had gone straight to the kitchen. It wasn’t a big room, with half a dozen oak-fronted units round a built-in oven and a framed Bovril poster on the wall. With a gloved hand, she pulled something out of a stack of bills and bank statements shoved behind a bread bin.

‘I think this is it,’ she said.

Cooper hurried into the kitchen.

‘What does it say?’

‘Not much. Take a look.’

She was right. The note was short and to the point, and written in block capitals. It simply read,