Fall Down Dead

21

Ben Cooper had asked both the Roths and Sophie Pullen to come into Edendale to make their formal statements. He was particularly interested in talking to Darius and Elsa Roth out of their normal environment. Being in a police station often made people think differently, or decide to tell an alternative story. It was as if the mere suggestion of being a suspect persuaded them to play a different role.

‘Elsa Roth’s background checks out,’ said Carol Villiers as they waited to speak to the Roths.

‘So why did she try to cast suspicion on Jonathan? I wonder,’ said Cooper.

‘And implicate Faith too.’

‘Yes. I don’t like that, Carol. It smells of victim-blaming.’

The Roths were shown into Cooper’s office. Darius perched uncomfortably on a chair as if he found it too small. He gazed around the room, and his eyes seemed to focus on the damp patch in a corner of the ceiling that Cooper had reported weeks ago. Villiers hovered by the door, paying most of her attention to Elsa.

‘No, I know nothing about a note,’ said Roth when Cooper asked him. ‘A threatening note sent to Faith? It’s bizarre.’

Cooper didn’t find him convincing. Everything about Roth was bizarre, yet when he said the word himself, it seemed to mean nothing.

‘We found it at her house,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea who might have sent it?’

‘None.’

‘Or who might have had a reason to threaten her?’

‘No again.’

Cooper thought about asking him if he’d met Faith Matthew during his stay at Meadow Park Hospital, but he changed his mind. It would be revealing that Elsa had spoken to him privately.

‘How dare anyone do this to one of my group?’ said Roth.

‘Your group?’ said Cooper. ‘You know, I still don’t quite grasp what unites you as a group.’

‘What unites us? We’re united by an attraction to the moors, specifically to Kinder Scout. It has a magic that gets into people’s souls.’

Cooper could understand that. He’d felt the magic himself. Kinder was a place like no other, a different universe, a world away from life in the city. But that didn’t explain what kept the group together, when there was so much to be gained by experiencing the moors alone.

‘It’s so much safer in a group,’ said Roth as if anticipating his question. ‘You can easily come to grief on your own, or even with just two of you. Safety in numbers, that’s what we always say. Enjoying the experience as a family.’

Cooper nodded. But it hadn’t been safe, had it? And the New Trespassers Walking Club were one of the most dysfunctional families he’d ever encountered.

‘What you don’t understand is that we’re not just recreating the Mass Trespass of 1932. We’re perpetuating it, moving the principles behind the trespass forward into the future. It’s about the rights of the people against the will of a small, powerful minority who rule our lives. That’s still happening now, as much as it was in my grandfather’s time.’

Roth took a deep breath.

‘And it’s no longer just landed aristocracy like the Duke of Devonshire,’ he said. ‘Some of them are large corporations who decide where we can go, and when. Our group is small, but we’re here and we’re persistent. And we get attention — I make sure of that. It’s a warning to all those who like to go back to the 1930s and keep the masses in their place.’

‘Forgive me, but you’re an odd choice for a working-class hero,’ said Cooper.

Roth laughed. ‘You know nothing about me. I came up the hard way. As I told you, my great-grandfather Adam worked in a railway yard in Gorton — the Beyer Peacock locomotive factory, which closed in the 1960s. My grandfather, Daniel, took all the overtime he could get in a boiler works until he’d saved enough money to open a small corner shop. My father helped him in the shop until it went bust, forced out of business by the supermarkets. He had to get a job at the Slack & Cox mineral-water factory and put his effort into supporting me, because he wanted us to do all the things he never could.’

Darius had a smooth, persuasive voice. Cooper felt he could listen to that voice all day. But he wouldn’t believe a word it said.

‘Didn’t your family run a textiles business?’ he asked.

‘The business was a huge gamble, but it paid off because of the way my father slaved day and night to make it a success. I might look affluent to you, Detective Inspector Cooper, but I’m a working-class boy. I live in Hayfield, but the back streets of Manchester are in my blood. I understand what those boys were trying to achieve when they came here to walk onto Kinder. I live the spirit of the Mass Trespass every day.’

By the time he’d finished, there was a flush in Darius’s cheeks and his eyes were alight. Cooper couldn’t doubt his passion. In a way, he had sympathy with it. But he was still unsure whether Darius Roth was using that passion in the right way.

Elsa was sitting quietly at his side, letting Darius do all the talking, nodding occasionally.

Her quietness reminded Cooper of Nick Haslam’s statement that Elsa had wanted to call the walk off when the fog came in. It was just that nobody took any notice of her. Perhaps Elsa was one suspect he could count out. Someone had taken advantage of the conditions on the Kinder plateau to kill Faith Matthew. If Elsa Roth had wanted to turn back, it suggested she had no such intentions.

But perhaps Villiers had been right. Maybe Elsa knew perfectly well that no one would take any notice of her, because no one ever did. So she’d been safe making the suggestion, in the knowledge that it would be ignored. Was she clever enough to have planned that bluff in advance? Cooper wasn’t sure. Elsa had been one of the least forthcoming — or the least talkative, anyway.

And she would have to be very clever, wouldn’t she? Because Elsa hadn’t volunteered that nugget of information herself when she was interviewed. It would have been the obvious thing to do, if she wanted to make herself appear innocent. But she’d left it up to one of the others to mention it. That made her look like someone who had no doubts about her own innocence and didn’t feel she had to justify herself.

Cooper took a deep breath. He looked at Elsa again, remembering what Villiers had said about her earlier. The quiet ones were often the most dangerous. It was harder to tell what they were thinking. He much preferred the suspects who found themselves in the interview room and couldn’t wait to spill their guts and tell their whole story. Sometimes they talked and talked and talked, and the difficulty was stopping them. It was as if they felt compelled to fill the silence of the room with all the stuff that was burning and seething inside their heads, waiting to get out.

A person who could keep secrets was rare. But it seemed there was at least one of them among the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club.

Carol Villiers was particularly unimpressed by Darius Roth. ‘Darius,’ she said after the Roths had left. ‘A biblical name, isn’t it? It makes me think of all those endless Hebrew family trees in the Old Testament. Adam begat Daniel, who begat David, et cetera.’

‘Actually, I think Darius was a Persian king,’ said Cooper. ‘Not Hebrew at all.’

‘Oh, Darius the Great?’

‘Yes. He had a vast empire in his day. They say he was ruler of half the world’s population.’

‘Our Darius’s empire is a bit smaller than that.’

‘Large or small,’ said Cooper, ‘all empires fall apart eventually.’

‘That’s very cryptic. What do you mean?’

‘I think we should start examining Darius Roth’s business affairs,’ said Cooper. ‘Let’s get Luke on to it.’

‘Why? No one has ever mentioned his businesses.’

‘That,’ said Cooper, ‘is exactly why.’

Sophie Pullen looked troubled. Her eyes were tired and dark-rimmed, as if she hadn’t slept since the day of Faith Matthew’s death.

‘Is something bothering you?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been turning it over and over in my mind since Sunday. I think I was near the place where Faith died. It’s hard to be certain, of course. But the more I think about it—’

‘You were with the Warburtons and the Gould brothers,’ said Cooper. ‘Did you separate from your party at some point?’

‘Only for a short while. I was right behind Sam and Pat Warburton, but I’d stopped to tie my bootlace and the others got ahead of me. I think I headed in the wrong direction for a few yards after that. That’s the reason I was there, in that particular spot. I could hear the waterfall and I got worried I was too near the drop. So that’s why I think it must have been where Faith fell. I was following someone, you see.’

‘Wait a minute. Who were you following?’ said Cooper.

‘I don’t know. I saw someone in a blue jacket. But I soon realised it wasn’t Sam or Pat Warburton and I turned back. Then I caught up with the others again.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It can’t have been a blue jacket.’

‘What?’

‘That doesn’t make sense. Perhaps it was someone wearing a blue scarf that you saw. You couldn’t have been sure in the fog.’

‘It was a blue jacket,’ repeated Sophie firmly.

‘Miss Pullen, I’ve been through the witness statements, the descriptions, the accounts of what everyone was wearing and all the photographs that were taken. Only one person on that walk was wearing a blue jacket — and that was you.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t have been mistaken about the colour. Even in the fog. It doesn’t confuse you so much that you’d mistake red for blue.’

‘No, but it might have been a blue scarf you saw,’ said Cooper. ‘Or a blue hat, perhaps. Not a blue jacket.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You do think I was mistaken.’

‘Mistaken or confused,’ he said. ‘In the end, it always comes down to a question of interpreting what you see.’

‘That’s just another way of saying you don’t believe me.’

Cooper paused. He was recollecting, as perhaps Sophie Pullen couldn’t, that Darius Roth had been wearing a long royal-blue lambswool scarf that day.

‘Was there anything else you noticed?’ he asked instead.

‘Yes, there’s one thing I haven’t described,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure I want to tell you about it now. You’ll say I was mistaken about this too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cooper. ‘I don’t mean to dismiss anything you say. If you noticed something else, it might be very important.’

She sighed. ‘Well, it was the shape of something, shining out of the fog.’

‘What do you mean, a shape?’

‘I can’t explain it. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.’

‘A rock formation,’ said Cooper. ‘There are many of them on the Kinder plateau. They have weird shapes sometimes.’

‘I know. I’ve seen them. But this...’

‘What?’

‘Well, it was the light. It shone through the shape, as if it wasn’t entirely solid. I realise I’m not explaining it very well.’

‘No, it’s fine. Go on.’

‘I’m calling it a shape,’ she said. ‘But actually it was a figure.’

‘You mean a human figure?’

‘Not really. Well... almost.’

Cooper could see she was struggling with her explanation, but he didn’t know how to help her. He let her take a few moments to recreate the memory in her mind.

‘The figure was huge,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain how big it looked. I was looking down on it and it seemed enormous. It stretched in an odd manner. It was like looking at a three-dimensional shadow, rather than a two-dimensional one, if you can understand that. And there was an arc of multicoloured light round its head, like part of a rainbow. Yes, it seemed to be a shadow, but a shadow of what? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I saw it. I looked at it for a few seconds; then it moved.’

‘Moved?’

‘Yes, it moved. Shimmered and moved. And then it was gone.’

She looked at Cooper for his reaction. What response could he give to that?

‘A trick of the fog,’ he said.

Sophie smiled. ‘Another one? Odd sounds, now strange shapes. It’s as if you think I was having illusions and just imagined it all.’

‘Kinder Scout is a strange place,’ said Cooper.

He was thinking about the photographs that had been collected from the phones of the walkers. Perhaps he needed to take a second look at them. Sophie Pullen was a good observer. And now he was beginning to get the feeling that there might have been something he had missed.

Sophie was no longer smiling at his tone. Cooper could see that she felt the same about Kinder as he did. She had been there, and she knew exactly how strange it could be.

‘I wouldn’t go back again, anyway,’ she said. ‘Next time — if there is a next time — I’d definitely be voting to turn back.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘That would probably be wise.’

None of the photographs taken on Kinder Scout were any good. There seemed to be nothing clear or in focus. But it wasn’t the fault of the photographers. Cooper could see that they’d been high enough on Kinder to be above cloud level. Mist had been lying deep in the groughs, dense against the wet mounds of peat, swirling slowly in a breeze off the mountain. Everything beyond the first few feet of foreground had faded out, as if a net curtain had been drawn over the view. In each picture, the background was nothing but a grey glimmer, mysterious and menacing.

Walkers were often tempted to continue higher and higher still to see what lay beyond the mist. Sometimes it could be a fatal mistake. Without proper equipment, there was no way of judging direction. What lay before you might be a rock formation, a cliff, a pool of icy water or a plunge into nine feet of grough. Some people couldn’t find their way off Kinder Scout without help. A few never found their way off at all.

Cooper looked through the list of photos he’d been given. Many were useless, being vague landscape shots — particularly those from the Gould brothers, who’d seemed more interested in cotton grass and sphagnum moss.

Though every member of the walking club had been carrying a smartphone, none of the photos were from Darius’s phone, or from Jonathan Matthew’s either. Cooper imagined that Darius would have seen himself as the centre of attention, so would never be on the other side of the lens. But why hadn’t Jonathan bothered? Well, perhaps that was the answer. He just wasn’t bothered. Jonathan had no interest in his surroundings, or in most of the people he was with. The one exception was his sister, though.

Many of the students’ photos showed Darius in his shooting jacket and fedora, often with Elsa close at his elbow in her Gucci windbreaker. Those from Elsa’s phone were almost entirely of Darius, some with him grinning at the camera, others more candid shots. It was interesting to observe how his face changed when he was unaware of being photographed. His expression lost that manic energy, the sparkle in the eyes, as well as the beaming smile. Whenever he thought he was unobserved, his look became more serious. In one or two shots, his stare looked lost and desperate. Like an actor, Darius was able to put on an instant public persona when it was needed.

And there was Faith Matthew, of course. She appeared in only two photographs, both from Millie Taylor’s phone. In one, Faith was walking near Liam Sharpe as the group made their way onto the Kinder plateau. The rocks along Sandy Heys ridge were visible in the background, so it must have been taken from somewhere near the Downfall.

The second showed her standing alone and pensive on a gritstone boulder while Karina Scott and Darius Roth pulled comic faces in the foreground. The fog had been closing in by then. Faith Matthew seemed like a figure posed dramatically against an artificial backdrop, a stage set lit from within to make it look more menacing.

He pulled out half a dozen shots and held each one to the light from his desk lamp as he studied them closely. These were all taken when the fog was at its thickest on Kinder. Millie and Karina had perhaps thought they could capture the atmosphere in a single digital snap. Instead, everything had washed out in a grey miasma.

He peered more closely at some of the later photographs, in which the fog was thickest. Were there lights in the murk? They might just be reflections from a flash on a phone camera, or an optical illusion caused by the fog itself. The impression meant nothing now, though he could see it might have struck someone on the moor as significant at the time.

Tales about the Devil’s Bonfires went back generations. Cooper’s own grandmother would have pointed towards Bleaklow and the Bronze Age mound of Torside Castle and Glossop Low and talk about ‘the devil’s lights’ that hovered above the Devil’s Elbow. Motorists has sometimes reported lights that looked like distress flares above the moors. One story said the lights were torches carried by phantom legions marching along the Devil’s Dyke, a Roman road linking the fort at Glossop with the Hope Valley. Many of the folk tales focused on the Devil’s Elbow, a dangerous bend in the Glossop to Woodhead road above Ogden Clough, a boundary between the inhabited valley and the desolate moor.

Even in recent years, strings of moving lights had been mistaken for ramblers lost on the mountain. A Mountain Rescue team had turned out from their base at Glossop on several occasions when lights or flares had been spotted, only to find the lights fade as they approached. Local police no longer passed on reports of mystery lights unless they felt it was a genuine sighting of a distress flare.

In his grandmother’s day, these phenomena were put down to devils and witchcraft. Now, it was more likely to be attributed to aliens and UFOs. But the traditional explanation he met with most often was that the lights were mischievous spirits intent on leading travellers astray.

And yes, there were lights in the fog. Cooper could see them himself.

But then he found the most striking photograph of them and realised he was looking at quite a different phenomenon. He sat back in his chair and breathed the name to himself.

‘A Brocken spectre,’ he said.

Carol Villiers sat across his desk a few minutes later and looked at him as if she’d misheard what he said.

‘A what?’ she asked.

‘You’ve not heard of it?’ said Cooper.

‘No, never.’

‘It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon, but it doesn’t occur very often. The conditions have to be just right, so most people have never seen one. It only happens when you’re looking down on a bank of mist or cloud in front of you and you have the sun directly behind you. The light projects your shadow through the mist, sometimes in a triangular shape.’

Cooper found himself standing up from his chair and gesturing as he tried to explain how it worked.

‘The strange thing is, you can only see your own spectre. If someone is standing right next to you, they can’t see yours, just their own.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘A kind of giant grey creature. They call it “the Big Grey Man” in Scotland. It’s an enormous, magnified shadow figure, and the head is surrounded by glowing rings of coloured light. They call it a “glory”. The magnification of the shadow is an optical illusion. The figure can even appear to move because of a shift in the cloud layer. It’s caused by light refracted through suspended water droplets in the air.’

‘A Brocken?’

‘A Brocken spectre. The name comes from the Harz Mountains in Germany. The first climber who saw one was so frightened by it that he fell to his death. He was killed by his own shadow, Carol.’