Fall Down Dead

9

A damp road, damp grass, damp sheep, a stone wall dripping with moisture. As Ben Cooper headed out of Edendale towards Hayfield, he could already see the mist hanging low over the moors and drifting into the valleys. Dark copses stood out against the grey background, a series of hills getting fainter and fainter into the distance.

As he left the outskirts of the town behind, the stone slates of the roofs gradually petered out along the River Eden, the deep green of the Eden Forest swarming along the opposite hillside. Beyond the limestone hills and a patchwork of fields divided by drystone walls lay the brooding, desolate moors of the Dark Peak, rising to the plateau of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District.

The route took him westwards through a series of White Peak villages. Abney, Bradwell, Hucklow, Tideswell. To Cooper, they were all places steeped in history and crime.

Turning onto the A623, he hit the A6 near Chapel-en-le-Frith and headed north over Chinley Head. He could have driven to Castleton and crossed the Winnats Pass to reach the same point, but even in October the area was likely to be busy with tourists visiting the show caves and Blue John mines.

Only ten miles north of Buxton, Hayfield was an old village, once a staging post on the packhorse route across the Pennines from Cheshire to Yorkshire. The settlement had grown with the arrival of cotton and the railways until it straggled down the valley into the basin of the River Sett.

North-east of the village lay a reservoir that controlled the flow of the River Kinder, avoiding the risk of flooding that had previously once been a serious problem in Hayfield, necessitating raising the height of the main street. The church had famously been flooded, causing corpses to rise up from their graves.

These days, it was the gateway to the west side of Kinder. An increasing number of residents were people who’d moved from Manchester and Stockport seeking a better quality of life. Hayfield was undergoing gentrification.

There was a big car park on the western side of the village, next to a now deserted visitor centre at the start of the Sett Valley Trail. But that side was mostly residential. The shops and pubs were on the eastern side, where the streets were choked with parked cars. At every corner, he found vehicles coming at him on the wrong side of the road.

A narrow road leading off to the side of the Royal Hotel passed another pub, the Sportsman, before arriving at Bowden Bridge quarry, the starting point for the famous Mass Trespass. From here, the view extended over the valley of the Sett to the high plateau of Kinder Scout, stretching across the eastern horizon like an enormous beached whale. What looked like a weeping wound in the whale’s flank was Kinder Downfall.

National Trust rangers had opened an access onto the moor for the police. Cooper met up with Carol Villiers and they got a ride up the hill in a Land Rover. They would have to walk the rest of the way when they came within reach of Kinder Gates and the Sandy Heys cliffs.

Villiers looked at him as they clambered into the back of the Land Rover.

‘It is an unexplained death,’ she said. ‘But probably an accident.’

‘We can’t say that yet.’

Cooper stared out of the window at the landscape, wondering if it was Kinder itself that was raising the hackles of his suspicion.

‘What do we know about the victim so far?’ he said.

‘Faith Matthew,’ said Villiers. ‘She was a nurse. Contracted to an agency, so she worked in different locations, both NHS and private hospitals. She has an address in Market Street, Hayfield. Aged thirty, unmarried, but there’s a boyfriend in the picture, by the name of Greg Barrett. He’s an electrician, runs his own business in the Hayfield and New Mills area.’

‘Any family?’

‘Not locally. Her parents live in Manchester. They’re due in Hayfield today, though. And there’s a younger brother, Jonathan, who was also on the walk yesterday. Luke is working on getting some information on the rest of the group. The only other thing we know is that Miss Matthew drove a silver Honda Jazz, which has been recovered from the car park at Bowden Bridge quarry.’

‘Good.’

When they got out of the Land Rover, Cooper could see the fog was still lingering at this height. In places it was dense enough to reduce visibility. It also changed the sound of the voices he could hear, their tones distorted as if the upper range of human vocal chords had been suppressed.

‘High-pitched sounds are muffled by fog,’ said Villiers when he mentioned it. ‘That’s why foghorns have such a low pitch, to carry a long distance.’

‘Something to do with the vibration of air on water molecules, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’

Beyond the covering of fog, Kinder was basically a massive bog. No one with any sense would come walking here after a period of heavy rain. Well... Cooper mentally corrected himself. No one with the smallest bit of local knowledge.

In places, the peat layer was fifteen feet thick. But erosion had already set in five millennia ago. Higher rainfall had worn deep gulleys into a pattern of meandering groughs, cutting right through to the bedrock. The process had been accelerated by acid rain from the nearby industrial cities. Now a trig point on Kinder stood a couple of metres clear of the eroded surface around it.

Cooper could almost feel the connection with the past through the soles of his boots on the muddy track. Fifteen feet represented a lot of the world’s history. You could walk along the groughs and pass between walls of peat representing ten thousand years of the Earth’s formation. It was like walking in a channel dug directly through time.

These moors had been laid down after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Within that black, sodden mass lay the remains of dead trees, grass, fungi, insects and animal carcasses, all preserved by the acidic conditions and a lack of oxygen. Occasionally, human remains were unearthed from a bog, shrivelled but intact, dried like a pickled walnut.

On the surface lurked dark gritstone outcrops, weather-beaten rocks sculpted into shapes the human eye struggled to make sense of. They’d been formed by exposure to ice, rain and wind over lengths of time he couldn’t even imagine. They stood here on Kinder like reminders of the prehistoric past. Nothing that happened in the last few centuries had even touched them.

Ahead, Cooper could see uniformed officers and crime scene examiners.

‘That’s the top of the Downfall,’ said Villiers.

Kinder Downfall flowed west over the gritstone cliffs at the edge of the plateau, barely a trickle in summer but impressive when it was in full spate. With a strong westerly wind, the water was blown back on itself, and the resulting cloud of spray could be seen from as far away as Stockport. If you were close to the Downfall, you could get wet from above and below at the same time. In cold winters the water could freeze against the rock, creating vertical sheets of ice that hung in the air like organ pipes, providing a challenge for climbers with their axes, ropes and crampons.

No wonder this was regarded as a magical place. Even on the sunniest day, that cliff of shattered rock looked like the edge of the world. He’d stood at the top many times and looked down over the valley, his eye attracted by the glint of light off a pool of water below — the legendary Mermaid’s Pool.

The village of Kinder once lay on the side of the mountain. Now there was only a mythical nymph who came to bathe in the Mermaid’s Pool. If you met her, she would either make you immortal or drag you to the bottom of the pool and drown you. The water was said to be so deep that it connected to the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinder was an awfully long way from the sea. But a fact like that didn’t get in a storyteller’s way. Inconvenient reality was never a barrier to the creation of a legend.

At the Downfall, the forensic team had cordoned off the approach to the edge of a massive gritstone slab that jutted out into space over the ravine. Dead Woman’s Drop. There must be an old story to account for the name, some incident from the distant past that Cooper was unaware of.

Outdoor crime scenes often caused problems for officers trying to tape off the scene. Sometimes they could use a tree or a bush, or a gate or a wall. Here on Kinder, there were none of those things. There weren’t any trees in sight across the whole of the plateau. Strong winds and rain could be problems too. They would be struggling to get tents up in this exposed position. The only answer was to work as quickly as possible and hope for the best.

Stepping plates also looked a bit futile. But Cooper followed the designated route to the edge and looked down, experiencing a momentary wave of vertigo at the sudden shift in perspective. A splash of bright red seemed to leap at him out of the fog, and he almost ducked at the sensation of something hurtling towards him.

But it was an illusion. That splash of red wasn’t moving. It was Faith Matthew’s body, lying spreadeagled at the foot of the Downfall, broken on the jagged and unforgiving rock. She’d fallen fifty feet from a vertical drop into the ravine. Her red jacket was spread out around her as if it had ballooned like a parachute as she fell. Her left arm and leg were thrown out at an odd angle, the bones shattered by the impact on the rock. Her right arm and leg were concealed beneath her body.

Cooper frowned. That seemed an odd way to fall. The natural instinct when you felt yourself falling face forward was to throw both your arms out to protect yourself. This looked as though Faith had been twisting her body as she fell, like a cat adjusting its position in mid-air. Could she have bounced off the side of the Downfall on the way down?

He kneeled and peered cautiously over the edge. No, the drop was sheer. There was nothing Faith could have hit before she impacted on the rock where she lay.

Thoughtfully, Cooper stood up and brushed off his knees. Damp had soaked into his trousers just in those few seconds of contact with the surface of the gritstone.

He walked back to the cordon and examined the spot Faith Matthew had fallen from. A CSI was crouched over the ground with a camera.

‘What have you got there?’ Cooper called.

‘A few shoe marks in a layer of mud. They’re not very clear.’

‘Just one set of boots? Or more?’

‘Just one, so far as we can tell.’

Cooper pointed at a print, set at a different angle to the others.

‘Have you recorded that one?’

‘Of course. Why?’

‘I’d like someone to focus on analysing which direction that print is facing.’

‘Will do.’

Cooper took another look at the corpse. It glittered with moisture, and the gritstone was dark and wet all around it. A few trickles of water still dripped from the overhang onto the body. Faith’s hat had fallen a few yards away and teetered on the brink of the waterfall.

But he couldn’t see Faith Matthew’s face from here. And that was what he needed most of all.

After a moment’s hesitation, he called Chloe Young’s number at the hospital in Edendale.

‘Ben? What’s up?’ she said.

‘I’d like you to take a look at a body in situ,’ he said. ‘Are you free?’

‘Now? Yes, OK, if you want my opinion. Where is it?’

Cooper told her.

‘Oh my goodness. I’d better make sure I’ve got the right gear.’

‘I’m sure you’ll have something that will do. I’ll get someone to watch out for you and drive you up onto the moor.’

‘Wait... Is this the missing hiker?’ said Young.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Not an accident, then? She was pushed?’

‘That,’ said Cooper, ‘is what I need your opinion on.’