Lost River

18

A man with white hair was playing a guitar in the Shaw Croft Centre near Boots the Chemist and the Co-op. He was performing a version of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’.

Near Victoria Square, St John Street still had its famous gallows-style pub sign spanning the street. It bore what must be one of the longest pub names in England — The Green Man and Black’s Head Royal Hotel. It sounded like three pubs, but was actually only one. Mounted on top of the sign was the head of the black boy himself. Seen from the Dig Street end, he was grinning like an idiot. But from the other side, his painted red lips were turned down in mock sadness. The guide books still referred to him as the ‘blackamoor’.

Heavy lorries were struggling to get past a keg delivery at the pub. Of course, it was no longer a brewery dray, but a lorry owned by Kuehne amp; Nagel drinks logistics.

Cooper realized that he might have chosen the wrong day. It was market day in Ashbourne, and parking spaces were in high demand. The market itself was only a small one, nothing like the size of Edendale’s. But people from the surrounding area were in town doing their shopping, or having tea at Spencer’s the Bakers tea rooms in the Market Place under the antique Turog sign.

Lodge’s supermarket was located in the southern half of the town, near the corner of London Road and Blenheim Road, just down from the Quality Inn and the Black Sheep Bar. Across the road were commercial premises on the Airfield Industrial Estate. Alruba Rubber, Artisan Biscuits, Vital Earth Organic Compost. The mixture of smells must be interesting over there. A forklift truck bumped up the road, carrying a stack of pallets to an engineering works.

The assistant manager of Lodge’s was David Underwood, a man in his thirties with a neat goatee beard and the sort of red hair that suggested distant Viking ancestors. When he met Cooper in the office, he was just removing a white coat.

‘I was about to go off shift,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could give me a lift home? I only live just up the road. I normally walk.’

‘Fine,’ said Cooper. It would be a better place to talk anyway. He could see members of staff already looking their way, wondering what his visit was all about.

Underwood lived in a nice post-war semi-detached house on Old Derby Road. Lots of hedges and larch lap fencing. Handy for the golf club, if you were interested. And Cooper noticed that all the streets in this area seemed to be named after plants — Rowan, Poplar, Chestnut, Lime. On Willow Meadow Road, they passed the Pinecroft Stores.

David Underwood invited him in.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked. ‘Is it anything to do with the death of Bob Nield’s little girl? We’ve all been very upset about that. A lot of the staff took time off to go to the funeral.’

Cooper remembered Robert Nield describing the Lodge’s staff as a big family. But was that entirely true?

‘Yes, I met one of your staff after the service. Marjorie Evans.’

‘Our checkout supervisor. She’s been at Lodge’s for years. We couldn’t manage without her.’

‘Are all the staff so loyal and contented?’

Underwood looked at him sideways. ‘I suppose Marjorie said something to you, did she? She’s a lovely woman, but she can be a bit of a gossip. Likes people to think she knows things they don’t, if you understand me.’

‘So if I asked you your opinion of Robert Nield, would it be an entirely positive one?’

With a smile, Underwood turned to gaze out of his front window at Old Derby Road. ‘It depends on how persistent you’re planning to be. I could say the two of us see totally eye to eye, and you might go away satisfied. But if you’re intending to talk to any of the staff, you’d get a different story. And then you would know I was lying.’

‘Well, it’s probably best not to start by telling any lies then, Mr Underwood,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, the fact is, we’ve had a few disagreements about the running of the store. Business isn’t good at the moment. The competition is too intense. If we don’t adapt and change, we’ll go down, like so many other businesses. That’s my view, anyway.’

‘And Mr Nield is more of a traditionalist, perhaps?’

‘He’s very conservative,’ said Underwood. ‘He says Lodge’s have unique values, and we’ve got to stick to them. But that’s not what customers look for these days, is it? They shop on convenience and price. The only value they want is value for money. Special offers — three for twos and BOGOFs. Locally sourced products are good, but it’s not the priority, if we’re going to survive.’

‘I can see you’re both probably quite passionate about it.’

‘We are. Bob Nield has a vested interest in the store, of course. But it’s my livelihood, too. I want a career in retailing. I don’t want to be part of a failing operation.’

‘Do you have disagreements about the staff too?’ asked Cooper.

Underwood shrugged. ‘Oh, sometimes. But, to be fair, Bob has a good eye for hiring staff. He can assess people pretty well. And, once they’re on the payroll, they become part of the family. He treats everyone like an uncle. That’s the part of the job he really loves, I think. Presiding over his family. The trouble is — some of his family know that he’s leading them towards disaster.’

Cooper nodded. It wasn’t an uncommon story. Nield sounded like a man who was giving far more attention to his work family than to his real one back home. Perhaps that was because he had more control in the workplace, the power over the pay packet, the ability to hire and fire. In the Nields’ home, Cooper suspected that Dawn was the one in control.

He turned back to Underwood.

‘You don’t happen to know a man called Sean Deacon, sir?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Cooper was surprised. It had been a bit of a shot in the dark.

‘You do?’

‘He worked for us for a while.’

‘At Lodge’s?’

‘Yes, Bob Nield gave him a job. I think he felt sorry for the man. Deacon wasn’t long out of prison then. He was trying to get his life back on track, he said. He seemed genuinely to want to work — though I would have said he was a bit over qualified for stacking shelves. He used to be a teacher, I think. But that profession is closed to him now.’

‘Did you have trouble with him?’

‘No, he was a perfectly good member of staff. Honest, punctual, hard working…’

‘Is there a “but”?’

‘There’s always a “but”,’ said Underwood. ‘It was other people who had problems with him. I mean, when it got around the area that a convicted paedophile was working at the store. You can imagine what that was like. Some of our customers were up in arms, and said they daren’t bring their children into the store while he was here.’

‘I see.’

‘All nonsense, of course. Complete hysteria.’

‘Do you have any children yourself?’ asked Cooper.

‘No.’ Underwood looked at him. ‘Oh, I see. You mean I can’t really understand how parents might feel in those circumstances. Well, perhaps you’re right. Anyway, Bob Nield had to let Deacon go in the end. I suppose we were being tainted by association. It was a real shame, though. The guy seemed absolutely genuine to me.’

‘Yes, I met him.’

‘Did he get another job?’

‘Yes. But I’m not sure it’s any better than stacking your shelves.’

‘Pity.’

‘Were there any anonymous letters written to the store at the time?’

Underwood hesitated. ‘Yes, a few.’

‘Did you report them to the police?’

‘No, we didn’t take it too seriously. And we’re hardly going to take our customers to court over something like that. Business is difficult enough as it is.’

‘I wonder if you kept any on file?’

‘No, I’m sure we didn’t. Why are you asking?’

‘Because we had one about Robert Nield, after the death of his daughter,’ said Cooper. ‘You haven’t heard about it? The letter was mentioned in the Eden Valley Times.’

‘We don’t get it here,’ said Underwood. ‘It’s the good old ANT — the Ashbourne News Telegraph.’

‘Of course. Well, if I had any idea who wrote it, that would help me.’

Underwood sighed, and looked faintly guilty.

‘I’m afraid that would probably be my mother. She has religion issues.’

‘How bad?’

‘Oh, bad. Basically, she believes that she’s one of the chosen. When the Apocalypse comes, she’ll get called up to Heaven in the Rapture, leaving nothing but an empty heap of clothes and the rest of us poor buggers burning in Hell.’

‘That affects her social interactions, I suppose.’

‘Oh, yeah. She won’t hardly speak to you, unless you’re among the chosen. You know, the way she looks at people sometimes — it’s as if they’re already burning, and she’s quite content that they deserve every second of the agony.’

‘Not the most congenial of neighbours, then.’

‘No.’

Then Underwood started to chuckle to himself.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Cooper.

‘Just a thought that popped into my head. They talk about “neighbours from Hell”, don’t they? But maybe a neighbour from Heaven could be every bit as bad.’

‘Is she at home?’

‘No, she works at Moy Park — the poultry company on the industrial estate over there.’

‘If I could be sure it was her…’

‘Handwriting that looks like a spider’s crawled across the page? Threats that God will wreak his vengeance on the wicked sinners?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She took a major objection to Bob Nield over the Sean Deacon business, blamed him personally for introducing wickedness. Getting rid of Deacon wasn’t enough for her. She practically crossed herself with garlic every time she saw Bob. You know, like you do with the Devil.’

‘Vampires maybe,’ said Cooper.

‘Funny that,’ said Underwood, with a small smile. ‘I always thought Bob Nield had a look of Christopher Lee about him. He’d make a good Count Dracula.’

Robert Nield looked at the photograph Cooper showed him, the shot of himself and Sean Deacon standing a few feet apart on the banks of the River Dove, below the limestone spur.

‘It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘That never happened.’

‘The evidence is there, sir.’

‘Where did you get this from?’

‘Does that matter?’

Nield was sweating inside the car. They were sitting in Cooper’s Toyota at the Dovedale car park. It had seemed preferable to making a nuisance of himself at their home in Ashbourne again, where he was starting to wear out his welcome. This might be something that Dawn and the rest of the family didn’t need to know about. There was no point in piling on the agony when it wasn’t necessary.

‘It’s true that I helped Sean Deacon out when he needed a job,’ said Nield. ‘He came to the store for an interview, and I was impressed with him. He was always open and honest about his background. I did my best for him, but it didn’t work out. That’s all.’

‘But you’ve been in contact with him since then, haven’t you?’

‘No. Well…’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘He phoned me at home last night. He was pretty upset. He told me he’d lost his job at the hotel.’

‘They sacked him from the Grand?’

‘Yes. He said it was because he’d been interviewed by the police again.’

‘That would have been me,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, he said people were talking, and the management didn’t like it. The same old story, I’m afraid. He’ll never be able to put his life back together, no matter how hard he tries.’

‘Why did Deacon phone you?’

‘Because I’m the only person who’s ever tried to help him.’

Cooper wondered if it was as simple as that. Could there be more to the relationship between Deacon and Nield, a comradeship made from shared interests? Paedophiles and child abusers had to find their friends where they could get them. They forged strong bonds in the face of adversity, like soldiers under fire.

He tapped the photograph again. ‘But you met him here in Dovedale on Monday, didn’t you sir? There’s hardly any point in denying it.’

Nield opened his mouth to speak, closed it again.

‘Are you going to arrest me?’ he said. ‘Because if you are, I’m not saying anything until I can speak to a solicitor.’

‘Of course not. We wouldn’t want it any other way, sir. We have rules here, you know. Codes of Practice, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. All for your protection.’

Nield looked confused. He’d probably watched too many detective dramas on TV, and been misled by all those scenes where the suspect was left sweating in a bare room, bullied and shouted at until he broke down and confessed. Sometimes those TV programmes were useful. They raised false expectations, and people were disorientated when they encountered the real thing. Many a first-time offender had discovered that police officers were real human beings, who treated you with politeness and consideration, brought you a cup of tea and asked how you felt. The British character couldn’t resist that treatment. It was only fair to be polite in return and tell the nice policeman what he wanted to know.

There were regulars who knew the score, of course. Hard cases who were doing the ‘no comment’ bit even before you got them in the van. But Robert Nield wasn’t one of those. Cooper was willing to bet that he’d never been in a police station in his life.

‘Look,’ said Nield. ‘If you’re not going to arrest me, let’s walk along the river to the place where that photograph is supposed to have been taken.’

Cooper hesitated. He didn’t want to go near the river again. The thought of it was disturbing, the water seemed to fill his eyes and mouth the moment he thought about it. He shuddered, knew that what Nield was suggesting made sense.

‘All right.’

They walked in silence past the stepping stones, alongside the weirs, and skirted the grassy spur of Lovers’ Leap to reach a spot close to the Natural Arch and Reynard’s Cave. Cooper stayed as far as he could from the bank, trying to shut out the sound of the rushing water.

‘About here, I think,’ said Nield.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You know, these rocks in used to be coral reefs, when this part of Derbyshire was under a tropical sea. It took millennia for water and wind to eat away the limestone and form those caves and arches, and leave the harder rock projecting from the valley. That arch was originally the mouth of a cavern until the roof fell in.’

‘Your point is?’ said Cooper.

‘It used to take thousands of years to change the shape of a landscape like this. Now we can change it in a few minutes — with the help of a computer.’

‘What?’

‘Compare your photograph to the real thing.’

Cooper located the position that Nield had been standing by an oddly shaped outcrop of rock nearby. To the left of it on the bank was a stand of trees, and one of the ancient stumps with coins hammered into its cut surface. A money tree.

Then he held up the photo. The oddly shaped rock was there, just to the left of Nield. But the money tree wasn’t there. Behind Sean Deacon was a background of grassy bank, slightly blurred in the print. In fact, the closer he looked, the more blurred the grass seemed, as if it had melted.

He looked at Robert Nield, remembering his son’s digitally enhanced photographs, the face superimposed on the limestone cliff. It would be perfectly possible for Alex to merge two images and tinker with the background to make them look like one. It was a trick performed all the time by the professionals.

And Alex had three days to come up with this. If he’d shown Cooper the image on his computer screen in higher definition, the line between the two halves might have been more obvious. But the low-quality print-out had been enough to fool him. He had only focused on the people, not the background — just as Alex had expected him to. He knew that Cooper would fail to see the pattern of the landscape.

‘I suppose you’ve guessed where I got this from, Mr Nield,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. My son is very talented. I did tell you that.’

‘Yes, you did. But why would he deliberately try to get you into trouble?’

Robert Nield shrugged and raised his hands, as if appealing to the river and the spires of the Twelve Apostles.

‘Who knows why teenage boys do these things? Their minds are a mystery to me.’

‘Why are you still pursuing this, Ben?’ asked DI Hitchens when Cooper reported to him at West Street.

‘I’m convinced there was someone else there,’ said Cooper.

‘Someone nearby when Emily Nield drowned. Possibly Sean Deacon.’

‘The photograph was just a prank by the teenage son, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there’s no other evidence?’

‘None of the witnesses is specific about it, but if you read between the lines in their statements…’

As soon as he said that, he knew it was a mistake. The CPS didn’t read between the lines of a statement. Nor did a judge and jury. They only read what was there, the words that had actually been said by a witness. No one read between the lines, except a police officer who’d become obsessed and was trying too hard to make a case out of nothing.

‘All right, you don’t need to tell me, sir,’ he said.

Hitchens looked relieved. ‘Thank God, Ben. I’m glad you see sense. We can’t have you going off the rails, can we? Not right now.’

‘No, sir. Not right now.’

Cooper tried a smile, and Hitchens rubbed his hands together, a sure sign that he thought the conversation was at an end.

‘Let it be then, eh? Leave the Nields in peace.’

In the CID room, Cooper tried to concentrate on something else. He’d remembered an old acquaintance who had been serving with the RAF Police until recently. Carol Parry was a local woman, who had often talked about applying to Derbyshire Constabulary for a job when she finished her time in the RAF. Derbyshire would have welcomed her with open arms — officers with her experience were vital to balance the number of new recruits who were filtering into the ranks.

But, in the end, Parry had met a man from Coventry and had applied to join West Midlands Police instead, so they could be together. She was a loss to Derbyshire. But she might still remember him.

He called her and chatted to her for a while before explaining what he wanted.

‘Okay, Ben, I’ll do some asking around. Details will be a bit hard to come by, you know — but I might get a general idea of what’s going on.’

‘That’s brilliant, Carol. I owe you one. Thanks a lot.’

Then Cooper turned his attention to the transcripts of the interviews with Michael Lowndes and his associate from the Devonshire Estate, who were now both under arrest.

Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst had done a good job with the interviews. But reading over the transcripts again, Cooper could see that there were some questions which had been leading. Irvine had almost put the answers into Lowndes’ mouth, so that he knew what he was expected to say. Awareness of that tendency in yourself came with experience.

For a moment, Cooper thought about the statements from witnesses in Dovedale. He realized that many of those individuals had been asked questions that could have influenced their subsequent memories. ‘Where were you when the girl fell into the water?’ ‘Did you see her bang her head on the stone?’ Anyone who’d been asked those questions would have no doubt that the girl had fallen, would believe that they’d actually seen the stone on which she hit her head. Careless phrasing during the interviews could have planted the images in their minds. It was called ‘verbal overshadowing’. It was a mistake to underestimate the power words had to affect the mind.

Cooper could still remember what it was like when he was a new, wet-behind-the-ears detective constable just learning the ropes. It didn’t seem all that long ago, really. But the years had passed quickly, and DC Luke Irvine was from a different generation.

His family were from West Yorkshire, some village between Huddersfield and Barns ley. Denby Dale? Wasn’t that the place they had giant pies? Irvine had once confided that his father used to work in the mining-equipment industry, but his job went when all the pits closed down. So he got a job at Rolls-Royce in Derby, and the family moved down to Derbyshire. He was only five at the time, so he didn’t remember much about Denby Dale, except for visits to his grandma. It sounded odd to Cooper. So many people seemed to be displaced. Was it all that unusual now to stay in the area where you grew up?

And Irvine had another quality that might come in useful. He was a bit of a computer geek in his spare time.

‘Well, you might call it geek language,’ said Irvine when Cooper showed him Alex Nield’s profile. ‘But some of this stuff is leetspeak.’

‘What?’

‘Leetspeak.’

‘Luke, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t know what leetspeak is?’

‘Not a clue. And I bet the Nields haven’t either.’

‘It’s a kind of cipher that you only come across on the internet. Originally, it began with users of the old bulletin board systems in the 1980s. If you had “elite” status, you could access special chat rooms, things like that. Elite became “leet”, you see.’

‘Right.’

‘They used these mis-spellings and ASCII characters to get round text filters, so they could discuss forbidden topics. They became a sort of code. Now, young kids use it to show off how knowledgeable they are. Everyone wants to be thought of as “leet”.’

‘So it would be used to show off, and to stop outsiders understanding what you’re saying?’

‘Yeah. And to mock newbies, of course.’

‘Noobs.’

‘That’s it.’

Irvine looked at the profile again.

‘Some of it is just text language, though. Like using “u” instead of “you”, or “n” instead of “and”.’

‘Those are the parts I can get,’ said Cooper.

He scrolled down to the sentence that had disturbed him most. u were born wrong n u must die!!!!!

‘I’ve seen a lot worse than that,’ said Irvine. ‘They can get pretty nasty, these kids. The general rule is, the nastier they talk, the younger they are. How old is this kid?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘About right.’

‘So what about this one?’ said Cooper. im s0 1337 taht i pwn ur @ss n00b!!!!

‘Okay, that’s easy,’ said Irvine. ‘A zero is used in place of an “o”. That’s an obvious one — so “n00b” instead of “noob”.’

‘Yes.’

‘Common mis-typings come into leet — so “taht” is deliberate, not a mistake. So is “pwn” which originally meant “own”, the “p” being next to the “o” on the keyboard. And the “@” symbol replaces an “a”.’

‘Okay so far,’ said Cooper.

Irvine looked up. ‘It feels strange just explaining this letter by letter. It’s not what you’re supposed to do with it. The idea is, you either understand it straight off, or you don’t. You’re either leet literate, or you’re not. There’s no in between.’

‘Well, I think I’m getting there,’ said Cooper. ‘Of course, “ur” is “your”, yes?’

‘Correct.’

‘But what’s this “1337”? What’s the significance of the number?’

‘Well, that’s leet,’ said Irvine.

‘I know, but — ’

‘No, I mean “1337” is leetspeak for “leet”.’

‘Say that again.’

Irvine grinned. ‘The numbers stand for letters, Ben. The one is “1”, the three is “e”…’

‘…and the seven is a “t”.’

‘You got it: “1337” is “leet” in leetspeak.’

Cooper blew out a breath, as if he’d been working physically hard for the last few minutes.

‘It makes your brain hurt a bit.’

‘So the sentence reads…?’ asked Irvine.

‘I’m so leet that I own your ass, noob.’

‘w00t!!!!!’

‘What?’

‘That’s a leet expression. w00t!!!!! It’s an exclamation of joy, or success.’

‘You should use it with lots of exclamation marks, I imagine,’ said Cooper.

Irvine laughed. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Luke?’

‘It’s good to get a chance to show off your talents.’

‘I’m so leet that I own your ass, noob. A bit American, but I suppose we get the message.’

‘The kid probably copied a lot of this stuff from someone else’s profile, you know.’

‘Probably.’

‘Right down at the bottom, we’ve got brb kk?? You see those a lot in messages — “brb” is “be right back”. You say “brb” when you’re ending a conversation. Sometimes you’re not coming back at all, it’s just a way of getting rid of someone you don’t want to talk to. And “kk??” is just “okay?”’

‘Some of it is just decoration, though,’ said Cooper. ‘The sword and the face.’

‘Yeah, just ASCII art.’

‘Art?’

‘That’s what they call it.’

‘These city names don’t mean anything to you, do they? Engine House, Dutchman, The Folly.’

Irvine shook his head. ‘Can’t help you there. They’re plain vanilla. Ordinary English. They must have particular meaning for the user.’

‘And is this just for decoration? It looks like something to do with money.’

Cooper pointed at the repeated characters.?0$7?0$7?0$7?0$7?0$7 R1v32

‘No, that’s leet,’ said Irvine. ‘A slightly different use of the character set, but you would do that to confuse the issue.’

‘Successfully, in this case.’

‘You see, the pound sign stands for an “1”…’

‘Maybe,’ said Cooper, ‘you could translate the words, rather than doing it letter by letter.’

Irvine shrugged. ‘Okay. This is what it says.’

He drew a message pad towards him and wrote it out in big capital letters that could be understood even by the most ignorant noob.

Cooper ripped the paper from the pad and stared at it. It read:

LOST

LOST

LOST

LOST RIVER