The Corpse Bridge

38

From Knowle Abbey, Cooper took a detour via the Corpse Bridge. He was able to bounce the Toyota halfway down the track, with the steering wheel lurching violently in his hands.

Off-roaders had been blamed for destroying many of the stone setts and churning up the ground into muddy ruts on either side. Although this had been designated as a byway open to all traffic for many years, the national park authority had imposed a traffic regulation order to exclude trail bikes and four-wheel drives.

But Cooper had heard off-roaders say they had as much right as anyone to enjoy the landscape. They pointed out that all kinds of recreation caused damage. If local authorities were too cash-strapped to maintain rights of way properly, that was a problem for everyone. As usual there were two sides to every story.

The police presence had gone from the scene of Sandra Blair’s death. The tape had been removed but for a few scraps still fluttering from a tree, where an officer had cut it instead of trying to untie a tight, wet knot. The forensic examination had been complete, the search had reached its outer perimeter, and the scene had been released for public access.

Not that there were many members of the public around. Unlike some more accessible murder scenes, the Corpse Bridge hadn’t attracted ghoulish spectators.

He walked towards the bridge and stopped at the parapet. Though it was daylight now, he was taken back to the moment he saw Sandra Blair’s body lying in the water just down there under the arch, tangled in the roots of a sycamore. Those dark, wet boulders and the roaring of the water. Cries of pain and a victim’s last, dying breath.

He relived that light-headed feeling, the result of a lack of sleep, and felt himself almost slipping again in the mud on the bank of the river. There had been so little blood. No more than a few drops on the stone.

Cooper didn’t need to spend any more time thinking about it. He was sure that his original impression had been perfectly correct when he stood here early on that morning after Halloween. Sandra Blair wasn’t alone when she died.

That afternoon Cooper took a call from Brendan Kilner. He sounded nervous and he was practically gabbling down the phone, like a man afraid of being overheard if he didn’t finish the call quickly.

‘Okay, so,’ said Kilner. ‘First of all, promise me my name doesn’t get mentioned in any way, shape or form.’

‘As long as you weren’t involved in a murder, Brendan,’ said Cooper. ‘Then all bets would be off.’

‘We both know I wasn’t. It was one of those people at the bridge.’

Cooper didn’t need to ask what bridge. ‘Which of those people exactly?’

‘I don’t know. Honest, I don’t. It could have been any of them or all of them, as far as I’m concerned. They’re all as mad as each other.’

‘Can you arrange a meeting?’

‘I suppose I could. But I wouldn’t do it. It would be too dangerous for me.’

‘I’m not expecting you to go to the meeting,’ said Cooper. ‘I will.’

The line was silent for a moment and Cooper thought Kilner had gone. But he must have been covering the phone with his hand, because his breathing suddenly came back on the line.

‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘But I don’t need to arrange anything. There’s a place you’ll find the person you want. At least, you will if you go there tonight.’

‘Excellent. Where is this place? Not the Grandfather Oak, preferably.’

‘No, that was just a one-off. But there’s a spot they’ve used before for meetings, where no one ever goes now. That’s where they’ll be. But they’re all canny, though, so don’t scare anyone off. No lights or sirens, you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, Brendan,’ said Cooper. ‘But where is this place?’

‘You might know it. The old cheese factory.’

Cooper put the phone down and sat at his desk for a few minutes, turning the situation over in his mind. It was a challenge, of course. But he had to prove that he was up to it.

He had a decision to take. There was one phone call he ought to make. Though it might put everything he hoped for at risk.

By late evening the air was cold, with a bright moon high in the sky behind a haze of fog, casting a pale-green sheen over the landscape. The streets of Hartington were very quiet. A smell of woodsmoke hung in the air, with a faint roar of central heating systems venting steam.

Ben Cooper couldn’t explain the feeling of unease this corner of the village gave him. He knew he’d been to the old cheese factory before, years ago when he was a uniformed PC. The factory had been working then, a thriving enterprise. The bays had been busy with vans and lorries. Men in blue boiler suits and yellow high-vis jackets walking around outside, the hum of machinery from inside the buildings. There was none of that now. The factory was dead.

Standing empty and abandoned, there was nothing attractive about the old stone buildings, or the newer sheds of green steel sheeting. They belonged firmly to the utilitarian side of the village, not the tourist part. Yes, the factory was only a short stroll from the duck pond and the Old Cheese Shop, but it was a step back into Hartington’s past.

Cooper walked between an empty car park and a long shed with a corrugated-iron roof covered in dense clumps of brown-green mould. Where a tall chimney was attached to the building, an orange stain had spread across the wall and run down on to the ground, discolouring the base of the chimney itself as if the lifeblood of the factory had slowly been draining away since its closure.

Two tall grey tanks stood in their own pond of green water. What the tanks had held, he couldn’t imagine. A network of steel pipes ran along the back wall of the factory, with weeds growing in all the crevices. There were CCTV cameras here, but he doubted they were working.

There didn’t seem to be much to steal here, though perhaps people would find ways to break into the factory for other purposes. It was inevitable with any abandoned building, especially in a spot like this where you wouldn’t be overlooked.

Cooper saw a small door standing open at the back of the main building. It was half-hidden under the mass of pipes and a steel platform supporting the hoods of a massive cooling system. Above it metal steps ran up the wall to a set of doors on the first floor. He watched and listened, but saw no movement and heard no noise from within the factory.

Then there was a metallic reverberation, a boom like a heavy object dropped on one of the empty tanks. But it came from behind him, not from the factory.

His heart thumping, Cooper whirled round. On top of a tank he glimpsed a figure just disappearing as someone descended a ladder. Where the person had been standing was a perfect vantage point to observe Cooper’s arrival. If it hadn’t been for that stray boot against the side of the tank, he might never have known anyone was there.

He cursed himself for not taking a more wary approach. But what had he been expecting when he came to Hartington, if not someone hiding out here? It was almost as if he’d deliberately given them a warning. And allowed them to escape.

But whoever it was, they hadn’t gone. Somehow they’d slipped round the back of one of the smaller sheds and reached the door into the main building, which had now closed behind them.

Cooper shivered and looked up at the sky. The moon was so bright it had created a ring of colours through the prism effect of the fog, like a circular rainbow. Well, a rainbow was supposed to be a sign, a portent that something was about to happen, or a direction to a pot of gold. But a rainbow at night seemed all wrong. Was it an omen of something terrible about to happen?

Diane Fry was surprised to be handed a couple of forensics reports by an officer entering the CID room at West Street.

‘What are these?’ she said.

‘Results from some items that Detective Sergeant Cooper sent through for processing.’

‘Really?’

Fry became aware of Becky Hurst bobbing up like a child who always knew the right answer in class.

‘Those will be the items from Harpur Hill,’ said Hurst.

‘Yes, you’re right.’ Fry frowned at the first report. ‘A hat? And an LED torch?’

Hurst came over to her desk. ‘That’s it. We believe they were Sandra Blair’s possessions.’

‘We?’

Fry smiled. She knew that when Becky Hurst said ‘we’ she actually meant Ben Cooper.

Hurst didn’t flinch at her tone. ‘They were found concealed in a plastic bag and dumped in a drinking hole for cattle. Somebody must have taken them away from the scene of Sandra Blair’s death at the bridge to dispose of them. There’s got to be a reason for them doing that.’

‘I suppose there has,’ said Fry.

She was interested now. She opened the report and gazed at its results for a moment. Hurst began to get impatient.

‘Well, what does it say?’

‘They got a hit from a print on the casing of the torch,’ said Fry. ‘And from the inside of the plastic bag the items were in too.’

‘A hit? Seriously? So it was someone who’s already on the database.’

‘Yes.’

Fry had turned to the second report. ‘And what’s this? The lid of a marble tomb? These are prints recovered from the Lady Chapel at Knowle Abbey this morning. And the results match.’

‘They got a hit to the same person?’

‘Yes, the same.’

She put the report down and began to speak more briskly. ‘We need to assemble a team for an arrest. Request an armed response unit. We need to use all precautions. He’s known to possess two shotguns. And there’s a dog on the premises too.’

‘But who is it?’ insisted Hurst.

‘An individual with a conviction for poaching fourteen years ago. Jason Shaw.’

‘Great.’

Hurst began to make calls, but she stopped and turned back to Fry.

‘Diane, there’s one thing we’ve forgotten,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘What happened to the explosives stolen from Deeplow Quarry? Where are they now?’

The first explosion was shocking in its suddenness. It caught Cooper completely off-guard. He should have known it was coming, but the moment of expectant silence before the detonation made it all the more shocking when it happened.

The loud boom echoed across the village green and bounced off the walls of the limestone houses. It startled a flock of wood pigeons out of their evening roost in a sycamore tree on the edge of the churchyard. For a few moments the birds flapped in a panicked circle, passing overhead and silhouetting themselves against a cascade of light the explosion had hurled into the air.

Cooper looked round, embarrassed at his own reaction, ready to laugh it off if anyone had noticed. Tonight was a test. Fire, heat, explosions, the sight of blazing timbers. When he’d decided to come out on Bonfire Night, he had no idea how he would cope with these sights and sounds. But it was something he had to face. He couldn’t avoid it for ever. There was no future in trying to run away from the past.

A barrage of missiles shrieked across the sky like hunting demons. Cooper was deafened by the screeching and jumped in shock at a volley of bangs on the hillside behind it.

He stopped for a minute to pull himself together. Despite the cold air, he could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead and his hands trembled. The reaction was deep down inside him, impossible to deal with on a deliberate, conscious level. He would have to fight his way through it.

Cooper stood in the yard, his face lit by the coloured flashes, surrounded by crackling and the smell of charcoal and sulphur. He felt once again that he was standing in the middle of a raging inferno, caught up in the heart of that burning building, with flames leaping around him and smoking timbers crashing to the ground, his skin scorched by the heat of the fire.

But there was nothing else for it. He would have to go inside.