The Devil’s Edge

16

Everyone had been called back to West Street for a briefing. The air of expectation was tangible as the meeting room filled up. Was there some progress in inquiries in South Yorkshire, where a joint operation was targeting the Savages? Did they have a person of interest?

Apparently not. DI Hitchens made no reference to South Yorkshire, but wanted to go over the two incidents in Riddings.

‘Thanks to the parents and the oldest daughter, we’ve finally established what’s missing from the Barron house,’ he said. ‘It seems extraordinary they would go to those extremes for such a small haul, but still… we haven’t been able to add anything to the list, no matter how hard we try. And as you’ll see, it’s a very short list. An iPhone in a pink case, belonging to Zoe Barron. A women’s Gucci wallet with an interlocking “G” charm. I’m told it’s made of rose peony guccissima leather, whatever that is. It was a gift to Zoe from Jake Barron. Two small, high-value items, easy to grab hold of. The wallet alone is worth three or four hundred pounds. We don’t know how much cash was in it.’

‘The phone…?’

‘It hasn’t been used since it was stolen. It was switched on, but it went off the network some time on Tuesday night, after the theft. Probably the battery just ran out.’

Information sheets were passed round, showing specifications and photographs of similar items to those stolen in the attack on the Barrons’ house. For a few minutes there was a general murmuring among the assembled officers.

‘That wallet has twelve card slots,’ said Murfin to Cooper. ‘Made for someone who might actually possess twelve credit cards, then.’

‘Hardly surprising, Gavin. The wallet is worth three or four hundred pounds, remember.’

‘They’ll have taken the cash and ditched the wallet. Even if they knew how much it was worth, it’s too distinctive for them to try to sell it.’

‘If they knew what they were doing,’ said Cooper.

‘The Savages are pros. That’s why we’ve never got near them.’

‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘ They are.’

Murfin looked at him, then at Villiers. He grunted. ‘Why do I get the feeling that you’re about to make it all too complicated? All I want is a nice quiet life, you know. I want to do exactly what I’m told, no more and no less. Another few months of keeping my head down and my nose clean, and I’m free and clear.’

‘Ah, but Gavin – is retirement what you really want? Remember, it’s impossible to do nothing all day. You’d go mad.’

Someone raised a hand, and Hitchens hushed the room.

‘Isn’t it right that the Barrons had alarm systems in place at their property?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Hitchens. ‘Why?’

‘Well, don’t burglars normally choose properties without alarms?’

‘It wasn’t an option once they decided to target a village like Riddings. All of these homes have security systems. Some of them are more sophisticated than others, but you’d have to be an expert to know that from the outside, just from looking at the alarm box. A number of them have automatic response from the monitoring centres. But apparently the only householder in the Curbar Lane area who has thought it necessary to install a panic button is Mr Tyler Kaye at Moorside House.’

‘There could have been some inside information.’

‘We’ve got lists of names and run checks on them. Nothing is presenting itself at the moment.’

‘The gardeners would be favourite, I reckon. Or a cleaner.’

‘Sometimes you can get the information you want online anyway. No need to hand out any cash.’

Cooper shifted restlessly in his chair as he listened to officers going over the arguments. Everyone knew the methods to use. At one time, burglars could buy information from the milkman or the postman about who was away on holiday, and which properties would be standing empty. It enabled them to get into a property at the start of a vacation, so that any loss might not be noticed for two weeks or more. That left plenty of time to fence the stuff and stash the proceeds before the police came knocking.

These days, some professionals used the internet. People gave away all sorts of information on Facebook, boasting about where they were going for their hols, tweeting from their villa on the Costa, posting messages to their friends to let them know when they’d be back. Dead handy, that was. There were other high-tech methods. Last year, thieves had broken into a couple’s car while they were on holiday in the Peak District, and stolen their sat nav. Then they’d plugged the device into their own car and set it to ‘home’. The sat nav had led them straight to the family’s empty house in Liverpool. Simple.

‘No, the gardeners. I’d take a bet on it.’

Yes, the old-fashioned ways still worked, too. The milkmen had disappeared, and the postmen were more cautious. But in neighbourhoods like Riddings, there were always the gardeners and cleaners, the folk who came and went un noticed and unappreciated. Better still, they were often paid peanuts. Minimum wage or less, cash in hand and not a word to the tax man, or the Immigration Service either. They sometimes found they could earn a decent bonus for a bit of information. And why not? It was all part of the free-market economy, wasn’t it?

Finally Cooper could bear it no longer.

‘We should check the Barrons’ background,’ he said.

Silence fell. To his surprise, Hitchens looked at him as if he’d just broken wind.

‘Why, DS Cooper?’

Cooper hesitated now, feeling the force of his DI’s disapproving stare.

‘Surely it’s standard procedure in a murder inquiry? To establish the victim’s connections and relationships. To find out what was going on in their life.’

‘If we were looking for a more personal motive for murder, yes.’

‘But aren’t we?’

Hitchens took a couple of steps towards him.

‘So you don’t believe in the Savages, DS Cooper? You don’t think all those other incidents took place in Hathersage, and Baslow, and Padley? You doubt the existence of householders injured by violent assailants in a series of aggravated burglaries? These offenders are looking for financial gain and the thrill of violence. At Valley View they just went a little bit further down that road. They could see that the Barrons had money and lived in an expensive property, and were likely to be vulnerable. I don’t think they needed any more motive than that.’

There was a moment of silence in the room after the DI’s speech. No one seemed quite sure what had happened to provoke the outburst. Cooper kept quite still, in case a movement from him caused any further provocation. But inside he was feeling wounded by the unfair treatment. He was sure he was right. But it was difficult to explain why, especially in this atmosphere, and in a room full of his colleagues.

‘Actually, DS Cooper has a point.’

The voice was Superintendent Branagh’s. She hadn’t moved from her position at the front of the room, but she took control of the situation without any effort. Hitchens stepped back, and the officers nearest to Cooper visibly relaxed.

‘There are a number of features about the attack on the Barron family that trouble me particularly,’ said Branagh. ‘For a start, their home life doesn’t seem to have been entirely idyllic.’

‘How so?’ asked Cooper.

Branagh looked at the DI. ‘Paul?

‘Yes.’ Hitchens turned over a few pages of his file. ‘Well, the oldest Barron girl, Melissa, has been able to talk to us a bit about Tuesday night. She’s told us that she heard her mother shouting, and then glass smashing downstairs.’

‘But she didn’t go down to see what had happened?’

‘No. She says she thought her parents were fighting. So she turned her music up a bit louder.’

‘What sort of childhood is that?’ said Cooper, shocked. ‘Isolated from your parents, spending all your time alone in your own room. And then – she was so used to hearing them arguing and throwing things at each other that it just seemed like a normal evening. Something to shut out with more noise.’

Hitchens threw out his hands in a helpless gesture, suggesting that he was unable to explain it.

The briefing moved on.

‘There were white handprints found by scenes-of-crime on the rear wall. DS Cooper has suggested that these could be from rock climbers, who use chalk to improve their grip. There are many climbers who visit Riddings Edge. It could be a long job, but we’re going to try to establish which of them might have been in the area on Tuesday evening.’

Cooper could sense a few black looks coming his way at that. Whoever got the frustrating job of tracking down the climbers would not be thanking him for the suggestion

‘Others we haven’t identified include a person seen by walkers in the public phone box on The Green. At present, no clues to identity, though probably male.’

Finally Superintendent Branagh clapped her hands, like a primary school teacher organising her class.

‘We need to be able to eliminate some of these people from our inquiries,’ she said. ‘So let’s get on with it.’

‘I’m not sure whether that went well or not,’ said Villiers when they were back at their desks in the CID room. ‘Do you think you can get people here to come round to your opinion?’

‘Not in one meeting,’ said Cooper. ‘Not in a single day. Not even in a week.’

‘You need something more convincing, I guess.’

‘Yes. The trouble is, we can’t get a handle on the relationships between these people.’

‘These people? Oh, you don’t mean your colleagues now. You mean the inhabitants of Riddings.’

‘There’s Riddings Show on Saturday. They’re all going to be there. If Mrs Holland is right, that’s probably the one occasion in the whole year when we might get an opportunity to see them together.’

‘A chance to assess the strength of the enemy.’

Irvine signalled Cooper urgently.

‘We’ve got the CCTV footage from the Barrons,’ he said. ‘They have a camera pointing at the gates, and one at the garage.’

‘Okay, let’s run it.’

‘This is the first one, from around the right time, just before the attack. There’s nothing happening, though. The gates are closed. Not even any cars passing on Curbar Lane.’

‘Wait a minute. Did you see that?’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘A movement.’

‘At the gate?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Cooper stopped the recording, and ran it back a few seconds. There was still no one visible at the gate. But he was looking at the convex mirror on the gatepost. He ran the tape forward again, watching closely. Now he was sure of the movement. He zoomed in towards the gate. What was that reflected in the mirror? He squinted, tilted his head on one side, then sent the image to print, in case it was clearer on a hard copy. It might be his imagination, but he felt sure he was looking at the reflection of a human figure, twisted out of shape by the distorting effect of the mirror. One side of the body looked normal, but the other side was swollen and out of proportion where it was caught in the centre of the reflection. They were like the halves of two different people. Or something that wasn’t entirely human at all, but part man, part monster.

‘Add another unidentified individual to the file,’ said Cooper. ‘Along with our mystery man in the phone box.’

‘They could be one and the same person, of course.’

‘Maybe. The time is right, and the two locations are only a few yards apart.’

Cooper pictured the short stretch of road along Curbar Lane from The Green to Valley View. He wished there had been CCTV in Riddings, the way there was on streets in Edendale town centre. A suspect emerging from the phone box and lurking outside the Barrons’ gates would immediately have been picked up and identifiable.

He remembered Luke Irvine’s comment about using Google to get a view of Riddings. The HOLMES staff would have done it already; would have produced a detailed image of the village to plot sightings and incidents.

Cooper opened Google maps, and typed ‘Riddings’ into the search bar. In an instant he was looking at a detailed satellite view of the village, with all the roads overlaid on to the map. When he zoomed in, every house was visible, every field boundary, even cars that had been left parked on drives. He could see who had a swimming pool, and who had a tennis court. So much for walls and security cameras, when anyone with internet access could peer into your back garden and see the layout of your property.

These large, expensive homes and their grounds had spread out from the centre of the old village, transforming acres of rough ground into upmarket suburbia. But the satellite image made it obvious that the battle for dominance over the landscape wasn’t all one-sided. Above the village, the cover of bracken and heather could be seen encroaching on to the old field systems, like a brown tide. Dry-stone walls seemed to be no barrier to the spread of vegetation from the direction of Riddings Edge. Given time, it would engulf those fields, erasing all signs that civilisation had ever been here. But for now, humanity was still in control of the lower slopes.

He clicked on the full extent of the zoom facility and centred the screen on Riddings Lodge. Details were clear now that he hadn’t been able to see when he was right there on the ground. He could calculate the best angle of approach from the back fence to the house without coming in sight of a window. He could see exactly how far away the neighbouring houses were, and how dense the trees were in between. He was surprised to discover a manege at the rear of the Edson property, and a small paddock set out with jumps. Those hadn’t been evident from his brief tour of the boundary. But it was clear now that there was access to them from behind the stable block.

When he scrolled the map towards the north-east, the rough ground at the foot of Riddings Edge became visible. The transition from rock-strewn slope to landscaped garden was quite startling at this point. The entire colour and texture of the image changed suddenly along a dead-straight line, as if the village existed in a bubble, cut off from the wilderness beyond it by an invisible barrier.

Cooper was reminded of a science fiction story he’d once read, in which a small community found itself isolated from the rest of the world by an alien force field that appeared overnight. The story went on to explore how the inhabitants behind the barrier dealt with the isolation, the power struggles and vicious infighting that developed. New hierarchies formed in the absence of authority, law and order gradually collapsed, and individuals with extreme beliefs came into their own. One religious fanatic proclaimed that their enforced isolation was a punishment from God for the community’s sinful behaviour.

Looking down on Riddings, through a camera mounted on an orbiting satellite, he felt a bit like God casting his eyes down from heaven, knowing all about the activities of the in habitants in this little place on the edge of Derbyshire. If he was God, would he have delivered a punishment on them like this? Let some of them die? And made the rest of them live forever in fear?

Well, of course he didn’t know everything about what went on in Riddings. He knew far too little, in fact. But down there was someone who knew more. Someone who had decided to take on the role of God, and had handed out the punishments. Did that person see the village as clearly as Cooper did now on his Google satellite image?

Along the corridor in the superintendent’s office, Hazel Branagh looked up at DI Hitchens, and raised an eyebrow.

‘Detective Sergeant Fry, you say?’

‘Yes, she’s a good officer,’ said Hitchens. ‘And her skills are being wasted at the moment.’

‘Possibly.’ Branagh picked up a memo. ‘But there’s a small matter of a Leicestershire officer with a broken nose.’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’

‘Well, like DS Fry, this officer is also a member of the Implementing Strategic Change working group. And it seems Fry was the only, er… witness to the incident in which he suffered his injury.’

Hitchens smiled. ‘I imagine it was self-inflicted.’

‘According to his own statement, he tripped over the kerb in a pub car park and struck his face on the bonnet of his own car.’

‘It’s easily done,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen that happen.’

Branagh replaced the memo on her desk. ‘It used to be suspects who fell down the stairs on the way to the cells,’ she said. ‘Even when the custody suite was all on one level.’

‘So I’ve heard. Those were the days, eh?’

‘Mmm. But now it seems to be our own officers who suffer mysterious injuries.’

‘Times change,’ said Hitchens. ‘But there are accident-prone individuals in every walk of life, I imagine. Besides…’

‘What?’

‘I thought you said he was from Leicestershire?’

Branagh’s lips twitched, the closest she came to a smile. For her, it was practically a belly laugh.

‘Good point,’ she said.

‘Anyway, we’ve been asked to withdraw DS Fry from the working group.’

‘She was never right for it,’ said Branagh.

‘About as right as a pit bull in a poodle parlour.’

‘Perhaps we’d better find her something more meaty to get her teeth into, then.’

‘You’re going where tomorrow?’ Gavin Murfin was saying.

‘Riddings Show,’ repeated Cooper. ‘Do you fancy coming?’

‘Look,’ said Murfin, pointing at his chest. ‘This is me. Add Saturday afternoon, plus the start of the football season. And what do you get?’

‘Pride Park,’ said Cooper.

‘Correct.’

The new season had started, and Murfin was a hardcore Rams fan. So dedicated that he’d even recovered from relegation and the arrival of American owners. His threats to transfer allegiance to Nottingham Forest had never translated into action. It was inconceivable, anyway. He was a true Derby County fan.

‘Take Carol with you,’ said Murfin. ‘Why not?’

Cooper looked at Villiers, and saw her expression immediately become eager.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he said. ‘There’s no overtime, remember.’

‘What else would I be doing?’ she said. ‘I haven’t been back in the area long enough to get a social life sorted out for myself yet.’

Murfin opened his mouth to make a suggestion.

‘And I don’t like football,’ said Villiers.

‘Riddings Show it is, then. I’ll buy you a choc ice.’

In a corner of the CID room, a TV news programme was replaying a clip from Superintendent Branagh’s earlier press conference, following the incident at Fourways.

‘Yes, we are connecting the inquiries,’ she was saying. ‘We believe the people who carried out this attack are the same offenders currently being sought for a series of previous incidents in other villages in this part of the county.’

Listening to her words, Cooper couldn’t help shaking his head.

‘You still think they’re wrong,’ said Villiers.

‘I can see why they’re thinking this way,’ said Cooper. ‘But it feels wrong to me.’

‘But you can’t go to Hitchens or Branagh and say you have a feeling, right?’

‘No.’

Villiers smiled. ‘I think I’m getting the hang of the way things work here. I thought there might be a bit more freedom to use your own initiative, but maybe not. It’s okay, it’s what I’m used to. But still

…’

‘You think I ought to do something about it,’ said Cooper.

‘It’s not for me to say. You’re a newly promoted DS, you want to keep your nose clean. At least until you’ve got your feet properly under the table. I understand that.’

Cooper looked at her. ‘It was one of the things that held me back for so long, my tendency to act on feelings, to follow an instinct when all the evidence pointed in a different direction. Otherwise I might have been a DS long before now.’

Villiers said nothing. But he could see from her face that she was disappointed in him. He couldn’t help that. This case was starting to irritate him.

‘One thing I really don’t understand is this obsession with Sheffield,’ he said. ‘Why does everyone keep talking about Sheffield? It’s as if they might be able to shift responsibility for a problem by pointing a finger at the nearest city. I’m telling you, Sheffield is just a distraction. It means nothing.’

Down the room, Luke Irvine had answered a phone call, and looked across at Cooper.

‘Ben, there’s a reporter downstairs from the local paper.’

‘The Eden Valley Times?’ he said. ‘They want a press officer, then. There’s someone in the building, Luke. Try the incident room.’

‘No, she wants to speak to a detective involved in the Riddings case. She thinks she might have some useful information to pass on.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘That’s what she says.’ Irvine pointed at the phone. ‘Does the address Sheffield Road mean anything to you?’