Lost River (10 page)

And any photograph of the stepping stones on a bank holiday had to include people. Would Alex have avoided them for that reason?

On the western bank, the path ended at a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates, blocking the way into the woods beneath the Rocky Bunster. Here, you had to cross the river by the stepping stones, or turn back. Cooper stumbled over mole hills on a muddy bank before reaching Lovers’ Leap and climbing the steps that had originally been cut into the bank by Italian prisoners of war. It formed a vantage point opposite the Twelve Apostles. A vantage point, but it had been too far from the water to be any use on Monday.

In Dovedale, even in the daytime, people often spoke in hushed tones, influenced by some kind of reverence for a special place. Tonight, an owl called in the woods on the opposite bank. But that was the only sound, apart from the water.

He thought again about the witness statements taken by
Sergeant Wragg and his team. He was trying to imagine where those bystanders would have been placed in relation to the Nield family. It immediately became obvious that some of them must have been screened from the incident by the slope of Lovers’ Leap, or by the trees overhanging the bank, dense with summer foliage.

They might have been able to see the middle of the river, where the water rushed over a weir at the angle of a bend. So they might have seen the dog, Buster. He was a golden retriever, a big dog, and he would have caused a lot of splashing. Had anyone really seen the girl, entering the water more slowly, perhaps hesitating near the bank, unsure of the depth? Or had they imagined the rest?

The slabs of limestone lying below the surface were clear even in this light. They gleamed in a sort of luminescence imparted by the foaming water. The water, the stones…it was easy for Cooper, even now, to imagine that he saw the little girl, trying to shield herself from the spray, wobbling, falling, vanishing among the submerged stones.

But he hadn’t seen that. He’d just been told that was what happened.

‘Yes, I saw the little girl fall and bang her head.’ ‘She was knocked over by the dog. The rock struck her on the side of the head.’ ‘She couldn’t catch the dog. I saw her slip and float downstream towards the rocks.’

Surely all those members of the public had already heard people talking about the incident before they were interviewed by Wragg’s PCs? They could simply be passing on their impressions, saying what they thought they were expected to say.

The only facts he felt sure about were that Emily and her brother had been playing on the bank, throwing sticks for Buster. Their parents must have been with them or nearby. Had they taken their eyes off the children for a while, thinking they were safe?

And had somebody been waiting for exactly that moment,
the second when a small girl was unobserved by her parents, by her older brother – a girl in a green summer dress, running after her dog?

Or had it been only one parent who had been distracted? It still wasn’t clear where Dawn Nield had been. Was she guiltily staying quiet? Had she, too, seen something? Had she seen the man standing on the bank, his hands raised, fingers dripping water? Her own husband. Or had she seen something else?

Cooper moved further on. The remains of a ram pump still stood on the eastern bank at the foot of Tissington Spires. It had once raised water to the farm above. And here, by the side of the path, hundreds of copper coins had been hammered into a dead tree trunk. More coins covered the surface of stump-like metal spikes. Many of the coins looked very old, others were clearly more recent, certainly since decimalization. A few had been forced into the wood within the past few months – their copper still showed bright and new where they’d bent under the blows. The stump wasn’t rotten. It had been a healthy tree when it was cut down, so the wood was solid and hard. It took quite a bit of effort to hammer a coin into solid wood. This was no casual whim, like tossing a coin into water, the way people did at wells and fountains. You had to want luck badly to go to that effort.

Cooper looked up the path. Three more tree stumps ahead bore the same prickly forest of half-buried coins. A lot of people felt they needed luck in their lives.

A movement in the undergrowth made him start. Wasn’t he alone, even now?

But it was a fox. Its eyes glowed red in the light of his torch. A narrow, pointed face, and suspicious eyes. After a moment, it slunk away into the darkness and was gone. Off to hunt somewhere else for its next meal.

As the water flowed towards Thorpe, it surged around a fallen tree marooned in the middle of the river like an old
shipwreck. He listened to the noise of water rushing over the weir.

Half-submerged objects floated by in the stream of his memory, too. Sometimes he recognized the flotsam, sometimes it swept past his awareness before he could make it out. Every time he thought about the incident, he came back to an image of Robert Nield, hands raised, droplets of water falling from his fingers.

Cooper felt he had to get away from the banks of the river. The water was flowing too close in the darkness. He shivered as he remembered the iciness of it on his body the day before, shuddered at the thought of it creeping towards him now, eager to suck him into its currents and drag his body away on to the rocks. Water and more water, closing over him, entering his mouth, filling his lungs…He had to get away from it.

It was a sharp, steep climb up to the Natural Arch. It was here that he’d seen a figure crouched high on the rock. Hunched up, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey. Had this been Sean Deacon, scrambling to escape from the scene of the activity, but reluctant to miss what was going on?

Hidden behind the arch was a shallow, mud-filled cave with a small chamber at the back. The cave was approached through a rocky cleft hung with thick jungles of ivy. Streams of water had formed patches of bright green moss on the rock.

Inside the cave, Cooper shone his torch on to the ground looking for traces of recent activity. He found a few footprints in the mud, graffiti scratched on the wall, and a scrap of cloth, which he bagged.

From the entrance to the cave, he had a narrow view through the arch down to the river. The water gleamed with movement in the darkness, surging endlessly through the night. Despite the distance, he could hear its noise. It reached him clearly on the night air, a murmuring, rushing, roaring sound
that seemed to grow louder and louder until it filled the cave, bouncing off the walls and echoing all around him until it swallowed him up in roar.

Cooper felt suddenly dizzy, put his hand to the rock wall to steady himself, and touched a patch of soft, cool moss that squashed and slithered under his fingers.

Immediately he was back again in that moment, standing in the rushing water, holding the cold, limp body of Emily Nield in his arms, calling desperately for help but knowing that she was already dead. And all the time the river kept rushing, rushing over the stones, its chill striking deep into his bones and making him tremble uncontrollably.

And finally Cooper let out a long, painful scream. He wanted to hear it bounce off the pinnacles and the limestone cliffs, he needed it to fill the gorge, to drown out the noise of that cold, rushing water. The scream had been inside him for hours, and it had to come out.

Late that night in her hotel room in Birmingham, Diane Fry woke with a jolt, sweating. Another nightmare.

It wasn’t the balti, but the presence of her sister that had caused the nightmare, and Rachel Murchison’s insistence on talking about her childhood. It had been a big risk, she knew. Just one sound, a single movement or a smell, could trigger the train of memory that stimulated her fear.

Once again, she had been dreaming of the sound of a footstep on a creaking floorboard, a door opening in the darkness. Opening and closing continually, but nothing coming through. She’d been dreaming that she was frightened, yet had no clear focus for her fear. She heard the footstep, and the door opening, saw shadows sliding across the wall. Still nobody came in. She woke with a wail in her throat and the smell of shaving foam in her nostrils – a smell that always made her nauseous, even now.

Fry lay awake, trying to orientate herself in unfamiliar
surroundings. Above her, someone was walking around the room upstairs. Perhaps that was what had intruded into her dreams, some guest returning late to the hotel. The closing of a door, the sound of random footsteps.

She got out of bed, made sure the door of her room was securely locked, the catch down, the safety chain on. It was an essential routine if she was going to get some sleep. The voices were right inside her head now.

But as soon as sleep came again, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she’d pushed deep into the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.

First, she sensed their presence, back there in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed.
‘It’s a copper,’
the voices said.
‘She’s a copper’

The memories churned and bubbled. There were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into segments by the streetlights, the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear one particular voice – that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness.
‘How do you like this, copper?’
The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.

Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her
head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air.
‘How do you like this, copper?’
And then came the groping and the prodding and the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs.
‘How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?’
Animal noises and more laughter. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.

But then it happened again.

And again.

Wednesday

Next morning, Ben Cooper received the first anonymous letter of his career. It was addressed to ‘Police Officer Cooper’, and it had been pushed through the door at Ashbourne section station. It wasn’t actually written in green ink, but the writing was difficult to decipher. After a few minutes, Cooper thought he made it out:

You should look into Mr Robert Nield. He’s not all he seems. The man is a sinful beast, and the Lord will punish his ways.

Well, the spelling and punctuation were good, anyway. That wasn’t what he expected from an anonymous letter. It suggested someone with a decent schooling in English grammar, which wasn’t easy to come by these days. An older person, he guessed. Educated in English and familiar with the Bible, if not entirely well balanced.

A shame there wasn’t much information in the letter. Cooper wasn’t personally familiar with anonymous allegations, but he’d imagined there would be more to go on – a few lurid details of what the accused person was supposed to have done.
But here, he had to use his own imagination. And that could sometimes be worse.

Taken together with his unease about the vagueness of the witness statements from Dovedale, and his own instinctive feelings towards the Nields, Cooper had something that he didn’t feel able to ignore. He might not have enough to put a case together on paper, but there was sufficient to raise concern, surely?

After a few minutes’ thought, he decided to take those concerns to his DI, Paul Hitchens, who was now his immediate line manager.

In his office, Hitchens smoothed his tie anxiously as he looked at the anonymous letter.

‘A nutter,’ he said. ‘We get them all the time. You know that, Ben.’

‘I think it might be worth following up, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘There was a convicted sex offender among the bystanders in Dovedale,’ said Cooper.

‘How do you know?’

‘I recognized him. His name is Sean Deacon.’

‘Was he near any children?’

Cooper hesitated. ‘I couldn’t say for sure.’

‘Do any of the witness statements mention him? Or the parents?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have any reason to suppose that Mr Nield is connected with Deacon in some way?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if you want to give this Deacon a warning, do that. But the witness statements agree on what happened to Emily Nield.’

‘I don’t think they do,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re inconsistent. No two statements give exactly the same sequence of events.’

‘That’s always the way with multiple witnesses,’ said Hitchens. ‘You know that, Ben.’

Cooper did know that. But he was discovering a stubborn streak in himself. The inconsistencies in the statements felt like a personal failure. He needed to know exactly what had happened to Emily Nield. Exactly. Vague and contradictory statements from confused eyewitnesses weren’t good enough.

Hitchens glowered at his intransigence.

‘There’s no mystery about the death of Emily Nield,’ he said. ‘It was an accident. The inquest was straightforward, the body has been released by the coroner, and the family will be able to hold the funeral this week.’

‘Yes, it’s tomorrow morning.’

‘Well, there you are. By tomorrow, it will all be over and done with. The family can get on with their lives. Isn’t that what we all want?’

‘She was so cold. As if she was in shock.’

‘She’d been in the water. And that water in the River Dove is cold at the best of times, even though the weather has been so warm. It comes straight down off the hills, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘As I understand the matter, it was thought at first that it might have been the shock of the cold water that stopped the girl’s heart when she first went into the river. But there was no evidence of that at the postmortem. Her heart was perfectly healthy.’

‘And the head injury –’

‘She slipped and hit her head on a rock.’

‘There’s no actual evidence of that.’

‘Well? Ben, you’re not suggesting one of the parents hit her, or something?’

‘It happens. Parents are driven beyond endurance sometimes.’

‘They don’t all kill their children,’ said Hitchens.

‘I have a feeling about the father. He’s bitter about rival supermarkets. I think business must be bad.’

‘So?’

‘Well, he’s under stress. That could drive him to do something desperate.’

‘Like drowning his eight-year-old daughter? You’re struggling now, Ben. Grasping at straws.’

‘Sir, my instinct is telling me there’s something wrong.’

Hitchens sighed.

‘Ben, just stop a minute, take a deep breath, and look at the situation impartially. You’ll see there’s no mileage in pursuing some vague accusation, or even your instinct. Anonymous letters are ten a penny. Ignore it and move on.’

‘If we ignore something now that turns out to be significant later on, it will reflect badly on this department.’

‘I’m prepared to take that risk. Call it
my
instinct, if you like. And I’ve been in this job longer than you have, Ben.’ Hitchens softened. ‘Look, you don’t need to find a high-profile case to prove yourself. There’s plenty for you to do to show your worth.’

‘That’s not what I’m trying to do, sir.’

‘Are you sure? I know you must see this as your opportunity to shine, with DS Fry out of the way for a while.’

‘No, sir. Really.’

‘Mmm. Well, take it easy. Don’t invent some mystery where there isn’t one, all right?’

‘All right, sir.’

‘Ben, it’s not personal, is it? There’s no emotional involvement? I mean, I know you were there at the time. Well, more than there, you took action. You –’

‘I tried to save her life, yes.’

‘Yes, of course. But you have to remain objective. Take a step back, consider this incident as if you weren’t involved. I repeat, there’s no mystery. Okay?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Now start paying some attention to the rest of your case-load. There’s Michael Lowndes, for a start.’

‘Yes, sir. Michael Lowndes.’

The Grand was the largest hotel in Edendale, a vast Victorian pile designed for the Duke of Devonshire and now owned by a Spanish company based in Majorca. The lobby was certainly grand, with its marble pillars, its chandeliers, and its wide staircase. From outside, the hotel looked French in architectural style, but inside the decoration was almost Moorish.

Cooper had never stayed here, or eaten in the expensive restaurant. But he’d once attended a wedding reception in the Cavendish Suite, and had his photograph taken with the rest of the wedding party on the lawn in front of the cherry trees.

He identified himself at the reception desk, and was taken through to the office, where a duty manager escorted him to the kitchens. They passed along an elegant corridor with gleaming tiles, then through a door marked ‘staff only’ and entered a completely different world, away from the eyes of the guests.

Here they found Sean Deacon dressed in white overalls, mopping the floors. Not exactly Gordon Ramsey, then.

Deacon was almost exactly as Cooper remembered him. A little older, of course, but it was hardly noticeable. An unremarkable face, the face of a middle-aged man with receding hair and a hint of grey stubble, a man who could pass unnoticed in any street. He’d put some weight on around the waist, moved a little more slowly. But Deacon was the same man he’d seen in Dovedale.

‘Sean Deacon,’ he said.

Deacon undoubtedly recognized the tone, if not Cooper’s voice. He had enough experience of the police. He looked up, a sideways glance – wary and suspicious. The eyes left Cooper in no doubt.

They were given a small storeroom to talk privately. Cooper let Deacon sit on the only chair, while he stood over him. Deacon didn’t object. He looked resigned, as if he’d gone through all this before and knew where it would end.

Cooper checked his details – his age, his address in Wirksworth. Deacon agreed that he was a registered sex offender.

‘What is it that you want?’ he said. ‘What’s happened that you want to implicate me in?’

‘Where were you on Monday morning, Mr Deacon?’

Deacon sighed. ‘I expect you already know. You people never ask those sorts of questions unless you already know the answers. It gets very tiresome.’

Cooper was taken aback by the way Deacon talked. He sounded well educated, his Derbyshire vowels softened by some other accent. Not only that, but Deacon spoke softly, with a relaxed manner that was more than just resignation. He seemed quite calm. He wasn’t what Cooper had expected.

‘You were in Dovedale on Monday morning. Is that right, sir?’

‘Yes, of course it is.’ Deacon looked up at him. ‘You were there, too. Your picture was in the paper. They didn’t do you justice. What did you say your name was again?’

‘DC…I mean, Acting DS Cooper.’

‘Forgotten who you are? Join the club.’

Cooper turned and walked a few paces away from him, found he was against the wall, and turned back. Deacon looked at him, smiling gently.

‘Thought you were meeting a monster, did you?’

Cooper found he was no longer looking at the man of his memory. This wasn’t the watchful predator of his recollection, the figure crouched on the rock above Dovedale. His mind had played him a trick, conjured something out of his imagination. And Deacon was right – he’d come here with an expectation.

‘I did my time,’ said Deacon. ‘But that’s not enough, I know. Not enough for society.’

‘No.’

A four-year prison sentence meant that Sean Deacon would be permanently on the Sex Offender Register. That was unless he took advantage of a High Court ruling that indefinite registration was incompatible with the European Convention of
Human Rights. The court had declared that it denied offenders a chance to prove they no longer posed a risk of re-offending.

Cooper tried to remember the man he’d once interviewed for that attempted abduction, the suspected paedophile slouching from an interview room to a cell in the custody suite at Edendale. That look over his shoulder, the tilt of the head, the distinctive way he moved. This was the same man. And yet he wasn’t.

‘What were you doing in Dovedale?’ asked Cooper again.

‘I’d been walking. It’s my hobby, when I’m not at work. I was on the moors west of Tissington. I’d parked my car in a lay-by on the A515, and I followed a footpath near Gaglane Barn to look at an old lime kiln in the middle of the fields there. The path comes out above Dovedale, near Reynard’s Cave.’

Cooper nodded. It sounded about right so far.

‘And then I heard all the noise in the dale, so I climbed up on to the arch to see what was happening,’ said Deacon. He looked at Cooper again. ‘And that was it.’

‘You’re sure you weren’t near the children at all?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Do you have any witnesses who say otherwise?’

‘No, we don’t,’ admitted Cooper.

Deacon studied him. Now Cooper felt he was the one being assessed, and perhaps failing to live up to expectations.

‘I heard about the little girl who drowned,’ said Deacon. ‘You were the one who tried to save her, weren’t you? I read it in the paper.’

‘Yes, that was me. But I failed.’

Deacon shook his head sadly. ‘It’s so often the case, that we either succeed or fail. Society doesn’t allow for anything else, does it?’

Tm not sure what you mean.’

The man stood up slowly. Cooper felt no sense of threat from him at all. In his white overalls, he looked faintly pathetic. Yet he had his own strange air of dignity.

‘I’ll admit there was another reason why I was on top of the arch near Reynard’s Cave,’ he said.

‘What is that?’

‘I like being high up.’

‘So you can see what’s going on? Check out who’s around?’

Deacon shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that. I like the idea of flying. Don’t you?’

‘I don’t think about it much.’

‘When I’m high up like that, I think about flying. Or perhaps about falling.’

Cooper looked at him again. Did Deacon have suicidal tendencies? It wasn’t uncommon among sex offenders. Their condition was often incurable, and many could see no other way out of a life of constant suspicion.

Deacon smiled sadly. ‘Life is all about falling and flying, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Falling and flying. If you’re good at what you do in life, you fly. If you’re bad at it, you fall. It’s as simple as that, Acting DS Cooper. The same with death, really. Up or down, falling or flying. We can only do one or the other. There’s no in between, is there?’

It was a pity that his name had appeared in the paper. Cooper picked up a copy of the
Eden Valley Times
on his way back to West Street. The story wasn’t difficult to find, since it was on the front page, and they’d dug out some old photograph of him from their archives. It made him look about fifteen years old.

Publicity was rarely a positive thing for an individual police officer, unless you happened to be involved in a community project, helping out at a fun day or giving kids fishing lessons. And then it was pretty much compulsory. When it came to major incidents, contact with the media was best left to the bosses and the Media Office.

But the headline ‘Cop’s brave bid to save drowning tot’ couldn’t do much damage, no matter how over the top it was. The subs on the
Eden Valley Times
loved short words, preferably no more than three letters. ‘Bid’, ‘cop’, ‘tot’ made a perfect combination. They hardly needed a verb.

Of course, Edendale would soon be without a local rag altogether. Everyone knew that the
Eden Valley Times
was on its last legs. The paper hadn’t been locally owned for years. Its present proprietors were a big publishing corporation based in Edinburgh, who had centralized everything they could think of. They’d moved admin to Peterborough, page production to Chesterfield, and printing to Gateshead. The edition Cooper held in his hands felt flimsy, no more than forty pages, when once it had been more than eighty.

Advertising revenue had fallen through the floor for papers like the
Times.
People got their news from TV or the internet these days. And once the recession cut the legs from under the Property and Motors sections, that was pretty much the last nail in the coffin. There were a few reporters left in the office on the corner of Fargate, but they rarely ventured out on the streets. Everything had to be done by phone when they were so shorthanded.