‘What?’
Though she got him to repeat what he’d said, the words still didn’t seem to make sense to Fry. The victim wasn’t some unconnected person, not in this case. It was wrong, completely wrong. An error in procedure. Contamination. Was this why the prosecution had been dropped?
‘What are you saying, Ben?’
‘The third DNA profile was a familial match to the victim’s. It belonged to a close family member. The familial DNA — it was a match to you, Diane.’
‘It’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a brother, or a son. You know that.’
‘Yes, I know.’
Reading the rest into his silence, Fry went slowly back to the French windows and looked at William Leeson.
‘Now she was feeling the memories collide and merge. A presence in her room as a small child, the smell of shaving foam, the creak of a door handle, a figure held in a shaft of light from the landing. A form crouching over her in the darkness of a patch of wasteland in Digbeth, his features blurred against a barbed-wire fence, but a familiar smell and touch. Too familiar.
Fry watched the blood trickle from Leeson’s nose and coil into his mouth, forming a slow, glistening spiral.
She had seen a lot of blood in her life. She knew it could run in unpredictable ways. It spurted and glistened, darkened and congealed, formed pools and jagged rivulets. A bubble of fresh blood would burst and collapse, a gush split into scores of crimson trickles. Your body’s fluid spread much further than you’d imagine. It could turn into an ever-expanding stain, a creeping edge that reddened everything it touched.
And your family could be a stain, too. Damaged genes spread through generations, darkening everything they came into contact with. Like death and taxes, your lineage was inescapable. It was bred in the bone, and it poisoned the blood. Some strains could run pure and free. But others formed thickening pools that soured and congealed, releasing the stink of heredity.
Fry had often thought about the genes she’d inherited. She’d wondered time and again what heredity had been inflicted on her, whose poisonous nature ran in her blood. She could feel that blood pump through her veins now. It was cold and alien, eating her flesh with its acid. She fought a momentary urge to slash open her wrists and let the blood drain away, to cleanse her body finally of the venom.
Leeson watched her calmly, his face giving nothing away. There was no suggestion in his expression that he was even aware of the feelings that were going through her.
Cold and insensitive, that’s what he was. A cruel, unfeeling, twisted bastard.
And he was her father.
27
Well, it was summer. Below ground, limestone sucked the water down like a thirsty giant, leaving the river bed dry and choked with dead weeds. Here, the river had vanished, gone from the face of the earth.
This was what they called a karst landscape, shaped by the dissolution of layers of rock. The geology meant that rivers responded rapidly to rainfall variations. In dry weather, water sank into the ground via swallets, and the surface rivers ran dry. During wet weather, water often burst back through resurgences, as the subterranean passages filled up. Then rivers flowed at the surface again.
Here, only a solitary stagnant pool was left in the shade of a sycamore, swarming with midges and mosquitoes. A crow picked its way between the rocks on the dry river bed. The big rhubarb-like leaves of gunnera were encroaching gradually from the banks. A weir stood bare and useless a few yards from the bridge.
Cooper pulled out his iPhone, and called up Google Maps. He zoomed into the Ashbourne area and scrolled across to Wetton. On the satellite image, the bends of the River Manifold formed an outline like a giant face superimposed on the landscape. The curve of a cheek, the jutting angle of a nose, trees fringing the shape like hair.
The Manifold had only one tributary, the Hamps. In summer, the Hamps also disappeared. It re-appeared, like the Manifold, at Ilam Risings four and a half miles to the southeast. And just downstream from there, in Ilam village, the Manifold met the Dove.
On the way to Ilam, Cooper stopped briefly to pass Carol Parry’s information on to Diane Fry, though Fry had hardly seemed to be concentrating on what he told her. Maybe he was just out of step now and she had moved on to something new. She might tell him eventually. Or, of course, she might not.
So that was what he was thinking about as he walked down into the grounds of Ilam Hall and across the Italian Gardens to St Bertram’s Bridge, once the main crossing of the River Manifold. Upstream of the bridge there were two weirs, and just above the second were the boil holes, where the water from the Manifold and Hamps surged back to the surface. Further upstream, there was nothing but a few stagnant pools.
A path emerged from the trees and moved away from the river bank. Paradise Walk, created for hall guests to take their exercise. In these surroundings, an obscure hole in the rock on the riverside walk probably went mostly unnoticed. Here, the rivers that had flowed underground through a series of caves and passages burst up to the surface in their boil holes. The Manifold had travelled out of sight for four and a half miles from Wetton Mill to re- emerge in a small grated grotto.
Currents spread outwards into the river as the Manifold and Hamps re-emerged into the daylight and gushed downstream towards their meeting with the Dove. Cooper noticed that the water in the rock pool was full of coins. Everywhere he saw that old superstition, the longing that something, anything, might bring a bit of luck. And again he had the sound of the water in his head.
He watched the bubbling currents, listened to the sound of gushing water. That sound took him back to the morning in Dovedale so clearly. A white face, hair floating, the blood washed clear by the stream, a green summer dress tangled on the body like weeds. Limbs flopping, a head lolling back, water cascading from her dress and oozing from the sides of her mouth.
Cooper closed his eyes, and saw another image. Robert Nield standing on the bank, his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers. Like a priest, performing a blessing. Or a funeral rite. But the scene only seemed to exist there, in the space behind his eyes. Had it never happened in reality? Was his memory so unreliable that his experience in Dovedale had created a false image? He supposed it was possible. The mind was a mysteriously murky pool.
So how had a river affected Alex Nield? Cooper felt sure there was a river involved in Alex’s real life story. And not just any river — a lost river.
The sound of the water was driving him away from this spot. And it was more than just a memory, an echo of the River Dove. This location just wasn’t right. Here was where the rivers re-emerged, where the Manifold and Hamps came back from the lost, bursting up to the surface. Ilam Risings were about rebirth, not loss. He was in totally the wrong place.
Getting his bearings, Cooper remembered that the bridge he’d stopped at was Redhurst Crossing, at the bottom of Leek Road. A short distance away, the first bridge south from Wetton Mill was Dafar Bridge. According to the map, the swallets lay on the section between the bridges. Wetton Mill Swallet, and Redhurst Swallet.
To the north, the Manifold Way diverged on to the River Hamps at Beeston Tor and ran upstream towards Waterhouses. To the south, the Manifold headed into Ilam to join the Dove at St Mary’s Bridge, close to the Izaak Walton Hotel.
Cooper drove back up the road towards Wetton Mill, part of the route merging into the Manifold Trail. The light railway had run for more than eight miles down the valley of the Hamps as far as Beeston Tor, before turning up the gorge of the Manifold, and through to Hulme End. The line had a large number of stations in its short distance. Even Thor’s Cave was said to have had its own station, with a waiting room and refreshment room. Today, it was obvious from a walk along the path that the line had crossed the Manifold dozens of times — including nine bridges in the short section between Sparrowlee and Beeston Tor.
Wetton Mill was a focal point for visitors to the Manifold Valley. The mill house itself was owned by the National Trust, with a tea room, shop and toilets. The bridge here was built by the Duke of Devonshire for
