packhorses carrying his copper from Ecton before the arrival of the railway.
If the Nields had spent their leisure time here as a family, he imagined they would have visited the tea rooms, walked across the stone bridge, maybe had their photographs taken in front of the stone arches. They’d have sat eating their picnic on the shelves of rock by the water, tried out the rock that had been carved to look like a throne. Those were the sorts of things families did.
Or had the children come here on their own, walking or riding their bikes, getting away from their parents for an afternoon? When he was ten or eleven years old, Alex Nield had gone through an experience that changed him so much his next-door neighbour had noticed. That was such a critical age. A traumatic event could affect his psychology for ever, if it was never dealt with.
Here at the mill, the river was flowing well, its water as clear as the Dove where it rattled over stones and foamed into pools under the limestone cliff. Yet within a few yards it had vanished. Just downstream, on the next bend, the bed was completely dry.
So somewhere near here were the actual swallets, the holes in the earth where the river disappeared, sucked up by the thirsty limestone.
Looking at the river, Cooper recalled standing with Diane Fry in Digbeth the day before, staring at the muddy River Rea. The Rea was hidden from sight, too — though not as a result of natural forces, like the Manifold. It had been channelled by human beings, who always wanted to control the flow of water, the way they controlled everything else.
But that wasn’t the most important thing. Cooper was remembering Fry’s comment as they stood above the Rea. It had seemed to mean very little at the time, a reference to Digbeth’s industrial past.
So what was it she’d said exactly?
‘But it’s not the river itself that’s important. It’s what’s on the banks of the river that matters.’
Cooper parked at Wetton Mill and hurried back down the Manifold Trail on foot. Almost opposite a field barn, he came to a crumbling, dilapidated gate. If he hadn’t been looking, he would never have noticed a tiny sign on the gate post, marking a Staffordshire RIGS geotrail. So there was a regionally important geological site here.
As far as he could see, only an empty pasture stood beyond the gate. Through the deep, lush grass, someone had left a clear trail, the long stalks of grass flattened in the direction of the river. But there was no sign of a trail coming back.
He crossed the field, pushed his way through the deep banks of gunnera and cow parsley, and found himself standing on the bank of a dry river bed. At certain times of year, the River Manifold flowed through here, but the limestone had swallowed it up. A single shoe, an orange Croc, lay abandoned on a pile of stones in the middle.
Carefully, Cooper stepped down on to the river bed. Dry rocks clattered under his feet like broken pottery. A faint smell reminded him of seaweed left on a beach by the ebbing tide. It suggested vegetation that had once grown in water, now decomposing in the open air. Within a few yards, he found a spot under a beech tree on the far bank, where water gurgled down a hole in the rocks, rushing below ground as if to escape from the daylight. Nearby, a smear of brown scum had gathered where a smaller rivulet slowly swirled and vanished.
Standing on the river bed, he realized he was out of sight of the road, and of the mill too. No sound reached him of the children playing on the bridge. Here, there was only the murmuring river in one direction, and dry, silent stones in the other. In front of him was a sheer, unclimbable limestone cliff, with jackdaws calling and circling overhead. And below the cliff, a steep slope dense with ivy ran right down to the edge of the river.
He followed the last trickles of water until he found a swirl like the suction of a plug hole under a wedge of stone near the opposite bank. He had to balance carefully to be able to step right on the spot where the water vanished beneath his feet. Then he leaned over to the bank, pulled back a branch of the beech tree and peered up into the ivy.
The earth had been scraped away from the roots of the tree. The soil was too thin here to conceal anything from a fox scavenging for carrion. The scent of a dead carcase would be strong enough to draw wild creatures down from the woods above the river.
There were just a few bones left, scattered on the surface among the twisted roots and white tendrils of ivy. At first, Cooper thought someone had buried a dog or a cat. He’d never asked whether Alex Nield had owned a pet when the family lived at Wetton, a predecessor to Buster. Could his father have drowned a puppy in the river and disposed of the body on the bank? Was that what Alex had been so upset about, the incident that had traumatized him and turned him against his father?
Cooper knew that some children could become obsessively attached to a pet, and might make an animal the focus of all the affection they ought to be sharing with other human beings, particularly with their family. Had Robert Nield forced Alex to watch the execution, ensuring that the awful memory would be etched into his son’s mind for ever? It would explain a lot.
Balancing with one knee on the bank, Cooper tugged back a clump of ivy to clear the earth around the bones. He found the skull, shrouded with mould, ran a hand over the dome of the cranium, brushed soil and dead leaves out of the eye sockets.
And then he knew for certain that he wasn’t looking at the bones of a dog.
28
Strain, line, breeding, blood. It was strange how those words could sound like a curse. Fry trembled with unreleased emotion as she made her way back to her car.
There had been little left to say to William Leeson once she’d realized the truth. Oh, there were plenty of questions she could have asked him. But there were no answers he could have given her that she would have believed. This was the man she and Angie had been taken away from as children, the man who had abused her sister. His name was the one missing from her birth certificate, the reason she carried her mother’s surname. And this was the same man who was now setting about wrecking her life in some way that she didn’t even understand.
‘I thought I’d better tell you all this, Diane,’ he’d said. ‘It’s time to be honest about things.’
‘You’re telling me because you know the truth is going to come out anyway. That’s not a conscience you’ve suddenly developed — it’s a defence mechanism. It’s the response of a cornered animal.’
‘Everything you’ve ever done is wrong. You never had any concern for other people.’
‘So you’re moralizing now? Spare me. I know lots of ways to kill you. It would just be a question of whether to make it quick…or whether I want you to suffer.’
He smiled, a slightly nervous smile. He was trying to show that he knew she was joking, while deep down he wasn’t quite sure if she was serious.
‘You don’t understand a thing,’ he said.
‘I wish people would stop telling me that.’
There was only one feeling that Fry was left with as she climbed back into her car and drove away from Leeson’s house. Hatred. It was the most corrosive of emotions. If it found no outlet, hatred would eat you up, bit by bit. It could drip acid into your heart and gnaw your brain to useless wreckage, like a self-inflicted cancer. Hatred would kill you in the end. Now and then, it killed someone else along the way.
Within a couple of miles, she began thinking of some of the things Leeson had said to her during the time in his house.
‘You know what they say, Diane. Blood is thicker than water. You might not believe it right at this moment. But you’ll learn the truth soon enough.’
And there had been something else.
‘Everyone thinks what they want to think. That’s the reason we so often put our trust in the wrong people.’
She called Angie, who had taken the case file away from her hotel room for safety.
‘Can you bring the file and meet me? I’ll be back in the city in half an hour.’
‘Yes, no problem.’
Diane swept into the hotel lobby in a hurry. Angie jumped up from a chair, sensing her urgency. She had the file clutched under her arm.
