Literally, it meant ‘Be right back, okay?’ But Luke Irvine had explained that it often signified something quite different. It was a way getting rid of someone you didn’t want to deal with. You were telling them you’d never be coming back. It was a way of saying goodbye.
A few minutes later, Cooper stopped his car and looked out over the country along the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. He saw Dovedale snaking off to the east, the dry valleys of the Manifold and The Hamps to the west. In between, there lay a scatter of villages, with Wetton in the centre, and Ecton Hill just visible beyond it.
He was trying to see the landscape in the way that Alex Nield would. Alex lived in a virtual world, moving around a continent populated by enemies — Saxons, Romans, Vikings. They all had to be confronted and dealt with. His was a world where you fought constantly for survival. Kill or be killed, that was the rule of the game.
But then, each player had his own castle, didn’t he? He established a defensive stronghold, a place of safety where he could resist attacks. Walls to keep out the rest of the world.
Yes, a place of safety. It was something that Alex Nield had never possessed in real life.
Or had he?
If he was Alex, Cooper knew he would have somewhere to go. At Bridge End Farm, there had been an old field barn that wasn’t used any more. Most of the roof had fallen in, except for the far corner, where it was dry and sheltered from the wind. It was a good three fields away from the house, so no one would ever find him, unless they really knew where to go looking. Having those stone walls around him gave him a sense of reassurance, as if the cold winds of insecurity would bounce off the stones with the rain.
So where would Alex go? Given that he couldn’t physically retreat into the world of War Tribe, there must be somewhere.
Cooper tried to recall the exact details of the boy’s profile on War Tribe. Not the Lost River part, the names of his castles. All the players seemed to choose names that they thought were cool, or had some specific meaning known only to them. But Cooper’s memory was failing him now. He wished he was back in the office in Edendale, with a PC and internet connection, so he could check.
But wait. He didn’t need that. He had an iPhone.
Cooper looked around, hoping that for once there was a decent signal. At least he wasn’t in a valley. He was on the plateau between the two rivers, close to the edge of Wetton Hill.
He likes patterns. Of course he does. From his behaviour, Alex might even be mildly autistic. Unsocial, solitary, slightly obsessive. Alex was always looking for patterns — in his online world, and in real life. Patterns in the bark of a tree, or in the lichen on a rock. So one river meant another river. Water that flowed in the same direction, faces in the rock, a pattern in events as there was in the landscape.
His hands shaking now with the urgency, Cooper used his phone to access the internet and logged on to War Tribe. It was much slower connecting than on his laptop at home, but finally he was clicking on Smoke Lord’s profile, scrolling down the names of Alex’s cities. Engine House, Dutchman, The Folly. And his latest city, conquered but not yet built into a castle. Powder House.
‘I get it,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m not such a noob, after all. I get it.’
A tiny side road led him to Back of Ecton, where footpaths snaked off to the old mine workings. He left his car in a gateway and walked to a trig point on the summit of Ecton Hill.
The Manifold Trail ran below him, diving through a tunnel at Swainsley, to the old station at Hulme End, a wooden-framed brown-and-cream building now housing a shop. In its day, the light railway must have been like a toy train set, its station platforms only six inches high, its trains running at fifteen miles an hour, stopping to pick up passengers on the footpath. A dairy had once stood at Ecton, making Stilton cheese. And below Ecton Hill, the loading platforms for the old copper mines lay along the route of the trail, though the railway had come too late for the future of the mines.
Beyond Ecton village, one of the public footpaths passed through an area on the hillside where the mines breached the surface. Here were the adits, the drift entrances that enabled miners to get access to the copper without the need for a long descent. Cooper saw a moss-covered tree, and behind it seven vertical iron bars with darkness beyond. A drift entrance, sealed off against the curious or foolhardy.
About seventy mine workings were scattered over Ecton Hill, including about fifty vertical shafts. The chief mines were the Duke of Devonshire’s Deep Ecton, Dutchman, and Chadwick mines, and the Burgoyne family’s Clayton and Waterbank. And down in the valley the smelting works and dressing floors were situated between the river and the road, along the slopes of the hillside. Only the mine manager’s house, sales room and offices were left, all used as dwellings. A castle-like folly with a copper spire dated from much later.
At their peak, these mines had reached three hundred yards below river level. Although the deep workings were now flooded, those above the level of the river were still accessible. They rose from deep inside the hill to the site of one of James Watt’s first steam engines, housed on the hilltop.
The slopes below him were too steep to descend safely. But as he approached the mine along the top of the ridge, Cooper saw a number of open shafts. They had been fenced off, but some of the fences were the worse for wear. Walkers would need to take care if they went too near the shafts. Too many accidents had happened in the past, small children disappearing into the earth as the ground crumbled beneath them.
He came to a halt. He’d strayed off the path somehow. In front of him was a fence, strands of barbed wire snagged with clumps of wool.
The fence followed the contours of the land to the east, then veered away from him. Beyond it, he glimpsed the remains of an old water tower, a rusted iron ladder dangling from the base of the tank like tendrils of blighted ivy. The fence was protecting something, or keeping walkers away. There must be an open mine shaft here, an entrance to the old copper workings above river level.
And then he saw, ahead of him, the limestone walls of James Watt’s engine house. The steam engine had once raised massive buckets full of copper out of the Deep Ecton Mine. The engine was long gone, and all the other machinery broken up when the mines ceased to be viable.
Engine House. That was the name of Alex Nield’s main city in War Tribe, his heavily fortified castle where he could be safe from his enemies. He needed a place of security in the real world, too.
The stone chimney was no more than a stump. Half-tumbled walls, ash tips grown over with grass. And what were these raised areas either side of the engine house? Cooper tried to remember the basics of the physics involved. The heavy ropes in the deep shaft had needed a balancing weight to raise them, so two shafts at the same height.
Pacing the ground around the engine house, Cooper glimpsed a scrap of colour below a tumble of stones on the edge of one of the shafts.
‘Alex? Alex? Don’t move.’
The boy was close to the edge of the shaft, motionless. Was he dead or unconscious? Or only frozen, afraid to move in any direction? Cooper felt the ground slither and crumble under his feet, a stone dropped away into darkness. He never heard the sound of it hitting the bottom. These shafts had gone down three hundred yards, way below river level. Without the drainage pumps and soughs, water would have filled up the lower levels centuries ago.
Sensing his rising panic, Cooper inched gingerly closer, until he could grab a handful of fabric. He’d lost two people in the last week. He wasn’t going to lose this one.
With a heave, Cooper drew Alex’s weight up from the edge, remembering all too clearly the feel of Emily Nield’s cold, limp body in his arms.
But this body was warm. Alex Nield was alive.
32
Monday
The weather had changed on the morning Diane Fry drove back to Derbyshire. Clouds rolled across the landscape, touching the tops of the hills. A stiff wind blew across the motorway, making a caravan in front of her sway dangerously. She turned off the air conditioning in her car. Was it the end of summer already?
Monday seemed to have come round too soon. Her Sunday had been spent trying to get everything straight in
