that he hadn’t eaten anything all day. He was starving. He had a vivid image of a pub that stood in the middle of Calver, overlooking the cricket field. A sprawling Georgian inn, said to be haunted. It was a pub, not a fancy restaurant, but it did good food. A lot of their produce was sourced from the area, and local people left bags of plums, pears and rhubarb at the back door, which was one of the reasons home-made desserts were always available.
It was the sort of place Cooper would choose to go to like a shot. But not Russell Edson. No home-grown rhubarb pie for him.
He tried Edson’s mobile number again. It was engaged, as it had been for some time.
Villiers and Hitchens arrived in the car park. A marked police car went past with its lights flashing, though Cooper couldn’t guess where it was heading.
‘Russell Edson?’ said Hitchens. ‘This is a firm suspect?’
‘Mr Edson is much too respectable to get his own hands dirty, of course,’ said Villiers. ‘So he must have contracted it out. Got a man in to do the job.’
‘In a way,’ said Cooper.
Villiers looked at him curiously, but he kept his face as straight as he could.
‘There’s very little daylight left,’ said Hitchens. ‘I think we’re going to have to leave it until morning, Ben. We can’t risk officers up there in the dark. They would all get lost and break their legs. The compensation payments don’t bear thinking about.’
When Hitchens turned away to respond to a call on his radio, Cooper looked up at the edge and saw a figure. Not an outcrop of rock this time, or a trick of the light – but a human figure gazing down towards Riddings.
‘Carol,’ he said, indicating the spot.
‘I see him. Is it…?’
‘I think so.’
He tried the number again. And this time it rang.
‘Mr Edson? Where are you?’
‘Ah, Sergeant Cooper. Where else would I be? I’m on the edge.’
‘Stay right where you are.’
‘Only if I choose to, Sergeant.’
Cursing under his breath, Cooper began to climb the path from the car park towards the edge. Villiers fell in behind him.
By the time they reached the moor, it was totally dark. The lights from Riddings and the other villages in the valley failed to reach this far. Besides, the sky overhead was black with clouds, which blotted out the stars and any moon there might have been. It wasn’t a night for watching meteor showers.
As the thought went through Cooper’s head, it began to rain. Heavy drops were suddenly beating on his shoulders and soaking his hair. He’d come without a waterproof, but there was no time to go back. Villiers, of course, had been much more sensible.
‘If I can get close enough, I’ll try talking to him,’ said Cooper. ‘But I don’t want to alarm him too much. He might be in a dangerous state.’
‘You mean you want me to stay out of the way, in case I frighten him,’ said Villiers.
‘Not exactly. But I think we can do this without fuss. He just needs approaching the right way.’
‘All right. I’ll take the other path and go round.’
‘Can you find it?’
‘I’m like a cat in the dark.’
Villiers vanished into the darkness, swishing through the wet bracken. Cooper continued up the path alone, placing his feet carefully out of the streams of water running down from the edge.
Normally, the night was the perfect time to walk on the moor. Out here in the dark, you could experience the place properly. Your eyes had a chance to adjust to the darkness, free from the glow of city lights. But you needed to use your night hearing too, and your other senses. The moor became a different world then. Its size was measured as much by sound and smell as by sight. You became more aware of the hum of life around you. Not human life, but the sound of the natural world stirring in the safety of darkness.
Cooper looked up as he walked. The sky… well, the sky was so much more visible than during the day. It dominated the moor, weighed down on him as he walked. All the time he was conscious of its glittering black canopy hanging over his head and swirling on the horizon. Out on the moor at night, you soon became aware how big the sky was. So much bigger than your own little world. So huge that it put everything beneath it into perspective.
Cooper was well aware that some people never looked up at the sky. It just didn’t occur to them to step out at night into an empty landscape and gaze at the stars. It was no wonder they failed to keep their lives in proper perspective. Small things seemed to take on an enormous significance for them. A momentary offence became a matter of life and death. An insult was the last straw. And the outcome could be disastrous. Tragic. If only they would all stop occasionally and look at the night sky, just take a few minutes to count the stars and reflect on the millions of solar systems they represented. The mind reeled at the immensity of the universe. The soul was humbled at an individual’s insignificant place in it.
That was one of the reasons he had never thought the Chadwicks capable of acting against Jake and Zoe Barron. They had spent their time watching the Perseid meteor shower, up here on the Devil’s Edge in the darkness. No perceived insult or offence from their neighbours could seem important enough to them after that.
Moths appeared suddenly in front of his face, fluttering out of the night. His ears told him that invisible sheep lay breathing and cudding in the heather. A gust of wind rattled through the bracken like an approaching train, blowing a squall of rain against his face. But there was nothing to worry about here. None of those things was a threat. It was only the imagination that turned them into something quite different.
After a few minutes, his feet hit rock, and he knew he was near the edge. Stepping more carefully now, he felt his way between the boulders until a view opened up in front of him. It was a panorama across the Derwent Valley, deep pits of blackness with the lights of villages here and there like clusters of beads strung up the hillsides. From here, he could see right up to the ghostly gleam of the limestone quarries in Middleton Dale.
For a moment he experienced a surge of panic as a wave of dizziness swept over him. He didn’t normally suffer from vertigo. But the sudden drop appearing beneath his feet had thrown him off balance, mentally as well as physically. He swayed a little on the balls of his feet, held out his arms to steady himself. The sensation was like solid ground lurching beneath his boots, as if the horizontal rock shelf had tilted towards forty-five degrees in an effort to tip him off the edge into the valley. For that second, he’d thought he was about to join the dead sheep, broken and bloodied amid the wreckage of millstones. But gradually the world was righting itself, his balance steadied and he knew he wasn’t going to fall.
Cooper felt the sweat dampening his forehead as he took a deep breath. That was definitely a primal fear, the terror of falling from a great height. The edge was a place that seemed to exploit that fear. His footsteps had been led to the drop as if by some unseen temptation.
The moor might look bare and empty in the cold light of reality. But in the minds of the people who’d travelled across it, there must have existed a dark forest of superstition, a psychological world inhabited by trolls and demons, crowded with all kinds of dangers that lurked in the darkness. Their consciousness would have been full of stories of death and madness, tales of ghosts and cut-throats, fear of storms and fog and sucking bogs. Above all, this would have become a mythical landscape where you might encounter terrible beasts.
Yet if there were demons on Big Moor, he hadn’t seen them. The Savages had become as mythical as hobs. But what about the evil at work down there in Riddings? Were those devils human? Or just a part of the landscape?
His mobile phone rang. Just one ring, then silence. Cooper looked at the display, and recognised the number he’d dialled only a few minutes ago. That was clever. Edson had called his phone to establish his position in the darkness. Now he knew exactly how close Cooper was.
‘Don’t come any nearer, Sergeant.’
Cooper stopped, peering into the night.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir. I just need you to come with me.’
‘I’m fine here, thank you.’
