Diane was unimpressed. ‘Can’t we go down to the Balti Triangle?’
‘Sis — you’d live in the Balti Triangle, given a chance.’
‘Yes. So?’
In the Balti Triangle of south Birmingham, scores of restaurants had combined to put the city firmly on the curry map. In fact, Brum claimed to have invented balti, just as it laid claim to the Mini and HP Sauce. Diane always thought of balti when she heard the bhangra music coming from cars cruising up the Soho Road. Music driven by the dhol drum, food sizzling in a balti dish with cumin and ginger. Both formed by ingredients from the Indian subcontinent.
‘K2. Alcester Road,’ said Angie at last.
‘Okay, then.’
‘I’ll get a taxi.’
Diane stood in the middle of the pavement, while people dodged around.
‘Sis?’ she said. ‘Will you help me?’
Angie hesitated, with her hand in the air in an effort to attract a passing cab. She looked back at her sister.
‘You know I will.’
At that time of the evening, Cooper had reached the Dog and Partridge crossroads, where he turned past the Dovedale Garage towards Peveril of the Peak Hotel in the village of Thorpe.
From the car showroom boomed the unmistakable sound of a cinema organ, someone playing an Irving Berlin medley. Posters announced the Mighty Compton Organ at Pipes in the Peaks. Of course, this was where the organ from the Regal in Derby had ended up, bought and restored by the garage owner, complete with turntable lift and vibraphone effects. The Compton and the cars shared the showroom space.
Even in the dusk, the conical outline of Thorpe Cloud rose beyond the hotel. It always reminded him of a pyramid, there was something so unnatural about its shape. Anywhere else, it would have been taken as man made. But here in the White Peak, among the ancient remnants of the limestone reefs, it was just another eccentric formation in the landscape.
Walking upriver from the Dovedale car park, he soon reached the stepping stones, opposite the outcrop named the Rocky Bunster. Beyond here, a series of weirs broke up the flow of the river, with a small island sitting just upstream of the first weir. Many visitors walked only as far as the stepping stones, while some ventured further on, towards the Twelve Apostles, but they’d start to flag when they reached the top of the long stretch of stone steps and after a rest on Lovers’ Leap most would turn back. Only the more active or determined walked the full length of Dovedale, or even reached as far as the packhorse bridge at Milldale.
So this stretch of the river was the most populated — the walk up towards Lovers’ Leap, past Tissington Spires and the Twelve Apostles, the Natural Arch and Reynard’s Cave, the Lions’ Face Rock and Pickering Tor. All familiar landmarks to the tourist.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors came to the dale on summer weekends and at bank holidays. They wobbled backwards and forwards on the stepping stones, picnicked on the grass, took photographs of each other on the edge of the water. At these times, with its manicured slopes and well-worn paths, Dovedale seemed to have been loved into tameness.
But at night, it was a totally different place. Its natural wildness re-asserting itself in the darkness, creeping out of the undergrowth like a shy, nocturnal animal. Sounds that had been only a background to the screaming of children and barking of dogs now grew louder, more dominant, more menacing. The river itself was a roaring, dangerous monster that thundered endlessly down the valley, and could snatch you away at one false step. The crags became looming giants, their white shanks sporadically visible through the trees. Across the water, the Apostles were motionless ghosts, a cluster of jagged teeth against the darkened hillside.
Cooper wondered what exactly Alex Nield had been taking photographs of in Dovedale yesterday. Perhaps one of the money trees. He would have liked the pattern of the copper coins in the grain of the trunk, their shadows on the wood, the glint of sun on their hammered edges.
But surely he would have taken photographs of the stepping stones too? For anyone even remotely interested in photography, it was impossible to visit Dovedale and not capture a shot of the stepping stones. The stones had an irresistible contract between their almost accidental symmetry and the random variation in the angle at which they lay in the water. In sun, each stone produced a slightly different tone — light and shade, light and shade, all the way across the river, with the water forced between them in dark streams.
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.
