A movement in the undergrowth made him start. Wasn’t he alone, even now?
But it was a fox. Its eyes glowed red in the light of his torch. A narrow, pointed face, and suspicious eyes. After a moment, it slunk away into the darkness and was gone. Off to hunt somewhere else for its next meal.
As the water flowed towards Thorpe, it surged around a fallen tree marooned in the middle of the river like an old shipwreck. He listened to the noise of water rushing over the weir.
Half-submerged objects floated by in the stream of his memory, too. Sometimes he recognized the flotsam, sometimes it swept past his awareness before he could make it out. Every time he thought about the incident, he came back to an image of Robert Nield, hands raised, droplets of water falling from his fingers.
Cooper felt he had to get away from the banks of the river. The water was flowing too close in the darkness. He shivered as he remembered the iciness of it on his body the day before, shuddered at the thought of it creeping towards him now, eager to suck him into its currents and drag his body away on to the rocks. Water and more water, closing over him, entering his mouth, filling his lungs…He had to get away from it.
It was a sharp, steep climb up to the Natural Arch. It was here that he’d seen a figure crouched high on the rock. Hunched up, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey. Had this been Sean Deacon, scrambling to escape from the scene of the activity, but reluctant to miss what was going on?
Hidden behind the arch was a shallow, mud-filled cave with a small chamber at the back. The cave was approached through a rocky cleft hung with thick jungles of ivy. Streams of water had formed patches of bright green moss on the rock.
Inside the cave, Cooper shone his torch on to the ground looking for traces of recent activity. He found a few footprints in the mud, graffiti scratched on the wall, and a scrap of cloth, which he bagged.
From the entrance to the cave, he had a narrow view through the arch down to the river. The water gleamed with movement in the darkness, surging endlessly through the night. Despite the distance, he could hear its noise. It reached him clearly on the night air, a murmuring, rushing, roaring sound that seemed to grow louder and louder until it filled the cave, bouncing off the walls and echoing all around him until it swallowed him up in roar.
Cooper felt suddenly dizzy, put his hand to the rock wall to steady himself, and touched a patch of soft, cool moss that squashed and slithered under his fingers.
Immediately he was back again in that moment, standing in the rushing water, holding the cold, limp body of Emily Nield in his arms, calling desperately for help but knowing that she was already dead. And all the time the river kept rushing, rushing over the stones, its chill striking deep into his bones and making him tremble uncontrollably.
And finally Cooper let out a long, painful scream. He wanted to hear it bounce off the pinnacles and the limestone cliffs, he needed it to fill the gorge, to drown out the noise of that cold, rushing water. The scream had been inside him for hours, and it had to come out.
Late that night in her hotel room in Birmingham, Diane Fry woke with a jolt, sweating. Another nightmare.
It wasn’t the balti, but the presence of her sister that had caused the nightmare, and Rachel Murchison’s insistence on talking about her childhood. It had been a big risk, she knew. Just one sound, a single movement or a smell, could trigger the train of memory that stimulated her fear.
Once again, she had been dreaming of the sound of a footstep on a creaking floorboard, a door opening in the darkness. Opening and closing continually, but nothing coming through. She’d been dreaming that she was frightened, yet had no clear focus for her fear. She heard the footstep, and the door opening, saw shadows sliding across the wall. Still nobody came in. She woke with a wail in her throat and the smell of shaving foam in her nostrils — a smell that always made her nauseous, even now.
Fry lay awake, trying to orientate herself in unfamiliar surroundings. Above her, someone was walking around the room upstairs. Perhaps that was what had intruded into her dreams, some guest returning late to the hotel. The closing of a door, the sound of random footsteps.
She got out of bed, made sure the door of her room was securely locked, the catch down, the safety chain on. It was an essential routine if she was going to get some sleep. The voices were right inside her head now.
But as soon as sleep came again, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she’d pushed deep into the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to re-emerge.
First, she sensed their presence, back there in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper’
The memories churned and bubbled. There were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into segments by the streetlights, the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed to hear one particular voice — that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.
Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And then came the groping and the prodding and the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs. ‘How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?’ Animal noises and more laughter. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.
But then it happened again.
And again.
10
Wednesday
Next morning, Ben Cooper received the first anonymous letter of his career. It was addressed to ‘Police Officer Cooper’, and it had been pushed through the door at Ashbourne section station. It wasn’t actually written in green ink, but the writing was difficult to decipher. After a few minutes, Cooper thought he made it out:
You should look into Mr Robert Nield. He’s not all he seems. The man is a sinful beast, and the Lord will punish his ways.
Well, the spelling and punctuation were good, anyway. That wasn’t what he expected from an anonymous letter. It suggested someone with a decent schooling in English grammar, which wasn’t easy to come by these days. An older person, he guessed. Educated in English and familiar with the Bible, if not entirely well balanced.
A shame there wasn’t much information in the letter. Cooper wasn’t personally familiar with anonymous allegations, but he’d imagined there would be more to go on — a few lurid details of what the accused person was supposed to have done. But here, he had to use his own imagination. And that could sometimes be worse.
Taken together with his unease about the vagueness of the witness statements from Dovedale, and his own instinctive feelings towards the Nields, Cooper had something that he didn’t feel able to ignore. He might not have enough to put a case together on paper, but there was sufficient to raise concern, surely?
After a few minutes’ thought, he decided to take those concerns to his DI, Paul Hitchens, who was now his immediate line manager.
In his office, Hitchens smoothed his tie anxiously as he looked at the anonymous letter.
‘A nutter,’ he said. ‘We get them all the time. You know that, Ben.’
‘I think it might be worth following up, sir.’
