‘Tunstead Farm is in a village called Tunstead Milton near Chapel-en-le-Frith, over in B Division. Local legend says that an owner of the farm was murdered in his bed during an ownership dispute with a cousin who’d taken the place over while the real owner was away fighting in the wars.’
‘And this was a very recent event, I suppose? Like, seventeenth century or something?’
‘Sixteenth.’
‘Of course.’
‘But the point is, they still have his skull. His head was preserved and kept at the farm. It’s what’s known as a “screaming skull”. You’ve never heard of them?’
‘No again,’ said Fry. ‘But you’re starting to interest me now.’
‘Dickie of Tunstead is quite celebrated. He’s been written about often. These days, no one is sure whether it’s a male or female skull, but locally it’s always been known as Dickie, so that’s the name it goes under still. There are others around the country, in rural places, where people have believed in the power of the screaming skull.’
‘Don’t start losing me, Ben. Stay in the realms of sanity.’
‘I’ll try.’ Cooper took another drink. ‘Well, the belief is that removing Dickie’s skull from Tunstead will bring bad luck. They say it’s been removed three times over the years — as a result, crops failed, a barn collapsed, livestock died, the house was damaged in a storm. The skull has been thrown in the river, buried in the churchyard, and stolen by thieves. The thieves were so disturbed by things that started to happen to them that they returned the skull to Tunstead.’
‘And this thing really is just a skull?’
‘I’ve seen photos of it. It’s just a yellowing old skull, holed and fragmented at the back as if it had been struck with a hammer at some time.’
‘We can establish cause of death in that case, then,’ said Fry. ‘Pity we can’t do it for more recent deaths.’
‘Dickie of Tunstead possesses supernatural powers to prevent anyone moving him out of his home,’ said Cooper, with a note of awe in his voice. ‘When the skull is left in place, everything goes right at the farm. He even acts as a guardian, warning when strangers approach. His real claim to fame was getting the course of the railway altered.’
‘Oh, come on. Railways are fairly solid and practical,’ said Fry.
‘It was in the nineteenth century, when they were building the Buxton to Stockport line. There was a compulsory purchase order for land belonging to Tunstead Farm. The railway company wanted to build a bridge and embankment on the land, but building work collapsed, and men and animals were injured. Engineers said the ground was unstable, but local people credited Dickie. In the end, the company diverted the line, and the new bridge was named after him. It’s still there, Diane. The bridge is real, and so is the skull.’
‘All right. And there was one of these skulls at Pity Wood Farm?’
‘Mr Goodwin says so. He was shown it, when he viewed the property. But it was one of the few things that had been taken away when he completed the purchase.’
‘A severed head inside the farmhouse.’
‘Yes, Diane.’
‘And this poor, gullible Manchester solicitor was told some ghostly legend about it, to keep him quiet?’
‘Well, there was definitely a skull,’ said Cooper.
‘So does Mr Goodwin know where the head went?’ asked Fry. ‘Has Raymond Sutton got it?’
‘In the bottom of his wardrobe at the care home? Hardly, Diane.’
‘Where, then?’
‘Mr Goodwin says the man who took it away claimed to be the farm manager.’
‘Tom Farnham?’
‘The very same.’
‘Let’s go, then.’
‘Right. Oh, Diane — aren’t you supposed to be on missing persons?’ said Cooper.
‘Sod missing persons. They can stay missing.’
Cooper had forgotten that there were areas in this part of the Peak where the viability of farming was already borderline even before the fall in prices, before foot and mouth even. It was obvious when you drove through. Many of the dry-stone walls were badly maintained, farms had scrap heaps of old machinery standing in their yards, and there was a generally unkempt feel to the landscape. Foot and mouth had shown how much tourism and farming depended on each other in a place like this. A rural way of life that had disappeared from most of England had survived here until quite recently.
Cooper recalled his father telling him about farms out this way that didn’t have electricity or running water until maybe twenty years ago. The 1980s, the decade of prosperity.
He bet most of the country wouldn’t have believed how people lived their lives, here on the fringes of the Pennines. ‘It’s not as if we’re living in a Third World country,’ they’d say. ‘There are cities only a few miles away, for goodness’ sake. You can practically see Manchester over that hill. Hi-tech industries and cafe society, a huge airport sending jet liners all around the world. How can anyone be living without electricity?’
But these local communities were conscious of the changes taking place around them. More conscious than most, he guessed.
Fairies and elves, spells and charms had been an integral part of life of the countryman, who wouldn’t have understood the causes and effects of droughts and floods, crop failures, or sickness in his livestock. Witches were blamed for evil in the Middle Ages, Celts had worshipped the head.
Lost in his own thoughts, Cooper only became aware of the nature of the silence when they were halfway to Rakedale.
‘What’s wrong, Diane?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
He hated it when she said ‘nothing’ like that. Her tone of voice meant anything but ‘nothing’. It told him that he damn well ought to know what was wrong, without him having to ask her.
‘Come on, what’s the matter?’
‘I told you. Nothing.’
Well, at least that meant it wasn’t his fault. She’d never been shy about telling him when he’d done something wrong. Quite the opposite. So someone else had upset her.
‘This business with the skulls — is it what Mrs Dain meant about “the old religion”?’ asked Fry eventually.
‘That would be Old Religion — capital “O”, capital “R”.’
‘I doubt it’s in my dictionary, Ben, all the same.’
‘Actually, I think she might have been referring to a series of TV programmes that were made back in the seventies. The producers claimed to have found a community in the Dark Peak who still worshipped the old gods.’
‘Just a minute — I suppose that would be Old Gods, capital “O”, capital “G”? Are we talking Paganism here?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Cooper. ‘In fact, the people involved were mostly practising Christians, I think. No, it was said to be a sort of respect for traditional beliefs that didn’t conflict with their Christian practices. They believed in the old Celtic gods, but never mentioned them. The programme interviewed someone who called herself a “guardian”. She talked about a scattered community who still believed in the old ways. They didn’t name the small mill town she came from — but most local people could have a good guess.’ ‘That’s nearly thirty years ago. The world has changed a lot since then.’
‘Yes, even in … well, even in the Peak District.’
He turned on to the A515 towards Newhaven. Not far away from here was Arbor Low — a sort of flattened version of Stonehenge, a circle of megaliths laid out like a clock face. When he’d walked up there on a school trip once, Cooper had thought the stones looked as though they’d been blown down by the wind. But their teacher said it was more likely they’d been deliberately knocked over by Christian zealots who disapproved of the stones’ religious significance.
Religious significance? Arbor Low was built more than four thousand years ago, wasn’t it? Now, that was the
