rubbish. Their drinks cans and plastic bags kill animals and birds and all sorts of small creatures. I’ve seen them. I know.’
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‘And you think it’s part of your job to clean up after people?’
‘It’s part of the job of a Ranger to care for the environment.’
‘Perhaps you sometimes take it too far, though, Mark?’ Mark looked sulky. ‘Someone has to care.’
‘Did you see Jenny Weston leave any rubbish?’
‘I didn’t see her at all. I mean, I didn’t see her until she was dead.’
‘No, of course. What about anybody else? Did you see anybody else that day on Ringham Moor?’
Mark shook his head.
‘Say it aloud for the tape, please,’ said Hitchens. ‘No, I didn’t see anybody on the moor. There was nobody.’
‘Ah, but you’re wrong there, Mark. If Jenny was already dead when you saw her, then obviously there was somebody.’
‘Yes, all right. There must have been. But I didn’t see them.’
‘I expect you’re quite good at following the signs, though, aren’t you, Mark?’
‘The signs?’
‘Signs that anybody has been around. Tracks, damage to plants, the rubbish they leave. You must have learned to see that someone has been past that way.’
Mark shrugged. ‘It’s obvious, sometimes.’
‘And that day?’ said Hitchens. ‘Could you tell someone had been on the moor?’
‘I could see the bike tracks,’ said Mark. ‘A mountain bike. But they were hers, weren’t they?’
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‘Yes, we think so.’ ‘She’d been out to the tower and back across to the Virgins. That was obvious. I picked some rubbish up at the tower. I don’t know if it was hers or not.’ ‘Did it annoy you that she was there?’ ‘It’s private land,’ said Mark. ‘There’s an access agreement, but there shouldn’t be mountain bikes up there. It’s against the bylaws.’ ‘Would you have told Jenny Weston that? If you had seen her alive, I mean.’ ‘Of course I would. Some people think they can just go anywhere they like, and they can’t.’ ‘Isn’t there a Right to Roam Act or something now?’ Mark snorted. ‘Right to roam! Responsibilities go with rights. But some of them have no sense of responsibility. They think they just have rights. And the women are the worst.’ Now Mark looked confused. He watched the tapes going round. So many people seemed to do that in the interview rooms, as if somehow they could will their words to erase themselves from the recording. ‘Owen again?’ said Hitchens. Mark looked stubborn. ‘He talks to me a lot. He’s joking most of the time.’ Hitchens nodded. ‘But can you tell when he’s not?’ ‘Sometimes,’ said Mark. ‘Have you talked to Warren Leach? Was I right about the dogfighting? Is Owen involved?’ Nobody answered him. Hitchens produced an evidence bag made of clear plastic, bearing a yellow label. He showed it to Mark. ‘We found these in a locker
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at Partridge Cross,’ he said. ‘We think they’re yours.’ Inside the bag was a plastic wallet full of newspaper cuttings and photocopies. Some of them were ageing and yellow. They referred to incidents that had taken place over a period of several years - rescues and accidents, the recovery of dead bodies from the moors, searches for missing children. ‘They’re not important,’ said Mark. ‘We checked them out with your headquarters at Bakewell. The newspaper reports don’t say so, but it seems all these incidents have one thing in common they all involved Peak Park Rangers, and in every case one of the Rangers was Owen Fox.’ ‘Yes. That’s right.’ ‘A bit of a hero to you, is he, Mark? It might be advisable to choose your heroes more carefully in future.’ ‘Look at that one,’ said Mark. He pointed at a front page from an old Eden Valley Times. One story took up the whole of the page, with several photographs of the scene of the incident and some of the people involved. There were head-and-shoulders pictures of three young men, and one of a team of exhausted Rangers with rescue equipment. The three young men had died when they had climbed a fence on Castle Hill, Cargreave, to chase their ball towards a slope. It was a steep, convex slope, but you couldn’t tell until it was too late, when you couldn’t go back and could no longer stand upright on the grass. The three boys had plunged into the rocky gorge below Castle Hill in front of tourists queuing for admission to the show cave.
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‘We know Owen Fox was one of the Rangers who recovered the bodies from the gorge,’ said Hitchens.
‘Yes. But you see those lads that were killed,’ said Mark. ‘One of them was my brother.’
When Owen Fox frowned, his eyebrows looked worn and ragged. They tended to spread across his forehead like well-used brushes. He took his hands away from his face and studied them. He had fingers that were thick and shabby, and his palms were creased like an antiquarian map of the Peak, all narrow valleys and hills.
‘I thought you brought me here to ask about the photographs,’ he said.
‘Not really,’ said Tailby. ‘Is that what you’d rather talk about?’
‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ ‘That’s what they all say.’
Owen seemed to rally for a moment. ‘In my case,’ he said, ‘it’s true.’
He told them that he had bought the computer after his mother had died, using the money she left him. He needed a distraction to take his mind off his memories of her. For so many years, she had been all that he had, apart from his job. Other memories had begun to come back to him, too - more memories of death.
At first, Owen said, his only idea was to learn about computers because they were coming into the Ranger Service and he didn’t want to be left behind by the young ones. He was terrified of having to retire early. What would he retire to? So he bought the computer
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to teach himself at home, where no one would see his ignorance.
He had heard of the internet, he said, but had never thought of using it. It had come as a surprise that the PC he ordered came complete with an internal modem and pre-loaded with software to get free internet access. Naturally, he had tried it out.
At first, Owen had joined innocent newsgroups on national parks and non-league football. He had found a website for the Dry Stone Walling Association. But then he had begun to notice spam messages on the newsgroups,
