that, surely? Don’t let her see how you react.’ ‘OK, don’t tell me. I’ll fetch the car.’ Cooper shrugged. ‘If you like.’ Fry put Maggie straight into her car. Maggie kept her head down, like a defendant being led into court. She
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looked as though she ought to have been wearing a blanket over her head. Except that Maggie Crew was the victim, not the accused. ‘Ben, I’m not sure we have the right location for the assault on Maggie,’ said Fry. ‘Oh?’ ‘Her statement doesn’t tally with the memories she’s getting now. She told me the other day that she remembered piles of leaves underfoot. But there are no leaves at the Cat Stones. I know it sounds like a small thing, but if we’ve missed examining the proper scene…’ ‘I’ll take a look,’ said Cooper. ‘We ought to get Forensics ‘ ‘I’ll take a look first, and see if I can narrow down the possibilities before we do that.’ ‘Of course, her memories may be distorted. They seem to be coming back, but who can say whether they’re accurate or not?’ ‘It would take a psychiatrist to do that. If her evidence ever comes to court, we’ll need to back it up with expert opinion.’ Fry sighed. ‘She’s really going to love that.’ ‘If only we could produce a case without her. But we can’t.’ ‘Another thing. She says she thinks she was just in the way.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘That she wasn’t the intended victim, I think. She says her attacker was breathless and running, not lying in wait for her.’ ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
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I ‘I’m not responsible for whether it makes sense,’ said Fry. ‘I’m just sharing information, right?’ ‘Fine.’ Cooper watched them drive off, then waited for Weenink to come back with their own car. ‘Where to now, Ben?’ he said. ‘Up there.’ ‘What? Ben, do you know it’s Monday? I’ll be missing drinking time soon.’ ‘Are you coming, or what?’ Weenink locked the car again. ‘Yes. But only because you’re not safe on your own.’ When they reached the Cat Stones, Cooper instinctively followed Diane Fry’s footsteps to the place where the attack on Maggie Crew was supposed to have taken place. He could see straight away what she meant about the leaves. No trees grew on the exposed gritstone edge. ‘Why shouldn’t it be here?’ said Weenink. ‘She might have been walking through the leaves earlier. She could have gone through them on the way up.’ ‘Possibly.’ Weenink began to get impatient. ‘Ben, there are things to do.’ ‘Let’s try this way a bit.’ ‘But bloody hell ‘ Cooper turned angrily. ‘Todd - just keep out of it!’ His face felt flushed. It was only a moment’s loss of control, but nagging doubts had made him irritable, and exasperation with himself was eating at him. He worked his way north, as Fry had done. Weenink sat on a rock and watched him, like a tolerant parent.
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After a minute or two, Cooper reached the spot where the rocks parted, and he could see down to Rowsley and the railway line. The last train had gone, but he could see where the line ran. Which way had Maggie’s attacker come from? Not from the other side of the rocks, that was sure - not unless he was Spiderman. The slope behind him was steep, too, and covered in loose stones that would be noisy and difficult to negotiate. If you were going to run at someone at speed and take them by surprise, there was only one way to do it - downhill. People had known that ever since violence had been invented. That was why Iron Age forts were built on the summits of steep hills.
There was more dead foliage on the ground near the Hammond Tower, certainly. But how much would there have been seven weeks ago?
Then, in front of the tower, Cooper suddenly stepped into a hidden hollow filled with wet drifts of leaves. They lay in layers, where they had collected over the years. Below the surface, the older material was black and slimy and decaying into mould. You could wade through this lot, if you wanted to, and be very vulnerable to someone approaching from above.
Skirting the edge of the hollow to reach the base of the tower, he wrinkled his nose as a trace of something acrid and familiar reached his nostrils. Could he be mistaken? Were his senses playing tricks on him again? No, the smell was quite distinct and recognizable. Cal and Stride’s van had smelled of chicken curry. Yet the Hammond Tower smelled of petrol.
From the tower, a steep track ran down to a ledge
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below the Cat Stones. Cooper scrambled down the track, puzzled at the origin of the petrol smell. But as he moved away from the tower, the smell dissipated. It was lingering around the wall of the tower itself.
He looked at the outcrop of rocks above him. They formed one of the biggest of the cat shapes - a pile of wind-sculpted blocks of gritstone perched on a softer layer that had been worn almost completely away by wind and water. A yawning gap had been left underneath on this side - a great empty gash that made you wonder how the cat-shaped blocks stayed hanging in that precarious position. One day, the cat’s legs would give way under the weight of rock and it would topple into the dale, forfeiting all of its nine lives in one go.
Cooper peered under the overhang. The cavity went deep under the rocks, six feet in, the height getting less as it receded to the back, a very shallow cave formed by the weathering of the stone. On the outer edge lay a handful of damp, grey feathers, where some predator had stopped long enough to dismember a wood pigeon. Cooper’s nose twitched. There was something else here. Not petrol now, but something that smelled stale and unpleasant.
He crouched and ducked his head below the rock, then waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The smell was more powerful and unmistakable. At these moments, he always remembered his first shift sergeant telling him to learn to breathe through his mouth at a death scene. If you were going to deal with dead bodies often, he said, it helped if you had a sinus problem, or chronic nasal congestion.
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Cooper saw a hand, then an arm. Where the body touched the rock, the surface was stained dark with leaking fluids. The muscles and tissues had shrunk inwards away from the skin, leaving it hanging loose, like the flesh of an old, old woman. On one edge of the forearm, the skin had burst open, exposing the layers of muscle and fat underneath. Next, he noticed the dark snakes of hair that lay around the head. Although the ledge was dry, enough moisture had been supplied by the body’s own fluids to support the process of putrefaction. By now, decomposition was well advanced, despite the cool air of the White Peak autumn. The body had been lying here a few weeks.
Cooper knew exactly what to do. It was as if the past few days had drawn him inexorably to this point, as if he had reached an inevitable conclusion without knowing any of the steps he had taken along the way.
He looked at the decomposed arm for a while, without surprise. There didn’t seem to be any hurry to do the next thing. In a dying landscape, one more death seemed completely natural.
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32
With the forensics team already fully occupied at Ringham Edge Farm, the news of another body mouldering away among the rocks just over the hill set up a howl of complaint about the shortage of resources. Little could be done until the next morning. By then, the lock on the big shed at the farm had been cut and the doors had finally been opened to let in the light. Leach’s chaotic kitchen was being sifted through, and it looked like a long job.
Ben Cooper was helping the SOCOs to reconstruct the dogfighting pit. They had found a heavily bloodstained area of floor and were placing straw bales from a stack in the shed around it on the assumption the bales might have been used for spectators’ seating. They discovered that some of the straw was itself splashed with animal blood. And the trousers of the people who had sat on it must have been marked, too - here and there, you could make out the outline of their legs against the straw. It was obvious that efforts had been made to clean the place up, but the distinctive smell of blood still filled the shed, undisguised by the disinfectant.
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‘It’s positively medieval,’ said Diane Fry, appearing in the doorway behind him.
