They were also elsewhere in your brother’s house/ she said.
And Philip Granger smiled at the mention of his brother.
42
Driving on the A628 towards the Flouch crossroads, Ben Cooper found the treacly expanses of Black Hill and Withens Moor opening up all around him. When he looked down into the valley, he could see the rain drifting across the face of the hills in sheets, like mist.
He had already passed the sites of two of the villages that had been on this road, the communities that Tracy Udall had said were removed by the water companies. Woodhead and Crowden at least had a few isolated houses left to show where they had been. But now the map said that he was approaching Saltersbrook.
Cooper looked down the hill from the road. There was a stony track leading down into a small valley, where a brook fed into the River Etherow and on down to the reservoirs. At the bottom of the track, he could see a tiny stone bridge over the stream. It looked like a packhorse bridge - presumably for the traders who had once brought salt on their packhorses from Cheshire to the cities in Yorkshire. This must have been the original salters’ way, which the village of Saltersbrook had been named after. But now, there was nothing here.
Deep banks of bracken grew on the slopes at the sides of the brook, masking some of the ground where Saltersbrook had once stood. All that remained of the village were the foundations of a few houses and the ruins of the village inn. Fireplaces were still visible in collapsed rooms where the inn had stood on rising ground beyond the bridge. The climb to it from the bridge was very steep, and the track had been cobbled to provide a secure grip for the hoofs of the packhorses. The fallen stones of the inn were overgrown now with nettles and rough grass. At the moment, they were being grazed by a few sheep.
457
Apart from the traffic on the A628, there was nothing else human in the landscape, except for the turbines of the wind farm to the north-east. He noticed that two of the turbines were motionless. And when he turned a bend, he suddenly had a clear view across the expanse of moor to the wind farm. There were several vehicles parked there.
Cooper pulled into the side of the road, careful not to drive too far on to the soft verge, where his wheels would surely sink into the peat. Clustered at the base of the turbines, he could see a couple of Land Rovers, a minibus, even a small mobile crane. There were people working at the wind farm, presumably a maintenance crew. How long had they been working there, without him being aware of them? Who might they have seen going to and from Withens from their unique vantage point?
Cooper looked at his watch. He was early yet. He had plenty of time to pay them a visit.
Philip Granger had decided to ignore the advice of the duty solicitor and explain himself. He did it with the same smile, as if he were helping his interviewers to get their ideas straight.
‘You have this all wrong/ he said. 1 didn’t intend to kill Neil. Why would I do that? He was my brother.’
‘We know that Neil was going to help the Reverend Alton dig up the graveyard. You knew he would find the remains of Barry Cully. All of your family knew that. And somebody had to stop him. We think the obvious person to do that was you, Mr Granger.’
Philip Granger looked paler than ever. He didn’t seem to have shaved for several days, and his clothes didn’t smell too clean either. He had deteriorated noticeably during the last week, and someone ought to have noticed.
‘Yes, yes. But I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said. ‘I meant to break Neil’s arm, that was all - not to kill him.’
‘But you did kill him, Mr Granger.’
He shook his head. ‘It was an accident. He moved at the wrong moment. He hit his head on the stones at the bottom of the air shaft. You know that’s what happened. It was an accident/
‘A broken arm wouldn’t have kept him out of action for ever,’ said Kitchens. ‘Besides, you should have known Mr Alton would carry on clearing the graveyard on his own, which is what he did. Did you really hope that the remains of Barry Cully would never be found?’
458
‘We hoped Alton would leave. We hoped the church would be closed/
‘We?’
‘The family were behind me/ said Granger.
‘But the vicar put a spanner in the works/
‘He was a bit obsessed about that graveyard. I don’t know why it was so important to him/
‘The damage to the vestry?’ said Kitchens. ‘The theft? The vandalism to his car?’
‘We didn’t have anything against him, really. But nothing seemed to take his attention away from that bloody graveyard. He should have left things well alone/
Fry consulted the notes she had made before starting the interview. One of the first things she’d noted was the record of Neil Granger’s calls from his mobile phone the night he was killed. They were calls to a number in Glossop - his brother’s number.
‘Well, there you go, then/ said Philip, when she asked him about the calls. He glanced at his solicitor with a little triumphant smile, but the solicitor didn’t respond. ‘Would Neil have phoned me to arrange to meet, if he thought I would do anything to him?’
The fact that Neil didn’t expect you to attack him doesn’t cast any light on your intentions,’ said Fry.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, why would I?’
‘You tell me/
‘Look, he pestered me to go up there. He had an idea about some ceremony at dawn on May Day, and he wanted to rehearse it. I think he’d had a row about it with Uncle Lucas and the others. So he had a point to prove. He was a bit like that, Neil - pigheaded. But it was no good to him doing it on his own, because he needed somebody to prove his point to. That’s why he thought of me. I had my uses, even for my little brother. Hell, do you think I wanted to go up the hill to that air shaft in the middle of the night? He pestered me until I said “yes”. I don’t know why I agreed to it/
‘Perhaps you suddenly realized what a convenient opportunity you’d been presented with/
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Philip, shaking his head.
Kitchens folded his hands together on the table as he took a turn to let Fry prepare her next question.
