‘I saw nothing,’ said Oxley. ‘Are you finished?’
‘Well, we’d like to have a word with any members of your family -‘
‘They’re not at home. You know the way out.’
The Alsatian’s ears went up as it heard the change of tone in Lucas Oxley’s voice, and it let out another rumbling growl. At this point, the procedure was to retreat.
‘Don’t you want to help?’ said Cooper in frustration.
Oxley looked unimpressed. ‘We help ourselves,’ he said.
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16
In the next lay-by down the valley from where Neil Granger had left his Volkswagen, there was a roadside cafe in a portakabin, for lorry drivers who wanted to stop on their trans-Pennine runs over the A628. Across the road, black-and-white crash barriers had a strip of red reflectors set into them, warning of the bend as well as the drop.
The lay-by itself contained the usual debris from passing vehicles - fragments of windscreen glass, cigarette packets, aluminium drinks cans, bits of broken pallet, an entire lorry wheel. And, inexplicably, a pair of green serge trousers lay on the grass, with their legs intertwined. The wall was topped by barbed wire strung between rusted iron posts, intended to discourage people from falling over into the stream below. Further up the hill, water ran down a series of natural steps formed from dark, smooth stones.
PC Udall pulled up as close as she could to the cafe. A huge twelve-wheeler Mercedes articulated lorry rumbled into the layby behind them. If it had been a small lay-by, like the one where the VW was parked, the truck would almost have filled it on its own. The grill, with its three-pointed star, was right behind their rear bumper, while the driver’s cab was somewhere above them, out of sight. The driver could see down into the car, without being seen himself - until Cooper got out.
There were two women serving inside the cafe, surrounded by smells of frying bacon and clouds of steam that the ventilator could hardly cope with. They were busy, and they shook their heads briskly when Cooper and Udall began asking questions. They didn’t remember any customers, except a few of their regular truckers. They didn’t see anything in the lay-by, unless it parked right up by their door.
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Even after a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get out of the stuffy atmosphere. He found he was sweating, and took his jacket off. Then he looked at the sky and saw the clouds dragging more showers towards his end of the valley. Above Torside Reservoir, the rain and sunlight were chasing each other across the face of the hillside so fast that it was as if somebody had just turned up the speed on a film.
He sighed, and put his jacket back on before leaving Udall in the lay-by and cautiously dodging the traffic to cross the road. He had noticed a rip in the steel crash barriers where a vehicle had gone through and over the edge towards the River Etherow.
The five Longdendale reservoirs were surrounded by a whole system of channels, weirs and culverts built from square sandstone blocks. They controlled the flow of water to and from the reservoirs, some of them coming into use only for overspill, when the water levels were too high.
Cooper descended a couple of flights of steps from the side of the A628. He could see that very few people walked here now. The steps were almost overgrown with brambles and ferns in places, and the stone was slippery with moss. Dampness hung in the air, and he had to cling on to the iron railings to keep his footing as he turned a corner halfway down the slope.
He found he was looking down into a smaller reservoir or holding basin, with water cascading over a weir right beneath his feet. The water ran into a channel and away through a culvert under massive stone buttresses towards the main reservoir. There was a straight drop of about twenty feet into the channel from the steps where he was standing, and the slopes on either side of him were covered in wire mesh to prevent the loose stone from slipping down and blocking the channel. The mesh didn’t hinder the vegetation, which was flourishing in the damp air and the sun on the south-facing slope.
The mesh had held back the stones, but something else was blocking the channel. The carcass of a dead sheep lay in the water, with white foam bubbling through its ragged fleece, and one of its black ears waving slowly backwards and forwards in the current. The animal had obviously been there for some time. Its body was swollen with gas, and the wool had gradually loosened from its head and shoulders, so that patches of mottled skin were visible through the water.
Cooper went back to the car and Udall drove round the bend,
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where they saw Michael Dearden in the next lay-by, arguing with a uniformed officer guarding the tape around Neil Granger’s Volkswagen. They stopped to see what the trouble was.
‘Ah, there you are - what’s your name,’ said Dearden when he saw Cooper. ‘How long are you going to keep the track blocked?’
‘As long as necessary, sir. We need to preserve any forensic evidence. It can be a long process, I’m afraid.’
‘Surely you can leave the track open?’
‘No, sir. And I don’t understand what the problem is in using the road through Withens.’
‘Oh, forget it.’
Cooper exchanged looks with the uniformed officer and got back in the car.
‘Can we get a look at the old railway tunnel entrances, Tracy?’ he said.
‘Of course. At this end, they’re right by where the Woodhead station used to be.’
She drove a few yards and turned sharply into a narrow roadway that had no signs indicating where it went. At the bottom, some of the station’s platforms were still visible, but the track, sleepers and ballast had all long since been removed.
It was the tunnels that caught the eye, of course. There were three of them, their entrances driven into a rock face that still bore the marks of the navvies’ pickaxes. The 1950s tunnel was much larger than the other two. It had been made wide enough to take two lines, and it was a lot higher, too. The two smaller tunnels huddled close together, and the three of them made Cooper think of the ewe and its twin lambs, attached to the same hill in their own way.
To his surprise, he found Gavin Murfin in front of the tunnels talking to one of the maintenance men, who he introduced as Sandy Norton.
