desert air. But there could also have been a trace of ingrained suspicion, a need to be aware of dangers approaching from a distance.
Cooper passed the photograph back. ‘When was he discharged, Gavin?’
‘Nine months ago. The army says he was a good soldier. A sound record, and all that.’
‘He served in several hotspots, I see.’
‘That’s not so unusual these days,’ said Fry. ‘The time is long past when British soldiers could look forward to spending their service careers idling around in Germany or Cyprus. They have to go out and get shot at on peacekeeping missions.’
‘You’re just trying to put me off,’ said Murfin.
‘He was in Northern Ireland in the eighties. Kuwait and Iraq during the first Gulf War; Bosnia, too. Did he see much action?’ asked Cooper.
‘I don’t know. They won’t give us that sort of information.’
‘I was just thinking a few survival skills would help him.’
Fry shook her head. ‘Lots of people claim to have been in the SAS, but very few actually were. Even fewer ever talk about it, and the ones that do tend to write books. But we’ll check, anyway.’
A railway engine went past on the cement works spur, pulling a line of dirty white tankers over the bridge.
Fry gazed at the works. ‘This place is pretty big,’ she said. ‘What’s it doing here? How come the environment lobby didn’t stop it?’
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‘It was here before the national park,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, it employs a lot of local people.’
‘A bit of the real world, eh?’
Cooper was sent to follow the public footpath that ran alongside the works fence and skirted the hillside hollowed out by quarrying operations. The whole scene was coloured a drab cement grey, but for red doors among the buildings and the occasional worker in orange overalls.
Against a continuous background roar and rumble, he heard the squeal of some kind of machinery operating on the spoil heap at the edge of the quarry. Down in the centre of the works, he saw a slowly rotating metal tube about two hundred yards long, its end disappearing into one of the buildings. Cement several inches thick lay encrusted on pipes, like ice formed on the masts of an Arctic exploration ship. Sirens sounded now and then, but not the one like an air-raid warning he’d heard from Peveril Castle.
The path crossed the tracks to the quarry itself, and conveyor belts rattled through a runway over his head. A vast hunk of machinery passed him on one of the tracks. He had to step aside and cling precariously to the banking in order to avoid its tyres, which only just fit into the width of the track.
Then he found an abandoned concrete building. Its walls were broken and its steel reinforcements were exposed. It lay half-buried in a mountain of limestone chippings, like a bombed bunker.
After only a few minutes in the vicinity of the cement works, Cooper’s mouth was starting to feel dry. His tongue was coated with dust, and he could taste nothing but limestone. Soon, he was having difficulty swallowing.
Cooper looked down at the ground. The bottom inch of his boots had turned white with cement dust. When he stamped his feet, the dust flew off them in clouds.
Diane Fry was standing on the grass in the middle of the
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works compound while a worker in orange overalls and a white helmet pointed out where he’d seen Thorpe. The strange structure of the pre-heater building towered above them, and the long metal tube of the kiln rumbled behind them as it rotated slowly.
A marked police car pulled into the works entrance. Backup. If Thorpe was around here and saw that, he’d be away.
Cooper came to a point where three dirt tracks met just beyond the fence, and he stopped underneath the runway of the conveyor belt and a cement-encrusted pipe. Two uniformed officers were making their way up the path from the road, __.
puffing a bit on the steeper stretches.
‘Some of these buildings near the fence are empty,’ said Fry. ‘They don’t look as though they’re used for anything. And there isn’t even a door on this one - anybody could walk in.’
‘We’ll have to check them, I suppose.’
Cooper recalled the abandoned building outside the fence, half buried in waste limestone. No one could be desperate enough to try living rough in something that looked like a bombed-out bunker. But as a temporary refuge, it would do fine.
While Fry directed the two PCs, Cooper walked a few yards further along the path. He thought the building had been under the gantries carrying the conveyor-belt mechanism, where the limestone came down from the rock crushers. At first, he couldn’t see it. His eyes had become too used to seeing everything in the same shade of cement grey. But the broken walls and exposed steel reinforcements gradually emerged from the dusty background.
Cooper stepped on to the unstable heap of limestone chip pings, his boots crunching as if he was walking on a shingle beach. He stopped, and looked back to see where Fry had got to. She was still some way down the track, and he ought to wait for her to catch him up.
The continuous roar and rumble from the works and the
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squeal of machinery above him on the edge of the quarry made it difficult for Cooper to hear much else. But he heard the cough quite clearly.
He peered through an empty and broken window into the darkness of the building, squinting to adjust his vision from the glare of the sun on the limestone. He felt as though he was staring deep into the hillside, though the building couldn’t have been more than a few yards across. It was a wheeze of breath that gave him a fix on what he was looking for, and a pair of startled eyes came suddenly into focus.
