Gingerly, he grasped the thing in a fold of paper and held it up to the light. It was the ripe seedhcad of a grass stalk, and it had been chewed. And surely by something bigger than a mouse.
The outer door of the toilet block creaked open on its spring. Still crouching, Cooper turned his head. An old man had entered and was unzipping himself at the urinal. He looked at Cooper squatting on the floor of the cubicle, clutching a small brown thing in a wad of toilet paper.
‘Pervert,’ he said. ‘You ought to get out of here before I have the police on you.’
Alistair Page lived in a narrow lane that rose steeply from the cavern approach. The house had recently been renovated, but alterations to the appearance of a property were strictly controlled in this area. The stonework had been cleaned, the new window frames were made of pine, and the front door was a stable-type design to match the nearby cottages. In the hillside above was a house with an arched window, like a chapel.
Page’s house sat right into the limestone cliff, with a gap knocked out of the rock big enough to take a small car. A blue Volkswagen was parked there now, but it was a narrow fit - its wing mirror came with an inch or two of a High Peak Council wheelie bin standing against the side door of the house. There was no garden. And the front door, like most of the others, opened directly on to the street.
The view was impressive, though. The first-floor windows looked down on to the cottages in the gorge below, and right into the mouth of Peak Cavern itself.
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The sight of the cavern made Ben Cooper pause. The Devil’s Arse, they called it. But surely they had the wrong part of the anatomy. To Cooper, the cavern entrance resembled a gaping maw waiting to suck in unwary passers-by, like the business end of a primeval sea creature lying just below the surface, its mouth hung with enticing stalactites and curtains of flowstone to tempt in the curious minnows that it fed on.
And during the daytime, minnows flocked into the mouth in large numbers. Cooper had seen them queuing at the turnstile to pay their money, and gathering at the top of the ropemakers’ terraces to watch the demonstrations before venturing deeper into the cave. More of them had been climbing the path into the gorge - scores of them thronging the riverside walk to the car park. The cavern’s gaping mouth never went hungry. Not during the tourist season, anyway.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Alistair Page, appearing at the front door of his cottage in a black T-shirt and jeans. The was watching out for you. I don’t normally use this door much - I go in and out at the side entrance, so I’m not stepping right into the roadway.’
‘Of course.’
‘You look hot. You’ll find it cooler in here.’
Cooper did feel a bit sticky from the walk. It wasn’t the heat that was the problem - the temperatures hadn’t got anywhere near last year’s record high. It was the humidity that wore him down and made him uncomfortable.
‘Sit down,’ said Page. ‘Drink?’
‘Yes. Something cold would be good.’
‘Cranberry juice OK?’
‘Fine.’
‘Sit down, then, while I get the drinks.’
Cooper didn’t like to sit down right away, if he could avoid it. Not in a house he’d never visited before. Slumped in one of these low-level imitation leather armchairs, he would miss
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a lot of the details that gave a house its character and told him so much about its owner.
So instead of accepting Page’s invitation, he paced the room a little, then stood in front of the gas fire like a man warming himself at an open hearth. Within those few seconds, he’d taken in the main impressions. There was no sign of a pet of any kind. No children, either. No sign of a partner, in fact. This was a single man’s home.
Page’s interests were indicated by the caving and hill walking books that filled the pine shelves in an alcove next to the fireplace, and by the widescreen TV and DVD player with a neatly ordered selection of DVDs, all in their cases and possibly even arranged in alphabetical order. Cooper saw Blade Runner - Director’s Cut near one end, and The Sixth Sense at the other. Science fiction classics and disaster movies, with a smattering of comedies.
And there were stacks of CDs, too - U2, Del Amitri, INXS. You could almost rely on being able to judge someone’s age from their CD collection. Many people formed their musical tastes in their teenage years. In Alistair’s case, the crucial period had been the late eighties and early nineties. Cooper remembered that time himself - in fact, Del Amitri’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ had provided the backing track for a particularly painful spell of teenage angst.
He examined the rest of the room. During renovations to the cottage, an open-plan staircase had been installed. A couple of steps led up into a kitchen extension at the back of the house, where Page was chinking glasses and slamming the door of a fridge. Space must have been very tight, because the back window of the extension looked directly on to a stone wall bordering the next property. The whole place was very small, of course - there wouldn’t have been scope to build any bigger in this side of the gorge.
‘The houses at this end of town were built pretty randomly,’ said Page, coming out of the kitchen and catching Cooper’s
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glance at the back window. ‘They were miners’ cottages, of course. When a new miner arrived, they used to buy a corner of someone else’s yard and put up their own property, which is why the cottages ended up so close together.’
‘I suppose you get the problem of tourists gawping through the windows,’ said Cooper.
‘Well, it’s an occupational hazard if you live in Castlcton. Aren’t you going to take a pew?’
‘Thanks.’
‘You said on the phone you were interested in a book,’ said Page.
‘That’s right. It’s called Death Underground.”
‘Yes, I’ve got a copy you can borrow. But what’s your interest? Were you really so scared by your experience on Monday?’
‘Well, it was pretty scary. But I remembered you mentioning a death in the cavern. A real death. It was unique, but a long time ago, you said.’
‘Not many people know that story now,’ said Page. He went to the shelves and pulled out a book. ‘Death
