of the flesh from the bones, bit by bit, shred by shred. A peck of a beak, the nibble of an insect, a slow disintegration. There’s no grand finale, no great denouement. There’s no bang in our ending, you see; there’s barely a whimper. Only a cry in the night that goes unheard.
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19
On the way into Cressbrook next morning, Ben Cooper caught a glint of sun on the cupola of the old mill, where a bell had once summoned labourers to work from their cottages in Apprentice Row. But that was the last glimpse of the sun he would get this morning. Before he reached the mill, the clouds had closed again, and the rain was back.
The roads down here were single track, with passing places cut into the bank where two cars could just get by with care. It called for a good deal of courtesy between drivers, of course. But as long as tourists didn’t park in the passing places to take photographs, the system worked fine.
Cooper was pleased to see that both the former cotton mills in this part of the Wye Valley had been converted into fashionable apartments after years of dereliction. The distance between the two mills was only about three- quarters of a mile, a little more if you followed the loops and weirs of the Wye. Upstream, Litton Mill had been notorious for child exploitation in the nineteenth century, when it was owned by the Needham family. Orphans had been brought from London to work in the mill, and beatings and abuse were rife. In fact, so many children had died that the Needhams sent their bodies
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to other parishes for burial, to conceal the scale of abuse from the authorities.
Yet Cressbrook had been entirely the opposite, a testament to the enlightenment of a self-educated carpenter. William Newton had built his mill like a grand Georgian mansion, with a village school and rows of pretty lattice- windowed cottages for his workers. But could Newton’s tenants see the blood of his rival’s child apprentices flowing downstream and over the weir? For the sake of residents in the new apartments at Litton Mill, Cooper hoped that the dead slept easy.
There was a hairpin bend above Cressbrook, quite a tricky turning on the way up the steep hill. And a few yards below the bend was the road into Ravensdale. It was tarmacked for part of the way, but only as far as Ravensdale Cottages, the old mill workers’ houses known locally as The Wick. The cottages were tiny, twelve of them in two rows facing each other across a sloping strip of earth. They were built of random limestone, with steps up to the front doors, arched leaded patterns in the windows and Russian vine covering the walls.
The road through Ravensdale was still wet, though the rain had stopped hours ago and the sun was out on the higher slopes. The upper end of the dale was so quiet that Cooper could hear the voices of two rock climbers calling instructions to each other as they clung to the face of Ravenscliffe Crag.
Beyond the cottages, a muddy footpath wound its way further north, heading up into Cressbrook Dale as far as Peter’s Stone, and over to Wardlow. But on the right a track forked off through the fields and followed the stream. Last year’s leaf litter lay in decomposing heaps at the sides of the track, churned into brown sludge by the wheels of passing vehicles.
A group of walkers went by, rustling in their cagoules and waterproof leggings, their boots crunching on the damp stones
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and splashing in the puddles. All four had their heads down, watching their feet. There was no talking on this stretch. Perhaps they were saving their breath for the climb up the other side of the dale, where the path would be muddy and dangerous.
As Cooper descended the track, the valley sides became lower, the crags disappeared, and the voices of the climbers faded into the background.
In the woods below Litton Foot, the search had resumed. Fry was already there, talking to the anthropologist, but DI Hitchens looked as though he’d arrived only seconds earlier. Swathes of mist hung high in the trees, and water cascaded continuously through the foliage. Before he’d been out of the car long, Cooper’s face was cool with moisture.
‘What’s going on?’ said Hitchens, as Fry picked her way towards them over the uneven ground.
‘The university team are worried about being able to remove the remains intact, because of the way the vegetation has grown through the bones. They say the roots are too strong, and the bones will come apart if they try to move them.’
‘So what are they proposing?’
‘They want to dig down a couple of feet and take the whole thing - top soil and surface vegetation all in one lump - so they can take it apart in the lab without damaging any of the bones.’
‘Can that be done?’
‘They say so. At most, they might have to cut the body in half somewhere along the spine and take it to the lab in two pieces. They’re saying they need to distinguish between any injuries to the bones at the time of death and damage caused by postmortem root growth.’
‘Which do you think is the least costly option?’ said Hitchens.
‘Probably the lab will be cheaper, rather than keeping all these people on site.’
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‘We’ll get better results, too,’ called the anthropologist, eavesdropping. ‘If you’re interested in that, at all.’
Hitchens turned away. ‘As long as it’s in their lab,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to ask the mortuary to take that sort of mess.’
‘I think we’re going to have to go along with them if we want any results,’ said Fry.
‘Forensic scientists - don’t you think they’re sometimes more trouble than they’re worth? They play hell with our budgets.’
‘Yes, sir. But, unfortunately, they’re the people juries believe these days, not us.’
Cooper discovered that a neighbouring force had loaned a special support dog for the search, one that was trained to find human remains. According to rumour, these dogs practised somewhere in the west of Scotland by locating the corpses of pigs buried in police uniforms. The aroma of decomposing pig flesh was said to be the nearest thing to the smell of human decomposition. But the bit about police uniforms was a joke, surely?
He took a chance to get into conversation with the dog handler. Cooper liked to hear about other people’s specializations. One day he’d probably have to choose one himself. A year or so ago, he’d been assigned to the Rural Crime Unit, and he’d expected it to be the first step towards a transfer. But the subject hadn’t arisen since, and it didn’t do to make enquiries, in case it tempted fate.
‘The dog’s brilliant,’ said the handler. ‘Nose like a radar. She can detect a decomposing body at the bottom of a
