‘With a fine tooth-comb this time?’
Fry put a hand on his arm. ‘With an eye to more recent physical traces, Ben. Last time, they were approaching it as a historic site. They probably thought we were asking them to be archaeologists.’
‘Sometimes I reckon they ought to bring back hanging for certain folk,’ said Tom Jarvis when Cooper called at Litton Foot. ‘Or something worse than hanging.’
Jarvis had been working in a shed at the side of his house. Among the tools inside, Cooper could see a vice and a lathe. The aromatic scent of fresh wood shavings seeped out of the open door.
‘Worse, sir?’
‘There’s other things they used to do round here, so they say. There was a time when they didn’t mess around with murderers and criminals.’
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That was a long time ago, Mr Jarvis.’
Jarvis snorted and beat his hands together to dislodge some curls of pale wood from his work gloves.
‘Do you know that big rock on the eastern ridge, near the head of Cressbrook Dale?’
He pointed up the dale. Just visible in the distance was the isolated limestone outcrop that Cooper had noticed a few days before. From here, it looked almost square, like a broken molar, the last tooth in a mouth crumbling from decay.
‘Yes, I’ve noticed it. That’s Peter’s Stone, isn’t it?’
‘Well, that’s the name it says on the maps,’ said Jarvis. ‘But Gibbet Rock is what it was always called round here.’
Cooper stared at him as the unexpected words sank in. ‘Did you say “gibbet”? It was called Gibbet Rock?’
‘And still is, for those who remember.’
Jarvis turned back into the shed, starting to pull off his gloves. He looked up in surprise when Cooper took hold of his arm.
‘Remember what, Mr Jarvis?’
‘Well, they reckon that’s where the last gibbeting took place. That’s what.’
Cooper dropped his hand, embarrassed by his own response. ‘Go on.’
‘Anthony Lingard - that’s what the young chap was called. They hanged him for the murder of the toll-house keeper at Wardlow Mires. Then he was gibbeted at the rock, fastened up in an iron cage where everyone could see him.’
‘When was this?’
‘The year of the Battle of Waterloo, they reckon.’
‘That was 1815, surely.’
Jarvis shrugged. The details weren’t important, he seemed to say. It might have happened yesterday.
‘Well, something like a gibbeting was a bit of a treat in those days,’ said Jarvis. ‘No telly, you know. So many folk turned out to see Lingard that the local fly-boys set up stalls
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near the rock. Hotdogs and souvenir postcards, or whatever they had then. It didn’t last, of course.’
‘Why?’
‘When his corpse started to rot, the spectacle lost its novelty.’
Cooper nodded. In Derbyshire, such pieces of history lived on in the landscape, memorialized in features like Gibbet Rock. The execution of Anthony Lingard could almost have been yesterday. For those who remembered.
‘Anyway, you came here for something,’ said Jarvis. ‘I expect you’re busy with more important things than me.’
‘Mr Jarvis, you told me that you used to let the dogs run in the woods at one time. Why did you stop them doing that?’
‘It wasn’t me that stopped them. The estate put new fences up. That was what stopped the dogs going into the woods.’
‘And when was this exactly?’
‘Oh, I dunno. The year before last, I suppose.’
‘Can we take a look at the new fence?’
‘If you like. There’s not much to see. It’s only a fence.’
Jarvis led him down the path through the garden and entered the paddock by a side gate. Two of the dogs ran up to them immediately, their tongues lolling and their eyes rolling with excitement. Jarvis held out his hand, though he still wore his work gloves.
‘Now then, Feckless,’ he said, rubbing one dog’s ears. ‘That’s Aimless you’ve got there.’
Aimless had his nose practically glued to Cooper’s boots. The dog sniffed like a bloodhound, almost inhaling the trailing ends of his laces. Cooper hardly dared to lift his feet, for fear of kicking the dog in its inquisitive muzzle.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Jarvis, noticing his hesitation. ‘Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling.’
The old fencing on the eastern side of the stream was broken in several places and full of holes, more than big enough for one of Tom Jarvis’s dogs to get through, or even Jarvis himself.
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But a hundred feet above it, near the crest of the slope, was a new fence made
