expected to come to the surface. The bleak, empty moors of the Dark Peak to the north looked remote and forbidding, an uncompromising landscape that was anything but human. The bare, twisted faces of hardened gritstone appeared to absorb the sun instead of reflecting it as the limestone did. They seemed to stand aloof and brooding, untouched by humanity.
At the top of a hill just outside Edendale stood a pub called the Light House, with stunning views across both limestone and millstone grit. Rumour had it that the Light House, like so many rural pubs, was struggling financially. Village after village was losing its centre of community life. Cooper expected to drive past the Light House one day and find it permanently closed and boarded up, a depressing backdrop to the view.
He looked at his watch as they began the descent into the town.
‘I have to go back to the office for a while,’ he said. ‘But your shift is over, Carol. No overtime.’
‘All right.’
‘I’ll meet you later, then.’
‘What?’
‘You wanted to see the edge, didn’t you? The evening is a good time.’
‘You’re sure it’s okay?’
‘Yes. Trust me, a breath of fresh air is just what I need right now.’
At West Street, Cooper headed to the DI’s office to report, conscious that he hadn’t been keeping in touch as he ought to have done. But Hitchens was just about to go into a meeting with Superintendent Branagh, and hardly seemed to listen.
‘Yes. Great, Ben. Get your team to write everything up and feed it into HOLMES, won’t you?’
‘Of course, sir. Are we making any progress?’
‘We think we’ve got some promising leads from the forensic sweep. Right now, we’re setting up a joint operation with South Yorkshire. Hoping for some arrests. Taking the Savages off the streets. The super has the headlines written already.’
‘Really? Can I-’
‘Later, Ben. Keep up the good work.’
Cooper nodded as he watched Hitchens disappear.
‘Okay, fine. So perhaps I’m wrong more often than I thought.’
12
It was one of those peculiar transitions that Cooper experienced from time to time in the Peak District. Within a few minutes, he’d passed from a secluded cluster of affluent twenty-first-century homes into an alien stone landscape. Pools of peat-stained water, traces of primitive habitation.
Often the shift could be quite sudden. In this case, it had been the point where he turned the corner of a rocky outcrop and found himself on the far side of the Devil’s Edge. The wind had dropped, the sound of traffic fell away, the last sign of human habitation disappeared. It all happened in a second, within a distance of two or three steps. But he’d been concentrating on keeping his footing on the smooth rock, and he hadn’t noticed the exact moment of change.
He turned to see if Villiers was still behind him. He felt as though he’d walked through an invisible doorway by accident. Maybe he’d never be able to find it again to return to the twenty-first century. Would that be such a bad thing?
From the edge, he found himself looking eastwards across an expanse of scrub on Stoke Flat towards Big Moor. Big Moor was a kind of no-man’s-land, a buffer zone wedged between the Peak District National Park and the city of Sheffield. Out here on the moors, you stumbled across mysterious locations every few hundred yards. Isolated guide posts pointed the way across empty moorland, patterns were burned into the heather like UFO landing strips, memorial cairns commemorated long-forgotten deaths. And there were so many of those dark, twisted outcrops of rock, sculpted by centuries of wind and rain into bizarre shapes. and marked on the map by sinister names.
For Cooper, this was a landscape infested with evil. Hobs and boggarts, and all kinds of monsters. Ahead of him, the ground was scattered with curious lumps and hollows that his grandmother would have said were hob holes. You wouldn’t go walking across this moor at night, for fear of what might climb out of those holes and grab at your ankles with sharp claws. Of course, they were rabbit burrows, most likely. Or the remains of ancient mine shafts. But they could break your ankle just the same in the dark. They were as lethal as a hob any day.
Villiers was close behind him, hardly even breathing heavily from the climb. But her face was glowing and her eyes were bright as she gazed over the valley, sharing his pleasure at the panoramic view.
‘This is terrific,’ she said. ‘You know, I was never based anywhere in the world that compared to the Peak District.’
‘I suppose this kind of country doesn’t lend itself to air strips.’
He’d never really been able to explain the appeal that a landscape like this had for him. In a way, he felt it must mirror some hidden landscape inside his head. Those stories from local history and folklore were permanently lodged in his subconscious, a legacy of tribal memory. But it was here, in the physical environment of the edges and moors, that they came to life and were acted out by ghostly figures. Their spirits were caught and preserved in the ancient stones and trackways, their names immortalised on the map, their shapes and faces still vividly re-created in the imagination.
People talked about the mists of the past, as if history was wrapped in a gentle haze of nostalgia. But when Cooper thought about some aspects of his ancestors’ lives, the images in his mind tended to be swallowed by an evil fog – a swirling miasma of fear and superstition, a bitter smog of poverty and suffering.
They walked part of the way along the summit track, stopping whenever a new view opened up of rocks and valley. Dusk was falling quickly, changing the light every few minutes as the sun played among low clouds on the western horizon.
Seen from the valley, these gritstone edges resembled the long, broken battlements of an old fortress. One of Cooper’s nieces, seeing the edges one day, had said they were like the ruins of Helm’s Deep after the siege of the orc army. But from up here, high on the moors, there were fantastic views over the rooftops of the Derwentside villages, right out across the Peak District, with the Kinder plateau and Bleaklow in the far distance.
Turning to the south, he glimpsed a magical vision – a vast mansion gleaming gold in the midst of a green landscape. Chatsworth, of course. The home of the Duke of Devonshire, a favourite destination for millions of tourists. Its gilded window frames made the whole house glow in the evening sun.
He knew that Chatsworth was literally packed to the rafters with priceless antiques. Old Masters and oriental porcelain had been collected by dukes over the centuries. Da Vincis and Rembrandts hung on its walls. Delft vases and Blue John bowls mingled with Roman statues and precious silver. But security on the estate was top notch. Most of the thefts they experienced at Chatsworth were the result of tourists taking plants from the gardens.
‘This track was a millstone road, made by seventeenth-century quarrymen,’ said Cooper. ‘Then it was owned by one of the dukes, and he set gamekeepers to guard it against pesky ramblers. Now the public has access. It must be one of the best stretches of scenery in the country.’
‘No argument there.’ Villiers took a deep breath. ‘No matter how often I came home on leave, I never really felt I was back properly.’
‘It gets in the blood, doesn’t it?’
‘Like a virus. But in a good way.’
From the edge, they could see the steep, wooded slopes below, with a dense covering of rotting silver birch. You could make your way down to the woods, but only if you had good stability and the right footwear.
Riddings Edge was also littered with prehistoric sites. Ancient settlements, burials, field systems. To the north, the Stoke Flat stone circle was only a few yards from the main path. And old maps showed a network of packhorse trails crossing the moors, from a time when they provided the only route from north Derbyshire to the towns and cities in the east. It must have been a wild and lonely place for packhorse men and traders to navigate across in safety.
Yet these moors were within such easy reach of Sheffield, Chesterfield, Derby and the M1 motorway that
