they were possibly the easiest wild place in Britain to access from a major city. There were good footpaths too, and parking close to the top so that people could enjoy the views without a long walk.
The moors had originally been shaped by farming, tree clearance and grouse shooting. There was the purple haze of heather, and the strange, cackling call of the red grouse. And maybe a fleeting glimpse of a common lizard basking on weather-worn rocks. Here and there, under a tree, Cooper saw little mounds writhing with brown ants. There were hairy wood ants, fearsome creatures that squirted formic acid at you if you came too close. The smell of vinegar was the warning sign. There were adders here too. The snakes hibernated for winter. But in May, as the weather warmed up, they came out on to the moor to sun themselves.
No adders or lizards were out at this time of day, not even a deer. Cooper saw only a Coke can lying in the bracken. An aluminium can outlived most people. If it wasn’t picked up, this one would still be lying here in sixty years’ time. Maybe seventy or eighty. It wouldn’t have rotted or decomposed. There was nothing biodegradable about it. By the end of the century, this can would still be weathering slowly, its bright red surface faded to a dirty brown that matched the dead bracken. Yet the entire population of Riddings would be dead and gone. The human body was different. In the High Peak mortuary, Zoe Barron’s body was doing more than just fading.
He jumped as a pheasant burst from under his feet in an explosion of noise and feathers. He had failed to see it, been completely unaware of its presence as it lay motionless in the heather.
On other moors, the shooting season had started on the Glorious Twelfth. But Big Moor was owned by the National Park authority and designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its rare plants and wildlife. Despite the ease of access, this moorland had been left pretty much undisturbed since prehistoric times.
‘You think a lot, don’t you?’ said Villiers. ‘You’d forgotten I was here for a while – I could tell by your face. I don’t remember that about you, Ben.’
‘Sorry,’ said Cooper.
But she was right. He’d started to feel so relaxed with her that he hadn’t felt it necessary to concentrate on acknowledging her presence, the way courtesy demanded you had to do with strangers.
‘How long is it, then?’ he said.
‘Since we saw each other?’ she guessed.
‘Yes, sorry. That’s what I mean.’
‘When I was home on leave once, visiting the old folks. Maybe five years.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would be about that. So… five years ago. Does that mean you’ve not been given any leave in the last five years?’
‘Well, you know…’
‘You had more interesting things to do.’
‘We move on, don’t we?’
‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘Just not always in a good way, I suppose.’
‘No.’
‘So which was it for you?
He watched her eyes as she thought about the question, saw the doubt and pain pass across her face, the conflicting memories of love and grief written as clear as any words could express.
‘Both, perhaps,’ she said. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t know.’
Villiers was silent for a moment, and Cooper thought he’d said the wrong thing, hurt her by poking into all those darkest corners of her life that she was trying so hard not to remember.
‘What about you, Ben?’ she said finally. ‘Moving on in a good way?’
Cooper hesitated. His first instinct was to tell her everything, to spill out all his feelings, explain exactly what he felt about his family, about his job, about Liz. Everything, for good or bad.
But then he looked at her again, noticing once more how changed she was. No, the time wasn’t right. Not quite yet. He needed to be sure that he still knew her as well as he’d always thought he did.
He pointed away from the edge towards the flats. Large expanses of these would be covered in bright red reeds in the autumn. The colour would merge with the purple of the flowering heather like a swathe of dramatic fabric. The furthest hills were already carpeted in heather. To stand on a rocky outcrop on the edge and look westwards was like gazing out over a red sea, crimson and magenta waves moving gently in the breeze like an ocean of blood.
‘Let’s walk that way for a while, across the moor towards White Edge. There’s a Neolithic settlement called Swine Sty. We should be able to reach that and get back again before the light goes.’
‘Okay. You’re the boss.’
‘Watch out for the hob holes,’ said Cooper.
Villiers laughed. ‘Hob? Are you kidding.’
‘You know about hobs?’
‘Yes, from my childhood fairy stories.’
The footpath towards White Edge crossed an area of grassland that gleamed gold even on a day of mist and rain. They headed towards a solitary tree standing in forlorn isolation on the moor.
‘I spend most of my time in this country, of course,’ said Villiers. ‘I served with an RAFP flight at a station in Cambridgeshire after I came back from Afghanistan. Mostly community policing, but you’d be surprised how much drug detection work we did, not to mention more recently breathalysing military personnel suspected of drink- driving.’
Cooper noted that her breathing was getting a bit ragged now. But the strenuous activity didn’t stop her talking. It was as if these wide-open spaces, the empty landscapes above the Devil’s Edge, had given her the freedom to express what she might not have said down in the valley, among strangers.
‘My last posting was with Number Five Squadron at RAF Waddington,’ she said. ‘In April last year, my unit was deployed to Santander after the Icelandic volcano closed air space. We were assisting stranded British troops from Afghanistan, and some UK civilians. They came back to the UK on board HMS Albion.’
‘I remember that in the news.’
‘Outside unit level, I had a spell in the investigations branch, the Specialist Police Wing. That’s plain clothes, the investigation of serious crime. CID work, in fact. Some of that time with the SPW was spent in Germany. I even liaised with the Forensic Science Flight on forensic investigations.’
‘Your CV must have read like a dream for the interview panel,’ said Cooper.
She laughed. ‘Yes, I think I had everything. A local girl who knows the area, has life experience and leadership abilities. Not to mention the training. Our basic training includes on-and off-road driving, weapons training, lines of communication…’
‘And good physical fitness.’
‘We were tested every six months. That doesn’t happen here, I guess.’
Cooper remembered the way she’d looked at Gavin Murfin.
‘No.’
They were climbing now, towards the highest point of Big Moor. Beyond Swine Sty, the county boundary ran right along a stream called Bar Brook. The moors they could see in the middle distance lay in South Yorkshire.
‘This stuff is difficult to walk through,’ said Villiers.
‘It’s peat, but it’s shallow peat. Not like the depths on Kinder or Bleaklow.’
The result of the peat’s shallowness on these eastern moors was a mass of coarse, tussocky grass interspersed with boggy areas. Villiers was right – it was a difficult landscape to walk through. In places, it felt like wading through drifts of snow, with no idea what lay underneath. Blankets of dead bracken stems choked everything.
‘And you met your husband in the service?’ asked Cooper.
‘Glen had a posting to the Tactical Provost Squadron. The TPS take on forward policing tasks in conflict zones. He served with his unit in the Gulf – Iraq, you know.’ Villiers paused, seemed to reflect for a moment on something. ‘The rest of his guys are still in a conflict zone now, in Afghanistan. Those are just the more publicised taskings, though. Most of our work doesn’t get in the news.’
‘Close protection duties?’
‘Not me personally. But I was given the training. We all were. So stick close to me and you’ll be safe, Ben.’
