Monica Gamble was tired. She’d been tired for years now. Not because she was ill – well, not all the time anyway. She was exhausted from the ordeal of living with her husband. Thirty-five years they’d been married. It was a life sentence. Two or three life sentences. From what she’d read in the papers, some murderers got out after twelve years.
Monica didn’t know what crime she’d committed to end up lumbered like this. Barry was the equivalent of the most annoying cell mate you could imagine getting banged up with in prison. She supposed anyone could get irritating after thirty-five years of close contact. But Barry made a special art of being annoying.
‘It’s a mistake to lie to the police, though, isn’t it?’ he said that night. ‘They always find out you’re lying, one way or another. They just keep on and on asking questions, until they catch you out.’
‘But they haven’t asked us anything important yet. So we’re not lying.’
‘No,’ said Barry doubtfully.
‘Well? We’re not, are we?’
He shook his head, still looking worried. ‘It makes no difference. They’ll be annoyed with us if they find out.’
‘Let them be annoyed.’
‘We’ll be in trouble.’
‘For God’s sake, Barry, do you think you can live your whole life avoiding trouble? That would be so boring, even if you could. It’s the thought of getting in trouble that makes life interesting. It’s the excitement of the risk. Don’t you see that?’
Monica gazed into his face, and sighed. Clearly he didn’t see it. She could read it in his puzzled eyes and wrinkled brow.
‘Look, just answer their questions as briefly as you can, and don’t volunteer any information. You can do that, surely?’
She flinched as she felt her nails digging into the palms of her hands. What had she done to deserve this?
Barry wandered off to his shed and left her standing in the garden in the dusk. Instead of going back into the house, she stayed out for a while. She was gazing upwards, beyond the village, watching the edge as the rocks were painted in vivid colours and shaped by the evening light.
In earlier years, Monica had often heard Barry point out those shapes to the children, encouraging them to picture faces or the outlines of animals in the rock. He said it developed their imaginations. It was true that if you watched the rocks in the setting sun, they seemed to move as perspectives changed, the shadows shifted and lengthened, and darkness filled a crevice to form the suggestion of a mouth or an eye. If you stared long enough, you could see a dragon turn its head to gaze across the valley, a giant dog rise from the ground, a cruel profile sink slowly into the dusk until it was lost from sight.
The children had asked once whether all those creatures came to life at night, when no one was looking. And Barry had said yes, they did. She supposed there was no harm in it. Nothing wrong with letting kids exercise their imaginations. It was better for them than all that sitting in front of TV screens and Game Boys, all that squinting at text messages on their mobile phones.
When she was a child herself, Monica had pictured all kinds of beasts roaming the flats, those wide plains of heather and mat grass that filled the space above the edges. She knew the stories were just folk tales to frighten the gullible. No one would go walking up there in the dark, would they? No one with any sense. Not if they had an ounce of imagination.
Monica had her own theory about those folk stories. She figured they represented natural common sense, a little bit of sound psychological strategy. After all, it was better to place your demons right out there in the dark, and leave them wailing mournfully on the edge. So much better than to keep them prowling endlessly inside your head.
18
Saturday
Above the villages of Riddings and Froggatt, the A625 swung up the hill and climbed through dense trees until it emerged again on to open ground near the Grouse Inn and reached the Longshaw Estate. At a triangular junction just below Longshaw was one of the Peak District’s quirkiest tourist attractions. It was a strange one, even for an area known for its quirkiness. It was a wooden pole, standing upright in the middle of a field.
Cooper knew that many visitors thought it was a joke. They came away convinced that the National Trust tourist sign that just said ‘Wooden Pole’ must be a fake – a hoax perpetrated on them by a local farmer. Yet thousands of them still came every year to look at the pole, and take photographs of it.
It was actually a packhorse route marker from the eighteenth century, marking the way up from Hathersage towards Dronfield. The track in a hollow just below it was the old road itself. The present pole wasn’t the original, but it had been there many years. It was so much of a landmark that the area around it was now known locally as Wooden Pole.
There was no explanation of all this on the sign, though. Cooper liked that. A bit of mystery in the landscape was good. Let the tourists go home wondering. A little further north there was another pole, above Stanage Edge. Carvings in the rocks at its base dated back four centuries to 1550, when it must have been a bit different around here.
He sat with Liz on a grassy slope overlooking the Longshaw Estate and Padley Gorge. Somewhere a long way below them ran Totley Tunnel, carrying the railway line from Sheffield that emerged at the little station down there in the gorge.
‘When we were children, Grandad Cooper used to tell us that there was a penny on top of this pole,’ he said. ‘He said if one of us climbed up to collect it, we could have it.’
Liz murmured comfortably. Her eyes were closed, her face turned up to the sun.
‘It used to be considered okay to tell kids anything in those days, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Except one afternoon, a couple of years ago, I overheard Matt telling his girls there was a pound coin on top.’
‘Well, that’s inflation for you.’
Cooper laughed. ‘Worse than that. They didn’t believe him for a second. Kids are much smarter now than we ever were.’
‘Less gullible, anyway.’
‘Some people say it’s a boundary pole, marking the spot where Yorkshire becomes Derbyshire, or vice versa. I seem to remember there was an old man who lived near here who claimed that lots of poles were erected on the moors during the Second World War, to prevent the Germans landing gliders full of troops to invade Sheffield.’
‘That’s the way it goes around here. You make up your own stories, and people choose which they want to believe.’
‘You’re right. It’s always been like that, I think.’
The National Trust sign was pretty much as Cooper remembered it. When you went up close to see what it told you about the pole, all it said was: Keep to the paths, do not climb the walls, keep dogs on leads. Observe the by-laws.
The pole stood about twenty feet high, but it was rather a knobbly-looking affair. In fact, it had the appearance of a failed totem pole, one that had been abandoned before the proper carving had been done. Basically, it was the trunk of a spindly tree, possibly a silver birch.
‘I’m glad we got this time together,’ said Liz. ‘I suspect you’d only be thinking about the Riddings case otherwise. You do get a bit obsessive, Ben.’
‘There are two Riddings cases,’ said Cooper.
‘Oh?’
That was one of the things he liked about her. She worried about him getting obsessed with particular cases, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she experienced the same surge of interest. It was evident in her voice, just that
