Dead And Buried

No, this had been a practical choice of location. Travellers passing over the moors needed somewhere to stop for the night, a place to change or rest their horses. The inn’s lights appearing in the dusk must have been a welcome sight to many thousands of people over the years. It was only much later that they came here for the view.

Thomas Pilkington left after handing over the keys to the pub. As his Volvo estate drove away, another vehicle was pulling up to the outer cordon. An unmarked Vauxhall Corsa CID pool car. And surely that was Gavin Murfin at the wheel? Not many officers drove with one hand while eating a sausage roll from the other.

Cooper shook his head. Murfin was probably just curious about what was going on. He couldn’t blame him for that. It was why he was here himself. But Gavin’s presence at the Light House was the last thing he needed right now. It was like tossing a burning rag into a pool of oil.

He tried making gestures at the Corsa. Go away, Gavin. But Murfin had wound the driver’s window down and was having a chat with the uniformed officer on duty. Everyone knew DC Murfin. He’d been in E Division for ever. Within a few minutes, he would know far more about the crime scene than Cooper did himself.

Cooper wasn’t the only person who’d noticed the pool car arrive, either. Fry was stomping about like an angry wasp.

‘Shouldn’t you and your team be somewhere?’ she said, approaching Cooper. ‘Going over the Pearsons’ movements, perhaps? Wasn’t that what we all agreed at the briefing this morning?’

‘I’m just on my way,’ said Cooper, but he didn’t move.

‘So …?’

‘Well the thing is — I’m not sure about the route,’ he said.

‘The route?’

‘The one the Pearsons took on their way back to the cottage from Castleton. It seems to have been assumed that they just followed the Limestone Way.’

‘Yes.’

‘But according to the statements in the case file, some customers waiting outside the fish and chip shop reported seeing them on The Stones.’

‘That was when the Pearsons were on their way down in to Castleton earlier in the evening.’

Cooper knew he shouldn’t have been surprised that she had the smallest details of the couple’s movements off by heart. It was one of Fry’s skills, along with the knack of making him feel useless. Well, superfluous at least.

‘Yes, but …?’ he said.

‘Ben, all that sighting does is confirm that David and Trisha Pearson went into Castleton for the evening. And we know that already from the staff at the George.’

‘But don’t you see …?’

‘Just go over the ground,’ she said slowly, as if to an idiot. ‘Check everything from the original inquiry. And we’ll take it from there. Okay?’

Cooper swallowed his words in frustration. There were none so blind as those who refused to see, and Diane Fry was one of the most stubborn.

When he’d looked at the reports and witness statements from the night David and Trisha Pearson disappeared, an idea had occurred to him. He needed to explain it to someone, but Diane Fry had been the wrong person.

9

Fry supposed this was what would have been called an old-fashioned pub. She pictured an open hearth and log fires in the winter, a place where dogs were welcome — sometimes more welcome than human patrons. What had the old man from the auctioneer’s called it? A unique destination food house? It wasn’t her idea of a destination. She wouldn’t waste petrol coming up here if she didn’t have to.

The pub had a stone slate roof, with a satellite dish high on the wall, and spotlights that must once have lit the facade of the pub and made it visible for miles. A sign was faintly chalked on an A-board left lying on the ground outside: We serve REAL chips.

A smokers’ shelter had been built against one wall. Ironically, there were plenty of butt bins provided, so it was probably the one place where cigarette ends could be disposed of safely anywhere on Oxlow Moor, where she could see the wildfires burning.

Sometimes Fry liked to see a fire. For her, flames could be cleansing, a means of getting rid of the old and clearing the way for something better. But she supposed Cooper and those like him wouldn’t see it that way. No doubt they would be panicking right now about the damage to their precious landscape, as if was a fossil that ought to be preserved in aspic and never altered.

It was nonsense, of course. Everyone knew that places like the Peak District looked the way they did because of centuries of human interference. Moorland landscapes had been shaped by deforestation and changes in farming methods. Yes, the credit for maintaining the moors went to all those damn sheep.

Fry stepped over the low boundary wall on to the terrace of the pub. The wall was lined with terracotta pots full of dead plants. Someone had made an attempt at decorating the main entrance with hanging baskets. They might have been full of petunias and trailing lobelias once. Now they hung from their rusting brackets, bare of flowers, spilling torn shreds of coconut-fibre liner.