Dead And Buried

‘I don’t know,’ said Hurst. ‘That could be the most likely explanation. Okay, there’s no cash here, or the sort of small electrical items that opportunist thieves usually go for. But scrap metal is worth a fair bit these days. Ask the vicars whose church roofs keep getting stripped of lead.’

Fry shook her head. ‘I still can’t see any signs that anything has been taken.’

‘There was definitely a vehicle here, though. The fire crews saw it. A white pickup. Just the sort of vehicle you’d use for scrap.’

‘Probably a white pickup.’

‘There were too many people up here. Too many for it to be just a coincidence. Too many for there to be a logical explanation. Not an innocent logical explanation anyway.’

From Fry’s research when she first transferred here from the West Midlands, she knew about the ten unsolved murders in Derbyshire Constabulary’s history. The oldest went back to 1966, the case of a Chesterfield teenager found beaten to death in a disused factory. It was senseless killings like that that tended to be the most difficult to detect and the most unlikely to result in a successful prosecution.

But whatever had happened inside this pub, it wasn’t senseless. At least two people had come together here, if only for a short while. There had been a reason for the killing.

Murder, or the idea of murder, wasn’t all that unfamiliar a concept to a lot of people, most of them ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It had been a part of human experience since Cain killed Abel. Normally it all went wrong with the disposal of the body. The killing itself was easy. It didn’t take much thought — a red mist in front of the eyes, a violent swing of the arm, and it was done. But a corpse on the floor was a different matter. There were bloodstains on the walls, one of your hairs on their clothes, a fragment of your skin caught under their fingernails. And perhaps a witness who had seen both of you arrive but only one of you leave. From that point, it took a lot of thought. And who was thinking straight in those circumstances? Most people just panicked and ran.

They’d interviewed some of the firefighters, and a couple of rangers who’d been in the vicinity. But the interviews had produced little of any use. Understandably, their attention had been on the fires, not on the pub. And that was a shame. Given the location, they were the only potential witnesses available.

‘The last landlord, you said?’

‘Mad Maurice,’ repeated Murfin. ‘Moved back down into Edendale with his family when the pub closed. Name of Wharton.’

‘Why do they call him Mad Maurice?’ asked Fry.

‘Because he used to get mad a lot,’ said Murfin. ‘There were loads of things he couldn’t stand. Mobile phones, children, people who just came into the pub to use the loo or ask directions. Anything like that, he’d get mad about. Maurice became a tourist attraction in his own right.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, folk used to come in the pub just in the hopes of seeing him get mad. They thought it was funny. “Let’s go and see Mad Maurice,” they’d say. Where other landlords called the traditional “Time gentlemen, please”, Maurice’s shout was “Come on, you buggers, clear off. Haven’t you got homes to go to?”’

‘Charming.’

‘It was just his way.’

‘If he shouted that at me, I’d never go back there again.’

‘Well that’s the point. If you couldn’t put up with a bit of abuse, he didn’t want you in his pub anyway. It meant you were the wrong sort of customer.’

‘Good grief. It’s no wonder the place went bust, if he chased away all his custom like that.’

‘On the contrary, it was one of the pub’s unique selling points. People used to go there because of Maurice. It’s a bit like customers going to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant hoping to hear him say the F-word. You know what I mean.’

‘Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity chef who’s always on the telly. He’s famous.’

‘Well so was Mad Maurice, in his own way. He was a local celebrity. For every customer he banned from the pub for a using a mobile phone or talking too loud, he’d get ten more coming in to see him do it.’

‘A clever marketing ploy on his part, then.’

‘No,’ said Murfin. ‘He just got mad a lot.’

Hurst took a call, and turned immediately to Fry.

‘We got an ID,’ she said. ‘Name of Aidan Merritt, a thirty-five-year-old teacher from Edendale.’

‘A teacher? What was he up to at the Light House?’

‘Dunno. But here’s the interesting thing. His name came up in HOLMES in connection with the Pearson inquiry.’

10

Ben Cooper parked his Toyota by the little green in the centre of Castleton and opened his Ordnance Survey map. It was a well-used, heavily creased copy of Outdoor Leisure 1, the Dark Peak.

As usual, the area he wanted went off the edge of the map and crossed into the White Peak. That was just to make things more difficult.