Lost River
Stephen Booth
a cognizant original v5 release october 21 2010
Monday
On the banks of the river, Ben Cooper was running. His breath came ragged and hot in his throat. The sweat ran into his eyes. All around him, water rushed over stones, pale rocks gleamed under the surface, wet slabs of limestone caught the glare of sunlight trapped in a narrow valley. As he splashed at the edge of the water, he saw shimmers of steam rising from the wet grass, bursts of foam on the edge of his vision. And he saw long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels.
A hundred yards away, someone had started to scream. The noise echoed off the limestone cliffs, and shrieked among the caves and pinnacles of the dale. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to block out the noise, to stop the pain of the screaming.
But he knew it would never stop, would never be out of his head again.
Behind him, other people were running. He could hear them stumbling and gasping, crashing into trees, cursing each other. The outlines of the Twelve Apostles swayed against the sky above him, jagged stone spires bursting from the hillside like teeth.
Cooper stopped to swipe the sweat from his eyes, wondering whether he was seeing anything properly. The sun reflecting off the water created impenetrable shadows and glittering fringes of light, caught strands of grass waving below the surface like hair. A fish popped up to the air, another jumped and splashed across the river. Water foamed around an obstruction, a shape lying deep on the gravel bed.
Cooper shook his head. Who was screaming? Why didn’t someone tell them to stop? There were enough people here by the river. Scores of people. Dozens of families had been drawn into Dovedale by the hot May bank holiday weather. Sensing the sudden burst of excitement, they milled aimlessly on the banks like panicked sheep. In the distance, he could see them lining the stepping stones in a dumb row.
Nearby, a man stood on the bank, his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers. Cooper had the mad impression that he was some kind of priest, performing a blessing. High on an arch of rock another figure hunched, silhouetted against the sky, his face invisible. A predator on its perch, scanning the valley for prey.
In the water, Cooper saw another rock. More rocks everywhere, lying half in and half out of the river, worn as smooth as skin. Pale, wet skin, everywhere in the water. What chance did he have of distinguishing anything? No chance. No chance, until it was too late.
He looked up again. Was it really someone screaming? Or was it just a bird, startled from its roost in the birches on the limestone edge? A whole flock of birds screeching to each other, over and over, a cacophony of despair. It felt as though the rocks themselves were screaming.
He breathed deeply, tried to focus, forced himself to be calm. Now wasn’t the time to lose his head. He was a police officer, and everyone was looking to him to do something. He lowered his eyes, and kept running. Still there was too much light glaring off the water, too many shadows, too much
random movement. The roots of an ash tree covered in algae crouched at the edge of the water. A broken branch lay like a severed limb.
There were shouts up ahead now, and the sound of an engine. Voices calling questions, and shouting instructions. Finally, someone was trying to take charge of the chaos. He stumbled into the water, splashed spray in a wide, glittering arc. The coldness of the water was a painful shock, a blast of ice on his hot skin. He missed his footing on a wet stone, slipped, found himself crouching low over the water, staring at a broken reflection of his own face.
No. Not his own face. It was smaller, motionless – a white face, hair floating, the blood washed clear by cold, crystal streams, a green summer dress tangled on the body like weeds. A green shroud of weeds barely stirring in the water.
He plunged his hands into the river and grasped the limp arms. With a heave, he drew the body up out of the water, into the air, and held the cold form in arms, hardly daring to look at the white face. The limbs flopped, her head lolled back on her neck. Water cascaded from the folds of her dress and oozed from the sides of her mouth.
Finally, Cooper raised his voice.
‘Here,’ he called.
And then the screaming stopped. The limestone gorge fell silent. And there was only the roar of rushing water – the endless sound of the River Dove, never stopping, continually washing clean. A torrent of water, purifying death.
Cooper turned towards the bank. And that was when he saw them. They were standing close together, but apart from the crowd, as if the onlookers had instinctively drawn away. Two adults, and a boy of about thirteen. He stared at them in despair, his mouth moving but no words coming out.
Their isolation, the tense attitude of their bodies, the desolation of their expressions – they all told him the same story. This was the dead girl’s family.
Well, the tourist authority would love it. They’d be sending out the ice-cream vans and unfolding the awnings at the tea rooms. For once, summer had come early in the Peak District.
The thought was no consolation to Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, as she sat in her car on a hot street in Edendale. The windows were open, but there wasn’t enough breeze here to ruffle her hair, let alone to cool the clammy interior of a black Audi. She cursed herself for having parked with the front seats in full sun, so the heat had been focused on the fake leather like a laser aimed through the windscreen. She couldn’t even use her air conditioning without risking the battery. Now the heat was rising all around her in a mist, steaming up the mirrors. Another half hour of this, and she might spontan-eously combust. That was, if she didn’t die of boredom first.
She thumbed the button on her handset.
‘Anything happening?’
‘Not yet. It’s all quiet.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
Fry sighed, glanced in her rear-view mirror, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The Audi was a new car, since she’d finally got rid of the battered old Peugeot. But she hadn’t been able to tear herself away from black. These days, everyone
seemed to go for silver grey or metallic blue, but personally she tended to agree with Henry Ford – anything, so long as it was black.
Of course, it wasn’t the best choice when the summer decided to start early, with a heat wave at the end of May. Black seemed to absorb every last drop of heat.
What she needed was movement. Her foot on the accelerator, a breeze whipping past the windows. The air con going full blast. She wouldn’t really care where she was heading, if only she was moving. Out of this housing estate, out of the town of Edendale, and into the Derbyshire countryside for the sake of a cool breeze on the hills. She never thought she would hear herself say it.
A voice crackled.
‘Still nothing. Shall we call it a day?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’m dying here, Diane.’
‘I’ll make sure you get a good funeral, Gavin.’
In the CID car, DC Gavin Murfin and young DC Becky Hurst would really be getting on each other’s nerves by now. Murfin would be dropping crumbs on the floor and sweating, and Hurst would be talking too much and spraying the interior with air freshener. One of them would probably kill the other, if she made them sit in the sun any longer. Fry pictured the contest. If she had to place a bet, her money would be on Hurst. She was younger, faster, and meaner.
Fry looked up the street again at a suggestion of movement. An old man walking an ancient dog. Neither of them was moving at more than half a mile an hour. The dog was black, like her car. Its head drooped as it slowly put one foot in front of the other on the pavement, heading towards the corner shop at the end of the street.
They weren’t what she was watching for. Her target was a fair-haired man in his late twenties, wearing a baseball cap. Intelligence said that he was living in one of these houses
halfway along the street, a typical Devonshire Estate council-owned semi. But she was starting to think he might have moved home.
‘I’d better start making a note of what music I want,’ said Murfin.
‘What?’
‘At my funeral. I don’t want any of this happy-clappy, cele-brating-his-life sort of stuff. I want everyone to cry when I go.’
‘Gavin, can we keep the chatter to a minimum, please?’
She heard him sigh. ‘Okay, boss.’
In the last few months, Fry had found herself thinking about moving home, too. She wasn’t sure whether it was the new car, or all the other things that she had to think about, particularly the major decisions she had to make. Decisions that she’d been putting off for weeks.
Whatever the reason, her flat at number 12 Grosvenor Avenue had begun to feel narrow and confining, as if she was living in a cell. The detached Victorian villa, once so solid and prosperous, had started to flake at the edges, the window frames warping with damp, tiles slipping off the roof during the night and frightening her half to death with their noise.
‘Is this him, Diane?’
Fry watched a white baseball cap emerge from behind an overgrown privet hedge on to the pavement.
‘No, it’s female.’
‘Oh, yeah. You’re right. Female, and suffering from a recent fashion disaster.’
Despite herself, Fry smiled. ‘You being the expert, of course, Gavin.’
She could hear another voice in the background. Hurst, giving Murfin some earache.
‘Becky says I’m being sexist,’ said Murfin. ‘So I’m going to have to go and kill myself.’
‘Fair enough.’
Fry looked at the row of council houses, wondering about
the kind of people who lived here, rent paid out of their Social Security benefits. Some of them hardly seemed to care about the conditions they brought their children up in.
When she’d first moved into her flat, there had been a private landlord – absent, but at least a real person who could be spoken to occasionally. Last winter, the property had been sold to a development company with an office somewhere in Manchester and an automated switchboard that put you on hold whenever you phoned with complaints.
It was a shame. When she looked around the other houses in Grosvenor Avenue, she saw what could be done by a responsible owner. But the present landlords didn’t worry about their steady turnover of tenants, who were mostly migrant workers with jobs in the bigger Edendale hotels, and a few students on courses at High Peak College. The former tended to disappear in the winter when the tourist season was over, and the latter were gone in the summer. Fry had been the longest surviving tenant for two or three years now. No doubt the owners wondered why she was still there. She was starting to wonder that herself. It was probably time to say goodbye to the mock porticos, and the flat on the first floor, with its washed-out carpets and indelible background smells.
But where would she go if she left Grosvenor Avenue? Well, that was yet another decision – one she wasn’t equipped to make right now. She had far more important things to think about. Subjects that would dominate her thoughts, if she let them. Decisions that would change her life for ever.
Fry swore under her breath and turned up the fan to coax a bit more action out of the air con. When she first joined the police, back in Birmingham, she hadn’t anticipated how much of her time would be spent sitting in cars. And always uncomfortably, too – wearing a uniform that didn’t fit because it was designed for a man, strapped into a stab-proof vest that pinched her skin in awkward places because…well, because it was designed for a man.
And then, when she moved to CID, she’d been too excited to take in what everyone told her – that she’d spend just as much time in car. And when she wasn’t in a car, she would be sitting at a desk, filling in forms, compiling case files, answering endless queries from the Crown Prosecution Service. Like so many other police officers, she lived for the moment when she got a chance to get out of the office. Well, maybe she had the answer to that. Perhaps she had a road trip coming up.
Recently, she’d been working hard to get back in physical condition, to regain all those skills that she’d learned under her old
Shotokan
master in Dudley. If you didn’t train regularly, you lost those skills. But now her body was tuned and fit again. Her natural leanness was no longer taken as a sign of poor health. As for her mind…well, maybe there was still some work to do.
Then her phone rang. Though she’d been getting desperate for something to happen, Fry was actually irritated. She checked the caller ID and saw it was Ben Cooper. It had better be important.
‘Ben?’
‘She’s dead, Diane.’
‘Who is?’
The connection was very bad. His voice was intermittent, crackly and fragmented like a message from outer space. Detective Constable Cooper calling from Planet Derbyshire.
‘The little girl. The paramedics tried to revive her, but she was dead.’
‘Ben, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I tried, Diane. But she was already –’
‘You’re breaking up badly. Where are you?’
‘Dovedale. It’s –’
But then he was gone completely, his signal lost in some valley in the depths of the Peak District. Dovedale? She had an idea that it was way down in the south of the division, somewhere near Ashbourne.
Fry frowned. Just before Cooper was cut off, she thought she’d heard a siren somewhere in the background. She dialled his mobile number, got the unobtainable tone. She tried again, with the same result. No surprise there. So she used her radio to call the Control Room.
‘An incident in Dovedale. Have you got anything coming in?’
She listened as the call handler found the incident log and read her the details. There was no mention of DC Cooper, just a series of 999 calls recorded from the public at irregular intervals, probably as people got signals on their mobiles. Units were attending the scene, along with paramedics and ambulance. One casualty reported. She supposed it would all become clear in due course.
‘Thank you.’
When she thumbed the button again, she got Gavin Murfin’s voice yelling for her.
‘Diane, where are you? He’s on the move, on the move. Your direction. Repeat, your direction. Have you got a visual?’
‘What?’
Fry looked up and saw movement on the pavement a few yards ahead of her position. But it was only the old man coming back towards her, flat cap pulled over his eyes, dog lead in one hand, plastic carrier bag in the other. The dog dug its heels in and stopped to water a lamp post.
‘Nothing. Nothing in sight here.’
‘He’s long gone,’ said Murfin. ‘He was legging it. Didn’t you see him?’
‘No.’
While his dog performed its business, the old man stood and stared at her defiantly like some ancient accusing angel.
‘Bloody Hell, Gavin,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve lost him.’
For the past half hour, Cooper had been listening to the yelp and wail. The modern tones of emergency response vehicles, howling up the dale one after another. The noises merged
inside his head with an echo of the screaming. The noise still bounced off the sides of his skull in the same way it had rico-cheted among the caves and pinnacles of Dovedale.
He still didn’t know who had screamed. Perhaps it was the mother. Or it might just have been some random bystander, reacting with horror to a glimpse of a body in the water. A small, white face. Long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels…
‘Their name is Nield.’
The tall uniformed sergeant was called Wragg. Cooper remembered him vaguely, and thought he’d probably turned up at a couple of major incidents in E Division when he was still a PC. He was fairly recently promoted, and was based at Ashbourne section now. He was wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over his uniform, and had removed his cap to reveal close-cropped fair hair. He looked harassed, but it might just be the heat.
‘Local?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes, by some miracle. Among all these crowds, you’d think it’d be city people who suffered an incident like this. You know, the sort who’ve never actually seen a river before. Folk who don’t think you can drown in water unless there’s a sign telling you so.’
‘You’ve seen too many tourists.’
‘You got that right,’ said Wragg. ‘I never want to catch duty on a bank holiday again, I can tell you. Do you know how long it took me to get my car through those jams? You won’t be able to move down here later.’
‘That will be somebody else’s headache.’
‘I wish.’
Cooper was leaning against Wragg’s car. He had a clear view up the gorge towards the weirs, and beyond them, the pool where he’d pulled the body out of the water.
‘How old is she?’ he said.
‘Eight.’
‘She’s only eight years old?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was here with her parents. How the hell did it happen?’
‘They say their dog went into the water to fetch a stick. A golden retriever, it is. It seems the girl ran in after the dog. Only the dog came out.’
Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘Where are the parents now?’
‘Gone with her to hospital.’
‘They surely don’t think she’ll be revived. Do they?’
Wragg shaded his eyes with a hand as he watched some members of the public being shepherded away from the scene.
‘You don’t give up in these circumstances,’ he said. ‘That’s the very last thing you do.’
Events had moved pretty quickly once the girl’s body had been recovered from the water. Cooper had carried her to the bank and laid her on the grass. Then a woman had come forward from the crowd of bystanders, saying she was a nurse. Cooper had handed over resuscitation efforts to her, and she kept it going until the fast-response paramedic arrived, closely followed by the ambulance and Sergeant Wragg and his colleagues from the Ashbourne section station.
‘We’ll need a statement from you, of course,’ said Wragg.
‘But it will do later. We’re trying to catch as many witnesses as we can among the public before they disappear.’
‘Of course.’
‘But there doesn’t seem any doubt it was an accidental drowning.’
‘There was blood, though,’ said Cooper. ‘Blood in the water. She had an injury on her head.’
‘She probably fell and hit her head on a stone. That would explain why she drowned in such a shallow depth.’
‘“Probably“?’
‘There’s hardly going to be any trace evidence,’ said Wragg irritably. ‘The stone is somewhere out there being washed by
thousands of gallons of water every second. We’ll see what eye-witness statements say, but I think you’ll find that’s it.’
‘Yes, all right.’
There had been no blood on the girl when he’d picked her up. But Cooper remembered seeing the wound now, an abrasion and broken skin on her forehead. The toughest thing he’d ever done was putting that body down, handing the little girl over to someone else. It felt like abandoning her to her fate. For some ridiculous reason, his instinct had been telling him he was the only person who could save her.
It was strange what your mind could do in a crisis. Sometimes, the rational part of your brain cut out altogether and you acted entirely on instinct, with no conscious thought involved. But occasionally your mind presented you with odd flashes of information that didn’t even seem to be relevant at the time.