The Corpse Bridge (31 page)

Becky Hurst appeared at the top of the slope. Cooper signalled to her to join him and waited until she scrambled down.

‘What have you found?' she said.

‘I'm not sure. Probably nothing.' He looked up the slope. ‘Where's Gavin?'

‘Having a quick sulk.'

‘And a snack?'

‘Probably. I didn't wait to see. There's only so much I can take.'

Cooper found a length of wood, hooked a handle of the plastic bag and fished it out of the water. When he prised it open he discovered some sodden clothing inside. Thrown away instead of being taken to a charity shop or disposed of properly?

He teased the clothing out and spread it on the ground. A crumpled shape turned out to be a woollen hat, with ear flaps and a Scandinavian design. He'd been right about the reindeer.

Something metallic rolled out of the hat on to the ground. It was a small LED torch. A tiny thing, but it would have provided a bright light, if its batteries hadn't been submerged in water for the past four days.

‘Sandra Blair's possessions,' said Cooper.

‘Wow,' said Hurst. ‘Why would someone take the trouble to dump them here? Why not leave them with the body?'

‘They probably handled them.'

‘So they were worried about fingerprints or DNA?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Do you reckon we'll be able get anything from them?'

Cooper slipped the items into separate evidence bags. ‘Let's hope so. It's about our only break so far.'

‘You really think there'll be another victim, Ben?' asked Hurst.

He straightened up and looked out over the Harpur Hill testing grounds, with the remaining route of the old coffin road heading away across Axe Edge Moor. The breeze fluttered a scrap of wool on the dismembered body of the sheep. It seemed inevitable. As if there had to be a death before anyone could cross the Corpse Bridge.

‘I'm certain of it,' he said.

C
hris Thornton was shift supervisor at Deeplow Quarry that day, when the crusher jammed. He was standing outside the office, checking the time sheets and cursing one of the dump truck drivers who'd failed to turn up for work. As far as he was concerned the first sign of trouble was the screech of metal. It shrieked across the quarry above the rumble of engines and the crash of broken stone. Then an alarm sounded for a few seconds before somebody hit the button and stopped the motor.

‘What the hell was that?'

Thornton began to run up the roadway towards the quarry face, kicking up limestone dust and veering aside to avoid a truck manoeuvring to deposit its load in the bottom hopper. He could see a group of men in orange overalls and hard hats, who were slowly gathering around the crusher. Someone had climbed on to the inspection plate and was staring down into the belt mechanism. Then the worker straightened up and said something to the other men below, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

As Thornton covered the last hundred yards, the entire group turned to look at him. He read a mixture of shock and relief on their faces. He knew the reason for the relief – they'd just set eyes on the man who was going to take responsibility from their shoulders. He didn't yet understand why they were looking so shocked.

In a moment, though, Chris Thornton would find out. Within the next few hours the whole of Derbyshire would know.

T
he road to Deeplow Quarry ran steeply down through neighbouring villages, carrying the telltale signs of quarrying. The unnaturally white surface of the carriageway and the crash barriers on every bend were the clues.

Ben Cooper knew that limestone lorries ground their way down this hill every day. No matter how well they were sheeted or how often their wheels were washed, they left their traces on the roads in the neighbourhood and reminded everyone of the quarry's existence. The barriers were there to protect residents living directly in the path of the lorries. If the brakes failed as one of them descended the hill, it would turn into an uncontrollable twelve-ton missile capable of demolishing a house. It had happened only once in living memory. But that was once too often for the people whose properties had been damaged.

Most of the quarries in this area were run by large multinational companies now. The name on the sign at the entrance would usually be that of Tarmac, or Omya, or Lhoist. But Deeplow was one of the few that had survived the spread of the conglomerates. It remained a locally owned operation, thanks to a source of good quality limestone which enabled it to produce pure lime, and kept it productive and profitable.

It was also thanks, perhaps, to the existence of a loyal workforce – local people who'd worked at the quarry for generations and relied on its existence for their livelihood, much as the workers on the Knowle estate did. Those quarrymen didn't want to see Deeplow swallowed up by a multinational with its headquarters in Switzerland or Mexico.

Cooper turned his Toyota into the quarry entrance. The crusher, where the stone was ground to a powder, was one of the most prominent buildings on the site.

There had been a quarry at the Deeplow site for over a hundred years. The present plant extracted and processed calcium carbonate, a carboniferous limestone more than a hundred and eighty million years old, formed from the compressed skeletons of millions of prehistoric animals and sea creatures.

There were four bigger quarries nearby – Hindlow, Hillhead, Brierlow and Dowlow, all lying close to the A515. A public footpath had crossed the site between the main road and a green lane on the west. Though it had been a public right of way for many years, the footpath had been diverted by the county council under the Highways Act.

So the old coffin road that once ran across this part of the countryside had gone, the ground ripped up and excavated, the route switched to the south.

‘It's mad,' said Chris Thornton, taking them into the Portakabin he used as an office. ‘I mean, why would anyone do something like this?'

‘We don't know, sir.'

‘Although I suppose it could have been worse. There have been a couple of bodies—'

‘Yes. But nothing for you to worry about.'

‘There was one at Pilsbury, which isn't very far away from here. Do you know who it was yet?'

‘We haven't released the victim's identity at this stage.'

Thornton removed his hard hat and ran a hand across the top of his head, making his hair stand up as if he'd just received an electric shock.

‘Well, someone obviously got on to the site and did this. It scared some of the blokes to death. They thought it was real at first. The older ones can be a bit superstitious, you know.'

‘I understand.'

‘Anyway, it's in here,' said Thornton. ‘I suppose you'll want it.'

He opened the door of a storeroom for Cooper to look in. The object had been ripped to shreds by the machinery. One of the legs was missing and the head hung from the neck by a few threads. Rips ran right up the plump torso. It was covered in white dust and Cooper coughed as he brushed some of it from the face.

There was no mistaking it, though. He could even take a good guess at who had made it. It was almost an exact copy of the Corpse Bridge dummy. But this time the effigy of Earl Manby had been through the crusher.

‘Could it have been one of your own employees who did this?' asked Cooper.

‘I'd be surprised,' said Thornton. ‘About a hundred people work here at Deeplow. But they're like a family. Some of their jobs have been passed down from father to son, the way it's always been.'

A siren went off – the first blast a long one, giving a two-minute warning of firing. Outside, near the quarry face, the blasting engineer had his det-line and detonator with two buttons like a simplified TV remote. The blasts followed each other within milliseconds. That vibration would be felt down in the valley.

‘What do you use for your explosives, Mr Thornton?' asked Cooper.

‘It's a coarse mixture of ammonium nitrate pellets and diesel fuel.'

Cooper nodded. ‘Do you happen to have any missing?'

Thornton went pale and dropped his hard hat on the desk with a thud. ‘We haven't reported it yet,' he said. ‘How did you know?'

W
hen Cooper went to report to Detective Superintendent Branagh at West Street, they were joined in Branagh's office by DI Walker. The superintendent was clearly unhappy with the new development.

‘We're waiting for one more,' said Branagh. ‘But you can give us the outline, Cooper.'

But Cooper had no sooner begun to tell his story, than the door opened after a brief knock, and Diane Fry came in.

‘Sorry I'm late, ma'am,' said Fry.

The superintendent just waved a hand. ‘Take a seat,' she said. ‘Carry on, Cooper.'

Fry seemed to listen impatiently. Out of the corner of his eye, Cooper was aware of her fidgeting and leaning forward as if about to interrupt. It didn't help his temper. When Cooper had finished, Fry was the first to react.

‘Explosives?' she said. ‘And what do you think their target might be?'

Cooper turned to her. ‘Well, what do you think? An effigy of Earl Manby is found hanging from a noose, curses are packed into a witch ball with the Manbys' eagle's head emblem, an anonymous letter is received about death, and acts of vandalism are committed at the family chapel. Then we find a note arranging a meeting at the Grandfather Oak at one o'clock in the morning.'

‘You mean the target could be Knowle Abbey itself?' said Branagh, calmly intervening.

‘Yes, ma'am, that's exactly what I mean.'

‘That would be a pretty dramatic statement.'

‘I'll say.'

Yes, dramatic hardly covered it. According to what Mr Thornton had told him at the quarry, in the brief instant of an explosive detonation, the pressure could reach more than three million pounds per square inch. The detonation front travelled at twenty thousand miles per hour, with temperatures of up to five thousand degrees Celsius. The shockwave shattered rock by exceeding its compressive strength.

Cooper tried to imagine what kind of damage that would cause to the crumbling façades and sagging walls of Knowle Abbey, with its wooden floors and rooms packed full of antique furniture and dusty specimen cases. He tried, but failed. The devastation was beyond imagining.

Even worse was the possible fate of the earl and his family, not to mention the scores of staff and any visitors who happened to be enjoying the tour at the time of an attack.

‘It would be impossible to do an efficient job, of course,' he said.

‘Oh, that's good news?'

‘In a quarry, blasting is only carried out after laser equipment is used to survey the rock face. The surveyor has a computer program to calculate the most effective blasting plan, drill positions, the firing sequence. They might not cause much damage at Knowle Abbey. Unless someone knows what he's doing.'

‘We won't be able to keep this one quiet,' said Branagh. ‘Too many of the workers at Deeplow Quarry know about it. It will be all around the area by now. All over the county.'

‘Agreed, ma'am.'

‘Well, one thing is obvious,' she said. ‘We'd better make sure extra security precautions are being taken at Knowle Abbey. If some disaster happens that we had warning of, then it would be all of us being fed through the crusher.'

T
hat was all very well. But how did you ensure the security of a place like Knowle Abbey? It seemed an unanswerable question as Ben Cooper and Diane Fry drove once again through the ornate gates and into the sprawling parkland towards the abbey.

There were hundreds of acres to cover, much of the landscape hidden by plantations of trees. There were so many buildings ancillary to the abbey – the restaurant, the craft centre, the gift shop, all the offices in the coach-house block. And then the abbey itself, vast and rambling, at least three storeys high, with attic rooms in the roof space and probably cellars under the servants' quarters. How many rooms would that be? Cooper hardly dared to think.

There was only one practical solution, the one he'd come away with from the meeting.

‘Your friend Ms Burns isn't going to like this at all,' said Fry as they pulled on to the gravel by the estate office.

‘I know,' said Cooper. Then he added: ‘But she's not my friend.'

‘Everyone is your friend. Or, at least, you think they are.'

Cooper shook his head at her jibe, but didn't feel resentment. Over the years he'd concluded that Fry did this as naturally as breathing. She didn't mean any personal animosity. In fact, she might regard it as a normal form of small talk.

‘Let's see if we can get a look at their overall set-up anyway,' he said.

‘I can't wait.'

T
he more eccentric members of the Manby family had amassed a vast collection of hidden treasures at Knowle Abbey. Dozens of rooms contained an eclectic accumulation of exotic artefacts and souvenirs of foreign expeditions, as well as antique objects. Some of them might have been fashionable or interesting at the time, supposed Cooper. There were stuffed marmosets and narwhal horns, mechanical toys and African tribal masks, not to mention a host of other mysterious, dusty objects whose purpose had long since been forgotten.

He remembered that a few years ago the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had cleared out their attics at Chatsworth House. They raised almost six and a half million pounds from the sale of valuable antiques and curiosities like the 6th Duke's Russian sleigh and alabaster Borghese table. But no one would pay a fiver for this lot at Knowle Abbey. Even the seediest antique shop in Edendale would give it a pass. There were cases of crumbling butterflies and semi-precious stones, toy soldiers and porcelain dolls, stuffed antelope heads and sporting prints.