The Corpse Bridge (33 page)

This was one of those odd places the Peak District was full of. Above Sterndale Moor, on Red Hurst Hill, a fake stone circle called Wheeldon's Folly had been built by a local farmer from random stones, lumps of concrete and even an old gatepost. In this area you never knew what sort of place you were arriving in or what might lie behind its façade.

Yet Sterndale Moor had one thing in common with Bowden. There were almost no people around. It was dark and the residents all seemed to be shut behind their own doors. All he could see was a young woman with a small child waiting in the bus shelter outside the social club. There was no sign of a bus.

Brendan Kilner lived in a small, pebble-dashed semi-detached house. The tiny front garden had been removed and concreted over to create just enough space to park a couple of cars off the road, a Ford Fiesta and a Peugeot.

Kilner looked surprised to see Ben Cooper standing on his doorstep. He'd been relaxing in front of the telly, judging by the sound of the
Coronation Street
theme tune drifting from an open door. Kilner was wearing jeans and an old checked shirt, and had come to the door in his socks, with a beer can clutched in one hand.

‘Something up?' he said.

‘Just a couple of things I wanted to ask you,' said Cooper.

‘You're working late, aren't you?'

‘You know what it's like, Brendan. No rest for the wicked.'

‘Oh, er…' Kilner glanced over his shoulder, as if calculating what might be on view inside the house that he wouldn't want anyone to see. But his conclusion must have been on the positive side. ‘I suppose you'd better come in.'

As he entered the house Cooper thought he detected that whiff of fried onions again, but perhaps it was just a memory of their meeting at Buxton Raceway. Just a bit of bad déjà vu.

‘Come through to the back,' said Kilner, with a wary glance through an open doorway.

Cooper took a peek too and saw the back of a woman's head on a sofa in front of a large TV screen. He felt certain the Kilners had a couple of sons, and perhaps a daughter. But they would all be well grown-up by now and probably extending the clan in their turn.

‘Just you and the wife at home?' said Cooper. ‘Sorry, I've forgotten her name.'

‘Lisa.'

Kilner had lowered his voice, perhaps worried in case he attracted her attention.

‘Is she okay?'

‘Fine.'

There was a small room at the back of the house, adjoining the kitchen. Kilner seemed to have converted it into a workshop. There were air filters and boxes of suspension springs, a crankshaft and even a couple of tyres.

‘I do a bit of work on the stocks now and then,' said Kilner.

‘On the side, I suppose?'

Kilner shrugged. ‘Everyone does it.'

‘And does Lisa not mind you bringing all this stuff into the house?'

‘As long as I clean up the oil, she doesn't yell too much.'

Cooper was trying to recall exactly what Brendan Kilner said to him at the raceway on Sunday. It was Kilner who'd said: ‘They've all got an axe to grind.' But there was something else.
It's all about family. Ancient history if you ask me. But that stuff means a lot to some people, doesn't it? Me, I can never bring myself to visit the place where my mum and dad were buried
.

He looked across the hall, glad of the noise coming from the sitting room, the TV turned up a bit too loud. It was such a different home from the expensive Georgian property rented by Marcus Everett and his friends near Pilsbury. Yet there was a similarity, which Cooper had suspected. It had been put into his mind by the sight of that drooping Mexican moustache, the fake Confederate soldier. That same man had offered him a joint outside the Sterndale Moor Social Club on the night he'd been dragged to the country and western evening.

And Gavin Murfin was right to remind him about Brendan Kilner's background too. Cooper had checked the intelligence.

The items on view in Kilner's kitchen were different from those he'd seen in the rental property at Pilsbury. There were no silver trays or plastic straws for sniffing lines of cocaine. Instead, he saw small cotton balls, a pile of bottle caps and a narrow leather belt with a series of teeth marks visible on the end, as if it had been chewed by the dog.

At least the Kilners disposed of their hypodermic needles, even if they were only in the pedal bin. That wasn't the case in some houses Cooper had visited, where the floor might be covered in used needles and you had to be careful where you put your feet when you walked across a room. Some illegal drugs gave the user a sense of invulnerability. Individuals began to believe they would never be found out, that no one would ever notice their paraphernalia or suspect what they were up to when they took a spare belt into the toilet to tie off a vein.

Brendan Kilner probably felt he was safe when he took that moment at the door to reassure himself that his needles and his wraps of heroin were safely out of sight.

But perhaps it wasn't Kilner himself who was the user. It might be his wife or one of his adult children. It wouldn't make any difference. It was all about family, after all.

Kilner had stopped and was watching him resignedly. He was an old hand and he knew the score. Cooper didn't have to explain it to him, the way he had to Everett. Some people grew up confident they would never have to deal with the law. Others expected it. And they were rarely mistaken.

‘So what do you want?' said Kilner. ‘I dare say there's something.'

‘Yes, as a matter of fact,' said Cooper. ‘There is.'

D
iane Fry got a call-out in the middle of the night. She always hated that. Yet at the same time she experienced an immediate buzz of excitement when her phone rang. This was what she lived for, after all. All the hours of tedium and paperwork were worthwhile, just for this.

The drive through Derbyshire had been dark and wet, the transition from city streets back to muddy rural lanes almost too painful to bear. She needed her satnav just to guide her to the A610 and on to the A6 towards Matlock. After that it was like entering the twilight zone.

At Knowle Abbey she had only to follow the signs of activity. By the time she reached the outer cordon the crime-scene tents had been erected and the scene itself was lit by powerful arc lights.

With the dark outline of Knowle Abbey as a sinister backdrop, the whole effect was of a badly illuminated scene from a melodrama. It looked to Fry as though Earl Manby had decided to stage a modern, open-air version of
Hamlet
in the grounds of the abbey. A perfect setting for Ben Cooper's ghosts haunting the mock battlements.

When she'd struggled into a scene suit and joined DCI Mackenzie inside the larger tent, Fry could see the gruesome reality. The earl's body lay sprawled on the grass, a splatter of blood and shredded flesh in a wide arc round him. His head was unrecognisable from this angle. One bloodied pulp looked much like another.

‘Shotgun?' she asked. Nothing else did that kind of damage to a human body at close quarters.

Mackenzie nodded. ‘He was shot twice. The second barrel was the one that killed him.'

Fry covered her mouth as she examined the injuries caused by the lead shot. The smell of raw meat rose from the ground under the hot lights.

‘And we're sure it's the earl himself?' she said.

‘He was found by one of the staff, who called the family. There's no doubt about it. I'm afraid there's been a lot of trampling of the scene and contamination of the evidence already, before we got here.'

Gradually, Fry moved around to the other side of the tent. She could see now that the left side of the earl's face was more or less intact. Most of the damage had been done to the back and side of his head. One ear had been shattered and the jawbone gleamed through oozing blood.

At least it looked as though the earl had tried to defend himself. The palms of his hands were also shredded by pellets, as if he'd made a defensive gesture at the last moment, trying to protect his face from the blast. But it had been futile. It was a pity he hadn't taken one of his own weapons from the gunroom with him when he went out in the grounds. His attacker might have thought twice.

But why had the earl gone out into the grounds of the abbey last night at all? It seemed an odd question to be asking herself, really. Why shouldn't any individual walk around his own property in perfect safety, whenever he wanted to? It ought not to matter who they were. But Walter Manby had been under threat. He'd been warned there might be an imminent danger to his life. And he'd still felt able to wander alone in the dark through the wooded parklands of Knowle.

In a way Fry had to admire the courage or self-assurance this man must have felt. Perhaps it was a quality that came with the position he'd been born into, like that air of affluence that had turned out to be such a façade. Maybe it was being on his own property that gave him confidence. The earl and Knowle Abbey had certainly seemed inseparable.

‘Do you think he came out here to meet someone he knew?' she said.

‘We don't know,' said Mackenzie. ‘Let's see what evidence Forensics can turn up.'

‘It's a bad business.'

Mackenzie smiled grimly. ‘Tell me about it. We'll need to start interviewing staff.'

‘Where are we going to get the help from?'

‘Why, how many are there?'

‘About three hundred,' said Fry automatically.

‘Seriously?'

‘Guides, housekeepers, office staff, the maintenance team, shop assistants, kitchen and serving staff in the restaurant, gardeners, gamekeepers, farmers, river bailiffs, car park attendants … where do you want to start?'

Mackenzie frowned at her tone. ‘With those who were on duty here when the shooting occurred. That's simple enough, Diane.'

Fry took one last look at the body before she left the tent and stripped off her scene suit.

‘When word gets round about this,' she said, ‘I know someone who'll say, “I told you so”.'

T
hat morning Cooper was due to give evidence in a trial at Derby Crown Court. Luckily, he didn't have to go all the way to Derby any more and waste an entire day sitting around waiting for his few minutes in court. The new video-link technology allowed him to give his evidence from a desk right there at the divisional headquarters in Edendale.

Other officers had been busy working on the George Redfearn murder inquiry. As he arrived at West Street, Cooper had seen Diane Fry's boss DCI Alistair Mackenzie there from the Major Crime Unit. Mackenzie would no doubt be acting as senior investigating officer.

For a moment Cooper wondered if the MCU had considered the Sandra Blair case to be too unimportant to merit their full attention from the start, even before doubt was cast on its status as a murder inquiry by the post-mortem results. He would have to make the best of that. While everyone else's attention was on the murder, he had the chance to resolve the situation at Knowle Abbey.

But when he came out of the video-link room later in the morning, Cooper began to hear people talking about Knowle Abbey in urgent tones. He had no idea what was going on. He felt as though he'd been locked into suspended animation for the past hour or so and emerged to find the world had moved on without him.

‘What's going on?' he asked Luke Irvine, who was the only occupant of the CID room. ‘What's all this about Knowle Abbey?'

‘It's the earl.'

Cooper detected the air of disaster. ‘Is he dead?'

‘He died last night. He was fatally wounded with a shotgun while everyone's attention was distracted by the fire at the estate village.'

‘And I don't suppose it was an accident, or suicide.'

‘No chance.'

C
ooper slowly gathered his team together from their various assignments. It seemed more important than ever that they concentrated on making connections that could explain the whole story, and not just a small part of it.

He'd asked for background enquiries on all the people involved in the protest group and there ought to be some results by now.

‘Talk to us about the quarry plan for Alderhill first, Luke,' he said.

Irvine explained the position of Eden Valley Mineral Products and their plans for Alderhill Quarry.

‘George Redfearn was Development Director at the company,' he said. ‘Mr Redfearn was responsible for winning the contract to bring the quarry back into operation. His name is signed on the dotted line. Along with the earl's of course.'

‘So, the protest group,' said Cooper. ‘The people we're interested in include Jason Shaw, aged thirty-two, with an address in Bowden on the Knowle estate, where we're told he works as a gamekeeper.'

‘Here's an interesting thing, though,' said Irvine. ‘At the end of last year Jason Shaw's hours at Knowle Abbey were cut back. So he managed to find some part-time work at Deeplow Quarry. He's been there a few months now.'

‘So he may have been the one who learned how to put an explosive charge together?' asked Irvine.

‘With diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, you mean?'

‘Exactly.'

‘He wasn't actually given any training in the use of explosives,' said Irvine. ‘They were pretty clear on that. He had no authorisation or experience. But I suppose you can pick up a few things just by observing and asking questions.'

‘A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,' said Cooper. ‘Especially when it comes to making explosives. Anything else?'

‘Well, before he got a job at the abbey, do you know Shaw worked at the cheese factory in Hartington?'

‘No, I didn't know that.'

‘He was a warehouseman and forklift truck driver.'

‘A real jack of all trades.'

‘From some of the hints I've been given when I followed up on Shaw, gamekeeping is the job that's most up his street, though.'