The Corpse Bridge (35 page)

Cooper walked past the crime-scene tent to look at the abbey. While he was alive the earl himself had come and gone from this side of the house, probably to avoid meeting the public. This section of parkland was fenced off and gated to prevent access. He could see a stable block and a building with a glass roof like a conservatory. An orangery? Was that what they called it?

Cooper hadn't seen the back of the abbey buildings on his previous visits. From here the place looked totally different. He was no longer seeing the over-elaborate façade that made Knowle Abbey look like a tourist postcard from the east. On the west side the buildings were random and grimy, almost ramshackle. Weeds were growing in the orangery, but no oranges. The stables were abandoned and derelict. They might have housed a few rats, but no horses.

The woodland was neglected too. Trees were diseased and damaged. Brambles and bracken had infested the woodland floor where once there might have been swathes of bluebells. There were no visible trails. A bridlepath from the stables had become choked by birch saplings and blocked by fallen branches.

Closer to hand, he could see that the wilderness was encroaching on to the gravel drive. In fact, it had probably crept closer to the abbey than it should have done by several yards. The gravel itself sprouted weeds, and heaps of rubbish had built up against the rear walls – rusting metal, broken plastic, a crumbling mess of wet plasterboard. The windows here were dirty and cobwebbed, some of them actually broken. Cooper thought back to the discussion with Meredith Burns about security measures. Did the insurance company know about this part of the abbey?

One of the opening lines from Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
came into his mind.
The woods crowded dark and uncontrolled to the drive.
Well,
Knowle Abbey was no Manderley, but
Rebecca would have noticed the same phenomenon here. All the estate work seemed to have been concentrated on the front of the abbey, the façade that visitors saw. Here the trees had been left unmanaged for years, by the look of them. It was a criminal neglect of valuable woodland. Not to mention the damage it must have done to the view from the west wing.

It seemed that all the time and effort the earl had talked about had been put into those parts of the estate that were on show to the public. He'd created a façade of elegance, with a ramshackle dereliction behind it, like a Hollywood film set. All appearance and no substance. A hollow charade.

Cooper turned to look at the house. He pictured Lord Manby at his desk in the library. The window was right there, on the first floor. The earl would have glanced up now and then from his paperwork and seen the evidence of neglect for himself. Had this untamed undergrowth seemed like the portents of inevitable ruin, creeping ever closer to his walls?

M
eredith Burns looked a bit lost, like a woman who no longer knew what her purpose was. She'd been standing watching Cooper as he examined the abbey. She said nothing, until he turned and found her there.

‘We took your advice and called in the security company,' she said.

‘But too late, it seems.'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Burns flapped her arms helplessly. ‘We've found something else,' she said. ‘I don't know if it's relevant or not.'

‘What is it?'

‘I'll show you.'

An intruder had tried to force open a Manby family tomb in the Lady Chapel. It was a marble sarcophagus with a cut-glass lid, but coated in grey mould from the damp of generations. Now a corner was broken off, as if someone had prised at it with a crowbar.

‘Could this have been what brought the earl out into the grounds last night?' asked Cooper.

‘That's what I wondered. If Walter heard a noise or saw someone near the chapel.'

‘It's a possibility. I'll get a crime-scene examiner to check it for fingerprints.'

Burns gazed round the crumbling walls and eroded statues of the chapel. ‘What do you think anyone would be looking for in here?' she said.

‘Nothing,' said Cooper. ‘I think they were probably intending to cause some damage.'

‘Like the graffiti?'

‘Yes, but a step further.'

‘It's awful to think they would come here with the intention of causing damage to a tomb.'

‘Or to the occupant.'

Cooper saw the shocked expression on Burns's face. But what Brendan Kilner had said still held good. It was all about family.

‘Your superintendent has arrived, by the way,' said Burns as they left the chapel.

‘Detective Superintendent Branagh is here?'

‘Yes. She's meeting with the earl.'

‘The earl? Lord Manby?'

‘I mean Peter Manby,' said Burns. ‘He's the new earl, of course. With the death of his father, he's just inherited the Knowle estate.'

‘Of course he has.'

Cooper looked out over the parkland towards the front of the abbey. What would the arrival of a new owner mean to the master plan for the development of Knowle? Would the latest Lord Manby steer the estate in a different direction or would he be too much under the influence of the Dowager Countess? Would the quarrying plan still go ahead? And might the bulldozers still move into the old graveyard, despite everything? Time would tell. But now at least there was a chance that someone could make a difference.

F
rom Knowle Abbey, Cooper took a detour via the Corpse Bridge. He was able to bounce the Toyota halfway down the track, with the steering wheel lurching violently in his hands.

Off-roaders had been blamed for destroying many of the stone setts and churning up the ground into muddy ruts on either side. Although this had been designated as a byway open to all traffic for many years, the national park authority had imposed a traffic regulation order to exclude trail bikes and four-wheel drives.

But Cooper had heard off-roaders say they had as much right as anyone to enjoy the landscape. They pointed out that all kinds of recreation caused damage. If local authorities were too cash-strapped to maintain rights of way properly, that was a problem for everyone. As usual there were two sides to every story.

The police presence had gone from the scene of Sandra Blair's death. The tape had been removed but for a few scraps still fluttering from a tree, where an officer had cut it instead of trying to untie a tight, wet knot. The forensic examination had been complete, the search had reached its outer perimeter, and the scene had been released for public access.

Not that there were many members of the public around. Unlike some more accessible murder scenes, the Corpse Bridge hadn't attracted ghoulish spectators.

He walked towards the bridge and stopped at the parapet. Though it was daylight now, he was taken back to the moment he saw Sandra Blair's body lying in the water just down there under the arch, tangled in the roots of a sycamore. Those dark, wet boulders and the roaring of the water. Cries of pain and a victim's last, dying breath.

He relived that light-headed feeling, the result of a lack of sleep, and felt himself almost slipping again in the mud on the bank of the river. There had been so little blood. No more than a few drops on the stone.

Cooper didn't need to spend any more time thinking about it. He was sure that his original impression had been perfectly correct when he stood here early on that morning after Halloween. Sandra Blair wasn't alone when she died.

T
hat afternoon Cooper took a call from Brendan Kilner. He sounded nervous and he was practically gabbling down the phone, like a man afraid of being overheard if he didn't finish the call quickly.

‘Okay, so,' said Kilner. ‘First of all, promise me my name doesn't get mentioned in any way, shape or form.'

‘As long as you weren't involved in a murder, Brendan,' said Cooper. ‘Then all bets would be off.'

‘We both know I wasn't. It was one of those people at the bridge.'

Cooper didn't need to ask what bridge. ‘Which of those people exactly?'

‘I don't know. Honest, I don't. It could have been any of them or all of them, as far as I'm concerned. They're all as mad as each other.'

‘Can you arrange a meeting?'

‘I suppose I could. But I wouldn't do it. It would be too dangerous for me.'

‘I'm not expecting you to go to the meeting,' said Cooper. ‘I will.'

The line was silent for a moment and Cooper thought Kilner had gone. But he must have been covering the phone with his hand, because his breathing suddenly came back on the line.

‘Okay,' he said finally. ‘But I don't need to arrange anything. There's a place you'll find the person you want. At least, you will if you go there tonight.'

‘Excellent. Where is this place? Not the Grandfather Oak, preferably.'

‘No, that was just a one-off. But there's a spot they've used before for meetings, where no one ever goes now. That's where they'll be. But they're all canny, though, so don't scare anyone off. No lights or sirens, you know what I mean?'

‘Yes, Brendan,' said Cooper. ‘But where is this place?'

‘You might know it. The old cheese factory.'

Cooper put the phone down and sat at his desk for a few minutes, turning the situation over in his mind. It was a challenge, of course. But he had to prove that he was up to it.

He had a decision to take. There was one phone call he ought to make. Though it might put everything he hoped for at risk.

B
y late evening the air was cold, with a bright moon high in the sky behind a haze of fog, casting a pale-green sheen over the landscape. The streets of Hartington were very quiet. A smell of woodsmoke hung in the air, with a faint roar of central heating systems venting steam.

Ben Cooper couldn't explain the feeling of unease this corner of the village gave him. He knew he'd been to the old cheese factory before, years ago when he was a uniformed PC. The factory had been working then, a thriving enterprise. The bays had been busy with vans and lorries. Men in blue boiler suits and yellow high-vis jackets walking around outside, the hum of machinery from inside the buildings. There was none of that now. The factory was dead.

Standing empty and abandoned, there was nothing attractive about the old stone buildings, or the newer sheds of green steel sheeting. They belonged firmly to the utilitarian side of the village, not the tourist part. Yes, the factory was only a short stroll from the duck pond and the Old Cheese Shop, but it was a step back into Hartington's past.

Cooper walked between an empty car park and a long shed with a corrugated-iron roof covered in dense clumps of brown-green mould. Where a tall chimney was attached to the building, an orange stain had spread across the wall and run down on to the ground, discolouring the base of the chimney itself as if the lifeblood of the factory had slowly been draining away since its closure.

Two tall grey tanks stood in their own pond of green water. What the tanks had held, he couldn't imagine. A network of steel pipes ran along the back wall of the factory, with weeds growing in all the crevices. There were CCTV cameras here, but he doubted they were working.

There didn't seem to be much to steal here, though perhaps people would find ways to break into the factory for other purposes. It was inevitable with any abandoned building, especially in a spot like this where you wouldn't be overlooked.

Cooper saw a small door standing open at the back of the main building. It was half-hidden under the mass of pipes and a steel platform supporting the hoods of a massive cooling system. Above it metal steps ran up the wall to a set of doors on the first floor. He watched and listened, but saw no movement and heard no noise from within the factory.

Then there was a metallic reverberation, a boom like a heavy object dropped on one of the empty tanks. But it came from behind him, not from the factory.

His heart thumping, Cooper whirled round. On top of a tank he glimpsed a figure just disappearing as someone descended a ladder. Where the person had been standing was a perfect vantage point to observe Cooper's arrival. If it hadn't been for that stray boot against the side of the tank, he might never have known anyone was there.

He cursed himself for not taking a more wary approach. But what had he been expecting when he came to Hartington, if not someone hiding out here? It was almost as if he'd deliberately given them a warning. And allowed them to escape.

But whoever it was, they hadn't gone. Somehow they'd slipped round the back of one of the smaller sheds and reached the door into the main building, which had now closed behind them.

Cooper shivered and looked up at the sky. The moon was so bright it had created a ring of colours through the prism effect of the fog, like a circular rainbow. Well, a rainbow was supposed to be a sign, a portent that something was about to happen, or a direction to a pot of gold. But a rainbow at night seemed all wrong. Was it an omen of something terrible about to happen?

D
iane Fry was surprised to be handed a couple of forensics reports by an officer entering the CID room at West Street.

‘What are these?' she said.

‘Results from some items that Detective Sergeant Cooper sent through for processing.'

‘Really?'

Fry became aware of Becky Hurst bobbing up like a child who always knew the right answer in class.

‘Those will be the items from Harpur Hill,' said Hurst.

‘Yes, you're right.' Fry frowned at the first report. ‘A hat? And an LED torch?'

Hurst came over to her desk. ‘That's it. We believe they were Sandra Blair's possessions.'

‘We?'

Fry smiled. She knew that when Becky Hurst said ‘we' she actually meant Ben Cooper.

Hurst didn't flinch at her tone. ‘They were found concealed in a plastic bag and dumped in a drinking hole for cattle. Somebody must have taken them away from the scene of Sandra Blair's death at the bridge to dispose of them. There's got to be a reason for them doing that.'