Edson took a step closer to the edge, wiping the rain from his face. The wind whipped round him, lashing his hair, flapping his coat open like the wings of a bird.
Cooper began to move towards him, but saw how slippery the wet rock was. He was afraid of startling Edson and making him lose his footing. The edge was too high, the drop too steep and sudden. Making a sudden move would be dangerous. He looked past Edson, met Villiers’ eye, made a small gesture to keep her back.
‘It’s very good,’ said Edson. ‘Your story, I mean. All those things that went wrong. I think it’s probably very accurate, in a way. An example of bad planning. Yes, it was an appalling decision to employ amateurs. It’s always better to spend a bit more money and use professionals. You get what you pay for, after all.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
Edson paused, and looked out over the dark valley.
‘There’s only one problem with that story, Sergeant Cooper,’ he said. ‘The person who hired those thugs to attack the Barrons – it wasn’t me.’
With a loud crack, a slice of rock shifted, dropped, then slowly peeled away from the face of the edge.
Cooper saw Russell Edson held for one second in mid-air, his arms outstretched, his coat flapping around him like wings. He was a huge black bird, screaming and screaming, a creature fighting against the blast of the wind and the pull of gravity. His last moment was only a flicker of movement, a dark thrashing against the sky.
And then he began to fall.
On the eastern edges, car windscreens flashed in the sun, like secret signals being sent across the valley. There would be no climbers on the Devil’s Edge today. The rock faces were too wet, and there was too much police activity. Parties of gritstone addicts took one look and went further north, to Froggatt or Stanage.
But at E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale, plenty was going on. The August bank holiday weekend was over, and Ben Cooper was at his desk, chest-high in paperwork. Who knew there would be so many forms to fill in when you’d just been involved in a fatal incident?
He’d told the whole story to Liz the day before, emptying out his feelings to her all day long, it seemed. And she’d listened to him for hours, as the bank holiday crowds thronged into the Peak District around them, intent on squeezing every last ounce of enjoyment from the scenery, from the picturesque villages, the stately homes and heritage centres. It had meant, for once, that Liz didn’t talk only about the wedding. He cared about her deeply, of course. Yet he was already starting to feel exhausted by the subject.
Wearily, Cooper stopped for a moment to gaze out of the window of the CID room at the rooftops of the town, longing to be out there in the open. But he was stuck here for quite a while yet, head down, repeating details he’d already given several times over.
At the same time, he was waiting impatiently for something to be decided. And waiting, as everyone knew, was the most difficult thing in the world.
‘Daydreaming, Ben?’
He started, and turned to find Diane Fry at his shoulder. She had never lost that ability to creep up on him when he wasn’t expecting it. It was a trick that made him feel particularly vulnerable.
‘Oh, Diane.’ He stood up eagerly. ‘Is there any …?’
‘News? Yes, the CPS have made a decision. Quick work, for them. But they’ve established precedents in the last few years. Similar cases, with similar reasons for their decision.’
‘What decision?’
‘No prosecution,’ said Fry. ‘Not in the public interest.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
‘I’m pleased for your brother, Ben.’
‘And it’s a victory for you too.’
A shadow passed across her face. ‘A victory of sorts,’ she said.
‘No, you did a really good job at the farm,’ said Cooper.
‘Average, I thought.’
‘Well, anyway … Thanks, Diane. I just wanted to say that.’
‘I didn’t do it as a favour to you.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t. But I’m saying thank you nevertheless.’
Cooper wondered why it always seemed to end up like this between them, why even saying thank you had to sound like an argument.
‘You know, when you first came to E Division,’ he said, ‘I really thought we would be able to work together.’
‘It’s too late for that now. There’s one DS too many in Edendale. A team can only have one leader.’
‘What went wrong, Diane?’ he asked, hearing the echo of a question he’d asked Russell Edson not so long ago
‘Wrong? I couldn’t say.’
Cooper gazed at her, but she looked away. To his ears, her answer seemed to mean ‘I don’t
want
to say’. Perhaps she just liked to give the impression that she knew more than she was telling. On the other hand, he couldn’t resist a nagging suspicion that she
did
know something he didn’t.
He was sure of one thing, though. He would never find out what it was unless he asked her exactly the right question.
‘You had a tough one in this Riddings place, from what I hear,’ said Fry. ‘Too many people with malicious intent. Whether there’s a prosecution or not, it never makes for a good outcome.’
Cooper wondered if that was a subtle dig, some oblique reference to the Bridge End Farm incident.
‘Matt was a different case,’ he said.
‘I know the difference,’ said Fry. ‘There are people who think they’re doing the right thing, protecting their families. And there are others who know that what they’re doing is wrong, but don’t care. I met one of those not very long ago, in Birmingham. He was as close to me as your brother is to you, genetically speaking. In other ways, we were worlds apart. But he’s gone now.’
‘Oh, you mean your biological father. He’s still alive, though, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, as far as I know. But to be honest, I wish I’d killed him.’
‘Not really,’ said Cooper, shocked that she could even contemplate the idea.
‘Yes, really.’
He began to feel angry. ‘If both your parents had died, you wouldn’t even think of saying that.’
She looked at him then, a mixture of emotions passing across her face. He wondered which of them would win. But this was Diane Fry he was talking to.
‘I suppose I ought to apologise,’ she said.
‘Oh, don’t feel that you have to.’
‘We’re so different, you and me. I’ll never understand your world. And you, Ben, will never understand mine. I’m not going to apologise for that.’
‘That wasn’t … Oh, never mind.’
‘I am sorry about your parents, really. I imagine it must have been hard.’
‘Yes. But it’s only an effort of the imagination with you. You don’t really
understand
, do you?’
Fry was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t think I ever did,’ she said. ‘That’s one thing you’re right about.’
He searched for something else to say. But he saw Gavin Murfin watching them from across the room, and only one thing came to mind.
‘So were there any repercussions for you, Diane? I mean from your own, er … incident in Nottingham?’
‘I received words of advice.’
‘Lucky.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
Cooper watched Fry walk away. He hadn’t asked her whether she had been successful in obtaining a transfer, or finding another job. He knew she’d been looking for a few weeks now. If she did, though, he would be the last person she told.
Well, one thing was certain. When she did go, Fry would be remembered. Though maybe not for the right reasons. Murfin still talked about the battered chips he’d seen in the Black Country, when he was there with Fry on an inquiry. He’d been trying to persuade his local chippy to make them for him ever since. Luckily for his arteries, they’d refused so far.
Fry paused in the doorway, caught once more in the act of passing from one place to another. It was the way that Cooper would always imagine her.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘who have you got in Interview Room One?’
‘It’s my Riddings suspect,’ said Cooper. ‘Name of Edson.’
In Interview Room One, Cooper sat down next to DI Hitchens and regarded the man across the table. He was accompanied by his solicitor, and he looked relaxed and confident.
Cooper recognised that look. It was in the eyes and mouth mostly. Without the make-up and the false beard, the similarity was obvious. His hair was dark, but swept back just like his father’s. It was the same sardonic eyebrow, the same supercilious curl to the lip.
For Cooper, the surprising thing was that he hadn’t recognised this man when he’d seen him with Adrian Summers last week. Thursday, that must have been, not long after he’d visited Riddings Lodge for the first time. He’d experienced a feeling of recognition, but it hadn’t clicked into place. It was a problem when you saw people out of context. In the end, it was only Gamble’s photograph that had made everything fall into place. But at least he’d found his missing Dave.
‘You are David Edson,’ said Hitchens, opening the interview with the tapes running. ‘The son of Mr Russell Edson, of Riddings Lodge?’
‘The same.’
‘We understand your father was a very wealthy man. A big lottery winner?’
‘He certainly was. And here I am, struggling to scrape a living.’
‘As a children’s entertainer,’ said Cooper, ‘if I’m not mistaken.’
The eyebrow lifted and the curl came to the mouth as David Edson smiled.
‘Oh, you saw me.’
‘Yes, of course. No one at Riddings Show could have missed you. The famous Doctor Woof.’
‘Well, that’s just a little hobby of mine. Not what I do to make a living.’
‘Especially when you don’t charge for your services, but volunteer to do it for nothing.’
‘True.’
‘I wonder what you have in your past, Mr Edson.’
‘I’m CRB checked, you know. I couldn’t work as a children’s entertainer if I wasn’t.’
‘Yes, we’re aware of that. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to discuss two murders. Those of Jake and Zoe Barron.’
As the interview went on, David Edson’s façade began to crumble. Cooper was glad to see it. His attitude was all show, after all. Just like his father’s.
In the end, Edson ignored his solicitor’s urgent advice, and blurted out the one thing that was most important for him to say.
‘I thought that killing them would make me feel better. But it didn’t.’
Carol Villiers was the first to congratulate Cooper. The rest of the CID team milled around in celebratory mood, their paperwork forgotten for a while.
‘You were right on that one, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘What infuriated the Edsons most was seeing the Barrons still spending money when they were about to lose everything. But David was the most infuriated. He was filled with rage. He blamed Jake Barron for his father’s situation.’
‘That’s a bit like a jealous lover, too, when you think about it,’ said Villiers.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, instead of blaming his father, he blamed the object of his father’s obsession. He took the view that Barron was ruining his life, and his future prospects.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Yes, Barron was draining off all the money that should have come his way. David had built all his expectations on that money.’
‘So it was David who hired Summers, knowing that the job would be blamed on the Savages.’
‘Yes. And there was never any intention to steal anything, just to grab a couple of things to make it look like a burglary. They went through a gap in the fence to get to and from Valley View, then up the track to dispose of the haul. They spent the night in Edson’s garage, then drove their van out next morning.’
‘Meanwhile, his father and grandmother calmly went off to have dinner at Bauers,’ said Villiers.
‘It must have been quite a shock for Russell to find Barry Gamble turning up on his doorstep that night. Gamble had figured it out. He wasn’t stupid. He knew all about people. And why wouldn’t he, when he spent so much of his time watching them?’
‘He’d been spying on the Edsons, then.’
‘Of course. Though he probably wouldn’t have called it that.’
‘How did you know what Gamble had been doing, Ben?’
‘In the first place, from one of his souvenirs,’ said Cooper. ‘A monkey puzzle cone. They grow on trees like the one in the garden at Riddings Lodge. That has to be where he picked it up. Mr Edson told me himself that there isn’t another tree of that species for miles. Why do you think Gamble ran to Riddings Lodge first when he discovered Zoe Barron’s body?’
‘Because he knew Edson was responsible?’
‘Well, not until he saw the light on. And not the light in the Barrons’ kitchen; I mean the light in Edson’s garage. The photographs confirmed it, of course. He’d snapped Edson with his son, David.’
‘No one even mentioned that David Edson was in the village,’ said Villiers. ‘In fact, no one mentioned him at all. That was suspicious in itself, looking back.’
‘One person mentioned him,’ said Cooper.
‘Oh? Who?’
‘His grandmother, Glenys. I thought she was talking about Russell. And Edson let me go away with that impression. But she wasn’t. When she spoke about children trying to bleed the life out of you, she meant David. She knew David was trying to drain off all the money for himself.’
For Edson, it had been a last desperate stand, as if he could protect what he’d owned by fighting with his neighbours. But he was aiming at the wrong target. Like so many people, he was his own worst enemy.
Cooper had never got the chance to talk more to Russell Edson about how the chalk traces came to be in his car. Of course Russell wasn’t a climber himself. But Cooper had wanted to say:
We could ask your son, perhaps. Because he is a rock climber, isn’t he, Mr Edson
?
‘Some time ago, David Edson was climbing on Riddings Edge with a friend when he fell from the face and struck his head on the rock.’
‘He was the climber who did a highball off Hell’s Reach and nearly died?’ said Villiers.
‘Yes. It was a close-run thing. He lost consciousness and went into a fit. He was stabilised by paramedics and a doctor from the mountain rescue team, then airlifted to Nottingham to be treated in the neurological unit at Queen’s Medical Centre.’
‘But he recovered.’
‘Yes. Later on, he gave a big donation to the mountain rescue people. And he went back to rock climbing.’
‘Those white handprints?’ asked Villiers. ‘There was never any explanation …’
‘David Edson was back climbing on Riddings Edge that day. I imagine he looked down from one of those spurs of rock on the edge, and saw how easy it would be to get into the grounds of Valley View. You can’t appreciate that from any other point – certainly not from anywhere in the village. You need to get the perspective, you see. You’ve got to achieve that bird’s-eye viewpoint you can only get from the edge. So you might say it was the Devil’s Edge that put the idea into his mind. It presented him with the temptation, just when he was most open to it.’
‘That must have been earlier in the day, during daylight.’
‘Of course. At the end of his climbing session, David went back down the edge. But instead of returning to his car, he tested out the route on the ground. No doubt he took note of the derelict farm building and the slurry pits, and figured out how he could use them. Then he got as far as the back wall at Valley View, and pulled himself up to look in.’
‘And that was when he left the handprints.’
‘Yes.’ Cooper looked at the clouds rolling in across the horizon. ‘In a way, he was unlucky. Unlucky that the weather stayed good for a few days. Rain washes the chalk off. Those handprints will be gone now.’
‘And he acted really fast, didn’t he? He signed up Adrian Summers as his accomplice and they did it that night.’