Dead And Buried

David Pearson had that look in the eyes. Confident, but unpredictable — the sort of man who would get an idea in his head, and then move heaven and earth to follow it through, against all the best advice and in the teeth of good sense. Trisha must have seen that in him. It was probably what had appealed to her, that aura of danger and unpredictability.

Cooper consulted the OS map again, and scanned the countryside around Brecks Farm.

‘Where does that track go to, I wonder?’ he said.

‘Shall we see?’ asked Villiers.

‘Fine.’

They bumped up the track, kicking up dust from their wheels, until they turned a bend and were stopped by a steel barrier.

It was an abandoned quarry. Some sites in the Peak District had been cleared up and machinery removed, then either converted to a different use, such as landfill, or restored to agriculture. This one was too recently abandoned, perhaps. The entrance gate was blocked by large chunks of calcite, left as if for display as geological samples.

Just inside the site, a series of blue shipping containers stood at one side of the roadway, with their doors left gaping open. One of them had been used as a store for equipment spares such as conveyors, pumps and screens. The sides of the interior still carried labels with faintly mysterious names: Transfer Conveyor, Crusher, Cobbles Belt, Pearls One. The door had been wedged open with a wooden pallet, and there was little left inside it now.

Outside, though, the ground was littered with long strips and rolls of black conveyor belt. They were heaped and scattered everywhere, as if the departing workers had simply thrown everything out of the containers before they left the site. Among the debris were broken bits of machinery, part of a drive shaft from a quarry vehicle. Two smaller containers were perched precariously on a pile of corrugated-iron roofing sections.

Further into the quarry was an abandoned lorry, digging equipment, a caravan that might once have been used as a site office. The signs warned of blasting and cautioned Cooper to observe a ten miles per hour speed limit. The barriers would not stop anyone who wanted to enter the site, but the machinery was too big to steal, so it had been left.

Now, only the sound of birds disturbed the site, where once there would have been a deafening cacophony of machinery, crushed stone and blasting.

‘This must have been searched at the time,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, surely.’

He wished he could feel as confident as he was trying to sound. Something had gone wrong in the original investigation of the Pearsons’ disappearance, and he wasn’t yet sure what it was. In fact, he had no firm idea at all.

Back at the office, Luke Irvine had been landed with the job of ploughing through all the old witness statements, search reports and case files. It was a thankless task, but someone had to do it, just in case a fresh pair of eyes spotted something new.

‘I’ll get Luke to check,’ said Cooper. ‘It might make him feel a bit more involved.’

Returning to the entrance, Cooper found himself standing in a gateway looking at a little circular sign with its yellow arrow identifying the Limestone Way. He’d noticed that right below it was another sign, with no words on it, only a simple graphic. It showed a small human figure falling head first into a hole in the ground.

Its message ought to be clear. But how many people set off to walk across the moors without any realisation of the dangers under their feet?

Cooper tried to imagine the Pearsons thinking they could follow the Limestone Way in the dark, and in a snowstorm too. If that was what they’d done, it could only be called foolhardy in the extreme. He supposed they weren’t the first ill-prepared travellers to have lost their lives on these moors. But it shouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century.

12

When they arrived back at West Street, Cooper soon heard that the body at the Light House had been identified, and the dead man’s wife already interviewed. That was Diane Fry, working fast as usual. If he wasn’t careful, she’d have this whole thing tied up in a neat bow within a few days, and all his vague doubts would count for nothing.

Cooper made a point of asking Fry to bring the team up to date. He suspected it wouldn’t happen otherwise. She would be reporting to her own DCI, and local CID would get bypassed. He couldn’t bear the thought that he’d continue to be left out in the cold, wondering what was happening, until he heard about some development on the office grapevine.

Fry had been allocated an old office that had recently been vacated by some centralised civilian staff member. It was little more than a cubbyhole, with frosted glass in the windows. It meant that she couldn’t be seen when she closed the door, except as a blurred movement inside.