‘The business was a huge gamble, but it paid off because of the way my father slaved day and night to make it a success. I might look affluent to you, Detective Inspector Cooper, but I’m a working-class boy. I live in Hayfield, but the back streets of Manchester are in my blood. I understand what those boys were trying to achieve when they came here to walk onto Kinder. I live the spirit of the Mass Trespass every day.’
By the time he’d finished, there was a flush in Darius’s cheeks and his eyes were alight. Cooper couldn’t doubt his passion. In a way, he had sympathy with it. But he was still unsure whether Darius Roth was using that passion in the right way.
Elsa was sitting quietly at his side, letting Darius do all the talking, nodding occasionally.
Her quietness reminded Cooper of Nick Haslam’s statement that Elsa had wanted to call the walk off when the fog came in. It was just that nobody took any notice of her. Perhaps Elsa was one suspect he could count out. Someone had taken advantage of the conditions on the Kinder plateau to kill Faith Matthew. If Elsa Roth had wanted to turn back, it suggested she had no such intentions.
But perhaps Villiers had been right. Maybe Elsa knew perfectly well that no one would take any notice of her, because no one ever did. So she’d been safe making the suggestion, in the knowledge that it would be ignored. Was she clever enough to have planned that bluff in advance? Cooper wasn’t sure. Elsa had been one of the least forthcoming — or the least talkative, anyway.
And she would have to be very clever, wouldn’t she? Because Elsa hadn’t volunteered that nugget of information herself when she was interviewed. It would have been the obvious thing to do, if she wanted to make herself appear innocent. But she’d left it up to one of the others to mention it. That made her look like someone who had no doubts about her own innocence and didn’t feel she had to justify herself.
Cooper took a deep breath. He looked at Elsa again, remembering what Villiers had said about her earlier. The quiet ones were often the most dangerous. It was harder to tell what they were thinking. He much preferred the suspects who found themselves in the interview room and couldn’t wait to spill their guts and tell their whole story. Sometimes they talked and talked and talked, and the difficulty was stopping them. It was as if they felt compelled to fill the silence of the room with all the stuff that was burning and seething inside their heads, waiting to get out.
A person who could keep secrets was rare. But it seemed there was at least one of them among the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club.
Carol Villiers was particularly unimpressed by Darius Roth. ‘Darius,’ she said after the Roths had left. ‘A biblical name, isn’t it? It makes me think of all those endless Hebrew family trees in the Old Testament. Adam begat Daniel, who begat David, et cetera.’
‘Actually, I think Darius was a Persian king,’ said Cooper. ‘Not Hebrew at all.’
‘Oh, Darius the Great?’
‘Yes. He had a vast empire in his day. They say he was ruler of half the world’s population.’
‘Our Darius’s empire is a bit smaller than that.’
‘Large or small,’ said Cooper, ‘all empires fall apart eventually.’
‘That’s very cryptic. What do you mean?’
‘I think we should start examining Darius Roth’s business affairs,’ said Cooper. ‘Let’s get Luke on to it.’
‘Why? No one has ever mentioned his businesses.’
‘That,’ said Cooper, ‘is exactly why.’
Sophie Pullen looked troubled. Her eyes were tired and dark-rimmed, as if she hadn’t slept since the day of Faith Matthew’s death.
‘Is something bothering you?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been turning it over and over in my mind since Sunday. I think I was near the place where Faith died. It’s hard to be certain, of course. But the more I think about it—’
‘You were with the Warburtons and the Gould brothers,’ said Cooper. ‘Did you separate from your party at some point?’
‘Only for a short while. I was right behind Sam and Pat Warburton, but I’d stopped to tie my bootlace and the others got ahead of me. I think I headed in the wrong direction for a few yards after that. That’s the reason I was there, in that particular spot. I could hear the waterfall and I got worried I was too near the drop. So that’s why I think it must have been where Faith fell. I was following someone, you see.’
‘Wait a minute. Who were you following?’ said Cooper.
‘I don’t know. I saw someone in a blue jacket. But I soon realised it wasn’t Sam or Pat Warburton and I turned back. Then I caught up with the others again.’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It can’t have been a blue jacket.’
‘What?’
‘That doesn’t make sense. Perhaps it was someone wearing a blue scarf that you saw. You couldn’t have been sure in the fog.’
‘It was a blue jacket,’ repeated Sophie firmly.
‘Miss Pullen, I’ve been through the witness statements, the descriptions, the accounts of what everyone was wearing and all the photographs that were taken. Only one person on that walk was wearing a blue jacket — and that was you.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t have been mistaken about the colour. Even in the fog. It doesn’t confuse you so much that you’d mistake red for blue.’
‘No, but it might have been a blue scarf you saw,’ said Cooper. ‘Or a blue hat, perhaps. Not a blue jacket.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘You do think I was mistaken.’
‘Mistaken or confused,’ he said. ‘In the end, it always comes down to a question of interpreting what you see.’
‘That’s just another way of saying you don’t believe me.’
Cooper paused. He was recollecting, as perhaps Sophie Pullen couldn’t, that Darius Roth had been wearing a long royal-blue lambswool scarf that day.
‘Was there anything else you noticed?’ he asked instead.
‘Yes, there’s one thing I haven’t described,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure I want to tell you about it now. You’ll say I was mistaken about this too.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cooper. ‘I don’t mean to dismiss anything you say. If you noticed something else, it might be very important.’
She sighed. ‘Well, it was the shape of something, shining out of the fog.’
‘What do you mean, a shape?’
‘I can’t explain it. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.’
‘A rock formation,’ said Cooper. ‘There are many of them on the Kinder plateau. They have weird shapes sometimes.’
‘I know. I’ve seen them. But this...’
‘What?’
‘Well, it was the light. It shone through the shape, as if it wasn’t entirely solid. I realise I’m not explaining it very well.’
‘No, it’s fine. Go on.’
‘I’m calling it a shape,’ she said. ‘But actually it was a figure.’
‘You mean a human figure?’
‘Not really. Well... almost.’
Cooper could see she was struggling with her explanation, but he didn’t know how to help her. He let her take a few moments to recreate the memory in her mind.
‘The figure was huge,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain how big it looked. I was looking down on it and it seemed enormous. It stretched in an odd manner. It was like looking at a three-dimensional shadow, rather than a two-dimensional one, if you can understand that. And there was an arc of multicoloured light round its head, like part of a rainbow. Yes, it seemed to be a shadow, but a shadow of what? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I saw it. I looked at it for a few seconds; then it moved.’
‘Moved?’
‘Yes, it moved. Shimmered and moved. And then it was gone.’
She looked at Cooper for his reaction. What response could he give to that?