‘A trick of the fog,’ he said.
Sophie smiled. ‘Another one? Odd sounds, now strange shapes. It’s as if you think I was having illusions and just imagined it all.’
‘Kinder Scout is a strange place,’ said Cooper.
He was thinking about the photographs that had been collected from the phones of the walkers. Perhaps he needed to take a second look at them. Sophie Pullen was a good observer. And now he was beginning to get the feeling that there might have been something he had missed.
Sophie was no longer smiling at his tone. Cooper could see that she felt the same about Kinder as he did. She had been there, and she knew exactly how strange it could be.
‘I wouldn’t go back again, anyway,’ she said. ‘Next time — if there is a next time — I’d definitely be voting to turn back.’
‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘That would probably be wise.’
None of the photographs taken on Kinder Scout were any good. There seemed to be nothing clear or in focus. But it wasn’t the fault of the photographers. Cooper could see that they’d been high enough on Kinder to be above cloud level. Mist had been lying deep in the groughs, dense against the wet mounds of peat, swirling slowly in a breeze off the mountain. Everything beyond the first few feet of foreground had faded out, as if a net curtain had been drawn over the view. In each picture, the background was nothing but a grey glimmer, mysterious and menacing.
Walkers were often tempted to continue higher and higher still to see what lay beyond the mist. Sometimes it could be a fatal mistake. Without proper equipment, there was no way of judging direction. What lay before you might be a rock formation, a cliff, a pool of icy water or a plunge into nine feet of grough. Some people couldn’t find their way off Kinder Scout without help. A few never found their way off at all.
Cooper looked through the list of photos he’d been given. Many were useless, being vague landscape shots — particularly those from the Gould brothers, who’d seemed more interested in cotton grass and sphagnum moss.
Though every member of the walking club had been carrying a smartphone, none of the photos were from Darius’s phone, or from Jonathan Matthew’s either. Cooper imagined that Darius would have seen himself as the centre of attention, so would never be on the other side of the lens. But why hadn’t Jonathan bothered? Well, perhaps that was the answer. He just wasn’t bothered. Jonathan had no interest in his surroundings, or in most of the people he was with. The one exception was his sister, though.
Many of the students’ photos showed Darius in his shooting jacket and fedora, often with Elsa close at his elbow in her Gucci windbreaker. Those from Elsa’s phone were almost entirely of Darius, some with him grinning at the camera, others more candid shots. It was interesting to observe how his face changed when he was unaware of being photographed. His expression lost that manic energy, the sparkle in the eyes, as well as the beaming smile. Whenever he thought he was unobserved, his look became more serious. In one or two shots, his stare looked lost and desperate. Like an actor, Darius was able to put on an instant public persona when it was needed.
And there was Faith Matthew, of course. She appeared in only two photographs, both from Millie Taylor’s phone. In one, Faith was walking near Liam Sharpe as the group made their way onto the Kinder plateau. The rocks along Sandy Heys ridge were visible in the background, so it must have been taken from somewhere near the Downfall.
The second showed her standing alone and pensive on a gritstone boulder while Karina Scott and Darius Roth pulled comic faces in the foreground. The fog had been closing in by then. Faith Matthew seemed like a figure posed dramatically against an artificial backdrop, a stage set lit from within to make it look more menacing.
He pulled out half a dozen shots and held each one to the light from his desk lamp as he studied them closely. These were all taken when the fog was at its thickest on Kinder. Millie and Karina had perhaps thought they could capture the atmosphere in a single digital snap. Instead, everything had washed out in a grey miasma.
He peered more closely at some of the later photographs, in which the fog was thickest. Were there lights in the murk? They might just be reflections from a flash on a phone camera, or an optical illusion caused by the fog itself. The impression meant nothing now, though he could see it might have struck someone on the moor as significant at the time.
Tales about the Devil’s Bonfires went back generations. Cooper’s own grandmother would have pointed towards Bleaklow and the Bronze Age mound of Torside Castle and Glossop Low and talk about ‘the devil’s lights’ that hovered above the Devil’s Elbow. Motorists has sometimes reported lights that looked like distress flares above the moors. One story said the lights were torches carried by phantom legions marching along the Devil’s Dyke, a Roman road linking the fort at Glossop with the Hope Valley. Many of the folk tales focused on the Devil’s Elbow, a dangerous bend in the Glossop to Woodhead road above Ogden Clough, a boundary between the inhabited valley and the desolate moor.
Even in recent years, strings of moving lights had been mistaken for ramblers lost on the mountain. A Mountain Rescue team had turned out from their base at Glossop on several occasions when lights or flares had been spotted, only to find the lights fade as they approached. Local police no longer passed on reports of mystery lights unless they felt it was a genuine sighting of a distress flare.
In his grandmother’s day, these phenomena were put down to devils and witchcraft. Now, it was more likely to be attributed to aliens and UFOs. But the traditional explanation he met with most often was that the lights were mischievous spirits intent on leading travellers astray.
And yes, there were lights in the fog. Cooper could see them himself.
But then he found the most striking photograph of them and realised he was looking at quite a different phenomenon. He sat back in his chair and breathed the name to himself.
‘A Brocken spectre,’ he said.
Carol Villiers sat across his desk a few minutes later and looked at him as if she’d misheard what he said.
‘A what?’ she asked.
‘You’ve not heard of it?’ said Cooper.
‘No, never.’
‘It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon, but it doesn’t occur very often. The conditions have to be just right, so most people have never seen one. It only happens when you’re looking down on a bank of mist or cloud in front of you and you have the sun directly behind you. The light projects your shadow through the mist, sometimes in a triangular shape.’
Cooper found himself standing up from his chair and gesturing as he tried to explain how it worked.
‘The strange thing is, you can only see your own spectre. If someone is standing right next to you, they can’t see yours, just their own.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘A kind of giant grey creature. They call it “the Big Grey Man” in Scotland. It’s an enormous, magnified shadow figure, and the head is surrounded by glowing rings of coloured light. They call it a “glory”. The magnification of the shadow is an optical illusion. The figure can even appear to move because of a shift in the cloud layer. It’s caused by light refracted through suspended water droplets in the air.’
‘A Brocken?’
‘A Brocken spectre. The name comes from the Harz Mountains in Germany. The first climber who saw one was so frightened by it that he fell to his death. He was killed by his own shadow, Carol.’
22
When Diane Fry finally called Cooper back, it was to ask him for his help. She wanted him to do her a favour.