‘He’s all right once we’re up the plateau,’ said Pat. ‘But getting him up there is a different matter. I told him we’d have to get a helicopter to winch him up next time. They could drop him in with the sacks of seed at the restoration project.’
Sam smiled. ‘There comes a point,’ he said, ‘when you just can’t do it any more and there’s no use pretending any longer. You stop putting on a front and admit it. You have to throw in the towel. So this would have been our last trip anyway, I think.’
‘Things haven’t always gone smoothly for us, to be honest,’ said Pat. ‘We had some problems with pension funds. We withdrew a large lump sum and invested it unwisely.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘We got over it.’
‘You get over everything, one way or another,’ said Sam.
Cooper stood up to leave. Pat was fiddling with her glasses again, sliding them back on her nose, as if to help her see more clearly.
‘Previous members,’ she said suddenly. ‘There’s only one I remember.’
Sam stared at her. ‘Really?’
Cooper noted the look exchanged between them. A hint of rebellion in Pat Warburton’s eyes? Sam might have preferred her not to speak, but she was taking no notice.
‘What was their name?’ asked Cooper quickly.
‘Eavis. That was it. Julie Eavis. I think she spelled her name with an “a” in the middle.’
‘Yes, she did,’ agreed Sam.
He knew when he’d lost at least. Sam must be able to see the same stubbornness on his wife’s face that Cooper could.
‘Do you have any idea how I can get hold of her?’
‘Not really.’
‘Where does she live?’
They looked at each other again, an unspoken agreement this time.
‘Buxton,’ said Sam. ‘That’s all we know. But it’s quite an unusual name. She shouldn’t be too difficult for you to find.’
‘I hope not,’ said Cooper. ‘But it rarely works out that way.’
As he left the site, Cooper looked back at the caravan. When he got to his car, he pulled out his phone and googled the price of a Swift Conqueror 630. Around thirty thousand pounds. With the value of the Nissan X-Trail added in, the Warburtons had around fifty grand worth of assets sitting on that campsite. You could buy a house for that in parts of Derbyshire. Though perhaps not in Didsbury.
Back in Edendale, Ben Cooper sat in his office quietly for a while after visiting the Warburtons. His impressions of the New Trespassers Walking Club were changing with every conversation. People came and people left much more often than he’d imagined. So perhaps Darius Roth didn’t have that much influence over them after all. They could take their leave of the club whenever they pleased.
Or at least, most of them could.
He did a search of the phone directory. As it turned out, there were only three addresses in Buxton with the name of Eavis. Cooper hit the right one on the third attempt.
‘Hello. I’m trying to contact Julie Eavis,’ he said when a man’s voice answered.
‘Who is this?’
‘Detective Inspector Cooper, Derbyshire Constabulary.’
‘You’re a bit late.’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘She died last year.’
‘I’m sorry. Can I ask...?’
‘It was a car accident. Last winter. She went off the road in the snow. They say she was driving too fast for the conditions.’
There was a hint of resentment in his words. Cooper had heard it often before. When a tragedy happened, the death of a loved one, the instinct was to find someone to blame. When no one else was involved, it became the mysterious ‘they’. In this case, unfortunately, ‘they’ was probably the police.
‘Am I speaking to Mr Eavis?’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘I apologise for intruding, Mr Eavis, but I wonder if you recall your wife being a member of a walking group called the New Trespassers.’
‘Yes, I remember. She was a bit of a local history enthusiast and she seemed to think it was important. She dropped out of it after a while.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘I don’t think she hit it off with some of the other members. She didn’t say much about it, but that’s the impression I got. Reading between the lines, like. She just dropped it one day and never went back.’
‘No one specific you can recall her mentioning?’ asked Cooper. ‘Or a particular incident?’
‘Not really. There was some meeting at the clubhouse that seemed to upset her.’
‘Clubhouse?’ said Cooper.
Eavis sounded unsure now. ‘I think that was it.’
‘You don’t mean at someone’s house? Trespass Lodge in Hayfield, perhaps?’
‘Mmm. No. She definitely mentioned a clubhouse. I don’t know any more than that. Sorry.’
‘Thank you for your help, sir.’
Cooper rang through to the CID room. ‘Carol, could you see if we can fix a time to speak to Theo and Duncan Gould, please?’
‘The landscape gardeners? As soon as possible, I suppose?’
‘You got it. Thanks. And send Luke Irvine in, will you?’
Irvine appeared almost straight away with his notebook.
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Can you do a bit of research for me, please, Luke?’
‘Of course. Is it connected with the Faith Matthew inquiry?’
‘I think so,’ said Cooper. ‘The Kinder Mass Trespass in April 1932.’
‘Oh, that. What about it?’
‘I think there were six men arrested and tried at Derby Assizes after a confrontation with gamekeepers. Can you find out who they were? Their names at least.’
‘No problem,’ said Irvine.
‘Thanks.’
Irvine looked at Cooper with a hint of surprise at his tone. Cooper realised he probably sounded less than businesslike. That was because he wasn’t entirely sure the information was relevant to the investigation. It might just be to satisfy his own curiosity.
‘Also, find out if there are any derelict or abandoned buildings in that area, near Hayfield,’ said Cooper. ‘And check on any properties Darius Roth owns in addition to his home at Trespass Lodge.’
‘I’ll get straight on to it.’
When Irvine had gone, Cooper spread the witness statements out on his desk, then separated them into three piles. The Roths, Millie Taylor, Karina Scott and Nick Haslam went into one stack, and the Goulds, the Warburtons and Sophie Pullen into another. That was the way they’d separated when they split up to get help. Then he put Liam Sharpe and Faith Matthew together in a third pile. Faith was the only one who’d stayed with the injured man when the others left.
But wait a minute. That left him with one witness statement in his hand. Jonathan Matthew’s. Why was he reluctant to put it in the third pile? Hadn’t Jonathan stayed with his sister? She was the only person he really knew in the walking group, certainly the one whose welfare he would have cared about. Everything else meant nothing to him.
So what was Jonathan’s account? Cooper skimmed through the statement again. Jonathan said that he’d waited behind when the two groups set off. And that wasn’t the same thing, was it? Jonathan seemed to have hovered in the background, not definitely part of any group. But he’d been doing that before the split, according to the statements. He’d wandered off the path, doing his own thing, disappearing in the fog for minutes at a time. Afterwards, no one could be sure where Jonathan had been at any point in the walk. And when the MRT located the walkers, he was found separately by Dolly. Jonathan definitely had the opportunity. But what could his motive have been?
Cooper sighed. So what did he know for certain? Lost on Kinder Scout in the fog, the walking group had split up. After an argument about which direction to take, they’d set off in different directions to see who could get a mobile-phone signal to call for help.