‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Well, then. There’s no need for you to worry.’
Angie fiddled with a strand of hair. She’d dyed it a shade or two darker than it used to be. That was one thing that was making her look different.
Diane had a sense of the world having turned on its head. Here she was giving her big sister advice, reassuring her when she was worried or upset. It used to be the other way round. Surely it should be the other way round.
‘Thanks, sis,’ said Angie. ‘I do feel better about it, now we’ve talked it through.’
‘Good,’ said Diane. ‘Because actually, I’m the one who’s in trouble right now.’
She explained to her sister about the disciplinary inquiry, repeated all the questions she’d been asked by Martin Jackson, and the concerns they’d raised in her mind over the past three days.
Even before she finished explaining, Angie had begun shaking her head.
‘Di, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help,’ she said. ‘I’m out of all that now. I’m keeping my head down because—’
‘Because of Zack. I get it.’
‘Sorry, sis.’
Diane was silent for a few moments.
‘There’s someone who could help,’ she said finally.
‘Who do you mean?’ said Angie.
‘There’s only one person. I hate him, but I’ve got to see him again.’
Angie began to shake her head. ‘Not him. You can’t trust him.’
‘I know that. I wouldn’t dream of trusting him. But he’s the only one who ever seemed to know what was going on.’
‘Well, he certainly knows that. He’s up to his neck in it himself.’
‘He always has been,’ said Diane. ‘That’s one thing Andy Kewley told me, before he died.’
What Ben Cooper most hoped to find waiting on his desk was some results from the forensic examination of the threatening note found at Faith Matthew’s house. But no such luck. Even a call to the lab failed to achieve anything. Nothing could shift their backlog, except time. Waiting didn’t come easily to him.
Instead, Cooper found that Luke Irvine had left him a printout of an article from a 1922 edition of the Sheffield Telegraph about the death of a lone walker on Kinder Scout.
Irvine had either tried to pander to his DI’s interest in Kinder or perhaps it had sparked his curiosity when he began to do the research. That was the way it got people sometimes.
The walker had set off in bad weather from the Snake Pass Inn on New Year’s Day that year. Despite appalling conditions, he’d made it onto the Kinder plateau. The wind had been howling across the exposed slopes at eighty miles an hour, and the rain was described as ‘falling in solid ropes’.
According to the Telegraph, when the man was reported missing, the opinion among experienced hill walkers was that the westerly gale would have forced him eastwards towards Grindsbrook. An extensive search on that side of Kinder had covered Golden Clough, Upper Tor, Beal Edge, the Blackden Valley and the dangerous gulleys of Fairbrook.
But the man’s body was eventually found a week later just four hundred yards south of the Downfall, as if he’d been making westwards towards Hayfield in the teeth of the wind and had collapsed through exhaustion sometime during the night. Close to the Downfall, the going was hard and dangerous. There was a steep precipice, with cliffs in some places a hundred feet high.
The story ended: All were glad that his body had been found, with the unspoken wish that he may have died quickly, and that he had not dragged himself about in agony for many hours, probably in darkness, and suffering acutely from anguish of mind and exposure. There is no worse place in England to be lost than on Kinder Scout.
Cooper put the page aside and found another cutting. Twelve months later, a woman who wanted to visit a cairn at the site of the walker’s death had slipped and fallen fifty feet from the Downfall and smashed her skull on the rocks. Her body was covered by drifting snow. It wasn’t discovered until March, when the thaw came.
A commentator at the time claimed that the fact Kinder Scout was private property, with no legal access, had made the mountain all the more attractive for ramblers who were prepared to take a risk in dangerous conditions.
Carol Villiers knocked on Cooper’s office door.
‘Oh, I recognise that expression,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking about?’
Cooper showed her the cuttings about the Kinder deaths.
‘I’m thinking about the symbolism of that choice of location.’
‘You mean Dead Woman’s Drop?’
‘Yes. It suggests someone with a poetic sense of humour, or a love of history and symbolism.’
Villiers was about to say something but seemed to change her mind.
‘Carol, don’t mention—’ he said.
‘Coincidence? I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘Good.’
‘You’re obviously thinking of Darius Roth himself, though.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Ben, it sounded like a perfect description of him.’
‘And yet,’ said Cooper, ‘the Warburtons threw a subtle spanner into the works when I talked to them. They managed to cast suspicion on Liam Sharpe.’
‘But he was the injured man,’ protested Villiers. ‘Liam Sharpe was already incapacitated, wasn’t he? No broken bones, as it turns out, but he had a badly sprained ankle and torn ligaments.’
‘Well, he did by the time the rescue teams got to him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the timing is a bit odd. Most of the accounts are quite specific that the group split up after Mr Sharpe was injured. But none of them actually witnessed his accident. They just believed what they were told.’
‘They heard him cry out in pain.’
‘But they didn’t see anything,’ repeated Cooper. ‘Faith Matthew was probably the only one who actually examined Liam’s ankle at the time. And we can’t ask her about it.’
‘Who was it that came and told the group he was injured?’
‘Sam Warburton. But he didn’t see it happen either. Nor did his wife. In their statements, they say they heard Liam cry out, found him on the ground and naturally accepted his story. That’s what people do. They take in impressions and fill in the details in their own imaginations. They might have thought they’d seen him fall at the time, but when you question them thoroughly, they didn’t see anything at all.’
‘The other thing these accounts aren’t clear about is exactly when the rest of the group lost contact with Faith Matthew. It means our timeline is just an assumption.’
‘Could it be an elaborate set-up?’
‘But Liam Sharpe definitely had a sprained ankle.’
‘It’s easy enough to do.’
‘Sharpe was following up at the rear, and the Matthews dropped back to be with him. Even the Warburtons passed them, so they must have been travelling slowly.’
‘Deliberately? He slowed down to lose touch with the group on purpose?’
‘Maybe.’
That was odd on its own. In Cooper’s experience of being part of a walking group, if one member was slow, you didn’t leave them behind. Faith Matthew seemed to have been the only one who followed that principle. Had that been her mistake? Had her good nature been exploited as a weakness?
He could see Villiers thinking about it.
‘So it’s possible he was pretending at first,’ she said. ‘He was actually fit enough to push Faith Matthew off that rock. But then what? He deliberately sprained his own ankle?’
‘That seems to be the suggestion.’
‘It would be a good alibi.’
‘Good enough that we’ve been discounting him from consideration so far. And that’s despite the fact that he seems to have been the last person to see Faith alive, except the killer.’