‘I’d be disappointed in you if you did. You wouldn’t be the woman I know.’
Fry squirmed uncomfortably and put down her glass. Was it her imagination again or had he been about to say something else, use quite a different phrase to describe her? This time, he was the one who’d had a lucky escape. If he’d said those other words, the ones she never wanted to hear, she would have had no option but to punch him on the nose, sick or not. Her body had already tensed, her fist clenched instinctively. With an effort, she forced her hand to relax.
Leeson stood up, as if recognising the moment had come for her to leave. They no longer had anything left to say to each other.
‘I’m glad you came, though, Diane,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing I can do for you, this may be it.’
Fry turned towards the door. She had no reason to feel grateful. He wasn’t doing her a favour, merely going a small way towards repaying a huge debt.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘I am your father.’
Fry flinched. But the moment had passed. She no longer felt like hitting anything, even him.
‘Not in any meaningful sense of the term,’ she said.
Leeson came to the door and watched her open her car.
‘Will I see you again, Diane?’ he said.
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘We’ll speak, then?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Fry glanced in her rear-view mirror as she put her car into gear. She could see William Leeson standing in the doorway of his house, unnaturally pale and fragile. He looked nothing more than a ghost, haunting her from the past.
For a moment, she thought he would raise a hand to wave goodbye. But Leeson didn’t move. And his image gradually faded away as she drove towards the gate.
It had been Ben Cooper who broke the news to her that the DNA hit from the scene of her assault had been a familial match, indicating a close relative of the victim’s. A relative of hers.
‘A brother or a son,’ Cooper had said, ‘or—’
‘No.’
Fry shook her head, even as she thought about that moment.
A familial match. But to a family member she didn’t even know existed then. Of course, she’d known she had a biological father, but not who he was, or where. And she never had any interest in finding anything out about him. She’d hated him without even knowing who he was.
And now that she’d found him, she detested him even more.
It was late when Ben Cooper returned to his home in Foolow. There were no street lights in the village, only a few windows still lit at the Bull’s Head.
As he drew level with the cross on the village green, Cooper noticed the rear lights of a car pulling away from the kerb near his cottage. It looked like a small four-by-four. As it passed under his neighbour’s security light, its paintwork gleamed an eerie red for a moment before it disappeared up the hill towards Grindlow. Something about the car caught his attention, but it was too far away to get a registration number. Probably he was just being paranoid. Spending too much time with Diane Fry could do that to him.
Cooper parked his Toyota behind the cottage and let himself in through the back door. He listened for the bang of the cat flap, but realised he was much later home than usual and out of routine. Hope was already curled up in her basket by the radiator. She opened one eye, gave him an accusing glare, then went back to sleep.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a hard day too.’
He shrugged off his jacket and turned towards the kitchen to make himself a drink. When he came back, the cat was out of her bed and sitting in the middle of the rug, staring at the front door, her ears tilted forward like a pointer.
‘What’s up?’ said Cooper. ‘Mouse?’
He opened the door into the entrance hall and saw a large envelope stuck halfway through his letterbox.
‘That’s odd.’
He inspected the envelope carefully before sliding it clear and jumped as the letterbox sprang shut behind it with a loud clang.
It was more than just an envelope. It was quite a thick package, which had only just fit through his door. The edges were scraped and torn where it had been pushed through with some force.
Cooper glanced out of the window at the darkened village, remembering the small red car that had pulled away as he entered Foolow. The post was often delivered late in the day in these rural villages. But not this late.
He took the package back into the sitting room and laid it on the table. Slowly, he slit one end open with a knife and slid out a pile of A4 sheets fastened together with a rubber band. He looked at the title on the top page.
‘Interesting,’ he said.
Behind him, the cat ran a paw over her whiskers and began to purr contentedly.
30
Thursday
Ben Cooper was out and about early next morning, just after dawn. It was his official rest day, and he had a few hours to kill before an appointment at four o’clock that afternoon. The weather was fine, and there was only one place in Derbyshire he thought of going.
The roads were quiet on the way into Hayfield. The white streams lying in the hollows like trails of smoke were only an early morning mist, not a sign of returning fog. It would soon burn off when the sun reached the valley.
In Hayfield, Cooper parked at Bowden Bridge and changed into his walking boots. He set off to climb onto White Brow, having decided to avoid the path to the south, where part of the River Kinder had found its own route down the hill from the dam and was flowing over the footbridge.
Even in summer Kinder Scout was no place for a solitary rambler. Pools formed deep enough to drown in. As the New Trespassers had found to their cost, a strong walker might leap from hag to hag before finally twisting an ankle or becoming exhausted. It could be days before another rambler passed that way.
Of course, it helped to be able to read a compass. You could get so disorientated traversing the bogs that you had no idea which direction you were heading, or where you were on the map. It was a truly unsettling feeling, especially if you were aware of the precipitous cliffs and steep drops onto shattered rocks. These days, people relied on mobile phones to get them out of trouble. But there were no phone masts on Kinder.
He passed the sheep wash at the hamlet of Booth, which would still have been in use when the mass trespassers came by in 1932, with hundreds of sheep collected from the western slopes of Kinder. Washing the sheep was regarded as a great social occasion in those decades, with shepherds standing waist-deep in the water as sheep were tossed in one by one for their fleeces to be scrubbed clean of peat before shearing, and farmers mixing their own sheep dip from soap and creosote to kill lice and ticks in the dense wool.
Cooper soon realised that he should have brought a stick or a hiking pole like the Warburtons. As soon as he stepped on the steepest stretch of cobbles beyond the entrance to the old water-treatment works, his feet slipped from underneath him. He hit the wet stones with a painful crash. For a moment, he was dazed. He sat up and rubbed his elbow where he’d scraped it on the ground. Then he got back to his feet and carried on upwards.
He passed along the edge of Kinder Reservoir, with the abandoned water-treatment works below him. The rows of arched windows on the filter house had been blocked up, and many of the skylights were smashed. The path here was scattered with dead leaves and the empty husks of acorns. A jay darted between a stand of oak trees growing along the brow.
Then the peace was shattered as an Emirates 747 roared low overhead, coming in to land at Manchester Airport, a white shape skimming in and out of the cloud. Flights passed constantly over the Kinder plateau. Where Manchester people had once fought for the right to ramble across these moors, now they flew over every week, ignoring Kinder on their way to holidays in Ibiza or Magaluf.