There was no one around the collection point. She filled up her car, bought her coffee and a packet of mints, and withdrew some money from the cash machine outside, taking her time. Then she stayed in her car for a few moments on the side of the forecourt, pretending to use her mobile phone.
A black BMW was parked across the road in the entrance to the river walk. It would be quite normal at this time of the morning. People took their dogs for exercise along the riverbank, though they rarely arrived in BMWs.
In this case, two men were sitting in the car, apparently doing nothing except admiring the scenery. They were parked so that their rear-view mirrors were angled towards the service station. Fry felt sure she was being watched. Had they been expecting her to check her locker? What would she have found inside it, if she had? Perhaps Angie’s warning had meant something, after all.
Fry smiled as she put her phone away. She had at least one shot on the phone that might show up the number plate of the BMW. She wondered if it would be there again tomorrow morning, or whether they would bother to use a different car. They would have a frustrating time. She had no intention of using her locker for the foreseeable future.
As she drove northwards, Fry felt as though she’d achieved a small victory. She even smiled at the prospect of her next interview with Martin Jackson, which was scheduled for tomorrow.
Today, though, she was back at her desk at EMSOU. Fry pulled into the car park behind a building just off a junction of the M1 and keyed in the security code. She half expected the code to have been changed so that she couldn’t get in. But the door opened and she walked through to her office, wondering whether she’d be able to give the appearance that everything was normal.
Everyone must know what was going on: all her colleagues would be aware of the disciplinary hearing. If not, they would naturally ask her where she’d been. But when she arrived at her desk, no one asked. She just got the usual casual greetings and a few brief nods.
Jamie Callaghan swung his chair over to speak to her.
‘You OK, Diane?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.’
Callaghan smiled, but didn’t say anything more.
Reports had piled up on Fry’s desk during the short time she’d been gone. She checked on the progress of the Danielle Atherton murder inquiry in Edendale and frowned over an MG11 witness statement from one of the Athertons’ neighbours. She made a note, wondering if DCI Mackenzie would be available to speak to her.
Then she turned to the latest briefings.
‘Jamie, what’s this about an unexplained death on Kinder Scout?’ she said.
‘Could be suspicious,’ said Callaghan. ‘Or maybe not. Your friend DI Cooper is dealing with it at the moment, North Division CID.’
‘He won’t want to pass it on to us,’ said Fry.
‘He’ll have to, if it’s confirmed as homicide.’
‘Mmm. There’s always a possibility that it’s confirmed too late, when there’s nothing left for us to do.’
Callaghan laughed. ‘Well, you know him best. To be honest, I think I’d probably be the same, unless it was a high-profile case.’
Fry looked around the office to see who was missing today, who might perhaps be at Ripley being interviewed by Professional Standards. She thought Mackenzie might have wanted to welcome her back to the team, but there was no sign of him.
‘Is the boss in, Jamie?’ she said.
‘I think he’s in a meeting,’ said Callaghan vaguely.
‘Maybe I’ll catch him later.’
Fry decided to keep her head down. DCI Mackenzie’s absence from the office could be suspicious. Or maybe not.
Ben Cooper looked at his phone. There had been no signal for some time as he made his way across the plateau. But now two bars were showing on his screen, and he could see that he’d missed a call from Carol Villiers.
‘I couldn’t shake Liam Sharpe,’ Villiers said when he called her back. ‘He’s at home, still with his foot up, and he can only walk with a limp. It looks genuine to me, and his account is totally consistent. He says he pleaded with Faith Matthew not to leave him alone on Kinder. Ben, he even started to look scared as he was talking about it. The memory was painful for him. I don’t think he’s that good an actor.’
‘Did you ask him any more about Faith?’
‘He says he liked her. More than he did some of the others in the group, anyway. He was glad she was the one who stayed behind. It made him feel reassured, he said. But then she left him... You should have heard him talking about it, Ben — it was like he’d been abandoned by his mother.’
‘But why did she leave him alone?’
‘She told him she’d noticed something, lights in the fog. She went up onto higher ground to see if it was a rescue party coming. It makes sense, I suppose.’
‘So you don’t think Mr Sharpe could have faked his injury.’
‘That’s my feeling.’
Cooper nodded as he listened to her account of the interview.
‘Oh well. It shouldn’t be possible anyway,’ he said. ‘Not just like that. It shouldn’t have been such a simple solution, a blatant deception that no one bothered to question. Someone would have noticed something.’
‘Especially when there are twelve witnesses.’
‘Well, perhaps that’s too many,’ said Cooper.
‘What?’
‘Sometimes the more witnesses you have, the more difficult it is to get at the facts. Every witness sees and hears something different. We’re taught that in basic training, aren’t we? The skill is to look for the consistencies and inconsistencies to get at the truth hidden among all the witness statements. It can be hard, though.’
‘Yes, it can.’
‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘don’t forget — one of those twelve people wasn’t just a witness.’
‘We’re still struggling for a motive.’
‘Speaking of which, see if someone can find out exactly when Darius Roth’s brother died.’
‘What was his first name?’
‘Magnus. He was a rock climber. According to Elsa, he died in a fall.’
He ended the call and looked at his surroundings. He’d carried on walking while he was listening to Villiers. Now he seemed to have lost his bearings. He looked downhill and frowned at the sense of unfamiliarity as he looked in vain for signs of the River Kinder. There were two main watercourses on the plateau, fed by those thousands of small streams. The Kinder drained west to the Irish Sea, while water from Fairbrook flowed eastwards and ended up in the North Sea.
The sun was behind the clouds, but he could see from a brighter patch where the west lay and which was east. And he was facing in the wrong direction.
Cooper muttered a curse. At some point in the last few minutes, he’d unintentionally crossed the watershed in the middle of England and was heading eastwards. Kinder had performed its dangerous magic again. It had turned him round three hundred and sixty degrees, without him being aware of it. He was a long way from where he should have been. He was looking down into the valley of the Noe at Grindsbrook instead of westwards towards Hayfield.
Cooper knew he should have navigated by compass rather than relying on landscape features and his sense of direction. Because this was Kinder, and the landscape seemed to change at will, stones constantly shifting position, the groughs growing deeper, streams changing direction, paths appearing and disappearing as they petered out into nowhere. That was why Kinder Scout was impossible to map. It never stayed the same long enough. For Cooper, this mountain was a living thing.
And this must have been what happened to the New Trespassers Walking Club. In the end, none of them would have had any idea where they were, no matter what they claimed in their witness statements. Faith Matthew probably wouldn’t have known she was perched on the edge of a precipice at Dead Woman’s Drop.