She changed the CD as she drove through a steep-sided dale. Alison Moyet’s The Turn came to hand, and she slipped it into the CD player. A solitary guitar, then the familiar bluesy voice singing ‘One More Time’. Perfect.
Birchlow was an amorphous cluster of gritstone cottages, laid out according to no visible plan. An organic village, then, thought Cooper. A settlement now barely interesting enough to attract a single tourist, unless they were lost. It had nothing to offer in competition with the attractions of areas to the south and west. Unlike Eyam, it had even escaped the effects of the plague.
Cooper knew tiny villages like this. They were dominated by the older generations, the younger population having moved away to find work, or to live in the cities. Few youngsters had any interest in scraping a living from the land. In Birchlow, the natural instinct would be to distrust the unfamiliar. He could expect politeness on the surface, suspicion underneath. Not to mention a tendency for people to conceal the fact that they were capable of any human feelings.
His other visits in Eyam had proved fruitless, as he’d suspected. But the system had flagged the calls up, and his boots were the ones on the ground right now in this area. If what Mr Wakeley had told him had any significance at all, he would find the answer here in Birchlow somewhere.
He dialled Fry’s number to let her know his location.
‘It’s close enough to your scene,’ he said. ‘Could be significant.’
‘Yes, it’s worth following up. But don’t knock yourself out, Ben.’
‘I’m here, so I’ll do the best I can.’
‘As you always do, right?’
Cooper passed a small church, which had one spectacular stained-glass window catching the light. A depiction of a saint, dying in great sanctity, with a quiver of arrows through his throat. Bright yellow daffodils grew in the cottage gardens, contrasting with a red pillar box, and a line of dark grey wheelie bins standing at the roadside, waiting for the refuse collectors. Milk bottles had been left out for the milkman, the way everyone had once done it.
There was a village pub in Birchlow, the Bird in Hand. But no shops. And no post office, of course. There was just a small car park behind the village hall, with a phone box and a parish notice board, and several cars parked up between the stone walls.
Looking for the farm whose land ran up the back of the churchyard, Cooper reflected that there were some characteristics that didn’t endear you to people in villages like this. Being openly inquisitive was one. Knowing too much was another. Unfortunately, a police detective was likely to fall into both categories.
When he came to a sign for Rough Side Farm, he knew he was in the right place. Eyam was clearly visible from here, spread out on the opposite hillside. Some of the land here looked to be good pasture, so good that it ought to be supporting a dairy herd. But who wanted to run a dairy farm when prices for milk were so poor, and the bull calves worthless for meat?
Cooper found the farmer lurking in his workshop, surrounded by tractor parts and bits of oily machinery. He introduced himself, and learned the farmer’s name was Peter Massey. He was a man in his late fifties, but lean and fit-looking, the way that the older generations of farmers often were. Physically, he was probably fitter than a lot of men half his age who did nothing but watch football and drink beer. He could certainly give Matt Cooper a fifty-yard start. No doubt all those hours spent out on the moors had done that for him. In a city, a man like Massey would probably credit his physical condition to tai chi or pilates.
Cooper commented on the quality of the land, usually a good ice breaker with a farmer who looked as though he’d been around for a while and could take the credit for it. Across the yard, he could see an empty cow shed, and the padlocked door to what must have been the milking parlour.
‘Yes, it used to be all fields and cows round here,’ said Massey, then paused for a moment. ‘Now it’s just fields.’
When Cooper explained that he wanted to see the route up to Birchlow that the old man had described, Massey wiped his hands on a rag and led him out of the yard. The farmhouse itself was a typical jumble of extensions and additions cluttering the outline of the original eighteenth-century building. A low profile against the Pennine winds, solid stone walls thick enough to keep out the cold.
‘My father would have been upset that I gave up the dairy herd,’ said the farmer as they passed through a gate and into the first field. ‘He bred some nice Friesian crosses. Wonderful milkers, they were. But not good enough. No cows would have been good enough.’
‘You inherited this farm from your father?’ asked Cooper.
‘Aye. And he took it over from his father. Lord, I was out in this yard helping with the morning milking by the time I was ten years old.’
‘You must have a lot of memories, then.’
Massey’s eyes clouded for a moment. He was gazing at the hillside, rather than at the house and buildings. Perhaps he felt he’d grown up out there in the fields, rather than indoors.
‘You might say that. Yes, I’ve got a lot of my memories bound up in this land. Buried now, some of them.’
They followed the line of the dry-stone wall as it snaked across the contours of the hillside, following the dips and hollows. At a couple of points it was intersected by similar walls running at right angles to it, dividing the fields into long, sloping strips of land. Ahead of him, Cooper could see miles and miles of wall, an endless limestone tracery overlaying the landscape.
Massey stopped, removed his cap and scratched his head. His hair was wispy, and that distinctive sandy colour common among people whose distant ancestors had been Scandinavian settlers. Remarkable how that Viking blood had persisted through the generations.
‘I reckon you must be talking about the bridlepath over there,’ he said. ‘We call it Badger’s Way in these parts. It connects up with Black Harry Lane. You can get up to Black Harry Gate and way over to Longstone without going anywhere near a road, if you have a mind to.’
‘A bridlepath. So it can be used by horse riders, not just walkers?’
‘Aye. It would have been a packhorse road, I suppose, in the old days. It was made for horses. Trouble is, we tend to get motorbikes up here of a weekend. Those things muddy it up for everybody.’
Cooper looked down into the bridlepath, which was sunk a few feet between two grass embankments topped by stone walls. In many places, you could pass unnoticed by anyone in the adjoining fields, even if you were on horseback.
Up the hill, he could see the square Norman tower of the church at Birchlow. Along the edge of the moor, the land in front of him became even bumpier. One area seemed to be raised in a more regular shape, perhaps the site of an Iron Age hill fort or the capped shaft of an ancient lead mine. There were lots of those in the Peak District, archaeological sites that were the bane of farmers keen to plough up or improve their land, or to put up new buildings. This one seemed to share its location with a line of telephone poles, long since disused.
‘Do you allow the Eden Valley Hunt to use your land, Mr Massey?’ asked Cooper.
Massey hesitated, a habit he’d probably developed in the face of repeated questions about fox hunting during the campaign for a ban. He would be weighing up the answer, deciding whether it was wise to come down on one side or the other, or stay on the fence.
‘They’ve got my permission,’ he said finally. ‘But they don’t hunt this way often. We don’t have the copses up here, see.’
‘And perhaps no problem with foxes?’
The farmer straightened his cap. ‘Funny, but the one place I’ve seen foxes regularly is here, in Badger’s Way. They run up the lane at dusk sometimes. They’ve got it figured out, those buggers. They know they won’t be spotted.’