Stephen Booth - The Corpse Bridge

Cooper passed a large concrete-lined watering hole for the cattle and sheep, formed into ledges to provide a safe footing for the animals when the water was low. And it was certainly low now. There were only a few inches lying below the final ledge. He could see glimpses of the muddy bottom, though most of the water was choked by weeds. A few chunks of limestone had fallen in, along with a rotting timber or two, and a rusted iron feeding trough.

And something else caught his eye. No more than a slight, flapping movement in the wind. It was a white plastic bag, one corner protruding above the muddy surface. If the water had been a fraction deeper, he would never have seen it.

Becky Hurst appeared at the top of the slope. Cooper signalled to her to join him and waited until she scrambled down.

‘What have you found?’ she said.

‘I’m not sure. Probably nothing.’ He looked up the slope. ‘Where’s Gavin?’

‘Having a quick sulk.’

‘And a snack?’

‘Probably. I didn’t wait to see. There’s only so much I can take.’

Cooper found a length of wood, hooked a handle of the plastic bag and fished it out of the water. When he prised it open he discovered some sodden clothing inside. Thrown away instead of being taken to a charity shop or disposed of properly?

He teased the clothing out and spread it on the ground. A crumpled shape turned out to be a woollen hat, with ear flaps and a Scandinavian design. He’d been right about the reindeer.

Something metallic rolled out of the hat on to the ground. It was a small LED torch. A tiny thing, but it would have provided a bright light, if its batteries hadn’t been submerged in water for the past four days.

‘Sandra Blair’s possessions,’ said Cooper.

‘Wow,’ said Hurst. ‘Why would someone take the trouble to dump them here? Why not leave them with the body?’

‘They probably handled them.’

‘So they were worried about fingerprints or DNA?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Do you reckon we’ll be able get anything from them?’

Cooper slipped the items into separate evidence bags. ‘Let’s hope so. It’s about our only break so far.’

‘You really think there’ll be another victim, Ben?’ asked Hurst.

He straightened up and looked out over the Harpur Hill testing grounds, with the remaining route of the old coffin road heading away across Axe Edge Moor. The breeze fluttered a scrap of wool on the dismembered body of the sheep. It seemed inevitable. As if there had to be a death before anyone could cross the Corpse Bridge.

‘I’m certain of it,’ he said.

Chris Thornton was shift supervisor at Deeplow Quarry that day, when the crusher jammed. He was standing outside the office, checking the time sheets and cursing one of the dump truck drivers who’d failed to turn up for work. As far as he was concerned the first sign of trouble was the screech of metal. It shrieked across the quarry above the rumble of engines and the crash of broken stone. Then an alarm sounded for a few seconds before somebody hit the button and stopped the motor.

‘What the hell was that?’

Thornton began to run up the roadway towards the quarry face, kicking up limestone dust and veering aside to avoid a truck manoeuvring to deposit its load in the bottom hopper. He could see a group of men in orange overalls and hard hats, who were slowly gathering around the crusher. Someone had climbed on to the inspection plate and was staring down into the belt mechanism. Then the worker straightened up and said something to the other men below, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

As Thornton covered the last hundred yards, the entire group turned to look at him. He read a mixture of shock and relief on their faces. He knew the reason for the relief — they’d just set eyes on the man who was going to take responsibility from their shoulders. He didn’t yet understand why they were looking so shocked.

In a moment, though, Chris Thornton would find out. Within the next few hours the whole of Derbyshire would know.

The road to Deeplow Quarry ran steeply down through neighbouring villages, carrying the telltale signs of quarrying. The unnaturally white surface of the carriageway and the crash barriers on every bend were the clues.

Ben Cooper knew that limestone lorries ground their way down this hill every day. No matter how well they were sheeted or how often their wheels were washed, they left their traces on the roads in the neighbourhood and reminded everyone of the quarry’s existence. The barriers were there to protect residents living directly in the path of the lorries. If the brakes failed as one of them descended the hill, it would turn into an uncontrollable twelve-ton missile capable of demolishing a house. It had happened only once in living memory. But that was once too often for the people whose properties had been damaged.

Most of the quarries in this area were run by large multinational companies now. The name on the sign at the entrance would usually be that of Tarmac, or Omya, or Lhoist. But Deeplow was one of the few that had survived the spread of the conglomerates. It remained a locally owned operation, thanks to a source of good quality limestone which enabled it to produce pure lime, and kept it productive and profitable.

It was also thanks, perhaps, to the existence of a loyal workforce — local people who’d worked at the quarry for generations and relied on its existence for their livelihood, much as the workers on the Knowle estate did. Those quarrymen didn’t want to see Deeplow swallowed up by a multinational with its headquarters in Switzerland or Mexico.

Cooper turned his Toyota into the quarry entrance. The crusher, where the stone was ground to a powder, was one of the most prominent buildings on the site.

There had been a quarry at the Deeplow site for over a hundred years. The present plant extracted and processed calcium carbonate, a carboniferous limestone more than a hundred and eighty million years old, formed from the compressed skeletons of millions of prehistoric animals and sea creatures.

There were four bigger quarries nearby — Hindlow, Hillhead, Brierlow and Dowlow, all lying close to the A515. A public footpath had crossed the site between the main road and a green lane on the west. Though it had been a public right of way for many years, the footpath had been diverted by the county council under the Highways Act.

So the old coffin road that once ran across this part of the countryside had gone, the ground ripped up and excavated, the route switched to the south.

‘It’s mad,’ said Chris Thornton, taking them into the Portakabin he used as an office. ‘I mean, why would anyone do something like this?’

‘We don’t know, sir.’

‘Although I suppose it could have been worse. There have been a couple of bodies-’

‘Yes. But nothing for you to worry about.’

‘There was one at Pilsbury, which isn’t very far away from here. Do you know who it was yet?’

‘We haven’t released the victim’s identity at this stage.’

Thornton removed his hard hat and ran a hand across the top of his head, making his hair stand up as if he’d just received an electric shock.

‘Well, someone obviously got on to the site and did this. It scared some of the blokes to death. They thought it was real at first. The older ones can be a bit superstitious, you know.’

‘I understand.’

‘Anyway, it’s in here,’ said Thornton. ‘I suppose you’ll want it.’

He opened the door of a storeroom for Cooper to look in. The object had been ripped to shreds by the machinery. One of the legs was missing and the head hung from the neck by a few threads. Rips ran right up the plump torso. It was covered in white dust and Cooper coughed as he brushed some of it from the face.