Stephen Booth - The Corpse Bridge

Irvine cursed under his breath. He heard laughter and turned to see a couple of girls about thirteen years old walking past. They were giggling and nudging each other like idiots. He felt himself beginning to flush. He was glad his DS couldn’t see him now.

He knew Ben Cooper had wanted children. Wanted them badly, in fact. Irvine had once run into Cooper on the street in town, when they were both off duty. It had been in Clappergate, near the entrance to the shopping precinct. He remembered the encounter well, because it had been one of the moments when details impressed themselves on his mind.

Cooper had been accompanied by his two nieces, the younger one holding his hand, the other a bit too old to do the same without embarrassment, but sticking close by his side. Irvine had tried to make polite small talk, the way you were supposed to. But he’d felt very awkward, and even a bit shocked, at this terribly domestic picture of his detective sergeant standing in the street like a proud dad.

Maybe it wouldn’t happen for Cooper now. He might never have his own children to take shopping. Irvine was sure it must be what Cooper was thinking.

Irvine didn’t like children much himself. He didn’t possess that urge to be a parent. He couldn’t help a horrified reaction to mothers sometimes. It was the way they seemed to regard motherhood as giving them not only special privileges, but some kind of superpower. Their sense of entitlement could be staggering and they instilled it in their children too. He’d never been brought up like that. Back home in Yorkshire he’d been taught a bit of humility and consideration for other people. It made him feel like some old fogey to be looking at these arrogant young kids and dreading what sort of society they’d create when they grew up.

At least he couldn’t picture Becky Hurst as a mother. It would be far too disruptive to her future plans.

He turned his back on the girls, surreptitiously wiped his shoes on a patch of grass and went to knock on the Beresfords’ door.

Once the search area was extended, it didn’t take long for the search teams to turn up their first find. When the shout went up from somewhere deep among the trees, Cooper felt all his senses prickle with anticipation. It was as if a shot of adrenalin had just gone through his veins. All the tiredness fell away like dead skin. There was an edge to the tone of the voices he could hear from the woods. It told him what he’d been waiting for. This was going to be something that would change the whole picture.

‘What have you found?’ he asked when he’d run up the slope to the point where the shout had come from.

‘Look for yourself, Sergeant.’

Cooper pushed through members of the search team and looked. There was another trackway here, descending the hill diagonally from the north-east. There was very little trace of the stone setts, if there had ever been any. But the track was marked by a low wall on the side where it overlooked the valley.

Just at the point where this route dipped to approach the Corpse Bridge, a large slab of stone was embedded in the ground. Its top was flat and smooth, and it must have been almost six feet in length. On its own it looked anomalous. It was obvious that it had been sited here deliberately, but a long time ago. Over the centuries it had weathered and become scarred and worn by use. Its mossy sides blended in with its surroundings, but it had clearly been important. It was functional, not decorative. And Cooper knew what it was.

‘A coffin stone,’ he said. ‘They would rest the coffin here before they crossed the bridge.’

The officers in the search team were looking at him expectantly now. That was the trouble with sounding as though you knew what you were talking about. Sometimes you didn’t. Sometimes you were as baffled as everyone else.

‘But as for that ,’ said Cooper. ‘I have no idea.’

Lying on the coffin stone was a makeshift dummy. It was an effigy stuffed with straw or cotton wool, stitched into an outfit of clothes that looked to have been made for it specially — brown corduroy trousers, a tweed jacket, a floppy hat.

‘It’s a guy,’ said someone. ‘That’s what it is.’

Cooper nodded. Yes, in some ways, it was a traditional Bonfire Night guy, the sort of thing that would be on bonfires all over the country in a few days’ time. But most of them would be much less carefully crafted than this one. There was something chilling about the amount of effort that had gone into creating the features of the face. He felt sure it was intended to resemble some real person, though it was no one he recognised. What message was it intended to convey?

The effigy lay sprawled on its back on the coffin stone, its limbs bent into unnatural shapes, its torso wet and beginning to cover over in dead leaves. The unnerving face was grinning up at him from amid the first stages of decomposition.

And that was the message, surely. It was a body, waiting here. Waiting for its time to cross the Corpse Bridge.

‘Staffordshire have made a find on their side too. Just a few yards up the track from the river.’

‘What is it?’

‘A piece of rope.’

‘Rope?’ said Cooper.

‘Well, to be exact — it’s a noose.’

Cooper gazed at the river crossing, with its two tracks coming down from the Derbyshire side and a third leading away into Staffordshire. Crossroads held a special place in folklore. In superstitious belief, places where tracks intersected were considered dangerous. They were protected by spirit guardians, because they were places where the world and the underworld met. Many people believed that the Devil could be made to manifest himself there.

Well, the Corpse Bridge wasn’t quite a crossroads, but it was a focal point where three routes met. It would probably have filled the requirements for believers in the old crossroads lore.

Cooper looked at the body, still lying on the bank. He tried to imagine what connection the victim might have had to the carefully constructed effigy on the coffin stone or to a rope noose. But his imagination failed him for once. Perhaps the link was something beyond his comprehension.

People scoffed at the old beliefs now, of course. But the Devil had manifested himself here, after all.

Luke Irvine came away from the Beresfords’ house in Earl Sterndale wondering whether his visit had been as useful as he’d hoped.

Yes, he’d obtained an address for Sandra Blair in Crowdecote and learned that she was widowed, her husband having died five years ago. No children either. The nearest thing to a next of kin was probably a sister in Scotland, who the Beresfords didn’t know. But that was about it.

Mrs Beresford didn’t know anything about the husband, Gary. She’d never met him, having only come into contact with Sandra at the tea rooms in Hartington, and later at WI meetings. Sandra had talked about her husband quite a bit, but only spoke of the small things, the personal stuff — a holiday in Tenerife, Gary’s favourite dog, their first house in Bowden, where they’d lived until her husband’s death. She seemed to have avoided the less personal topics.

Sandra Blair was local, though, and not an incomer. That ought to help. More people would know her than if she’d only moved into the area in the last few years.

Irvine had already phoned these details to his DS. But would they be enough? Cooper had sounded distracted and distant on the phone. Of course, he liked his DCs to give him more than just the basic facts. He liked to get their impressions of the people involved, an opinion or instinctive reaction. Becky Hurst was great at that. And DC Carol Villiers too, of course. Ben always trusted her opinion.

Privately, Irvine felt he might be lacking in this department. He couldn’t seem to form any subjective impressions of individuals while he was concentrating on asking the important questions and making notes. The temptation was to make something up, offer an opinion he didn’t really feel.