Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘OK, OK. I get the message.’

He could feel Fry staring at him until he started to flush, but he wasn’t going to rise to her baiting.

‘Have you noticed,’ he said, ‘how quickly Pity Wood Farm went on the market after Derek Sutton died? Raymond must have phoned the estate agents at the same time he called in the funeral directors.’

‘He wanted to be busy,’ suggested Fry. ‘One of the main reasons we have funerals is to give bereaved people something to do. The way it was explained to me, you have to continue doing things that are in the present tense, otherwise your life would just stop when a loved one dies.’

‘We were told that, too, when Mum went. But it’s funny that Raymond didn’t really do that when Derek died. Well, not for long. He seems to have had the farm up for sale pretty quick, doesn’t he? That was certainly a “past tense” action, if you like. It brought everything to a stop. The whole of the life that he and his brother had been living at Pity Wood for decades — it was just ripped up and thrown in a skip by a Polish builder.’

‘Yes, it does sound very final, when you put it like that. But he might have had reasons.’

Cooper finally remembered what else was near Godfrey’s Rough when they were still more than half a mile away. He could see it, standing gaunt and eerie on the skyline, framed by skeletal trees. Stone ruins like the keep of a medieval castle. Steel winding gear like a rusted scaffold. Deep shafts that drove eight hundred feet into the ice-cold water below the limestone.

‘Magpie Mine,’ he said. ‘Beware of the widows’ curse.’

Minerals had been a key element in the wealth of the Peak District for centuries. The remnants of the lead-mining industry were widespread, their impact on the landscape had been so dramatic that it would be many centuries yet before their traces disappeared.

Magpie Mine was the best preserved of the hundreds of lead mines that had once been visible everywhere, rumpling the surface into bumps and hollows, piercing it with hidden shafts, scattering it with centuries of miners’ spoil. Its heyday was in the nineteenth century, but it had finally closed in the 1950s, and it was heritage now, one of the youngest protected sites in the national park.

‘I don’t think it was the picnic site that interested Farnham and Elder,’ said Cooper. ‘I think it was this.’

‘Why, Ben?’

‘A remote location, easy to access, and unlikely to be disturbed for development, because it’s a protected site. Yet look at these spoil heaps from the old mine workings, Diane. Heaps? They’re small mountains. You could bury anything here, and no one would notice any disturbance. Half of the remaining structures are underground anyway.’

A cloud of starlings swept across the road, twisting and turning, dipping until they almost skimmed the tarmac before settling all at once in a ploughed field. They immediately vanished, camouflaged against the brown earth. When Cooper parked and got out of the Toyota, the wind rattled the buckle of his seat belt against the side of the car. Ash keys hung in damp clumps from the branches of a tree, too wet even to rattle in the wind.

They stepped carefully over the bars of a cattle grid. Beneath the bars, the pit was filled with a black sludge of leaves and stagnant pools of water. Past the cattle grid, the sheep pellets scattered on the ground changed to cow pats, though Cooper couldn’t see any cows.

The wind scything across the plateau felt cold enough to slice off an ear if you turned the wrong way. As they walked on to the site, loose sheets of corrugated iron could be heard banging incessantly in the wind.

The former agent’s house was the first building, now a field centre for the mine’s historical society. Beyond the agent’s house, the old mine buildings crowded in suddenly, clustering on either side and looming overhead on a high mound.

Even in the sun, the wind was too cold to stand still in for long, too cold to leave your hands uncovered if you didn’t want your fingers to go numb.

Fry shivered. ‘What did you mean about the widows’ curse?’ she said.

‘Can you feel it, Diane?’

‘Feel it? I can’t even feel my fingers. It’s bloody freezing out here, Ben.’

‘They were the widows of the Red Soil men,’ said Cooper. ‘You see, there were originally two separate mines on this site, governed by the rules of the old Barmote Court. But Magpie miners broke through into the Great Red Soil vein, and there was a long-running dispute between the two mines. The Magpie men lit fires from straw and tar to smoke out their rivals, and three Red Soil miners were killed in the shaft, suffocated by the fumes. Ten men were tried for their murder at Derby, but they were found not guilty. Conflicting evidence, and a lack of intent. It could be difficult to get a successful prosecution, even in those days.’

‘Was that justice?’

‘Local people didn’t think so. It was one of those disputes that was bound to happen. Red Soil was being worked by local men, but the Magpie was being mined by labour imported from Cornwall. Anyway, it’s said that the widows of the murdered men put a curse on the mine. It never made money again.’

There were two tall chimneys surviving on the site, a round one and an older square chimney. At the base of the round chimney, Cooper found a large iron grille set into the ground. He tugged at it, and found the grille was loose and could be lifted off its bolts. It was heavy, but he had no trouble raising one side and letting it fall back on to the ground, leaving the entrance to a tunnel clear. In one direction, it seemed to lead into the base of the chimney. The other way, he guessed it must enter the engine house.

On the floor of the tunnel he could see a disposable lighter, crumpled yogurt pots, and an empty John West tuna sachet. Left-overs from someone’s picnic that could be forced through the bars of the grille.

The main mine shaft was supposed to be more than seven hundred feet deep, though the bottom fifth of it was always flooded. On a bright day, they said, you could see the water if you peered through the grille. But there was no brightness today, just the grey cloud and drizzle cloaking the skeletal trees.

Cooper stood over one of the smaller shafts. Ferns peeping through the grille were dying and blackened by frost. But below them, a couple of feet into the shelter of the shaft, he glimpsed the glossy green fronds of some plant he didn’t recognize, still thriving in the gloom, even in December. Whatever it was, it looked much too healthy, considering the lack of light and the cold wind whistling overhead.

A couple of old millstones lay abandoned on the ground, one of them broken into three pieces. The walls of the engine house ran with water on the inside. Drops of water fell from the arch and the lintels of the windows. Cooper craned his head back and watched a drop falling towards him. Before it reached him, it was caught by the wind and veered off suddenly, elongating like a tear drop as it accelerated.

The water above the flooded level of the shaft was drained by the Magpie Sough, which ran into the River Wye, away to the north below Great Shacklow Wood. That was one of the longest soughs in the Peak District, more than a mile and a quarter of it, and its construction had practically ruined the mines’ shareholders.

‘My hands are completely numb now,’ said Fry. ‘Why is it so much colder here than in Edendale?’

‘We’re completely exposed,’ said Cooper. ‘Imagine what it was like working here.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘And imagine,’ he said, ‘how easy it would be to bury a murder victim here.’

Fry took a call on her mobile. ‘That was the DI,’ she said. ‘They’re setting up a HOLMES incident room for the Farnham killing.’