Stephen Booth - The Devil’s Edge

‘So who won?’

‘Well, that’s debatable. Reading the reports, it sounds as though they both thought they’d lost the case. Neither of them really got what they wanted, you see. Not completely. The judge thought he was achieving a reasonable compromise, but neither of the parties involved seems to have been in any mood to find a middle ground.’

‘That’s the problem with the Judgement of Solomon. The baby tends to die in the process.’

She nodded. ‘Well, strictly speaking, the Barrons were given the judgment. They weren’t awarded any costs, but in the letter of the law they were the successful party.’

‘So… Did Nowak seem to you like a man who would bear a grudge?’

‘I don’t know. But it certainly must have cost him a lot of money.’

Cooper stood up, his tiredness forgotten.

‘Well, I think we’d better talk to Mr Nowak again,’ he said.

‘Ah. So now we do know what we were looking for, do we?’

On the way back into Riddings, Cooper came to a traffic jam on Curbar Lane. A couple of uniformed officers were trying to marshal a media posse into a convenient cluster. Of course, there had been a lot of press attention ever since the Savages first started operating in the eastern edges. Yet now, with two fatal attacks in the same village, all the photographers seemed to be clustered around the gate of Moorside House, hoping for a glimpse of Tyler Kaye.

‘This isn’t helping at all,’ he said.

‘Nothing we can do about it,’ said Villiers.

‘We haven’t heard that Mr Kaye is back yet, have we?’

‘Last we heard he was still in Florida. But I’ll check.’

‘Thanks. I wouldn’t like to think the press knows more than we do.’

Cooper turned into Croft Lane and slowed the car to a crawl. Many of these lanes around Riddings petered out into rough tracks that meandered upwards to the moors. Several times already in the last few days he’d had to stop where the tarmac ran out and struggled to turn the Toyota in someone’s gateway.

He stopped at a point where he judged the back of the Hollands’ property met the Barrons’.

‘I won’t be a minute, Carol. I just want to take a look here.’

He went through the back gate into the garden of Fourways. In the copse at the back of the house, he came across an area that had been left wild, perhaps to encourage wildlife. Pushing his way through the undergrowth, he came to the remains of a dry-stone wall, so overgrown and covered in moss that it was invisible until he was practically touching it. The wire fence that surrounded the Barrons’ property ran along the top of this wall too. Or at least, it had at one time. Now there was a gap. He found the broken end of the wire, and could see from the glint of the metal that it had been cut cleanly, and quite recently too.

He turned to go back to the gate, thinking he ought to send scenes-of-crime down here. He could see that Villiers had got out of the car and was waiting for him, a puzzled look on her face. Perhaps he ought to explain himself too.

It was then that he noticed the remains of the old gravel path under the foliage. Small granules of gravel, too small to be used on a drive where vehicles would compact it. Small enough to stick in the soles of your boots, especially if you were running.

Cooper stopped. The hairs on the back of his neck crawled as he sensed movement in the undergrowth at the bottom of the garden. A surreptitious rustle, the faintest of sounds, almost inaudible against the sigh of the wind.

Keeping his back to the garden, he spoke to Villiers.

‘Carol, I think we’re being watched. Go back round the house and out into the lane. Quietly, without any fuss. Make it look as though you’re leaving.’

He pretended to be checking messages on his phone, while he waited a couple of minutes to give Villiers enough time to get out and round the corner into the lane. Then he turned back to the garden and strode rapidly across the grass.

Now he saw a face in the bushes. It almost merged with the undergrowth, and bits of foliage seemed to sprout from it like whiskers. It reminded Cooper of one of those stone gargoyles you saw on old churches. A living image of the green man.

‘Mr Gamble?’ he said. ‘You might as well come out.’

There was a moment of silence, then a loud sniff and more rustling in the undergrowth. Finally a figure pushed aside the branches and stepped on to the grass.

‘I heard something going on,’ he said. ‘So I came to have a look. You can’t be too careful. Especially at the moment. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Of course.’

Gamble made a half-hearted attempt to brush the twigs and burrs from his jacket, apparently oblivious to the privet leaves in his hair. For a moment Cooper saw him as a kind of elemental figure, something from a children’s folk tale. A mischievous goblin or ancient woodland sprite. The boggart in the flesh. But what mischief was he up to now?

‘So you were just passing, were you, Mr Gamble?’

‘Yes.’

Cooper nodded. ‘Again?’

Villiers pushed her way through the bushes behind him.

‘Do we need the handcuffs again?’ she said, straightening her jacket.

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not this time.’

He turned back to Gamble. ‘You never learn, do you, sir?’

Gamble shuffled his feet. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong.’

‘This is a crime scene. You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Oh well, I’d better be off then. So, er… what happened to the Hollands?’

‘I’ve no doubt you’ll find out in due course.’

‘Only I saw the ambulance.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘You don’t give much away, do you?’

‘No. But if you happen to stumble across any information, Mr Gamble, I’m sure you’ll come and share it with us, won’t you?’

‘I don’t know anything. Not a thing,’ said Gamble. ‘Shall I just

…?’

‘DC Villiers will escort you off the property,’ said Cooper.

‘Fair enough.’

‘No – wait a minute.’

Gamble stopped, his eyebrows waggling uncertainly.

‘Perhaps you can help,’ said Cooper. ‘What do you know about a dispute between Mr Nowak and the Barrons? An argument over a bit of land.’

‘Oh, that. Everyone knows about that. It was the boundary, you see. Just along there, on Croft Lane.’

‘How did it start?’

‘Well, when Nowak bought Lane End, there was no wall or fence there, not even a hedge to mark the boundary between the properties. There was just a grass verge bordering the lane.’ Gamble removed his hat and scratched his head. ‘It had been that way for decades, I suppose, and the previous owners had never bothered about it. But when the Barrons moved in at Valley View, they decided to lay claim to the verge. Jake Barron said he wanted to create an access into the pony paddock. Their daughters are into horses, you know. Gymkhanas and stuff. They wanted to get a trailer in without going through the main entrance and past the garage block.’

‘So they claimed the land they needed?’

‘Aye. Trouble was, there were no maps with the deeds, to show the exact line of the boundary. If you ask me, I think it might actually have been common land, dating from the time when the original village was built by the duke. I don’t suppose anyone worried about boundaries back then, being as how the whole village belonged to one person. It would just have been shared by the community.’

‘I see.’

Gamble smiled ruefully. ‘Those were the days, eh? Not much community spirit now. Not between those two, anyway. Not anywhere, really.’

‘So they ended up in a dispute that went as far as a court hearing.’

‘That’s right. You know, if they’d got on better, it might have been settled amicably. But they hated each other on sight, I reckon. Nowak and Barron, they were like two bulls at a gate. They locked horns, and that was it. Neither of them was ever going to give in. Not in this life.’