Stephen Booth - The Devil’s Edge

Hitchens threw out his hands in a helpless gesture, suggesting that he was unable to explain it.

The briefing moved on.

‘There were white handprints found by scenes-of-crime on the rear wall. DS Cooper has suggested that these could be from rock climbers, who use chalk to improve their grip. There are many climbers who visit Riddings Edge. It could be a long job, but we’re going to try to establish which of them might have been in the area on Tuesday evening.’

Cooper could sense a few black looks coming his way at that. Whoever got the frustrating job of tracking down the climbers would not be thanking him for the suggestion

‘Others we haven’t identified include a person seen by walkers in the public phone box on The Green. At present, no clues to identity, though probably male.’

Finally Superintendent Branagh clapped her hands, like a primary school teacher organising her class.

‘We need to be able to eliminate some of these people from our inquiries,’ she said. ‘So let’s get on with it.’

‘I’m not sure whether that went well or not,’ said Villiers when they were back at their desks in the CID room. ‘Do you think you can get people here to come round to your opinion?’

‘Not in one meeting,’ said Cooper. ‘Not in a single day. Not even in a week.’

‘You need something more convincing, I guess.’

‘Yes. The trouble is, we can’t get a handle on the relationships between these people.’

‘These people? Oh, you don’t mean your colleagues now. You mean the inhabitants of Riddings.’

‘There’s Riddings Show on Saturday. They’re all going to be there. If Mrs Holland is right, that’s probably the one occasion in the whole year when we might get an opportunity to see them together.’

‘A chance to assess the strength of the enemy.’

Irvine signalled Cooper urgently.

‘We’ve got the CCTV footage from the Barrons,’ he said. ‘They have a camera pointing at the gates, and one at the garage.’

‘Okay, let’s run it.’

‘This is the first one, from around the right time, just before the attack. There’s nothing happening, though. The gates are closed. Not even any cars passing on Curbar Lane.’

‘Wait a minute. Did you see that?’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘A movement.’

‘At the gate?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Cooper stopped the recording, and ran it back a few seconds. There was still no one visible at the gate. But he was looking at the convex mirror on the gatepost. He ran the tape forward again, watching closely. Now he was sure of the movement. He zoomed in towards the gate. What was that reflected in the mirror? He squinted, tilted his head on one side, then sent the image to print, in case it was clearer on a hard copy. It might be his imagination, but he felt sure he was looking at the reflection of a human figure, twisted out of shape by the distorting effect of the mirror. One side of the body looked normal, but the other side was swollen and out of proportion where it was caught in the centre of the reflection. They were like the halves of two different people. Or something that wasn’t entirely human at all, but part man, part monster.

‘Add another unidentified individual to the file,’ said Cooper. ‘Along with our mystery man in the phone box.’

‘They could be one and the same person, of course.’

‘Maybe. The time is right, and the two locations are only a few yards apart.’

Cooper pictured the short stretch of road along Curbar Lane from The Green to Valley View. He wished there had been CCTV in Riddings, the way there was on streets in Edendale town centre. A suspect emerging from the phone box and lurking outside the Barrons’ gates would immediately have been picked up and identifiable.

He remembered Luke Irvine’s comment about using Google to get a view of Riddings. The HOLMES staff would have done it already; would have produced a detailed image of the village to plot sightings and incidents.

Cooper opened Google maps, and typed ‘Riddings’ into the search bar. In an instant he was looking at a detailed satellite view of the village, with all the roads overlaid on to the map. When he zoomed in, every house was visible, every field boundary, even cars that had been left parked on drives. He could see who had a swimming pool, and who had a tennis court. So much for walls and security cameras, when anyone with internet access could peer into your back garden and see the layout of your property.

These large, expensive homes and their grounds had spread out from the centre of the old village, transforming acres of rough ground into upmarket suburbia. But the satellite image made it obvious that the battle for dominance over the landscape wasn’t all one-sided. Above the village, the cover of bracken and heather could be seen encroaching on to the old field systems, like a brown tide. Dry-stone walls seemed to be no barrier to the spread of vegetation from the direction of Riddings Edge. Given time, it would engulf those fields, erasing all signs that civilisation had ever been here. But for now, humanity was still in control of the lower slopes.

He clicked on the full extent of the zoom facility and centred the screen on Riddings Lodge. Details were clear now that he hadn’t been able to see when he was right there on the ground. He could calculate the best angle of approach from the back fence to the house without coming in sight of a window. He could see exactly how far away the neighbouring houses were, and how dense the trees were in between. He was surprised to discover a manege at the rear of the Edson property, and a small paddock set out with jumps. Those hadn’t been evident from his brief tour of the boundary. But it was clear now that there was access to them from behind the stable block.

When he scrolled the map towards the north-east, the rough ground at the foot of Riddings Edge became visible. The transition from rock-strewn slope to landscaped garden was quite startling at this point. The entire colour and texture of the image changed suddenly along a dead-straight line, as if the village existed in a bubble, cut off from the wilderness beyond it by an invisible barrier.

Cooper was reminded of a science fiction story he’d once read, in which a small community found itself isolated from the rest of the world by an alien force field that appeared overnight. The story went on to explore how the inhabitants behind the barrier dealt with the isolation, the power struggles and vicious infighting that developed. New hierarchies formed in the absence of authority, law and order gradually collapsed, and individuals with extreme beliefs came into their own. One religious fanatic proclaimed that their enforced isolation was a punishment from God for the community’s sinful behaviour.

Looking down on Riddings, through a camera mounted on an orbiting satellite, he felt a bit like God casting his eyes down from heaven, knowing all about the activities of the in habitants in this little place on the edge of Derbyshire. If he was God, would he have delivered a punishment on them like this? Let some of them die? And made the rest of them live forever in fear?

Well, of course he didn’t know everything about what went on in Riddings. He knew far too little, in fact. But down there was someone who knew more. Someone who had decided to take on the role of God, and had handed out the punishments. Did that person see the village as clearly as Cooper did now on his Google satellite image?

Along the corridor in the superintendent’s office, Hazel Branagh looked up at DI Hitchens, and raised an eyebrow.

‘Detective Sergeant Fry, you say?’

‘Yes, she’s a good officer,’ said Hitchens. ‘And her skills are being wasted at the moment.’