Stephen Booth - The Devil’s Edge

He gazed down the slope. Nothing looked quite so dead as dead heather. Though it was probably only last year’s growth, the stems of the dead plants already looked fossilised, dry and skeletal, their brittle stems crumbling under his boots. They were petrified, as if they were already on their way to becoming the next layer of peat.

‘And I think that could be the packhorse way,’ he said.

From the guide stoop, there was a clear route winding its way down the hillside. Overgrown with bracken and reeds, it looked hardly more than a rabbit track. But for the route to have remained distinct even during the summer, there must at least be well-compacted earth, or more likely stone slabs laid on the ground to make it passable in wet weather. Otherwise the undergrowth would have covered it completely in time.

With his back to the guide stoop, Cooper let his eye follow the line of the track downhill. It curved between the scattered rocks, taking a circuitous route that avoided the steepest parts of the slope.

‘Is that what you’d call a road?’ said Villiers, when he pointed it out.

‘Some people would. If they used tracks and old pathways to get around this area. That looks almost like a three-lane highway.’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose we should follow it, then?’

Towards the end of the track, just before they reached the outskirts of the village, they stumbled across an area enclosed by half-tumbled stone walls and fractured lengths of barbed-wire fencing.

‘Wait,’ said Cooper.

Through the undergrowth he’d glimpsed the remains of an ancient building with a corrugated-iron roof and no windows. Moss grew on the stone walls, and a crooked door was half covered in peeling green paint. The weeds in front of it were dense and impenetrable, and a bird had built its nest on a broken downspout. He was looking at an old farm building, a lot older than most of the properties in Riddings. It was Barry Gamble’s artistic statement about decay and abandonment.

And now Cooper could see why the composition of Mr Gamble’s photograph had been all wrong. There was a reason why the angle of his shot had been awkward, with the building off-centre. The photographer had been unable to move those ten yards to the right and take a few steps closer to his subject. He had been prevented by the barbed-wire enclosure.

Inside the enclosure, Cooper saw a pair of brick slurry pits, which must have lain disused for decades. They were overgrown with willowherb and full of a dark, oily sludge, choked with old tyres and covered with green scum. He dreaded to think how foul that sludge would smell, once you broke through the crust on the surface. Matt would never have let any part of his land get like this.

Cooper leaned over and looked into the nearest pit. There was one clear patch on the surface, where something had dropped through the scum and vanished into the murky depths. A small cloud of mosquitoes hovered over it.

For a moment, he stood quite still, oblivious to anything else around him. The moor seemed to recede as if it was no more than a landscape in a dream. For a second he’d slipped back into the real world, the one inhabited by all those people down there in Riddings.

He looked towards the village, and saw the distinctive roof of one of the houses very close to the bottom of the track. His mind filled rapidly with images. The body of Zoe Barron, her blood staining the tiles. The fragments of gravel scattered across the Barrons’ lawn. The white handprints on their back wall. Gardeners, a grey woollen fleece, and a gust of wind blowing canvas over a face-painting tent.

Then he shook himself. He felt as though he’d just woken up and found the nightmare was real. He took a step backwards, and almost bumped-into Villiers.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Ben? What is it?’

Cooper could barely answer her. After everything that had happened this week, it was as if his mind had suddenly cleared. The fog had lifted, the mist had finally been burned away by the sun. He still didn’t have the proof, of course. But like those white chalk marks on the rock faces of the edge, he realised that there were one person’s prints all over this case.

‘We need to get some equipment up here, and empty out these slurry pits,’ he said.

‘Oh my God, Ben. Are you serious? You are going to be really popular.’

‘I know. Trust me, I know.’

Diane Fry stood in the farmyard at Bridge End, watching the activity still going on. A tractor had been reversed out of the way to give the forensics team room to work, and a ballistics expert brought in from the Forensic Science Service was faffing about in the yard in his scene suit. To one side stood a trailer full of fresh manure, which no one had wanted to move. Nearby, a cat sat on the wall, washing its paws calmly, as if waiting for the next stage of the entertainment.

Fry had supervised a neighbouring farmer who had come to deal with the cows, taking them round the back of the milking parlour to avoid crossing the ground in front of the house. That would have made DCI Mackenzie really unhappy, to see a herd of cattle trampling his crime scene. Considering that possibility, Fry almost wished she’d allowed it to happen.

She looked around the yard again, picturing the scenario of last night’s shooting. The victim, Graham Smith, had been hit by a single shotgun blast in the middle of the yard. Blood splatter on the ground had been indicated by a series of yellow plastic evidence markers. The preliminary theory was that Smith had been shot in the back while running away from the farmer brandishing a shotgun. And no evidence had so far been found to contradict that theory.

According to the ballistics man, the lead shot used would have had a muzzle velocity of more than thirteen hundred feet per second. Fry knew that that could make a terrible mess of a human body at close range. Further away, the damage was serious, but more widely spread. Individual pellets became embedded under the skin – but provided the face wasn’t hit, it might only be a question of scarring once the pellets were removed.

But if the pellets missed their target and travelled even further, they would become scattered and lose their velocity, causing minimal damage. Eventually, the shot would fall harmlessly to the ground.

Fry stood in the doorway where Matt Cooper would have emerged from the house, an old jacket and a pair of jeans pulled over his pyjamas. He would probably have fired from here, if he’d been defending his property. But perhaps not if he’d been pursuing an innocent victim who was already fleeing. No cartridge case or wad had been found to show where he was standing when he fired. But the victim had been hit in the back, so it was obvious, wasn’t it?

She studied the surface of the yard around the area of the yellow markers. Then she took one final glance around the outbuildings, the parked tractor, the trailer full of manure, the cat grooming itself.

Finally, she sighed. Of course, she felt under no obligation to try too hard to find evidence clearing Matt Cooper. And yet…

Fry looked at Mackenzie as he walked gingerly along the edge of the yard, skirting the smellier areas. She remembered seeing the DCI slip on a cowpat as he came into the yard, twisting his body painfully as he tried to keep his footing.

‘What are you thinking about, DS Fry?’ asked Mackenzie as he came nearer.

‘Cow muck.’

‘Well, there’s plenty of it.’

‘And it’s slippery.’

‘Yes. So?’

‘I’m thinking that if Graham Smith slipped as he was running away across the yard…’

Mackenzie looked at her more closely. ‘It’s possible. I did it myself.’

‘I know you did, sir. I saw you.’