Stephen Booth - The Devil’s Edge

Cooper had never got the chance to talk more to Russell Edson about how the chalk traces came to be in his car. Of course Russell wasn’t a climber himself. But Cooper had wanted to say: We could ask your son, perhaps. Because he is a rock climber, isn’t he, Mr Edson?

‘Some time ago, David Edson was climbing on Riddings Edge with a friend when he fell from the face and struck his head on the rock.’

‘He was the climber who did a highball off Hell’s Reach and nearly died?’ said Villiers.

‘Yes. It was a close-run thing. He lost consciousness and went into a fit. He was stabilised by paramedics and a doctor from the mountain rescue team, then airlifted to Nottingham to be treated in the neurological unit at Queen’s Medical Centre.’

‘But he recovered.’

‘Yes. Later on, he gave a big donation to the mountain rescue people. And he went back to rock climbing.’

‘Those white handprints?’ asked Villiers. ‘There was never any explanation…’

‘David Edson was back climbing on Riddings Edge that day. I imagine he looked down from one of those spurs of rock on the edge, and saw how easy it would be to get into the grounds of Valley View. You can’t appreciate that from any other point – certainly not from anywhere in the village. You need to get the perspective, you see. You’ve got to achieve that bird’s-eye viewpoint you can only get from the edge. So you might say it was the Devil’s Edge that put the idea into his mind. It presented him with the temptation, just when he was most open to it.’

‘That must have been earlier in the day, during daylight.’

‘Of course. At the end of his climbing session, David went back down the edge. But instead of returning to his car, he tested out the route on the ground. No doubt he took note of the derelict farm building and the slurry pits, and figured out how he could use them. Then he got as far as the back wall at Valley View, and pulled himself up to look in.’

‘And that was when he left the handprints.’

‘Yes.’ Cooper looked at the clouds rolling in across the horizon. ‘In a way, he was unlucky. Unlucky that the weather stayed good for a few days. Rain washes the chalk off. Those handprints will be gone now.’

‘And he acted really fast, didn’t he? He signed up Adrian Summers as his accomplice and they did it that night.’

‘One thing they didn’t reckon with was Barry Gamble,’ said Cooper. ‘He was right on the spot.’

‘Nothing like a bit of good surveillance.’

‘And then Summers got greedy. Well, he’d been getting away with it for weeks, and he was being built up as a folk hero, some sort of Robin Hood figure. He must have started to believe his own press, and thought he was untouchable. After he’d done the job with Edson, he saw an opportunity and two nights later decided to check out the neighbouring property. The Hollands were never involved in anything. Martin Holland was an incidental death.’

‘Collateral damage,’ said Villiers.

‘Summers is in custody anyway. They scooped him up in Sheffield, along with another accomplice.’

‘So the Savages’ time is over.’

‘I wonder, though,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘Whether David Edson ever did recover fully from the head injury he suffered in that fall from the rock face. A good defence lawyer will be able to come up with medical evidence to show that he’s been left with a degree of permanent brain damage – enough to change his personality and impair his judgement. He’ll get manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.’

‘Well, that’s the way it goes.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s exactly how it goes.’

‘Russell and David Edson are no one’s idea of folk heroes,’ said Villiers. ‘But they’re not complete monsters either.’

No, thought Cooper. Who needed monsters and devils, when people had so much evil in them?

‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘everybody else in Riddings deserves a medal.’

‘What for?’

‘For not having murdered Barry Gamble.’

Villiers laughed. ‘Or any of their neighbours, in fact.’

‘Despite the provocation.’

‘At least those other monsters are off the streets,’ said Villiers. ‘The Savages, I mean. Now people can live their lives without fear again. No need to worry about being attacked in their own homes in the middle of the night.’

‘We always have monsters in our lives,’ said Cooper. ‘But sometimes the monsters are ourselves.’

It was difficult to understand all the bad things that happened in the world. But you had to make the attempt – it was part of the job. Sometimes, though, the only way was to find the evil inside yourself, and use it.

Cooper doubted if he would ever go back to the eastern edges with the same feeling about them. The Devil’s Edge had not only provided a backdrop, a barrier, a protection, a perspective. In the end, it had also given him the clues he needed to the secrets of Riddings.

Diane Fry let herself out of the custody suite on the ground floor, and crossed the walkway to enter the main building. She was oblivious to the weather, or her surroundings – at least, as far as it was possible not to be aware that she was in Derbyshire, in the middle of the Peak District, surrounded by these rural wastelands.

She was thinking of one thing – DCI Mackenzie’s parting shot, aimed at her as he left Bridge End Farm. A real farm girl, aren’t you?

She wondered why she didn’t feel more resentful. Helping Cooper’s family had lost her an opportunity to transfer to the city. Okay, Derby might not be the biggest metropolis in the world, but at least it would have been a route out of this backwater. Somehow even that had gone wrong.

She walked back into the CID room, looking around hesitantly as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. She approached Cooper’s desk.

‘Your brother is just being processed out of the custody suite,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d want to know straight away.’

‘Great. I’ll take him home.’

‘Oh, okay. I’m sure that will be fine, Ben.’

‘Thanks…’ he began.

But Fry held up a hand, placed it between them like a shield.

‘There’s no need,’ she said. ‘Really. No need at all.’

A few minutes later, Cooper waited while his brother shook hands with Fry. That was something he’d never expected to see. But nothing was the same now. His family had come pretty close to the edge themselves.

Matt walked down with him to the car park and got into the passenger seat of the Toyota. Ben said nothing, and his brother looked at him as he fastened his seat belt.

‘I was just saying thank you,’ he said. ‘She did a good job. That other bloke from Derby knew nothing. If it had been left up to him, I reckon I’d be spending the next ten years of my life in a prison cell.’

‘Yes, it’s fine.’

‘Because they kept you out of it, didn’t they, Ben? You weren’t allowed anywhere near the investigation. That’s what they told me. Conflict of interest and all that.’

‘That’s right, yes. Conflict of interest.’

‘Because if you had got involved, it might have prejudiced the outcome. The Crown Prosecution Service could have gone ahead with charges just to show there was no favouritism to the family of a police officer. That’s what they told me.’

‘Yes, that can be a problem.’

Matt shook his head in despair. ‘It’s all been such a nightmare from the start. It’s appalling, the state the countryside has come to.’

Ben thought of Riddings, and how different it was from the way he’d always imagined a village should be. He supposed a place like that was a particular form of twenty-first-century Britain. It still retained the superficial appearance of a village, right down to the horse trough and the smell of manure. But the horse trough was a relic of the past, just like the empty phone box.