Martin Edwards - The Coffin Trail

But he was lying and they both knew it. He’d had the same dream many times before, although this was the first time he’d woken her with it. Each time he was running through the streets of Oxford, pounding the pavements, heart thumping, desperate to find Aimee before it was too late. Always the same panic, the same sick feeling in his stomach. No matter how many times he had that dream, it always ended in precisely the same way. He failed to save her, he was always too late.

Miranda dozed off, but sleep continued to elude him. In the recesses of his brain, a scratchy voice echoed. It belonged to the woman who had lived here for so long.

‘Barrie! Barrie! Now look what you’ve done!’

Daniel remembered Mrs Gilpin shouting out to her son, scolding him for coming into the cottage without bothering to wipe his muddy feet. It was the wettest morning of the holiday and the two of them had been right here in the front room, playing with a Monopoly set that Daniel had brought. Barrie was unfamiliar with the rules but found the names of the London roads and stations fascinating. Soon he could recite them by heart, even though his strategy in zooming around the board was closer to anarchy than capitalism. It was great fun and their hoots of glee attracted the attention of his mum who had been out in the barn, chopping firewood. She always needed to be occupied. He never actually heard her say that the devil finds work for idle hands, but he was sure she believed it.

‘It was my fault, Mrs Gilpin, not Barrie’s,’ he said, as she appeared in the doorway, red-faced and scowling. ‘I got caught in the cloudburst and dashed in the moment Barrie opened the door. Sorry, I forgot…’

‘You mustn’t cover up for him,’ she said, her cheeks dark with temper. ‘He has to take responsibility for his own actions. He’s not a little child any more.’

Daniel opened his mouth to protest but a glance at Barrie kept him quiet. His friend was shaking his head, as if to say It’s not worth it, she won’t listen to you. Everything’s always my fault.

In the end he gave up the struggle for sleep and padded into the front room. It was a mess, with hundreds of his files crammed into cardboard storage boxes piled into dangerously leaning towers. He tiptoed around them, searching out the sheaf of press cuttings he’d collected about Barrie Gilpin’s crime, before retreating into the soon-to-be-tiled kitchen to study them by the warmth of the stove.

The murdered woman was called Gabrielle Anders and she’d been in her twenties. Not much seemed to be known about her. She came from London, not Cumbria, but she’d lived in the States for years. She had been staying in Brackdale for a few days while she toured around and visited friends. One night someone had slashed her throat so viciously as almost to sever her head. After stripping off her clothes, the killer laid her ruined body on the Sacrifice Stone.

A young woman found dead on an ancient boulder mentioned in legends about pagan rituals. Journalists loved it and treated their readers to lurid descriptions of human sacrifice through the ages. A popular historian from Bristol University contributed an excitable feature claiming that the instinct to shed the blood of innocents as a means of self-preservation remains just below the surface of every supposedly civilised society. Early reports added that a local man was missing from home. The police gave his name as Barrie Gilpin and revealed that he was known to the victim. With a red pen, Daniel had highlighted the quote from Detective Chief Inspector Ben Kind of Cumbria Constabulary that had first caught his eye. His father said that the missing man might be able to help with their inquiries. A smudged photograph of Barrie scowling at the camera illustrated more vividly than any words that he was the sort who preyed on pretty and defenceless young women. Even the laziest reader would deduce his guilt. The hunt did not last long. Forty-eight hours after the killing, a walker peered into a narrow ravine and caught sight of a crumpled body at the bottom of the cleft. Barrie had not travelled far.

Suicide or accident? A quick death or a lingering end in a rocky tomb? Who cared? The reports implied a poetic justice about his death. The final cutting carried another comment from Ben Kind. It said little, but was pregnant with implications. He announced that the police investigation into the murder of Gabrielle Anders was being scaled down.

Same old story, Daniel thought, as he slipped the scraps of paper back into the buff folder. Everything was always Barrie’s fault.

After daybreak, he went out for a walk. Dew glistened on the grass and gusts of wind whipped his hair. After circling the tarn, he followed the track that meandered up the side of the fell to a small cairn that marked the halfway point. Above the tree-line, the terrain was patched with heather and scrub. In the sun, he had to screw up his eyes as he took in the view. The serenity of the valley was a perfect cure for a troubled night. The village slept, but he could hear plaintive cries from sheep in the fields surrounding Brack Hall.

I mustn’t let the murder take me over.

Rather than continue on the steep path to the Sacrifice Stone, he turned back. When he reached the cottage and looked in the living room, he saw Miranda’s shape under the duvet.

A tousled head appeared. ‘Where did you get to?’

‘Just getting some fresh air.’

He bent over and began to kiss her. She squealed, protesting that his cheeks were cold, and he said that she would have to warm him up. Hungrily, he undressed again and wrapped himself around her.

An hour and a half later, after breakfasting on scrambled eggs and scalding coffee, he jumped in his car and drove along the tree-fringed lanes towards the village. When he switched on the radio, Isaac Hayes was crooning “Walk On By”, followed by Sandie Shaw with “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me”. He couldn’t help laughing at himself. There was no escape.

What exactly had happened to Gabrielle Anders up on the heights? Unable to resist temptation any longer, he glanced over his shoulder. High on the hillside stood the Sacrifice Stone. Melancholy even on a spring day, it preserved its mysteries in sombre silence.

He turned his head back just in time to see an oncoming tractor. Putting his foot on the brakes and squeezing against the hawthorn hedge, he reminded himself that even in this pretty lane, unexpected dangers could lurk around the corner. Taking more care, he arrived at the first row of cottages that marked the entrance to Brack. The village was full of nooks and crannies. Over the centuries it had grown in higgledy-piggledy fashion, artless and appealing. The main street curved over the stream before running past the church. It divided around a small square boasting a general store and The Moon under Water before narrowing as it left the settlement and heading for the world beyond the valley. Behind the square wound a maze of paths and lanes, the homes of a couple of hundred people and a handful of barns, small businesses, and workshops.

Daniel was still accustoming himself to the transition from the busy malls of Oxford to this quiet backwater. In Brackdale, people relished the chance to linger over gossip. Everyone knew everyone else and no transaction was ever hurried; he was having to learn to relax and stop rushing at everything. And he was loving it.

Brack’s principal store was called Tasker’s; it doubled as a postoffice and he had a parcel of books to send back to the London Library. The local newspaper regularly chronicled the continuing struggle between the Royal Mail, wishing to increase efficiency and cut overheads through centralisation, and local people who campaigned against plans to compel them to travel miles to collect their pensions and BBC licences. In the end, economic realities would prevail and the community would lose its battle, but Daniel was sure it was worth going down fighting.