Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

In the lay-by on the A628, Ben Cooper could see that a cordon had been taped off around a light blue Volkswagen Beetle. He recognized Liz Petty pulling on her white suit, getting ready to approach the vehicle.

‘They’ve asked me to do the car, to avoid cross-contamination,’ said Petty. ‘So let’s hope that Locard’s Principle is working in our favour today. Every contact leaves a trace. If the perpetrator travelled in this vehicle with the victim, he’ll have left traces of himself for us to find, and carried others away with him. It’s quite an old vehicle, which is good, because there are more likely to be distinctive traces on the seats and the floor.’

‘It’s been standing here overnight at least,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes, I noticed the spider’s web. It’s been spun from the hawthorn shrub to the wing mirror.’

‘The doctor says the body’s been lying up there over twenty-four hours.’

‘Don’t come any closer,’ said Petty, reminding Cooper of Lucas Oxley and his dog.

‘Why?’

‘Be really careful of where you tread. There look to be some interesting traces on the ground here. Anyone getting into or out of this vehicle will most likely have got something on the soles of their shoes. Or anyone using another vehicle, for that matter.’

Cooper studied the surface of the lay-by. ‘All I can see are chocolate wrappers, sweet papers and the remains of a burger and fries.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Why don’t people use the litter bins?’ said Cooper.

‘In this case,’ said Petty, ‘we might be grateful that they didn’t.’

‘I see.’

‘The interior of the car could be what matters most, though. By the way, there’s a box of some kind in the footwell at the back,’ she said, peering through the car window.

‘You realize the perpetrator probably didn’t arrive in this car, Liz?’

‘We can hope, can’t we, Ben?’

‘He might not even have come this way. Apparently, there’s a track to the air shaft from the other side of the hill, from a place called Withens.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Petty.

‘You will.’

‘Tourist hot spot, is it?’

‘Hardly.’

Cooper couldn’t recall seeing anything picturesque about the village where the Oxleys lived. No wonder there were never any tourists passing through, as there were in other Peak District villages.

But at least there was one good thing about Withens. It was a long way from Diane Fry.

With a slam of the door, DC Gavin Murfin started the car and turned out of the West Street car park towards Edendale.

‘So how the hell do we get to this Withens place?’ said Fry. ‘Have you any idea, Gavin?’

‘Why don’t you find it on the map?’ said DC Murfin. ‘I put a couple in the glove compartment.’

Fry found two thick, badly folded Ordnance Survey maps from the Outdoor Leisure series, covering the whole of the Peak District at two and a half inches to the mile.

‘We want Dark Peak, right?’ she said.

‘Hey, you’re learning the lingo.’

‘I just try to remember that it gets dark if you go north and lighter if you go south. Can’t go wrong then.’

‘I suppose so.’

Before she had unfolded the map even halfway, Fry realized that it was huge. It was so big that it was almost the size of the Peak District itself. There was no way she could open it fully inside the car, not without covering the windscreen and blocking Murfin’s vision. Then she discovered that the map was printed on both sides, too.

‘All right — Dark Peak West or Dark Peak East?’ she said.

‘West, I think,’ said Murfin.

‘You think?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘You don’t sound certain enough for me. You do know this place we’re heading? It is in Derbyshire, isn’t it?’

‘Just about. But it isn’t the kind of area you really know unless you live there, like.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Fry suspiciously.

‘You’ll see.’

‘Oh, I can hardly wait.’

‘Dark Peak West,’ said Murfin. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Stop the car for a minute, then.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s on the other side of the map, that’s why. I need some space.’

Murfin pulled into a gateway. Fry got out and began to unfold the map on the car roof so that she could turn it over. When it was opened up, the map almost covered the roof of the Peugeot completely. She cursed steadily as the wind blowing down the valley snatched at the corners of the map and pulled sections of it from her hands, slapping them against the roof and tearing the folded edges.

‘Right, I’ve got Dark Peak West,’ she called to Murfin. ‘I’m looking at the top right-hand corner, and I can see a place called Holmfirth. Anywhere near there?’

‘Not far off. Holmfirth is a few miles over the border into West Yorkshire. Come south a bit, and you’ll be about right. It’s just this side of the national park boundary, in an area called Longdendale.’

‘South a bit? But there’s nothing there.’

‘Well, not quite nothing.’

‘Gavin, I can see the national park boundary, and I’m telling you that there’s nothing anywhere near it on this side.’

‘We’ll find it,’ said Murfin.

Fry ducked her head and got in the car. She pulled down the visor to look at herself in the little mirror. Her hair had been pushed up on end by the wind in old-fashioned spiky punk style. Murfin was also going to have to apply a bit of Sellotape to his map to hold it together, or buy a new one.

‘Drive then,’ she said. ‘But as far as I can see, we’re heading towards — what do they call it around here? — the moon’s backside.’

‘The Back of the Moon,’ said Murfin.

‘All right. But I think I prefer my version.’

A few minutes later, they were out of Edendale and heading north into the Hope Valley, approaching the village of Bamford.

‘Are you planning to go over the Snake Pass?’ said Fry, trying to follow their route on the map.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that the best way, Gavin?’

‘Definitely.’

Fry looked for the area called Longdendale. This was where a body had been found early that morning, but it was a long valley, which ran right across the map. She studied the adjacent terrain in growing disbelief. Apart from the thin red ribbon of the A628 trunk road snaking its way from east to west through the valley, and the blue of the reservoirs in the valley bottom, the map had no features at all. No, that wasn’t quite true. There were masses of thin brown lines that swirled everywhere, clustering tightly together here and there. They were contour lines. The closer together the lines were, the steeper the slope of the land — she knew that from some distant geography lesson. But crossing these brown lines were almost as many pale blue ones — little snaky things that ran down from all the summits, branching and trickling away in every direction. They looked like the worst case of varicose veins she had ever seen.

Many of these pale blue lines were labelled ‘cloughs’, ‘slacks’ or ‘groughs’. They were streams and rivulets feeding down into the valleys. She could imagine how boggy the ground between them would be, because this was certainly peat moor.

Sure enough, there were lots of little clusters of black dots on the map, too. Fry checked the key for the meaning of the symbol. Rough grassland. In some places, those flecks turned blue. That meant marsh — a polite name for boggy ground that was like wet Christmas pudding to walk through, the sort of ground that the Dark Peak seemed to specialize in. She sighed. If anyone tried to persuade her to walk across one yard of those barren acres of peat moor, she would refuse. There had to be a tarmacked street somewhere in this place.