Стивен Бут: Blind to the Bones

Udall followed his gaze. ‘Hell!’

Black clouds were billowing across a wide stretch of the moor, with an occasional flicker of flame visible behind them. The seat of the fire looked as though it might be just below the horizon. PC Udall went off to her car to use the radio, but was back in a couple of minutes.

‘Moorland fire. They think it was started by some kids on a school outing from Manchester. The fire service are turning out all the crews they can muster, but it’s right on the summit above Crowden, so it’s pretty inaccessible. The poor bloody firefighters will have to do the last half-mile on foot with their equipment. They’re also saying they might have to mobilize the helicopter to bomb it with water from the reservoirs.’

‘Beyond our remit, anyway,’ said Cooper.

‘Thank God.’

A gust of wind blew along the road and another shower spattered their faces. But there was too little rain to help the firefighters.

‘I think they’re ready for us down there,’ said Udall.

‘OK.’

Cooper took one last look at the moors above Withens. The smoke was spreading in the wind rolling low over the heather. But in front of it, blacker even than the smoke, the two carrion crows were still circling.

Even before the sun had risen on Withens Moor, Neil Granger had known he wasn’t alone. He had been standing with his back to one of the air shafts above the old railway tunnels, facing east towards the approaching dawn. There was nothing but air between his face and the black ridge of Gallows Moss, where the light would soon begin to creep up among the tors.

Every sound from the surrounding valleys had reached his ears — a bird splashing out of the water on one of the reservoirs in Longdendale, the growl of an engine on the A628. Even the slightest movement of the wind stirred the coarse grass, like fingers groping for his presence in the darkness. The air was so clean that he could taste the first vapour rising from the dew on the heather, like the tang of cold metal in his mouth. But in a few minutes, the dawn would take away the darkness and the dew.

At first, the sounds he heard nearby could have been the shifting of small pieces of stone on the slope behind him. The scree was loose, and the changing temperature could easily make the stones move against each other. But gradually Neil became aware that someone had walked up to the air shaft behind him. Now, he thought, they were probably resting on the other side of the high, circular wall.

‘Well, I’d given up on you,’ said Neil. ‘I was starting to think no one was coming.’

His voice dropped into the valley, carried away on the wind. There was no response from the darkness, and he smiled.

‘It’s a bit of a steep climb, isn’t it? It creased me up completely.’

He expected to hear someone gasping for breath. But there was nothing — only the darkness and the distant sounds from the valley.

‘I’m so unfit after the winter that, by the time I got to the top, I thought I was having a heart attack.’

He paused, but still there was nothing.

‘I thought I was going to die up here, and nobody would know. If I’d died and you hadn’t come, then no one would have found me for days.’

Neil glanced at Gallows Moss. A pale wash of colour was starting to touch the clouds. He raised his voice a little, as if the appearance of the light had revealed something that he hadn’t suspected until now.

‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘Do you want a hand?’

Neil waited in the silence, no longer facing east, but looking back over his shoulder into the west. Away from the light and towards the darkness. Something was different. The wind no longer felt refreshingly cool, but was cold enough to make him shiver. The sensations against his face weren’t like gentle fingers, but sharp claws scratching his skin. The air didn’t taste of the dew, but of an unnamed fear. Neil wondered if he would ever hear the first bird calling at the sight of the rising sun. It had been only the darkness that had made him feel safe, after all. And in a moment, the dawn would take away the darkness.

‘Yes, I thought I was going to die up here,’ he said.

The first blow that hit him was so unexpected — like the world falling in, like a ton of stone toppling on to him from the air shaft, or a train bursting out of the ground from the old railway tunnel.

Neil went down, instantly unconscious, crashing on to the stones with a thud and crunch of bone. Part of his scalp had peeled away, and the bone underneath had shattered, ripping the membrane that covered the brain. Within a few moments, his cerebrospinal fluid was leaking from the tear on to the stones — stones that were already covered in blood that was spreading from his scalp wound. Blood had matted his hair and trickled in small rivulets down his face and neck, forming an interconnecting web like the meandering channels that drained the peat moor on which he lay. But the blood could find nowhere on his skin to settle and dry. So it continued to trickle across the greasy surface until it touched the stones and ran into the ground.

Where the fluid was leaking from his brain, infection would soon enter. But it would be too late to matter. Part of his brain tissue had been bruised by the impact, and now a small haematoma was forming deep among the tangled pathways and ganglia. The haematoma would be fatal.

But Neil might still have survived, if he had received urgent attention in a hospital emergency room. A neurosurgeon could have ordered a CT scan, operated to remove the haematoma, then sutured the membrane and carefully picked out the remaining bone fragments. With immediate surgery and a course of antibiotics against the infection, Neil might have lived.

But Neil Granger was destined never to reach a hospital, or a neurosurgeon. As his life oozed away into the peat, there was one person who waited for him to die. But there was no one to call an ambulance. Neil would never recover from the unconsciousness that followed the first blow to his head, or the coma that the second produced. He would never know what happened after he was left alone, and never feel the fear of what would happen to his body after death.

Nothing moved around the air shaft except the steam that trickled out of its mouth and drifted down the valley — and, a little while later, the two black shapes that circled over Withens Moor.

DS Diane Fry knew all about fear. Some people were excited by it, and liked to play with the taste and smell of it, teasing their senses to the limit. But others were destroyed by its poison, eaten away by a senseless, insidious acid that seeped into their brains before they could fight it.

It wasn’t always possible to know what made you afraid. A therapist had once told her that fear conditioning could be created by a single episode, because that was the way nature had designed the human brain. It was an evolutionary advantage, a mechanism to prevent you from returning to a dangerous situation. Once frightened, forever cautious. And that was why just one sound, a single movement or a smell, could trigger the train of memory that stimulated fear. The sound of a footstep on a creaking floorboard, the sliding pattern of shadows as a door opened in the darkness, the soapy smell of shaving foam that made her nauseous even now.

The evidence bag that Diane Fry was holding contained none of those things. It contained only a grubby and stained mobile phone. So why did she feel as though the process had begun that would send her sliding down a long, dark tunnel towards the source of her fear?

‘Do the parents know about this yet, sir?’ she said.

Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens was also nothing to be afraid of, as far as Fry was concerned. He was capable enough, but had a disrespectful attitude towards his senior officers that wasn’t going to get him any further in the promotion game. It was a tendency he didn’t seem able to control, any more than Fry could control the dark shadow that had flapped and squirmed somewhere in her mind when she had picked up the bag.