"I"m just on my way," said Cooper, but he didn"t move.
"So ...?"
"Well the thing is a I"m not sure about the route," he said.
"The route?"
"The one the Pearsons took on their way back to the cottage from Castleton. It seems to have been a.s.sumed that they just followed the Limestone Way."
"Yes."
"But according to the statements in the case file, some customers waiting outside the fish and chip shop reported seeing them on The Stones."
"That was when the Pearsons were on their way down in to Castleton earlier in the evening."
Cooper knew he shouldn"t have been surprised that she had the smallest details of the couple"s movements off by heart. It was one of Fry"s skills, along with the knack of making him feel useless. Well, superfluous at least.
"Yes, but ...?" he said.
"Ben, all that sighting does is confirm that David and Trisha Pearson went into Castleton for the evening. And we know that already from the staff at the George."
"But don"t you see ...?"
"Just go over the ground," she said slowly, as if to an idiot. "Check everything from the original inquiry. And we"ll take it from there. Okay?"
Cooper swallowed his words in frustration. There were none so blind as those who refused to see, and Diane Fry was one of the most stubborn.
When he"d looked at the reports and witness statements from the night David and Trisha Pearson disappeared, an idea had occurred to him. He needed to explain it to someone, but Diane Fry had been the wrong person.
9.
Fry supposed this was what would have been called an old-fashioned pub. She pictured an open hearth and log fires in the winter, a place where dogs were welcome a sometimes more welcome than human patrons. What had the old man from the auctioneer"s called it? A unique destination food house? It wasn"t her idea of a destination. She wouldn"t waste petrol coming up here if she didn"t have to.
The pub had a stone slate roof, with a satellite dish high on the wall, and spotlights that must once have lit the facade of the pub and made it visible for miles. A sign was faintly chalked on an A-board left lying on the ground outside: We serve REAL chips.
A smokers" shelter had been built against one wall. Ironically, there were plenty of b.u.t.t bins provided, so it was probably the one place where cigarette ends could be disposed of safely anywhere on Oxlow Moor, where she could see the wildfires burning.
Sometimes Fry liked to see a fire. For her, flames could be cleansing, a means of getting rid of the old and clearing the way for something better. But she supposed Cooper and those like him wouldn"t see it that way. No doubt they would be panicking right now about the damage to their precious landscape, as if was a fossil that ought to be preserved in aspic and never altered.
It was nonsense, of course. Everyone knew that places like the Peak District looked the way they did because of centuries of human interference. Moorland landscapes had been shaped by deforestation and changes in farming methods. Yes, the credit for maintaining the moors went to all those d.a.m.n sheep.
Fry stepped over the low boundary wall on to the terrace of the pub. The wall was lined with terracotta pots full of dead plants. Someone had made an attempt at decorating the main entrance with hanging baskets. They might have been full of petunias and trailing lobelias once. Now they hung from their rusting brackets, bare of flowers, spilling torn shreds of coconut-fibre liner.
She couldn"t see into the bar because of the boarding over the windows. But she didn"t really need to. The interior of a place like this was too predictable. She pictured flagstones, oak settles and low doorways. She imagined an aged local sitting with a pint of Old Moorland Original in front of him on a wobbly table, a bored landlord reading a copy of the Daily Mail at the bar, a deathly silence broken only by a clock ticking away the seconds until closing time.
"Sergeant, I think we need Gavin Murfin here," said Hurst tentatively.
"Why?"
"Local knowledge. Gavin has it."
"Oh G.o.d. See if he"s still outside, then."
"Will do."
The interior of the Light House was a strange dichotomy. Part of it was a major crime scene, brightly illuminated and tightly controlled, busy with SOCOs in scene suits, rich with the familiar smells of a forensic examination. But the rest was exactly as it had been left when it closed for business six months ago.
The main rooms on the ground floor had been securely locked, so were available to Fry with the help of the set of keys handed over by Thomas Pilkington.
Here in the bar, the atmosphere was stale and dusty. Although scenes of crime had found the main switch for the electricity supply and turned on the lights, the boarding over the windows kept the room as gloomy as if it was permanently night.
A few tables stood around, chairs stacked haphazardly, empty shelves and optics behind the long counter. Bra.s.s fittings that might once have gleamed with polish were now dull with acc.u.mulated grime. The big fireplace where the log fire would have burned during the winter was filled with sc.r.a.ps of old newspaper, fragments of a bird"s nest and the remains of a soot fall.
Fry watched Becky Hurst walk back into the bar. She was pleased that she"d been given Hurst. Of all the members of the CID team in Edendale, this was the officer she might have hopes for. Hurst was smart and tenacious, and Fry had seen how she dealt with Murfin, and even with Luke Irvine, who had about the same length of service.
"It"s a pity," said Hurst. "This place would make a good youth hostel or something."
Gavin Murfin was standing behind her in the doorway.
"It"d make a better pub," he said grumpily. "Oh, I forgot a that"s exactly what it was, until the bean counters put the boot in."
"Didn"t you used to drink here, Gavin?" asked Hurst.
"Drink here? I was practically brought up in this pub. My old man used to leave me outside in the car with a packet of cheese and onion crisps, while he played snooker in the public."
"A packet of crisps?" said Hurst. "And a bottle of dandelion and burdock, surely?"
"c.o.ke. We were quite a trendy family, for plebs."
"It"s haunted, I suppose?"
Fry snorted. "Aren"t they all? I thought it was an essential feature to get a listing in the tourist guides, like having toilets and satellite TV."
"No, this one is genuinely haunted," said Murfin. "They say it"s the ghost of some servant girl who burned to death in a kitchen accident. Set her clothes alight when she was cooking or something. Now and then she still walks the corridors, giving off a horrible fiery glow."
"Yeah, right. They tell those stories because they think it"ll bring gullible American tourists in."
"No," said Murfin solemnly. "I saw her once."
"Come off it."
"I did. I was about to leave here one night, and had to go to the gents. They"re down a corridor round the back of the bar there, you know. And that was when I saw her, all glowing. Gave me the shock of my life, it did."
"Glowing?"
"Yeah, glowing. Like she was on fire.
"You were drunk, Gavin."
"Believe what you want, I don"t care."
Fry looked at Murfin closely, sure that he must be joking. She"d known him for a long time, and he wasn"t the kind to believe in ghosts and all that stuff. But his face never slipped. He appeared to be serious.
She looked out across the moor, where the smoke and flames seemed to be getting ever nearer to the pub.
"If that wind changes direction," she said, "your flaming kitchen maid could be in danger of burning to death all over again."
The pub was accessed directly from the car park, and was essentially a one-room open-plan layout, although in visually distinct sections. A games room featured a pool table, darts board and plasma-screen TV. At one end, a dark-panelled snug with pew benches had been left as a reminder of days gone by. It had been heated by a small wood-burning stove.
In this part of the pub, some of the old pictures had been left on the walls. A few portraits, hunting groups, dukes and squires posing with their dogs and horses. In the dim light, there were too many eyes in the room for Fry"s comfort, squinting at her beneath their layers of dust.
And what was that smell? She made her way along a short pa.s.sage and found herself in a galley-style catering kitchen with tiled walls and overhead stainless-steel extractor hoods. Yes, this was where the smell was coming from. The odour of scampi and chips seemed to have been absorbed into the walls and ventilation ducts, and was now being released back into the air.
Fry was reminded of the theory that ghosts were the lingering echoes of people whose lives and deaths were imprinted indelibly in the stone. This smell seemed to bring a sense of life back to the stale air, peopling the abandoned kitchens with the shadowy spirits of those who"d worked there over the years.
But that was Gavin Murfin who"d put the idea of ghosts into her head. She ought to know better than to listen to him, even for a moment.
"Owner"s accommodation?" she said.
Murfin jerked his head. "Upstairs."
She found the access to the stairs just past a series of doors marked as ladies, gents and disabled toilet facilities, and another door giving access to the rear yard area.
Upstairs, a room had been turned into a small function suite, with its own corner bar for private parties. It was the brightest room in the pub, thanks to four large sash and case windows looking out over the moor. It was laid with a dark blue carpet, leaving a tiny wooden dance floor area in the middle. It would never have hosted any major events. Thirty or forty people would have filled it to capacity. A small wedding, perhaps. An office party. Groups of laughing workers deposited by minibus. No chance of walking home from here.
The guest rooms were also on the first floor. Just three of them. According to the name plaques on their doors, they were called the Bakewell, Buxton and Bradwell rooms.
There was another, narrower set of stairs leading to the top floor, where the pub"s owner had lived. But the owner"s accommodation was completely bare. In every room, the furniture had been removed, the carpets stripped from the floor, the curtains pulled down from the windows. There were clear marks against the walls where a picture had hung or a chest of drawers had stood. The former occupants had removed themselves completely.
A few minutes later, Fry found herself looking down two flights of stairs into the rear corridor, the gloom in the doorways barely relieved by the light from the huge sash window on the landing. For a moment she was puzzled and disturbed by the way the shadows seemed to move below her, as if the darkness was writhing around itself, invisible snakes stirring the dust on the floor.
It was only when her eyes adjusted to the light that she realised what she was seeing. Smoke and flames from the hillside, casting their distant outlines through the window, thrusting their ominous presence right into the heart of the building.
"If you want to know about the pub, you could start with Mad Maurice, I suppose," said Murfin.
"Who?" asked Fry.
"Maurice Wharton, the last landlord. He ran the pub right up until the day it closed."
"He lived on the premises too, of course?"
"Yes, with his wife and children. I can"t remember their names, but we can soon find that out."
"No live-in staff?"
"Not that I remember. The bar staff usually came up from town for their shift. A lot of them were students earning a bit of money during the evenings or at weekends."
Fry sniffed the air, detecting again that faint whiff of chips.
"Who did the cooking here? There must have been some kitchen staff."
Murfin didn"t answer, and Fry glanced at him, ready to ask the question again.
"I don"t know," he said.
Fry turned to Hurst, softening her instinctive response a little.
"Find out, will you?"
"Sure."
She looked at Murfin again. "Gavin, did I hear that you were liaising with the firefighters?"
"Yes," said Murfin. "Trumpton reported seeing a white pickup. They can"t be specific about the make or model, or how many people were in it. Or how long it was here before it left. They were a bit vague about the colour, come to think of it a white being so easily confused with blue or red, like. I suppose it"s true what they say in the song. Smoke does get in your eyes."
"Trumpton?" said Fry again.
Murfin ignored her with a complacent smile.
"So two people were here, at least," he said.
"Well that didn"t take much figuring out, Sherlock, since one of them got left behind, and he happens to be dead."
"And someone drove the pickup away," added Murfin helpfully.
"Thanks, Gavin."
"Just saying."
"What were they doing here? It doesn"t make sense."
Hurst shrugged. "People break into empty buildings all the time. They could have been looking for somewhere to smoke dope, have s.e.x, find a squat for a few weeks."
"In the middle of burning moorland? They"d have to be particularly desperate, or stupid."
"Fair point."
Fry looked around the empty rooms. "I"d say they might have taken the opportunity to find something worth stealing, but it seems a bit unlikely."
"I don"t know," said Hurst. "That could be the most likely explanation. Okay, there"s no cash here, or the sort of small electrical items that opportunist thieves usually go for. But sc.r.a.p metal is worth a fair bit these days. Ask the vicars whose church roofs keep getting stripped of lead."