Part 9 (1/2)

'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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.