Each time, as he slowed and turned towards Bamford, all that he wanted was to go back and do it over again.
Tonight was different. Cooper had been driving on a straight stretch of road, with rain bouncing off the tarmac in front of him, windscreen wipers beating so hypnotically that he was driving on autopilot.
But he’d found himself on the wrong side of the moors. The realisation brought him to a juddering halt, his car swerving across the road as his foot hit the brake.
On the skyline stood the blackened remains of the Light House pub. Its lights were extinguished now – probably for good, unless the auctioneers, Pilkington and Son, found a buyer with more money than sense. Surely the only option would be to demolish the remaining walls and clear the site.
The old Light House had been a famous landmark, visible for miles, familiar to thousands of visitors to this part of Derbyshire. But any plan to erect a new building in such a prominent position in the middle of a national park? He wouldn’t put much money on its chances. More likely, the site would gradually deteriorate and revert to the moorland. The outline of its foundations would disappear under a mass of heather and bracken until it was just one more enigmatic scattering of stones, like so many others in the Peak District.
He wondered if the cellar would be left intact when they demolished the walls. It had hardly been touched by the fire. Perhaps they would just seal it up to make it safe – a few truckloads of rubble tipped into the stairwell below the bar, a slab or two of concrete to cover the delivery hatch. Then it would become a cave, a grave, a dark hole in the ground where people had once lived and breathed. The cellar of the Light House would become indistinguishable from the abandoned mine workings scattered around it on Oxlow Moor.
He’d tried so hard to avoid reminders, to keep a firm control over the little things that could creep under his guard unexpectedly. But there he was, stumbling insensibly into a trap of his own making, acting without thought until he found himself plummeting into the darkness of memory.
He recalled pulling himself up to the delivery hatch in that cellar and peering outside, seeing the white Japanese pickup standing in the pub car park. As happened so often, it was a small detail that had let everyone down. That white pickup had been seen on the first day. It had been noticed by some of the firefighters tackling the moorland blaze that had left Oxlow Moor looking like a post-apocalyptic landscape. But the vehicle hadn’t been identified, its owner never traced. If only he’d known that it belonged to Eliot Wharton. Things could have been so different. He ought to have put more effort into tracing the pickup. Someone ought to have. But they’d had other priorities.
And that was why Liz Petty had died. She’d only been doing her job, working as a scenes of crime officer, examining Room One at the Light House. It was known as the Bakewell Room, the place where a couple of tourists had died two years previously. Liz had been searching for bloodstains, sweeping for trace evidence. She’d died because he didn’t get her out of the pub quickly enough when the fire started. If only he’d been upstairs with her, instead of in the cellar, or had made sure that someone was on watch outside.
That was the way fate swung between life and death. If only, if only…
9
Thursday
On Thursday morning, a Derbyshire County Council gully-emptying crew had stopped on the roadside near the patch of woodland. They could see the stream of water running on to the road and forming deep puddles stretching right across the carriageway. They walked along the verge looking for blocked gullies, sucked out some mud and dead leaves, but found it didn’t make any difference.
‘Where is it all coming from?’ one of the crew asked the other.
He shrugged. ‘It must be a blocked watercourse somewhere in the woods.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Not our problem anyway. Watercourses are the landowner’s responsibility. Them, or the Environment Agency.’
The driver was getting back into the cab, but his mate hesitated.
‘It’s making quite a mess of the road,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘Well, maybe we ought to check what it is. So we can report it properly.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘You know what it’s like these days – if a motorist has an accident on this stretch of road because of all the surface water, everybody will be looking for someone to blame. We have to make sure that’s not us. So we cover our backs. Check it out, and report it to the appropriate people.’
‘You’re a real stickler, aren’t you?’
‘Just being realistic, that’s all.’
The driver sighed and got back down from the cab. ‘Come on, then. Which way do you reckon it’s coming from?’