Already Dead(32)

‘Hi, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Charlie Dean. How are you doing? Yeah, great. Well, you know … not that great, actually.’

Confused by his own indecision, Charlie stared out of his car window at the rows of cottages. Each door was painted a different colour, but all had the same brass knocker. He wondered how he would market one. He liked each of his properties to be unique, with its own special character. That was Charlie Dean’s style. He felt it reflected his personality.

‘I need you to help me with a little matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit delicate, so … Oh yeah, funny. You’re such a scream.’

He looked down the road towards Wirksworth. He pictured Green Hill and The Dale winding their way up the slopes to the right until they were stopped by the walls of the abandoned quarry. Barbara might be up there at the moment, in their house on The Dale. That is, unless she was out visiting one of her friends, gossiping about him in a sitting room or yakking over a cappuccino at PeliDeli in St John’s Street.

‘Meet me for a drink,’ said Charlie. ‘Then we can talk about it.’





12





That afternoon, Ben Cooper was standing on the wall of the Iron Age hill fort at Carl Wark, waiting for his brother. His lungs were sore, and a wheeze escaped from his burning airways with every breath. But his muscles tingled from the steep climb, and that felt good. The clean air on his face was like a refreshing shower.

The entire Hope Valley stretched out in front of him, closed in by the rocky ridge of Stanage Edge and a line of southern moors. He could see over the villages as far as Castleton, with Mam Tor blocking the head of the valley and the grey bulk of Kinder Scout lurking in the distance, its outline obscured by low-lying clouds.

Southwards over Millstone Edge and the hump of Eyam Moor was the town of Edendale. But right now Cooper couldn’t see it, and he didn’t want to. From here, he could try to pretend it didn’t exist, that the town and everything it contained was a figment of his imagination, a feature of some parallel universe where his life might have taken a different direction. The windows of E Division police headquarters on West Street might seem familiar in his memories, but at this moment they were part of a half-forgotten dream. The ground-floor flat in Welbeck Street was no more his home than was this hill fort.

In his heart, he didn’t feel he belonged anywhere, except to the air over the valley and the rain that fell continually on the Peak District. This feeling of dislocation ought to be frightening or unsettling, since he’d valued a sense of belonging so highly all his years. He should be disturbed by the loss of connection with his previous life. Yet he’d never felt so free.

All the time he’d spent in hospital, this was what he’d longed for. There had been windows in the ward, but the view was over the town, grey stone and wet roofs and the occasional curl of smoke. The tiny hint of distant views, the shape of a hill glimpsed in a bank of cloud on the horizon – that only made it worse. It was the taunting detail that made his captivity intolerable.

His brother puffed up the hill behind him. Matt was carrying too much weight these days. He spent so many hours sitting in the cab of his John Deere, letting the tractor do the physical work. He didn’t even walk around his fields at Bridge End Farm any more, but used his latest toy, a quad bike.

‘My God, why would people have lived all the way up here?’ said Matt when he’d got his breath back.

‘I don’t think they did,’ said Ben.

‘What? They put all the effort into building this thing, then didn’t live in it?’

‘As far as they can tell from the evidence. It’s a question of interpretation what it was used for. There are theories.’

‘I don’t like theories. You can’t eat them, or put them in your fuel tank.’

This hill fort was one of Ben’s favourite places in the Peak District. The views from the top were as spectacular as you might expect, and well worth the slog up the steep slope among the debris of scattered stones. But wonderful views were everywhere in this area. Carl Wark was special because there was nowhere more steeped in history in the whole region. The fort might have been constructed between eight hundred and five hundred BC, but archaeologists said the use of the promontory dated back much earlier, to Neolithic times.

‘This might have been a hill fort, or it could have been a ceremonial site of some kind,’ he said. ‘There are people who say it was a sort of court, a place that tribes could come to for the administration of justice.’

‘Really?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Like I say, it’s another theory.’