Already Dead(33)

‘I prefer facts myself.’

‘I know you do, Matt.’

‘You make it sound as if that’s a bad thing.’

Of course, one glance showed that Carl Wark was a natural defensive site, with steep cliffs on three sides and a stone rampart constructed on the fourth. They stood on the edge looking over the ramparts towards Hathersage Moor. It was amazing to think people had built this without tools, with only their time and sweat and determination, hauling materials up the hillside stone by stone until they’d built a wall to protect themselves against the world. Yet people hadn’t lived at Carl Wark, but had used it as a refuge and perhaps for religious or ceremonial purposes. In other words, it was a sanctuary.

‘Thanks for coming, Matt,’ Ben said. ‘I know it’s difficult taking time away from the farm.’

‘Oh, well. The weather’s buggered everything up as usual,’ his brother said grumpily.

‘I know you can always find some jobs to do.’

‘Which reminds me,’ said Matt. ‘Let me have those fencing spikes back. I’m going to need them.’

‘I’m sorry, I keep forgetting.’

‘Your memory is worse than mine.’

The landscape towards Eyam in the south was a deep, damp green, washed by the constant rain. Ben had never seen such a vibrant green, nor such a range of shades. It was like looking into an emerald sea, with patches of mist hanging in the cloughs like smoke. They reminded him of the moorland fires, making the scorched skin on his hands sting, the back of his throat choke as if his lungs had suddenly filled again with smoke.

They’d parked on the back road leading into Hathersage Booths and crossed a stile to take the steep climb up Higger Tor. Within fifty yards of the road, it felt as though you’d stepped back in time. The dramatic view across to Carl Wark always made Ben pause for a while before scrambling over the rocks to find the path. Between the tor and Carl Wark, gigantic boulders were piled among the heather, as if a giant had started to build a castle but had got tired and given up. As they approached the fort, he’d been awed as ever by the wall rising above him, almost perfectly preserved as it had first been built all those centuries ago.

Carl Wark used steep natural cliffs as part of its defences. The wall of gritstone blocks at the western end of the fort was about ten feet high with an earth and rubble bank piled against its inside. Sheer cliffs rose to about eighty feet, surrounded by a steep bank. Across the neck of the plateau an L-shaped rampart had been constructed to form an entrance. This two-acre enclosure had been occupied by Roman troops during a Celtic uprising in the first century. And before the Celts? Even the name suggested that the origins of the fort were mysterious or unknown. Carl was a synonym for T’owd Mon, the Old Man. Otherwise known as the Devil.

‘Are you okay, Ben?’ asked Matt.

‘Yes. Well – you know.’

Ben realised that the rock behind him felt cold. Far too cold. It was summer, after all. These stones should be warmed by the sun, the ground between them dry and dusty, not trampled with mud. There was definitely something wrong with the seasons. Nature had begun to feel out of order, the natural cycle disrupted by an unnatural event.

But then, there was something wrong with the rest of the world, too.

Next week should have been his wedding but his fiancée, Liz Petty, had died in a fire at the abandoned Light House pub. No, not just a fire, but arson. A deliberate attempt to harm, to kill, to destroy evidence of an earlier murder. That was what it should always be called. Just like the blazes which had destroyed large swathes of the Peak District National Park, the fire at the Light House had been no accident. Whether through recklessness or malice, there was always someone to blame.

If he couldn’t see Edendale from here, he was certainly in no danger of catching a glimpse of Oxlow Moor. The blackened remains of the pub still stood on a stretch of that moor, in the west beyond the Eden Valley. It was difficult now for him to drive that way out of town, except in the dark. The Light House itself had been extinguished, so it no longer lit up the skyline as it had done for so many years.

‘Time,’ said Matt. He hesitated, then stopped speaking, as if he’d lost track of his thoughts … Or, more likely, he’d realised the utter futility of completing the sentence.

‘I hope you weren’t going to say that time heals everything,’ said Ben, ‘that things might look bleak now, but everything will be marvellous again in a few months? That I just need some time to get over it?’

‘Something like that, I suppose. I’ll not bother, then?’

‘We’ll take it as read, shall we?’