Already Dead(40)

14





Ben Cooper peered into the distance to pick out the distinctive shape of Mam Tor. The mountain couldn’t be seen from Carl Wark until you walked through the entrance and up on to the banks behind the walling. Then the dark, brooding silhouette suddenly appeared on the horizon. Mam Tor, the Mother Heights, the Shivering Mountain. And the destroyer of the old A625 too, the road which was swept away in the 1970s by tons of shale cascading from its fragile slopes.

Mam Tor was the site of another hill fort, and a Bronze Age settlement. It was strange to think of people looking out over this same valley two thousand years ago and perhaps seeing each other’s fires in the distance. What would they have been signalling? A friendly communication? Or a warning?

‘I’m worried about you, Ben,’ said Matt behind him.

Ben didn’t turn round to look at him. He knew what expression he would see on his brother’s face.

‘There’s no need,’ he said.

‘There is. I’m really bothered.’

‘And there’s really no need for you to be.’

‘I’m concerned that you’re still eaten up with guilt,’ said Matt. ‘There’s no reason for you to feel guilty, Ben. None at all.’

‘So you’ve said.’

‘And I’ll say it again and again, until you get the message.’

Ben didn’t feel like arguing with his brother today, no matter how wrong Matt was. And Matt had definitely got it wrong. Wherever there was death, there was always guilt.

He recalled that although everything he could see from here was part of Derbyshire, Carl Wark itself had the distinction of being outside the county. It had been moved into South Yorkshire some time in the 1970s when local government boundaries were reorganised. The county border ran below him, past the remains of an old rain gauge and along the bottom of Millstone Edge to Surprise View. In a way, it felt even more like a refuge because of that. When he was on Carl Wark, he was outside his own territory, standing beyond the edge, existing for a while in the safer fringes of his world.

And safety was hard to find these days. Hard for anyone, it seemed. But perhaps he’d just been in the job too long. He’d seen all kinds of human cruelty.

‘It’s fine, Matt,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not fine. None of this is fine at all!’

Ben looked up, startled by his brother’s angry reaction. It took a lot to get an emotional response from Matt. He wondered what he’d done to provoke it. All he’d said was ‘It’s fine.’

Right now, he was standing in the Dark Peak, looking south towards the more gentle hills of the White Peak. Those two distinct geological halves of the Peak District had always represented good and evil to him, one of those over-imaginative thoughts that he tried to keep to himself when he was among his colleagues. Dark and white, good and evil. It was obvious, really. Good and evil were right there in the landscape, laid out in front of him. He only had to make a decision. He had to decide which direction to head in from here. It was as simple as that.

‘Will you help me, Matt?’ he said. ‘To put things right?’

‘No. Not if you mean what I think you do.’

‘But you’re my brother.’

‘No. I won’t help you to destroy yourself, Ben.’

‘Matt, please—’

‘Find someone else.’

Matt stamped off towards the top of the path, and a few moments later Ben heard him clattering over the loose stones like a herd of clumsy cattle.

He didn’t watch his brother leave, but remained gazing at the hills on the north side of the valley. The heather was coming into flower on the moors all across the Peak District. In late summer, many visitors came just to see the distinctive swathes of colour, the unending blanket of reddish-purple that had appeared on thousands of postcards and holiday snaps. But it needed sun to bring out the colour, and it looked doubtful whether Derbyshire would get any this year. The heather flowers would stay wet and dull under these overcast skies.

Ben found he was experiencing a sensation he sometimes had as a teenager – that he was the only real person in the world and everyone else was just playing a part, a bunch of extras acting out an elaborate pantomime around him. He couldn’t imagine these people having separate lives once they went out of the door and disappeared from sight. It seemed as though they existed only to perform a function, to be mere props on his stage, accessories to his needs and desires. He was the centre of the universe, its reason and purpose. All the thoughts and feelings in the world went on inside his head, and no one else could understand what it was like. How could they, when he was unique?