Already Dead(82)

There were so many fossils underfoot in the rocks as he walked along the paths that he’d been aware of walking on history here, more than anywhere else he knew. In his imagination, he was moving through exotic sea creatures, touching a coral reef, paddling on the floor of an ancient lagoon. He was just three hundred million years too late for his tropical holiday.

He could see Josh Lane clearly now. He was dressed in a black anorak and blue denims, and his head was bare, showing a gleam of gelled hair. At least his boots must be practical. Cooper noticed that he’d come to a halt by a picnic area. It had been built by young people serving community sentences, part of a system called restorative justice. It was supposed to be based on the the concept of ‘closing the circle’, a North American Indian belief that a circle was broken when a crime was committed in a community. Restoration could only be achieved when the offender made amends to the community and closed the circle.

Here, the amends to the community consisted of a circle of stone seats, with relief carvings depicting the prehistoric sea creatures which had once lived here. The reef they’d lived on was just behind him, exposed by centuries of quarrying.

Cooper looked round, and stepped behind a stretch of stone wall. In fact, it wasn’t just any wall, but the Millennium Wall, a series of dry-stone sections representing a range of styles from all over the UK. Round boulders from Galloway, tight wedges from Caithness, a stone-faced earth wall from Wales that looked like a length snipped from Offa’s Dyke.

From Lane’s stance, it looked almost as though he was aware of being watched. His interest in the restorative justice project seemed to Cooper to be an act of defiance, a provocative gesture. Lane was symbolically putting two fingers up, just as he had been all these months. Could that really just be in his imagination?

Right in front of Cooper’s face as he ducked down was the Derbyshire section, built in two contrasting styles – the irregular fractures of limestone and the regular coursing of gritstone. Even in the construction of its walls, the Peak District was divided: rolling farmland and bleak peat moor, picturesque villages and the empty black wastes. The White Peak and the Dark Peak. Good and evil. Their presence in the landscape had never been so obvious to Cooper as he crouched behind that wall.

The frustration was beginning to get difficult to tolerate.

‘Move on, move on,’ he muttered to himself.

As if he’d heard from this distance, Lane began to walk up the slope again. Through the trees above, Cooper glimpsed the blue glass of the Discovery Centre. In front of the entrance was a set of wide steps, where he’d once walked up through the different eras of stone, right up to the final step made of Antrim basalt, a mere sixty million years old. He assumed that Josh Lane was going into the café at the Discovery Centre. He would probably sit and have a coffee, maybe a sandwich.

Cooper sat down to wait. The High Peak Trail ran over the bridge just before the car park and he could hear people chatting as they passed overhead. Just beyond a small lime kiln there had once been a small settlement of half a dozen cottages. The Coal Hills hamlet. With that kiln smoking all day and all night, it must have been a nightmarish place to live in. But the hamlet had been abandoned and demolished in the 1930s – not because of the smoke, but when the water supply in this limestone area became unreliable. All that remained now were a few heaps of tumbled stones covered in moss.

Nearer to the road was the Derbyshire Eco Centre, where even the bike shed had solar panels. He saw more and more solar panels these days. Wind turbines too – sometimes just the odd one running a small-scale rural enterprise, but in other locations an entire wind farm, the turbine blades turning slowly, some even stopped.

There was no wind this summer, let alone any sun. Soon there’d be talk of harnessing water power to plug the gap in the country’s energy supply. Cooper had heard there was already a water turbine operating down in Alport, a derelict watermill converted to harness the flow of the River Bradford. Surely that was a better idea? It reused an existing site, and a water turbine was always hidden away in a valley. Not like these giant structures on the hillsides, visible for miles. They made him think of Don Quixote, famous for his futile tilting at windmills in the cause of justice. But at least he’d never given up.

A Royal Mail van pulled into the car park and an employee in his orange reflective jacket got out carrying a parcel of fish and chips for his lunch. The smell as he passed reminded Cooper that he was likely to miss lunch himself. But it was good that he was thinking about food with enthusiasm, even if he wasn’t actually eating.