Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) (12 page)

‘It’s a pity,’ said Hurst. ‘This place would make a good youth hostel or something.’

Gavin Murfin was standing behind her in the doorway.

‘It’d make a better pub,’ he said grumpily. ‘Oh, I forgot – that’s exactly what it was, until the bean counters put the boot in.’

‘Didn’t you used to drink here, Gavin?’ asked Hurst.

‘Drink here? I was practically brought up in this pub. My old man used to leave me outside in the car with a packet of cheese and onion crisps, while he played snooker in the public.’

‘A packet of crisps?’ said Hurst. ‘And a bottle of dandelion and burdock, surely?’

‘Coke. We were quite a trendy family, for plebs.’

‘It’s haunted,
I suppose?’

Fry snorted. ‘Aren’t they all? I thought it was an essential feature to get a listing in the tourist guides, like having toilets and satellite TV.’

‘No, this one is genuinely haunted,’ said Murfin. ‘They say it’s the ghost of some servant girl who burned to death in a kitchen accident. Set her clothes alight when she was cooking or something. Now and then she still walks the corridors, giving off a horrible fiery glow.’

‘Yeah, right. They tell those stories because they think it’ll bring gullible American tourists in.’

‘No,’ said Murfin solemnly. ‘I saw her once.’

‘Come off it.’

‘I did. I was about to leave here one night, and had to go to the gents. They’re down a corridor round the back of the bar there, you know. And that was when I saw her, all glowing. Gave me the shock of my life, it did.’

‘Glowing?’

‘Yeah, glowing. Like she was on fire.

‘You were drunk, Gavin.’

‘Believe what you want, I don’t care.’

Fry looked at Murfin closely, sure that he must be joking. She’d known him for a long time, and he wasn’t the kind to believe in ghosts and all that stuff. But his face never slipped. He appeared to be serious.

She looked out across the moor, where the smoke and flames seemed to be getting ever nearer to the pub.

‘If that wind changes direction,’ she said, ‘your flaming kitchen maid could be in danger of burning to death all over again.’

The pub was accessed directly from the car park, and was essentially a one-room open-plan layout, although in visually distinct sections. A games room featured a pool table, darts board and plasma-screen TV. At one end, a
dark-panelled snug with pew benches had been left as a reminder of days gone by. It had been heated by a small wood-burning stove.

In this part of the pub, some of the old pictures had been left on the walls. A few portraits, hunting groups, dukes and squires posing with their dogs and horses. In the dim light, there were too many eyes in the room for Fry’s comfort, squinting at her beneath their layers of dust.

And what was that smell? She made her way along a short passage and found herself in a galley-style catering kitchen with tiled walls and overhead stainless-steel extractor hoods. Yes, this was where the smell was coming from. The odour of scampi and chips seemed to have been absorbed into the walls and ventilation ducts, and was now being released back into the air.

Fry was reminded of the theory that ghosts were the lingering echoes of people whose lives and deaths were imprinted indelibly in the stone. This smell seemed to bring a sense of life back to the stale air, peopling the abandoned kitchens with the shadowy spirits of those who’d worked there over the years.

But that was Gavin Murfin who’d put the idea of ghosts into her head. She ought to know better than to listen to him, even for a moment.

‘Owner’s accommodation?’ she said.

Murfin jerked his head. ‘Upstairs.’

She found the access to the stairs just past a series of doors marked as ladies, gents and disabled toilet facilities, and another door giving access to the rear yard area.

Upstairs, a room had been turned into a small function suite, with its own corner bar for private parties. It was the brightest room in the pub, thanks to four large sash and case windows looking out over the moor. It was laid with a dark blue carpet, leaving a tiny wooden dance floor area in the
middle. It would never have hosted any major events. Thirty or forty people would have filled it to capacity. A small wedding, perhaps. An office party. Groups of laughing workers deposited by minibus. No chance of walking home from here.

The guest rooms were also on the first floor. Just three of them. According to the name plaques on their doors, they were called the Bakewell, Buxton and Bradwell rooms.

There was another, narrower set of stairs leading to the top floor, where the pub’s owner had lived. But the owner’s accommodation was completely bare. In every room, the furniture had been removed, the carpets stripped from the floor, the curtains pulled down from the windows. There were clear marks against the walls where a picture had hung or a chest of drawers had stood. The former occupants had removed themselves completely.

A few minutes later, Fry found herself looking down two flights of stairs into the rear corridor, the gloom in the doorways barely relieved by the light from the huge sash window on the landing. For a moment she was puzzled and disturbed by the way the shadows seemed to move below her, as if the darkness was writhing around itself, invisible snakes stirring the dust on the floor.

It was only when her eyes adjusted to the light that she realised what she was seeing. Smoke and flames from the hillside, casting their distant outlines through the window, thrusting their ominous presence right into the heart of the building.

‘If you want to know about the pub, you could start with Mad Maurice, I suppose,’ said Murfin.

‘Who?’ asked Fry.

‘Maurice Wharton, the last landlord. He ran the pub right up until the day it closed.’

‘He
lived on the premises too, of course?’

‘Yes, with his wife and children. I can’t remember their names, but we can soon find that out.’

‘No live-in staff?’

‘Not that I remember. The bar staff usually came up from town for their shift. A lot of them were students earning a bit of money during the evenings or at weekends.’

Fry sniffed the air, detecting again that faint whiff of chips.

‘Who did the cooking here? There must have been some kitchen staff.’

Murfin didn’t answer, and Fry glanced at him, ready to ask the question again.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Fry turned to Hurst, softening her instinctive response a little.

‘Find out, will you?’

‘Sure.’

She looked at Murfin again. ‘Gavin, did I hear that you were liaising with the firefighters?’

‘Yes,’ said Murfin. ‘Trumpton reported seeing a white pickup. They can’t be specific about the make or model, or how many people were in it. Or how long it was here before it left. They were a bit vague about the colour, come to think of it – white being so easily confused with blue or red, like. I suppose it’s true what they say in the song. Smoke does get in your eyes.’

‘Trumpton?’ said Fry again.

Murfin ignored her with a complacent smile.

‘So two people were here, at least,’ he said.

‘Well that didn’t take much figuring out, Sherlock, since one of them got left behind, and he happens to be dead.’

‘And someone drove the pickup away,’ added Murfin helpfully.

‘Thanks, Gavin.’

‘Just
saying.’

‘What were they doing here? It doesn’t make sense.’

Hurst shrugged. ‘People break into empty buildings all the time. They could have been looking for somewhere to smoke dope, have sex, find a squat for a few weeks.’

‘In the middle of burning moorland? They’d have to be particularly desperate, or stupid.’

‘Fair point.’

Fry looked around the empty rooms. ‘I’d say they might have taken the opportunity to find something worth stealing, but it seems a bit unlikely.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hurst. ‘That could be the most likely explanation. Okay, there’s no cash here, or the sort of small electrical items that opportunist thieves usually go for. But scrap metal is worth a fair bit these days. Ask the vicars whose church roofs keep getting stripped of lead.’

Fry shook her head. ‘I still can’t see any signs that anything has been taken.’

‘There was definitely a vehicle here, though. The fire crews saw it. A white pickup. Just the sort of vehicle you’d use for scrap.’

‘Probably
a white pickup.’

‘There were too many people up here. Too many for it to be just a coincidence. Too many for there to be a logical explanation. Not an
innocent
logical explanation anyway.’

From Fry’s research when she first transferred here from the West Midlands, she knew about the ten unsolved murders in Derbyshire Constabulary’s history. The oldest went back to 1966, the case of a Chesterfield teenager found beaten to death in a disused factory. It was senseless killings like that that tended to be the most difficult to detect and the most unlikely to result in a successful prosecution.

But
whatever had happened inside this pub, it wasn’t senseless. At least two people had come together here, if only for a short while. There had been a reason for the killing.

Murder, or the idea of murder, wasn’t all that unfamiliar a concept to a lot of people, most of them ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It had been a part of human experience since Cain killed Abel. Normally it all went wrong with the disposal of the body. The killing itself was easy. It didn’t take much thought – a red mist in front of the eyes, a violent swing of the arm, and it was done. But a corpse on the floor was a different matter. There were bloodstains on the walls, one of your hairs on their clothes, a fragment of your skin caught under their fingernails. And perhaps a witness who had seen both of you arrive but only one of you leave. From that point, it took a lot of thought. And who was thinking straight in those circumstances? Most people just panicked and ran.

They’d interviewed some of the firefighters, and a couple of rangers who’d been in the vicinity. But the interviews had produced little of any use. Understandably, their attention had been on the fires, not on the pub. And that was a shame. Given the location, they were the only potential witnesses available.

‘The last landlord, you said?’

‘Mad Maurice,’ repeated Murfin. ‘Moved back down into Edendale with his family when the pub closed. Name of Wharton.’

‘Why do they call him Mad Maurice?’ asked Fry.

‘Because he used to get mad a lot,’ said Murfin. ‘There were loads of things he couldn’t stand. Mobile phones, children, people who just came into the pub to use the loo or ask directions. Anything like that, he’d get mad about. Maurice became a tourist attraction in his own right.’

‘How
do you mean?’

‘Well, folk used to come in the pub just in the hopes of seeing him get mad. They thought it was funny. “Let’s go and see Mad Maurice,” they’d say. Where other landlords called the traditional “Time gentlemen, please”, Maurice’s shout was “Come on, you buggers, clear off. Haven’t you got homes to go to?”’

‘Charming.’

‘It was just his way.’

‘If he shouted that at me, I’d never go back there again.’

‘Well that’s the point. If you couldn’t put up with a bit of abuse, he didn’t want you in his pub anyway. It meant you were the wrong sort of customer.’

‘Good grief. It’s no wonder the place went bust, if he chased away all his custom like that.’

‘On the contrary, it was one of the pub’s unique selling points. People used to go there because of Maurice. It’s a bit like customers going to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant hoping to hear him say the F-word. You know what I mean.’

‘Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity chef who’s always on the telly. He’s famous.’

‘Well so was Mad Maurice, in his own way. He was a
local
celebrity. For every customer he banned from the pub for a using a mobile phone or talking too loud, he’d get ten more coming in to see him do it.’

‘A clever marketing ploy on his part, then.’

‘No,’ said Murfin. ‘He just got mad a lot.’

Hurst took a call, and turned immediately to Fry.

‘We got an ID,’ she said. ‘Name of Aidan Merritt, a thirty-five-year-old teacher from Edendale.’

‘A teacher? What was he up to at the Light House?’

‘Dunno. But here’s the interesting thing. His name came up in HOLMES in connection with the Pearson inquiry.’

Ben
Cooper parked his Toyota by the little green in the centre of Castleton and opened his Ordnance Survey map. It was a well-used, heavily creased copy of Outdoor Leisure 1, the Dark Peak.

As usual, the area he wanted went off the edge of the map and crossed into the White Peak. That was just to make things more difficult.

Above the town, a team of officers were attempting to follow the route that the Pearsons might have taken from Castleton on the night they disappeared. It had been done before, but DCI Mackenzie had insisted on it being done again. The scope of the search had been widened, taking in a broad sweep of the moor right over to Speedwell Cavern and Winnats Pass on one side, and including the Limestone Way itself on the other.

In most parts of the country it would be impossible to imagine how two people could simply disappear in open countryside like this. But Cooper was aware of what lay underneath his feet. The whole of this landscape was hollow. It was one huge lump of porous limestone, scooped out over millennia by running water to form endless caves and tunnels and passages.

The Peak Cavern system alone ran for more than ten miles before it emerged at Speedwell, and it included the
deepest shaft in the UK, twice the size of St Paul’s Cathedral. Rain falling on the surface in Cavedale found its way through to the show caverns below and fell as lime-stained waterfalls on the heads of tourists.

Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had once said: ‘All this county is hollow. Could you strike it with some gigantic hammer it would boom like a drum.’ In that wider context, it was far too easy to imagine anything disappearing.

Cooper glanced out of the car window. Up Castle Street, he could see the sign outside the George, directly opposite the parish church. He dialled Carol Villiers’ mobile number, and she answered after three or four rings.