Lost River (15 page)

Eighty miles away from Birmingham, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. Matt repaired the track regularly with compacted earth and stones, but the first heavy rain of winter always washed it all away again. When the water came rushing down from the hillside, it turned the narrow track into a muddy river.

His wheels rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard, tyres splashing through trails of fresh-dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking.

At this time of year, there would normally be some calves waiting to go to Bakewell Market, but their pen was empty. Matt used to have a vintage tractor tucked away in the implement shed, an old grey Fergie that he loved to tinker with in any spare minutes. But that had gone now, sold off to make a bit of money. Farming was one constant battle against cashflow problems.

Standing in the tractor shed was the solitary big green John Deere. Its bulky shape usually made Ben smile – it looked so much the way his older brother did in his green overalls, with his big shoulders and barrel chest.

But for some reason he didn’t feel like smiling tonight. He was conscious of so many other things that he had to do, which were being neglected. And he was starting to get anxious about what might be wrong at the farm. He’d experienced too many family traumas to bear the thought of facing another so soon. His father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, had been everybody’s favourite local bobby until he was kicked to death in the street in Edendale by a gang of drunken yobs. His mother had suffered from schizophrenia for years, putting the whole family through nightmare scenes until the final release of her death. Was it wrong to wish that people would only bring him good news about the family, and keep their problems to themselves?

But he loved his two nieces. Amy was thirteen now, the same age as Alex Nield. In some ways, she’d been strangely adult since the age of eleven. Ben had started to feel sorry for the teachers at Amy’s new school. She could be mercilessly outspoken if you were boring her.

And Josie…well, maybe she still kept that imaginary friend in her head, but at least she’d stopped talking about her, and that had allowed Matt to stop worrying about Josie inheriting her grandmother’s mental illness.

Ben entered the big farmhouse kitchen through the back door and gave his sister-in-law Kate a kiss. The girls weren’t around, presumably doing their homework or whatever girls got up to in their own rooms.

‘So what are you working on at the moment?’ asked Matt.

‘All kinds of things,’ said Ben, picturing the paperwork on his desk rather than what he had actually been spending his time on. ‘I was in Ashbourne today. The little girl who died in Dovedale.’

‘Oh, the drowning,’ said Matt. ‘Was there something funny about it?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘I’ve got a friend who farms in that area. Brian Dyott.
I met him through the NFU. Odd sort of place, isn’t it? It seems to be important what other people think about you. When you talk to Brian, you’d think his greatest ambition was to be featured in the farming pages of the
Ashbourne News Telegraph.’

‘Really?’

‘When they had Jonathan Dimbleby and
Any Questions?
at the grammar school last year, Brian tried to ask about the single farm payment scheme. Not because he thought anyone would be interested. It was just so he could get his name mentioned. They didn’t pick him.’

‘Is he standing for election to the town council, or something?’

‘Maybe. Anyway…’ said Matt, carefully not looking at him, ‘he might know the family of that girl.’

Ben didn’t react to the hint. While it was useful to get information from any source he could, it was never wise to involve his own family, even peripherally.

‘What’s the problem at home, Matt? You didn’t explain in your message.’

‘Well, it’s about Amy,’ said Matt.

‘What has she been up to?’

‘I’m not really sure she’s been up to anything. She seems to be having trouble at school. The teachers say she’s been bullying other pupils, but I don’t think that can be right. You know Amy – she’s more likely to be the one that’s getting bullied. But if she loses her temper and retaliates –’

‘Has she hurt somebody?’

‘There was a complaint from some other girl’s parents,’ admitted Matt. ‘They’re talking about sending her to a counsellor or something. The parents wanted to report it, just because Amy made the girl bleed a bit. I mean, it’s not as if she’s a criminal. She’s not going to turn into a serial killer, just because she had a bit of a teenage spat with another kid. It’s ridiculous.’

‘What does Amy say?’ asked Ben.

‘Well, that’s the problem. She won’t talk to us about it. And God knows, we’ve tried, both of us.’

Ben felt suddenly angry. He stared at his brother, his red farmer’s face so complacent, his mind so bound up with his own concerns that he saw nothing of anybody’s else’s problems. He was as isolated from the realities of life in the outside world as his farm was from the streets of the town.

‘Matt, what exactly do you expect me to do?’ he said. ‘If she won’t talk to her mum and dad, she’s not going to talk to me, is she?’

‘Well, I thought you might –’

‘You thought what? Jesus, Matt, don’t you think I’ve got better things to do? Have you any idea what’s going on out there in the real world? On Monday, I held a dead girl in my arms.’

‘Yes, we heard –’

‘Right here, in my arms, Matt, and I couldn’t save her. And now I don’t know if she was killed, or who killed her. Don’t you think that’s more important than your petty worries about some upset in your perfect little family? Wake up, man. I’m your brother, not your keeper.’

Ben could feel the flush that had been rising from his neck into his face, the surge of unaccustomed rage seething through his veins. It felt wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. He saw his brother’s face change from shock to a grim hostility. He saw Kate turn and stare at him in horror.

‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Before I say any more.’

‘Yes, Ben,’ said Matt. ‘I think you better had.’

At home that evening, Cooper kept thinking, not about his own family, but about the Nields. There was definitely something not right about the father. He was hiding something, but it was impossible for him to say what, without more information.

The idea of Robert Nield being responsible for the death of Emily was starting to recede from Cooper’s suspicions. It didn’t seem likely. Besides, Dawn had been right there with the family on the bank of the river. There were some instincts that even centuries of civilization had failed to suppress. One of those was the ‘tiger mother’ instinct – a killing rage against anything that threatened her children. She would never have stood by and let her daughter die, if there had been anything she could do to stop it. So what had Dawn been doing while it all happened?

Cooper was finding that he couldn’t trust his own memory. And if he couldn’t trust his memory, he couldn’t trust himself. He no longer felt able to rely on his own instincts.

This frustrating ambiguity of his recollections was like the first stages of some degenerative brain disease. The events in Dovedale had happened only two days ago, yet they were beyond his grasp. On the other hand, when Diane Fry had asked him about his childhood, he’d summoned up perfectly clear images from thirty years ago or more. Was he becoming like those old people who could recite every word of some wartime song, but failed to recognize their own children from the day before? Or was this some short-term effect? He felt perfectly okay. But who knew when your mind might decide to play tricks on you?

As for Alex…well, Cooper suspected Alex was much the same sort of boy that he’d been himself at that age. His with-drawal took a different form, that was all. These multi-player online games hadn’t existed when he was growing up, in the days before broadband access and game servers. It seemed decades ago now. Well, he’d played
Doom
and
Myst,
but those were essentially solitary games. This ability to meet, befriend and bully other online users was a fairly recent development – but it had drawn in millions of players all around the world.

Cooper switched on his laptop and idly googled for references to multi-player online role-playing games. He was sure
there would have been some analysis of the effects the games had on participants, or the types of person they attracted.

And indeed there was. In one sociological study, it was found that just over one in five gamers said they preferred socializing online to offline. Significantly more male gamers than female said they found it easier to converse online than offline. It was also found that fifty-seven per cent of gamers had created a character of the opposite gender – an online female persona providing some positive social attributes that individuals lacked in real life.

He came across something called the Bartle Test, which had classified multi-player RPG players into four psychological groups. There were the Achievers, who preferred to accumulate points, levels, and equipment as measures of success in a game. On the other hand, the Explorers liked to dig around, discover new areas, and create maps to put their world into some kind of order. Many were Socializers, who chose to play for the social aspect, rather than the actual game itself, gaining enjoyment from interacting with other players, and making online friends. And then there were the Killers, who thrived on competition, preferring fighting, carnage, action, and destruction. They were the individuals who liked to depart from the norm of being ‘the good guy’ and play on the side of evil.

Cooper found a link directing him to the major online games, including
War Tribe.
It was the easiest thing in the world to click through and find himself on a page urging him to sign up and start playing straight away. Well, why not? Perhaps it would be a way of discovering that other side of Alex Nield, the one his parents never saw.

He soon figured out the basics of the game. It seemed to be all about building up your cities, making your defensive wall strong and training as many soldiers as possible. Then you could go out raiding, plundering the resources of neigh-bouring cities or conquering them with your chieftain. With
many thousands of players signed up, the permutations of the conflict were endless. You could experience betrayal and conspiracy. You could make friends, enemies, have spies and allies, take part in wars, destroy and pillage to your heart’s content.

Cooper could imagine the sort of messages that must go back and forth via the instant messaging function. Vicious arguments, threats of destruction, the curses of the destroyed. He supposed there would have to be some in-game rules to control the abusive language and threats of real physical violence. He felt sure it would be that serious. If a fraction of the players put as much time and commitment into the game as Alex Nield did, they would have a huge emotional investment in their cities.

When his city was created, Cooper switched to the map view. He saw all the Turks on the edge of Continent 34. Aggressive and well organized, those Turks. And there was never any point in trying to talk to them. Oh, well. He didn’t expect to last very long in the game. A few battle-axes would finish him off.

Then he found Alex’s cities on the map and clicked on his profile. The artwork on his profile page was dominated by a huge sword created from multiple ASCII characters – slashes, back slashes, hash marks, and some symbols that Cooper didn’t even know the name for. It must have taken hours to get that right. And an awful lot of patience, too.

There was a screed of text below the sword. Cooper picked out a few expressions and acronyms.

i just took ur city

wtf u goin to do?

That was pretty clear, if you knew what WTF meant, which Cooper reckoned he did. But there were other lines he was baffled by, like:

im s0 1337 taht i pwn ur @ss n00b!!!

The last word looked a version of ‘noob’, the derogatory
term for a ‘newbie’ – or a new, inexperienced player who didn’t know how to play the game properly. Someone like him, in fact. An idiot who asked stupid questions, made mistakes all the time, and was easy prey for the more experienced player.

There were plenty of threats, too. That was to be expected, he supposed – your profile was all about bravado and pretending that you were a tougher guy than your neighbours.

if u dare to touch my cities u wr born wrong, and u must die!!!!!!

Lots of exclamation marks featured pretty much everywhere. A minimum of six at the end of every line. That made the threats more scary, perhaps.

Alex’s log-in name was SmokeLord, but his cities had strange names. They ought to have been called Smoke Screen, or Smoke and Mirrors. Oh, and Smoke on the Water, of course. Those would have been Cooper’s choices, if he was going for a cool theme.

But Alex Nield hadn’t done that. Cooper scrolled through the list. His city names included Engine House, Dutchman, The Folly. His capital seemed to be Engine House, the biggest of his cities by the number of its points, so its walls were probably high level and almost impregnable, the numbers of defensive troops stacked up. That made sense, he supposed. It would be the engine room of his expanding empire.

There was a lot of repetition of symbols in the profile. Cooper couldn’t make head or tail of some of them. In fact, he wasn’t sure whether they had any meaning or were just for decoration. One sequence of characters was repeated several times. It said:

£0$7

Some kind of money obsession? Though how much £0$7 was, he had no clue.

Beneath a representation in ASCII characters of a sort of cartoon baby face, the sequence occurred again.

£0$7

£0$7

£0$7

£0$7 R1√32

And finally at the bottom, Alex’s profile ended:

brb

kk??

He was in need of a translator. Like other police forces, Derbyshire Constabulary spent many thousands of pounds every year on translation services, to help deal with suspects who had a poor command of English. But he didn’t think this particular language would be offered by the translation service. It could only be described as geek.