Lost River (29 page)

There were more officers at the Nield house now. Uniforms in the garden, checking along the back fence, talking to the neighbours. Two social workers were with Mrs Nield in the sitting room.

‘We’ve looked everywhere,’ said Hurst. ‘He’s gone. Disappeared without a word. He must have gone out of the back door when we arrived to talk to his parents.’

‘If not before that,’ said Cooper. ‘They wouldn’t have noticed that he’d gone.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

Why did everyone keep wanting to take the blame? Cooper looked around desperately for clues.

‘Did he leave a note? A message? A text?’

‘Nothing,’ said Mrs Nield. ‘We’ve got to find him. He’s only thirteen, you know.’

‘Okay, so where would he go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’ll have to get a full-scale search under way, Becky. He has quite a head start.’

‘I’ll see to it.’

No message, that was bad news. Cooper turned to the only
person who Alex might have been in touch with. His older sister. At least he now had a phone number for her.

‘Lauren, has Alex contacted you?’

‘I got an email a little while ago.’

‘Of course you did. What did he say?’

‘It was really short. He just said “brb kk?’”

Cooper thought again of Alex’s online profile. That terse final line:

brb kk?

Literally, it meant ‘Be right back, okay?’ But Luke Irvine had explained that it often signified something quite different. It was a way getting rid of someone you didn’t want to deal with. You were telling them you’d never be coming back. It was a way of saying goodbye.

A few minutes later, Cooper stopped his car and looked out over the country along the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. He saw Dovedale snaking off to the east, the dry valleys of the Manifold and The Hamps to the west. In between, there lay a scatter of villages, with Wetton in the centre, and Ecton Hill just visible beyond it.

He was trying to see the landscape in the way that Alex Nield would. Alex lived in a virtual world, moving around a continent populated by enemies – Saxons, Romans, Vikings. They all had to be confronted and dealt with. His was a world where you fought constantly for survival. Kill or be killed, that was the rule of the game.

But then, each player had his own castle, didn’t he? He established a defensive stronghold, a place of safety where he could resist attacks. Walls to keep out the rest of the world.

Yes, a place of safety. It was something that Alex Nield had never possessed in real life.

Or had he?

If he was Alex, Cooper knew he would have somewhere to go. At Bridge End Farm, there had been an old field barn
that wasn’t used any more. Most of the roof had fallen in, except for the far corner, where it was dry and sheltered from the wind. It was a good three fields away from the house, so no one would ever find him, unless they really knew where to go looking. Having those stone walls around him gave him a sense of reassurance, as if the cold winds of insecurity would bounce off the stones with the rain.

So where would Alex go? Given that he couldn’t physically retreat into the world of
War Tribe,
there must be somewhere.

Cooper tried to recall the exact details of the boy’s profile on
War Tribe.
Not the Lost River part, the names of his castles. All the players seemed to choose names that they thought were cool, or had some specific meaning known only to them. But Cooper’s memory was failing him now. He wished he was back in the office in Edendale, with a PC and internet connection, so he could check.

But wait. He didn’t need that. He had an iPhone.

Cooper looked around, hoping that for once there was a decent signal. At least he wasn’t in a valley. He was on the plateau between the two rivers, close to the edge of Wetton Hill.

He likes patterns. Of course he does. From his behaviour, Alex might even be mildly autistic. Unsocial, solitary, slightly obsessive. Alex was always looking for patterns – in his online world, and in real life. Patterns in the bark of a tree, or in the lichen on a rock. So one river meant another river. Water that flowed in the same direction, faces in the rock, a pattern in events as there was in the landscape.

His hands shaking now with the urgency, Cooper used his phone to access the internet and logged on to
War Tribe.
It was much slower connecting than on his laptop at home, but finally he was clicking on Smoke Lord’s profile, scrolling down the names of Alex’s cities. Engine House, Dutchman, The Folly. And his latest city, conquered but not yet built into a castle. Powder House.

‘I get it,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m not such a noob, after all. I get it.’

A tiny side road led him to Back of Ecton, where footpaths snaked off to the old mine workings. He left his car in a gateway and walked to a trig point on the summit of Ecton Hill.

The Manifold Trail ran below him, diving through a tunnel at Swainsley, to the old station at Hulme End, a wooden-framed brown-and-cream building now housing a shop. In its day, the light railway must have been like a toy train set, its station platforms only six inches high, its trains running at fifteen miles an hour, stopping to pick up passengers on the footpath. A dairy had once stood at Ecton, making Stilton cheese. And below Ecton Hill, the loading platforms for the old copper mines lay along the route of the trail, though the railway had come too late for the future of the mines.

Beyond Ecton village, one of the public footpaths passed through an area on the hillside where the mines breached the surface. Here were the adits, the drift entrances that enabled miners to get access to the copper without the need for a long descent. Cooper saw a moss-covered tree, and behind it seven vertical iron bars with darkness beyond. A drift entrance, sealed off against the curious or foolhardy.

About seventy mine workings were scattered over Ecton Hill, including about fifty vertical shafts. The chief mines were the Duke of Devonshire’s Deep Ecton, Dutchman, and Chadwick mines, and the Burgoyne family’s Clayton and Waterbank. And down in the valley the smelting works and dressing floors were situated between the river and the road, along the slopes of the hillside. Only the mine manager’s house, sales room and offices were left, all used as dwellings. A castle-like folly with a copper spire dated from much later.

At their peak, these mines had reached three hundred yards below river level. Although the deep workings were now flooded, those above the level of the river were still accessible.
They rose from deep inside the hill to the site of one of James Watt’s first steam engines, housed on the hilltop.

The slopes below him were too steep to descend safely. But as he approached the mine along the top of the ridge, Cooper saw a number of open shafts. They had been fenced off, but some of the fences were the worse for wear. Walkers would need to take care if they went too near the shafts. Too many accidents had happened in the past, small children disappearing into the earth as the ground crumbled beneath them.

He came to a halt. He’d strayed off the path somehow. In front of him was a fence, strands of barbed wire snagged with clumps of wool.

The fence followed the contours of the land to the east, then veered away from him. Beyond it, he glimpsed the remains of an old water tower, a rusted iron ladder dangling from the base of the tank like tendrils of blighted ivy. The fence was protecting something, or keeping walkers away. There must be an open mine shaft here, an entrance to the old copper workings above river level.

And then he saw, ahead of him, the limestone walls of James Watt’s engine house. The steam engine had once raised massive buckets full of copper out of the Deep Ecton Mine. The engine was long gone, and all the other machinery broken up when the mines ceased to be viable.

Engine House. That was the name of Alex Nield’s main city in War Tribe, his heavily fortified castle where he could be safe from his enemies. He needed a place of security in the real world, too.

The stone chimney was no more than a stump. Half-tumbled walls, ash tips grown over with grass. And what were these raised areas either side of the engine house? Cooper tried to remember the basics of the physics involved. The heavy ropes in the deep shaft had needed a balancing weight to raise them, so two shafts at the same height.

Pacing the ground around the engine house, Cooper
glimpsed a scrap of colour below a tumble of stones on the edge of one of the shafts.

‘Alex? Alex? Don’t move.’

The boy was close to the edge of the shaft, motionless. Was he dead or unconscious? Or only frozen, afraid to move in any direction? Cooper felt the ground slither and crumble under his feet, a stone dropped away into darkness. He never heard the sound of it hitting the bottom. These shafts had gone down three hundred yards, way below river level. Without the drainage pumps and soughs, water would have filled up the lower levels centuries ago.

Sensing his rising panic, Cooper inched gingerly closer, until he could grab a handful of fabric. He’d lost two people in the last week. He wasn’t going to lose this one.

With a heave, Cooper drew Alex’s weight up from the edge, remembering all too clearly the feel of Emily Nield’s cold, limp body in his arms.

But this body was warm. Alex Nield was alive.

Monday

The weather had changed on the morning Diane Fry drove back to Derbyshire. Clouds rolled across the landscape, touching the tops of the hills. A stiff wind blew across the motorway, making a caravan in front of her sway dangerously. She turned off the air conditioning in her car. Was it the end of summer already?

Monday seemed to have come round too soon. Her Sunday had been spent trying to get everything straight in her mind. In the evening, she’d decided on a drink in the Pitcher and Piano at the Water’s Edge. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she passed Tin Tin and Shogun Teppan-Yaki on the way to the pub. Choosing between Chinese and Japanese food would have seemed like too big a decision earlier in the week.

But last night, as she sat eating Mongolian lamb in the Tin Tin, Fry had finally realized that she was worrying about all the wrong people. Why should she concern herself about the fate of William Leeson, or Darren Barnes and Shepherd? Or even Andy Kewley, or Vincent Bowskill?

The concrete city belonged to the past now. Her foster parents, her old home in Warley, her career with West Midlands
Police – it all belonged to the past. Birmingham was no longer the same place she’d worked in, and her history had been flattened by those bulldozers. It was a blue-glass city now. Brum was moving on. There was no reason why she couldn’t do the same.

This morning, Fry felt as though she was waking from the horror of a bad dream. For the first time in years, she seemed to have discovered a peaceful place in her own mind. It was here now, inside her – an ocean of calm. She could imagine it blue and warm, glittering with sunlight, stretching endlessly to that horizon.

As she was passing the outer suburbs of Walsall, she switched on her radio and found she was still tuned to BBC WM. The presenter’s voice was giving way to a news bulletin. According to the lead item, two members of the notorious m1 Crew had been killed in a drive-by shooting in Handsworth. They were executed, it was believed, in a revenge attack by a rival gang. The victims had been named as Marcus Shepherd and Darren Joseph Barnes.

Maybe someone was on her side, after all.

In Edendale, Ben Cooper had just left the Superintendent’s office. Somehow, things had gone right for him this week. He didn’t really understand why, but he wasn’t going to fight it. Two arrests, and a missing child recovered alive – those had helped. And he’d even earned credit for giving the young DCs their head, allowing them the chance to show what they could do with the Lowndes enquiry on the Devonshire Estate. Another successful outcome.

As a result, Branagh had offered him a permanent promotion to detective sergeant. Well, he was hardly going to refuse. For some reason, the Super seemed to like him.

And there was another reason to feel good today. Last night, as soon as he was free, Cooper had climbed into his car and turned it towards Bridge End Farm without even thinking
where he was going. The time he’d spent with the Nields had reminded him of something that he should never have forgotten – that the worst thing you could do was destroy your own family.

Where had he read that
A person’s enemies will include members of his own family?
He had a feeling it was in the Bible somewhere. But that should never be the case, should it?

Matt had been surprised to see him. But as they faced each other on the threshold of the farmhouse, the words had almost been unnecessary. His apology, when it came, had felt like a huge release.

‘It’s okay,’ Matt had said. ‘It’s okay, Ben. We’re always okay, you and me.’

Sitting at his desk, Cooper smiled at the memory. But there was just one more thing left to do, and he’d been putting it off. He might have put it off too long already. After the row with Liz on Friday night, the situation was coming to a head. He’d heard nothing from Liz over the weekend, not even a text message. That put the responsibility on to him. He had to sort it out. A decision had to be made, one way or another.

When Diane Fry called the office a few minutes later, he could tell she was in her car from the amount of road noise. She would be hands free, of course. Fry always followed the rules.

‘Well, I’m on my way back,’ she said.

‘Great. So how are you feeling about things now?’

‘It’s strange. I feel good – though logically I shouldn’t. I learned one thing, Ben, if nothing else.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The people who you think are on your side always turn round and betray you. No one sticks by you all the way. No one.’

Cooper felt his heart thump painfully with the need to speak. But he held his tongue. Now wasn’t the time. But then, would it ever be the time? Their relationship had been
unpredictable ever since she transferred to Derbyshire. To an outsider, it might seem that he had no reason to feel any affection for Diane Fry. And yet, when she asked, he had felt no hesitation in giving her his help. Had she forgotten that so quickly? Or was this just typical of the Diane that he knew, saying honestly what she thought?

‘I should have known, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It’s always the people closest to you who cause you the most harm. Always your family who wreck your life.’

‘I didn’t know you were that close to him, Diane,’ said Cooper. ‘I don’t think you ever mentioned him, even.’

‘Who?’

‘Vincent Bowskill.’

‘Oh, Vince. Well, it was years ago, Ben. Years ago.’

She ought to sound as weary as ever. Yet there was a different quality in her voice. Something must have happened to her in Birmingham, in connection with her past. Cooper supposed it was nothing to do with him, and he might never know what it was. The passage of time could turn a person into someone you didn’t recognize. But that was true the other way round, too. Sometimes, you couldn’t relate to the person they’d been in the past, either.

‘Ben,’ said Fry, ‘Angie wants me to come back to Birmingham. I mean – for good.’

‘But…I thought Birmingham held bad memories for you.’

‘Memories disappear in the end. They do, don’t they? It just takes time.’

‘Oh, well. I suppose that’s where you feel you belong, Diane.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And there’s no reason for you stay in Derbyshire. Is there?’

‘Nothing too important.’

‘So what have you decided to do?’

There was a silence at the other end of the line, apart from the hum of tyres on tarmac. Cooper listened. He listened as
hard as he could, until he became aware that he was holding his breath because he was straining so hard to hear. He needed to hear something. Anything. But still, there was silence.

‘Diane? So what have you –’

But now there was no road noise either. It was the silence of a lost signal.

When she reached Edendale, Fry called first at her flat in Grosvenor Avenue. After just a few days away, her furniture had turned into some kind of huge dust magnet. She wondered why she had ever thought the place was fit to live in.

The house was completely quiet, too. All the students were at college, and the restaurant workers sleeping. A scatter of envelopes lay behind her door. Junk mail to welcome her home. There was no point in staying here.

An hour later, she walked into the CID room at West Street. Gavin Murfin was eating a meat-and-potato pie over his paperwork. There was an officer she didn’t know sitting at the rickety desk in the corner. The window nearest her was spattered with bird droppings. She already felt as though she’d stepped into a parallel universe, where the twenty-first century had ceased to exist.

She tried to work, to plough her way through the mountain of memos and bulletins, to read a few of the emails filling her inbox. But, within a few minutes, Fry felt stifled.

Cooper stopped by her desk and looked at her anxiously.

‘This William Leeson,’ he said quietly. ‘He was your real dad?’

‘No. He might be my father. But he was never my dad.’

Fry thought about what she’d just said. For years, she’d considered Jim and Alice Bowskill her mum and dad. They were the people who’d brought her up when she was a teenager, given her the stability she needed at a critical time in her life. It was true that there had always been the knowledge that they were not her real parents. How could it be otherwise?
And always there had been that nagging question – why had they never adopted her, as they did Vince?

Maybe it was because she’d already been too old when she came to them, or perhaps it was their experience with Angie. But there had been a lack of commitment she’d tried not to resent when she looked at Vince, a hint that they might have expected her to move on somewhere else after a while. Perhaps they’d been surprised that she’d stayed with them so long.

The questions were endless. She really had no way of imagining what it was like, either to have children of your own, or to be caring for someone else’s children. What sacrifices did you have to make, what compromises, what denial of your own feelings?

She stared out of the window at the same old view. The stand of Edendale Football Club, the roofs of the town, a vague line of hills on the horizon. She gazed around the CID room. Ben Cooper, Gavin Murfin. The two young DCs, Irvine and Hurst. DI Hitchens walking down the corridor towards his office. She’d been here in Edendale for years, made herself part of the life of the Peak District, in her own way. Or had she?

She turned to Cooper. ‘Ben, is there any chance we can get out of here for a bit?’

‘Yes, why not?’ he said. ‘Gavin can manage. I think I can get away with taking an hour off. I’m in the good books at the moment.’

Now was Fry’s chance to sit down and tell him everything, the way she’d promised herself she would. She’d said she trusted him, and it was true. There was just one thing she wasn’t sure of – whether Cooper would be able to understand hatred.

Edendale’s river was too shallow for anyone to drown in. Even the mallards were able to stand up to their feathers in the water as it rushed over their feet.

Cooper still felt reluctant to get too close to the water, so they walked slowly along the path where tourists sat enjoying the sun. Fry listened while he told her about the Nields.

‘That family is destroyed now,’ he said. ‘There is no family. Yet some people have the idea that crimes committed on behalf of their offspring are morally justified.’

‘Do parents think like that?’ asked Fry. ‘This man lost his child. If you’re a parent, I would have thought your own children would be the most important thing in the world to you. Your own flesh and blood.’

But she sounded uncertain, as if it was a subject she wasn’t qualified to speak on.

‘Four,’ said Cooper. ‘This is a man who’s lost four children, for different reasons.’

‘What? How?’

‘He lost the baby, he lost Emily – and he’ll lose Alex, at least for a while. And Lauren took herself away from home two years ago, so she might as well be lost.’

‘She might go back,’ said Fry.

‘You think so? How could she forgive her father?’

‘People do.’

Cooper nodded. Well, people did all kinds of things that he could never understand. Of course, DI Hitchens had been right. Parents who killed their children were in the minority. But there was a fine line between the people who did those things and the rest of us.

‘The witness statements were so confusing,’ he said. ‘No one saw the right thing, not even me. They all thought they knew what they’d seen, yet everyone saw something different.’

‘One person’s truth is someone else’s lie,’ said Fry. ‘We all know that.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Ben, you remember me asking you about your childhood memories?’

‘Yes. And you didn’t have any.’

‘No. Well, I realized my most accurate memories consisted of sounds and smells.’

‘You’re right. Mine too. There are certain sounds that are still inside my head, long after the event.’

‘Do you get that as well?’ asked Fry. ‘I thought it was just me.’

Cooper smiled. ‘It’s probably everybody, Diane. We’re not unique, are we?’

‘Far from it.’

Hearing the tone of her voice, Cooper looked at her. He was changing his mind. He decided he quite liked this new Diane Fry, after all.

‘Didn’t you once tell me that you and Angie were taken into care because of allegations of abuse?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then he ought to have been listed on the Sex Offenders’ Register, like Sean Deacon.’

‘It was too long ago. The register was only created in 1997, and it wasn’t retrospective. There could be lots of Sean Deacons and William Leesons walking about still. Men who have been able to leave their past behind.’

When they reached the bridge under the High Street, Cooper turned to her. He had the strong feeling that there was more she wanted to tell him. If only he could find a way of getting her to relax and talk to him properly. There were few opportunities, and this seemed like one of them. Too valuable a moment to miss.

‘So?’ he said. ‘Are you going home, or do you want to come for a drink?’

But Fry was watching the river flow past, her eyes following the water as it came into the town from the hills to the west and headed out again, out beyond the borders of Derbyshire, where it didn’t stop until it finally reached the sea. She had the air of someone experiencing a revelation.

Then Fry looked at him, with a softer expression in her
eyes than Cooper had ever seen before. It was a look, almost, of apology.

‘Home, I think,’ she said.

Cooper sighed. ‘Okay, Diane.’

For a moment, Fry stopped in the car park to allow a coachload of tourists to pass.

‘A permanent promotion, then,’ she said. ‘I bet you’re happy, Ben.’

‘It will help,’ said Cooper. ‘The extra money makes a difference. And the security.’

Fry nodded. ‘It will help you plan for the future. You and Liz probably have…well, lots of plans.’

‘Maybe,’ said Cooper.

But Fry was gazing at Edendale as if she was seeing it for the first time. Or perhaps for the last.

‘Well that’s great,’ she said. ‘So you got what you always wanted.’

Cooper watched her get into her car. She had started the engine and was already driving away down West Street, well out of earshot, before he could think of an answer.