Secrets of Death Page 8

  It was impossible to stop at that point on the road as it began its descent towards Hathersage. In the year since, doing that same journey, Burgess had seen many brake lights come on as he followed visitors’ cars into the Hope Valley, with drivers hitting the pedal in that instinctive reaction to an astonishing panorama suddenly opening up in front of them. He could see them looking for a pull-in where they could reach for the camera to capture the vista. But there was nowhere safe to stop. Surprise View was so beautiful that it was dangerous.

  So that was the reason for the car park. It was located a hundred yards or so before the bend, tucked into the hillside below the twisted rock tors of Mother Cap and Over Owler, where the broken slopes marked the site of an abandoned millstone quarry. Its location meant you had to know what you were approaching, otherwise you were past the bend on the descent into Hathersage and you had to circle all the way back.

  That suited Gordon Burgess. It meant fewer random visitors getting lost and asking questions. Those people ended up down in the valley bottom.

  A jet airliner roared overhead, the voice of a climber drifted clear in the air, a partridge rattled in the heather. In the distance, a rocky edge curved and twisted like a giant snake, two figures visible on top of the rocks, near the trig point.

  Looking up the Hope Valley, he couldn’t quite make out the cement works at Hope, which visitors sometimes complained about as a blot on the landscape, ruining an otherwise perfect view. Yet the cement works were a major employer for people who lived in the area, as were the limestone quarries, the massive excavations of which scarred the hillsides. Without people living and working in the national park all the year round, this landscape wouldn’t exist.

  Three vehicles were already in the car park, clustered close to the entrance: a Fiat Panda, a Peugeot Escapade, a Citroën Cactus. Burgess wondered about the names and whose job it was to come up with new models. There were so many that they no longer seemed to bear any relevance to what they were – just machines on wheels, after all.

  Perhaps the naming of cars symbolised the whole of life. All surface gloss and pretence, with no meaning behind it. No meaning at all. It had always baffled him that so many people went through their lives not recognising that fact but accepting the meaningless gloss. They thought it was important what kind of car they drove, what letters were on the number-plate, what postcode they lived in, what brand of clothes they wore.

  Of course, a few like him saw through it all, recognising the utter meaninglessness of life. Certainly of their own lives. He thanked his lucky stars that he’d found that out in the end, learned that he wasn’t alone in the world.

  Lucky stars? Well, maybe he could thank God soon and do it in person. If that was what lay beyond death.

  There was just one last goodbye to say. The second secret of death. He hoped that everyone understood it, particularly his mother. He’d been saying goodbye to her for years, in a way. She just hadn’t noticed yet.

  He watched a couple leave the Peugeot with a spaniel on a lead. They walked towards a belt of trees and on up the hill towards the moor. None of the visitors had paid the parking charge yet. Surprise View had a card-only payment machine, and the screen was unreadable early in the morning until the sun reached it and cleared the condensation from inside the glass.

  But Burgess was going to pay, when he could. It was £4.50 for the day on his credit card. He wouldn’t leave with a debt to his name. Especially not when he knew the money would go towards preserving the landscape of the national park.

  He’d arrived early to make sure of his place. He didn’t want to be stuck in some far corner staring at a patch of bracken and an overflowing litter bin. It was bad enough being on your own without that. He was here because it was his favourite place. The only place in the world he wanted to be right now.

  A muffled thump in the back of the car reminded him that he wasn’t entirely alone. There was one last job to do.

  * * *

  Parts of Edendale were crumbling rapidly. And it wasn’t just old age, though the town had existed for several centuries. From what Cooper had heard, it was mostly due to the number of cars on the roads. The sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide in exhaust fumes combined with rain to form an acid cocktail, a toxic mixture that ate away at sedimentary rocks like sand-stone.

  Cooper could see the results in some of the buildings around the market square as he drove through Edendale from Foolow that morning. The walls of the town hall and the tourist information centre had been partially dissolved up to about knee height. The process had left dangerous-looking holes with a few trickles of sand spilling out of them, as if some monstrous creature had chewed on the tastier bits of the buildings, licking the hollows smooth and spitting out the grit.

  According to an article in the Eden Valley Times, the district council had considered using a preservative spray, in the hope of saving the most vulnerable areas of the town from collapse. They’d been deterred by one factor – the spray made buildings look pink.

  They were probably right. The people of Edendale weren’t ready to live in a pink town. But in the end, it might prove better than no town at all.

  For Cooper, the best thing about Edendale was that it still retained its own character, a proper sense of place. It had its distinctive smells and sounds and sights, an accumulation of sensations that gave it a unique identity, so that you always knew where you were. The same couldn’t be said of many towns and cities, where the high streets had begun to look indistinguishable.

  The businesses in the market square were mostly banks and building societies, estate agents and pubs, with a town hall clock that always sounded too loud in an empty square, when its clangs reverberated off the taller buildings.

  There was a baker’s shop in Clappergate, with wicker baskets, a painted milk churn and a delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions standing outside on the pavement to attract customers. There used to be a New Age shop there too. You could always tell you were near it from the smell of aromatherapy oils and scented candles. But the scent had gone now, along with the Tarot cards and crystals. Other towns were considered more New Age than Edendale.

  Cooper particularly liked the narrow lanes and arcades in the oldest part of Edendale, between Eyre Street and the market square. He could wander for hours among the shops selling pine furniture, chocolates and malt whisky, antiques, coffee and books.

  Edendale’s character made it attractive to outsiders, and not just tourists. Recently a television crew had been filming around the town. Their vehicles and equipment blocked the streets around the market square, attracting crowds of spectators but annoying shopkeepers, who complained they were losing business, and residents, who had to step over lengths of cable snaking across the pavements.

  At West Street, Cooper checked his internal emails and phone messages, read some memos and signed a few reports. There was one memo that he didn’t fully understand, but which seemed to refer to what Detective Superintendent Branagh had been telling him yesterday: ‘Supplementing staff resources’. It sounded good, but the devil was always in the detail with these things. He would withhold judgement until he saw for himself what it really meant. If he walked into the CID room one day and he had extra staff, he might believe it.

  Currently on his desk was an abstraction request, already approved. Three days ago, immigration officers acting on intelligence had raided two local restaurants and arrested four men. The raids took place in Underbank and Lowbridge at about 6 p.m. Staff were questioned to check if they had the right to live and work in the UK. Taken into custody were a Nepalese man and a Pakistani man at one restaurant, and two Pakistanis from the other. All had overstayed their student visas.

  One man was detained while steps were taken to remove him from the UK. The others were ordered to report regularly to the Home Office while their cases were progressed. Businesses were liable to a financial penalty of up to £20,000 per illegal worker, unless they could show that the correct pre-employm
ent checks had been carried out.

  According to the intel, these arrests could be just the tip of the iceberg. Reports suggested that an organised scheme was being run from a location somewhere in Derbyshire, supplying illegal workers for restaurants, bars and takeaways. It was one of the difficulties for intelligence teams and divisional officers alike that many migrant workers were perfectly legal if they came from a European Union country or had the correct documentation.

  So his detective sergeant, Dev Sharma, had been requested and assigned to liaise with the immigration officers. They wanted his experience in the city of Derby, where he’d been based before his transfer to E Division.

  Extractions were a headache when you were trying to manage a small team. They were unpredictable and hard to refuse.

  Cooper made sure his DCs were occupied, which was hardly necessary, and he collected Carol Villiers.

  ‘Where first?’ she said.

  ‘Monsal Head, I thought. Before it gets busy.’

  ‘Kuzneski,’ said Villiers.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Cooper drove as they headed south out of town on the Buxton Road. It climbed and climbed until it reached a plateau where the limestone quarries competed with the moors as background scenery. The stone slates of the roofs were gradually left behind, petering out along the course of the River Eden.

  Edendale sat astride a wide valley in the gap between the two halves of the Peak District. Nowhere was the contrast between the White Peak and the Dark Peak more striking than on the climb southwards out of Edendale, past the last of the houses, past the sports field and the religious retreat run by the Sisters of Our Lady.

  It promised to be another warm day and their visors were down against the sun already glaring through the windscreen. Cooper could barely keep his eyes off the landscape as he drove. It was a constant pleasure to escape from Edendale into the surrounding hills, where the changing moods of the scenery always fascinated him.

  Of course, appearances could be deceptive. Even the White Peak bore its scars – the great crude gashes where the limestone quarries and opencast workings had been blasted and ripped from its hills.

  ‘David Kuzneski vanished from his home in Totley without telling anyone where he was going,’ said Villiers, reminding Cooper of the case. ‘He took the family car and disappeared without a word.’

  ‘And, unlike so many cases where someone goes missing, his wife was worried straight away,’ remembered Cooper.

  ‘That’s right. She phoned the police and tried to convince the call handler that her husband was a vulnerable person. But David Kuzneski was forty years old and therefore low priority. He wouldn’t be classed as a missing person for a while.’

  Cooper reached the A623 and headed west to Wardlow Mires, turning the Toyota on to a road that skirted the hills above Cressbrook Dale towards Ashford-in-the-Water.

  It was almost impossible for him to drive around this area now without passing locations he’d been brought to while pursuing a murder inquiry, often in the company of Diane Fry. Here was the village of Wardlow, with its old red phone box still standing near the church. And not far beyond lay the little overgrown graveyard called the Infidels’ Cemetery.

  ‘And that was too long in this case,’ he said.

  ‘He was found close to death at Monsal Head before a search had even begun.’

  Cooper nodded. From the moment he left home, David Kuzneski had been given time to do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was to end his own life.

  When he saw the first visitors’ cars parked in a lay-by, with their owners pointing cameras over the wall, Cooper knew he was at Monsal Head. A few yards further down the hill, he turned into the viewpoint car park by the Monsal Head Hotel.

  Unlike many locations in the national park, you could park all night at Monsal Head for no more than a pound. One of the parking areas overlooked Monsal Dale itself and the spectacular viaduct, with a narrow road plunging down to the River Wye and twisting its way north along the valley bottom towards Cressbrook.

  Cooper and Villiers got out of the car. Behind them, the hotel, Hobb’s Café and the Stables Bar were all doing good business. A queue had already formed at the ice cream van in the corner of the car park.

  Hobb’s Café. Cooper smiled to himself. Only in Derbyshire would a café be named after an evil spirit. The rock formation known as Hobb’s House was on the hillside a few hundred yards north of the viaduct. He could see its outline from here, though he suspected most of the visitors who came to Monsal Head weren’t aware of it, or what it was said to be. In this case, Hobb was a giant who emerged at night and threshed the farmers’ corn – but only as long as you rewarded him with a bowl of cream.

  It was a glorious vista from here, though, with the river forming a dramatic horseshoe below the Iron Age hillfort of Fin Cop. Upstream, the peaceful river turned to a raging torrent under the rock spires of Chee Tor. Here, the River Wye wound through a peaceful dense green landscape.

  And above it was the dramatic Headstone Viaduct, three hundred feet long, with five fifty-foot-span arches. It soared forty feet above the dale to connect with the opposite hillside. It had once served the Midland Railway, though it was now part of a walking and cycling trail.

  The building of this railway line had been a spectacular example of bold Victorian engineering. They had cut a route directly through the limestone landscape of the Wye Valley between Hassop and Buxton, creating no fewer than eight tunnels, two major viaducts and several smaller ones within a distance of just eleven miles. Yet the line had lasted hardly more than a century. In the 1960s it had become a victim of the Dr Beeching cuts.

  When it was built, this viaduct had been a particularly controversial project. The writer John Ruskin complained bitterly that the view had been destroyed purely so that ‘every fool in Buxton could be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’. It was a passage often quoted, even today.

  Nature had performed its magic since Ruskin’s time. The raw slashes of the original cuttings had been covered over by vegetation and merged back into the landscape. Now the viaduct was a tourist attraction in its own right, forming the focal point of the spectacular view. People came from both Buxton and Bakewell to admire the vista from Monsal Head, as well as from much further afield.

  David Kuzneski had chosen well, thought Cooper. When the tourists and ice cream customers had gone home, there was no better place to spend a few quiet minutes. Even if those minutes were going to be your last. Or perhaps especially if they were your last.

  ‘Where exactly was he found, Carol?’ he asked.

  ‘On one of the benches. Just stretched out as if he was asleep, according to the member of the public who came across him.’

  ‘And the cause of death was lithium carbonate poisoning.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  It wasn’t a very common form of suicide. Lithium was sold under several brand names and was used for the treatment of recurrent bipolar depression and affective disorders. It evened out the highs and lows, the mania and depression. In some cases, it was added to the medication for patients who didn’t respond to anti-depressants alone.

  David Kuzneski had been prescribed lithium carbonate for a bipolar condition. Yet he’d also bought an extra sixty 300mg lithium carbonate tablets for less than thirty pounds on a US internet site, without the need for a prescription.

  Kuzneski had taken the tablets as he sat on this bench at Monsal Head. He had still been alive when found, but only just. Despite medical intervention, he was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

  In the viewpoint car park, a series of wooden benches overlooked the dale and the viaduct. Each bench had a plaque attached to it, dedicated by families in memory of some deceased relative.

  ‘This one,’ said Villiers.

  The bench David Kuzneski had chosen bore a plaque. Cooper stood looking at it, reading the words.

  Rest here a while, it said. When you go, leav
e all your troubles behind.

  Upperdale was close to Monsal Head. It lay just down in the valley, a slightly hair-rising drive along a narrow, winding road, where he had to dodge tourists’ cars coming the other way, as well as walkers and cyclists.

  At the site of Alex Denning’s suicide, they found a dozen cars tucked into a pull-in deep in the dale, their bonnets pointing towards the river. Beyond Upperdale, the Monsal Trail ran on through two more tunnels at Cressbrook and Litton.

  ‘Sleeping pills. Benzodiazepines. They’re not as dangerous as barbiturates used to be. Well, not unless you take them in combination with alcohol or an opioid such as methadone or tramadol,’ said Villiers.

  ‘Which did Alex Denning combine them with?’

  ‘Both. Meth and a bottle of vodka.’

  ‘He would have experienced all the symptoms of impairment of the central nervous system. Intoxication, drowsiness, lack of balance, slurred speech.’

  ‘Someone who saw him earlier on at Upperdale said he was drunk. They thought he’d stretched out on the grass to sleep it off.’

  ‘I suppose that’s exactly what he did,’ said Cooper. ‘In a way.’

  Who had called sleep ‘the brother of death’? It was terrifyingly true. In a way, we died every night, he thought. He wondered how many people went to sleep at night not feeling entirely sure that they’d wake up in the morning. Or whether they wanted to.

  But people craved certainty, didn’t they? A definite end. The finality of death. That might be preferable to the ceaseless uncertainty of life.

  Alex Denning’s home was in a seven-storey block, six storeys of flats above a row of garages and service areas at ground level. It was almost opposite the Park Farm Shopping Centre, an outdoor precinct where Cooper could see a Boots, a Wilko and a Co-op.

  From a communal entrance, he walked into a tiny hallway. A sitting room, a bedroom and a kitchen with modern units. The neutral decor in all the rooms looked quite recent. The bedroom even had a small balcony overlooking the shopping centre car park. The place looked as though it must have come unfurnished. The contents were sparse and randomly matched. The sofa might have come from one of those charity shops selling second-hand furniture. Yet the TV screen was new and attached to a Sky box.