LITMIR.BIZ

       4

      By full light, black-headed gulls had been drifting up from the reservoirs in the valley, scavenging for the previous night’s roadkill.

      Every day, on his way into Edendale from Bridge End Farm, Ben Cooper had got used to seeing the squashed and bloodied remains of the wildlife slaughtered by traffic during the hours of darkness. Dead foxes and badgers, rabbits and pheasants, hedgehogs and stoats littered the roadway and the verges. Some of the corpses looked quite fresh until they were flattened into the tarmac by the rush of vehicles. Then their skins burst and their intestines were spread on the road, and it was impossible to tell what species they had belonged to.

      It was a pretty hard lesson for the wildlife to learn. The road was part of their territory at night, attracting them because the tarmacked surface retained heat longer than the surrounding landscape. By dawn, though, the road had become a different world entirely, when it was occupied by thundering juggernauts and hurtling cars. As a battle for territory, it was the most unequal of struggles, and the fate of the victims was inevitable and predictable.

      Nature never accepted defeat, though. She might lose a battle, but never the war. The gulls and the crows, and a thousand smaller scavengers, made sure the corpses didn’t go to waste. Cooper had always thought it would be a good idea to have nature on your side, rather than against you.

      ‘And there it is,’ said PC Tracy Udall. ‘Way down there is Withens.’

      She passed Cooper the binoculars.

      ‘Not very scenic, is it?’ he said.

      Udall shrugged. ‘It’s just Withens,’ she said.

      The vantage point they had found was a lay-by on an unnamed minor road off the A628 – the only place, according to PC Udall, where Withens could be seen without actually being in it.

      By 6.30 in the morning, the A628 was already busy with a constant stream of lorries and cars. But, apart from the traffic, there seemed to be no signs of human life for miles along the route through the Longdendale valley. Close to where they had turned off, there had been a pull-in on the left at the top of the hill, with an orange emergency phone provided for stranded motorists. But that was about it for civilization. As if to make the point, a sign by the roadside said: ‘Sheep for seven miles’.

      To the north, above Withens, Cooper could see one of the stone air shafts for the old railway tunnels standing on a rise in a fold of the hills. Around the shaft, Withens Moor seemed to be suffering badly from erosion. Where the last layer of peat had been worn away, the bedrock was bare. Ice and rain might loosen the rock eventually, so that it slipped and crashed down on to the houses in the valley or closed the road, as had happened at Castleton.

      ‘You’re right, it’s not very scenic,’ said Udall. ‘It’s certainly not what the tourist brochures want. There doesn’t seem to be any colour, for a start.’

      Cooper sighed. Back home at Bridge End Farm, in the limestone country of the White Peak, the banks of dazzling yellow gorse were in flower now. Many of the fields were a mass of white daisies or golden dandelions, and the umbrellas of wild garlic plants were spreading along the roadside verges, with the pale blue stars of forget-me-nots underfoot.

      The warm, damp weather conditions of early spring had caused an explosion of plant growth and animal activity, with the landscape changing by the day. The swallows were nesting, the first cuckoo calling. And just now, there were swathes of bluebells in the broadleaf woods of the Eden Valley. The bluebells had to flower and seed before the tree canopy cast shade over the woodland floor, so every year they had a race against time to reproduce and survive. In this weather, even their colour would be changing – blue when the sky was overcast, and purple in sunlight.

      But here was Withens, where the only colour visible was provided by the red canisters of propane gas against the outside walls of some of the houses. So there was no mains gas supply here. Probably it had been one of the last places to get electricity, too, despite the fact that the National Grid power cables ran right through the hillside. As for solar power – in Withens it would have been a joke in poor taste. The lie of the land meant that the sun would rise behind one hill to the south east and disappear behind another to the south west, without touching Withens. No wonder the gardens he could glimpse through the trees had yet to show signs of colour.

      ‘So what’s the situation here?’ said Cooper.

      ‘Well, some of the homes have been suffering from the same problems we’re getting elsewhere – recurrent burglaries, often with associated criminal damage. Particularly the more isolated homes, which are less overlooked. There’s one just past the village itself, which has been a particular target. Also the church, I’m afraid.’

      ‘Oh yes. You said the vicar had reported a break-in.’

      Cooper could see the tower of the church above the trees. It seemed to stand a little away from the village, on the near side of the river. It was a short, square tower, in the Norman style, but nothing like so old as that. There were genuine Saxon and Norman towers in Derbyshire, but this wasn’t one of them. He estimated its date as the middle of the nineteenth century.

      Cooper turned his attention back to Withens.

      ‘You said some of the homes have been targeted. So presumably others haven’t. Is there any pattern there?’

      Udall hesitated. ‘Possibly.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘There’s a problem family in the village, by the name of Oxley. Dad is the type who makes his living in a way you can’t quite pin down. There’s an extended family and loads of kids, most of them known to us – not to mention Social Services. There’s one little lad who got himself excluded from his primary school for anti-social behaviour. You might have seen something about him in the newspapers. They couldn’t identify him, of course, but they started to call him the “Tiny Terror”.’

      ‘It does ring a bell,’ said Cooper.

      ‘I’ll show you when we can get down into the village,’ she said. ‘That would be the best way.’

      This bit of the county was hardly accessible from anywhere else in Derbyshire. It was much easier to get to it from Sheffield on the Yorkshire side, or even from Hyde on the Manchester side. But in the 1970s, someone in an office in London had ruled that it should be in Derbyshire, so that was the way it was. Which county you lived in could make a difference of several thousand pounds to the value of your house.

      Cooper looked down at the village once more, feeling that there was something he hadn’t paid proper attention to. Just below the bridge near the church, the river widened into a pool where a few willows were still bare now, but would surely add a bit of greenery later in the summer. Here, the bank was full of nettles and rosebay willowherb. But there was something strange about the pool.

      He focused PC Udall’s binoculars on the water. But in fact, he could barely see the water, because the pool was half-full of large, flat objects. They seemed to be rectangular wooden

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