for more signs of civilization in the bare Dark Peak landscape of peat moors and heather. His attention was caught by a small, tree-lined valley and the glimpse of a church tower.
‘What’s over there?’ he said.
‘That? Oh, that’s Withens.’
Cooper could hardly see the village itself. It seemed to be lying in the bottom of a hollow, slipped casually into a narrow cleft in the moors. There were trees above the village on the lower slopes, through which the roofs of houses were barely visible. But the valley was so narrow that it looked as though the two facing slopes were only waiting for the right moment to slide back together and crush the village completely, and all its inhabitants with it.
‘Withens,’ said Cooper, trying the sound of the name in his mouth as he might taste an unfamiliar morsel of food, not sure whether it was going to be bitter or sweet, soft on the teeth or difficult to chew.
Above the village was a moorland plateau, a gloomy blend of dark khakis and greens, with no sign of the purple flowers of the heather that would bring colour in the summer. Much of the landscape up there would be quagmire – a wet morass of peat bog that shifted underfoot, sucking at the soles of boots and clinging to trousers. Across the valley, Bleaklow Mountain stood right on the watershed of England, and attracted sixty inches of rain a year to its wastes of haggs and groughs.
‘I thought we’d go down to the village and take a look when we’ve finished here,’ said Udall. ‘You might be interested to see it. Withens has its own problems. As it happens, the local vicar reported a break-in yesterday.’
‘Fine.’
Cooper noticed a pair of black shapes in the distance, circling over the moor. He turned the binoculars towards them, grateful for any sign of life in the landscape.
But this wasn’t the sort of life he welcomed. They were carrion crows. Though he couldn’t see what had attracted them, he guessed they probably had their eye on a weak lamb. Sometimes, before shearing, their prey might be an adult sheep that had rolled over and couldn’t get up again because of the weight of the unshorn fleece on its back. But in the spring it was the sickliest lambs that the crows were looking for as they flapped and circled over the moors. Just now, their diet would consist mostly of young grouse and the eggs of other birds. But a weak lamb was a great bonus. Its carcass would last them for days.
If they’d found a lamb up there, then they would land in a little while and perch on a handy rock as they waited patiently for it to weaken enough to be helpless. Then they would begin to work on its eyes, picking at the white flesh as if they were delicacies that had to be eaten fresh. And once the lamb was blind, the crows could eat the rest of it at their leisure, while it died.
Cooper lowered the binoculars and looked up at the dark bulk of the hills beyond Withens.
‘Tracy, have you noticed the smoke?’ he said.
Udall followed his gaze. ‘Hell!’
Black clouds were billowing across a wide stretch of the moor, with an occasional flicker of flame visible behind them. The seat of the fire looked as though it might be just below the horizon. PC Udall went off to her car to use the radio, but was back in a couple of minutes.
‘Moorland fire. They think it was started by some kids on a school outing from Manchester. The fire service are turning out all the crews they can muster, but it’s right on the summit above Crowden, so it’s pretty inaccessible. The poor bloody firefighters will have to do the last half-mile on foot with their equipment. They’re also saying they might have to mobilize the helicopter to bomb it with water from the reservoirs.’
‘Beyond our remit, anyway,’ said Cooper.
‘Thank God.’
A gust of wind blew along the road and another shower spattered their faces. But there was too little rain to help the firefighters.
‘I think they’re ready for us down there,’ said Udall.
‘OK.’
Cooper took one last look at the moors above Withens. The smoke was spreading in the wind rolling low over the heather. But in front of it, blacker even than the smoke, the two carrion crows were still circling.
Even before the sun had risen on Withens Moor, Neil Granger had known he wasn’t alone. He had been standing with his back to one of the air shafts above the old railway tunnels, facing east towards the approaching dawn. There was nothing but air between his face and the black ridge of Gallows Moss, where the light would soon begin to creep up among the tors.
Every sound from the surrounding valleys had reached his ears – a bird splashing out of the water on one of the reservoirs in Longdendale, the growl of an engine on the A628. Even the slightest movement of the wind stirred the coarse grass, like fingers groping for his presence in the darkness. The air was so clean that he could taste the first vapour rising from the dew on the heather, like the tang of cold metal in his mouth. But in a few minutes, the dawn would take away the darkness and the dew.
At first, the sounds he heard nearby could have been the shifting of small pieces of stone on the slope behind him. The scree was loose, and the changing temperature could easily make the stones move against each other. But gradually Neil became aware that someone had walked up to the air shaft behind him. Now, he thought, they were probably resting on the other side of the high, circular wall.
‘Well, I’d given up on you,’ said Neil. ‘I was starting to think no one was coming.’
His voice dropped into the valley, carried away on the wind. There was no response from the darkness, and he smiled.
‘It’s a bit of a steep climb, isn’t it? It creased me up completely.’
He expected to hear someone gasping for breath. But there was nothing – only the darkness and the distant sounds from the valley.
‘I’m so unfit after the winter that, by the time I got to the top, I thought I was having a heart attack.’
He paused, but still there was nothing.
‘I thought I was going to die up here, and nobody would know. If I’d died and you hadn’t come, then no one would have found me for days.’
Neil glanced at Gallows Moss. A pale wash of colour was starting to touch the clouds. He raised his voice a little, as if the appearance of the light had revealed something that he hadn’t suspected until now.
‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘Do you want a hand?’
Neil waited in the silence, no longer facing east, but looking back over his shoulder into the west. Away from the light and towards the darkness. Something was different. The wind no longer felt refreshingly cool, but was cold enough to make him shiver. The sensations against his face weren’t like gentle fingers, but sharp claws scratching his skin. The air didn’t taste of the dew, but of an unnamed fear. Neil wondered if he would ever hear the first bird calling at the sight of the rising sun. It had been only the darkness that had made him feel safe, after all. And in a moment, the dawn would take away the darkness.
‘Yes, I thought I was going to die up here,’ he said.
The first blow that hit him was so unexpected – like the world falling in, like a ton of stone toppling on to him from the air shaft, or a
