one hand, plastic carrier bag in the other. The dog dug its heels in and stopped to water a lamp post.
‘Nothing. Nothing in sight here.’
‘He’s long gone,’ said Murfin. ‘He was legging it. Didn’t you see him?’
‘No.’
While his dog performed its business, the old man stood and stared at her defiantly like some ancient accusing angel.
‘Bloody Hell, Gavin,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve lost him.’
For the past half hour, Cooper had been listening to the yelp and wail. The modern tones of emergency response vehicles, howling up the dale one after another. The noises merged inside his head with an echo of the screaming. The noise still bounced off the sides of his skull in the same way it had rico-cheted among the caves and pinnacles of Dovedale.
He still didn’t know who had screamed. Perhaps it was the mother. Or it might just have been some random bystander, reacting with horror to a glimpse of a body in the water. A small, white face. Long streams of blood, swirling in the current like eels…
‘Their name is Nield.’
The tall uniformed sergeant was called Wragg. Cooper remembered him vaguely, and thought he’d probably turned up at a couple of major incidents in E Division when he was still a PC. He was fairly recently promoted, and was based at Ashbourne section now. He was wearing a yellow high-vis jacket over his uniform, and had removed his cap to reveal close-cropped fair hair. He looked harassed, but it might just be the heat.
‘Local?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes, by some miracle. Among all these crowds, you’d think it’d be city people who suffered an incident like this. You know, the sort who’ve never actually seen a river before. Folk who don’t think you can drown in water unless there’s a sign telling you so.’
‘You’ve seen too many tourists.’
‘You got that right,’ said Wragg. ‘I never want to catch duty on a bank holiday again, I can tell you. Do you know how long it took me to get my car through those jams? You won’t be able to move down here later.’
‘That will be somebody else’s headache.’
‘I wish.’
Cooper was leaning against Wragg’s car. He had a clear view up the gorge towards the weirs, and beyond them, the pool where he’d pulled the body out of the water.
‘How old is she?’ he said.
‘Eight.’
‘She’s only eight years old?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was here with her parents. How the hell did it happen?’
‘They say their dog went into the water to fetch a stick. A golden retriever, it is. It seems the girl ran in after the dog. Only the dog came out.’
Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘Where are the parents now?’
‘Gone with her to hospital.’
‘They surely don’t think she’ll be revived. Do they?’
Wragg shaded his eyes with a hand as he watched some members of the public being shepherded away from the scene.
‘You don’t give up in these circumstances,’ he said. ‘That’s the very last thing you do.’
Events had moved pretty quickly once the girl’s body had been recovered from the water. Cooper had carried her to the bank and laid her on the grass. Then a woman had come forward from the crowd of bystanders, saying she was a nurse. Cooper had handed over resuscitation efforts to her, and she kept it going until the fast-response paramedic arrived, closely followed by the ambulance and Sergeant Wragg and his colleagues from the Ashbourne section station.
‘We’ll need a statement from you, of course,’ said Wragg.
‘But it will do later. We’re trying to catch as many witnesses as we can among the public before they disappear.’
‘Of course.’
‘But there doesn’t seem any doubt it was an accidental drowning.’
‘There was blood, though,’ said Cooper. ‘Blood in the water. She had an injury on her head.’
‘She probably fell and hit her head on a stone. That would explain why she drowned in such a shallow depth.’
‘“Probably“?’
‘There’s hardly going to be any trace evidence,’ said Wragg irritably. ‘The stone is somewhere out there being washed by thousands of gallons of water every second. We’ll see what eye-witness statements say, but I think you’ll find that’s it.’
‘Yes, all right.’
There had been no blood on the girl when he’d picked her up. But Cooper remembered seeing the wound now, an abrasion and broken skin on her forehead. The toughest thing he’d ever done was putting that body down, handing the little girl over to someone else. It felt like abandoning her to her fate. For some ridiculous reason, his instinct had been telling him he was the only person who could save her.
It was strange what your mind could do in a crisis. Sometimes, the rational part of your brain cut out altogether and you acted entirely on instinct, with no conscious thought involved. But occasionally your mind presented you with odd flashes of information that didn’t even seem to be relevant at the time.
Right now, Cooper was remembering images from the last hour or so. Paler rocks under the surface, streams of blood swirling in the current like eels. Jagged limestone spires at crazy angles. A dead, white face with floating hair. And a man with his hands raised, water dripping from his fingers.
‘Anyway, the Nield family…’ said Wragg, consulting his notebook. ‘Father is a supermarket manager in Ashbourne. Mum is a teacher. There’s a boy, about thirteen years old, name of Alex. They’re all in a state of shock, as you can imagine.’
‘And the girl?’ said Cooper.
‘What?’
‘The girl. You haven’t mentioned her name. She must have a name.’
Wragg looked taken aback.
‘Of course. Her name is Emily – Emily Nield. She’s eight years old.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s what I wanted to know.’
He was aware of the noise of tourist cars rattling over the cattle grids out of Dovedale. Streams of scree had spilled from Thorpe Cloud like ash from a small volcano, slithering slowly towards the valley bottom. Two spaniels splashed in the water, scattering the mallards.
Many visitors were still clustered on the smooth, green slopes of the lower dale, where the limestone grassland had been grazed short by rabbits and sheep. Some were making their way down to the car park from the slopes
