Cooper couldn’t get the ideas of the coffin roads out of his head. Sandra Blair and the Corpse Bridge were at the centre of everything, he was sure. The discovery of George Redfearn’s body had distracted most of the attention today, including his. The post-mortem result on Mrs Blair hadn’t helped.

As a consequence his time had been taken up interviewing a middle-class cocaine user and a dodgy enquiry agent, not to mention a giant oak tree. Instead, he should have been trying to find a way of breaking open the group of people Sandra Blair had been involved with. He should have been seeking the weak link he’d mentioned to Luke Irvine.

Cooper could feel his position weakening hour by hour, though. Without more evidence, his justification for concentrating on Sandra Blair and Knowle Abbey was being eroded away and soon his stance would become untenable. And there would be no shortage of people willing to point it out.

As Cooper finished his pasta, Diane Fry was driving through the gates of a modern executive development on the outskirts of Nottingham and drawing up outside her new home. She’d rented a double-bedroom, top-floor apartment with an open-plan lounge and kitchen area, a master bedroom with fitted wardrobes and juliet balcony, and a secure door entry system. The rent was about six hundred pounds a month, but it did have its own parking space. And it was only a stone’s throw from the A52 for her commute into the city.

She sat in the car for a few moments and looked at the other properties, with their neat grass verges and the little access roads between them. There was barely a sign of human occupation, but for lights behind curtained windows and a car parked in front of a garage door.

It was amazingly quiet here – much more peaceful than the house in Edendale, with its constant comings and goings, the endless flow of noisy students and migrant workers, the neighbours who wanted to stop and chat in the street, the friendly family in the corner shop who always smiled and asked after her health.

It didn’t seem right, really. The city ought to be noisier and livelier than a small country town. But she was in the suburbs here, twenty minutes from the city centre with its pubs and shops and theatres. Suburban life had its own rhythm.

Fry let herself into the apartment, remembering to clear the burglar alarm. It was something she’d never had to do in Edendale. But then, she didn’t have anything worth stealing. She’d never felt the urge to surround herself with material possessions. But she lived here now. Perhaps she would feel obliged to go shopping.

She walked to the windows and looked outside. She found herself worrying about where she should put her wheelie bins without making the development look untidy. And she realised with a shock that she must have become middle class.

Fry took off her jacket and dropped her keys on the table. She had to admit that the rooms sounded empty and strange. She turned and looked at the corner of the lounge, where a table stood waiting for her TV set to arrive.

Well, that was one thing that kept her connected to Edendale. There was one small part of her that still hadn’t left.

28

Monday 4 November

It was a typical early morning in November. A frost lay on the ground and a thick mist blanketed the valley. Above the mist the humped backs of Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill were lit by the sun, like whales breaking the surface.

Ben Cooper couldn’t believe he was out so early. He’d been sleeping better for the past few nights, but this morning he woke so promptly that he was out of the house at dawn. Barely half an hour later he was here on the edge of the county, watching the sun rise.

The very top of Parkhouse Hill felt almost razor sharp. With that vertical drop on one side, you wouldn’t want to lose your footing on a day like this. He imagined two people up here together. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? He could see the picture now in his mind and hear the conversation.

‘Watch where you’re walking. It’s slippery.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Here, let me hold on to you…’

It wouldn’t take much. A quick push, a momentary loss of balance. And the result would be serious injury or even death.

He continued to walk until he’d passed through the mist and emerged into sunlight. With a deep breath, Cooper turned and looked northwards. From here the view was stunning. It fired his imagination like no other vista in the Peak District.

Seen from Parkhouse, Chrome Hill was clearly the body of an ancient dinosaur, a dragon sleeping in the Derbyshire landscape. It was half buried in the ground, its sides covered with grass over the centuries. The dragon was quite clear, and obvious. He could see its ridged back and scaly tail. If he leaned a few yards to the left, he’d be able to make out its massive head. Its belly lay beneath those scrubby trees on the southern flank. The rise and fall of its breathing was almost visible to him.

Cooper saw it all so clearly that he even doubted for a moment if the dragon was sleeping at all. Perhaps it was about to rise to its feet with a roar, angered by his unwelcome presence in its lair.

Because that was what this place must be – a dragon’s lair. Parkhouse and Chrome were prehistoric anomalies. One glance told him they belonged to a distant past. They shouldn’t exist here, in the twenty-first century. These strange hills were a fragment of some parallel universe, dropped into Derbyshire by a momentary connection between their two worlds. He was standing in reality, but looking at legend.

Cooper found a flat rock and spread out his map. He marked Bowden, with its chapel and graveyard. Then he located the villages to the east. With a bit of guesswork, he could trace the probable routes of the coffin ways from each of those villages, the twists and turns the mourners would have taken to reach the crossing at the Corpse Bridge. One track came over the Pilsbury Hills and skirted the site of the castle as it descended to the river.

Another of the routes had passed through an area now swallowed up by an enormous limestone quarry. It was one of a whole series of quarries still operating south of Buxton – vast holes blasted out of the rock, their cliff faces carved into ledges like Roman amphitheatres, with diggers and dumper trucks that looked like Dinky toys as they trundled backwards and forwards on the roadways below. They were much larger than the disused quarry, the remains of which he could see now behind Knowle Abbey. They had become massive white limestone basins gleaming in the sun, but bowls of choking dust when the machinery was loading crushed stone. That route from Deeplow had once been a public right of way, now diverted at the request of the quarry owners, in an attempt to keep walkers away from the quarry.

And of course there had been a third coffin road, at least. He could see it on the map as it approached the bridge from the north. But where did it originate? It was hard to tell, but it looked as though mourners taking their dead to their final resting place at Knowle must have followed a very tortuous route. Their way had led across an area of ground now marked with a scatter of isolated structures arranged in a pattern unlike any community or industrial site he knew of in the Peak District.

Cooper could recall the Reverend Latham’s voice describing the funeral. The bearers and the funeral party making their way down the hill, resting the coffin, dividing and coming together again across the water.

But wait a minute. Dividing? Was that what Latham had said? He was quite sure of it. He could hear the words clearly in his head. Dividing and coming together again across the water. Did he mean the funeral party? Surely he must have done. But why would they have divided? They stopped and rested the coffin at the bridge, on the stone put there for the purpose. That was to allow the bearers to change over, the men who’d been carrying the coffin down the hill getting a rest and fresh shoulders taking up the load. So what else happened there?