Chapter 9

With daylight beginning to fail in the remoteness of the Peak District, the illuminated digits on my watch indicate 4:17 p.m.  I’ve been walking for close to ten long hours and, not daring to rest for any longer than a few minutes, exhaustion is beginning to take hold.  With the fatigue, coupled with the fever and the pain from my neck, I feel like death.  But despite my suffering, the relief that I remain a free man tempers my mood.  To my astonishment the police helicopter hasn’t appeared, and scanning the horizon in the gathering gloom I can see that there are still no pursuing officers on the ground.

Reaching the ruins of Crookstone Barn, I’m now just a mile short of my ultimate destination.  The final section involves a climb of around two hundred metres up an old Roman Road, a route I’ve taken many times before, including four occasions in the last month, when dropping off supplies.  On what is probably one of the least demanding paths to the summit, I would normally stop and take the time to marvel at the views of the mysterious peak of Lose Hill away to the south, and the awe-inspiring reflections on Ladybower reservoir beyond.  But of course today is different, and with darkness encroaching my only priority is to put one foot in front of the other and drive myself forward to my bolt-hole and to what I hope will be security.

I stop briefly to dig out a Yorkie bar from the bottom of the side pocket of my rucksack and take a huge bite, not so much out of hunger but more in a conscious effort to refuel my weary body.  I immediately start walking again and begin the climb up Crookstone Hill, following the well-trodden track up the east side of Kinder Scout.  Halfway up the hill my progress is abruptly haltered by a sudden searing pain in my calf, and I collapse to the ground.  I’m stunned by the intensity, and in my fatigue-ridden and paranoid state my first thought is that I’ve come under fire from a police marksman.  Reality quickly re-established, I realise that it’s just cramp and begin frantically massaging my lower leg to ease the pain, regretting that I’d not taken more fluids on board during the course of the day.  The pain is unrelenting, but within a minute I’m on my way again, struggling up the hill.

Forty-five minutes later I reach the summit of Kinder Scout just as the last of the daylight disappears.  With the moon hidden by the dense cloud and many miles from the nearest street lighting, I can barely see more than a few metres.  I stumble over the rocks littering the path and I’m desperate to switch on my torch, but now that I’m so close to the bolt-hole I daren’t risk the light giving me away.  Negotiating the darkness and battling against cramp, the final hundred metres to the bolt-hole takes almost as long as the previous half mile, but finally I reach my Nirvana at the fantastically named Madwoman’s Stones.

Sick with fever and exhaustion, I neurotically check over my shoulder one more time.  Reassured that I’m still alone, I remove the rucksack, and with the energy drained from me I slump to my knees and bow my head, almost as if offering a prayer of thanks.  In the darkness, and relying on my sense of touch, I crawl behind the distinctive rock that signals the entrance to my sanctuary.  It’s only now that I switch on the torch, but even so I keep my hand over the lens and it illuminates only half a metre or so in front of me.  I study each rock in detail and compare it with the almost photographic image in my head from when I was last here a little over a week ago.  Mercifully nothing has been disturbed, and I remove the rocks and make my way through the entrance.  The glorious feeling is of returning home after a long trip away to the relief and comfort of familiar surroundings.

Safely inside, I reposition the rocks behind me to secure the entrance and reduce the chances of inadvertent discovery.  The entrance area is about three metres long, 0.5 metres wide and 0.5 metres high; similar to the dimensions of the Graves Park bolt-hole.  But once I’ve negotiated the entrance, the remainder of the subterranean hideaway opens into a metre-high space that’s more than two metres across.  Far bigger than the Graves Park bolt-hole, it feels almost cavernous by comparison.

The Kinder Scout bolt-hole had always been a key feature of my contingency planning, a plan that had evolved from my worries that if for any reason I wasn’t able to reach the airport, I would have a secure place to hide out.  Though I’d always been totally committed to Musgrove’s untimely demise and confident that it was achievable, I was determined not to let complacency compromise my chance of future freedom.  Now, of course, I’m more than a little grateful for the foresight of such a contingency.

I’d always had a clear idea of the perfect bolt-hole.  It would be isolated, but at the same time somewhere I could reach on foot. I would be familiar with the area, and I must be able to live self-sufficiently for several months while the murder was newsworthy or the police investigation at its height.  I’d considered all the remote areas I’d previously visited: the Highlands of Scotland, Dartmoor and the Lake District.  In many ways they were ideal, but getting to these places, a good few hundred miles from home, would be difficult, particularly if the police were giving chase.  Then I remembered my last visit to Kinder Scout in the Peak District just a few days earlier.  The place was isolated and remote, yet within a hard day’s walking, and it had the added advantage that I’d been there numerous times.  Just picturing the area in my mind, I’d remembered a hiking trip to the plateau of Kinder Scout some twenty-five years earlier while in the Boy Scouts.  We’d spent several hours fox-holing, as we called it at the time, a game that involved hiding in and around the numerous stacks of boulders that were strewn across the landscape as if flung by an angry giant.

One of these massive structures in particular was imprinted on my memory.  Bizarrely, it resembled a massive distorted face presumably formed after thousands of years of exposure to the fierce elements.  In school at the time we’d talked about abstract art with our trendy art teacher, and my friends and I had called the distinctive feature Picasso’s Head.  Inside there was a large cavity that had been a godsend in a game of hide-and-seek, and although even as a kid in my early teens it wasn’t big enough to stand fully upright, I suspected it was big enough to hide out in relative comfort.  If I stocked it with food, sufficient for six months or so, and with plenty of fresh water from the nearby streams, it offered the ideal solution.

From the outside the structure is no different to the numerous other haphazard stacks of boulders that litter this part of the “dark peak”.  As a child, I explored many of the piles of rocks while on visits with my parents or more often as a teenager with the Boy Scouts.  We spent hours climbing the stacks, some containing boulders as large as ten metres across, pretending each was the summit of Everest.  In school geography classes we studied the Peak District, and some twenty-five years later I’m amazed how much I can still remember.  I can picture the brown corduroy trousers and checked shirt, and hear the monotone voice of my geography teacher, Mr Willis: “The Peak District covers an area of over five hundred square miles, quiet at the back there, and is bordered by the industrial conurbations of Sheffield and Manchester.  The geology of the land separates the area into the dark and light peaks, the former formed by millstone grit and the latter by carboniferous limestone.”  I smile to myself: after all these years God only knows why I still remember these irrelevant facts.  At the time, as a thirteen-year-old, I was far from thrilled with geography, but studying this area of the District held my boyish interest, largely because of the unusual-sounding names of the landmarks in the area.  I recall one particular geography lesson when Mr Willis had handed out photocopied maps and we’d all been intrigued by place names like Madwoman’s Stones, Mermaid’s Pool, Ringing Roger and Pym Chair, and had tried to imagine the stories behind such evocative names.