Josh Lane had been going out every day. He wasn’t working, just taking a trip somewhere different each morning. If the rain had stopped, he went for a walk. Sometimes even when it was still raining too. Then he would stop for lunch in a pub somewhere.
As he followed Lane’s silver grey Honda Civic from Derwent Park that Friday morning, Ben Cooper wondered what was going through Lane’s mind when he did this. It was the sort of thing he imagined he would do himself, if he was facing the possibility of a spell in prison. Taking a look at the world around him before he lost it for a while. Getting the most out of that last taste of freedom.
But he couldn’t bear the idea that he and Lane might think the same way. That wasn’t possible. He wanted this man to be eaten up by guilt. He needed to believe that Josh Lane was desperately seeking peace of mind that he might never get. And, if Cooper had his way, he’d make sure he never got it.
Peace was certainly available in many of these places, if your mind was in the right condition to see it. Today, Lane was driving the short distance up the A6 into Cromford, where he turned into the centre of the village at the traffic lights and headed up the long hill going south.
The road from Wirksworth ran steeply down into Cromford, carrying all telltale signs of nearby quarrying. The unnaturally white surface of the carriageway and the presence of crash barriers on every bend were the clues. Lorries loaded with asphalt and aggregates ground their way up and down this hill every day. No matter how well they were sheeted, or how often their wheels were washed, they left their traces on the roads as reminders of the quarry’s existence. The barriers were there to protect residents living directly in the path of the lorries. If the brakes failed as one of them descended the hill, it would turn into an uncontrollable twelve-ton missile capable of demolishing a house.
As they passed the huge tarmac works at Dean Hollow, Cooper heard the siren go off – a long first blast, giving a two-minute warning of firing. The blasting engineer would be ready with his detonator and firing mechanism, sodium chloride fertiliser pellets packed into tubes to create almost instantaneous blasts. He knew from experience that the vibration would be felt down in the valley.
When they reached Steeple Grange, Cooper thought Lane was heading into Wirksworth. A wide arc of abandoned quarries curved west and north of the little town, forming a backdrop to many of the views over it. Several of those old quarries had been absorbed into the site of the National Stone Centre, which occupied fifty acres of land between the Middleton and Cromford roads.
During the Carboniferous period three hundred million years ago, Wirksworth had been under a tropical sea, which left it with vast quantities of limestone. Centuries of quarrying had left their scars on the area. But almost all of the quarries were disused and derelict now, forming Derbyshire’s own lunar landscape. You could step off a track, or out of a meadow, and find yourself walking on a dead surface of dust and rock, your view blocked on every side by coarse limestone walls, as if you were standing in a crater on the moon.
The great upheaval for Wirksworth came in the 1920s with the reopening of Dale Quarry, known by local people as ‘The Big Hole’. Mechanisation had arrived, and a vast stone crusher was installed. Dust, dirt and noise polluted the heart of the town. Anyone who could afford to leave abandoned Wirksworth, taking commerce with them. Jobs were lost, buildings fell into disrepair, fine old houses were left to decay. What had been one of Derbyshire’s most important towns was blighted.
But in the 1970s the town had been chosen for regeneration. The Wirksworth Project had restored buildings that were falling down, and which now became part of the town’s historic character. With regeneration came new businesses, and a different type of resident had moved in. It had become the sort of place that he and Liz might have wanted to live in.
Cooper was almost caught by surprise when Josh Lane’s car slowed and indicated right near the Lime Kiln pub, well short of Wirksworth town centre.
‘Damn. Where is he going?’ Cooper said to himself, as the Honda waited for traffic to clear. It would be too obvious to pull up right on Lane’s rear bumper for the turn, so Cooper drove on a few yards and stopped in front of a row of neat stone cottages, each with its front door painted a different colour – one green, one blue, the next black – but every one with the same brass urn-shaped knocker.
When Lane had completed his turn, Cooper reversed into an opening between the cottages and followed the grey Honda into Middleton Road. He found himself in front of the ornate gates of Stoney Wood, a park created from the remains of one of the quarries. Lane’s car was in the pull-in by the gates, and Lane himself was already out of it. Cooper turned his head away as he drove past and parked on the grass verge near Middlepeak granite works.
He gave Lane a few minutes, then cautiously made his way through the entrance of Stoney Wood. The slopes of the old quarry had been planted with trees and filled with artworks. Lane was walking up the steepest part of the hill, past hundreds of stones laid out to form an infinity symbol. His head was down as he watched his footing on the slippery ground.
Cooper stayed just out of sight among the trees at the bottom of the slope, and waited. He remembered this place. Its conception had been part of Wirksworth’s regeneration, yet here were all the signs of pagan folk memory that were inescapable in Derbyshire. In Stoney Wood, they were both formal and informal. Close by where he stood, someone had recently laid a pattern of holly and ivy wreaths on the stone seating. Near the top of the hill, he knew Lane would pass the Calendar Stones, modern monoliths placed to align with the sun at the time of the equinox and solstice.
He kept his eyes fixed on the figure picking its way gingerly over a patch of muddy grass. Lane circled the Calendar Stones and stopped. Then Cooper knew he was visiting the StarDisc.
This was just the sort of thing that his sister Claire became enthusiastic about. She loved anything with the kind of New Age atmosphere she’d tried to create in her shop in Edendale. The StarDisc was on a different scale from her crystals and pendulums. It had been created here in Stoney Wood as a twenty-first-century stone circle. A celestial amphitheatre thirty-five feet wide, a temple without walls. Carved into black granite to evoke the darkness of deep space was a star chart mirroring the night sky, its surface inscribed with the constellations. Around the perimeter stood twelve seats denoting the months of the year. Scores of lights illuminating the StarDisc at night were powered by the nearest star – the Sun.
Claire had dragged him to the opening of the StarDisc a few years ago. She must have had no boyfriend in tow at the time, and of course she knew it was a waste of time trying to rope Matt in for something like this. It had been quite an extraordinary event, Ben had to admit. More than a thousand people had turned up to watch an outdoor screening of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and listen to a specially recorded message from the astronomer Patrick Moore. The old lead miners and quarrymen could never have imagined that.
Josh Lane was moving around the StarDisc, walking over the constellations, crouching occasionally to read the name of a star system. He turned slowly to gaze over the scenery in all directions, and Cooper made sure he was standing completely still behind trees. Wearing his green waxed jacket, he wouldn’t be noticeable as long as he didn’t move.
Then Lane began to slither back down the hill to his car, and Cooper turned to make sure he could get to his Toyota in time before he pulled out on to Middleton Road.
Now they were definitely heading into Wirksworth. Down Hutchinson’s Drive, past the Bailey Croft service station and the BP petrol forecourt, and under the arched footbridge that carried a pathway high over the road between Green Hill and Chapel Lane.
A maze of narrow streets and alleyways sprawled on both sides of the main street, some of them leading to an old church set in its own close like a cathedral. On Cooper’s right, the limestone cottages of The Dale and Green Hill clung precariously to the hillside, as if Wirksworth was a Cornish fishing village with only the sea missing. In places it was possible to walk from the garden of one house on to the roof of another. Some residents had even erected greenhouses on their garage roofs in the absence of available space at ground level.
In the centre of town, Lane turned his Honda away from the tea rooms in Coldwell Street and squeezed his car through a narrow archway entrance into the car park of the Red Lion.
Cooper couldn’t risk parking at the pub, but he found a space close by in the Barmote Croft car park, facing the old Temperance Hall. He didn’t want to attract attention by getting a ticket on his windscreen, but the ticket machine wasn’t working. And a passing Wirksworth resident said they never paid it anyway.
He walked a few yards to the Red Lion, wondering who Josh Lane might be meeting inside. And wondering even more what he himself was doing here. Why was he obsessing about Lane’s movements? What could he hope to learn?
Cooper shook his head and tried to take in his surroundings. The old Wirksworth Town Hall stood directly across the street from the Red Lion. Golden stone, ornate pillars, an Italianate facade, even a clock tower. It was a Victorian creation for use by the local Freemasons. But now it housed the library and an Age UK charity shop. A whitewashed cast-iron milestone on the corner of the building told Cooper that London was a hundred and thirty-nine miles from the centre of Wirksworth. It felt an awful lot further away than that.
Charlie Dean cruised the BMW up Harrison Drive on the way out of Wirksworth, automatically glancing up at the footbridge over the road, checking for anyone watching him. There was no one on the bridge, of course. He was just getting paranoid.
And that was Sheena’s fault. He was quite sure that she was wrong about Jay getting suspicious. They’d been much too careful up to now. They never phoned each other at home, only ever sent texts, and then deleted them at once. They had never risked being seen together too close to where they lived or worked. They’d made certain they had plausible reasons for all their absences.
But Dean had a sudden thought as he indicated to pull into the Bailey Croft service station. He knew that he’d always done those things himself. What about Sheena? He only had her word for it. What if she’d just been telling him what he wanted to hear? Had she been forgetting to delete his texts? Had she let drop some incriminating remark? Had she, God forbid, confided in one of her friends at the hairdressing salon? He knew she could lie. She’d been lying to Jay all this time, after all. Couldn’t she just as easily be lying to him?
A worm of unease crawled in his stomach. Just when he’d been convincing himself that everything was fine and no one was going to ask them any questions, suddenly he wasn’t so sure that everything was fine at all.
He turned in past the petrol station forecourt and the Spar shop, his foot on the accelerator pedal, ready to drive away again if something went wrong or he lost courage. They didn’t know him here because he always filled up his car at a service station in Ashbourne, where the company had an account. But you never knew who you might bump into in Wirksworth. It was a small town.
Then he saw Sheena standing in the corner of the car park and the sight of her made him forget his worries. At least for a while. He opened the door and Sheena climbed into the BMW.
Half a mile further on, a Vauxhall Astra had skidded on the wet surface and gone off the road, ending up with its nose in a shallow ditch. Other motorists took no notice of its fate, hurtling on by to wherever they were heading so urgently.
Dean looked at the cars whizzing past, and the rear end of the Vauxhall in the ditch. ‘I bet not one of them has been on a speed awareness course,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
His head still ached a bit from his session in the pub last night. It had been good to be able to relax, though.
Suddenly, Charlie Dean felt reckless. It was a tendency of his that Barbara had complained about often in the past. She said it was incredibly juvenile, this instinct to react to danger by confronting it head-on. Tempting fate, she called it. But he had better descriptions. Facing up to a risk. Showing the world he wasn’t afraid. That was more like it. Charlie Dean wasn’t a man to be cowed by threats.
‘I’ve got a great idea,’ he said. ‘A bit of a treat for us today.’
‘What are you on about, Charlie?’ said Sheena, with that scornful little laugh of hers.
He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and jingled them in front of her eyes.
‘There’s a property I’m handling. We’ve just put it on the market this week. But the owners have moved out already and it’s standing empty.’
‘So?’
‘Well, when I say “empty”, I just mean no one’s living there. The vendors have bought a villa in France and they’re fitting it out locally. So they’ve left most of their furniture in place in the old house. It’ll go into storage eventually of course, or get sold off. But it’s easier for us to market a furnished property than an empty shell, you see.’
‘Why are you talking about furniture?’
‘Furniture. You know …’ Dean winked. ‘Beds, for example.’
‘Oh. Where is it?’
‘Right here in Wirksworth. Green Hill.’
‘Isn’t that a bit close, Charlie? You always told me we had to be careful.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said.
Dean smiled as he pulled into the entrance to the Wirksworth Industrial Centre to do a U-turn. It was exhilarating, this living dangerously. It made him feel really alive, gave him a buzz that he never experienced in any other way. Certainly not in his job at Williamson Hart. These days he spent all his time dealing with frustrated vendors who couldn’t find a buyer, and time-wasting buyers who wanted a property dirt cheap. Why not make use of the opportunities of the job when they came up? He’d heard of people doing this before with empty properties. He was pretty sure one of the senior partners, Gerry Hart, had done it in the past. So where was the harm?
‘Is it a nice house?’ asked Sheena. As if that mattered.
‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ he said.