'They ought to get something off the items dug out of the peat,' he said. 'I know there will have been some deterioration, but we'd be very unlucky to get nothing at all. Haven't we had any results back yet?'

'Still waiting.'

Cooper stared at Fry. He found he just didn't believe her. Forensic results could be slow, it was true. But he was sure that she was lying to him in this instance. Why would she do that?

Henry Pearson was almost exactly as Cooper had pictured him. He was a tall man, with grey hair and sharp, intelligent eyes that turned to deep pools of sadness when his face was at rest. Most of the time he was far from at rest. Pearson fixed his gaze on each of the officers in the room by turn, studying them as if he was trying to see right into their hearts. When he'd been round the room once, he started all over again, perhaps hoping he might see something different next time.

At the same time he was listening intently to everything that was said. He'd brought a briefcase with him, and opened it to pull out a leather-bound pad. Cooper watched him write a careful note of the date and time, and the place of the meeting. Underneath, he listed the names of the police officers present. He made notes as Superintendent Branagh spoke, but still looked up periodically to examine the reactions of the people round him.

'Naturally, Mr Pearson, in light of the new evidence, we're reopening the inquiry into the disappearance of your son and his wife,' said Branagh, seeming a little unsettled by Pearson's manner.

'Reopening?' said Pearson. 'I was under the impression that the case was never actually closed. Am I wrong in that?'

'No, sir. The inquiry is active, and always has been. But the fact is, we exhausted all the avenues. It's only the new evidence we've turned up that has given us fresh leads to follow.'

'Is there a question of resources?'

'There's always a question of resources.'

'If money would help ...' said Pearson.

As one, the officers in the room bristled, their faces a mixture of indignation and panic. The mere suggestion that someone had offered financial inducements was enough to cause consternation. Cooper imagined the investigations that might follow. A neighbouring force sent in to examine procedures and records, probing questions about bank balances ... It was everyone's worst nightmare.

But that wasn't what Mr Pearson meant. He scanned the shocked faces, and almost smiled. It was no more than a twitch of the lips, which disappeared as quickly as it had come. But in that one second, Cooper saw that their visitor had a sense of humour, and he began to warm to him a little.

'I mean, in order to encourage witnesses to come forward, of course,' said Pearson. 'That's normal practice, isn't it? I've seen it done in other cases.'

'A reward?' asked Branagh, an audible hint of relief in her voice.

'If that's what you call it. If it might help to overcome the reluctance of certain individuals, I would be happy to put some cash up. If someone is still hesitating over what they should do, a reasonable amount of money could tip the balance in our favour, couldn't it?'

'It's true,' put in Hitchens, with a glance at Branagh. 'We've had results that way in the past.'

'Perhaps we can make a decision on that in a few days' time. Let's see what progress we can make in the meantime, shall we?'

'All right. I suppose I'll have to accept that.'

'Mr Pearson, can I ask you something? Do you remain convinced that your son and his wife have met with a violent end?'

'Yes, of course.' He hesitated. 'Obviously I'm very well aware of the stories that have been going round over the past couple of years. All that nonsense on the internet, all those wild theories. Every one of them is ludicrous. It's inconceivable that David and Patricia would have somehow managed to disappear and change their ident.i.ties. If my son had known he was accused of doing something wrong, he would have stayed to face the music. He would have wanted to clear his name. He is not the type to run away.

'There's one more thing I want to say,' added Pearson.

'Sir?'

'Unlike most of you, I've spent every day and every week of the past two and a half years looking for my son and his wife. I've given every minute of my time to trying to locate David and Patricia, wherever they may be.'

Pearson looked around the room again, giving them the benefit of his steady gaze.

'And that,' he said, 'is despite the fact that I've never been entirely sure, deep in my own heart, that there was still someone alive to look for.'

18.

The sense of isolation struck Cooper every time he got out of his car at the Light House. It wasn't just the feel of the wind on his face as it swept over the bare acres of moor. It wasn't the silence either, which was almost unnatural given the attention the old pub was getting. The isolation seemed to be a quality in the character of the building itself.

It wouldn't always have been like this. The old roads had come this way, the packhorse ways and traders' routes a all the local foot and cart traffic that had followed the departure of the Romans from Britain. The Light House would have gradually grown up to service the pa.s.sing trade, becoming a place to rest and change the horses before crossing the moor to markets in Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton.

But the people who'd come along later and built the modern road system had different ideas. They preferred to travel in the valleys, and take a more circuitous route to their destination. So the A625 and the A623 had developed, and taken all the traffic away to the north and south of Oxlow Moor, leaving the Light House isolated despite its prominent location.

From the first-floor windows the Whartons could have looked out and seen cars moving on both main roads in the distance, knowing that very few of those drivers would ever find their way to the pub.

Right now, a crime-scene tent stood incongruously in the middle of a vast expanse of blackened vegetation, like the aftermath of a nuclear blast. Black dust covered everything, and wisps of smoke and steam trailed into the air. The heat from the ground could still be felt, yet the peat squelched wetly underfoot.

There had been more than twenty pumps on site for over a week as the fire continued to burn. United Utilities staff were out in two Argocats with fire fogging units. Fogging had been developed to fight fires with low water volume, producing a high-density fog of water droplets that turned very quickly to steam and absorbed large amounts of heat.

Digging in the peat was going to be a long, laborious job. The smoke rolling across the moor made it look more dangerous than it probably was.

'If the wind changes and the fire begins to move this way, the fire service will have to abandon the moor and concentrate on protecting these buildings,' said Wayne Abbott, pulling off his face mask.

'Any more finds?' asked Cooper.

'Not so far.'

'I'm not sure if that's good news, or bad.'

Cooper gazed into the trench that was slowly being dug into the peat. He half expected to see a human hand or foot protruding from the ground, stained brown but perfectly preserved. If the Pearsons were buried here, theirs wouldn't be the first bodies to emerge from the peat bogs.

In the village of Hope, legend had it that the corpses of a grazier and his maidservant who had died from exposure on the moors thirty years previously were once put on public display. The two bodies had been so well preserved by the peaty soil that they were kept on show for twenty years before eventually being given a decent burial.

Inhabitants of the Peak District seemed to have had an interest in preserving bodies. According to one old Peakland custom, the soul of a dead person could be purified by laying a heap of salt on the corpse's chest. A parson who called at a Calver farmhouse on the death of one of his parishioners was said to have been horrified when he found the whole body pickled in salt.

'Wear masks if you're going to be out here,' said Abbott. 'Don't take risks.'

Abbott was responsible for the meticulous art of crime-scene management a deciding where to search and what techniques to use, while taking care not to disturb potential evidence.

Cooper remembered Liz repeating a motto she'd learned in training as a crime-scene examiner.

'ABC. Nothing, n.o.body, everything.'

'Sorry?' he'd said.

'Remember your ABC. a.s.sume nothing. Believe n.o.body. Check everything.'

'Okay, I get it.'

'It's worth remembering.'

During their training, student crime-scene examiners never knew quite what to expect at the end of an a.s.signment. It could be a person hanging from a tree or slumped in a car dead from exhaust fumes. They had to feel that shock factor a they couldn't be sent off to their forces after training only to freeze when they saw a dead body. Part of the job was detaching yourself from emotion.

Cooper looked around for the presence of police vehicles. A liveried Honda CR-V four-wheel drive had left the pub car park and ventured out on to the edge of the moor. It was now sitting like a UFO on the black expanse of charred heather. He could see it a hundred yards away, with its red stripe and its light bar still flashing blue against a backdrop of smoke.

'It reminds me of a fire I attended once,' said Villiers. 'That was a gra.s.s fire, along about a mile of railway embankment.'

'You don't have experience of firefighting, surely?' said Cooper.

'Not really. But back in 2002 and 2003, our guys took part in Operation Fresco. If you remember, that was the operation to provide fire service cover during the strike by civilian firefighters. It went on for six or seven months.'

'The old Green G.o.ddesses. Of course.'

Villiers laughed. 'They were what all the press wanted to take pictures of. But the armed forces have some modern equipment too, you know. In fact, there are professional firefighters in the RAF. They're needed at airfields. During the strike, they headed up specialist units, like breathing apparatus and rescue equipment support teams. Firefighting isn't such a mystery.'

Cooper shook his head. He found himself constantly amazed at the breadth of experience Carol Villiers had gathered during her career in the RAF Police. Just the number of countries she'd served in made his time with Derbyshire Constabulary seem incredibly parochial. He wasn't sure whether he envied her or not.

'Wayne, have they decided what sort of buildings have been uncovered?' asked Cooper.

'Just mine buildings,' said Abbott.

'Someone will be interested.'

At High Rake nearby, the Peak District Mines Historical Society had undertaken an eight-year excavation project, which had uncovered two steam-engine houses, a platform for a capstan and wooden gin engine, an ore crusher and an ore-dressing floor. The remains had mostly dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the mine was state-of-the-art. The highlight of the excavation was the discovery of the bottom third of a Cornish pumping-engine house, which had been set underground, a relatively rare and complex type of engine and thought to be the best surviving example in the world. Yes, there would be people interested.

'A lead miners' building?' said Villiers. 'They didn't have many structures on the surface.'

'Not so old as we first thought, then.'

'No. But see ...'

Abbott directed Cooper a few feet away from the line of stones. He noticed a corroded iron plate lying in the burnt gra.s.s. He'd seen one of these before, only recently.

'A capped mine shaft?'

'Yes. I don't think this one was generally known about. It's not on any maps. We're checking with the Mines Historical Society to see if they have any information on, it, but I suspect it's one that got lost and forgotten.'

The plate was around three foot square and made of rusted iron on crude hinges. There was no lock or bolt on it of any kind, and it would be easy to raise, even using one hand. Another hole was covered by a larger buckled iron sheet, which hadn't been fixed down at all but simply rested on stone edgings. Cooper examined the hinges of the plate. They were caked in rust and covered in a layer of peat, with fragments of burnt vegetation fused to them as if stuck with glue.

Unlike the open-cast workings of Moss Rake and Shuttle Rake, these were vertical shafts dug deep into the ground by lead miners. Some of the local rakes were still in use for the quarrying of minerals like fluorspar and calcite. But the lead mines had fallen into disuse decades ago.

The two shafts had been fenced off at some time with a few posts and a bit of barbed wire. But the posts were gone, and the wire that had hung between them lay on the ground.

'Haven't you looked inside?' asked Cooper.

'No,' said Abbott.

'But there might be traces of the Pearsons down there.'

'No, no. That's not possible. These shafts haven't been opened for decades. Possibly for a hundred years or more.'

'I see.'

Abbott looked at him, as if sensing that he was disappointed.

'However,' he said, 'these old lead mines rarely had just one shaft. If there was a vein of ore running across this area, they would have dug several shafts to get access to it.'

'We'll find some more, then?' asked Cooper.

'If we look. Yes, I'm sure we will.'

When he lifted the plate, Cooper found he could look straight down into the hole, though without a torch he could see only a few feet into its depths. The shaft was simply hacked out of the rock and was barely wide enough to accommodate a fully grown man. The sides had been worn smooth in places by the shoulders of miners pa.s.sing up and down. A single iron bolt had been hammered in as a makeshift foothold, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing to prevent a direct plunge into darkness.

Those old lead miners must have been small men. Poor people had been small anyway in those days, thanks to the general lack of nutrition. But perhaps miners had been chosen for their size, like jockeys. It would certainly be much easier to get access through the shafts if you were no more than five foot six and built on the skinny side.

There had been incidents recorded in the past of small children falling into mine shafts and being killed. But as Cooper looked at the width of the shaft in front of him, he found it difficult to imagine any adult being unable to prevent themselves from falling all the way in.

At least, he corrected himself, any conscious, living adult.

During their years at the Light House, the Whartons had tried to fight off the inevitable. Long ago, they'd moved away from the traditional hunting prints and picturesque Peak District scenes. The horse bra.s.ses and decorative plates had gone.

For a while, Cooper recalled, they'd opted for a cultural look a shelves of ancient hardback books bought in a job lot, modern abstract artworks, an occasional musical instrument hung near the ceiling. Then one day it had all vanished again, the pub closed for refurbishment, consultants swarming through the rooms, distressing the decor, jamming decrepit furniture into every corner a wooden benches and oak dressers, a reproduction writing desk. An antique look, he supposed. Nostalgic chic. It was an attempt to recapture some past that had never existed. Because the Light House as it appeared now had been a Victorian re-creation. Still a stop-off for travellers, yes. But it had been the height of modernity in its day. The facade hinted of aspirations to grandeur.

Well, the antiques were gone again, sold off to raise a bit of cash against the Whartons' debts perhaps. The main bar was left with a range of standard pub furniture, gla.s.s-topped tables and wooden chairs, scattered haphazardly, as if the clientele had abandoned the pub in a hurry.

'I want to take a look at the function room upstairs,' he said.

'Oh, the party?' said Villiers. 'Right, I see. Reliving the memories.'

They climbed the stairs to the first floor, where Cooper opened the door and examined the dusty floor and the little bar in the corner. The YFC party had taken place in this room, he was fairly sure. Even in his inebriated state, he remembered coming up and down those stairs. There seemed to have been a lot of people in the pub that night, though. Had someone else been holding a party here? Or was the function room spilling out revellers into the public bar from time to time?

Given the lack of records, it would require someone with a better memory than his to recall the facts. He could get Hurst or Irvine to trawl through the witness statements again, looking for someone who'd been attending a different party. Two days before Christmas, though? Whose memory wasn't hazy, especially if you were the kind to get caught up in the social whirl?

'Why not ask your brother?' suggested Villiers, as he was about to close the door again.

'Matt?'

'That's the only brother you've got, as far as I recall.'

'Yes, but ...'

'He was there too, wasn't he? I mean, he was in the Light House that night. You came here with him. That's what you told us, Ben.'

Cooper said nothing, and found he was gripping the door handle a little too tightly. Villiers nodded, reading his silence as clearly as if he'd spoken everything that was in his mind.