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 — 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 passing 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 — 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, nobody, everything.’
‘Sorry?’ he’d said.
‘Remember your ABC. Assume nothing. Believe nobody. 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 assignment. 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 — 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 grass fire, along about a mile of railway embankment.’
‘You don’t have experience of firefighting, surely?’ said Cooper.