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Chapter 3

I retreated to my work-station and sat staring at my screen. Sweat prickled my back. I’d come to Derbyshire to get away from this. To make a new start, wipe the slate clean, and various other clichés. I couldn’t let an idiot like Craig get to me. I sat up straighter in my chair and forced my shoulders back. I’d just have to show them I was up to the job. I had a good brain. I was a good detective.

My little pep talk sounded unconvincing even to me – like those motivational posters you see on the walls of ailing companies, or the pseudo-profound positive quotes on your most depressed friends’ Facebook pages. But I forced myself out of my chair and went to find Jai. He and I were visiting the victim’s wife that evening.

‘What a total arsehole Craig is,’ he said. ‘He’d be having a go at me if he wasn’t so scared of the PC brigade.’

I felt my shoulders soften. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘And if he hadn’t heard I was a psycho.’

I laughed. ‘Maybe I need to get more violent.’

Jai smiled, but then his face creased into concern. ‘Watch him though. He can be a nasty bastard. Just… I don’t know. Be careful.’

By the time Jai and I left the Station, the clouds had lifted and a streaky sunset lit the sky as we drove through the rock-strewn hills towards Eldercliffe. Mum lived on its outskirts, so I knew the town a little. Its jumbled, narrow streets hunkered down in the base of the valley, as if defending themselves from the advancing quarries.

We headed away from the main town, up a lane so steep it made my ears pop. On the right was a farm and on the left was the rim of the quarry, the ground falling away behind it into nothingness. Just one house sat on the edge like an eagle’s nest – a cottage made from the same stone as the quarry, as if it had grown out of the rock.

‘That’s his house,’ Jai said. ‘Crazy place.’

‘Yeah, not somewhere to live if you suffer from suicidal thoughts.’ I immediately wished I hadn’t said that.

‘Wife’s a doctor,’ Jai said. ‘Kate Webster. Has she been told?’

I nodded. At least we didn’t have to do that. I pictured Hamilton’s face, lacerated by his own nails. How would you cope with knowing your husband’s last minutes were spent trying to claw his skin off?

We walked up to the cottage, and the door was flung open to reveal a small woman in jogging trousers. Her body was thin but her face was puffy as if it had been lightly inflated.

I showed her my card.

‘Oh, right. I’m Beth. Peter’s sister.’ She gestured us into a long hallway which smelt of beeswax and vanilla. The kind of place where they employed a cleaner.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

Beth gave a quick nod. ‘Kate’s in the living room. Go through. I’ll make some tea.’

We walked into a room dominated by a vast inglenook fireplace and a picture window overlooking the shocking drop into the quarry. The curtains were open to the darkening sky. Two squidgy sofas sat at right angles, one facing the fireplace and the other with its back to the window. There was space to walk around, unlike in my living room where you had to move around in a crab-like shuffle to avoid gouging your leg on the corner of something.

A slender woman stood by the window with her back to us.

‘Dr Webster,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

She turned and gave us a cautious look. Her eyes were red but she looked delicate and composed in her grief, like a Victorian consumptive.

‘It must be a mistake.’ She took a couple of steps towards us. ‘Please tell me you’ve come because it’s a mistake.’

‘I’m sorry. We’ll need to formally identify him, but he had his driving licence on him. And he matched your description exactly.’

A tear dripped onto her T-shirt. ‘What the hell happened to him?’

‘Are you able to answer a few questions?’ I asked. Jai and I walked across the oak-boarded floor and sat on the sofa facing the fire. I hoped she’d follow our social cue. She didn’t.

‘How did he die?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t know yet. When did you last see him?’

She started pacing up and down by the window, shoulders hunched and arms crossed. ‘I saw him this morning. He was working from home which he always does on Mondays. It was all totally normal, for God’s sake. They say he was found in a cave or something?’

‘Yes, it’s about fifteen feet up, cut into the rock.’

‘What the hell was he doing in there? He’s supposed to have a quick walk to clear his head, not sit around for hours in a cave.’

‘We don’t know. Did you know about the place?’

‘I knew there was supposed to be a cave. The locals say it’s haunted. They’re a bit like that round here. They say our house… Oh, never mind.’

Beth returned with a tray of tea and digestive biscuits. She lowered it onto a rather splendid coffee table made from old painted floorboards, and sat down. Kate stepped across the room to sit next to her.

Jai took a mug of tea, got stuck into the biscuits, and made notes.

‘What were you saying about this house?’ I asked.

‘Oh, just that everyone said it was bad luck,’ Kate said. ‘That we shouldn’t come here. But we took no notice. How can a house bring bad luck? But now I’m thinking—’

‘Come on, Kate.’ Beth’s tone was sharp. ‘It’s terrible about Peter, but it’s not the house’s fault.’

‘But what about those other people? Before we moved here?’ Kate turned to us. ‘No one would buy the house. It had been empty for ages.’

Jai paused with his biscuit halfway to his mouth. ‘What happened to the other people?’

‘The man fell off the cliff outside, or threw himself off, no one knew. And then his daughter… Oh, it was horrible.’

‘It’s not relevant,’ Beth snapped. ‘We need to find who killed Peter.’

‘She was only fifteen,’ Kate said. ‘She went off to this horrendous underground cave system on the other side of the valley and killed herself. Everyone said the house was cursed, but we thought we were so clever, we were above all that. We got it cheap.’

‘I remember that,’ Jai said. ‘Section tried to get her out, but—’

‘It’s not relevant,’ Beth said. ‘Kate’s just upset. There’s nothing wrong with the house.’

I remembered Ben Pearson telling me about the girl he’d failed to rescue. ‘Was she the girl who hanged herself in the Labyrinth?’

‘Yes. It was awful. And the Victorian who originally built the house threw himself off the cliff.’ Kate sat forward on the sofa and spoke fast. ‘And other people have died here. Even Peter’s grandmother said there’s a curse. Something to do with witches. She said the spirits of the witches can push you off the cliff out there, so you shouldn’t get too close to the edge. Not that Beth takes any notice when she’s tending that horrendous rock garden.’

‘It’s bloody ridiculous,’ Beth snapped.

Kate turned to me. ‘Why do people who live here keep dying?’

Beth folded her arms. ‘My grandmother’s in the early stages of dementia. I can’t believe we’re talking about a ludicrous old wives’ tale when my brother’s just been killed!’

I made a note to talk to the grandmother. My ears always pricked when relatives laid into one another. They’d sometimes forget we were even there. Beth obviously hadn’t forgotten us though. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This is all irrelevant. What do you need to know?’

I smiled at them both. ‘Do either of you know why he’d have gone in the cave house?’

‘He always liked caves,’ Beth said. ‘But I didn’t realise—’

‘Hang on.’ Kate stared right into my eyes. ‘Was someone else there with him? Is that why he went to the cave house?’

I shook my head. ‘We don’t think so.’

She looked down at her tea. ‘Right.’

‘We’ll need to take his phone,’ I said. ‘And his laptop. And we’ll have to get people to go through the house.’

Kate sighed. ‘Yeah, do whatever.’ She hesitated. ‘Just so you know, there’s, well, emails on his laptop from me saying I’ve had enough.’ She shook her hair off her face. ‘But it wasn’t serious. Normal marital stuff, you know. He’s been difficult recently. But I didn’t kill him.’ She gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘If I had, I’d have deleted the emails, wouldn’t I?’

I mentally noted her assumption that she could access her husband’s emails. ‘Where were you today?’

‘What? I was at work all day. You don’t seriously think I might have done it?’

‘Just a formality,’ I said. ‘What did Peter do for a living?’

‘He was a patent attorney. You know, with inventions.’ She leaned forward over the coffee table, took a biscuit and looked at it with horror before dropping it back on the plate. I’d observed with the bereaved, the thin ones never ate the biscuits.

‘It looks like he’d had some chocolate cake. It was in a plastic wrapper saying “Susie’s Cakes” – is that something you bought?’

‘No, never heard of it. But Peter loves cake. He’d never turn it down if someone offered. Was anyone else seen in the woods?’

‘We’re checking that.’

‘I can’t imagine him buying it for himself. There are no shops on the way down there.’ She tapped her fingers against her knee.

There was a buzzy energy about Kate Webster. Not the usual flatness of someone who’d lost a relative. I noticed my toes were curled in my shoes as if I was clutching the floor with them. ‘You say he’d been difficult recently?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Yes. I mean, he’d been grumpy with me. And drinking too much. I thought he was hiding something.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘Oh God, it’s going to turn out he was having an affair, isn’t it? I can’t bear it.’ She rose, walked again to the picture window, and stood with her back to us.

I kept my voice gentle. ‘I’m sorry to ask but I don’t suppose, if he was having an affair, you’d have any idea who it might possibly be with?’

She turned and stood silhouetted against the evening sunset, leaning against the window in a way which made me nervous. ‘Christ almighty,’ she said. ‘Of all the questions you hope you’ll never be asked. Who could your husband be having an affair with, in case they…’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Look, he didn’t socialise on his own outside work and they’re mainly men at his office. There was a client he mentioned a couple of times, Lisa something, but he didn’t even like her. No, he wasn’t interested in her.’ She rubbed her nose. ‘Oh God, he would give that impression, wouldn’t he? I can’t believe this is happening. How can this be happening to me?’

Beth stood and walked to the window, gently touched Kate’s arm, and led her back to the sofa. ‘Peter wasn’t having an affair,’ she said.

I took a biscuit. It seemed to relax people when you ate their biscuits. At least that was my story. ‘Can I ask,’ I said, ‘how was his sleeping? And eating?’

Kate crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘He was always eating. Loved his food. But actually he’d lost a bit of weight recently. And I suppose he had been a bit more tossy and turny over the last year, always dragging the duvet off me. He’s had a few nightmares. I put it down to work stress.’

I turned to Beth. ‘Did you notice anything?’

She shook her head. ‘He seemed okay to me.’

‘Was he on anti-depressants?’

‘No,’ Kate said. ‘He hated drugs. Ironic, given his job.’ A tiny smile twitched at the edges of her lips. ‘He thought they were a sign of feeble-mindedness.’

‘When did you get worried about his drinking?’

‘I wasn’t exactly worried. But, well, it started about a year ago and it’s got worse recently.’ Her lower lip shook. She took a deep breath and continued. ‘I’d get home and he’d be in front of the TV with a beer. He’d claim he’d only had one but sometimes he’d stagger when he got up. And he was hiding the bottles. And other times he smelt like he’d been smoking. Not tobacco either.’

‘Can you imagine him ever wanting to harm himself?’

‘What? No, no.’ She shook her head like a dog shaking off water. ‘No. He wouldn’t do that to me.’

Of course, relatives always said that. But some of us knew better.

I stood. Something caught my eye in the wood-burner. It was an expensive cast-iron thing with a glass front. The fire wasn’t lit, but inside were several half-burnt logs and a few pieces of paper, visible through the sooty glass. They were almost completely singed black but the end of one piece of paper was still intact and had handwriting on it.

‘What are those papers?’ I asked.

Kate jumped up and lunged towards the fireplace. ‘Oh, nothing!’ She grabbed a poker and reached for the door of the wood-burner.

‘Leave it!’ I shouted, as if she was a dog heading for a picnic.

Beth flashed angry eyes at Kate, who froze in a poker-wielding stance. She turned her head slowly towards me, as if wondering whether I had the right to do this. Presumably, she decided I did; she put the poker down on the hearth and stepped back. ‘Sorry.’ She retreated to the sofa. ‘It’s nothing. Just some old papers I was using as scrap.’

I exchanged a look with Jai. ‘Okay, I’d like our people to see them.’

I left Jai to finish the interview, and asked to see Peter Hamilton’s study. According to Kate, he’d usually worked there before he went on his walk, and it certainly looked like he’d been planning to return – no suicidal tidying was in evidence. The room had a slightly musty but not unpleasant smell that reminded me of the libraries of my youth. An antique-style desk was strewn with papers covered with handwritten notes, much crossed out. The messiest page was headed ‘Claims’, and chemical formulae spidered their way across it.

Bookcases lined the walls, crammed with unappealing books about biochemistry and patent law, many covered with a layer of dust. But the bottom shelf caught my eye – a collection of photograph albums. I crouched and gently pulled out one of the albums. It was filled with holiday snaps. Kate Webster and Peter Hamilton, very much alive. All bright smiles, white villages and sunny skies. The other albums were similar – happy holidays, any discord well hidden. I eased out the album that looked oldest. The pages were stiff and the plastic sheets that were supposed to keep the photographs in place had yellowed and lost their stickiness. I turned the pages slowly, holding them at their edges.

The early part of the album included wedding photos – a man and a woman, presumably Hamilton’s parents. A later photograph showed the same couple, with two boys and a younger girl who must have been Beth. The woman now sat flaccidly in a wheelchair. On her knee was a cat of such a vivid orange it stole the light and made everything else look grey. All three children stared adoringly at it.

I flipped through pages of later childhood photographs – scorched lawns and yellow Cornish beaches; no mother in these. Then the university years – punting on the river and lounging in Cambridge college gardens, surrounded by glistening turrets and pinnacles. Most of those photographs featured a rather beautiful girl. Her huge, dark eyes gazed out of the photographs right at me. She was the central point, like the sun to the other people’s planets. She stared at the camera and Peter Hamilton stared at her. Even after I looked away, her face was in my head.

I stood and looked again at the papers on the desk. I lifted the one headed ‘Claims’. Something was written on the back. I turned it gently. One word covered the paper, written maybe one hundred times, in different-sized lettering and at different angles and with different pens.

Cursed.

Chapter 4

We pulled away from Kate Webster’s house. My mind was swirling with witches and curses and poison, and flashes of Peter Hamilton’s blood-stained face. I glanced back towards the cottage, perched resolutely on the cliff with the quarry falling away all around it. An outside light shone on a little rock garden which sprawled over the stone to the side of the house. I pictured the drop onto the rocks far below, and wondered if the cottage would ever surrender itself to the quarry, as if on an eroding coastline.

‘Did you find anything else useful?’ I asked Jai.

‘Not really. Apparently he goes for a walk every Monday when he works from home, but not always in the quarry. He was a greedy sod who’d take cake from anyone, but no one would have wanted to harm him.’

‘Clearly.’

‘All that stuff about a curse on the house was a bit weird. You wouldn’t think a doctor would fall for that.’

‘Or a patent attorney. It’s odd though, if people who live there keep dying. Did you ask if anyone had died recently?’

‘Yeah. No. Last one was that girl ten years ago.’

‘Ben Pearson told me about her yesterday. The duty sergeant. That Labyrinth is supposed to have the initials of the people who died cut into the rock.’

Jai glanced at me. ‘What, like in our cave?’

‘Yes.’ I steered the car down the steep hill towards the town centre, praying we wouldn’t meet anyone coming up. ‘So, it’s pretty strange that the girl came from the same house, don’t you think?’

‘Hmm, yes. And there was something else his wife said.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Okay, so when I asked if either of them knew about the carving in the cave, the wife started saying something that I didn’t quite catch, and the sister shut her up. Then the wife made out she hadn’t said anything. And you know how sometimes your brain pieces together later what someone said – well, I’m thinking she said something about the basement.’

I dropped Jai at his house in Matlock and took the A6 towards Belper. It was late and dark and the drizzle had morphed into a diffuse fog that distorted the headlights of the oncoming cars. Either my eyes were getting worse or driving at night had always been an act of faith. I squinted into the gloom and wished I was in bed.

Back home, I let myself into my tiny, rented cottage. The heating was on and the hallway felt cosy for once, the long, rust-coloured rug warming the stone-flagged floor and books sitting in chaotic piles on the shelves. A phone balancing on one of the piles flashed a tiny red light. At what point in my life had answer-phone messages transformed from exciting to depressing? I kicked off my shoes and pressed the button. Mum’s voice. The usual stuff. How was I? How was work? Was I eating? (Seriously, had she not seen this body?) There was something about her voice – high-pitched but breathy, as if she was trying not to be overheard. She’d seemed different recently, as if she was worried about something, but I was damned if I could get her to tell me what it was. Probably just the strain of looking after Gran. A wave of guilt and helplessness washed over me. I probably wouldn’t find time to visit her tomorrow. I’d be up to my neck in the investigation.

I glanced into the living room, then walked to the kitchen with the message still playing. Hamlet burst through the cat flap in a haze of black and white fur. I leaned and scooped him into my arms, somewhat against his wishes, and buried my face in his soft belly. He purred grudgingly and wriggled out of my grasp. I gave him food even though he’d have been stuffing his fat face at my indulgent neighbour’s house all evening, grabbed a glass of water, and sat at the kitchen table with my laptop.

I eventually found it on a website about Derbyshire myths and legends – the story of the Labyrinth, the witches and the initials on the wall, just as Ben Pearson had said. It was classed ‘not verified’. The cave house was also mentioned. It was said to be haunted by a woman as thin as a skeleton, who wailed for her lost lover. I snapped my laptop shut, and rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose pimples. I didn’t believe in ghosts.

I climbed the steep stairs, Hamlet forming a trip-hazard at my ankles, and tried to resist the compulsion to check the upstairs rooms. I had to stop doing this. I closed my eyes and leant against the wall of my tiny landing. I pictured the noose deep inside the Labyrinth. Straight and empty. That other image flickered at the edge of my consciousness. A young girl hanging. I squeezed my eyes tight shut and forced my fists into my temples. She faded away.

I poked my head into the chaotic study and the overflowing spare room, glancing up at the ceilings, as always.