Blind to the Bones (51 page)

‘Cholera?' said Cooper.

His dictionary defined cholera as an acute communicable bacterial infection of the small intestine by
vibrio cholerae
, derived from the ingestion of food or water contaminated by human sewage containing the micro-organism. It said the symptoms included the rapid onset of a profuse, white, watery diarrhoea, with muscle cramps, vomiting and progressive fluid loss, resulting in death within a few hours.

Cooper had very soon started feeling unwell.

‘I mean,
cholera
?'

‘It was a result of the conditions the navvies lived in,' said Udall. ‘You know, the shanty town?'

‘Yes.'

‘They not only had poor food and no health-and-safety regulations, they also weren't provided with any clean water or any toilet facilities. Their food and water got contaminated by human sewage, and men started dying of cholera by the dozen. Some are buried at Woodhead Chapel, above the A628.'

‘But others are buried in the churchyard at Withens.'

‘That's right. It's ironic, when you think about it. Well dressing is supposed to have started after the Black Death. The villages that escaped being affected by the plague credited the purity of their local water supply for protecting them. So they revived the tradition of blessing the wells as a way of saying thank you. I think Tissington was one of the first.'

‘Some of them probably still believed they were propitiating the water goddess in those days,' said Cooper.

But Udall was right. Those Derbyshire villagers did have good reason to be thankful. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Black Death had killed a third of the population of England. Villages like Tissington were very lucky not to have been touched. Five hundred years later, though, it had been cholera that had taken the lives of the navvies building the Woodhead tunnels and living in their pitiful shanty towns.

‘So the other well in Withens is avoided because it's on the wrong side of the churchyard – below it, where the cholera from the bodies buried there could get into the water supply?'

‘It's nonsense, of course.'

‘But you understand how that fear might have arisen. Those men died from drinking contaminated water in the first place.'

Udall dried the handcuff grip and reset the handcuffs to preload.

‘You know, a lot of people use the tip of a ballpoint pen to double-lock their cuffs,' she said. ‘I always think that looks a bit unprofessional – it gives the impression you've lost the key and you're trying to pick the lock with a pen.'

‘Some people
do
lose the key,' said Cooper. ‘Or forget to take one with them.'

Udall sniffed. ‘Some people seem to want trouble. They go in as if they want a suspect to turn violent. Not me. These handcuffs are the most important bit of equipment I have, and learning touch 'n'cuff has been a godsend. It's saved me a lot of trouble from arrests over the last few years. I'll be happy if I never have to draw a baton. A lot of my arrests don't know what's happening. The first time I touch them, they're under my control.
Then
I tell them they're under arrest. And they come like lambs, by and large.'

She eased the handcuffs back into their pouch and patted it, almost with affection.

‘Do you think it helps being female?' said Cooper. He had seen plenty of male officers who had exactly the attitude that Udall had described. When they went in to a situation, it was as if they wanted trouble, either because it made them feel macho, or because they liked the adrenalin rush from the risk of injury, he wasn't sure.

‘Oh yes,' said Udall. ‘They take one look at me, and they're lulled into a false sense of security. They don't realize how dangerous I am.'

‘Want to come and give the Reverend Derek Alton a lift back to Withens?'

‘Why not?'

D
erek Alton didn't seem to want to talk on the way home. He sat in the car staring out of the window at the passing scenery as they descended into Longdendale.

‘Will you be blessing the well dressing this weekend?' said Ben Cooper.

‘Yes, of course.'

‘I always thought well dressings were pagan. Water worship. But the church has taken them over these days, hasn't it?'

‘The Church of England is nothing if not pragmatic,' said Alton. ‘The early missionaries were told not to destroy the pagan holy places and beliefs but to incorporate them into the new religion. The spring festival of the fertility goddess Oestre became the date of the resurrection. They still name it Easter, which I always think is a bit of a giveaway, myself. And death and resurrection have symbolized the beginning of spring for thousands of years. Winter and spring, death and life, the dark and the light. The natural cycle.'

‘Like the mummers' play tradition. The Fool is killed, then brought back to life again.'

‘Of course. It's a resurrection play.'

‘Except they didn't save a part for Jesus.'

Alton decided not to take the bait. He went back to the scenery as they approached the road over the reservoirs.

‘And you're interested in the Border Rats,' said Cooper.

‘They're based on Border morris, which was the real workingmen's tradition. It was a way of getting a bit of money during the winter, when their families might have starved otherwise. Since begging was illegal, they blacked their faces up as a disguise. But in Withens, the tradition has developed in its own way. That's the nature of genuine traditions. They're not preserved in aspic, they develop naturally and mean whatever people want them to mean.'

‘Some of them told me the dance symbolized killing the rats in the old railway tunnels where the navvies worked.'

‘That could be so,' said Alton. ‘Nobody can know for sure now. It's passed down from one generation to the next, and it gets changed along the way, because nothing is ever written down. Each year it changes a bit more, depending on the people involved.'

‘How is it you know so much about these traditions, sir?'

‘I'm a morris man myself, I have to admit,' said Alton. ‘I danced Cotswold morris in a previous parish.'

‘With the bells and hankies?'

‘Yes.'

‘Pagan origins again?'

‘Pagan or not, every dance has its own meaning. A spiritual dimension. The rituals are important, of course. Dressing up, setting aside a special day, learning the words and the movements. All part of the ritual. There's even a sacred space for the dancers to perform in. In religion, it's called the “temenos”. But ritual isn't quite enough. If the moments of spiritual connection are going to happen, you have to commit, you have to invest belief in it.'

Cooper noted that the Border Rats seemed to have sparked a bit more interest than a mention of Jesus.

‘But this is very limited. It seems to be entirely members of the Oxley family.'

‘Not really,' said Alton. ‘These days, some of the Border Rats live in Hey Bridge. The two groups hardly speak to each other outside rehearsals, but when they're performing, they hardly seem to know who's who. There's never any shortage of volunteers to join. Lucas Oxley's rule is to give places to those who live nearest to Withens, but as long as they're willing to give everything when they're Border Rats, Lucas doesn't care. If they treat the Rats as a joke, they're out.'

‘Thank you,' said Cooper. ‘That was very interesting.'

‘And no earthly use to you at all, I'm sure.'

‘Well …'

‘The thing to remember is that morris isn't really terribly, terribly old. And there's no inherent mystical meaning, only what the individual puts into it. But it
has
grown out of our own culture and history, and it belonged to generations of our own ancestors. That's why it's important.'

B
en Cooper looked at his watch as he and Tracy Udall turned back on to the A628 towards Longdendale. There were several active lines of enquiry that he could be helping out with now. But as she drove along the reservoirs, Udall was still thinking about cholera.

‘Do you know, there was a notorious murder here around the time of that cholera outbreak,' she said. ‘It was a case that would have defeated even Derbyshire Constabulary, if it had existed in those days.'

‘What was that?'

‘The Woodhead Tunnel Murder. Not heard of it?'

‘No.'

‘It was in 1849.'

‘Oh, well. The Constabulary wasn't formed until 1857. Besides, Longdendale was in Cheshire until 1974. There might have been a petty constable or something, but a magistrate would have taken charge in a murder case. Where did it happen?'

‘In the shanty town where the navvies lived. The place had already became notorious, but this was just after the cholera outbreak. One of the big problems the navvies faced was the contract system. In fact, it was a complicated process of sub-contracting, called “truck”. At every level, there was someone who creamed off some of the money for themselves by reducing supplies, buying the cheapest food, cutting corners. You can imagine.'

‘Yes. That hasn't changed much.'

‘Well, one of the worst sub-contractors was a man called Nathan Pidcock. He was a local man, who ran a haulier's business from Tintwistle. He jumped at the chance of getting involved in the tunnel project, because there were big profits to be made. By all accounts, he made a lucrative business for himself by supplying rotting food, dirty water, and substandard materials at inflated prices. The navvies hated him, of course, but they were living in their shanty town in the middle of nowhere, and they relied on people like Pidcock for supplies. Anyway, finally he must have gone too far. The outbreak of cholera was blamed on water polluted by human waste. Dozens of men died over a period of days. And one morning, Nathan Pidcock was found dead in a ditch on the edge of the camp. He had been beaten to death.'

‘And were there no suspects?'

‘Suspects?' Udall laughed. ‘That's the question of a twenty-first century policeman. Yes, there were fifteen hundred of them. The theory was that a group of workmen decided to exact their own brand of justice on Pidcock for the deaths of their mates. The rest of the men in the camp must have known what happened, but nobody said a word. So the authorities were helpless.'

‘A conspiracy of silence?'

‘I expect these days we could have done a mass DNA test or something.'

‘Only if there was some blood, or traces of other bodily fluids from the perpetrators at the scene, or Pidcock's blood on their clothing. But basically, you're right – there would certainly have been some forensic evidence to follow up.'

‘There was one witness, though,' said Udall. ‘Nathan Pidcock had a young assistant, a lad called John Cobb. He helped with deliveries to the camp. But he was only about fourteen, and the attackers left him alone.'

‘Wasn't Cobb able to identify anyone?'

‘No. He saw the whole thing, but couldn't point out any one of his employer's attackers. His story was that they had disguised themselves. He said they all had their faces blacked up.'

Cooper wasn't surprised. The continuity seemed to be there even now, a tradition passed down through the generations. Maybe the Oxleys were direct descendants of those railway navvies who had died building the tunnels. Maybe their ancestors had lived in the shanty town, which seemed to be treated as the village's dirty little secret.

He recalled the superstition that Sandy Norton had mentioned about the tunnels. Those workmen were right that an evil had been brought down on them by the tunnelling project. But it hadn't been caused by some primeval force that had slept for eons under the hill and had been disturbed by their blasting. It had been a much more human evil. Its cause was greed.

T
he second time Ben Cooper met his new neighbour, it was on neutral territory again. He had arrived home and was fiddling around in his pockets for his door key. It had been a hard day, and his mind was full of fragments of conversation, and pictures of young Oxleys he couldn't put the right name to.

As he managed to get the key into his hand, the door to the other flat opened. Briefly, he wondered whether Peggy Check had been listening for him coming in. If Dorothy Shelley was the only person she knew in Edendale, she might be getting desperate for a bit of normal human contact. Cooper immediately felt guilty that he hadn't made an effort to be more sociable.

‘Hello, how's it going?' he said.

‘Great, thanks. And you?'

Cooper knew he was probably a bit dishevelled at the end of his shift, rather unshaven and maybe a bit grubby.

‘Fine. I'm sorry, I'm just home from work.'

He opened his door, still feeling a little embarrassed. He thought perhaps he didn't smell too good either.

‘You must come in for a coffee some time.'

‘Sure. That would be great.'