Dark Peak Read online

  Ten minutes later, she was on Hammersmith Road outside the hotel. She flagged down a black cab and told the driver to take her to the Kensington Tube Station as quickly as possible.

  “Where you going, love?” he asked her.

  “I just told you, Kensington Tube Station.”

  “I mean after that. Where are you getting the tube to?”

  “The Bellanger Restaurant in Islington.”

  “I’ll have you there in fifteen minutes, love. The tube takes half an hour.”

  And costs about forty pounds less, Elly thought. But she knew she’d be late if she took the tube. Maybe this taxi driver was her saviour. Glenister had mentioned on the phone that he wanted to present her with a proposal for a new book. If she was late, he might give it to another writer. Elly knew how fickle the high-ups in the publishing business were and Glenister was no different. “Okay, get me there,” she told the driver.

  The vehicle’s tyres screeched on the road as the cabbie pulled away from the kerb and joined the traffic heading towards Shepherd’s Bush.

  The day was bright and hot, the people walking along the pavement dressed in summer dresses and T-shirts. The cab windows were down, letting warm air smelling of dust and exhaust fumes into the vehicle. Elly closed her eyes and rested her head against the headrest, trying to compose herself for the meeting ahead.

  Yesterday morning, she’d been at home in Birmingham. Glenister had called her at eleven and told her that he had something to propose to her regarding a new book and everything since then had been a frenetic race to get here: throwing a quickly-chosen assortment of clothes into her case, rushing for the train, and booking a last-minute room at the hotel from her phone during the train journey.

  Jen had said she was running from her problems and Elly had denied it at the time but now that she thought about it, she’d been only too eager to get on the first train to London and escape the home she’d shared with Paul.

  There was more to it than just running away though; she needed the book proposal Glenister was offering, whatever it was. Sales of her first true crime book, Heart of a Killer, had been great when the book had first been released six years ago, and had even propelled the book onto the Sunday Times bestseller list, but now they were waning.

  Well, what did she expect, that the book would sell forever? There were only so many readers interested in Leonard Sims, the Eastbourne Ripper, and it seemed that everyone who wanted to read about his exploits had now done so. It was time for something new. She just hoped that Glenister’s proposal was something interesting and that the agent didn’t just want a book rehashing the cases of killers that had already been written about ad infinitum like Fred and Rosemary West or The Moors Murderers.

  She’d rather write a book about something that interested her and hadn’t been done to death already, but the truth was, she’d take any job if it meant a lucrative publishing contract. She still had a healthy bank account thanks to Heart of a Killer but that wasn’t going to last forever. She needed to think about her future.

  She’d always assumed that she and Paul would grow old together. Neither of them had spoken about it much, it had just been implied by the fact that they’d spent five years together and grown comfortable with each other.

  Those five years had been good ones. For the past three, they’d been living together. All their friends had assumed that their relationship was strong, indestructible. Hell, even Elly had assumed as much. Until three nights ago when Paul had come home from work and told her that he was leaving her to be with his boss’s PA. The indestructible bond between them had been destroyed totally.

  Elly had thrown a glass vase full of plastic yellow flowers at Paul as he’d slinked out the front door. It had smashed against the door and Elly had fallen to her knees, crying among the glass shards and broken plastic. An hour later, she’d wiped her eyes and decided to get on with her life. Her tears weren’t going to change anything.

  Opening her eyes and looking out the open cab window at the buildings of Holland Park, she wondered if she was cold after all, like Jen had said. Breaking up with Paul should have affected her more. The fact that he’d been cheating on her should have made her feel incensed. But she felt nothing. After the initial flood of tears among the broken vase, there had been no further signs of grief. Just an emptiness inside whenever she thought of Paul.

  Coming to London had helped, of course, by focusing her mind on the meeting with Glenister, not letting her dwell for too long on her ex-boyfriend.

  The cab driver was true to his word and pulled up outside The Bellanger fourteen minutes after they’d set off from the hotel. It was exactly eleven o’ clock.

  Elly paid the fare and added a tip, reminding herself that if she’d taken the tube, she wouldn’t have made it here on time. Rushing into the restaurant, she avoided looking into the mirrors set on the dark wood-panelled walls and instead searched for Glenister. She spotted him sitting in a booth near the rear of the establishment, past the bar where a number of people were sitting and drinking tea, coffee, and wine.

  The Belanger’s decor was art nouveau in style, with retro lamps on the tables and fittings and fixtures of brass and dark wood to match the walls. Elly walked past the bar to where Glenister was waiting.

  She’d met Jack Glenister only on a few occasions, mostly when Heart of a Killer was accepted by a publisher six years ago. During the years the book had been in print, Elly’s contact with Glenister had mostly been in the form of emails and phone calls. The fact that he had called her here in person implied that he had something important to impart.

  He looked up from the menu he was perusing as Elly approached the table and a warm smile lit his face. He’d hardly changed since the last time Elly had seen him all those years ago: same white hair parted carefully at the side and reaching down to his collar, same friendly grey eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and same air of impeccability. He was dressed in a dark suit and midnight blue tie, and Elly self-consciously smoothed down her trousers with her hands. She knew she looked a mess and sitting with Glenister was going to make her untidiness even more obvious.

  He stood and held out his arms, drawing her into a brief hug. “Elly, so good to see you again. Did you come on the early train?”

  She realised he was excusing her appearance, believing it to be the by-product of getting up early this morning and spending hours on a train from Birmingham.

  “No,” she said, taking a seat opposite him at the table, “I arrived in London yesterday.”

  “Oh.” His eyebrow rose slightly but he made no further comment. “Let’s order and then I’ll show you what I’ve got for you.” He patted a brown leather briefcase that was sitting at his feet.

  Elly looked at the briefcase. That innocuous piece of baggage could hold the key to her future. At the very least, it could hold the key to her survival for the next few months.

  If Glenister was proposing a book, that meant he was also offering an advance from a publisher. Now that Elly and Paul had split up, the house they shared would have to be sold and Elly was going to have to find somewhere else to live. She was going to have to build a new life for herself and that would require money. Her world was falling apart but the contents of that briefcase could be her lifeline.

  When the waiter came to the table, Glenister ordered a fillet of rainbow trout, Elly a salad with grilled chicken. She felt too nervous to eat anything more than that. As an afterthought, she added a glass of white wine to her order. If this meeting turned out to be a bust, at least she’d get a drink out of it, courtesy of her agent.

  While they waited for the drinks to arrive, Glenister told her about one of his clients who had just signed a multi-million-pound deal with a major publisher for three crime novels. Elly was barely listening; her attention kept being drawn to the briefcase at Glenister’s feet.

  The drinks arrived after what seemed to Elly to be an age but was actually only a couple of minutes according to her watch. Glenis
ter reached down and brought the briefcase up to the table. He popped open the clasps and lifted the lid, reaching in and pulling out a slim manila folder. He placed it on the table next to his glass of wine and returned the case to the floor. “Tell me,” he said, leaning forward slightly, “what do you know about the Peak District in Derbyshire?”

  Elly shrugged. She’d been there once as a child, spending a week in a caravan with her family. How old had she been? Eight? Nine? She remembered that Jen had been a pain in the arse the entire holiday, whining all the time. “Not much,” she told Glenister. “There are a lot of hills there and it’s popular with walkers. A scenic part of the country.”

  He nodded slowly. “I don’t know anything about the place myself. I rarely leave London.”

  Elly found that easy to believe. She knew Glenister was London born and bred, raised in the East End. From humble beginnings, he’d moved ever upward in the publishing circles until he got to where he was today, living in luxury on the Chelsea Embankment. He still had a trace of his cockney accent but it was almost totally buried beneath his precise, controlled tones.

  He opened the manila folder and took out a sheet of paper that had a page from a newspaper scanned onto it. He pushed it across the table towards Elly. “Ever hear of this?”

  She looked down at the headline. SEVEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL GOES MISSING IN PEAK DISTRICT. The accompanying text was about a girl called Sarah Walker who had gone missing one night while walking in the woods with her brother.

  Elly liked to think she was up to date with news stories like this but she’d never heard of Sarah Walker. Then she saw the date at the top of the newspaper page. “This happened thirty years ago.”

  “It did indeed,” he agreed. He took another sheet of paper from the folder and handed it to her. “This was more recent.”

  Elly checked the date on the top of the scanned newspaper article first this time. January 2nd 2000. The headline read NEW YEARS EVE REVELLER MISSING. The article was about a 23-year-old journalist named Lindsey Grofield who had last been seen leaving a New Year’s Eve party at a pub in Bakewell and had never made it home. She hadn’t been seen nor heard from since.

  “Are you saying there’s a connection between these disappearances?” Elly asked.

  Her agent shrugged and spread his hands. “I’m not saying anything of the sort. But some bright spark at Wollstonecraft Publishing who fancies himself a detective believes there might be.” He reached into the folder again. “There’s more. Have a look at this.”

  The article he gave her this time had a more sensational headline. BLACKDEN EDGE MURDERER STRIKES AGAIN! Beneath the headline, there was a black-and-white photo of a desolate piece of countryside that Elly assumed was Blackden Edge. According to the article, the naked body of Josie Wagner, a 23-year-old nurse from Manchester, had been discovered at Blackden Edge, Derbyshire. Josie had been strangled to death and her body mutilated. The article was dated August 16th 1977.

  The food arrived and while the waiter was putting the dishes down on the table, Elly did a quick mental calculation. Lindsey Grofield had gone missing twenty-three years after Josie Wagner’s murder. It was a stretch to think there might be a connection between the two occurrences, or even a connection between Grofield and Walker’s disappearances.

  Grofield was twenty-three when she vanished, the Walker girl only seven. If there was one thing Elly had learned from interviewing Leonard Sims, it was that killers usually had a type. After all, that was how she’d been the only journalist Sims agreed to talk to. His victims had all been redheads and Elly had used that, making sure to include a photo of herself when she wrote to Sims at Broadmoor Hospital, requesting an interview.

  “I’m not seeing a connection here,” she told Glenister. “The timeline is too long and the young girl doesn’t fit with the other two victims. If you take her out of the equation, you’re talking about a strangling that took place in 1977 and a disappearance from a pub twenty-three years later. I think the wannabe detective at Wollstonecraft is making a huge leap of imagination to believe those two events are linked.”

  “Perhaps,” Glenister said, “but the thing that piqued his interest is that 1977 headline. That’s the front page of a local newspaper, the Peak Observer or Gazette or some such thing. It’s vanished now, and in its heyday it probably had a circulation of no more than a hundred or so copies. The national tabloids reported on the story of the murdered nurse, of course, but none of them mentioned anything about a Blackden Edge Murderer. The only place that phrase appears is in the local rag.”

  “Okay, so you think there’s a serial killer in Derbyshire that no one outside of that area knows about? The headline says “strikes again” so when did he strike before he murdered Josie Wagner?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Glenister said, “nobody knows. According to the fellow at Wollstonecraft, there are tales of this murderer passed down from parents to their children. ’Don’t stay out after dark or the Blackden Edge Murderer will get you’, that sort of thing.”

  Elly rolled her eyes. “Sounds like an urban legend, a cautionary tale they tell to their kids but do you think there’s really a book’s worth of material in it? What sort of book does Wollstonecraft want, an investigation of the legend or a true crime book? Because if I’m to write the latter, there isn’t much to go on.”

  Glenister gave her a thin smile and looked sheepish. “Well, they’re not sure there’s a book in this. If it turns out there really is a connection between that murder and those disappearances, then that’s all well and good. The publishers will commission you to write a book on the subject.”

  Elly suddenly felt like her key to the future wasn’t going to fit the lock of reality. “And if there isn’t enough material for a book?”

  Glenister shrugged. “Then they’ll drop the idea and move on.”

  She jabbed her fingers at the newspaper articles. “You want me to investigate this without the promise of anything at the end of it? What about the proposal you were going to make?”

  He gestured to the papers. “This is the proposal. It isn’t a book proposal exactly but just think about it, Elly. What if you uncover a serial killer that no one has ever heard of? Think about the fame, the money. You’ll be back in the charts before the book even comes off the press.”

  Elly sighed. “Jack, you and I both know there’s not going to be a connection between any of these events. Just because someone at a publishing house thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes doesn’t make it so. He’ll be still in a job working with other people’s books while I go chasing after his delusional fantasy and end up with nothing to show for it.”

  “I’ll be straight with you,” Glenister said, taking a sip of his wine. “This is all I’ve got to offer you. Sales of Heart of a Killer have dropped off lately and no one knows who Elly Cooper is anymore. So, unless you want to go and interview the Eastbourne Ripper again and uncover something new for a sequel, this is it. What Wollstonecraft are proposing is to pay all your expenses for a two-week trip to Derbyshire. Snoop around a bit. When you return, we’ll discuss what you have and they’ll decide whether to follow up with a book proposal or not.” He drained his wine and put the empty glass on the table.

  They’d discussed a sequel to Heart of a Killer before. Elly always told Glenister that Sims had no more secrets to offer, that there was nothing more the Eastbourne Ripper could reveal about himself that would interest the public if it were published. But the truth was, she couldn’t bring herself to talk to Sims again, to sit across a table from him. Not for any amount of money.

  She had no desire to delve deeper into the mind of Leonard Sims. When telling her about the murders he’d carried out, he’d delighted in Elly’s reactions. No matter how much she tried to hide her emotions from him, Sims always seemed to know what she was feeling and he played on that, describing every murder in intricate, gruesome detail.

  He hinted at further crimes, ones which the police knew nothing about, but as soon as Elly
had enough material for her book, she cut all contact with him. She couldn’t bear to be close to that man again. It was like sitting across a table from a reptilian creature that was searching for its next decadent thrill and had decided that she would fit the bill just nicely.

  Every time she had returned to her hotel room from Broadmoor, the first thing she did was stand under a very hot shower for a very long time because she felt as if the filthy essence of Leonard Sims were clinging to her skin.

  So, a sequel to her bestselling book was out of the question and it looked like the best she could hope for from a publisher was a paid holiday in Derbyshire. She didn’t think for one moment that a book was going to come out of the flimsy information she’d been given.

  “I have a place for you to start,” Glenister offered. “In fact, this is why it’s caught the interest of the publishers. There was a fellow up in Derbyshire called Michael Walker, a well-to-do Lord of the manor type. He was the father of the girl who went missing in 1987. The police were interested in him at the time, brought him in for questioning on a few occasions, that sort of thing. Nothing ever came of it but that could be because he had connections with the powers that be. Maybe he got away with murder.”

  He took a bite of his trout. “Anyway, Michael Walker died a couple of weeks ago so perhaps some secrets will come out if you dig a little. People might be more willing to talk about Walker now that he’s dead. And remember,” he said with a wink, “you can’t slander the dead so there won’t be any fear of legal repercussions if your investigation leads to this fellow being the Blackden Edge Murderer.”

  Elly took a bite of her chicken salad. It was delicious but she wished she was eating it under different circumstances. Was Glenister hinting that he wanted her to set up Michael Walker as a murderer? She could imagine the sensation such a book would cause. Lord of the manor wealthy guy turns out to be a murderer and may even have killed his own daughter in 1987 and got away with it. Was that what Wollstonecraft Publishing wanted, a sensationalist book that was going to fly off the shelves, whether it was true or not?