Scafell

By Matthew Pink

A mutilated body popping up lake-side is not the peaceful start Stephen 'Sparky' Markham was hoping for when he moved up to the Lake District to come to terms with disastrous recent events involving his family.

Across a rain-drenched and wintry landscape, things begin to get bleaker and increasingly more surreal for Sparky when his best friend Detective Charlie Slider does a sudden disappearing act, a crafty old nemesis rears his head unexpectedly, and Sparky finds himself thrust into a weird plot apparently involving fracking magnate Silas Mourner, his aide and a shadowy figure connecting crime networks across Europe.

What Sparky hoped was going to be a cathartic period in a rural idyll passing time bird-watching and trail-running the fells, transforms into a hallucinatory and nightmarish world which increasingly appears to be a trap laid only for him.

This is the first crime novel featuring Sparky Markham. It mixes mystery, surrealism, humour and is set to a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll, blues, jazz, country and electronic music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Pink
• Release date: Feb 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301721047

Matthew Pink

Having grown up in the British rural idyll where Cumbria rubs up against Lancashire, gorging on books and music magazines and surrounded by Swaledale sheep, I shuffled off to study languages at the University Of Leeds. From there I moved abroad to work and study in France and Italy, picking up the cinephile virus while studying film in a French university on the way. After an extended period living in Madrid at the end of my studies, I moved to London where I began a career (broadly) in content production and dissemination. Since then I’ve worked across a variety of different platforms and media, communicating to a diverse range of (international) audiences and honing my writing skills. I also managed to squeeze in an MA in Cinema Studies at the University Of Bristol along the way. In the past I’ve worked as a children’s campsite entertainer, a beater for grouse shoots, a pretend Press Gang officer for the Royal Navy, a guide on witch tours, a sales assistant in an Iraqi shop, a club DJ, and a nursery school teaching assistant. I am quite flexible. Nowadays, when I’m not grafting on some content or copy, you’ll find me out on the moors chasing the sheep I left behind, or at a gig trying not stand in anyone’s way, or watching some poncey arthouse film or another. Or nursing a pale ale in a cosy pub. Scafell is my first novel.

Book preview

PART ONE

Chapter 1

I read once that, in the movies, they have a name for a first shot which appears on the screen unbuttressed by opening titles or narration or such like. This shot appears just – bam! – as if someone clapped or blinked or clicked some magic fingers. And there it is.

They call it the ‘Cold Open.’

My favourite version of a cold open throws wide a rainy location framing a landscape foreign to me in a world I do not yet know.

Every time I open the heavy back door of my cottage in the mornings I am reminded of this kind of shot. Looking out from the doorway frame, that is exactly what it feels like and sounds like too, with the patter of water falling on the bracken leaves, the turf and the soils across the valley below me; a widescreen view conjured from the black, coloured and textured by the rain.

In the Lakes, you see, the rain is tonal.

It is a commonly stated but mistaken truism, I believe, that Inuits employ some 400 words to mean quite simply - 'snow.' Well, Lakelanders should have somewhere about the same number for the wet. It is not unusual to have five distinct weather systems within any same square mile of fell on an early spring day in the Lakes. All of them hydrated.

If you have snow in winter, you'll probably have rain too. If you are fortunate enough to have sun in the summer, you can be sure you'll get hit by a shower at some point. If you have late autumn sleet then, worry not, because bona fide, non-duplicitous, proper rain is but a cumulonimbus or two or away. Wind? Well, yes of course that equals a downpour too; one which just comes down on you harder. And with more bite to the cheek.

When I say the rain is tonal, I mean that the marginal differences in the texture and volume of the different manifestations of rain here are consistent only in their infinitude. You may say that is the case anywhere it rains, but it is not like here - I assure you. Most days, the rain opens up about 4am and moves through its tonal spectrum as the day tries to unfold within it. By mid-afternoon it will have reached its apex, swelling the rivers, feeding the lakes, turning the earthen tracks which spiderweb across the fells into treacly slicks and the marshy areas on the lower ground into pools big enough for pike to spawn.

Those rare days on which it doesn't rain are in the bleak midwinter when the field fork will no longer pierce the turf; kids skate across three inches of black glass packed on top of the water; and iced rocks on the fell sides look diamond-encrusted in the glare of the low winter sun.

But those days are as rare as purple sheep.

Most locals barely notice the rain. For some it's the source of all their earthly ills about which they can bitterly complain on a daily basis. Some find it exhilarating, cathartic, or redemptive, even. I find it strangely calming myself. It is one of the reasons I moved up here from the South.

Old Joe Crosthwaite is one of those local folks who does not bat an eyelid at the rain. You'll see him out in the most violent of deluges, walking his dogs across the lower fells as he does twice a day with nothing but a wax jacket and flat cap to protect him. I swear that when he returns from those one and a half hour hikes, you can barely tell whether he'd set out an hour or merely a few minutes ago. The only thing that gives him away is the state of those two black Labs of his - Pot and Kettle.

On the morning of the 4th of November in that year, as was his usual routine, Old Joe was up before the dawn had broken. He liked to get the dogs out before he had his regular breakfast of a pork sausage sandwich lathered in brown sauce which he'd wash down with a couple of mugs of milky instant coffee. He also liked to time his walks so that he would reach the cusp of the hill, about thirty minutes away from his slate and grey stone farmhouse, just as the first morning light broke through the crepuscular Lakeland skies. There he would release the dogs from their leashes and watch as they’d tear across the moor onto the scent of rabbits and those of other dogs which also called this area of the Lakes their home.

On that morning Joe had been a little heavy to rise. The previous night's eighth pint of Cumberland ale counted three more than he could usually swill, yet he and Jack ‘Gulping’ Gilpin - the landlord of the Green Man where he drank most evenings - had been bellied up at the bar in high spirits owing to their rugby team's bitterly-fought victory over local rivals that very afternoon. They had rolled around like scattered skittles in the bar when one prop recounted his successful application of the Dirty Sanchez onto his opposite number.

Up Joe got, however, and groggily pulled on his worn-through forest green corduroys, a crumpled white and brown checked shirt and a navy woollen jumper that his sister had given him fifteen years hence, and which he wore nearly every day throughout autumn and winter every year regardless of its ever-deteriorating state. He rubbed the yellow crusts of sleep from his eyes with his roughly-skinned knuckles and, grabbing his wax jacket from a hook on the wall carved in the shape of a shepherd's crook, he opened his front door and stepped with Pot and Kettle into the pre-dawn gloom.

The rain was already there, sure enough. It was a light film of rain, one of those that, though you barely feel its presence, is deceptively voluminous and steals the shape out of a trimly-cut jacket quicker than you can say Hackett. Needless to say, Joe wasn't bothered the least bit and breathed deep lungfuls of the cold, wet morning air and increased his stride to shake off the hazy weight of alcohol tugging at his brain.

The path he took that morning was sticky with black mud and rotting leaf mulch; the two dogs relished the conditions more so than Joe whose legs felt unusually cumbersome. His normal energy was lacking; he was getting on now, after all. The dogs decided the direction he took once they were over the style and into the moorland and he was relieved that they stayed on the lower ground near the waters of the lake.

After forty minutes or so Joe began to feel the fug lift from his eyes and he started to enjoy himself. Pot and Kettle had picked up a trail on the edge of a small patch of birch up the hill to his right and were pushing one another onward. Joe did not mind as the dogs remained in full sight and he saw that the woodland was small enough not to lose them for too long.

Joe slowed by the waterside as he glimpsed the first milky streaks of morning light reflecting on the surface of the lake waters out to his left. He looked up and watched as a soft grey and yellow dawn scrolled cautiously through and illuminated the thin curtain of moisture which hung over the fells and the moors like a spectre.

Old Joe rubbed his eyes again and breathed in the new day. Later he planned to take his Land Rover up to Keswick for Harry Haltwhistle to have a look at. The previous day it had begun to make a noise like a pig being slowly tortured when he was on his way back from the vets. He also planned to finish clearing his garden in preparation for the cruel frosts of December and January which last year had wiped out half his year's work.

Old Joe thought of these tasks and more while he scanned the Lakeland slowly from right to left. His field of vision took in the silhouettes of his dogs up to no good on the edge of the birch patch; that uncertain dawn peeping over the fells out in front; and the stretch of water off to his left slowly turning from black to green as the light edged through. But the tracking scope of his gaze was interrupted when his eyes lighted on a shapeless lump down by the waterside about thirty metres in front of where he had stopped.

Curious, he walked towards it, picking up a stick from the pebbled shore covered in lake weed and shiny and damp with the morning mists. Now closer, he could see that the shapeless lump comprised a couple of black bin liners concealing something angular and bulky. Parcel tape had been strapped round the join of the bags which were symmetrically inverted, and it held them together. The bags were denting gently in the light early morning wind; they were worn with moisture damage and torn in places. More bloody fly-tippers, Joe thought.

But the breeze dropped for a second or two and Joe suddenly became aware of a foul smell which curdled his stomach and made him recoil in disgust. The odour was a thousand times worse than the sickly sweet smell of rotting sandwiches and the unwanted remains of mouldy fruit which fly-tippers usually left. He used the stick to pull back a flapping edge on one of the bin liners and what he saw behind it would remain with him until his dying day, polluting his dreams and cruelly poisoning Joe's latent magnanimosity toward the human race forever.

When he pulled back the bin liner Joe made out the head and torso of a young girl. One arm was crossed in front of the chest in a manner which would have otherwise been a physical impossibility. The flesh was bloated, milk white and marbled with the greens and blues of veins which looked starved of oxygen and which had pushed to the surface of the skin in order to find some. The head of the body hung off at an ugly angle and was attached only to the torso by a couple of exposed tendons.

All of this would be repulsive enough to turn the strongest stomach but what stayed with Joe and what he saw every night subsequent to this when he closed his eyes before he tried to sleep was the face of the victim staring back at him. Joe's gaze was met by a pair of black maws, as black as the night lake water, coloured only by the thin neat purpling bruises next to the sockets from where the eyeballs had been prised.

A trickle of sweat slipped down the small of Joe's back and into the crack at the top of his underwear: It felt like a tea cup of napalm.

The thin veil of rain which cloaked the moors and the fells was parted up by the new dawn and the water now fell more forcefully across the open ground and the lakeside where Old Joe Crosthwaite stood.

Chapter 2

The first sound I became aware of when I awoke on the morning of November the 4th was the spiral scratch of the stylus on my record player in the far corner of my living room which looked out onto Wastwater.

The second was the muted bleating of a Swaledale sheep looking in through the French windows of my living room in an apparently concerned manner.

Daylight had reached the valleys around Wastwater maybe a couple of hours previously. I pulled myself out of the crimson plunge cushions on my couch where I had spent the previous night, knocking over the remains of a bottle of St Magdalene single malt balancing on the edge of a footstool onto the grey carpet below and, cursing, stumbled like a stun-gunned heifer over to the record decks.

The stylus was stuck on the end of a Link Wray record I had been playing over and over in my stupor the night before. The song I had been playing in particular was a song called 'Fallin' Rain.' The lilt in the melody and the lyric about a man in the lap of his own regrets facing the in-built insanity of the world blunted the shards of ice which occasionally pierced my brain these days, and melted them away into the night. The song is a cruelly short one and, as a consequence, leaves the listener with an unquenchable thirst to play the record repeatedly.

Miraculously the vinyl looked OK but the stylus would probably need replacing again. Sometimes the extra crackle that wear gives a record can add a little warmth to the sound but I was pushing my luck here. I switched over the records and put on a well-worn Sonny Rollins LP to coax me into the day. The rough crackle of that record allied with the syncopated rhythms and the flat notes of Rollins often worked to reconfigure my jumbled morning-head.

I cleared my eyes and splashed cold water into my face at the kitchen sink, reaching into the cupboard for some fresh coffee to put on the stove.

As the coffee stewed, I looked out onto Wastwater. Its dark and deep waters offered me the blank solace which I required. The lake was somewhere I could project the terrors which came to me in the night and accept them silently into its black embrace.

The building on a fell overlooking Wastwater in which I lived alone was originally a shelter built over two hundred years ago by a shepherd using his bare hands. Here he would have herded his flock when the gales and the rains over the fells became too savage. Now it was a simple cottage consisting of a small living space (where I had taken to sleeping most nights), an even smaller kitchen comprising two gas plates, a couple of chipboard cupboards with a fridge-freezer beneath, and a bedroom I had just about managed to erect a pine double bed within.

I had lived there for the last three years after moving here from the South and had inherited it from my grandfather on my father's side who had spent his last thirty years here living alone before his death from liver cancer at the age of ninety-four.

Though I had spent the majority of my formative years around London, I had spent many summers here as a child and had not really known what to do with it when the family solicitor had informed me of my inheritance in the winter of 2006.

Now, though, I knew.

When the rains paused for those few glorious moments, the skies broadened and the light grew celestial, the views out and around the valleys were God-given. In late, late summer, when you were most likely to get a clear day, you would not have me believe that there was a more beautiful place in the world.

But the rain was the rain. It was the thread in the tapestry of the place. As John Cooper Clarke once astutely said, Without the rain it would just be the crater district.

The previous night I had dreamed in my whisky daze that sheep had encircled me in some vast colourless Helmand desert and were bleating my name in unison. As I approached one of the flock to ask what they wanted of me, it had smiled, stepped back and parted the circle to reveal a circus show in the desert where my sister Esther blew fire off the head of a torch in huge balls and her son Thomas called out for me from behind her in the darkness.

It was not the first time that I had had that dream.

I sipped the bitter coffee and walked into the bathroom for a cold shower when the phone rang.

Sparky? It's Charlie.

Charlie. Morning.

Listen, can't make the Mere any more this morning. Something's come up. Something nasty. OK to take a rain check son?

Charlie Slider was an old colleague from the Met who had been transferred up to the Lakes at his wife's behest when their marriage hit the skids owing to his London shift patterns and his social habits. Originally from the Eden Valley to the east of here, he'd been posted up here one year longer than I had and loved the area violently and as much as me. His and Cassie's presence here was another reason I had come to this place.

Yeah, no beef, I replied, A bit slow to get going today anyways. What's up?

You been sifting for gold again lad? I can smell you from here. Yeah it's a...it’s a bit of a humdinger. I'll give you a tinkle later about it. See what you think. Catch you then OK?

Sure, I said and hung up the phone staring out the window watching the early drizzle over the lake subside.

We'd been due to park out down near Haweswater to try and catch a glimpse of the pair of golden eagles which nest there, though in all honesty it's a bit like trying to catch a bubble with an ice pick. Usually we settle for a few redstarts and be done with it.

In reality, our fortnightly birding meetings were more of an excuse for the two of us to drink whisky and shoot the breeze away from Charlie's wife Cassie, but recently my interest had been intensified after picking up a book from a shop down in Ambleside called 'The Running Sky.' Over twelve chapters the author, a poet and radio producer, describes a series of journeys and encounters with birds which help him to open up cobwebby childhood memories and explore the small epiphanies which mark our development into adult life. The book had fed an appetite I did not know I possessed and I wanted more.

After my shower, as the day settled a little, I took the dry stone-walled lane down the edge of High Scale Wood to the trickle of shops near the waterside to get a paper and some breakfast. I was surprised at how quickly I had managed to chase the fug out from my head.

Turning out of the lane I stepped out onto a small stony track which followed the underside of the wood on the hillside and led downward to the small huddle of buildings comprising my local amenities; an under stocked outward bound shop, a butcher which opened only on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Shirley's - my destination.

As I opened the door to the shop the smell of cooking bacon leaked out and a man in a green quilted jacket with flaxen hair slicked back on his head like a banker from a shiny 80s American film hurried out of the doorway past me, brushing my shoulder as he did so. I recognised the man from somewhere I could not quite place. I noticed that he possessed a beaked nose which teased his upper lip such was its downward trajectory.

You treat all the ladies like that? I said, moving through the door.

The man with the flaxen hair swivelled and faced me while still walking backward. What was that? Oh I see, yes... Sorry, he replied in a tone which sounded as warm and conciliatory as the inside of a meat locker. He then jumped into the open door of a black Freelander that was pulled up on the curb with its engine still humming.

I shook my head and moved in towards the smell of the bacon. The full-busted girl behind the counter looked up from the frying pan and smiled when she saw me.

She wore her soot-black hair tied up in a bun from which a few strands spilled from the sides, no make-up and had tied a plastic red apron over her faded denim shirt. On the apron was some purple lettering which read If you can read this then you're probably staring at my tits.

Shirley was a Lakes girl through and through. Born in Kendal hospital, schooled until the age of sixteen in Penrith, her family had land which stretched up from Keswick and almost to the border where they farmed livestock. She had been running this cafe-cum-shop for some years, her family having branched out when foot and mouth had decimated the farming industry - including that of her family for a time. She had been doling out pasties, hot pork sandwiches and brutal tea in polystyrene cups to rain-battered and wind-beaten walkers and locals alike for over four years now.

She had a sharp tongue and an acid wit and did not suffer fools for very long. This endeared her to me greatly. On top of the simple, artery-clogging hot food she served up to shivering and sodden customers, Shirley's place offered basic household supplies, newspapers, a postal service and free advice straight off the bat regarding your sartorial selection for that day or the direction of your social life, perhaps.

Well, that fella had obviously poured sour milk on his flakes this morning! What a weapon. Rank hair to boot. How we doing today then mister? What you havin'? Summat salty I don't doubt. Have you heard about what Old Joe found down by Buttermere? Pretty minging by all accounts.

I grabbed a stool, sharpened up, ordered a bacon roll and opened my ears.

Chapter 3

Charles Frederick Slider is an elusive man at the best of times. I believe that his wife would say the same thing and she has lived with and without him for nearly ten years now. He will often go missing from your life for weeks on end, maybe even months, and then the phone will ring and it will be like you saw him only a moment ago. No excuses, no explanations, no cover stories, merely the repeated mention of a joke or anecdote or phrase he knows you will recognise from a transiently intimate moment with him and you are up and running once again.

We worked the same beats down in East London for quite a while - Bow, Newham, Upton - and like the asphalt cowboys we pretended to be, we'd spend many a freezing foggy night driving round the dead-end, litter-strewn estates looking for and shaking down scrots you wouldn't flush down your toilet lest they infect it with their disease.

We'd rile people we shouldn't have riled because of that. Charlie had been suspended a couple of times, though eventually his golden tongue would talk his way around and he'd get himself back sitting pretty. I, on the other hand, got something of an easy ride from my superiors for reasons I am still unsure of today. I’m pretty sure I used up my nine lives during those nights in the neon haze anyway. And I ran with that, I readily admit.

Charlie was a good partner to have at that time. His easy charm and fast talk got him in with everyone from the pushers on the estates, the