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Back The Dead Place Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Dedication
  2. Author’s Note
  3. Epigraph
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen
  17. Chapter Fourteen
  18. Chapter Fifteen
  19. Chapter Sixteen
  20. Chapter Seventeen
  21. Chapter Eighteen
  22. Chapter Nineteen
  23. Chapter Twenty
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. About the Author
  42. Also by Stephen Booth
  43. About the Publisher

‘Don’t worry,’ said Cooper. ‘The dress code is casual. The Duke and Duchess won’t be at home.’

He took a last glance at the plastic box before they piled all the stuff back in. There were stickers and pens in a plastic Waitrose bag, a pencil sharpener, dart flights, sweets, and cloth badges advertising something called Les Randonneurs Mondiaux. A label inside the Waitrose bag said: Congratulations! You’ve found it!

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

The White Peak could boast very few celebrities, apart from some ageing pop stars and TV personalities. If Cooper racked his brains, he could only recall the singer Long John Baldry, who’d been born in Bakewell, Buxton’s Tim Brooke-Taylor of The Goodies and DJ Dave Lee Travis. Great writers had passed through the area and moved on. Charlotte Brontë had created Jane Eyre while staying with a friend in Hathersage; Jane Austen had written part of Pride and Prejudice at a Bakewell hotel; and D.H. Lawrence had found his real-life inspiration for Mellors the gamekeeper living on the Via Gellia, near Matlock. So even literary links tended to be a bit tenuous.

As a result of the celebrity shortage, local people had to make do with the aristocracy. The dukes of Devonshire and Rutland had once owned the whole of this area between them, and large chunks of it still bore their names. The Devonshires’ home at Chatsworth House was a major tourist attraction, more spectacular and more opulent than Buckingham Palace, and containing a substantial share of the nation’s art treasures. Or so it had seemed to Cooper when he’d toured the house as a child.

Alder Hall had been one of the Devonshires’ smaller properties, so insignificant that an early duke had presented the estate as a gift to a less affluent cousin. The present hall had only fifteen bedrooms and two hundred acres of private grounds, so it would hardly have been missed.

The walls around the estate were high and festooned with ivy. Here and there, water gushed into stone troughs from drainage holes designed to relieve the pressure that built up behind the walls after heavy rain. The main gates were open when they arrived, so presumably the agent had got there before them. Cooper turned into the gateway and rolled the car slowly on to the gravel drive.