Chapter 34

The Chapel Wood Institute estate was on the southern slope of Sale Fell, on the A66 side of Bassenthwaite Lake. It was three hundred yards from the actual Chapel Wood and half a mile from Barf, a steep, rocky fell internationally known for the whitewashed pillar of rock on its lower slopes. According to local legend, the rock marked the exact spot where, in 1783, Frederick Augustus Hervey, the Bishop of Derry, was killed falling from his horse after a foolish – and no doubt drunken – wager he could ride all the way up to the top. Poe had mentioned this to Bradshaw a couple of years earlier, thinking she'd be impressed he knew something she didn't. She'd responded by telling him that Frederick Augustus Hervey had actually died twenty years later in the Italian peninsula. When he'd asked her why the mountain rescue team still whitewashed the rock every year if it hadn't happened, she'd replied that tradition was just peer pressure from dead people. This time when they passed Barf, Poe refused to look at it.

As soon as he turned off the A66 he hit a series of smaller and smaller roads. Poe's satnav gave up but Bradshaw was able to direct him via the GPS on her mobile.

‘Turn left in thirty metres, Poe,' she said.

‘There isn't anywhere to turn, Tilly. It's . . . oh, hang on, here it is.'

He stopped the car and the three of them stared at the track leading to the Chapel Wood Institute.

‘Not exactly welcoming, is it?' Linus said.

Linus had a point, but Poe wasn't going to admit it. He put the car back in gear and began inching along what was little more than a sun-baked dirt track, broken up by clumps of dandelions, their petals the colour of egg yolk.

The Bishop of Carlisle had told them that when it had been a private boarding school, the access road to Chapel Wood had been well maintained, but it seemed the Children of Job had allowed it to fall into disrepair. It had so many craters it looked like the satellite image of a bombed runway, and the vegetation either side was so overgrown it was scratching Poe's car. In the rare gaps between the dense brush, Poe caught glimpses of barbed wire fences, and beyond them fields and grazing cattle. The grass here was valley grass and it was lush and green. The exact opposite of the short, dry stuff on the fells that the Herdwick sheep eked out a living on.

‘Superintendent Nightingale says they have a modern minibus,' Poe said, his eyes back on the road. ‘They use it for supply runs and for picking up students.'

‘She knows more than she did yesterday afternoon then,' Linus said.

‘Her guys were here yesterday. They took a load of things from Cornelius's office. Spoke to a few key people.'

‘Cornelius Green lived here?'

‘A lot of them do, apparently. Superintendent Nightingale said it's weird and insular, but not in a Wicker Man kind of way. And while they weren't obstructive, the group didn't offer anything unless asked directly about it.'

‘Who's in charge now?'

‘Pro tem, a man called Joshua Meade,' Poe said, ‘but I'm told the board will make a permanent appointment in the next three weeks.'

The road turned a hard left, the bend half-hidden by two giant rhododendron bushes. Poe slowed and squeezed between them like he was driving through an automatic car wash machine. He winced as one of his wing mirrors got caught on a branch.

‘I can understand them not wanting to spend money on maintaining a road,' Linus said, ‘but why the heck wouldn't they keep on top of these branches? It makes no sense. Not if they have a nice shiny minibus.'

Poe rounded the corner. He blinked in surprise. ‘That's why,' he said.