The room occupied by Maurice Wharton had an electrically operated positional bed, air conditioning, a flat-screen TV and en suite toilet facilities. Wharton would have felt he was staying in a nice three-star hotel, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was dying.

During his stay in the hospice, he had received the constant attentions of the palliative care nurse, the health care support workers and the occupational therapist. At intervals he was given aromatherapy massage with essential plant oils. He was becoming familiar with their powerful scents, which clung to his body. Camomile, lavender, rosemary, eucalyptus. So very different from what he’d been used to all his life – beer and cigarette smoke, the smells of cooking. He was starting to believe that death would smell of lavender.

It was two weeks since he’d moved from palliative care on a day basis, and taken up permanent occupation in St Luke’s. It was progress of a kind, he supposed – another step on the road towards his inevitable destination. And ‘permanent’ was a word that didn’t mean quite what it used to do.

Terminal care. They said the aim was to make the last few months of life relatively peaceful and pain-free. Some patients escaped the pain, he’d been told. But intractable pain was experienced in more than seventy per cent of cases with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Ninety-five per cent of patients died within five years. He’d lived most of his life being considered out of the ordinary. Now, in his last few weeks, he’d become part of the majority.

The pain in his abdomen, the loss of appetite, the yellowing in his skin and eyes, the fatigue and nausea, the insomnia. Why was the list so long? Doctors had initially related his symptoms to depression. So the pancreatic cancer had already been well advanced when the diagnosis was confirmed by CT scans of his abdomen, and surgery had become impossible. The only available treatment by then had been chemotherapy, a drug called Gemcitabine. It was ironic that the side effects of the drug were nausea and vomiting, skin rashes – and the fluid retention that swelled his body again.

Maurice Wharton had never really believed in God, or heaven. But occasionally he had a chat with the hospice chaplain, while he waited for his personal visitors at three o’clock in the afternoon. Should he be afraid of hell? Was there some endless ordeal waiting for him when this temporary suffering was over? If so, the chaplain had never mentioned it. Eternal torment only came to him in his dreams.

Wharton wondered whether he should stop trying to keep up with the news from the outside world. But sometimes, when his family visited, he couldn’t avoid it. There were things they wanted to talk about. There were the moorland fires, which had been burning for weeks and were now destroying Oxlow Moor. There was the campaign against the building of a new Tesco store in town. Nancy and the children knew how irrelevant those topics were to him, yet it was important to talk about them, as if everything was normal.

But nothing was normal now. His four-hourly doses of oral morphine were vital to get him through the day, though they made him prone to vomiting, constipation and dry mouth. The cancer had also affected his liver. The doctors told him that worsening renal function altered the metabolisation of the morphine and caused toxicity. The explanation meant nothing to him. But he knew what the results were. Agitation, confusion, hallucinations, involuntary jerking of his limbs and vivid dreams.

Yes, those vivid dreams. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep at all. At other times he was afraid to sleep, because his dreams woke him in a panic, sweating in the face of unnameable fears.

Were those nightmares caused by morphine toxicity, or by something else entirely?

The road from Edendale climbed steeply over the edge of Abney Moor and passed through the Hazlebadge parish. From here, the Light House was already visible. Cooper glimpsed it now and then from the highest points of the road as a distinctive feature on the horizon.

The pub had always seemed to draw his eye, as if it was trying to lure him, to tempt him to call in for a visit. It was a famous landmark in this part of the Peak District. Famous when it was open, at least. The Light House had shut its doors six month ago.

Well, it was just one of thousands of rural pubs that had closed during the last few years. But this one was such a shame. The pub stood on the highest point of Oxlow Moor and was known as a landmark for miles around. The roof line and the shape of the chimneys were recognisable from a great distance, unmistakably the Light House. When it was open, the illuminated facade of the pub had been visible at night in all directions, from the B6061 above Winnats Pass to the main road running south-west out of Edendale towards Peak Forest.

The Light House might still be visible now, once the smoke of the wildfires had cleared. But it was no longer the landmark Cooper had known. The roof line was still there, and the shape of the chimneys. But the pub itself was a blank, windowless and dead.

Finding the place was the difficulty, though. Its presence on the skyline gave no clue how you were supposed to reach it. And within minutes it had vanished again as the road descended past the abandoned open-cast mine workings at Shuttle Rake and Moss Rake.

From one short stretch of road, he could see part of the vast quarry that served the Castleton cement works. Its walls were blasted into deep ledges like an enormous Roman amphitheatre glowing white in the sunlight. A stack of white silage bags formed a startling feature of the landscape, an unexpected contrast to the usual black silage stores. Many of the road signs directed quarry lorries towards the best routes to reach the sites that were still operating. Without them, large vehicles would constantly be attempting to negotiate the narrowest of lanes, getting stuck and bringing traffic to a complete halt.

Cooper turned on to a short stretch of Batham Gate, the old Roman road, where he glimpsed a herd of piebald horses grazing in the field. Then he turned again towards Bradwell Moor, where the Light House soon came back into view.

The dark expanses of Oxlow Moor stretched away west and south, increasing the pub’s impression of isolation. Since the only approach was up the hill from the east, you used to be able to step out of the pub and feel as though you were in the middle of nowhere. Well, you were in the middle of nowhere. There was almost nothing in sight to remind you of civilisation, except the occasional farmstead nestled into the landscape on the more distant hills.

To the north he could see Rushup Edge and Mam Tor, with the plateau of Kinder Scout a ghostly grey presence behind them. Away to the east, he was looking across the Hope Valley to Winhill Pike, the distinctive conical tor on Win Hill. To the south-west, the view was over Jewelknoll Plantation to Ox Low, and a glimpse of farmland near Peak Forest. He knew Edendale was somewhere to the south-east, beyond Bradwell Moor, but the town was lost from view now.

He stopped for a moment, wound down the window and looked up the hill at the pub. A large auctioneer’s sign had been fixed high on the wall. Historic landmark inn for sale by public auction.

Below his position, a track snaked away towards the remains of some disused lead mines, crossing the Limestone Way about a mile down. There were walkers on the trail now. He could hear the clang of gates being closed as they passed from one part of route to the next, sprung stainless-steel latches crashing into place. The sound was perfectly clear, though the trail was a long way below him.

All around the edges of the moor were irregular clusters of bumps and hollow – the traces of those long-abandoned mine workings, their mounds of spoil thrown up like giant ant heaps. At another time, sheep would have been dozing on those mounds, using the extra height for vantage points, or places of safety. Beneath a tumble of stones in the bottom of each hollow would be the entrance to a disused mine shaft. Not so safe at all.