Already Dead (25 page)

‘We’re treating it as a murder inquiry,’ said Fry.

‘That’s what I understood. So how can I help?’

‘Well, we’ve been told that Glen Turner was planning to sue the Eden Valley Adventure Centre for injuries he sustained during a recent paintballing session.’

‘I thought that might be it. Well, it’s true – in a way.’

‘He did suffer injuries,’ said Fry. ‘They were visible on his body.’

‘Yes, of course. And, in fact, we have some photographs.’

‘Really? May I see them?’

Chadburn passed her a series of fairly low quality pictures, which looked as though they’d been printed on a standard laser printer. They showed Glen Turner with his shirt removed, from the front and from behind, the lesions on his torso clearly visible as painful looking red blotches, though the accuracy of the colour on the printouts was doubtful.

Fry recognised the background in the photographs. The red striped curtains, the computer work station with two monitors. They had been taken in Glen Turner’s bedroom at the cottage on St John’s Street.

‘Who took these?’ asked Fry.

‘I believe it was my client’s mother,’ said Chadburn.

Fry put the photos down. As evidence, they were dubious. Any one of Kenneth Chadburn’s colleagues on the criminal side of the practice could have demolished their validity in court in a few minutes. It was impossible to tell whether the marks on his body were genuine bruises or had been created using make-up. And they were taken in his bedroom by his mum?

‘Of course, they were relatively minor injuries,’ said Chadburn. ‘Soft tissue damage, causing considerable pain but with complete recovery expected within twelve months. Normally, we’d be looking for a level of compensation at around three or four thousand pounds. That would be in the case of a car accident, say, or if you slip on a spillage and suffer a fall in a supermarket. We deal with a lot of those.’

‘That’s probably why the price of shopping has been going up so much,’ said Fry.

He looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Never mind, sir.’

‘I see. Well, the big companies like supermarkets have policies for this sort of thing. If a customer reports an injury in one of their stores they offer a small amount of compensation – a discount on the next purchase, a few points on a loyalty card. You see, they rely on members of the public not being aware of the amount of compensation they might get or the right steps to take at the time, such as getting the names of witnesses. Those sort of cases can be a waste of time for us. But smaller companies are a different matter.’

‘Why so?’

‘They’re not used to it. When they get an incident, their staff often don’t know what to do. And they tend to get worried about the potential damage to their reputation, which makes them more willing to settle without a court hearing.’

Fry looked at the photos again. She remembered thinking how painful they looked. They’d given her the impression Turner might have been tortured before he died.

‘But you said yourself these are minor injuries,’ she said. ‘And paintballs are just gelatin capsules, surely?’

‘Yes, we did a little bit of research when Mr Turner came to us, of course.’ He referred to a note in the file. ‘It seems paintballs consist of a gelatin shell containing mostly polyethylene glycol and dye. They’re designed to break on impact. Even the dye washes out of most clothes. But when fired from a gun – more properly known as a marker, I believe – paintballs may travel at speeds up to three hundred feet per second. As you can imagine, they have the potential to cause considerable damage to a human target, depending on the velocity and angle and the particular part of the body they hit.’

‘What exactly happened to Mr Turner, then?’

Chadburn adjusted his glasses. A small trickle of sweat had run down his forehead on to the centre of the frame and he dabbed it from the lens.

‘Well, as you may know, these paintballing sessions were part of a team building weekend organised by his employers, Prospectus Assurance. There had been other activities during the weekend, which might not be of any relevance to you.’

‘Role playing, blind driving, motivational talks.’

‘Just so.’ The solicitor gave her a rather sad smile. ‘Legal practices like ours never go in for that sort of thing. The older partners would be horrified. But I sometimes think it’s rather a pity.’

‘I don’t think it’s all that much fun,’ said Fry.

‘No?’ Chadburn looked disappointed. ‘Ah well, on to the paintballing. In his statement to us, Mr Turner described how the staff at the adventure centre split his party from Prospectus Assurance into two teams. They explained that the objective of the game was to capture the other team’s flag without getting hit by a paintball. Anyone hit is effectively out of the game, I understand. If you get shot, you’re … Well, you’re…’

‘Dead,’ said Fry.

He cleared his throat. ‘Precisely. Dead. Well, then they were given safety goggles and loaded guns. In the first game, a gun misfired and a paintball hit Mr Turner in the, er … crotch area.’

‘The crotch area?’ repeated Fry.

‘Yes, erm … the crotch area. A largely unprotected part of the body, you understand.’

‘And that was an accident?’

‘According to my client.’

Fry didn’t need to wonder for very long why there was no photograph of that particular injury. Even Glen Turner wouldn’t have wanted his mother taking pictures of his genitals. Perhaps he hadn’t mentioned that shot to her. It was the sort of thing he could only share with his doctor or his lawyer.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘Well, Mr Turner told me that this injury was particularly painful. And he admitted that … well, he gave expression to the pain rather loudly, I gather.’

‘He …? Oh, you mean he screamed.’

‘Ah. Yes.’

Fry nodded. She could imagine how that would have gone down with Turner’s colleagues. There was nothing like someone else’s discomfort for causing hilarity. She hardly had to ask the rest of the story. By screaming like a girl the first time he was hit, Glen Turner had made himself the preferred target for every trigger-happy employee on the paintballing field.

‘And it seems in the next game my client took several hits, some of them at point blank range,’ said Chadburn. ‘One shot hit him on his uncovered neck and others hit him in the side, on his back and on his stomach. At first he thought his neck was actually bleeding, but it was just the oily paint running down his skin. The bruises stung for hours afterwards, he said. But when he complained the other players just laughed at him and said he should think of them as battle wounds.’

‘Battle wounds?’

‘Yes, that was the phrase.’

‘Didn’t you say a few moment ago that when you were hit by a paintball, you were out of the game.’

‘That seems to be the way it works.’

‘So how was it that Mr Turner was hit so many times in one game? Surely he would have been out on the first hit?’

‘Indeed.’ Chadburn even smiled a little now. ‘Many of those shots must have been fired at him after he was officially dead. Very much against the rules of the game, I imagine.’

Fry nodded. ‘I assume the adventure centre must have public liability insurance.’

‘Of course.’ Chadburn looked smug now, as if he’d been saving this nugget of information to himself. ‘But perhaps I don’t need to give you many guesses who their insurance policy is with?’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Not at all. In fact, because of their existing business relationship with Prospectus Assurance, the adventure centre gave them preferential rates on their team building weekends.’

Fry shook her head in amazement. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Deliciously ironic, I think.’

‘So do you think Mr Turner would have had a case against them?’

‘When he came to me on Monday, I told him he was unlikely to have a case against the adventure centre itself, as the injury wasn’t caused by an act of negligence on their part – and I believe he signed a waiver before the game started. I expect the safety briefing mentioned a ban on head shots and so forth.
Volenti non fit injuria
.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s Latin.
To a willing person, injury is not done
. It’s a common law doctrine, meaning that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, they can’t bring a claim against the other party. But…’

‘What?’

‘Well, the person or persons who directly caused the injuries are a different issue. Consent wasn’t given to an actual assault. In my opinion, Mr Turner’s injuries might be considered to have resulted from the reckless act of another. I advised him that he could consider reporting the incident to the police as a criminal assault, possibly actual bodily harm. And I suggested that if he decided to pursue that course, he should get photographs taken of his injuries sooner rather than later. In fact, it provides more convincing evidence if the police take the photographs themselves. I’m probably telling you something that you already know, Detective Sergeant.’

‘But Mr Turner didn’t take your advice, did he? He never got to the point of reporting this incident as a criminal offence.’

‘No, I don’t believe so. I suspect he was having second thoughts. With all due respect to my client – my late client – he didn’t strike me as the most decisive of individuals. All I could do was advise him on his legal position. It wasn’t my place to persuade Mr Turner towards one course of action or another.’

‘What were his reservations?’

‘Oh, the consequences for the people involved. A criminal record, the loss of employment. It’s a serious matter.’

‘Did he name the individuals he believed caused his injuries?’

‘Oh, of course. After all, he knew everyone involved in that team building exercise. It was all in the family, so to speak. The named parties were two of his colleagues at Prospectus Assurance.’

Fry recalled Ralph Edge’s account of the staff being divided into teams based on their departments, which meant he’d been on the same team as Glen Turner. So who had they been competing against? Yes, that was it.
Some of those women in Sales are merciless
.

‘Are you going to tell me the names?’ she said.

‘Oh, well … I suppose that will be acceptable, in the circumstances.’

Chadburn made a performance of looking for a specific page in the file. He did it so slowly that Fry began to grow irritated. But she didn’t dare express her irritation out loud for fear that he might decide this was one detail he should claim confidentiality for.

‘Yes, here we are,’ he said finally. ‘The two gentlemen alleged to be responsible for my client’s injuries go by the names of Mr Nathan Baird and Mr Ralph Edge.’

24

Diane Fry never realised it could be so dark during the day. Even when there was a total eclipse, you got a bit of light creeping round the edges to remind you that the sun was still up there, the universe still functioning in the normal way. Today, there was almost no natural light in Edendale. The clouds were so dark that the sky seemed to have decided it could do without the sun.

She had to walk a couple of hundred yards from the offices of Richmond Jones in the Market Square to reach the car park where she’d left her Audi. In the distance, above the roofs of Edendale, she could see clouds lying against the hills on either side of the valley, blocking the skyline and swallowing the horizon.

Fry began to feel suffocated. The air was so humid and thick it felt as if she was walking through warm soup. She knew she’d have a headache before the day was over. The tension in the air was concentrating behind her eyes, squeezing her head until it buzzed. Was it possible to feel so claustrophobic in a wide open space like the Eden Valley? With weather like this, it was. Natural forces were pressing down with all their might, trying to squash a nest of ants. It would be a relief when it rained again. And rain it surely would, before long. An ocean of moisture was gathering overhead in that sagging grey blanket. It couldn’t hold much longer.

Lights had come on in the shops along Clappergate. Cars drove on sidelights as they crossed the junction. People were hurrying along the street, their heads down as if they needed to get home before a curfew. An air of tension was palpable. The whole world was waiting for the moment.

Suddenly the atmosphere changed. A moment of hesitation, a pregnant pause. People stopped and looked up, perhaps sensing the first, solitary plop of rain on the back of a neck, then responded to the warning, quickening their pace in the vain hope of reaching shelter before the deluge. Most wouldn’t make it. In the next few seconds they vanished in sheets of water, vertical curtains of rain soaking them in an instant, plastering their hair to their skulls, penetrating their summer clothes, bouncing mud off the pavement on to their shoes.

As she ran for her car, Fry was deafened by the roar of the torrent. Cars swept by on the road, swishing through pools of water, hissing over wet tarmac, throwing up spray like a tidal wave. A Transit van went past and its nearside wheels hit the deepest part of the water, creating a tidal wave that surged across the pavement and swept over Fry’s shoes. The force of the water as it withdrew to the road almost pulled her off her feet.

There was still time for her to get to Prospectus Assurance before the end of the afternoon. As Fry arrived in Nathan Baird’s office she was conscious of a murmur of speculation from the bank of call handlers she passed. Word had gone round the company. Perhaps some of them were hoping that their manager would be arrested for crimes against humanity.

‘Yes, well, the incident itself was just a bit of fun,’ said Baird when she challenged him on Glen Turner’s paintballing injuries. ‘It’s part of what team building is all about, letting your hair down and having a laugh with your colleagues. People get to know each other better that way, in an informal setting.’

‘It seems Mr Turner didn’t think it was a bit of fun,’ said Fry. ‘He wasn’t laughing at the time.’

Baird waved his slender hand in a gesture that Fry remembered, as if an irritating fly had returned. ‘Oh, I know Glen took it a bit too seriously. But he got over it.’