Already Dead (26 page)

‘He had photographs taken of his injuries, and he went to see a solicitor on Monday to discuss legal action. Possibly against you, Mr Baird.’

‘No, no, no. That was all a lot of nonsense. Glen was sulking for a while. He didn’t come in to work on the Monday, just to make a point. And when he appeared on Tuesday morning, he had this exaggerated limp, as if his leg had been shot off. I suppose he thought people would feel sorry for him. But it didn’t wash. We just got on with the job as usual. Water under the bridge and all that.’

‘Did you actually talk to Mr Turner about it?’

‘Yes, he came in here and we had a chat. As I said to you yesterday, my door is always open. Glen knew perfectly well he could talk to me about things. So that’s what we did. He never seriously considered suing me or any of his colleagues. It was just hot air, believe me. He got it all off his chest, we shook hands on it, and he went back to work. Job done.’

‘You did tell me yesterday that nothing unusual had happened on Tuesday, sir.’

‘Well, it wasn’t all that unusual. I’m team leader. Sorting out little issues like that – well, it’s all part of my job. Besides…’

‘What?’

‘Well, poor old Glen. It didn’t seem fair to spread the story far and wide. You don’t want to make your employees’ discomfiture public, do you? What happens at Prospectus stays at Prospectus. Do you know what I mean?’

Fry discovered that Ralph Edge wasn’t at work, so she phoned him at home. He laughed at her question.

‘Yes, poor old Glen,’ he said. ‘I told you he was sore afterwards, didn’t I? I mean, I was the one who told you about the paintballing excitement, Sergeant.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were one of the individuals responsible for it,’ said Fry. ‘You let me believe it was the opposing team from Sales.’

‘Well, is there actually any proof who did it?’ asked Edge in an innocent tone.

‘Mr Turner’s statement to his solicitor.’

‘Would that stand up in court?’ He laughed again. ‘No, it’s a fair cop. But it was all part of the office banter, you know. Someone gets paintballed every time. This time, it was Glen. It could just as easily have been me, or Nathan Baird. Nothing to get upset about. He didn’t report it to the police or anything, did he?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ admitted Fry.

‘There you are, then. He calmed down, saw the funny side eventually. He probably did something weird to make himself feel better, if I know Glen. Bought himself a little present, maybe. Oh, I’m sorry he’s dead and all that, but he was a bit of a funny bugger in some ways.’

‘Maybe so.’

‘Speaking of funny buggers,’ said Edge, as she was about to end the call. ‘You’ve got some among your people too, haven’t you? A right weirdo we had here this afternoon.’

When she got back into the office, soaking wet and uncomfortable, Fry found that Luke Irvine had been developing a theory. Suspicious, Fry glanced at Gavin Murfin, who smirked back at her round a cheese pasty. Had he been taking the mentoring role too seriously?

‘Go on then, Luke,’ she said. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Well, first of all, you have to realise there are a lot of angry people around at the moment. I mean home owners who’ve lost everything in the floods, and not for the first time either. This time round, some of them have been abandoned by the insurance companies.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that. There was a failure to reach a deal that would let everyone get flood insurance, even if they’d made claims before.’

‘Exactly. So imagine how those people are feeling now. Betrayed and upset.’

‘What has this got to do with Glen Turner?’

‘It was his job,’ said Irvine. ‘Turning down legitimate claims.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Fry. ‘Are you suggesting a posse of outraged citizens are roaming the country to hunt down insurance claims adjusters?’

‘No, but—’

‘What, then?’

‘Well, it would only take one or two, wouldn’t it? People who had personal dealings with Glen Turner, and were furious at what they saw as an injustice. Angry enough to want revenge. Some form of justice. It’s difficult to focus that sort of emotion on an anonymous institution or the people working for it. But if you’ve got an actual human target for your vengeance right in front of you, that’s a different thing.’

‘If home owners couldn’t get insurance against flooding any more, it surely wasn’t the fault of a claims adjuster like Turner,’ put in Hurst. ‘Isn’t it the job of underwriters to assess the risks?’

‘Probably. But if you’re angry enough, who’s going to be thinking logically or asking questions about the structure of the insurance industry? No, I don’t think so. A target is a target. It’s whatever comes within reach.’ Irvine looked pleased with himself now. ‘Revenge isn’t about a fair distribution of justice, but about making yourself feel better.’

‘So whoever carried this out, it might all have been about them, and not about Glen Turner at all?’

‘That’s it,’ said Irvine. ‘It’s a small flaw in the theory of victimology, I think.’

‘You’ll be lecturing to Senior Investigating Officers at Bramshill next.’

‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’

Fry looked at him. It wasn’t very compelling as a theory, of course. It had too much of a revenge fantasy about it, and she’d never be able to justify putting resources into following it up. Not unless some concrete evidence presented itself, which seemed unlikely. But at least Irvine was thinking for himself a bit. That fresh view was what she needed. A challenging opinion, even if she didn’t agree with it. It was surprising how much that helped to focus her own mind.

‘Mr Turner bought his mother a new greenhouse recently,’ she said. ‘Expensive looking. He had a windfall from somewhere.’

‘There’s no record of any large amounts of money coming into his bank account,’ said Irvine. ‘And since he’s been paying all the household bills for the property on St John’s Street, he hasn’t been putting much aside in savings from his salary either.’

‘He must have received cash.’

‘A pay-off for something?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know what.’

Photographs of Glen Turner’s Renault Mégane were on her desk, including a shot of the fossil and its accompanying receipt from the National Stone Centre. Well, she’d said that she wanted everything.

Fry examined the fossil. It was just a dead sea creature that had been turned to stone over millions of years. She shared Mrs Turner’s view on these things. They were dead and gone, rock and dust. So what had interested Mr Turner so much about this object that he’d gone to the stone centre to buy it straight after his consultation with Mr Chadburn at Richmond Jones?

Tha
t evening at the Wheatsheaf, Luke Irvine was eager to be the first to buy Carol Villiers a drink when she described the time she’d spent with Ben Cooper earlier that day.

‘How did you do it?’ asked Irvine in admiration.

‘It was actually quite easy,’ said Villiers. ‘He’s still the same old Ben Cooper deep down, you know. Some things he can’t resist. An interesting case, for example.’

‘You’ve been giving him information about the murder inquiry?’

‘Yes, some.’

Irvine felt uneasy. ‘It’s up to you. But Diane Fry mustn’t find out.’

‘No, Diane mustn’t know.’

He looked at Murfin and Hurst, checking to see that they shared the need for conspiratorial silence. He could see from their faces that they did.

‘So do you think you’ve distracted him from his obsession, Carol?’ asked Irvine.

‘Sure.’ She hesitated only slightly. ‘Well, I think so.’

‘You can have my medal,’ said Murfin, raising his glass in a toast. ‘You deserve it more than me. It’s still in my drawer at the office.’

‘Your Diamond Jubilee medal? I thought it was your most treasured possession, Gavin. You couldn’t wait for it to arrive.’

‘I know,’ said Murfin. ‘It’s funny, though. Getting it was the really important thing. Just knowing they hadn’t forgotten me completely, the people up there. The thing itself, well … it’s just a bit of old metal, isn’t it?’

Irvine watched them in silence. He wasn’t convinced about Ben Cooper. But he didn’t feel able to say so. Both Carol Villiers and Gavin Murfin had known Cooper much longer. They ought to be right about these things.

Still, Irvine had an uneasy feeling – one of those feelings you were supposed to keep to yourself. So that was what he’d better do, he supposed.

25

The one thing Ben Cooper couldn’t ask Carol Villiers to do was run a PNC check. Unauthorised use of the police national computer system was a serious disciplinary offence. Many officers around the country had been sacked for accessing information from the PNC, or passing it on to members of the public. Some had even been prosecuted for breaches of the Data Protection Act.

At one time, Cooper might have turned to his contacts on the local newspaper for information. There was a journalist called Erin Byrne that he’d dealt with in the past. But the
Eden Valley Times
no longer had an office in Edendale. Its parent company had been swallowed up by one of the big publishing corporations that already owned half of the regional newspapers in the UK. What was left of the editorial staff had been centralised and now worked from a production hub twenty miles away in Sheffield. Like most small towns, Edendale would probably never have its own local paper again.

So who could he talk to? Who would have the same sort of local knowledge that an old-fashioned newspaper reporter used to possess? Who would know the area and its characters well, particularly its villains? He need someone like his father, the old-style copper. But they didn’t exist any more, did they? Well, not still in the service.

The old police station at Lowbridge had been closed in the previous year’s cutbacks. It was just one of the county’s assets to be offloaded, following cuts in the annual policing budget. Many of the force’s properties had been under-used for years – or so the argument went. Money could be saved, and revenue earned, by selling off surplus buildings like this one. Yet here it still stood, empty and abandoned, its doors and windows boarded up and scrawled with obscene graffiti. No one wanted to buy a disused police station in Lowbridge.

And why would they? There were already enough empty properties waiting for a buyer. If you were looking for somewhere to open a shop, you were spoiled for choice on the high street. ‘For Sale’ and ‘To Let’ signs sprouted on almost every frontage. If you wanted a property to convert into flats, there was the old primary school, or the Mechanics’ Institute, or the magistrates’ court. They’d all stood empty for years. Prime residential development opportunities for someone with the money, the vision, and a massive amount of optimism. But a derelict police station? Surely it was best left to the ghosts of old coppers, to the memories of prisoners who’d literally left their mark on the walls of the disused cells, or even to the vandals who’d swarmed to the empty building like locusts. Its symbolism made it a prime target for protest and abuse.

Stanley Walker still had keys to the place, though. He’d been Police Constable Walker in the old days, and could still tell you his collar number. In fact, he would recite it at any opportunity, like a prisoner of war giving his name and rank. He’d completed thirty years’ service in uniform, including spells in Public Order, Response and Traffic, but had started and ended his career right here in Lowbridge. Then he’d become Old Stan, a part-time civilian employee standing behind the front counter, a friendly face to greet the public.

‘Only, some of the public weren’t so friendly,’ he said, as he made Cooper a cup of tea in his house in Lowbridge. ‘Especially the ones that remembered me from when I was in uniform.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘So I was glad to go in the end. There comes a point when you want to be out of the firing line.’

Now that Stanley Walker was retired, he lived on his memories. Word on the grapevine had it that he was writing it all down, working on a memoir. Cooper wondered if that might be true. There was supposed to be quite a market these days for first-person accounts by police officers, paramedics, doctors, firefighters – in fact, anyone who’d met the public on a day-to-day basis for a few decades and could write about it with humour. If you could look back to a period like the 1970s, you might be on to a winner. The public loved nostalgia, and the Seventies had been a different world. As a young PC, Walker would have been unencumbered by PACE, or the Scarman Report, or political correctness.

Cooper looked around Walker’s house for signs of a manuscript, or at least a laptop or computer. Most police officers weren’t known for their literary talent, but even if you couldn’t get a publisher, you could upload your work to the internet yourself as an eBook and hope for the best. Your family and friends might buy a few copies, at least.

Walker opened a drawer and rattled a large bunch of keys.

‘Want to take a look at the old hellhole, then?’ he said. ‘I can offer you the fifty pence tour of the cells, or the one quid tour. Ask me the difference.’

‘What’s the difference, Stan?’ asked Cooper.

‘For a quid, you get to come out again.’

Walker put his coat on and they walked a couple of streets through Lowbridge to the old police station. Though Lowbridge was called a village, the spread of development along the valley bottom from Edendale meant there were no longer any green fields to separate the two places, only a road sign at the point where one house was in Edendale and the next one in Lowbridge.

A glimpse of the swollen River Eden and the water already lying in surrounding fields reminded Cooper that properties to the east of Edendale were among those most at risk of flooding. He knew that most of Lowbridge sat in the ‘purple area’ on flood maps, where homes and businesses received warnings when flooding was expected.

A housing development had been built here on what local people insisted had always been a floodplain for the River Eden. They’d said it loudly at the time, when planning permission was given, and they’d said it again when the builders moved in and started work on the foundations. Just because the area hadn’t flooded recently, that didn’t mean it would never flood again. But nobody took any notice of them. Not until occupants had moved into the houses and the first floods arrived. Now the access road was closed to traffic by deep water and front doors all along the new crescents were protected by sandbags.