Already Dead (3 page)

And it had rained a lot in Derbyshire recently. It was almost certainly raining now.

Well, she supposed she’d have to make the best of the situation. Some new blood in the division would have been ideal, of course, but Fry knew that was too much to hope for. There were fewer young officers applying for a transfer into CID. Why would they, when there was no extra pay, no promotion, no recognition of the extra responsibility? It just meant a lot more work to do, exams you could only study for in your spare time at the end of a long shift, a bigger and bigger caseload, a role as the muggins everyone turned to for help with their own investigations. You could be the entire CID representation on a night duty, called out to any incident the uniforms felt like passing the buck on. Not that there were many vacancies any more. But when they did get a recruit, they had to be pitched in at the deep end. Without a mentor, they would sink without trace, every one of them.

‘In my day, they were called tutors,’ said Murfin, as if reading her mind. ‘When I was wet behind the ears in CID, I was sent to some fat old DC who basically just told me to watch my back and not volunteer for anything.’

‘Not everything changes, then,’ said Fry.

Of course, Gavin Murfin should be gone by now. His thirty years’ service were up, and he could claim his full pension. His wife had been planning a Caribbean cruise for months. But Murfin had been pressed to stay on as a temporary measure in the current circumstances, and Fry had been presented with the fact as if management were doing her a favour by giving her someone with experience. He’d been bribed with more money, she knew. And probably with an endless supply of jelly babies, judging by the white powder on his fingers and the empty packets in his waste-paper bin. Yes, Murfin had experience. But it was mostly of the kind you wouldn’t want passed on to posterity.

She wondered how much the changes in police pay had affected the service. In the 1980s, pay and conditions had been good, compared to similar professions. Police forces were finding it difficult to recruit the right people in those days, and they had to offer inducements to attract decent candidates. Now, though, it seemed they didn’t want to be bothered by too many applicants at all.

Fry cast her eye over the room again. Becky Hurst was the most willing member of the team, never thought any job too routine for her to tackle. She was like a little terrier, kept at a task until she produced a result. Her hair was very short and its colour seemed to vary week by week, though right now it was a sort of coppery red.

‘Becky,’ said Fry.

‘Yes, Sarge?’

Hurst came over clutching her notebook, her expression just a bit too alert and eager for Fry’s liking. She was always suspicious of those who seemed a bit too good to be true.

‘How are we doing with the cannabis farm?’ she said.

It was the only interesting case they had on the books, a standout inquiry among the mass of run-of-the-mill volume crime.

‘Those reports coming in from the public about a property in Matlock were out of date,’ said Hurst. ‘A Vietnamese cannabis gardener got scooped up when the premises were raided last year. He was given eighteen months inside – and he’ll be deported when his sentence comes to an end. He’s not our problem now, Diane.’

‘He was just the gardener, though. What about his employers?’

‘They were never located. The property was handled by a rental agent, and the actual tenant never lived there. They created a couple of steps to remove themselves from the gardener.’

‘A dead end there, then?’

‘Yes, we don’t seem to be getting the breaks that C Division benefited from. Their operation was a gift from start to finish.’

Fry nodded. Like so many successful inquiries, the recent drugs case had started with a bit of luck. A nineteen-year-old Chesterfield man had been involved in a serious RTC, when his Renault van had skidded, gone off the road and crashed into a tree. While he was being taken to hospital with a broken leg and internal injuries, officers at the scene had examined the damaged Renault. They discovered that he’d been working as a delivery driver for a drugs gang, carrying small bags of cannabis in a cake tin under the dashboard. He had three mobile phones on the passenger seat of the van – one phone to take orders from customers, one to contact his employers, and a third to call his mum to tell her he’d be late home for his tea.

A full-scale operation had been launched after the trail led to a cannabis factory in a house in the eastern borders of Derbyshire, which turned out to have links to growers across the country. A search of the house found more than four hundred cannabis plants being tended by an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese man, who tried to hide in the attic when police arrived. Officers guarding the house on the night of the raid had noticed a suspicious car which drove past several times. They stopped the vehicle and found eight thousand pounds in cash, as well as more mobile phones and SIM cards. Phone records and text messages linked the people in the car to the cannabis gardener and other members of the gang. Warrants had been executed at two other addresses, in each of which a Vietnamese teenager was found hiding out with hundreds of cannabis plants he’d been responsible for.

As a result, a gang involved in growing hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of cannabis across four counties had been jailed for a total of twenty-two years between them. They had more than a thousand plants under cultivation at addresses in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and even down in the West Midlands. Their assets had later been confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

But the operation had left a few remnants of the drug trade still in existence. Somewhere in their area, at least one more Vietnamese was believed to be holed up in a house full of plants. The sad thing was, those cannabis gardeners were at the lowest end of the food chain in the illegal drugs trade, forced to live in squalid conditions and working practically as slaves for their masters. Fry couldn’t imagine what it would be like for him now, with his contacts gone, his supplies dried up, just spending his time waiting for a knock on the door.

‘So have we got any new leads?’ she asked.

‘No. But Special Operations Unit have got appropriate resources deployed in the Vietnamese community to gather information,’ said Hurst, as if she was quoting from an emailed memo.

‘Appropriate resources?’

‘CHIS, I should imagine.’

‘Of course.’

Covert Human Intelligence Sources. They used to be called informants, snouts, narks or grasses – at least until political correctness became the rule, rather than the exception. They were part of an age-old tactic. Get your information direct from the horse’s mouth.

‘So we’re waiting for SOU?’ said Fry.

‘Unless you have any other suggestions?’

‘Just keep on it.’ She paused. ‘Is there actually a Vietnamese community in Edendale?’

‘Not that you’d notice.’

Murfin raised a hand like the clever child in class.

‘I’m trained in multiculturalism,’ he said. ‘In fact, I was on duty at Mix It Up in June.’

‘At what?’

‘Mix It Up. The community festival, you know.’

‘No.’

‘It’s all about the meeting of cultures, experiencing the differences. We were there on a community relations exercise. But you get the chance to try things out too.’

‘So what did you try out, Gavin?’ asked Hurst.

‘Cossack dancing.’

‘Really? So there’s a thriving Cossack culture in the Eden Valley, is there?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Yes, I would.’

Fry clenched her fist in her hair, wishing she’d kept it longer and had more of it to tear out.

‘Luke,’ she said.

Irvine’s shoulders had stopped shaking by the time his head appeared from behind his computer screen. In one way, Fry had something in common with Irvine. He wasn’t local. At least, he wasn’t Derbyshire through and through, the way a lot of their colleagues in Edendale were. He came from a Yorkshire mining family, but had Scottish blood a generation or two back and liked to talk about his Celtic heritage. Maybe he was the one who ought to be a redhead, but he wasn’t – he had a much darker look, as if one of those Spanish sailors who’d landed in Scotland from the doomed Armada was also in his bloodline.

‘Yes?’ said Irvine.

A less eager response. Fry suspected he might turn a bit bolshie, if he wasn’t reined in soon enough. She’d overheard political arguments between him and Hurst, and Irvine was definitely out on the left wing.

‘Luke, I want you to get out and interview this youth who had the iPod stolen,’ said Fry. ‘Poor little sod must be traumatised.’

Irvine sighed. ‘Okay.’

‘I’d lay ten to one he knew the lads who took it,’ put in Murfin. ‘I reckon he probably swapped it for some E.’

Fry turned back to him, only now remembering that he was there.

‘And why would you jump to that unfounded conclusion, Gavin?’ she said.

‘It’s the way things go down on a Tuesday night in Edendale. You have no idea what it’s like out there on the streets.’

3

As she creaked slowly towards her front door, Dorothy Shelley supported herself on a walking stick. She wasn’t able to move very quickly these days. Well, she’d never exactly been an athlete. A walk with the dog to the end of Welbeck Street and back had been the limit of her exercise routine for more years than she cared to remember.

There was one time she’d tried horse riding during a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, persuaded into it by Gerald, who saw himself as some kind of John Wayne figure. Back then, her husband could be very persuasive when he set his mind on something. Persistent. too. She’d always let him get his way in the end. It was such a relief when he died and she could do some of the things she’d always wanted to do on her own. And exercise wasn’t one of them. It had taken her weeks to get over the bruising on her legs and backside from that horse. At least Gerald had been the one who fell off. Her life seemed to be made up of such small pleasures, scattered through the years of alternating tedium and irritation that had constituted her marriage.

Now, she was unsteady on her legs, and was frightened of moving too quickly in case the dog got under her feet and tripped her up. Jasper the Jack Russell was as elderly as his owner, or the equivalent in dog years. He wanted to stay close to her because he couldn’t see very well now. Her wobbly legs and his bad eyes were a lethal combination. She knew she was going to come a cropper one day, and her family would lose no time getting her out of the house and into a nursing home.

When she opened the door, she saw that it was raining. Tutting quietly, she pulled on a coat that was hanging by the door and slipped a PVC hood over her hair. For a moment, she looked at the slippers on her feet, but decided it was too much trouble to change into shoes. She wasn’t going far.

Mrs Shelley stepped out into Welbeck Street, taking her time negotiating the step. It was only a few paces to number eight, the house next door which Gerald had insisted on buying with the intention of knocking the two places together and forming a much larger property. A town house, he’d called it. A pipe dream, if ever there was one.

He’d never got round to finishing the project, of course. He never did, not once in his life. There had been a lot of dust and mess, then everything had stopped before a single wall came down. That was shortly before he died. His legacy was a house where all the plaster had been knocked off, the skirting boards ripped away, and the bathroom suite was sitting in a skip in the street.

At least the finished job had left her with a bit of income – a house converted in two flats, the rent coming in very handy to supplement her pension. It also provided her with a bit of company when she needed it, as well as someone younger to change a light bulb or put out the wheelie bins. She’d always made a point of getting the right sort of person when she was looking for a new tenant. Reliable and trustworthy professional people only.

Mrs Shelley was looking for her ground floor tenant now. She hadn’t seen him for days. She hadn’t even heard any of his music or noticed the smell of his coffee, which sometimes wafted out of the back door. She’d seen the cat in the back garden and tried to feed it a couple of times, but it had shied away from her, even when offered fresh chicken.

She knew she was getting a bit vague in her old age. Her son-in-law whispered that she was barmy, when he thought she couldn’t hear him. He was desperate to take over her properties. Preventing him from achieving that ambition was the one thing that kept her going.

But things confused her sometimes. Names and details escaped her. The most obvious facts could slip out of her memory. She wondered whether her tenant had told her that he was going away on holiday. Usually she got him to write important things down. But she had a feeling that something had gone wrong, and he might not have had time, or not wanted her to know where he was.

She hesitated outside the door of the flat. There was no answer to her knock, and the curtains were closed. She had a key, of course. She was the owner of the property, wasn’t she? Yes, she was quite sure she was. She hadn’t sold it or anything. She was the landlady, and she had a right to enter in an emergency.

But she didn’t want to do it. She was reluctant to intrude, didn’t want to disturb anybody or make it seem as though she was prying. She had to admit that she was also little bit frightened of what she might find if she went in.

Mrs Shelley turned away and shuffled back to her own house, telling herself that she’d catch her tenant tomorrow. She’d forgotten that she had already spent the last three days looking for Ben Cooper.

DC Luke Irvine paused on his way out of the office, standing by Diane Fry’s desk.

‘Sarge,’ he said hesitantly.

Fry looked up at him curiously, surprised that he hadn’t left yet. Whatever faults Irvine had, being hesitant wasn’t one of them. What was he nervous about asking her?

‘What is it, Luke?’

‘The talk is that the medical reports aren’t good,’ said Irvine. ‘You know—’