Already Dead (8 page)

‘Actually no,’ he said.

‘But…?’

Murfin glanced across at Villiers. She nodded slowly, a little reluctantly.

‘Ben and I grew up in the same area. We were at school together. So I suppose you could say I’ve known him almost all his life. But that doesn’t mean I know him best. Gavin has worked with him longest. I was away from Derbyshire for years while I was in the forces. Just the occasional visit home on leave. You lose touch, miss out on things happening in your friends’ lives back home, no matter how close you once were.’

The others shifted uncomfortably when she said ‘no matter how close’. Fry could understand why. It sounded strangely possessive, as if Villiers felt she had a prior claim on her childhood friend but had diplomatically stayed out of the way in view of his engagement to Liz Petty. It seemed particularly insensitive to be referring to it now.

But perhaps she hadn’t meant it that way at all. People were awkward in these circumstances and said the wrong things all the time. Fry was deliberately keeping quiet. She knew she’d put her foot in it the same way herself. People would be shocked and look at her as if she was a heartless monster. It was best to know your own faults – in her case, it was difficult to deny them when so many others had pointed them out over the years.

The group around the table were looking at her now. Expectant expressions, a respectful silence. They were waiting for her to speak.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no. You can’t think that I know him better than any of you. Ben Cooper is a mystery to me. I have about as much in common with him as with that pork pie Gavin has in his pocket for later. You were at school with him, Carol. Gavin, you worked in the same division with him a long time before I came to Derbyshire. You’re both far better qualified than me.’

They said nothing, forcing her to keep on talking.

‘In any case,’ she said, ‘it should be something his line manager deals with.’

That got a response at least.

‘The DI? Paul Hitchens?’ Irvine laughed. ‘We’re not talking about filling in a form and booking a counselling session. It needs a bit of action outside the HR process.’

‘His family, then,’ said Fry. ‘He has an older brother. The one who runs Bridge End Farm. There’s a sister too. One of them, surely…’

They still watched her, letting her run out of ideas. Well, she’d met Matt Cooper herself, and knew he was hardly the ideal person to handle an issue sensitively.

‘The sister,’ she said again. ‘Does anyone know her?’

‘She’s called Claire,’ said Villiers. ‘She’s a bit odd, in a New Agey sort of way. Doesn’t really have her feet on the ground. I don’t think Ben is all that close to her anyway. Not the way he is with Matt.’

Fry sighed, starting to feel trapped. Those eyes fixed on her face were like the walls of the pub closing in around her.

‘Friends, then,’ she said. ‘He’s talked about a couple of mates he used to go on walking holidays with.’

‘Yes. Rakki went back to Mombasa, where he grew up before his family came to the UK. Oscar got married last year and moved to Bristol.’

‘All right. But … Ben must have been seeing a doctor.’

No one commented on the obvious fact that she was straying further and further away from practicalities. The people who could realistically do something about the situation were all sitting around a table in this grotty Edendale pub. The ability was here. But perhaps only some of them had the will.

‘Anyway,’ said Fry at last. ‘You can count me out. I’m the wrong person for this.’

‘But, Diane—’ began Hurst.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s a definite, definite “no”.’

Diane Fry was driving as she and Becky Hurst turned the corner into Welbeck Street. She pulled the Audi in to the kerb and turned off the engine.

‘It’s number eight,’ said Hurst. ‘A bit further down the street. The blue door.’

‘I know.’

‘So why have we stopped?’

‘We can walk the rest of the way.’

‘We’ll get wet,’ pointed out Hurst. ‘And there’s space just outside the house. He has the ground-floor flat.’

‘Yes, I can see.’

Fry found it difficult to explain to Hurst why she didn’t want to park her car right outside Ben Cooper’s flat. She had a vague idea about not wanting to scare him off, as if he was a wild stag and she was the stalker, or he was a suspect under observation, and she was a surveillance officer. It was probably just professional instinct, then. Not some silly superstition at all.

In fact, she would have difficulty explaining to anyone why she was in Welbeck Street in the first place. Hadn’t she told them all plainly enough that she wouldn’t do it? But instead of arguing with her, they’d sat gazing at her with their cow eyes, all four of them, and they’d let her think about it herself, without any hassle. That was a dirty trick.

With the ignition turned off, her wipers had stopped. The blue door at number eight was gradually disappearing in the streaks of rain running down the glass. Fry could have sat there all evening. She could have waited until it grew dark and the street lights came on, and then just gone home. But Becky Hurst was a woman on a mission.

‘Okay, then,’ she said, pulling up her collar. ‘Let’s do it.’

But there was no answer to the bell of Flat One, or to their banging on the door. Fry tried dialling the landline number, and they could hear the phone ringing inside the flat, until the answering machine cut in.

Like many of these houses whose windows looked directly on to the pavement, this one had net curtains and a couple of plants on the window ledge to discourage passers-by from peering inside. It didn’t deter Hurst, who pushed her face close to the glass, shaded her eyes with a hand, and twisted herself into a position where she could squint into the sitting room.

She was quite still for a few moments, and Fry began to fidget impatiently, looking up and down the street anxiously, feeling like a potential burglar. Then Hurst started to tap on the window, as if trying to attract someone’s attention.

‘What is it?’ said Fry at last. ‘What can you see?’

Hurst straightened up. ‘Pretty much what I expected,’ she said. ‘A cat.’

‘That’s it, then. A washout.’

‘His landlady lives in the house next door.’

‘Oh. I think you’re right.’

Hurst strode boldly to the door of number six and rang the bell. They heard a dog barking inside. She rang again, and rapped the knocker.

‘I remember Ben saying she’s quite elderly. She’s probably a bit deaf.’

Eventually, a chain rattled and the door creaked open a few inches. An anxious face appeared in the narrow gap.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Oh, you must be Mrs Shelley?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Fry wondered how Hurst had memorised the name of Ben Cooper’s landlady. She couldn’t recall him ever mentioning it to her. Though Hurst had been here once or twice in the past, so perhaps it had cropped up.

‘We’re police officers.’ Hurst showed her warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Constable Hurst. This is Detective Sergeant Fry.’

Mrs Shelley didn’t even look at her ID. From the way she was squinting, she probably couldn’t have read it anyway. But she responded with a big smile.

‘Oh. You must be friends of Ben’s,’ she said, opening the door an inch or two more. She peered at Fry, as if she might actually remember her face.

‘Yes,’ said Hurst. ‘We’re his friends. Aren’t we, Diane?’

‘Of course. His colleagues.’

‘Do you know where he is, Mrs Shelley?’

‘No. Well, he went out a while ago. I couldn’t tell you where. At least … no, I don’t think he said where he was going. You could phone him.’

‘We’ve tried. He doesn’t answer,’ said Fry.

‘Do you want me to give him a message?’

‘We were just wondering,’ said Fry, speaking up clearly on the assumption that Mrs Shelley was also deaf. ‘Well, do you have a key to his flat?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘We’re a bit worried about him, you see.’

‘So am I.’

‘Could we perhaps…?’

Mrs Shelley hardly hesitated. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll fetch it, shall I?’

Fry and Hurst exchanged glances while they waited for her to come back. Mrs Shelley had seemed far too eager to co-operate with the request. It was entirely contrary to the advice they were always giving to householders.

‘This is wrong,’ said Hurst.

‘Yes, I know. But…?’

Fry was shocked. Entering Ben Cooper’s flat was like walking into the home of a psychopathic serial killer. Not that she’d ever done that – all the murderers she’d ever dealt with had been ordinary people who’d crossed a line. Everyone was capable of doing that, in the right circumstances. You didn’t have to be a psychopath.

One wall of the kitchen was covered in cuttings, torn roughly from various newspapers. News reports of the arson at the Light House, and the shocking death of Derbyshire Constabulary civilian scenes of crime officer Elizabeth Petty. Coverage of the funeral, a tribute to the dead woman, a coffin carried by uniformed pall-bearers.
Killed in the line of duty
.

And photos. Lots of photos. Many of them were actually the same shot, but printed in different sizes and different resolutions, cropped to a variety of shapes. Then there were items about the arrest, the suspects being charged. It had been major news in this area. Every detail had been covered.

The media had managed to come up with mug shots of Eliot Wharton and Josh Lane too. Fry couldn’t remember whether the press office had released those. It was quite unusual until after the trial, unless a suspect was on the run and the public was being appealed to for help. But in this case it had probably been judged that the public interest was overwhelming.

Towards the bottom of the collage was an obituary of Mad Maurice Wharton himself, the landlord of the Light House at the time it had been closed. The disappearance of the two tourists, David and Trisha Pearson, had been rehashed by the newspapers, of course. That was inevitable. In fact, the whole history of the events at the pub was here – the Whartons’ disastrous financial commitments, the debts they couldn’t pay back, Maurice’s drinking. Then the arrival of the Pearsons in that snowstorm and the fatal consequences, the moorland fires intended to draw attention away from the abandoned pub and the evidence in the cellar. Fry remembered Nancy Wharton complaining that it never came to end, the cleaning and covering over.
The blood always seemed to be there
.

Free space had been left at the bottom of the collage. That would be for the eventual outcome. Verdict and sentence. The ultimate fate of the owners of those two faces, Eliot Wharton and Josh Lane, the men who had burned down the Light House and killed Liz Petty.

‘As you can see, he’s not here,’ said Mrs Shelley.

Hurst turned to her. ‘Just ask him to call, would you?’ she said.

‘Have you got a…?’

Automatically, Fry began to produce her card. But she caught a glance from Hurst. She was probably right. Fry put her card back in its holder and let Becky hand over a card instead. Mrs Shelley tucked it into a pocket of her cashmere cardigan.

‘Is he …?’ said Hurst tentatively.

‘What?’

‘Is he all right, do you think?’

The dog began barking again inside the house next door. Mrs Shelley began to edge towards the door.

‘He told me he’s fine,’ she said. ‘Just fine.’

Fry looked around at the cuttings again before she left the flat. No, you didn’t have to be a psychopath to commit a murder. But it did help.

8

Ben Cooper’s Toyota surged through pools of standing water, spray cascading over his bonnet, headlights probing through the rain at a darkened landscape.

For weeks now, he’d been driving around in the rain, with no idea where he was going, or where he’d been. He’d done this many times. Always driving at night, and always surprised when first light came that he was still so near home. It was as if he couldn’t escape this area. He was drawn like a moth to a flame, a creature seeking warmth from the sun, but finding only lethal fire.

There was a film he saw once … well, there was always a film. In this one, people couldn’t escape from a motel. They kept driving away through a tunnel and finding themselves back in the same place, going through the same actions, the same conversations, living the same day over and over. They had no escape.

Sometimes his life seemed to have been written a long time ago by a team of scriptwriters in the back room of a movie studio off Hollywood Boulevard. They’d recorded in advance all the incidents, triumphs and tragedies that would happen to him over the years and showed them on screen. Now and then, the script slipped into cliché. Tragedy, then disaster and another tragedy, until a character was pushed too close to the edge.

But perhaps he’d just watched too many films. There had been so many DVDs from Blockbuster, or late night B movies on TV, too many surreptitious downloads from his favourite torrent site. There would always be an echo of a parallel celluloid world where the same thing had happened a stranger he didn’t know and hadn’t really cared about. Some odd, uncomfortable parallel, a shadow flickering behind him in a permanent flashback.

Now he could no longer watch films. There were enough horror stories playing out on the screen inside his head, so many screams reverberating in his memories. Too many real terrors were out there, stalking in the dark.

Some nights, he would drive up to Glossop and head towards the Snake Pass. There was something cathartic about driving up and up further over the pass, swinging the car round the narrow bends, getting closer and closer to the steep drop off the southern edge, taking the inclines as fast as he could. He loved to watch the cat’s eyes flicker past in front of his bonnet, the warning signs flash by on the edge of his vision, a narrow pool of light from his dipped headlights showing a few yards of road ahead, then a great ocean of blackness beyond. It was exhilarating not to know exactly what lay ahead of him in the darkness as he raced towards it. Stone walls flying by, glimpses of chevrons on the tightest bends the only indication of which way he should twist the wheel. He was overwhelmed by the sense of the hills out there watching him from the darkness.