Scared to Live (47 page)

all the photographs of the fire had been deleted from the memory card.' 'I'm not surprised,' said Fry. 'He was worried we might find something incriminating.' 'Like what?' 'I think he probably started taking photographs long before he made the 999 call. We'd have been able to see the time of each photograph on the memory card, wouldn't we?' 'Yes, that's right. Or even on a jpeg copy if he'd emailed them.' 'Well, then it might have occurred to us to compare them to the time of his call. And he'd have some difficult questions to answer. I don't think our Mr Wade is too technical. He wouldn't have known how to check the time stamp of each photo, so he deleted the whole lot.' 'You must have had him worried from the start, Diane.' 'He was an amateur. Look at how many mistakes he made,' 'Well, you always said the answer to the Mullen case would be close to home.' 'I didn't mean it like that,' said Fry. 'I was thinking about a member of the family. But I suppose your next-door neighbour is pretty close. The Mullens put their trust in him.' Hitchens stood up from his chair. 'Let's go and see the DCI.'

In the DCI's office, they found that Kessen had just received the results of the latest actions from the incident room - a detailed assessment of Rose Shepherd's financial circumstances. 'Miss Shepherd had several savings accounts at different banks,' he said, 'but they were practically empty. Unless there are some investments or deposits we haven't located, the victim's funds were getting dangerously low.' 'She doesn't seem to have had any income, either,' pointed out Fry. 'That's right. Apart from interest on her savings, nothing has been added to any of the accounts as far back as we can

go. Since the house purchase, the flow of money has been in one direction - into her current account, where it's been used to pay bills. We had a quick calculation of her annual expenditure. At her present rate, she couldn't have survived more than another six months, I reckon.' Fry took the print-out he offered her. 'Was she spending heavily?' 'Not really. Well, her big expenditure was on the house purchase and everything that went with it - solicitor's fees, and the work she had done, like the gates and the burglar alarms. That must have made a huge hole in her resources. But since then, it's just been normal living expenses. Council Tax, utilities, telephone bills. Not to mention food and general household expenses. They've all been increasing.' 'And interest rates have been falling.' 'She must have miscalculated badly, if she thought she could hide herself away in Bain House for the rest of her life.' 'In any case, she must have been able to see what was going to happen not too far in the future. She was going to run out of money.' 'Bain House would have had to go, for a start. She could have survived a few years longer if she'd flogged it and bought a terraced property in the city somewhere.' 'She could have got a job,' said Fry. 'Look at the way she lived here,' said Kessen. 'Neither of those two options would have seemed possible to Rose Shepherd. She was too frightened of being tracked down.' 'Yes, of course.' Kessen coughed. 'Are we nearly finished here? We need all the manpower we can get at Matlock Bath. Don't forget we're still looking for the child. And whoever assaulted DC Cooper, of course.' 'Thank goodness the Zhivko bombing is C Division's baby,' said Hitchens. 'We couldn't have coped with that as well. By all accounts, it's proving a big headache for them.'

'I'll send them our sympathy.' 'What about Brian Mullen?' asked Fry, turning back to the room. 'Should we interview him again? It does seem a bit tough on him, so soon after everything else that's happened.' 'Leave it for now,' said Hitchens. 'I'll have another try at Tony Donnelly first.'

'No, look,' said Donnelly a few minutes later. 'All I did was nick a car and torch it afterwards. That's nothing. You just get a ticking off for that. Community service, that sort of thing. It's no big deal.' 'You've done it before, Mr Donnelly, haven't you?' 'Well, yeah. Everybody has. When we were kids, we did it all the time round our way.' 'But you're not a kid any more.' 'No. Well, I had given it up. This was just a one-off.' 'Found something more lucrative, did you?' 'I don't know what you're on about.' 'I think you do,' said Hitchens. Donnelly shook his head. 'So why this one-off?' 'Look, it was a favour. Someone wanted a car for a bit, that's all. A decent car, a four-by-four. I found one for him, and I did it as a favour.' 'This would be the Shogun?' 'Yes.' 'Are you saying you didn't know what the vehicle was being used for?' Donnelly chuckled. 'No, of course not. You don't ask questions like that.' 'We do.' 'Yeah, well . . .' He shrugged. 'I can't tell you, can I? No matter how long you keep me here, I can't tell you, because I don't know.'

'We don't need you to tell us that, Mr Donnelly. We already know. The car you stole was used to commit a murder.' 'Eh?' 'A shooting in Foxlow.' 'No. Well, I heard about that, but you can't-- Well, you can't, that's all.' 'Mr Donnelly, unless you tell us who you did this favour for, you're our number one suspect right now.' 'For a murder? You've got to be joking.' 'Not at all, sir. I've never been more serious. I suggest you start being more co-operative, or you could be here for a lot longer yet.' Donnelly stared at him for a long moment, his eyes flickering anxiously as he worked out the odds. Either way, they didn't look good. 'He was good to me,' he said. 'He gave me a job, and he helped me to set up on my own when things started to go pear-shaped. I owed him a favour, that's all. He's a good bloke. I did it as a favour, I don't know anything else.' 'Who are you talking about, Mr Donnelly?' Donnelly took a deep breath before finally committing himself. 'OK, I'll tell you.'

Cooper caught up with Fry in the car park, between the security gate and the custody suite. A light drizzle was falling, and Fry seemed to want to get to her car quickly, but he stopped her. 'Ben? What the heck are you doing here? You're supposed to be at home recuperating.' 'I don't need to recuperate. I'm fine.' He waited for the response he expected, wincing as he remembered what Liz had said to him when he put his jacket on to leave the flat. But, from Fry, it didn't come. 'So what do you think you're going to do here?' she said. 'I want to help. Are there any developments?'

Fry brought him up to date on Keith Wade, then told him about Rose Shepherd's dire financial circumstances. 'God, she must have been getting desperate,' said Cooper. 'There wasn't even anyone she could turn to for help or advice. She was dealing with that prospect alone.' Fry leaned against the side of a police van. 'You know, in those circumstances, I think you'd probably get to a point where you didn't care any more. You'd be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one - she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.' Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain. But Cooper wasn't at all sure about what she'd just said. He couldn't feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them. But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens' smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night. 'Diane, there is another possibility that Miss Shepherd might have considered,' said Cooper. 'What's that, Ben?' 'I wonder if she thought she'd found a lifeline. She might have made contact with someone she thought she could get money out of.' 'What?' Cooper saw the sceptical look in her eyes, and started his

train of thought all over again. 'I asked about the rifle. You remember, the Romanian semi-automatic?' 'Yes.' 'Well, apart from the military sniper rifle, there's a sporting version of the PSL made for export, the Romak-3. It's very similar, but has the bayonet lug ground off and some other modifications to comply with US import laws.' 'A sporting version. Do you mean a hunting rifle?' 'Yes. A hunting rifle.' Fry tilted her head slightly to one side as she looked at him. 'What are you thinking, Ben?' He smiled at the echo of Liz's words earlier. Liz had known what he was thinking before he said it. She'd known, even though he denied it. But Fry was different - she wanted it spelled out. She wanted to hear him explain it. They connected on quite a different level. 'I listened to the tapes of John Lowther's interviews,' he said. 'You remember his sentence referring to hunting? He said some people go "hunting for whores. No, for babies . . ."' 'Yes, I remember.' 'I wonder if that was an example of what Dr Sinclair called "clang associations", a confusion of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters. I wonder if he meant some people go hunting boars.' 'Boars?' 'Wild pigs. They still hunt them in parts of the world. Bulgaria, for example.' 'So?' 'There's another thing. When Henry Lowther had that business trip to Bulgaria, it wasn't all vodka and red wine. His business contacts took him wild boar hunting.' 'How do you know that?' 'You asked him where he went and he mentioned the name of a place. Dounav. That was a mistake on his part, but I suppose he couldn't think of anywhere else in Bulgaria on the

spur of the moment. There are some lies that you need to plan.' 'What's wrong with Dounav?' 'I looked it up,' said Cooper. 'Dounav is a state game preserve in northern Bulgaria. One of its hunting ranges is called the Bulgarian jungle because of its deep forests. Hunters go there to shoot deer, foxes and even the occasional wolf. But mostly wild boar.' With the back of her hand, Fry wiped a bit of rain from her face and began to walk towards her car again. 'OK. So . . . ?' 'Well, how do you go about hunting boar?' said Cooper. 'Those are big animals. I doubt if you'd use a bow and arrow.' Fry stopped in her tracks. 'You'd use a hunting rifle, right?' 'I think so, don't you?' Her expression had changed. The rain was getting heavier, but she let a trickle run into her eyes and hardly noticed. 'OK, I'm with you, Ben. Let's see if we can check out Henry Lowther's financial status. He seems to have parted with money pretty readily when they were getting Zlatka Shishkov out of Bulgaria. But does he really have such deep pockets? I'm no expert on property prices, but I'd guess that bungalow at Darley Dale is probably worth less than Bain House.' 'If Rose Shepherd was making an attempt to blackmail Mr Lowther, she might have seriously misjudged his ability to pay.' 'Yes. But we've got to be discreet - I don't want him to know we're checking him out.' 'Right, Diane. And what then?' 'I'll talk to the DI. When we've got everything together, we'll go and see the Lowthers again.' 'They've lost both their children in the past week,' said Cooper. 'I know. No one said this was going to be easy.'

38

Rain spattered on the glass roof of the Lowthers' conservatory and ran down the windows in long, slow streaks. The stone angel had turned a darker shade of grey, puddles were forming on the backs of the flattened tortoises. Inside, the atmosphere was humid, condensation forming on the leaves of the tree ferns. It almost made up for the icy stares from Henry and Moira Lowther, sitting together on their settee. Fry gritted her teeth, steeling herself to resist the waves of resentment surging through the foliage. For a few moments on the doorstep, she'd wondered whether they were even going to be allowed into the bungalow. Now, that would have been awkward. 'Luanne - she's still alive somewhere, surely?' said Mrs Lowther. 'The fact that you haven't found her yet ... I mean, we will see her again, won't we?' 'I'm sorry, we can't say, Mrs Lowther. We're still looking.' After that, the Lowthers just looked at her expectantly, offering nothing, asking no questions. And why should they? It wasn't their job to make it easier for her. 'I want to go back to what you told me about the adoption,' said Fry eventually. 'I understand the procedure for international adoptions can be rather complicated in Bulgaria.'

Henry Lowther grunted angrily. 'Complicated? You don't know the half of it. The whole business is like some nightmare from a Kafka novel.' 'A lot of hurdles in the way.' 'Absolutely. Right from the beginning, it was made as difficult as possible.' She detected instant relief from the Lowthers at the direction of her questions. More obvious from Moira than her husband, perhaps. But Henry was prepared to talk now. Eager, in fact. 'Prospective parents have to obtain the consent of the Bulgarian Justice Minister in advance, before they can even think of starting court proceedings,' he said. 'And the application has to refer to a particular child, so you've got to find the child before you do anything else.' 'Hence the orphanage being the first port of call.' 'Exactly. Then we had to go to the ministry and demonstrate adoption would be in the child's best interests. Lindsay and Brian had to provide information about themselves: age, health, criminal records, that sort of thing. You need declarations of consent from the child's natural parents - or the chief physician of the orphanage, in our case. It was only when the minister gave his say-so that we could apply to the regional court in Sofia.' 'A lot of documents required, were there, sir?' 'Documents? A whole bloody library of documents. I could reel them off for you now, they're so imprinted on my brain. I used to go through the list every night before I went to sleep, I was so afraid we'd missed some detail that would bring the whole thing crashing down. Lindsay and Brian had to testify in writing to their motivations. They had to produce their birth certificates and marriage certificate. They had to give evidence about their home, their employment, their income, proof of their financial assets.'

Mrs Lowther was nodding in agreement. 'And their religion, their ability to raise children . . . They had to provide references, as if they were applying for a job.' 'Absolutely,' said Henry. 'And they had to produce doctors' reports - not just a physical examination, but their psychiatric condition, too. There had to be background checks, even for motoring offences. They had to make a declaration of intent, stating that they wouldn't use the child for medical experimentation. Medical experimentation! What sort of people do they think we are, for heaven's sake?' 'And all those documents had to be translated into Bulgarian, and certified by a notary public,' said Mrs Lowther, trumping him with what must have seemed like the final straw. Her husband took a breath. 'Yes, the process was far too complicated. There were insurmountable obstacles put in our way at every stage, and we were defeated by the sheer bloody weight of bureaucracy. It was an emotional and financial drain on the whole family.' 'Financial, sir?' 'Oh yes, financial. Didn't I mention that? With lawyer's fees and notary's fees, and the cost of travelling backwards and forwards to Sofia all the time, the expense was crippling. And the worst thing was, we couldn't foresee any end to it. Not ever. Even Lindsay was so worn down by it all that she thought we'd have to give up.' 'But you didn't give up, did you?' said Fry. 'You found a way around the system, am I right?' Lowther twisted in his chair to glance at his wife. They exchanged a look that carried too many meanings for Fry to interpret. 'Yes,' admitted Lowther finally. 'It was then - at the darkest moment in the whole process, when we were all at our lowest ebb - it was then that a miracle happened, as far as we were concerned. That was when we were contacted by Rose Shepherd.'