The Devil's Edge (23 page)
‘Did Adrian Summers ask you to do any more jobs? In Riddings, particularly?’
‘No, mate. Like I said, I told him I didn’t want any more. So he never asked. I kept out of it. Good thing too. That was a bad business. Nasty stuff. It’s not worth it.’
Word filtered through via one of the officers in the HOLMES incident room that a suspect was in custody. When he heard the news, Cooper was first amazed, then angry. His logical mind told him that his resentment was irrational, but he couldn’t stop it welling up into his chest and making him feel light-headed with anger.
As soon as he saw DI Hitchens enter his office, he burst in without the barest suggestion of a knock on the door. Hitchens swung round in astonishment and alarm.
‘Ben? What are you doing?’
‘Why didn’t I know about this arrest?’ said Cooper bluntly.
Even to his own ears, his voice sounded too loud, and too aggressive. He saw the DI’s face set into a rigid mask, and knew he’d already gone too far. But it was too late to step back now.
‘You’re not in charge of this inquiry,’ said Hitchens.
‘Even so – I should have known about this. I should have been told.’
‘The operation was on a need-to-know basis. You’ve seen what the interest from the press and public has been like? Well, the super is worried about leaks to the media. So a decision was made to limit the people involved. And that’s the end of the discussion.’
Cooper felt a flush rising at the suggestion that he might be responsible for leaks. Then he remembered his meeting with Erin Lynch, and realised he hadn’t told his DI about the letter. Perhaps it was best not to do it now.
But the surge of guilt only seemed to make him angry all over again. He was afraid he might not be responsible for anything he said in the next few minutes. So he took a couple of deep breaths before he spoke.
Hitchens raised a warning finger when he saw Cooper’s expression.
‘Don’t push this, Ben,’ he said.
Cooper shook his head. ‘Was this arrest a result of the forensic evidence?’
The DI’s face was still grim. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A DNA match from Hathersage.’
‘Hathersage? But not from Riddings.’
‘No.’
Cooper’s anger began to dissipate. Maybe he hadn’t been proved wrong behind his back after all. ‘So who …?’
‘We pulled in a gardener working for Adrian Summers,’ said Hitchens. ‘A Sheffield lad.’
‘I’ve seen Summers. Big shoulders, cropped blond hair.’
‘That’s him. He has a bit of a record. Nothing major, but some of his associates are interesting.’
‘Can we tie him to the assault on the Barrons?’
‘Not yet. Just the Hathersage job. But when we find him, we’re definitely going to ask him some tough questions. He’s got to be one of the Savages, though maybe not the leader.’
Cooper hadn’t always had good experiences with gardeners. He still winced whenever he remembered a case a few years ago when he was still a hopeful DC. In the village of Moorhay, that was. He’d managed to make a fool of himself, and jokes about compost heaps had followed him around the division for months afterwards. In fact, given half a chance, Gavin Murfin would bring the subject up even now.
He turned away to the door, and managed a brief, apologetic nod that he knew wouldn’t be enough for his DI.
‘But it’s never the gardener,’ said Cooper. ‘Never.’
It was no longer acceptable for the dead to be untidy. Civic orderliness, or health and safety considerations – whatever the reason, the headstones in the newest part of Edendale cemetery would never be permitted to lean, or grow mossy with age.
Sergeant Joe Cooper was buried in the new cemetery. He had no visible grave, only one of many headstones regimented into a neat row, with the grass around them mowed short and smooth. At the moment of his dying, when his blood had run on to the stone setts in Clappergate, he had left a stain that had taken weeks to remove. Sergeant Cooper’s killing had darkened the reputation of the town. But now they had done their best to tidy him away.
Every time Ben came here, the row of headstones had extended a little further, as if his father was slowly vanishing into the distance. Not far away, in a more recent row, stood his mother’s grave. Isabel Cooper might have expected to be buried in her village churchyard, like her parents, and her grandparents before them. But the churchyards were full. Now it was the new cemetery, or a trip to the crematorium. Those were the facts of death.
Normally the family came here in November, at the anniversary of their father’s death. And lately they had been coming in September too. Cooper supposed they would stop coming one day, at some distant time in the future. He couldn’t imagine when that would be, but it was bound to happen.
Today he had come for a different reason. This was something he could only do alone. He would never have an opportunity to sit down with his parents and tell them about his engagement. Well, that wasn’t quite true. They might never know now – but it didn’t stop him telling them.
Every year, when he came here with his brother, the conversation seemed to follow exactly the same pattern. Their exchange had become a ritual, as much as the laying of flowers.
Three years, and it doesn’t seem a day.
Matt’s words couldn’t help but sound trite. But Ben had never objected, just waited for the next part of the custom.
I still keep expecting him to appear. I think he’s going to come round the corner and tell me to stop idling around. It’s as if he’s just been on night shift for a while.
Ben had always known it would be impossible to escape his father’s shadow completely, unless he transferred from E Division. Sergeant Joe Cooper’s memory would always be there, in Edendale, imprinted on the walls of the police station. Literally, in some places. In the chief superintendent’s office at West Street, there was a large framed photograph of dozens of solemn men sitting or standing in long rows. They were the entire uniformed strength of Edendale section, pictured during a visit by some member of the royal family in the 1980s. On the second row, as a young sergeant, was his father. Downstairs, in the reception area, a memorial hung on the wall near the front counter – a plaque commemorating the death of Sergeant Joe Cooper, killed while on duty. Yes, he would always be there, cemented into the very fabric of E Division.
Eventually, in a few hundred years, Sergeant Joe Cooper’s name might be worn away from this headstone by the winter frosts and the rains lashing down the Eden Valley. But for now, the letters were still clear and precise, with sharply chiselled edges. Life might be brief and transient. But death was written in stone.
Ben shivered. It was that cold shudder again. Perhaps it was just a result of standing on this hillside surrounded by death, an effect of all these graves around him. But he felt an uneasy sensation that somewhere out there, a disaster was about to happen. No, not quite that. It had happened already.
He spent a few quiet minutes standing by his mother’s grave, thinking through everything that was happening in his life, hoping that she would understand. Then he walked back through the cemetery, reaching the exit just before the gates were closed for the night.
When he reached the car, he paused and looked back. He knew his father’s grave would no longer be discernible from here. It had long since merged into the anonymous rows of headstones, swallowed up among Edendale‘s dead.
In his flat at 8 Welbeck Street, Cooper had finally fallen asleep in his armchair in front of the TV, with his cat purring in the crook of his arm, well fed and content. When his phone rang, he jerked awake in panic, knocking the cat off the chair in a protesting heap.
‘Yes?’
‘Sarge, it’s Luke Irvine.’
‘Oh, Luke. What is it?’
‘Reports are starting to come in of another incident. I thought you’d want to know straight away.’
‘Not in Riddings?’
‘No. Further away, on the other side of Edendale.’
‘Can it be connected to the other attacks in our inquiry?’ asked Cooper.
‘I don’t know at this stage. But everyone in the division is jumpy. The DI is on alert, maybe even the superintendent.’
‘Everyone knows it’s impossible to predict where and when the next attack will be.’
‘If that’s what it is.’
‘What do you mean? Is this an aggravated burglary, or not?’
‘There are no details yet, Ben. Just the 999 call so far. We’ll have to wait for the FOAs to report in. Sorry, that’s all I have.’
Cooper saw that he had another call waiting.
‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Keep in touch if you get anything more definite, Luke.’ And he pressed the key to accept the new call.
At first there was only silence on the line. No, not silence – a series of strange, disturbing sounds thudding and yelping in the background. Noises he couldn’t identify, but which made his heart lurch and his throat constrict with fear.
‘Hello? Hello? Who is that?’
Finally a voice, barely distinguishable. It sounded muffled, oddly choked by distress and panic.
‘Ben? Ben, you’ve got to come to the farm.’
‘Kate? Is that Kate? I can barely hear you. What’s happened? Is it one of the girls?’
‘No, no. It’s Matt.’
There was a long pause on the line, with Kate quietly sobbing, and Cooper’s mind racing as all the possibilities went through his head. He was picturing an accident with a piece of farm machinery, his brother trapped and crushed under a toppled tractor, his leg caught and mangled in the blades of a combine harvester. His thoughts moved so rapidly that they’d flashed through all the scenarios and reached the scene in hospital, Matt on a trolley in A&E, being wheeled straight into theatre for emergency surgery to save a severed limb. He felt sick with the immediacy of the horror and pain and blood that he knew awaited him at Bridge End Farm.
Time must have stood still for a moment, because it all went round and round inside his head before Kate finally spoke again and dropped the bombshell that turned Cooper’s life over.
‘Ben,’ she said. ‘It’s Matt – he’s shot somebody.’
The light of dawn came slowly to Bridge End Farm. The hills to the east hid the morning sun and kept the farm in shadow, even while the valley below it was already bathed in light. Ben Cooper shivered in the chill of the paddock behind the house. Within the next hour or so, the dew would begin to evaporate, forming a mist between the dry-stone walls, leaving him floating in space, half in sun and half lost in a haze.
He’d just finished helping Kate to pack up the car and drive away from the farm with the girls, still dazed and tearful with incomprehension. She was taking them to her sister’s, who lived over the hills near Holmfirth.
After a mad race from Edendale, Ben had arrived at Bridge End just as the ambulance departed. He had been in time to see Matt, too, handcuffed and being guided into the back of a police car. His brother had looked pale and dishevelled, unshaven and somehow smaller and older than he had ever appeared before.
In the darkness of the early hours, the lights of emergency vehicles filling the farmyard had turned the scene into a stage set. Bridge End had looked alien, an artificial setting for a TV melodrama. For the first time, the farmhouse he’d grown up in looked totally unfamiliar, a mere façade under flickering stage lights. At that time of night, the blinding flicker and glare had emphasised the depths of blackness beyond the farmyard, reinforcing the impression that all these people were simply actors. Somewhere out there in the darkness was the real world, where this kind of thing didn’t happen.
No wonder he found it impossible to believe the official account of the night’s events. Somebody must have made it all up. It was one more incredible story released on the world, with the inevitable tragic outcome.
It was only when Kate had told him the tale herself that he was forced to accept the truth. His sister-in-law was a real, living person, a victim dragged into the drama against her will.
‘It was about midnight,’ she’d said. ‘We were in bed, asleep. Well, I’m not sure Matt was asleep. He’s been sleeping very badly recently, you know?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Anyway, he got up, without me noticing. I woke a few minute later, and realised he wasn’t there. I thought he’d just gone to the bathroom. But then I heard noises …’
‘Outside? Or in the house?’
‘No, outside in the yard. I knew there were people out there. And suddenly I was frightened. I jumped out of bed to go to the girls’ rooms, to see they were all right. But then …’
‘Then?’
‘I heard the shots.’
As he watched the sun come up over the hill, Ben realised finally how exhausted he was. His skin felt dry and gritty, as if he’d been wading through sand. His eyes burned, and a dull ache throbbed deep in his skull. The exhaustion wasn’t just physical, though. It was emotional, too.
Ben had always sensed the police service being blamed by members of his family for the death of his father. Now the police were taking the blame for the arrest of his brother. And he had become part of the police. As far as his family and their friends were concerned, he
was
the police.
The one thing he couldn’t do – couldn’t possibly do, in any circumstances – was let his brother get sent to prison. The prospect was unimaginable. He couldn’t be seen to stand by as that happened, let alone appear to be helping the process along. He would have to resign from the force before that happened. Yes, his job was important to him. But family came first.
Bridge End Farm inextricably tied the Cooper family together. It had played that role for generations. For Ben, these trees and slopes were as familiar as family photographs. Barns where he’d played as a child, fields where he’d lain in the sun through his school holidays.
But tonight, standing in the yard at Bridge End had been like finding himself marooned on an island while the whole world rushed around him on important business that he had no part in. For the first time he became aware of how the family could be ignored in situations like this. The SOCOs and uniformed officers were inclined to treat them as if they didn’t exist. They seemed embarrassed to be spoken to, even avoiding eye contact, as if they were visiting a leper colony.
Dealing with the family was the worst job in a murder case. Worse than handling a dead body, more difficult than seeing the blood or sifting through the mess for evidence. Raw emotions from living people were much harder to cope with. Everyone said it. He’d said it himself. He’d never realised that it might be so obvious to the family that no one wanted to have anything to do with them, and didn’t want the trouble of explaining what was going on to people who might be in an emotionally fragile state. From this point of view, it was much more convenient to pretend the family didn’t exist, to walk around them without acknowledging them and tell yourself it was a question of professional detachment. The danger of getting too involved. That was what officers shied away from. But how did you judge where the fine line lay between detachment and insensitivity?
‘They’re only doing their job, I suppose,’ Kate had said, as if reading his thoughts.
Ben could tell she was trying to rationalise her own feelings. She didn’t want to make a scene, but could feel herself right on the edge.
She had rested against his shoulder, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She looked terrible.
Guiltily, Ben remembered what he’d said to Carol Villiers just a couple of days before.
When people get as jumpy as this, something bad is likely to happen. You’ll see, there’ll be an idiot who decides to take the law into his own hands, and a random passer-by will get hurt. It’s inevitable, the way things are going
.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Kate. ‘I just can’t see what there is I can do. How do I support Matt right now? How do I support him and the girls at the same time? Ben?’
He didn’t really know how to answer her. What were you supposed to say in these situations?
‘What are they saying happened exactly?’ he asked.
She wiped her eyes again, and took a ragged breath.
‘It seems Matt saw these two men coming across the paddock towards the house. They say he took the shotgun from the cabinet, loaded it and went out to challenge them. Then he fired at one of them, and hit him. But, Ben, they’re saying he shot the man when he was already running away. Shot him in the back.’
‘Matt wouldn’t do that,’ said Ben. ‘He wouldn’t shoot someone unless he had to, unless he was driven to defend himself or protect his family. He wouldn’t have shot a burglar who was running away. He’s my brother. I know he wouldn’t do that. So I’m with you, Kate. I’m on your side.’
Kate had looked at him then through red, swollen eyes.
‘That’s the trouble,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I hate to say it. It … it sounds so disloyal. But with the state of mind he’s been in recently, I think Matt actually could have done it.’
Even now, hours later, Ben still recoiled at the shock of that tentative confession from his sister-in-law. He was very fond of Kate. In fact, he’d always liked her, ever since the time he first met her, his older brother’s new girlfriend, brought home to meet the parents. She had always seemed so balanced, so supportive. He’d often envied his brother, felt Matt had found exactly the right partner. He’d wondered many times if he would ever find someone like Kate.
But for her to tell him that … It showed what a degree of trust she had in him. He had a suspicion that she would never dare say it to anyone else. She probably shouldn’t have said it to him, in the circumstances. And wasn’t it ironic that she seemed to trust him more than his own brother did?
He wondered how Matt was coping right now. Not well, that was certain. He could barely imagine his brother in a police cell. It was a picture that just didn’t make any sense, an impossible optical illusion, like one of those paintings by Escher, where stairs ran upside down. It did not compute. Of all people, Matt was made to be outdoors, not to be locked up away from the daylight.
There were some choices you made that you could never go back on. A split-second decision that changed your life. That moment for Matt had come when his finger tensed on the trigger of the shotgun. Once the hammer had begun its acceleration towards the firing pin, there had been no going back.
Some time early in the morning, Superintendent Branagh had made an appearance at the farm, looking grim-faced.
‘You can’t be involved, Ben,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Cooper couldn’t remember her ever calling him Ben before.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
‘We’re bringing in a DCI from Derby to head the inquiry. It will all be handled properly.’
‘He’ll need local liaison.’
Branagh shook her head. ‘Not you, anyway.’
A bit later, when he saw Diane Fry walk into his field of vision, Cooper blinked and looked at her wearily. Perhaps he ought to be surprised to see her here at the farm. But nothing made any impact on him any more, after the night he’d just gone through.
‘Ben,’ she said.
‘What are you doing, Diane? Aren’t you off back to the working group?’
She hesitated. Cooper had hardly ever seen Fry hesitant about giving a reply. She was always ready with a sharp comeback, or a quick put-down. Why should she hesitate? What was it that she was reluctant to tell him?
‘I’ve been given another assignment,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
Cooper was staring at her, trying to get her to meet his eye. But she looked deliberately away from him.
‘You can guess what it is,’ she said finally.
His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on her now. She seemed even more unreal than any of the other individuals coming and going in the farmyard. For a moment he wondered if he might actually be hallucinating and had imagined her.
But then he nodded.
‘Local liaison,’ he said, ‘for the DCI from Derby.’
‘Right first time.’
Fry had been told to meet the team from Derby at the entrance to Bridge End Farm. She had visited this farm just once before. Not that she remembered a great deal about it. One farm was pretty much like another, wasn’t it? Mud, more mud, and all those pervasive animal smells that seemed to cling to your clothes for weeks.
When she’d come here previously, Ben Cooper had actually been living at the farm. His mother had been alive then, too. With Matt Cooper’s two daughters, that had meant three generations of the Cooper family making their home together. For Fry, it had seemed strange to see people doing that willingly. In her experience, it was something a family did only when it was forced on them by necessity.
But the Coopers had always been a type of person beyond her experience. Who knew what went on in a close-knit family group like that, with their own peculiar ways of doing things? Especially out here in these remote farmsteads, where no outsider could have any idea what was going on, and shotguns were so readily available. Perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that a man like Matt Cooper had ended up shooting somebody. Maybe the real surprise was that it didn’t happen more often.
A couple of cars pulled into the gateway of the farm. The team were arriving from Derby. She’d been told to expect a DCI Mackenzie, and it looked as though he’d brought a couple of bag carriers for moral support.
As he walked into the yard, the DCI skidded on a wet cowpat and twisted his body awkwardly, grimacing in pain as he tried to keep his footing. He was wearing the wrong kind of footwear for this job. Fry had remembered to pack her boots in the car before she left.
Fry introduced herself, and Mackenzie shook hands. He was a big man, over six feet tall and wide across the shoulders. A bit top-heavy, perhaps, carrying too much weight above the belt to be fast on his feet. He gave her a shrewd stare, weighing her up in that way an experienced officer did, even with a colleague.
‘You’ve familiarised yourself with the reports, DS Fry,’ he said.
‘Of course. I’ve read everything. The entire file, such as it is at this stage.’
‘So what’s your initial assessment?’ he said. ‘What would have been the scenario?’
‘Well, first of all, there’s a context of aggravated burglaries in this area, as I’m sure you know. A whole series of them, including serious assaults and one homeowner left dead.’
‘Yes. So it’s likely we have a member of the public who is on edge. He’s been made anxious by reports of incidents in the area.’
‘Exactly.’
‘The suspect is …?’
‘Matthew Cooper, aged forty. A farmer.’
‘Family in the house?’
‘A wife and two young daughters. So he would be protective.’
‘Naturally.’
Fry waited for the next question.
‘And the circumstances at the time of the incident …?’
‘It was dark, of course,’ she said.
Mackenzie turned round slowly, did a full three hundred and sixty degrees as if searching for something on the horizon.
‘And no street lights out here,’ he said.
‘Obviously.’
Fry looked at the city DCI, irritated to find herself having to explain the obvious facts about the countryside. No, there are no street lights. Yes, if you’ve noticed, there are fields, and cows and sheep. It’s a farm. What a surprise.
Mackenzie tilted his head slightly to one side to look at her.
‘We have to get this one right,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you know that, DS Fry. Our task is to balance the requirements of justice and the rights of the individual. It’s going to be a fine line we’re walking together.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Fry, regretting how stiff she sounded.
He nodded. ‘All right, then.’
‘The National Farmers’ Union say that people living in isolated rural properties face particular problems when it comes to crime.’
Mackenzie smiled. ‘You might want to try telling that to people on my patch in the city.’
‘It’s true, though. All those CCTV cameras have been having an effect on crime prevention and prosecution rates in the towns and cities. Thieves are looking at rural areas for softer targets. Well-planned and opportunist thefts are increasing.’
