Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper didn’t reply.

  Sam smiled. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Liam Sharpe would have been the last person to see her alive.’

  27

  When Diane Fry had finished her interviews for the afternoon, she jumped into her car to drive to Birmingham.

  She’d finally bitten the bullet and called her sister. Angie’s phone was busy, so she left a brief message. Half an hour later, Angie called her back. It was always an odd sensation whenever they reconnected. It felt as though she was meeting a new person every time.

  ‘Sis?’ said Angie cautiously. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘Yes, I think there is.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m coming down. I need to talk to you about it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Don’t try to sound so innocent.’

  ‘It’s a long while since you were so keen to talk to me about anything.’

  It was true. Diane had worshipped her sister at one time. But the scales had fallen from her eyes that time in Birmingham when Angie had revealed unexpected contacts and abilities.

  Diane remembered the sensation of leafing through case files, the astonishment to find herself fighting a feeling of guilt at the knowledge she was handling confidential information that she should never have had access to.

  The case summary, witness statements, records of interview. And on all of the pages was the familiar black bar – RESTRICTED WHEN COMPLETE. It went against the grain even to handle something like that, when she knew it had been obtained illegitimately.

  And she recalled her sister’s response: ‘Oh, you have got to be kidding. What – you’re suddenly going to go all upright and honourable again? You don’t want to put a foot wrong in case you upset your bosses? That’s the old Diane. Things have changed, sis. Haven’t you noticed? We’re not playing this game by the rules any more. And that was your decision. Don’t forget that.’

  And Angie had walked out of the door, leaving her to make her own decision.

  The one thing it told her was that Angie knew someone who worked at West Midlands Police headquarters in Lloyd House. She knew them pretty well, too – well enough to persuade them to break the rules.

  When someone was on your side, you were supposed to feel grateful that they were willing to buck the system and help you achieve justice. Diane had never been able to figure out why that feeling of gratitude didn’t come.

  She’d always tried to go by the book, to follow procedures and not put a foot wrong. Yet she saw officers breaking the rules all the time. And not just back in the 1990s when she first joined up. Even now there were people willing to bend the rules, play the system or totally cross the line.

  Was there some honourable justification she could claim for implicating herself in a breach of the rules? Did it really make any difference? The outcome would be the same, if she was found out.

  And who had done this to her? Who was it who’d placed temptation in front of her? Her own sister.

  If she couldn’t trust her own sister, who could she trust?

  Angie Fry had changed. She was no longer so skinny, her shoulders no longer so thin and angular. Diane knew that Angie had been fighting to control the weight she’d put on after the pregnancy, but she could see now that the battle was lost. Her habit of carrying the baby in a sling had pulled her shoulders down, making her look slow and ungainly.

  And her face had changed too. It was the approach of middle age, of course. Angie had had a child relatively late, as so many women did. When Diane looked at her now, she saw a slow-moving middle-aged woman – which she would never be herself, surely? It was if an alien had taken possession of her sister’s body.

  Angie had a flat on the eighth floor of Inkerman House, a Birmingham City Council tower block overlooking the Aldi store at Newtown Shopping Centre and a huge Royal Mail delivery office on New Town Row. It was barely a mile from the police station in Aston where Diane had been based.

  Diane stood by the window for a moment, gazing out over the familiar streets. Then she glanced down at a parking area below the tower block.

  ‘Is that your old red Suzuki down there?’ she said. ‘Have you still got it?’

  Angie came to stand beside her.

  ‘The Jimny? Yes, that’s mine.’

  ‘I always thought it looked a bit odd to have a four-by-four in the middle of Birmingham.’

  ‘I just like it. It’s not too big, like some of the monsters you see on the roads.’

  ‘And there’s a baby seat for Zack, I suppose.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Angie looked at her curiously.

  ‘So what is it all about, Di?’ she said. ‘What’s so urgent that it made you come all the way down here from Nottingham? It wasn’t just to admire my car.’

  ‘I want to ask you about your dealings with the National Crime Agency,’ said Diane, conscious of the stiffness of the question.

  Her sister picked up on the tone straight away, of course. And she wasn’t the kind of person to let it go unremarked.

  ‘Really? What is this?’ she said with a laugh. ‘Am I being interviewed as a suspect? Shouldn’t I be given a caution? What about a lawyer?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Diane. ‘But I’ve got to ask you. There’s a reason.’

  Angie became more serious.

  ‘I told you about the NCA,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you were recruited as an informant when you were in Sheffield.’

  ‘They’ve had a pretty bad rap over the years, but some of them were good to me. They were conducting a covert operation against some major drug gangs. So they approached me and made me a CHIS. Isn’t that your jargon?’

  ‘A covert human intelligence source.’

  ‘Right. A posh name for an informant. A snitch, a nark.’

  ‘You put yourself at risk.’

  ‘Of course I did. I had regular contact with some dangerous people.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why? Di, there comes a time in your life when you have to make a decision, to bite the bullet and make a major change of direction. That was the moment for me, sis. I’d been heading in the wrong direction for years. But I managed to kick the heroin and get clean. I wouldn’t be here now with Zack if I hadn’t made that decision at the time I did.’

  ‘Right.’

  For Diane, being a single mother saddled with a screaming child didn’t seem like an objective she would aim for herself, let alone regard as some kind of dream outcome. But she’d learned to accept that Angie was different. Her sister had powerful maternal instincts that she’d searched for in her own heart and failed to locate. That was the way things were, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  ‘My handlers got a bit nervous when you started making inquiries about me, and even more when your friend started asking questions.’

  ‘Ben Cooper?’

  ‘Yes, dear old Ben. He ruined things for me. They dropped me not long after that. I was too exposed, they said. My handlers said I should go back to Birmingham. So I did. And here I am. It was a pity really. The money was good.’

  It was hard for Diane to imagine, even now. To be a CHIS, Angie must have signed a contract and been allocated to a handler. Diane’s brain filled with extracts from the Code of Ethics relating to Section Seventy-One of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Written authorisation from a designated authorising officer, a standard application form providing details of the purpose for which the source would be tasked, details of any confidential material that might be obtained. A risk assessment, of course.

  Then someone would have kept detailed records of every task, and been prepared to account for their actions to the chief surveillance commissioner. Angie made it sound so informal. But that wasn’t the way it worked any more, the street detective with his private snouts. It would all have been logged and documented.

  ‘When you told me about your time working for the NCA, you said you were telling me because you might n
eed my help,’ said Diane. ‘What did you mean by that?’

  Angie shrugged. ‘Down here it’s different. West Midlands Police. Do I need to explain it to you?’

  ‘You think there are some dirty cops?’

  ‘Do I think so? I suppose you remember what happened to your old buddy Andy Kewley? He talked too much, that bloke. Far too much. It’s not going to happen to me.’

  ‘Have you been threatened?’

  ‘Not directly. That wouldn’t be their style. It’s always just something that someone has heard and decides to pass on. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘Is that why Zack’s dad got the boot?’

  ‘He was on the way out anyway. But yeah – Craig was a remnant from an old lifestyle. I had to clear the decks. I’m with Sonny now, and I’ve got Zack. I’m a different person, sis.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘So I need to know that I can rely on you if push comes to shove. It may not happen. But I didn’t want to have to start from scratch explaining it all you. So I made you aware of the situation.’

  ‘You’re worried about Zack, aren’t you?’ said Diane, feeling she’d experienced a sudden insight.

  Her sister snapped at her impatiently, ‘Of course I’m worried about Zack. Wouldn’t you be?’

  Diane held up a hand placatingly. ‘I’m sure everything will be fine. Look, they’ll have forgotten about you by now.’ Then she had a sudden doubt. ‘Unless there’s a court case outstanding. One where your evidence will be used against someone.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, then. There’s no need for you to worry.’

  Angie fiddled with a strand of hair. She’d dyed it a shade or two darker than it used to be. That was one thing that was making her look different.

  Diane had a sense of the world having turned on its head. Here she was giving her big sister advice, reassuring her when she was worried or upset. It used to be the other way round. Surely it should be the other way round.

  ‘Thanks, sis,’ said Angie. ‘I do feel better about it, now we’ve talked it through.’

  ‘Good,’ said Diane. ‘Because actually, I’m the one who’s in trouble right now.’

  She explained to her sister about the disciplinary inquiry, repeated all the questions she’d been asked by Martin Jackson, and the concerns they’d raised in her mind over the past three days.

  Even before she finished explaining, Angie had begun shaking her head.

  ‘Di, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help,’ she said. ‘I’m out of all that now. I’m keeping my head down because—’

  ‘Because of Zack. I get it.’

  ‘Sorry, sis.’

  Diane was silent for a few moments.

  ‘There’s someone who could help,’ she said finally.

  ‘Who do you mean?’ said Angie.

  ‘There’s only one person. I hate him, but I’ve got to see him again.’

  Angie began to shake her head. ‘Not him. You can’t trust him.’

  ‘I know that. I wouldn’t dream of trusting him. But he’s the only one who ever seemed to know what was going on.’

  ‘Well, he certainly knows that. He’s up to his neck in it himself.’

  ‘He always has been,’ said Diane. ‘That’s one thing Andy Kewley told me, before he died.’

  What Ben Cooper most hoped to find waiting on his desk was some results from the forensic examination of the threatening note found at Faith Matthew’s house. But no such luck. Even a call to the lab failed to achieve anything. Nothing could shift their backlog, except time. Waiting didn’t come easily to him.

  Instead, Cooper found that Luke Irvine had left him a printout of an article from a 1922 edition of the Sheffield Telegraph about the death of a lone walker on Kinder Scout.

  Irvine had either tried to pander to his DI’s interest in Kinder or perhaps it had sparked his curiosity when he began to do the research. That was the way it got people sometimes.

  The walker had set off in bad weather from the Snake Pass Inn on New Year’s Day that year. Despite appalling conditions, he’d made it onto the Kinder plateau. The wind had been howling across the exposed slopes at eighty miles an hour, and the rain was described as ‘falling in solid ropes’.

  According to the Telegraph, when the man was reported missing, the opinion among experienced hill walkers was that the westerly gale would have forced him eastwards towards Grindsbrook. An extensive search on that side of Kinder had covered Golden Clough, Upper Tor, Beal Edge, the Blackden Valley and the dangerous gulleys of Fairbrook.

  But the man’s body was eventually found a week later just four hundred yards south of the Downfall, as if he’d been making westwards towards Hayfield in the teeth of the wind and had collapsed through exhaustion sometime during the night. Close to the Downfall, the going was hard and dangerous. There was a steep precipice, with cliffs in some places a hundred feet high.

  The story ended: All were glad that his body had been found, with the unspoken wish that he may have died quickly, and that he had not dragged himself about in agony for many hours, probably in darkness, and suffering acutely from anguish of mind and exposure. There is no worse place in England to be lost than on Kinder Scout.

  Cooper put the page aside and found another cutting. Twelve months later, a woman who wanted to visit a cairn at the site of the walker’s death had slipped and fallen fifty feet from the Downfall and smashed her skull on the rocks. Her body was covered by drifting snow. It wasn’t discovered until March, when the thaw came.

  A commentator at the time claimed that the fact Kinder Scout was private property, with no legal access, had made the mountain all the more attractive for ramblers who were prepared to take a risk in dangerous conditions.

  Carol Villiers knocked on Cooper’s office door.

  ‘Oh, I recognise that expression,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  Cooper showed her the cuttings about the Kinder deaths.

  ‘I’m thinking about the symbolism of that choice of location.’

  ‘You mean Dead Woman’s Drop?’

  ‘Yes. It suggests someone with a poetic sense of humour, or a love of history and symbolism.’

  Villiers was about to say something but seemed to change her mind.

  ‘Carol, don’t mention—’ he said.

  ‘Coincidence? I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You’re obviously thinking of Darius Roth himself, though.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Ben, it sounded like a perfect description of him.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Cooper, ‘the Warburtons threw a subtle spanner into the works when I talked to them. They managed to cast suspicion on Liam Sharpe.’

  ‘But he was the injured man,’ protested Villiers. ‘Liam Sharpe was already incapacitated, wasn’t he? No broken bones, as it turns out, but he had a badly sprained ankle and torn ligaments.’

  ‘Well, he did by the time the rescue teams got to him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the timing is a bit odd. Most of the accounts are quite specific that the group split up after Mr Sharpe was injured. But none of them actually witnessed his accident. They just believed what they were told.’

  ‘They heard him cry out in pain.’

  ‘But they didn’t see anything,’ repeated Cooper. ‘Faith Matthew was probably the only one who actually examined Liam’s ankle at the time. And we can’t ask her about it.’

  ‘Who was it that came and told the group he was injured?’

  ‘Sam Warburton. But he didn’t see it happen either. Nor did his wife. In their statements, they say they heard Liam cry out, found him on the ground and naturally accepted his story. That’s what people do. They take in impressions and fill in the details in their own imaginations. They might have thought they’d seen him fall at the time, but when you question them thoroughly, they didn’t see anything at all.’

/>   ‘The other thing these accounts aren’t clear about is exactly when the rest of the group lost contact with Faith Matthew. It means our timeline is just an assumption.’

  ‘Could it be an elaborate set-up?’

  ‘But Liam Sharpe definitely had a sprained ankle.’

  ‘It’s easy enough to do.’

  ‘Sharpe was following up at the rear, and the Matthews dropped back to be with him. Even the Warburtons passed them, so they must have been travelling slowly.’

  ‘Deliberately? He slowed down to lose touch with the group on purpose?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  That was odd on its own. In Cooper’s experience of being part of a walking group, if one member was slow, you didn’t leave them behind. Faith Matthew seemed to have been the only one who followed that principle. Had that been her mistake? Had her good nature been exploited as a weakness?

  He could see Villiers thinking about it.

  ‘So it’s possible he was pretending at first,’ she said. ‘He was actually fit enough to push Faith Matthew off that rock. But then what? He deliberately sprained his own ankle?’

  ‘That seems to be the suggestion.’

  ‘It would be a good alibi.’

  ‘Good enough that we’ve been discounting him from consideration so far. And that’s despite the fact that he seems to have been the last person to see Faith alive, except the killer.’

  ‘She stayed with him when the others went for help,’ said Villiers. ‘Liam Sharpe was alone with her all that time, while the rest of the group were wandering around the moor.’

  ‘Remind me what his statement says.’

  Villiers sorted through the pile of witness statements.

  ‘Here it is. According to Mr Sharpe, Faith got worried that the others were taking too long to fetch help and she left him to see if she could find anyone. She told him she wouldn’t go far and she’d only be a few minutes.’

  ‘But she never came back,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Exactly. That’s the precise phrase he uses.’

  Villiers passed the statement back to him, and he read it through again. It was simple, unadorned. No flights of the imagination from Mr Sharpe. And it was the shortest of the twelve too. As far as Liam Sharpe was concerned, his story ended with a painful slip on a wet rock. He lay there helpless as people panicked around him, while Faith Matthew came to sit with him, then disappeared recklessly into the fog. Left alone, he saw and heard nothing more until Dolly, the SARDA search dog, came nosing along the hillside following his scent and barked for her handler.