Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  Chapter Three

  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—’

  She didn’t need to ask what reports he was talking about.

  ‘And how would anyone get to hear that?’

  Irvine shrugged. ‘You know how these things get around. People in this place gossip like a lot of housewives.’

  ‘Whatever happened to the concept of confidentiality?’

  She noticed that Becky Hurst had followed him to her desk, shadowing him like a watchful guard dog. Her hair was tied back in a businesslike way and she was dressed in a black trouser suit like a lawyer or company executive. Very professional looking.

  ‘Housewife is an outdated term,’ muttered Hurst. ‘And women don’t gossip any more than certain men do.’

  Irvine ignored her as usual, and Hurst turned her attention to Fry.

  ‘Is it true, then? About the medical reports?’

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ snapped Fry. ‘I’m not his doctor. I’m not his nurse. And I’m certainly not his mother. You’re asking the wrong person.’

  ‘His mother died,’ said Hurst quietly.

  ‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘Look – yes, I know.’

  She flapped her hands in despair and sat down at her desk, recognising a conversation that she wasn’t going come out of well. But Irvine decided to try again.

  ‘We just thought—’ he said. ‘Well, we knew you worked together, and you were quite close for a while. So we thought you’d have been able to find something out. That you’d have a bit of information we don’t. You could have asked somebody.’

  ‘Close?’ said Fry. ‘Were we? Close?’

  ‘You’re more senior than us anyway,’ Hurst was saying. ‘The same rank as him. You could ask—’

  ‘And that means nothing either,’ said Fry. ‘Rank and all that. Nothing. Or else why would I be back here?’

  Irvine looked stubborn. ‘I just felt I had to speak up.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ said Fry. ‘Next time you feel the need to speak up, do it with your mouth shut.’

  Irvine and Hurst exchanged glances and reluctantly went back to work. Fry stared across the CID room thoughtfully, until Gavin Murfin caught her eye. He was chewing, slowly extracting the maximum satisfaction from whatever he was eating.

  Murfin paused, and swallowed. Then, very deliberately, he gave Fry a long, slow wink.

  Well, thanks a lot, Gavin. Always ready to give her just what she needed – a bit of support from the most experienced member of the team.

  Fry left the room and walked up the corridor to the top of the stairs, where a large window looked out over the forecourt of the building towards the east stand of Edendale football ground. She watched Luke Irvine drive out through the barrier in the CID pool car and turn on to West Street. The rain was coming down heavily, and she saw him turn on the sidelights to be safe in poor visibility.

  This rain had started suddenly after a long dry spell. For months, Fry remembered the water companies talking about a drought. Dry weather through the previous autumn, winter and spring had reduced the levels of their reservoirs dramatically,
and the use of hosepipes had been banned. No amount of rain during the summer would make any difference, they said. It didn’t soak into the ground, but evaporated in the warmer air. The drought would last until next winter at least.

  Fry shook her head. In Derbyshire, nature had different ideas. The talk of droughts had lulled everyone into the idea that it would stay dry for ever. Had there been a warning on the weather forecasts? Possibly. But who took any notice of those? No one had since Michael Fish dismissed rumours of a hurricane, just before the Great Storm of 1987 killed eighteen people and ripped up thousands of trees across the south-east of England.

  She’d seen it happen, all the predictable consequences. Right across the Peak District, car windscreens had become filmed over with dust and grease during the dry weather, encrusted with the debris of dead insects. When the heavens opened and the sky emptied its deluge on to the landscape, wipers had screeched into action, their rubber blades smearing thousands of windscreens into instant impenetrability. Tides of filth ran down the glass, and rain splattered into thick gobbets. Visibility fell to zero.

  The emergency call centres had started to be deluged too, as drivers panicked, swerved, braked, and the roads were blocked by demolished walls, shattered glass, and dozens of rear-end shunts. There had been collisions on all the main cross-county routes – the Woodhead Pass, the Snake, the A623 and A6 – where streams of HGVs ploughed on through flash floods, their headlights blazing. Those were professional drivers, and their windscreens were clean, but their spray blinded motorists in their wake, preventing them from seeing the oceans of surface water before they found themselves aquaplaning straight into a stone wall.

  Fry looked up at the sky, seeking a break in the cloud. It wasn’t getting any better. The news this morning had said that records for the amount of rain falling in a twenty-four hour period had been broken several times already. In one day, as much water had fallen on the Peak District as would normally be expected in a month.

  Yet it showed no signs of stopping. The rain bucketed down every day. Fields had become mud, and roads turned into rivers. July and August had been washouts so far, the incessant rain keeping tourists away, closing caravan-and campsites, forcing the cancellation of outdoor events. Summer? This was more like a monsoon season.

  Irvine had disappeared down West Street, heading into the centre of the rain-soaked town like Captain Oates walking into a snowstorm. He might be some time.

  Two uniformed officers came up the stairs and gave Fry curious looks as they passed. A few yards along the corridor, one turned to say something to the other. She thought she heard a laugh as they went round the corner. She felt herself tense with anger again. She had no doubt she must be the object of their joke. She wondered what the station gossip was saying about her these days. Nothing good, she supposed. But at least they didn’t chat about her medical condition.

  When she was sent back to Edendale, Fry had known that she’d never be able to escape from the shadow of Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper. Not while she was in E Division, where everyone knew him – even when she walked out on to the streets of the town, members of the public were likely to ask about him. And certainly not while she was running his old team. Those two young DCs had been taken under Cooper’s wing like newborn chicks. She’d never get the loyalty from Irvine and Hurst that she might otherwise have expected. And Carol Villiers? She was an old friend of Cooper’s since childhood. There was no way she could compete with that. As for Gavin Murfin, he was too old a dog to learn any new tricks. He’d always been inclined to make satirical comments from the sidelines, and he wasn’t going to change.

  And Fry didn’t know what to do now, or what to think. Seriously? Close? The word had taken her completely by surprise. Had she and Cooper ever been close, really? What did that actually mean? Yes, she’d unwisely shared some personal information about herself with him, and he’d managed to infiltrate himself into her life in various ways. That was true. And there had been moments…

  But no. That wasn’t being close. You could do those things, and have those conversations, with a stranger you’d just met in the pub when you were both drunk. It meant nothing, didn’t it?

  It was true that the medical reports weren’t good. She’d heard those rumours herself. Of course she had. Police officers were worse for office gossip than any housewife had ever been. The word was that DS Cooper’s extended leave would continue for a good while yet. Whether his ongoing problems were physical or psychological was less clear. No one seemed to know the details. Either that, or they just weren’t saying.

  Against her better instincts, Fry wondered where Ben Cooper was at this moment, and what he was doing. What would he be thinking right now? That, too, could be nothing good.

  Chapter Four

  The garage door began to rise with a faint hum as Charlie Dean thumbed the remote. As he waited for Barbara, he stood on the drive for a few minutes under his folding umbrella, looking at the sky, wondering if it would stop raining today. A clear sky and a bit of sun made his job easier, encouraged his prospective buyers into a more cheerful and optimistic frame of mind, making them more likely to sign on the dotted line

  He was feeling a lot better this morning, more like his real self. In fact, he was back to the old confident Charlie who was such a talented property negotiator and so attractive to women. It felt good to be back to normal. The events of the night before had started to feel like an exciting little adventure that he might joke about with his mates in the pub for years to come.

  Last night, he’d decided to go to the Old Horse for the last half-hour before closing time. He did it partly because he went there most nights, and a rare absence might be commented on by someone who knew his wife. But he went mostly because if he came home smelling of whisky, Barbara would never question where he’d been all evening. The word ‘alibi’ kept going through his mind, though he’d done nothing to feel guilty about. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking logically when he turned into the pub car park, but seeking reassurance, the comfort of doing something. Or maybe it was just the drink he needed.

  The Old Horse stood on a busy corner in the centre of Wirksworth. The old folk said this little Derbyshire market town once had a lot more pubs, but they’d been steadily dwindling in numbers. A couple more would close in the next few years, and the Old Horse would probably be one of them. It still relied largely on local custom, people who lived within walking distance in the town. It hadn’t reached out to the tourists the way some of the other pubs had.

  So Charlie had been in no doubt he’d see familiar faces in the bar, a few individuals who knew his name, would speak to him to say hello and would remember he was there. The landlord had a good memory for customers, and was always sober, even if none of his regulars were.

  As soon as he got the first whisky in his hand, he’d begun to feel a bit more comfortable. The man in the red rain jacket had scared him, he had to admit. The thought that the stranger had come out of the woods made him go cold. He and Sheena had been in there only a few minutes before. He couldn’t stand the idea that the man in the red jacket might have been a lurking presence, watching them all the time. What a bastard. He ought to be locked up.

  But that wasn’t going to happen, was it? It would involve talking to the police, and telling the story. The one thing that Charlie couldn’t do.

  He checked his phone for messages while he waited for the garage door to complete its arc. When it had stopped, he put the phone back in his pocket and looked up and down the road impatiently. He was supposed to be giving Barbara a lift this morning, dropping her off at the hairdresser’s in the Market Place to get her roots done. She was scared to death of reverting to her natural colour. He couldn’t even remember what it was now.

  Sheena had been terrified on that roadside last night too. She’d told him many times that she was sensitive, that she could detect things about people by some sixth sense. It wasn’t quite like reading auras, she said, but close to it. Dean didn’t know
what auras were, or how you’d read one, but he didn’t say so. It was easier just to let Sheena talk when she got going. If she was interrupted, she got confused, and then tetchy. So he’d allowed her to tell him over and over again about this business of her sensitivity. She’d look at someone and say they were sad, or that she had a positive feeling about them. And Dean would nod and grunt, as if he understood. It was enough for her.

  But when they’d stood by the side of the road that night and the stranger’s car had pulled up behind them, he’d noticed an expression on her face that he’d never seen before. She looked like one of those young women in a horror film when they see the monster for the first time, or hear the deranged killer approaching. In the car headlights, he’d seen the pale oval of her face, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. Terror and dread. The frozen rabbit expression.

  And for the first time, he’d believed that she might be sensitive about people. Because he’d felt it himself a few moments later, a sensation like a dark shadow falling across him, even though it was night-time. A chill that struck to his heart and made the tiny hairs stand up on the back of his neck. My God, he couldn’t get away fast enough.

  Charlie noticed Barbara standing in the lounge watching him through the window. She’d be wondering what he was up to, as usual. She was on the phone, of course, chatting to one of her friends, and no doubt complaining about him. But rather than concentrating on the conversation, she’d moved to a position where her eyes were fixed on his movements, staring with hawk-like intensity. She was gossiping about him and spying on him at the same time. And probably making an obscene gesture towards him with her other hand. He supposed she would call that multitasking.

  He gave her a thin smile and rotated his finger in a ‘hurry up’ sign. But she stared straight through him and carried on talking. Charlie sighed. He and Barbara had been married for ten years and he’d been experiencing the seven-year itch for nine of them.