Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  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.

  Chapter Eight

  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.

  At that time of night there was almost no other traffic on the Snake. He could put his foot down time and again as he reached a bend, letting the car slide across the centre line, heading further and further uphill until he was at the highest point of the pass and beginning to descend again, his wheels turning faster and faster as gravity took the weight of the car and the descent took him back down towards the valley. He would hurtle past the Snake Inn and the lights of a distant farm, slipping under the moors and racing down, down, down. Within a few minutes he’d be heading towards Ladybower, into the spreading arms of the great reservoir, seeing water stretching out dark and glittering to his right. And finally he’d coast towards the traffic lights marking the viaduct and the end of the Snake.

  Each time, as he slowed and turned towards Bamford, all that he wanted was to go back and do it over again.

  Tonight was different. Cooper had been driving on a straight stretch of road, with rain bouncing off the tarmac in front of him, windscreen wipers beating so hypnotically that he was driving on autopilot.

  But he’d found himself on the wrong side of the moors. The realisation brought him to a juddering halt, his car swerving across the road as his foot hit the brake.

  On the skyline stood the blackened remains of the Light House pub. Its lights were extinguished now – probably for good, unless the auctioneers, Pilkington and Son, found a buyer with more money than sense. Surely the only option would be to demolish the remaining walls and clear the site.

  The old Light House had been a famous landmark, visible for miles, familiar to thousands of visitors to this part of Derbyshire. But any plan to erect a new building in such a prominent position in the middle of a national park? He wouldn’t put much money on its chances. More likely, the site would gradually deteriorate and revert to the moorland. The outline of its foundations would disappear under a mass of heather and bracken until it was just one more enigmatic scattering of stones, like so many others in the Peak District.

  He wondered if the cellar would be left intact when they demolished the walls. It had hardly been touched by the fire. Perhaps they would just seal it up to make it safe – a few truckloads of rubble tipped into the stairwell below the bar, a slab or two of concrete to cover the delivery hatch. Then it would become a cave, a grave, a dark hole in the ground where people had once lived and breathed. The cellar of the Light House would become indistinguishable from the abandoned mine workings scattered around it on Oxlow Moor.

  He’d tried so hard to avoid reminders, to keep a firm control over the little things that could creep under his guard unexpectedly. But there he was, stumbling insensibly into a trap of his own making, acting without thought until he found himself plummeting into the darkness of memory.

  He recalled pulling himself up to the delivery hatch in that cellar and peering outside, seeing the white Japanese pickup standing in the pub car park. As happened so often, it was a small detail that had let everyone down. That white pickup had been seen on the first day. It had been noticed by some of the firefighters tackling the moorland blaze that had left Oxlow Moor looking like a post-apocalyptic landscape. But the vehicle hadn’t been identified, its owner never traced. If only he’d known that it belonged to Eliot Wharton. Things could have been so different. He ought to have put more effort into tracing the pickup. Someone ought to have. But they’d had other priorities.

  And that was why Liz Petty had died. She’d only been doing her job, working as a scenes of crime officer, examining Room One at the Light House. It was known as the Bakewell Room, the place where a couple of tourists had died two years previously. Liz had been searching for bloodstains, sweeping for trace evidence. She’d died because he didn’t get her out of the pub quickly enough when the fire started. If only he’d been upstairs with her, instead of in the cellar, or had made sure that someone was on watch outside.

  That was the way fate swung between life and death. If only, if only…

  Chapter Nine: Thursday

  On Thursday morning, a Derbyshire County Council gully-emptying crew had stopped on the roadside near the patch of woodland. They could see the stream of water running on to the road and forming deep puddles stretching right across the carriageway. The
y walked along the verge looking for blocked gullies, sucked out some mud and dead leaves, but found it didn’t make any difference.

  ‘Where is it all coming from?’ one of the crew asked the other.

  He shrugged. ‘It must be a blocked watercourse somewhere in the woods.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Not our problem anyway. Watercourses are the landowner’s responsibility. Them, or the Environment Agency.’

  The driver was getting back into the cab, but his mate hesitated.

  ‘It’s making quite a mess of the road,’ he said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, maybe we ought to check what it is. So we can report it properly.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘You know what it’s like these days – if a motorist has an accident on this stretch of road because of all the surface water, everybody will be looking for someone to blame. We have to make sure that’s not us. So we cover our backs. Check it out, and report it to the appropriate people.’

  ‘You’re a real stickler, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just being realistic, that’s all.’

  The driver sighed and got back down from the cab. ‘Come on, then. Which way do you reckon it’s coming from?’

  His mate pointed into the trees. ‘Up above. Something’s not quite right up there in the woods.’

  In the CID room in Edendale, Gavin Murfin took a call. He looked at Diane Fry as he put the phone down. ‘We’ve got a body,’ he said.

  Fry couldn’t resist that old surge of excitement. It was what she’d gone to the Major Crimes Unit for. It was what made her life worth living most of the time.

  ‘A body?’ she said. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  ‘Well, it might only be—’

  But Fry had already stacked her paperwork back in her in-tray and was putting on her jacket.

  ‘Where is it, Gavin?’

  ‘A place called Sparrow Wood. It’s just off the B5056, west of Brassington.’

  Fry hesitated and looked round the office. ‘Okay, that’s er…?’

  ‘South,’ said Irvine. ‘It’ll take about half an hour.’

  ‘We’d better get going, then.’

  ‘Me?’ said Irvine.

  ‘Of course. Are you coming?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Grabbing his jacket, Irvine almost ran after Fry as she headed for the door. Hurst watched him go with a sour expression. Fry noticed it only for a second as she turned in the doorway.

  ‘It’s going to rain again, you know,’ called Murfin.

  ‘It’s always bloody raining.’

  The water running through the edge of this wood had been no more than a trickle three days ago, according to the local farmer who owned the fields above. It was only a narrow drainage channel, taking a bit of water off the hillside, not even worth the name of a stream or brook.

  There was a bigger watercourse to the west where a torrent crashed over rocks and scoured away the roots of trees growing too close to its banks. But some of the flood water had diverted this way and found a route into the channel where the body lay. The past forty-eight hours had filled the channel and overflowed its side, so that the ground for yards around was a swamp, boots squelching six inches deep into sodden peat. The water had dredged soil and debris from both sides. Much of the detritus carried down from the woods up the hill had come to a stop here, clogged up by a blockage in the channel.

  The blockage was a man, naked and sprawled out in two feet of muddy water. He was lying on stones with his head tilted slightly backwards, his eyes staring up into the trees, the white protrusion of a toe or a shoulder bizarrely incongruous. From Fry’s vantage point on a rocky outcrop, the crime scene looked like a thick soup floating with pale, unidentified vegetables.

  ‘This will be a long job,’ said Wayne Abbott, the crime scene manager. ‘We’re trying to dam the water upstream and divert the flow. At the moment, the water is washing away our forensic evidence even as we watch.’

  ‘What about the water he’s lying in?’ asked Fry.

  ‘It’ll have to be pumped into a temporary reservoir and then sifted through carefully. We can’t see what might be in it otherwise. We’re working on the practical details. But, like I say…’

  ‘… it’ll be a long job, yes. Did he drown?’

  ‘The medical examiner thinks not.’

  ‘You can drown in a couple of inches of water.’

  ‘True. But only if you’re lying face down, I think,’ said Abbott. ‘Our victim is on his back, and well jammed in between the banks. The water would need to be at least nine inches deep to cover his face, wouldn’t it? Besides, the doctor says he’s been dead too long. Between thirty and forty hours. The water has only built up since then. We’ll know more when they can get him on the slab for a post-mortem.’

  Fry nodded. ‘Of course.’

  Luke Irvine was beside her, looking down at the victim, jotting down details and first impressions in his notebook like an assiduous student.

  ‘Wondering who he was?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Obviously. And I’m wondering who he met in these woods for this to happen to him.’

  ‘Do you think it would have been a stranger?’

  Irvine seemed to take her question as a test. Would he remember what he’d been taught in detective training?

  ‘Well, an investigation begins with the assumption that there’s no such as thing as a stranger murder,’ he said. ‘In almost all murders, the assailant is known to the victim.’

  Fry hadn’t really meant it as a test at all. But she could see that Irvine regarded her as some kind of strict schoolteacher who might put him in detention if he forgot his lines. There was no point in trying to explain what she’d really meant – it would take too much time and effort. So she might as well play up to his expectations.

  ‘Well done, Luke. That’s almost word perfect.’

  Irvine looked at her. ‘Yes, the “who” is sometimes easy, isn’t it? But the “why” can be a lot more complicated.’

  Fry blinked, taken by surprise. That was something that Ben Cooper would have said. She could almost hear him saying it now. Cooper was one who always wanted to look for the complications, to explore the tangled subtleties of people’s relationships. He would certainly have wanted to know the ‘why’. It was often the place he started from in an investigation, rather than the obvious ‘who’.

  In the past, she’d never worried too much about the differences in Cooper’s approach. Sometimes he got there, but often he didn’t. Sticking to the book, following the laid-down procedures – that always worked, eventually. So why was she thinking about what Cooper would say? If he’d been here in the woods alongside her she would have ignored what he said, treated his opinion with contempt, even. But it was another thing when he wasn’t here. His absence was more powerful than his presence.

  Fry turned to look at the landscape of the White Peak beyond the woods. An isolated farm, a derelict field barn, a couple of old cottages nestling in a narrow valley, trapped in a network of stone walls between wet hills scattered with sheep. It was Ben Cooper country. He should definitely be here.

  ‘Do you think we have a murder, then?’ she said.

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ admitted Irvine. ‘So far, there’s no evidence of a struggle, or even of a second person being present. And we’d need to know the cause of death.’

  ‘Right.’

  Fry shoved her hands in her pockets. Was it wrong for her to be standing in this damp wood hoping that an unidentified man had been the victim of a criminal act? Probably. This might well have been a suicide or an accidental death. There were certainly more of those around than murders. But her instincts were telling her something different. This man had ended up dead in the stream as a result of someone else’s actions.

  ‘Luke, call Becky Hurst and get her down here,’ she said. ‘We’re going to need another pair of hands before long.’

  Although it was daytime, the ove
rcast sky made the woods gloomy, and arc lights had been set up under the trees. Fry had found a remnant of stone wall that was just the right height to sit on while she waited.

  When Becky Hurst arrived at the scene, she ducked through the cordon and looked down at the body.

  ‘Look at the way his eyes are staring,’ she said. ‘Like a blind person.’

  ‘That’s probably right,’ said Irvine. ‘Imagine it was night-time, with a heavily overcast sky. And no source of light nearby. It would have been pitch black out here. I mean, really black.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fry. ‘So he wouldn’t have been able to see a thing.’

  ‘Yes, it’s just like being blind,’ said Irvine. ‘I was visiting one of those show caves in Castleton once with Michelle, and the guide turned off the lights…’

  ‘I know all about that,’ she said. ‘I know about darkness.’

  Irvine glanced at her. ‘I dare say you do.’

  Fry shuddered. There was one thing for sure. Without the benefit of these arc lights, she wouldn’t be out here in the woods at night, overcast sky or not. There were too many insects and tiny, crawling creatures waiting to drop on to her face from the trees when she couldn’t see them coming. It wouldn’t be her choice for a suitable place to commit suicide, or to have an accident. It wasn’t her idea of a place to die at all.

  She realised that Irvine had kept looking at her, as if he was expecting something. Fry sensed one of those moments when her people skills were about to fail her. She supposed someone other than her would know instinctively how to behave, and what to say. But it was impossible to figure out logically what was required of you: people had to tell you. While Irvine waited, she went back over what he’d been saying.