Already Dead
Page 9
‘We’ll have to talk to his employers.’
‘They’re in the address book. I phoned them, but they haven’t seen him today. I suppose he’ll be in trouble when he gets into work tomorrow.’
It was so disorientating, this way of holding a conversation in two different tenses. Every time she mentioned Glen Turner in the past tense, his mother answered as if he was still alive and about to walk through the door at any moment. It was like being a time traveller, living in the past and present simultaneously.
Fry looked at the white tablecloth. There was an extra place mat laid, an extra coaster, another cup and saucer, standing waiting for tea to be poured. None of them had taken sugar, but the bowl was there, filled and ready. She would take a bet that Glen had taken at least two spoonfuls in his tea.
‘What about friends?’ asked Fry.
Ingrid looked round, puzzled. ‘There’s Mrs Jones across the road. Or Pat Mercer. Pat and I go to the WI together. She’s got a little car. All I have is my Mango card for the Sixes bus. I often use the 6.1 service to Derby via Belper.’
‘No, I meant friends of your son’s,’ said Fry impatiently.
Hurst leaned forward to speak to Mrs Turner. ‘It is something we ask, you know. I mean, when we have to give news of a death. We suggest contacting a friend to come and sit with the bereaved relative—’
Fry stared at her. ‘Yes. Thank you, DC Hurst…’
Mrs Turner was looking from one to the other. ‘He is dead, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Yes, Mrs Turner. I’m afraid so. That’s what we told you.’
The last thing Fry wanted was to let Becky Hurst take over the interview. But Ingrid Turner seemed to respond to her. It was as if the woman hadn’t heard anything that Fry had said to her when they arrived at the house. Yes, your son is dead. She must have imagined something like this when she decided to report him missing.
‘I’m all right,’ said Mrs Turner. ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Do you have any family, other than Glen?’
‘He’s my only child. We never had any more kids. And his father died a few years ago. Heart attack, you know. The usual.’ She looked at Hurst brightly, as if she was trying her hardest to be helpful. ‘I do have a sister in Manchester. She’s got children.’
‘Perhaps we should call your sister for you,’ said Hurst. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own.’
‘Or Pat Mercer,’ said Fry.
Mrs Turner began to shake her head, looking thoughtful. ‘No, Glen doesn’t really have any friends,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but he’s turned out a bit of a loner. There’s nothing wrong with that though, is there? A lot of people are happy with their own company. It doesn’t mean anything.’
Fry could see that the initial shock was starting to wear off. The impact of what Mrs Turner had been told was about to hit her. She was running their conversation backwards in her mind until she reached the moment when she opened the door to two police officers and was told that her son was dead. But before she reached that point, it seemed that she’d finally heard Fry’s question.
‘He’s single?’ she asked. ‘No girlfriends?’
‘None that I know of. And I’m sure I’d know.’
‘No girlfriends, then. So perhaps a boyfriend…?’
Mrs Turner began to shake her head emphatically.
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Fry. ‘Not these days. It’s all fine.’
‘No, you don’t understand. His father wouldn’t have liked it. Clive was dead set in his views on the subject.’
Fry sat back in frustration. Yes, some fathers still cast that shadow, no matter how absent they were. Even the dead fathers, it seemed. Clive Turner wouldn’t have liked his son to be gay, so he wasn’t. It was as simple as that for Ingrid.
But perhaps it wasn’t at all simple for poor old Glen.
‘Did Glen have any enemies, then? Had he fallen out with anyone recently? Got himself into trouble of some kind?’
But it was too late. Mrs Turner’s mental rewind had reached the critical juncture. Her body sagged, the lines of her face began to crumple and blood suffused her cheeks as her veins swelled with an enormous pressure.
Just like her house, Ingrid Turner seemed about to collapse.
Charlie Dean thought he must be getting paranoid. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to see a hooded figure with staring eyes. He glimpsed it on every street corner in Wirksworth, lurking in every entrance in the area of narrow alleyways people called the Puzzle Gardens. He saw a dark shape at the bottom of the garden when he was showing a young couple round a semi-detached house in Brassington. He felt as though someone was standing waiting in every room of an empty property he’d been asked to value in Cromford.
It was ridiculous, of course. He’d never been the over-imaginative type. Down to earth and reliable, that was Charlie Dean. He left the flights of imagination to the women. Sheena was good at it. And Barbara, too – though the ideas that ran through her mind were always the worst things she could imagine about him. She loved to torment herself like that, creating entire fantasy scenarios in which her husband was always the villain, the cold-hearted monster. She probably pictured herself taking revenge on him for whatever she dreamed he’d done.
Because it had been like that at home since Barbara had convinced herself so firmly of his guilt, Charlie had decided a long time ago that they might as well enjoy some of the things he was considered guilty of. He might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat. Or something like that.
But that Thursday morning, as he drove back from Cromford to his office at Williamson Hart, the unsettling anxiety that dogged his working day was undermining Charlie Dean’s confidence. He wondered once or twice whether Barbara had hired someone to follow him, some thug who’d been given the job of scaring him. If that was the case, he was doing a really good job.
But it was probably a bit too subtle for Barbara. She was the sort of woman who was more likely to cut up his clothes and pour paint over his BMW. He’d promised her the new kitchen extension she’d been nagging him about, and the builders had started delivering materials this week. But no matter how much money he spent, he knew it would never be enough for Barbara.
Charlie pulled into a side road between Steeple Grange and Wirksworth, recognising three little terraces of stone cottages that had been cleaned up and sandblasted, and separated with wrought iron railings. When he’d parked, he dialled a number on his mobile. But when it was answered he found he didn’t really know what to say.
‘Hi, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Charlie Dean. How are you doing? Yeah, great. Well, you know … not that great, actually.’
Confused by his own indecision, Charlie stared out of his car window at the rows of cottages. Each door was painted a different colour, but all had the same brass knocker. He wondered how he would market one. He liked each of his properties to be unique, with its own special character. That was Charlie Dean’s style. He felt it reflected his personality.
‘I need you to help me with a little matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit delicate, so … Oh yeah, funny. You’re such a scream.’
He looked down the road towards Wirksworth. He pictured Green Hill and The Dale winding their way up the slopes to the right until they were stopped by the walls of the abandoned quarry. Barbara might be up there at the moment, in their house on The Dale. That is, unless she was out visiting one of her friends, gossiping about him in a sitting room or yakking over a cappuccino at PeliDeli in St John’s Street.
‘Meet me for a drink,’ said Charlie. ‘Then we can talk about it.’
Chapter Twelve
That afternoon, Ben Cooper was standing on the wall of the Iron Age hill fort at Carl Wark, waiting for his brother. His lungs were sore, and a wheeze escaped from his burning airways with every breath. But his muscles tingled from the steep climb, and that felt good. The clean air on his face was like a refreshing shower.
The entire Hope Valley st
retched out in front of him, closed in by the rocky ridge of Stanage Edge and a line of southern moors. He could see over the villages as far as Castleton, with Mam Tor blocking the head of the valley and the grey bulk of Kinder Scout lurking in the distance, its outline obscured by lowlying clouds.
Southwards over Millstone Edge and the hump of Eyam Moor was the town of Edendale. But right now Cooper couldn’t see it, and he didn’t want to. From here, he could try to pretend it didn’t exist, that the town and everything it contained was a figment of his imagination, a feature of some parallel universe where his life might have taken a different direction. The windows of E Division police headquarters on West Street might seem familiar in his memories, but at this moment they were part of a half-forgotten dream. The ground-floor flat in Welbeck Street was no more his home than was this hill fort.
In his heart, he didn’t feel he belonged anywhere, except to the air over the valley and the rain that fell continually on the Peak District. This feeling of dislocation ought to be frightening or unsettling, since he’d valued a sense of belonging so highly all his years. He should be disturbed by the loss of connection with his previous life. Yet he’d never felt so free.
All the time he’d spent in hospital, this was what he’d longed for. There had been windows in the ward, but the view was over the town, grey stone and wet roofs and the occasional curl of smoke. The tiny hint of distant views, the shape of a hill glimpsed in a bank of cloud on the horizon – that only made it worse. It was the taunting detail that made his captivity intolerable.
His brother puffed up the hill behind him. Matt was carrying too much weight these days. He spent so many hours sitting in the cab of his John Deere, letting the tractor do the physical work. He didn’t even walk around his fields at Bridge End Farm any more, but used his latest toy, a quad bike.
‘My God, why would people have lived all the way up here?’ said Matt when he’d got his breath back.
‘I don’t think they did,’ said Ben.
‘What? They put all the effort into building this thing, then didn’t live in it?’
‘As far as they can tell from the evidence. It’s a question of interpretation what it was used for. There are theories.’
‘I don’t like theories. You can’t eat them, or put them in your fuel tank.’
This hill fort was one of Ben’s favourite places in the Peak District. The views from the top were as spectacular as you might expect, and well worth the slog up the steep slope among the debris of scattered stones. But wonderful views were everywhere in this area. Carl Wark was special because there was nowhere more steeped in history in the whole region. The fort might have been constructed between eight hundred and five hundred BC, but archaeologists said the use of the promontory dated back much earlier, to Neolithic times.
‘This might have been a hill fort, or it could have been a ceremonial site of some kind,’ he said. ‘There are people who say it was a sort of court, a place that tribes could come to for the administration of justice.’
‘Really?’
Ben shrugged. ‘Like I say, it’s another theory.’
‘I prefer facts myself.’
‘I know you do, Matt.’
‘You make it sound as if that’s a bad thing.’
Of course, one glance showed that Carl Wark was a natural defensive site, with steep cliffs on three sides and a stone rampart constructed on the fourth. They stood on the edge looking over the ramparts towards Hathersage Moor. It was amazing to think people had built this without tools, with only their time and sweat and determination, hauling materials up the hillside stone by stone until they’d built a wall to protect themselves against the world. Yet people hadn’t lived at Carl Wark, but had used it as a refuge and perhaps for religious or ceremonial purposes. In other words, it was a sanctuary.
‘Thanks for coming, Matt,’ Ben said. ‘I know it’s difficult taking time away from the farm.’
‘Oh, well. The weather’s buggered everything up as usual,’ his brother said grumpily.
‘I know you can always find some jobs to do.’
‘Which reminds me,’ said Matt. ‘Let me have those fencing spikes back. I’m going to need them.’
‘I’m sorry, I keep forgetting.’
‘Your memory is worse than mine.’
The landscape towards Eyam in the south was a deep, damp green, washed by the constant rain. Ben had never seen such a vibrant green, nor such a range of shades. It was like looking into an emerald sea, with patches of mist hanging in the cloughs like smoke. They reminded him of the moorland fires, making the scorched skin on his hands sting, the back of his throat choke as if his lungs had suddenly filled again with smoke.
They’d parked on the back road leading into Hathersage Booths and crossed a stile to take the steep climb up Higger Tor. Within fifty yards of the road, it felt as though you’d stepped back in time. The dramatic view across to Carl Wark always made Ben pause for a while before scrambling over the rocks to find the path. Between the tor and Carl Wark, gigantic boulders were piled among the heather, as if a giant had started to build a castle but had got tired and given up. As they approached the fort, he’d been awed as ever by the wall rising above him, almost perfectly preserved as it had first been built all those centuries ago.
Carl Wark used steep natural cliffs as part of its defences. The wall of gritstone blocks at the western end of the fort was about ten feet high with an earth and rubble bank piled against its inside. Sheer cliffs rose to about eighty feet, surrounded by a steep bank. Across the neck of the plateau an L-shaped rampart had been constructed to form an entrance. This two-acre enclosure had been occupied by Roman troops during a Celtic uprising in the first century. And before the Celts? Even the name suggested that the origins of the fort were mysterious or unknown. Carl was a synonym for T’owd Mon, the Old Man. Otherwise known as the Devil.
‘Are you okay, Ben?’ asked Matt.
‘Yes. Well – you know.’
Ben realised that the rock behind him felt cold. Far too cold. It was summer, after all. These stones should be warmed by the sun, the ground between them dry and dusty, not trampled with mud. There was definitely something wrong with the seasons. Nature had begun to feel out of order, the natural cycle disrupted by an unnatural event.
But then, there was something wrong with the rest of the world, too.
Next week should have been his wedding but his fiancée, Liz Petty, had died in a fire at the abandoned Light House pub. No, not just a fire, but arson. A deliberate attempt to harm, to kill, to destroy evidence of an earlier murder. That was what it should always be called. Just like the blazes which had destroyed large swathes of the Peak District National Park, the fire at the Light House had been no accident. Whether through recklessness or malice, there was always someone to blame.
If he couldn’t see Edendale from here, he was certainly in no danger of catching a glimpse of Oxlow Moor. The blackened remains of the pub still stood on a stretch of that moor, in the west beyond the Eden Valley. It was difficult now for him to drive that way out of town, except in the dark. The Light House itself had been extinguished, so it no longer lit up the skyline as it had done for so many years.
‘Time,’ said Matt. He hesitated, then stopped speaking, as if he’d lost track of his thoughts … Or, more likely, he’d realised the utter futility of completing the sentence.
‘I hope you weren’t going to say that time heals everything,’ said Ben, ‘that things might look bleak now, but everything will be marvellous again in a few months? That I just need some time to get over it?’
‘Something like that, I suppose. I’ll not bother, then?’
‘We’ll take it as read, shall we?’
Ben wished people would just stop saying these things. It made Liz’s death sound so inevitable. As if it was part of some great pattern, a universal plan. Just time passing from one month to the next. The cycle of the seasons. The leaves on the trees growing, dying, falling.
‘So what’s the news on a trial?’ asked Matt. ‘You know – the son. The crazy youth.’
‘Eliot Wharton. He’s been remanded by the magistrates again. He’ll appear in Crown court, but probably not until next year.’
‘Oh God. Why does it seem to take forever?’
Ben shrugged. ‘It’s the way things work. The accused has to be given a chance to prepare his defence.’
‘I think it’s bollocks. What about the barman?’
‘Josh Lane? You know about him.’
‘He’s still out, wandering around scot-free?’
Ben found he couldn’t reply. His throat had constricted and the words were jammed in his larynx, immovable and painful, like a sharp splinter of bone from something indigestible.
During the past few weeks, Matt seemed to have grown used to getting no reply from his brother. They’d never spoken all that much before, had never really needed endless conversation to understand each other. But now Matt simply accepted a silence, without questioning whether it was the result of physical incapacity, or a more emotional form of pain.
‘At least that bastard who ran the Light House didn’t survive,’ he said. ‘Good riddance, I say.’
Ben nodded. The former landlord of the Light House, Maurice Wharton, had died not long after the fire at his empty pub. Known universally as ‘Mad Maurice’, he had been suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer, and he’d passed away in St Luke’s Hospice right there in Edendale. His signed confession was on file at West Street, but it was useless without forensic evidence or some corroboration from witnesses. Maurice had already been dying back then, with only a few weeks of pain-filled existence left to him. He would never have been dragged into court, even if he’d lived long enough.
Of course, there was his son. The crazy youth, as Matt called him. Though according to the psychiatric reports he wasn’t really mad at all, any more than his father had been. Young Eliot Wharton was now on remand in Risley awaiting trial. He’d been granted an escorted visit to Edendale for his father’s funeral a little while ago. The Coopers had stayed away from that. It had been too recent and too raw, the whole show too public.