Scared to Live bcadf-7

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Ben, are you there? What about the child?’

  ‘There’s no sign of her, Diane. She’s gone.’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone for a moment. Silence, apart from the distant sound of a car engine and faint, echoing voices. He pictured Fry still in the parking levels, struggling to cope with members of the public wanting to remove their cars.

  ‘OK, Ben, hang on there. Stay with Mullen until assistance comes. Is Georgi with you?’

  ‘I think he’s still upstairs. But, Diane — ’

  ‘Just don’t do anything stupid.’

  And then she was gone. Cooper sighed as he ended the call, and checked Brian Mullen’s pulse and breathing again. His skin felt very cold, so Cooper covered him with a bolt of cloth. There wasn’t much he could do to stop the bleeding, but scalp wounds always looked worse than they really were.

  He knew he ought to wait with Mullen, just as Diane said. But he was too conscious of time ticking away, too painfully aware that he might have been able to save John Lowther’s life yesterday, if he’d acted more quickly. How could he sit here now and wait while a small girl was nearby, needing his help? Luanne Mullen might at this moment be at risk in the darkness. The thought was intolerable. He knew he’d never be able to live with himself if he did nothing.

  Goading himself into action, Cooper ran back to the stairs to shout for Georgi Kotsev, at the expense of destroying the silence in the mill. He was saved the trouble when Kotsev appeared at the top of the wooden steps, looking huge framed in Cooper’s torchlight.

  ‘A problem, Ben?’

  ‘Come down, Georgi, will you?’

  Kotsev cursed quietly when he saw the body. ‘And the child?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Dyavol da go vzeme.’

  ‘Stay with him, will you, Georgi? Help is on the way.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find the child.’

  They looked at each other for a moment. Kotsev seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. He nodded briefly.

  ‘I understand.’

  Then Cooper left him with Brian Mullen, and hurried down to the far end of the shed, tracking the sound of a closing door somewhere ahead. Noises echoed so much inside the mill that it was impossible to move around quietly. But it wasn’t quite so easy to tell what direction the noise came from.

  He had no idea of the layout at this end of the mill. Above Cooper’s head, a bridge crossed over the looms to the mill entrance at road level. Ahead of him, a cavernous space gradually revealed itself to be the boiler house. Four black, riveted monsters glinted in his torch beam. Strangely, their upper surfaces were being used to store rabbit hutches.

  He climbed back up the steps to a heavy steel door set into the outer wall. It looked like the entrance to a tunnel that would lead to the base of the mill chimney. He supposed someone must once have had to crawl in there to clean out the flue. Cooper paused for a moment, trying to decide between several doors and a series of smaller rooms, cramped spaces after the length of the weaving shed.

  The door he chose turned out to be the bobbin room. The floorboards squealed and moved under the pressure of his feet as he entered. It occurred to him that he could be the ghost of Arkwright himself, prowling the mill at night, tracking down a fugitive child apprentice.

  One flick of his torch showed Cooper a room like nothing he’d ever seen before. It contained dozens of musty-smelling hessian sacks spilling bobbins on to the floor. There were wooden tubs full of bobbins, bobbins in drawers and hanging on the walls. And above his head there were hundreds more of them strung in bunches — a thick layer of bobbins hanging as if they’d grown from the ceiling, like a strange fungal growth or a thousand stalactites filling every available inch. There were all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours, and they rattled slightly in a breeze blowing from an open door. Cooper could feel the chill striking through the doorway, and knew this must be the passage that led outside to the goyt, and to the river.

  He slipped through the door on to a wooden walkway over the water channel. This area was open to the air, filled with the noise of the river and the sensation of empty space all around and above him in the darkness. The water that had once driven the mill’s waterwheels still ran the turbines, and it flowed fast under the walkway here. He could hear its rush and feel the vibrations of the current.

  But beyond the end rail was a stagnant basin. His torch picked out iron chains hanging from ancient pulleys, coated with dust and cobwebs. The chains disappeared into the murk, reaching down towards mysterious shapes that he barely glimpsed in the depths, metal structures with a forgotten purpose. Cooper shivered as he saw bits of dead vegetation floating on the surface. Even an adult might have difficulty in that water. Imagine getting tangled in the chains and dragged to the bottom.

  His torchlight illuminated a warning sign. But was it the fast-flowing goyt it was warning of? Or the still, dark basin with its shadows below the surface?

  Cooper turned sharply to the left, not sure what he was reacting to. His senses were confused by the adjustment from the silent interior of the mill to the noise outside. A series of explosions reminded him that the fireworks display was still going on over the village. The cascade of coloured light helped him to orientate himself. Beyond the goyt he could make out the bank of the river, and directly in front of him was an area of slippery concrete channels and sudden drops into black, lethal water.

  It didn’t feel any safer out here than it had inside. Of course, he ought to let Fry know where he was. So Cooper tried his phone again. But he was down by the river now, with the vast bulk of the mill behind him and the limestone crags towering on both sides. He raised his phone to head height and moved it in a different direction. No signal.

  The roar of the weir sounded much louder at night. Now that he was close to it, it almost drowned the crack and scream of the fireworks launching from High Tor. Cooper strained to listen for sounds of movement above the rush of water from the weir and the hum of the turbines in the mill. The only other noise he could hear was a tap-tap-tap against the side of the channel as a polystyrene cup bobbed on the surface of the water. Tap-tap-tap on the concrete walls.

  He thought he heard a shout somewhere, a woman’s voice. But the words were incomprehensible. He was almost sure he saw a shadow flickering, and caught the rustle of a long skirt on concrete.

  Then the tap-tap-tap became a clatter, the sudden sound of running footsteps. Cooper swung his torch, but he couldn’t tell which direction the footsteps were coming from. The flashes and crashing of the fireworks were too disorientating, the reflection of his Maglite off the dark water too confusing.

  So he spun round too late and didn’t see the black shape that came at him out of the night, or the fists that smashed into him and knocked him off balance. He teetered for a moment on the concrete edge, drawing a breath to cry out. His torch dropped from his hand and plunged into the goyt with a loud splash. A second later, Cooper was following it. He plunged into the water, falling towards the light as it swirled and spun towards the muddy depths.

  It seemed a long time before the light stopped falling, its beam swinging through the water to dazzle him. Cooper closed his eyes against the shock and the roar of water in his ears. He panicked when he realized he couldn’t tell which way was up, and he began to thrash his arms and legs. He seemed to hit something, or something hit him, he couldn’t tell which. The cold was already striking through to his soaking skin.

  He opened his eyes again, and saw that the light was receding now, drawing away from him into the gloom. He seemed to be trapped by something, his clothes caught up on some heavy, rusty object under the water. He thought he must be sinking, and he thrashed harder. Just when he felt he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, his head suddenly burst clear of the water and he gasped in a deep, ragged mouthful of air.

  Dazed, Cooper realized that the collar of his jacket was being gripped by someone, and h
e was being dragged vigorously towards the side of the channel.

  A deep voice laughed close to his ear.

  ‘Bezopasno li e pluvaneto tuk? Are you sure it’s safe to swim here?’

  37

  Sunday, 30 October

  The following afternoon, Fry was sitting alone in the CID room at West Street. Everyone else who was on duty today had joined the search for Luanne Mullen. Most of them were expecting the divers of the underwater search team to have made a find by the time they’d finished dragging the channels of the mill goyt. Unless the child’s body had been swept out into the river and was miles away from Matlock Bath by now.

  Fry was thinking of her conversation with Brian Mullen early that morning. Same hospital, different ward. A Mullen who looked sicker and paler than ever.

  ‘I always thought the adoption in Bulgaria was the wrong thing,’ Mullen had said to her. ‘I mean, I love Luanne to bits, and I wouldn’t have parted with her, once we’d got her. I couldn’t have taken her away from Lindsay. But I never thought it was right. It felt dodgy to me. I knew there’d be trouble. But Henry kept pushing and pushing, and Lindsay always went along with what he said.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It was all illegal, wasn’t it? False documents, and everything?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  Mullen had lain back, exhausted. ‘I’ve never been involved in anything illegal before. Never. I knew they’d catch up with us.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I never knew who they’d be exactly, but I was sure someone would come one day, to take Luanne back. It was like we were living on borrowed time. And once that Rose Shepherd turned up again, that was the last straw. But no one else could see what I was afraid of. They told me I was being stupid.’

  ‘Is that what you were having arguments with Lindsay about?’

  ‘No, we never had arguments, I told you. We disagreed about some things. But I was right, wasn’t I? They did come.’

  ‘Possibly. But you have no idea who these people might be?’

  ‘Somebody from Bulgaria, that’s all I can guess at. They’ve got Luanne, haven’t they? Have they taken her back there?’

  ‘I really don’t know, sir. I’m sorry. But we’re doing our best to find her.’

  It hadn’t sounded convincing, even to Fry herself. Mullen had just looked even more sick.

  ‘Can I ask you about something else, Mr Mullen?’ she’d said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your next-door neighbour, Mr Wade.’

  ‘Keith Wade? He’s a good neighbour. He’s always kept an eye on our house. I know he can seem a bit rough, and his wife walked out on him, poor bloke. But Lindsay saw a lot of him during the day when he was on late shifts, and he always took an interest in the kids.’

  ‘Mr Mullen, when you say Mr Wade kept an eye on your house, what exactly do you mean?’

  ‘We gave him a spare key. So if we were away for the weekend, he could get in to deal with any emergencies.’

  ‘Wait a minute — he has a key to your house?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Fry shook her head at the memory of her conversation with Mullen. As far as she was concerned, the question of who’d killed Lindsay Mullen and the two boys in the fire remained open. Despite his parents’ protestations, it would be easy to blame John Lowther and leave it at that. But she was feeling guilty that she’d been so wrong about him. Her preconceptions had overruled her judgement. Bad mistake.

  She considered Brian Mullen again. He was one of only two people she could definitely place at the scene around the time of the fire. Mullen had a key to the house, so he wouldn’t have needed to break in through the side window. Of course, the damage to the window might simply have been a blind, to make everyone think there had been a break-in.

  She wondered whether she ought to have seized Mullen’s clothes for forensic examination at an early stage in the enquiry. But it would have been a pointless exercise, even immediately after the incident. Mullen had legitimate reasons for his clothes being impregnated with smoke, or even singed by the fire. He’d tried to get into the house to rescue his children, hadn’t he? He had plenty of witnesses to that fact, including the two firefighters who’d physically dragged him back to the pavement. It took a bit of clever forward planning to contaminate forensic evidence like that. She couldn’t believe Brian Mullen had it in him.

  But no, she shouldn’t rule out it out completely. No more false assumptions.

  Gradually, Fry found her thoughts focusing on Keith Wade. The perfect neighbour, the assiduous member of Neighbourhood Watch. The keen amateur photographer. The only other person she knew to have been at the scene when the fire started.

  Fry paused and checked her email. Wade had promised to send her some of his photos, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She doubted if they ever would.

  Then another thought struck her. Brian Mullen had an alibi for the time of the fire — he’d been at the Broken Wheel with Jed Skinner until the early hours of the morning. In Wade’s case, it was that very same fact that had made it possible for him to get into the Mullens’ house. If Brian hadn’t been out late that night, the front door of number 32 would have been bolted on the inside. But Lindsay had left the bolts off for her husband to come home. Wade could have known that quite easily, couldn’t he?

  There was one person who wasn’t out with the search teams. He wasn’t on duty because he was at home, recovering from his unexpected dip in the trapped waters of the Derwent. Fry dialled his number.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘can I bounce something off you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking, Diane.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I can tell you’re all right by the way you sound.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘What did you want to bounce off me?’

  ‘Brian Mullen. You know that he denied the arguments with his wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whose word do we have that those arguments ever took place?’

  Cooper considered the question for a moment. ‘Well, the lady on one side of the Mullens heard the row about the carpet.’

  ‘Which is the only one Brian admits to. And the rest?’

  ‘We only have the other neighbour’s word for those.’

  ‘Keith Wade.’

  ‘Yes, Wade. Why, Diane?’

  ‘I’m thinking of getting Mr Wade in. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good friend of the Mullens, after all.’

  ‘But he seems to have been the perfect next-door neighbour.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did the prints come back from the can of lighter fluid?’

  ‘Yes, just today. I’m going to ask Mr Wade to give his prints for comparison.’

  ‘He’s lived next door to the Mullens for six years,’ said Cooper. ‘And they got on fine, by all accounts. Why would he decide to do them harm? What would have been his motive?’

  ‘Motive?’

  ‘Yes, motive. That’s a bit of a problem all round, isn’t it? Juries like a motive. They’re never entirely happy if they don’t get one, you know.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to let you know when I find out,’ said Fry.

  Cooper paused. ‘Do you want me to come in?’

  ‘No, you’re recuperating.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any news …?’

  ‘We’re still working on the Rose Shepherd shooting.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘No, there isn’t any news of Luanne Mullen. Not yet.’

  Cooper put the phone down thoughtfully. Neighbours had been a bit outside his experience until he moved to Welbeck Street. At Bridge End Farm, the nearest house had been several fields away. Even here in Edendale, there was only his landlady, Mrs Shelley, on one side, and a retired couple on the other, two former teachers who seemed to spend most of their time in Spain.

  ‘Who was that, Ben?’

  ‘It was Diane Fry.’

  Liz was in his kitchen. Coo
per wasn’t sure what she was doing, and it felt wrong somehow for her to be there. A few months of living on his own, and he was already feeling territorial about his space. He just hoped she wasn’t tidying up. He couldn’t do with that.

  Cooper put his head around the door and saw that Liz was talking to the cat, who’d taken to her straightaway. So that was all right.

  ‘They still haven’t found the child,’ he said. ‘You know — Luanne Mullen.’

  Liz looked up, her eyes suddenly full of concern at something she’d detected in his voice. Her dark hair was loose today, curled round her ears in the way that he liked.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault if the child was snatched, Ben.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was.’

  ‘No, but you were thinking it.’

  Cooper raised his hands. ‘It’s a fair cop.’

  Liz gave the cat another stroke, rubbing him behind the ears, creating a deep buzz of pleasure.

  ‘Just so long as you weren’t planning on going in to work,’ she said. ‘This is a rest day. We don’t get much chance to spend a whole day together.’

  ‘No, of course,’ said Cooper. ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She stood up and came towards him. When she was close, he could feel her warmth. In another moment, he’d be distracted completely from what had really been on his mind.

  ‘Diane says they’re still working on the Rose Shepherd shooting,’ he said. ‘There’s a suspect in custody, but it isn’t going too well with him, from what I hear.’

  Liz looked up at him, instinctively sharing the desire to see a satisfactory conclusion in a tragic case like the death of Miss Shepherd.

  ‘Did I tell you about the gun, by the way?’

  ‘The gun?’ said Cooper.

  ‘The gun you asked about, Ben. The Romanian PSL. I did tell you about the gun, didn’t I?’

  A defendant was always advised by his lawyers to smarten himself up when he appeared in court. It made a better impression on a jury, and even on magistrates, who ought to know better. Have a shave, comb your hair, and borrow a suit, even if it didn’t fit.