The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper stood up to leave. ‘No, you’ve been very helpful. I wish everyone was so forthcoming.’

  Hesitantly, Bateman shook his hand. ‘I wouldn’t want you to go away thinking this company isn’t concerned about the possibility of injury and damage during deliveries. We always carry out risk assessments, you know. It’s part of our responsibility under health and safety regulations.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Cooper. ‘But I don’t think your risk assessment would have covered this case.’

  Mac Kelsey’s wife had been contacted by phone, but a personal visit was essential. Anne and Malcolm Kelsey lived in a dormer bungalow in the Heysbank area of Disley, one of the first villages over the border in Cheshire. It was an easy call on the way back from Windmill Feed Solutions.

  Cooper parked his car at the kerb and walked through a dense box hedge to reach the steps to the front door. He saw a blurred figure appear through the frosted glass panes before he even rang the bell.

  Inside, the house was neat and bright, and smelled of pine air freshener. Anne Kelsey looked as though she might have dressed for his arrival, her hair brushed and a fresh touch of make-up.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happened to Malcolm,’ she said. ‘Someone tried to explain it to me when they called, but it just didn’t sink in. I mean, Mac has gone missing or something? Don’t his firm know where he is? If you ask them at the office . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper as gently as he could. ‘They have no idea, any more than we do. We’ve found his lorry, but not your husband.’

  ‘He wouldn’t just leave it,’ she said. ‘He must be ill, don’t you think?’

  ‘Or injured, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She hesitated, seemed to be about to ask the obvious question, but then decided not to. Sometimes it was better not to know too much detail. It could send the imagination off in the wrong direction.

  And Cooper was thankful not to have to explain about the blood in her husband’s cab. She must surely know by his very presence in her house how seriously the police were taking Malcolm’s disappearance.

  ‘He’ll turn up somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘What can you tell me about his routine on Monday?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Well, not much. He left for work at the usual time, so far as I know. He sets off early, before I’m up.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I was out on Monday night,’ said Anne. ‘Malcolm knew I was going to be out. Mondays are the nights for my creative writing class.’

  ‘Creative writing?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a change, you know. And I enjoy it. Afterwards we tend to go to the pub for a chat. So he would have to fend for himself, instead of me having a meal ready for him. But Malcolm was used to that on a Monday night. Not that it meant anything more than him calling at a takeaway.’

  ‘Has your husband had any problems recently?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘Money troubles? Debt? An argument with anyone?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Would you know if he did, Mrs Kelsey?’

  ‘I’m his wife,’ she said simply. ‘I would know if there was something wrong. He wouldn’t be able to hide it from me. I would get it out of him in the end.’

  ‘But you hadn’t noticed anything recently?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Does he have any brothers or sisters? Or close friends?’

  ‘You mean people he might have talked to, because he couldn’t talk to me?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Cooper, though it was very close to what he did mean.

  ‘Malcolm has an older sister who lives in Manchester with her husband. They have two grown-up children, and grandchildren. We don’t see very much of them. They’re always too busy.’

  Cooper wondered if the slightly aggrieved tone indicated envy of Mrs Kelsey’s sister-in-law. Was it her children, or her grandchildren? Or perhaps even her husband, who she was too busy to spare time away from to visit her brother down the road in Disley.

  ‘There are some people we know in the village, of course,’ said Anne. ‘People we socialise with. They’re friends of both of us, though. I can’t think who Malcolm might have confided in, unless it was one of his colleagues at work. One of the other drivers?’

  ‘Has he always driven a lorry?’

  ‘Well, he worked up to it, you might say. He started off driving vans for a courier company. He liked being on the road. Then he got a job at Windmill and took the training to get his HGV licence. He’s always said they’re a good company to work for.’

  ‘No trouble at work, then?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ she said, loyally. ‘Nothing that was worrying him.’

  Cooper hesitated before the next question, wondering whether she could anticipate it. Some spouses did – perhaps because they already had their own suspicions, or they’d run through all the scenarios in their minds and eventually arrived at this one.

  ‘And what about any problems in your marriage?’ he said.

  From her expression, Mrs Kelsey seemed to be genuinely shocked.

  ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘You’re asking me that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. But I’m afraid it’s a possibility we always have to take into account. You’d be surprised how often it comes down to something like that. So I’m obliged to ask. It saves us a lot of time if we know from the beginning, one way or the other.’

  Mrs Kelsey was quiet for a moment and Cooper could see her thinking about what he’d said. He didn’t tell her that even if she assured him there were no problems, he still wouldn’t discount it as a possibility. Yes, it did happen often that a relationship problem was at the root of a disappearance or a violent incident. And in many of those cases the spouse had no idea there was a problem.

  ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘I couldn’t say there was a problem. Oh, Malcolm used to have a bit of a roving eye, but that was years ago. I never asked too many questions at the time, because I didn’t want to know. And he settled down. He lost interest, I think. It happens with age, I suppose. No, there are no problems.’

  Cooper nodded. It was only half an answer she’d given. There didn’t have to be anyone else involved for him to want to disappear. If things were bad enough at home, that was enough of a motive. And age didn’t make any difference, in his experience.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Kelsey. I’m sorry to have to ask these questions.’

  ‘I understand.’

  He wasn’t sure that she did. But at least he’d escaped an angry outburst. Some situations he hated – they made him feel so intrusive. He’d been telling her the truth, though. The questions were necessary.

  ‘And does your husband have any interests outside work?’ he asked.

  ‘Interests?’ she said vaguely.

  ‘Any hobbies, or sports he’s involved in?’

  Mrs Kelsey rallied now, grateful to be on safer ground. This was a subject she felt much happier talking about.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Well, Malcolm isn’t very sporty. Not when it comes to participating anyway. He likes to watch football and rugby on TV. He has a drink occasionally. We went to see The Meat Loaf Story at Manchester Opera House. That was probably the last time we went anywhere together.’

  ‘The Meat Loaf Story? That’s a new one on me.’

  ‘It’s a tribute act,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, one of those.’

  There were so many successful tribute acts now that there were whole ‘fake festivals’ dedicated to them. Everybody was watching New2, Oasish, the Antarctic Monkeys.

  But Cooper was more interested in the tension that had been immediately evident in Anne Kelsey’s manner when he asked that innocuous question about her husband’s interests outside work. What interests had she been thinking of, if not hobbies and sports?

  ‘Where’s Malcolm’s car?’ said Anne suddenly.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Cooper. ‘Mr Kelsey w
as driving a DAF lorry.’

  ‘No, I mean his car. The Megane. The one he drives to work in.’

  Kelsey owned a car, of course. It was strange that it hadn’t occurred to Cooper much earlier. He’d got so fixated on the image of Kelsey sitting in the driver’s seat of a large HGV that it hadn’t struck him straight away that he would also be a normal motorist.

  ‘Can you give me the details?’

  ‘A silver-grey Renault Megane. I’ll have to find the registration number if you want it.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  That was an oversight. No doubt Mac Kelsey’s silver-grey Megane was still standing in the staff parking area at Windmill Feeds. If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t know how to explain the circumstance.

  ‘I’m quite sure Malcolm will turn up somewhere,’ Anne Kelsey said again when she came back with the registration number. ‘There’ll be a logical explanation.’

  The search for Mac Kelsey had resumed at first daylight and was making better progress. A team had started out from the Cloughpit Lane bridge, with a line of officers slowly moving across the ground, heads down in concentration, alert for any traces of evidence. A spot of blood, a discarded item, a patch of crushed vegetation.

  Two dog units had been called in to help the search. A four-year-old German Shepherd called Max, who had come direct from Germany for his training with the Derbyshire dog unit, responded mostly to commands in his native language. But he was the first across a field between two dry-stone walls, nose down as he followed a trail through coarse grass and dead bracken to a stack of old straw bales slowly rotting near a gateway.

  Max stopped at the corner of the stack, dwarfed by the giant round bales, and indicated for his handler. The officer hurried up to see what he’d located. A few minutes later it was obvious to everyone.

  The body of Mac Kelsey had been hastily buried in a shallow pit under the loose stones of a collapsed wall. When officers lifted some of the debris clear, the imprint of the heavier stones was still visible on the softening skin of his corpse.

  13

  An hour later Ben Cooper stood with the Crime Scene Manager Wayne Abbott as officers in scene suits photographed the heap of stones and uncovered the body inch by inch, setting each stone carefully aside to be labelled and bagged. Every rock might carry vital traces that could be used as evidence.

  ‘We should get the tents up quickly before any more trains come over the bridge,’ said Cooper. ‘We don’t want gawpers and gongoozlers seeing all this.’

  ‘We’ll only be a couple of minutes,’ said Abbott. ‘They shouldn’t have moved so many stones before we got here.’

  ‘From your perspective, perhaps,’ said Cooper. ‘But they had to be sure the victim wasn’t still alive. That’s the first priority.’

  Mac Kelsey was still wearing his brown fleece with the green Windmill logo on the breast pocket and a yellow high-vis jacket, the reflective strips glowing garishly in the powerful crime scene lighting. His matching baseball cap had been found lying at his feet, thrown in with the body and covered up. On his feet were heavy black safety boots with steel toe caps. The maker’s name on the side said, ‘Himalayan’.

  Kelsey was a big man, but in death his torso looked deflated and squashed. In time he might have become flattened by the weight on top of him, as the soft tissues decayed and the bones gave way under the pressure.

  As Cooper approached, the forensic medical examiner stood up and brushed himself off.

  ‘The post-mortem examination may find other injuries,’ he said. ‘But it looks as though the fatal one was a stab wound to the left side of the neck. I’d say it punctured his jugular vein. There’s a great deal of blood on his left hand and the sleeve of his jacket on that side.’

  ‘He was holding his neck to try to suppress the bleeding?’ said Cooper.

  ‘That would be my guess.’

  Mac Kelsey had been trying to get away from whatever had happened. He’d tried to make it to safety, but hadn’t known where he was heading. Looking at him lying in his shallow makeshift grave, Cooper wasn’t sure how fast he could have run in his high-vis jacket and Himalayan safety boots.

  Cooper remembered Carol Villiers’ first call to him about the incident in Shawhead. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood. A lot more than the woman who called it in noticed. She said she thought the lorry driver must have cut himself. If so, it was one hell of a cut.’

  Well, there had certainly been a lot of blood. Kelsey’s fleece was soaked in it. It had turned the brown fabric to a dark magenta mantle around his shoulders, and there were flecks of it on his arms and back.

  When they turned the body over, Cooper could see that the blood had begun to pool in the shallow depression, clotting into sticky wads on the grass. Kelsey’s hair was stiff with it and his face was partially obscured. Against that background, the green windmill logo on his breast pocket stood out in a garish mockery.

  ‘Whoever did this, they certainly meant it,’ said Carol Villiers.

  Cooper jumped. For a moment he’d forgotten she was even there. But that was Villiers – quietly efficient, capable of being unobtrusive when necessary.

  ‘What do you mean, Carol?’ he said.

  ‘Look at the extent of the injuries. This wasn’t the result of a few bruises sustained in a struggle. Someone intended him to die and wanted to make sure of it.’

  ‘It’s always difficult to understand how anyone could beat a person to death like this. How could you physically do it? What would be going through your mind?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Cooper wondered how he would react if a colleague said he or she could imagine exactly what it felt like to beat someone to death. Luckily, no one ever had.

  ‘It’s been quite a few hours now since he first went missing.’ Villiers looked at her watch. ‘Forty hours since we got the original call. Maybe a bit longer.’

  ‘It’s far too long,’ said Cooper. ‘But I don’t know what we could have done any better, given the circumstances.’

  ‘I think I know that song.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘If we can get a time of death, it will help,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they buried him until he was dead.’

  Villiers winced. ‘Good point. But I’m not sure how we’ll get that. If he died on Monday night, we’re well past the point of rigor mortis or body temperature being any use.’

  ‘We’ll see what the post-mortem can tell us.’

  ‘I’ve alerted the mortuary. Dr van Doon is on call.’

  ‘Good. I don’t suppose there’s any sign of a weapon?’

  Cooper turned to the Crime Scene Manager, who was supervising the collection and recording of evidence. So far there looked to be nothing in the evidence bags that would constitute a weapon.

  ‘Unless it was one of these stones,’ said Abbott. ‘There’s blood on some of them. If one was used as a weapon, there may be traces of hair and skin from the victim’s scalp. We’ll know when we can get them to the lab.’

  ‘It would be useful to know if all the stones were from the same place,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘If a stone was used to attack Mr Kelsey, it’s more likely to have been one that was picked up by the roadside, not one from this wall. It’s a good three hundred yards from the scene of the assault.’

  ‘I see,’ said Abbott. ‘Well, I’m not sure how we’ll tell the difference, but I’ll make a note of it for the lab.’

  ‘Is there anything else of interest?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Just general rubbish here. Nothing immediately suggestive. Unless you’re interested in the two other bodies we found.’

  ‘What?’

  Abbott smiled. ‘When I say “we”, I’m taking credit for someone else’s achievement. They were found by the search team, buried a few yards from the road.’

  It was the nature of the smile that tipped Cooper off. He’d been about to explode, but of course Abbott was joking. It was just the sort
of wind-up that SOCOs delighted in. They loved to take the mickey out of innocent coppers. But this one seemed a particularly juvenile and meaningless joke.

  ‘Yes, very funny,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I’m serious,’ protested Abbott. ‘They dug up two corpses from shallow graves. Recently deceased too. We’ve bagged them, just in case. It’s a bit late for the mint sauce, though.’

  ‘They’re sheep,’ said Cooper.

  Abbott laughed. ‘Ewe got it.’

  Cooper and Villiers left the forensic team to their work and walked back towards Cloughpit Lane, following a carefully marked-out approach and ducking under the tape at the outer cordon.

  ‘It’s a long way from the bridge,’ said Cooper. ‘I wonder if Mac Kelsey made it that far under his own steam.’

  ‘If he did, he was probably running away from someone,’ said Villiers. ‘Trying to escape his attackers?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Cooper looked back towards the hamlet. If that was the case, it surely couldn’t have happened until well after dark had fallen. Even in Shawhead, someone would have been likely to notice an injured man being pursued across open fields, murdered, then buried under a makeshift cairn. It didn’t seem credible otherwise.

  Villiers had managed to persuade Grant Swindells to unlock a field gate so that they could get police vehicles off the road. Cooper was intending to ask her how she’d done it, but of course it was in Swindells’ own interests to have the road clear. Nevertheless, he could imagine the farmer grumbling about the damage all the vehicles were doing to his field. No doubt he’d be muttering the word ‘compensation’ to anyone who’d listen.

  ‘Where had Mac Kelsey been delivering earlier in the day?’ asked Cooper thoughtfully.

  ‘We’ve got his schedule from Mr Bateman at Windmill Feed Solutions.’

  ‘I know. But I’d like someone to check the completed dockets to make sure he made all his deliveries. Then phone the customers and ask them whether they noticed anything unusual, if he seemed nervous or was behaving oddly. You know the routine. And I’d like to be sure that he was on his own, that he hadn’t picked someone up in his cab at any point during the day.’