Standing with other members of Ashley’s family outside the court, Mr Flynn said: ‘The sentence passed on James Allsop today will not bring Ashley back and does not ease the pain and grief that we will always feel. In this situation it is the family of the victim who have been given a life sentence. We didn’t have the opportunity to say goodbye to our daughter and that is something we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives.
‘Ashley was a bright and intelligent young woman, full of personality. She was a loving person, who brought joy to everyone who knew her. We have lost a daughter who might well have gone on to be a loving mother herself. Our family will never be the same again, and nothing that has been said in court today can change that.’
He added: ‘We will always miss hearing Ashley’s voice and seeing her smile. We will always live with the sorrow of knowing that her life was ended much too soon. Our daughter has been stolen from us by a driver who behaved with no regard for other road users.’
‘The usual stuff,’ said Villiers, shuffling her notes impatiently.
Cooper was looking at the photograph accompanying the piece. It showed the family in front of a cluster of cameras and microphones as they left court. Clutching the sheet of paper he’d read his statement from was a tall middle-aged man with grey hair. He was staring defiantly out at the reader. Next to him was a tearful woman, presumably the mother. Behind stood a group including an obvious lawyer and a couple of young men in their twenties or thirties, squeezed into suits and ties for the occasion, as if they were attending a funeral. Of course, in a way they were doing exactly that.
‘What about her husband?’ said Cooper. ‘Scott Brooks. He isn’t mentioned at all.’
‘No, he doesn’t seem to have got much of a look-in. The father did all the talking. Do you think the family pushed him out? It happens sometimes, especially if he was a fairly recent husband. On the other hand, he could have been too broken up by grief. Not everyone can stand up and make a statement in front of the media.’
Cooper looked at the picture again.
‘Not everyone would want to,’ he said.
‘And some people go way over the top when they see the cameras and microphones. They start to think they’re on The X Factor or something, and they have to win the public over with a sob story.’
‘That’s a bit cynical for you, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s wrong?’
Villiers gazed back with a straight face. ‘Nothing.’
Cooper made a mental to ask her later, when they could get a few minutes alone. He expected the cynical comments from Luke Irvine or Becky Hurst, not from Villiers. But now obviously wasn’t the right time to pursue it.
‘These news reports aren’t enough,’ he said. ‘Have you got the witness statements there?’
Villiers looked at Sharma, waiting for him to speak.
‘Yes, we do have them,’ he said. ‘But they’re extensive. Is it really necessary?’
‘Humour me,’ said Cooper.
‘Well, the driver of the other lorry involved was Polish, a man by the name of Artus Borzuczek.’
He pronounced the name badly, sliding over the ‘z’ sounds as if he was ‘shushing’ a noisy child. Was that why he’d been reluctant? It was nothing to be ashamed of. East European names caused problems for many people.
‘And ah, let’s see . . .’ Sharma murmured to himself as he flicked through the pages. ‘Yes, here’s the gist of it. According to his statement, Mr Borzuczek was asleep at the time of the crash. He was interviewed of course, but they didn’t get much out of him, even with the help of a translator. He said he couldn’t remember anything about the crash, except a loud bang. He thought a bomb had gone off, he said. But his memory must only have been of a split second, because he was knocked unconscious when he hit the windscreen of his cab. He never saw Ashley Brooks’ Honda Civic. It wasn’t there when he stopped.’
‘Was he injured?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes. As a result of the collision, he suffered a broken collarbone, scalp lacerations and facial injuries. He spent some time in hospital, then went back to Poland. His statement was given to the court in writing.’
‘Who else have we got?’
Sharma was beginning to look flustered. Cooper watched him closely as he fumbled at the file. Did he have a problem responding under pressure?
‘The owner of a roadside cafe on the opposite carriageway,’ he said. ‘She didn’t see the collision, but witnessed the aftermath. She was the first to call the emergency services. And a number of drivers were traced who’d been travelling behind Allsop’s lorry on the southbound carriageway of the A6.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They testified that they’d seen the lorry being driven erratically and swerving off the road. They said Allsop made no attempt to brake until it was too late. None of the drivers was local, though. One was from Burton-on-Trent, one from Birmingham—’
‘Is that it?’ interrupted Cooper.
‘Not quite. There were two people looking down from a bridge over the road. Two of the drivers mentioned seeing them at the time of the collision.’
‘A bridge?’
For a moment Cooper pictured the Cloughpit Lane bridge, but he knew he must be wrong. There was no railway bridge like that over the A6. Then a different image came into his mind. A small road bridge built to cross the dual carriageway connecting the outskirts of Whaley Bridge to . . .
‘Bugsworth Basin,’ he said.
Both Villiers and Sharma looked at him in surprise.
‘The canal basin,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the terminus of the Peak Forest Canal. It used to be a busy industrial area, full of lime kilns. It was derelict and disused for decades, then there was a restoration project. It’s in water again and they’ve turned it into a visitor attraction. A road runs through the basin and it crosses the A6 on a bridge near there.’
‘Yes, I think that’s the one,’ said Sharma. ‘Should I have known that?’
‘No,’ admitted Cooper. ‘It takes a bit of local knowledge. People park their cars on that bridge sometimes if they’re visiting Bugsworth Basin. Uniforms have dealt with a couple of complaints of youths throwing objects off the bridge into the traffic. Nothing serious, but that’s only by luck.’
‘If not kids, why would anyone else be standing on the bridge at that time of night?’ said Villiers.
‘It’s anyone’s guess. It’s an isolated spot, in its own way. If you don’t count four lanes of traffic passing underneath you.’
Cooper turned back to the original newspaper report. ‘Travelling too fast in wet and dangerous road conditions’. That was what the trial judge had said.
‘It was raining too,’ he said.
‘Yes, heavily,’ said Villiers. ‘It had been raining for hours.’
‘Did these people come forward as witnesses?’
Sharma shook his head. ‘No. Efforts were made to find them, of course. Appeals in the papers, signs out by the road. Officers even went to the pub at Bugsworth to talk to the staff and customers, to see if they could identify them. But no luck. They were never traced.’
‘So we have two people standing on a bridge in the rain, at night, just watching the traffic,’ said Cooper.
‘It sounds odd enough, doesn’t it?’ said Villiers. ‘But people do strange things.’
‘And they watched a fatal collision happen right in front of their eyes, but did nothing.’
Sharma frowned. ‘We don’t know for certain that they did nothing.’
‘What do you mean, Dev?’
‘For all we can tell, they might have come down from the bridge to see if they could help.’
‘There were several 999 calls made in a short space of time by other road users,’ added Villiers. ‘They might have come down, then realised there was nothing they could do.’
‘So why weren’t they there when the first emergency vehicles arrived at the scene?’
Sharma shrugged. ‘Witnesses leave the
scene of an accident all the time, even when they’ve stopped to help. People don’t want to get involved. They have somewhere to go, or—’
‘Or something to hide?’ suggested Cooper.
‘Or that too.’
His last comment must have had a sound of finality. Both Villiers and Sharma began to gather the scattered papers together as if they were about to leave his office. They felt they’d given him all the information they’d gathered. Now it was up to him what he did with it. He was the DI. He had to make those assessments.
But Cooper held up a hand to stop them leaving. There was always one more small detail that was important to complete the picture. He didn’t know what that detail was, but he knew that it was still missing. What he’d been presented with was a jigsaw that someone had dropped and vital pieces were lost, leaving a hole where a figure should be, a small scene that would change the whole meaning of the picture.
Villiers and Sharma sat back down and waited uncertainly while Cooper grasped for the elusive question. For a long moment it slipped away from him like a dream that vanished the instant he woke up.
Then it came to him.
‘There was a van involved,’ he said. ‘A van parked in the lay-by. Wasn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ said Villiers. ‘Hold on.’
Sharma was holding the witness reports. He spread them out on the desk – a great sheaf of them. Post-mortem examination, forensic reports, expert witnesses, phone records. There was far too much for anyone to grasp.
Villiers leaned over and pulled the relevant statement out of the pile, as if she was picking a card for a magician’s trick. She glanced at it and nodded.
‘Here it is.’
Then she stopped. Cooper watched her, puzzled by her sudden silence. The colour had drained from her face. She looked shocked. And guilty too, as if she’d committed some fatal oversight. She could hardly meet Cooper’s eye.
‘What is it, Carol?’ he said.
Villiers shook her head in despair.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she said. ‘The van driver who was parked in that lay-by on the A6. His name was Malcolm Kelsey.’
20
The stretch of road between the two roundabouts on the A6 was a distance of about three and a half miles, according to his dashboard trip meter. It felt longer.
This section of dual carriageway had been built to bypass both Chapel-en-le-Frith and Whaley Bridge, which the old A6 had gone straight through. Well, perhaps not straight through, given the traffic congestion that had been suffered in those two small towns for many years. Further on the stretch towards Stockport was slow and always very busy.
Bridgemont Roundabout was the junction between the A6 and the A5004 road into Whaley Bridge. On the map it became obvious that the roundabout was right at the centre of a transport network. As well as the main roads, three arms of the Peak Forest Canal ran under it. The River Goyt passed below too, squeezed into a narrow corridor by two railway lines. In between all these transport links lay the Bugsworth canal basin, though by car it could only be reached by a twisting back road through.
Opposite each other between the Charley Lane underpass and the Whitehough Head bridge were two lay-bys. Both were full of massive HGVs: there was a Hovis lorry, a few trucks from the big haulage companies and a flatbed loaded with gas cylinders; between them a scatter of vans and pick-ups, like minnows round a school of whales.
But there was another pull-in just before the canal basin at Bugsworth, close to a length of steep banking and a few yards past a small road bridge over the A6. This was the lay-by where the fatal crash had taken place eight years previously. It was the spot where Ashley Brooks’ life had ended.
Cooper drew in by a sign warning him of a £100 fine for littering. Almost concealed by the trees next to it was a fingerpost for a public footpath. It didn’t look as though the path was used very much. He opened his OS map and located his position. The path led to a back road that skirted the hill, Eccles Pike, with another branch leading off towards the canal basin.
He’d sent Dev Sharma on to Shawhead to join Luke Irvine, with instructions to make Irvine pull his finger out. He felt more comfortable with Carol Villiers alongside him. Should he feel guilty about that too?
Cooper stood in the lay-by and looked back at the road bridge, trying to picture the two people who’d been reported by drivers to be standing in the rain watching the traffic that night. He could see a couple cars up there now, parked half on the kerb by visitors to the canal basin. There was no sign of anyone interested in watching the traffic on the A6. But then, why would you?
He supposed Villiers was right in her guess that those two people could have come down from the bridge when they saw the crash. It was just about possible for someone to clamber over the parapet, slide down the banking, push their way through the trees and scale a fence. Difficult, though not impossible. But what about going back up? That did look really tricky. It was too steep to scramble up the banking to the bridge. It had been raining for hours at the time and that slope would have been lethally slippery with mud. And the angle to reach the parapet from below was surely unfeasible.
Villiers came to stand next to him and read his thoughts as she followed his gaze.
‘They would have been the closest witnesses, wouldn’t they?’ she said. ‘Whoever they were.’
‘Male or female?’ asked Cooper. ‘Or one of each?’
‘Impossible to say. One of the motorists said he thought they were wearing dark clothing with hoods. As you would, since it was raining hard.’
‘Yes. So was there a car on the bridge too?’
‘We don’t know.’
Further down the A6, on the opposite carriageway, was another lay-by where the roadside cafe was sited. It was housed in a couple of converted shipping containers by the look of it. And according to the lettering painted on the side, it was called Sally’s Snack Box. An illuminated sign over the cafe said, ‘Open’. There were several potential customers parked up in the lay-by. Mostly vans and a few HGVs.
But roadside cafes were closed at night, weren’t they? That would normally discount Sally as a witness. But she’d been the first to dial 999 and report the collision that killed Ashley Brooks.
‘Ben, have you seen this?’ called Villiers.
He turned to see that Villiers had moved away and was standing by the fence, bending over something on the ground.
‘What have you found, Carol?’
‘Come and look for yourself.’
It was one of those twenty-first-century roadside shrines – an informal memorial for the dead. They sprang up spontaneously after any fatal road accident, a tribute that had come to be expected now from those who knew the victim, but often added to by complete strangers, especially if the death was that of a child.
Most of the memorials by the side of roads in Derbyshire seemed like a random accumulation of items scattered among a sea of dying flowers. Balloons, crosses, football scarves, teddy bears. Sometimes, if it was a car driver who’d been killed, their number plate would be displayed close to the crash site.
The remains of this one in the A6 lay-by were badly stained and faded after surviving several Peak District winters. There were no football scarves, but a couple of small teddy bears lay mouldering in the long grass. Some of the floral tributes had been arranged on crosses, but that didn’t necessarily suggest any religious significance these days.
There was one fairly fresh set of flowers, a wreath of yellow roses tied to the fence with a twist of wire. Next to it a handwritten dedication had been pinned to the wood. It consisted of a single sheet of A4 paper, protected against the rain by one of those plastic wallets punched with holes for use in a box file or binder.
Cooper picked his way carefully through the debris. There were conflicting opinions on these roadside memorials. Some local authorities disapproved of them and would order the flowers to be removed after a certain length of time. People would often get upset by this and simpl
y create a new memorial. But the council were usually acting on the advice of the police, who feared that drivers would be distracted by these displays. On an already dangerous stretch of road, it would be ironic if they caused further accidents. It was a difficult balance to strike, one of those situations where it was impossible to satisfy everyone.
There were cards still lying on the ground in their cellophane covers, now crumpled and grubby. Miss You Already, Rest in Peace, Always in Our Hearts.
Near the ground he found a partially inflated foil balloon, its helium almost leaked away. The message on it read, You’re Special. Beneath it lay a remnant of red foil, what was left of another balloon. He prised it open and stretched the wrinkled surface. Together Forever. He wondered who that one was from. Together Forever seemed an odd sentiment to express to someone who’d died. The only way you could be together for ever was if you were dead too.
But he’d seen similar messages in Scott Brooks’ house in New Mills. Cooper continued to search among the debris, feeling like a scavenger. He finally discovered the remains of a wreath with a message formed at the centre. Ever Yours, Come Back to Me.
They got back into Cooper’s car and he pulled out into the traffic. He drove just over three miles southwards to the Chapel-en-le-Frith exit at Bowden, went all the way around the roundabout and headed back north again.
‘Where are we going?’ said Villiers.
But Cooper just pointed at a sign board by the side of the road. It was placed to give drivers enough time to slow down and pull in. It said, ‘Good food next lay-by’.
Of course, Sally’s Snack Box was one of those semi-permanent roadside cafes that looked as though it had been there for ever, like a Neolithic henge. He could imagine Roman legionnaires calling in for salted bread and a bowl of porridge en route to Aquae Arnemetiae, or Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebels stopping off for a consoling tankard of ale on their way home from Derby. The fact that the Snack Box was housed in an old shipping container didn’t seem to make any difference. From the outside it looked ageless.
The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery Page 19