The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper slowed down as he reached the Cloughpit Lane bridge, letting the Toyota stand for a moment between the arches. The fog funnelled into the gap, swirling in an evil-looking miasma against the damp stone.

  He rolled down the window and looked up at the parapet. Where there ought to be sky, he saw only a faint reflection of his headlights, absorbed and dissipated by the vapour. Dark outlines appeared and disappeared as the fog churned in the opening.

  The throbbing of his engine was amplified by the funnel effect and it was uncomfortable to listen to. But he knew if he switched the ignition off, there would be no sound at all, except for the drip of moisture from the walls. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  At Shawhead Cottages Amanda Hibbert was at home alone. She was surprised to see him again, especially in the evening.

  ‘Is your husband here?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s out.’

  ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘He sometimes walks down to the pub for a drink. You know, the Navigation Inn down by the canal basin? It gives him a bit of exercise, gets him out of the house for a while and he doesn’t have to drive home. It’s good all round. And he’s always calmer when he comes back. I wouldn’t want to stop him doing it.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ said Cooper. ‘Except your husband doesn’t go to the pub. They’ve never seen him at the Navigation Inn.’

  She shook her head in confusion. ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s probably just a mistake.’

  ‘How long is it since he left?’

  ‘Just a few minutes,’ she said.

  Cooper found the stile at Higher Fold Farm by working his way along the wall at the side of the road. For once Mrs Swindells wouldn’t be able to see what was going on outside her house, even if she was looking through the window. If there had been a fog like this on the night Malcolm Kelsey took his wrong turning, he might still be alive. No one could see what they were doing in this.

  Cooper made his way carefully, following the line of a wall rather than trying to strike across the field as the footpath did. It was too easy to lose the line of an unmarked or little used path, even in daylight. He located the stretch of collapsed wall and knew he was in the right place. It was just on the other side of here that Kelsey had been hastily buried under a heap of fallen stones.

  Then the railway embankment loomed ahead of him out of the murk. He turned to the right and kept walking until he reached a small bridge. It was no more than a tunnel really, just wide enough to take the footpath under the railway and leading to a flight of worn stone steps on the other side.

  The final stretch of the Peak Forest Canal had been built halfway up the hillside to serve the limestone quarries. After a few minutes Cooper came out onto the track of one of the old tramlines leading into the basin. He could hear the slow movement of water, the dull slap of the stagnant surface, the muffled sounds of activity on the canalside.

  Mist danced in the narrow beam of light from his torch. Ten feet away his torch light smeared itself flat against a wall of fog.

  And then he saw Ian Hibbert. His figure emerged from the mist, wet and glistening in a ragged burst of light spilling from the hatch of a narrowboat. His face was white and startled as he turned towards Cooper. In his hand he was swinging a short iron implement with a heavy, rounded end. A windlass.

  When Luke Irvine called, Cooper gave him directions to reach Bugsworth Basin. At least with Irvine here, he wouldn’t have to walk back to Shawhead for his car.

  ‘I found out who Mr Hibbert was visiting,’ said Irvine, slightly breathless as he drew into the car park.

  ‘Anne-Marie?’ said Cooper.

  ‘No, the name of the boat is Anne-Marie. The people are called Cartwright – Jessica and Danny Cartwright. They’re itinerant folk musicians. They play gigs in pubs along the canal.’

  ‘Itinerant? When did you start using words like that, Luke?’

  ‘It means they move about.’

  ‘I know what it means. Are you saying they don’t have a fixed address?’

  ‘They live on the boat,’ said Irvine.

  ‘Oh, I see. But I don’t think there are any residential moorings here at Bugsworth. They need planning consent from the local authority.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s why the Cartwrights move around. Even a leisure mooring can cost up to two thousand pounds a year, they told me. It’s an expensive business. Since they don’t have a residential mooring, they have to keep moving on. They’d been at Bugsworth too long, so they pulled up anchor on Wednesday. When I found them, they were in a mooring basin at Marple Junction, just where the Peak Forest connects to the Macclesfield Canal. They were supposed to be coming back here this afternoon, but they broke down and had to call out River Canal Rescue. It turns out their boat had a blocked fuel filter.’

  ‘So they weren’t at Bugsworth when Ian Hibbert took his usual walk across the fields on Wednesday night?’

  ‘No. But he got hold of them on the phone and found out where they were. Then he called at Marple Junction on his way into work to pick up some supplies. That was the reason for him taking a different route to work on Thursday morning. His usual train into Manchester goes via Disley and Hazel Grove.’

  Cooper’s heart sank as he realised Ian Hibbert had led them to a dead end. Now he would be no nearer to the answers he needed. He’d promised Superintendent Branagh progress and there would be nothing to show her. Did no one share his sense of urgency?

  ‘Supplies?’ he said with a sigh. ‘So why was Mr Hibbert visiting them at night? Not to listen to folk music, I imagine?’

  Irvine smiled and gestured with his hand to his mouth, blowing gently from behind two fingers.

  ‘It’s where Mr Hibbert gets his fix,’ he said. ‘Their boat reeks of marijuana.’

  ‘Smoking pot on a narrowboat with a couple of folkies,’ said Cooper bitterly. ‘Now that’s a proper hippy.’

  Cooper stood over Ian Hibbert as he huddled on a bollard by the canal. At the moment he wasn’t feeling well disposed towards the man. He could happily blame him for all the time being wasted. Whatever Hibbert had been up to, he was being an idiot.

  ‘You’re seriously telling us that when you went out on Monday night and walked down that footpath to the canal, you didn’t notice anything?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes. Well, that’s the truth,’ said Hibbert.

  ‘You heard nothing? Saw no one?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No one. Why is that so hard to believe? You’ve seen how quiet it is out there.’

  ‘It wasn’t quiet that night,’ said Cooper.

  Hibbert swallowed nervously. ‘Is this concerned with the lorry driver?’

  ‘What did you think it was concerned with, sir?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not . . . well, I didn’t know. So it’s the lorry driver? It’s about what happened to him.’

  Cooper didn’t reply, but watched the man, waiting for him to carry on talking.

  Hibbert’s puzzlement seemed to clear from his face.

  ‘That was on Monday night, of course.’ Then anxiety replaced his puzzlement. ‘Do you think the murderer was still around then? Was he nearby when I walked down the field to meet . . . I mean, when I walked down to the canal?’

  How good an actor was Ian Hibbert? He was either putting it on too much, or he was actually very naive. Cooper recollected that Amanda Hibbert was a member of the amateur dramatic society in New Mills, though she only worked behind the scenes.

  ‘I’m sorry about the windlass,’ said Hibbert. ‘Someone had dropped it on the canal bank. I tripped over it and nearly fell in the water. I was just trying to find the right boat to return it to. You took me by surprise when you shone that torch in my face.’

  ‘It’s lucky you dropped it, sir,’ said Cooper.

  Hibbert laughed bitterly.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been much good, if it had been a real assailant,’ he said. ‘A murderer lurking in the fog. He would
have made short work of me.’

  They put Ian Hibbert into Irvine’s car and drove him back to Shawhead. It seemed a long way round compared to the walk over the fields. The fog was so thick that Irvine missed the turning into Cloughpit Lane and had to reverse dangerously to the junction.

  When they entered the house, Cooper noticed plasters on two knuckles of Hibbert’s right hand.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself, sir?’

  ‘It’s just a scratch. I stumbled against a wall in the dark.’

  ‘It’s easily done.’

  But then Cooper saw a splintered crack in the glass of one of the patio doors.

  ‘Did you have a break-in?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Somebody tried to get in here. Or threw a brick at your window. That’s more than a bird strike.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing.’

  Cooper looked more closely. He could see a trace of blood on the broken glass. He turned back to Hibbert.

  ‘Did you do this yourself, sir?’

  Hibbert looked embarrassed. ‘Well, yes. It was just one of those things, though. An impulse. You know.’

  ‘An impulse? You have anger problems then, sir?’

  Hibbert didn’t answer. He shook his injured hand, as if remembering the pain of the impact with the glass.

  ‘What was it about?’ asked Cooper. ‘Did you have an argument with your wife?’

  Hibbert sighed. ‘She can be a bit aggravating sometimes. I’m sure you know what it’s like – when you’ve been married for a while, I mean. You can get along fine most of the time, but just now and then it all gets too much.’

  Cooper regarded him steadily. ‘Even so. If it’s a problem, you should get counselling before it escalates. I’d hate to hear from your wife that it wasn’t just the window that felt your anger. Unless already . . . ?’

  He could see the man was sweating now. Hibbert shook his head. ‘No, no, I promise you. Nothing like that. You can ask her.’

  ‘Perhaps I will.’

  ‘I know I have a short temper. It’s why I go to visit Anne-Marie. It helps me, you see. It calms me down.’

  A few minutes later Amanda Hibbert saw Cooper to the door of Shawhead Cottages.

  ‘You know, I didn’t really think anything terrible had happened to the driver of that lorry at first,’ she said. ‘It’s very shocking. And in a place like this too.’

  Cooper resisted telling her that it was often in small communities that murders happened. Though perhaps not as small as Shawhead. He smiled at the thought that there were so few people here that they had to import a victim for a murder, instead of killing each other.

  Mrs Hibbert noticed his smile before he could hide it and she frowned in disapproval.

  ‘I suppose it’s different for you when you’re in the police,’ she said sharply. ‘You deal with it all the time. People like us, we’re not used to such violence. We live in places like this to get away from it. But it seems that’s not possible.’

  Cooper stepped out into the fog, feeling suitably abashed. Amanda Hibbert was right, of course. People ought to be able to live in places like Shawhead without the fear of violence. They should be able to live anywhere in safety, in an ideal world.

  But he knew from his job that nothing was ideal. Violence might strike anywhere. You couldn’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it was just something that happened on the news, that violent crime would never reach your own doorstep.

  Besides, Cooper couldn’t deny the inescapable conclusion that he’d been facing from the start of this inquiry. Somehow the hamlet of Shawhead had brought violent death on itself.

  Instead of returning to the A6, Cooper took a back road that climbed over the edge of Chinley Churn, rising well above the remains of the fog. The lane was as narrow as the approach to Shawhead and it coiled in tight, blind curves up the hill. But there was no traffic at this time of night and he had the road entirely to himself.

  He spotted a gateway where he could pull in. When he’d stopped the car, he wound down the window and listened to the silence.

  He’d been remembering the way he felt on the way to Rowarth. He could feel the hills calling to him out there in the darkness now, a tempting murmur on the wind. This was what he’d been missing, the sense of the wide, open spaces of the Peak District, the acres and acres of wild, majestic country that he’d always loved. Tonight the temptation was too strong.

  Cooper got out of the car and locked the doors. He could hear no traffic sounds, not even the background hum from the A6. The hillside undulated so much that he must be protected by a hump of ground, despite the height he’d reached. It was as if the landscape was holding him gently in its palm and sheltering him from the outside world.

  He crossed the road to a footpath and walked a few yards up the hill onto Cracken Edge. The remains of quarrying were everywhere here – layers of rock carved into rugged faces, the remnants of buildings left by generations of quarry workers, with tracks worn between them by thousands of tired feet. This was the real Peak, a spectacular landscape that had been shaped by human hands over the centuries, until the sense of history and humanity was etched deep into the rocks themselves.

  Below him to the south lay Chinley, its lights like a string of pearls along the valley floor, and the conical shape of Eccles Pike silhouetted against the sky behind it. The mass of rolling hills merged into the night as they swept away to the east, rising higher and higher as they headed towards Kinder Scout.

  Cooper turned and looked to the west. Down there was Shawhead, hidden now by those comforting folds of the landscape, and sunk in the mist. Now he was able to see the place in its context instead of from the inside, the way people living there saw it. He was finally able to let air in where he’d begun to feel so claustrophobic.

  He turned his face to the wind and felt it blowing through him, cleaning out the cobwebs. Soon he would be able to sweep the clammy grasp of Shawhead from his life completely.

  29

  Saturday 14 February

  Saturday morning was quiet at West Street. Many of the offices were empty. Uniforms on weekend duty would mostly come in later on to deal with the drunks in town and the usual Saturday night incidents. So when Ben Cooper tapped the code into the keypad and opened the door, he walked into a building that echoed like the morgue.

  But Carol Villiers was in the CID room, sitting in splendid isolation among a small sea of empty desks. She was the one person he could always rely on. Cooper knew he should never let himself forget that.

  ‘Have you got something, Carol?’ he said when he got his jacket off.

  ‘We managed to get hold of some scene photos from the A6 collision,’ said Villiers. ‘These were never released to the press, of course.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Some of them aren’t very pleasant.’

  ‘When are they ever?’

  It was difficult to tell anything from the photographs of the scene on the A6. The tangle of torn metal was barely distinguishable as separate vehicles.

  Cooper could make out the Polish lorry from the name on the side of the cab, some European haulage company. And there was a glimpse of a white van in front of it. But the wreckage at the back was worse. Ashley Brooks’ Honda was almost impossible to see between the lorries, except in the close-up shots. Of course, the fire and rescue service would have had to take the shell of the car apart to get Ashley out. Wrecked cars often looked as though they’d been in much worse accidents than they actually had, as a result of having their roofs cut off to remove an injured driver safely.

  The centre of the mess was blackened by fire and the trailer of the Polish lorry had been almost destroyed. The flames had also centred around the Honda and the cab of the Iveco.

  ‘Was James Allsop burned in the fire?’ he asked.

  ‘Slightly,’ said Villiers. ‘Let’s see . . . yes, second degree burns to his legs and feet. He was lucky, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, you could call i
t that.’

  Police crash investigators would have spent several hours measuring and photographing the scene of the crash, trying to gather evidence about the cause and nature of the incident before they could reopen the road. They were always working under the pressure of time, just as Cooper himself had been at Shawhead. How long could you justify keeping a road closed, or stop trains running over a bridge? They were always tough decisions. And it was even more difficult on a major trunk road like the A6. Traffic would have been backing up for miles and clogging all the surrounding roads while the task was carried out.

  But the Forensic Collision Investigation Unit were experienced and very skilled at their jobs. According to the crash investigators, three of the vehicles had been stationary, parked in the lay-by, when they were hit by the Iveco Stralis – first the Honda, then substantial impact damage on the Volvo lorry and the Renault van.

  It was obvious that blame for the crash had lain squarely with the driver of the Iveco, who must have strayed out of his lane to collide with the vehicles in the lay-by. There were no signs of him braking until almost at the site of the first impact. There were no skid marks on the surface of the road or remains of tyre tread in the section approaching the lay-by.

  Cooper recalled the witness statements taken from other drivers on the southbound carriageway who had seen Allsop veering onto the hard shoulder. It seemed fairly cut and dried. And when his mobile phone records were analysed, the case against him was strong.

  He laid the post-mortem report on Ashley Brooks on Villiers’ desk.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ he said. ‘Or can you face these pictures?’

  ‘Are they worse than mine?’ said Villiers.

  ‘Well, let me put it this way – even Dr van Doon said they “weren’t pretty”.’

  ‘Oh God. That bad?’

  The photos had made Cooper flinch. They showed the remains of Ashley Brooks after she had been removed from the burned-out Honda – a blackened mass, barely human in shape. Her charred arms were held out in front of her body as if she was still clutching the steering wheel. It was what they called the ‘pugilistic stance’, typical of a severely burned body, the result of the high temperature of a fire stiffening and shrinking the muscle fibres, flexing the elbows, knees and hips, clenching the hands into fists. It happened to a body even if the person was already dead before the fire. Some areas of the body could be protected by the stance and were burned less. But the fire had burned through the layers of Ashley’s skin to the tissues underneath. Professor Webster’s report had referred to ‘thermally altered bones’.