The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery

by Stephen Booth

  ‘You lot should never have made him drive into that canal,’ said Flynn. ‘That’s criminal. That’s on you. You killed my brother.’

  There would certainly be an internal inquiry into how a suspect had died during a police pursuit. The Independent Police Complaints Commission was already on the case.

  But Cooper reassured himself that he’d held back, in fact had stopped before Jason Flynn made the fatal mistake of trying to get under the canal bridge. Inquiries were never pleasant for anyone, but it would have to be gone through.

  Right now he didn’t know what to say to Aidan about his brother’s death. In fact, he wasn’t allowed to say anything. If he showed any regret, a lawyer could use his words as the basis for an action against the force for negligence. So he had to sit tight-lipped and say nothing in the face of Aidan’s anger.

  All he could do was wait for Flynn to calm down.

  So Cooper let him get a drink of water and gave him a chance to think about his situation while his anger subsided. There was no point in applying too much pressure at this stage – it would only produce negative results. But a few minutes of reflection usually worked, even on the angriest interviewee.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without Jason,’ Flynn said eventually. ‘I’m no good for anything without him. He always told me what to do.’

  When he heard that statement, Cooper wondered if this would be Flynn’s argument in court, that he’d been under the influence of his older brother. It wouldn’t earn him an acquittal, but it might reduce the tariff for his automatic life sentence.

  But then Aidan undermined his own mitigation straight away.

  ‘Jason had it all figured out with the lorry,’ he said. ‘We worked it out to put the driver right there on tap for Scott. But when Scott saw him, he got cold feet. He tried to say it was the wrong driver. But it was too late by then. We’d come too far.’

  The solicitor looked horrified and tried to intervene. But Flynn ignored him as if he wasn’t there. It was often the case. When the opportunity came for a suspect to get something off their chest, it could be irresistible. The calculations about pleas and mitigation came later. Sometimes when it was too late.

  ‘So Scott Brooks was there at the bridge on Monday night?’ asked Sharma.

  ‘We made sure he was there. But he was hopeless. Completely useless. He just walked away. No – he ran away. Jason got angry then. He went after Scott to bring him back. The driver tried to run off then, so . . .’

  ‘So what, Aidan?’

  He leaned towards them across the table, his voice suddenly earnest, almost pleading.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ he said. ‘I think I must have panicked. I had the knife in my hand and I reacted when he came towards me.’

  ‘It was you who stabbed him?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so?’

  Cooper took a breath. He mustn’t get annoyed with Aidan Flynn. After all, he had no idea what it was like to be in that situation. Was it possible to sever someone’s jugular vein without being quite sure whether you’d done it or not? Perhaps it was, in the heat of the moment. If you were agitated and frightened. If you panicked.

  ‘So let’s be clear – it was you who stabbed Malcolm Kelsey, not your brother?’ he said.

  But Aidan shook his head and didn’t answer directly.

  ‘He tried to run. He fell down twice, then his legs just gave way. He was dead. Jason was as freaked out as me. Scott had gone by then, I don’t know how he got back to New Mills. He was an idiot. We thought he might run off to someone and shop us. He wasn’t really family, you know, just because he married Ashley. We never had anything in common with him.’

  ‘You thought he might go the police?’ asked Sharma.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Cooper felt it more likely that it had never occurred to Scott Brooks to do that. He’d taken the guilt on himself. Perhaps because he did think of the Flynns as family.

  ‘This was all to do with the crash that your sister was killed in,’ said Cooper. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Aidan. ‘Sally at the Snack Box described it all to us. The crash in that lay-by. How the van driver just stood and watched Ashley burn.’

  ‘When you say “us”,’ said Sharma. ‘Would that include your brother-in-law?’

  Flynn nodded. ‘He knew everything. We talked to Scott about it all the time. We used to see him around town at night, drinking on his own in one pub or another. Jason liked to find out which pub he was in, then walk up to him at the bar and tap him on the shoulder. Scott would jump out of his skin every time. It made him really paranoid. Jason thought it was hilarious.’

  ‘So you deliberately tormented him for years,’ said Cooper.

  ‘He was really wet. We wanted him to do something – well, anything. But he didn’t seem to care about what happened to Ashley.’

  ‘That wasn’t true,’ said Cooper. ‘He cared more than you could possibly understand. He just didn’t show it in the way you wanted him to.’

  Flynn stared at him as if he was talking Chinese. And he might as well have been, in some respects. Aidan Flynn and his brother had been upset about the death of their sister, but almost as a matter of pride, an insult to their family that had to be avenged. Their mentality was the opposite of Scott’s. He’d cared more deeply about Ashley, but in a manner that had consumed him daily and didn’t require anyone else to die.

  Cooper silently corrected his thoughts. Of course, it had required someone to die. Scott himself.

  ‘Did you and your brother know that Ashley was having an affair after she married Scott Brooks?’ he asked.

  Aidan scowled. ‘What is that to you?’

  ‘So you did know?’

  Flynn fidgeted with the paper cup until he spilled the last drops of water on the table. He watched it dumbly as it trickled slowly towards the edge and began to drip.

  ‘There were rumours,’ he said. ‘There are always rumours in New Mills. Jason wasn’t happy. He smacked a bloke once for making a crack about Ashley.’

  ‘Your brother was angry that Ashley might be having an affair. But you said he didn’t think much of Scott either. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes, but . . . well, Ashley was married to Scott. No matter how useless he was, he was still her husband. Don’t you see?’

  ‘So it was a matter of honour.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Did you know who she was seeing?’ asked Sharma.

  Aidan shook his head. ‘No. If he’d found out who it was, Jason would have killed him. But the rumours didn’t go that far. I think Ashley must have let something drop to one of her girlfriends. You know the way they talk. She probably just couldn’t keep a secret and needed to tell someone. She had to boast about it. And when Jason found out, he went ballistic. He laid it on the line that she’d better give her boyfriend the boot.’

  Cooper recalled that Pat Turner had also confronted Ashley with her knowledge of the affair. With her older brother on her case too, Ashley must have felt under a lot of pressure to end it.

  But Aidan didn’t seem to think it was important. He was more concerned about what had happened on Monday night – and rightly so, since it was going to affect his whole future.

  ‘We had to finish him off,’ he said earnestly. ‘That driver, you know. Jason was as freaked out as me. We had to do something.’

  Sharma glanced at Cooper, who nodded. So now it had become ‘we’ again. Aidan would take careful handling when he was in court. But with the right cross-examination, he would confess to everything that was put to him.

  ‘We couldn’t believe he died so quickly,’ said Aidan. He actually sounded aggrieved, as if it was all Mac Kelsey’s fault. ‘I didn’t know that would happen. But all that blood. Why was there so much blood?’

  The duty solicitor finally stopped the interview, though he almost had to shut Aidan Flynn up by force. Cooper s
tudied the young man, wondering what he was really thinking now.

  ‘You cut through Mr Kelsey’s jugular vein,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s why there was so much blood.’

  Flynn looked at him wearily.

  ‘I don’t even know what that means,’ he said.

  ‘We’re going to have to interview Donna Schofield,’ said Cooper when he and Dev Sharma came out of the interview room.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Donna Schofield is a member of the Flynn family. She was Ashley Brooks’ aunt.’

  Sharma nodded. ‘It would explain why she’s been keeping her head down. But how long did she think she could keep that up? Until we went away, I suppose.’

  ‘I bet she was relying on people in Shawhead having no idea whether she was at home or not,’ said Cooper. ‘Sometimes keeping yourself to yourself has its advantages.’

  ‘It would never have worked, would it?’

  ‘Well, if she held out long enough, she might have been able to slip away when we cleared the scene. Perhaps she really was intending to head for Thailand. If we search her house, we might find her suitcases packed and ready to go.’

  Cooper looked at his new DS. There was one fact he couldn’t let go without an explanation.

  ‘There’s one thing, Dev . . .’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mrs Swindells says she saw Ian Hibbert coming and going across the field at night several times, not just on Monday. And she claims she told you that. Is it true?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ admitted Sharma.

  Cooper felt a surge of irritation – not at the mistake itself, but his sergeant’s apparent lack of concern.

  ‘You were selective with the information you passed on,’ he said.

  ‘Does it matter? We were only interested in that one evening. The other nights weren’t relevant.’

  Cooper bit his lip, annoyed that he should have to explain this to someone who had been appointed to the rank of detective sergeant.

  ‘If we’d known it was a regular occurrence, it would have cast a different light on Mr Hibbert’s activities. We might have formed a more accurate hypothesis from the start.’

  At least Sharma responded to his tone of rebuke. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Cooper. ‘Remember that we share information fully in this team. Don’t keep details like that to yourself.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  Well, that seemed fairly painless. No sign of defensiveness. But what else might Dev Sharma be keeping to himself? Without knowing that, Cooper wasn’t sure they would be able to work together. The jury was still out.

  When Sharma had gone back to the CID room, Cooper sat alone in his office and assessed his case. He would never know what had caused Mac Kelsey to turn up Cloughpit Lane and get his lorry stuck under the bridge. Had someone placed that diversion sign at the corner of the lane, either as a joke or for a more sinister reason? Or was it simply another satnav error? The only person who could tell them whether he’d followed a diversion was dead.

  The height warning had certainly gone from its position on the bridge, but that might have been wear and tear. Even if someone’s fingerprints were found on the sign, it wasn’t proof that they’d removed it from the bridge. They might have picked it up from the road and put it safely out of the way on the verge. He needed something more solid than that.

  What he really needed was a weapon. That would make all the difference. But where was that knife?

  If he was right, the Flynn brothers had accessed the old mineral line from the Durkins’ property to stage the attack. They couldn’t have been certain that Kelsey would drive his lorry right under the bridge and get stuck, but their plan had worked out perfectly for them up to that point. They must have been jubilant.

  He could imagine Jason and Aidan getting frenzied and overexcited, dropping down onto the roof of the cab like a pair of characters out of Mission Impossible. Had they intended to kill Mac Kelsey? Was that part of the plan all along? Perhaps not. It might only have been an exercise in intimidation, a prank to frighten him.

  Or it might have been staged as a test for Scott Brooks, the brother-in-law they’d come to despise for his weakness. They’d tried to force Scott to come face to face with the man who’d stood and let his wife die in her car. And Scott had backed down. He’d walked away and chickened out of their plan. The Flynns would have been furious. Who would they have taken that anger out on?

  Well, it would be up to the CPS to assess whether a murder charge was justified and had a reasonable chance of success. And if it came to a full trial, it would be a jury’s responsibility to decide the Flynns’ intentions. Aidan Flynn was left to face that possibility on his own.

  Carol Villiers knocked and put her head round his door.

  ‘We’ve searched the pick-up truck and properties of the two Flynn brothers,’ she said. ‘We’ve seized some clothing – which has been washed, but may retain some residual blood staining, if we’re lucky. There’s no sign of a weapon, though. Nothing like the one used in the assault on Malcolm Kelsey. Sorry.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have taken it back home with them anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s been disposed of somewhere.’

  He was thinking about the little collection of houses in Shawhead. He was picturing the Flynn brothers coming out of the yard at Cloughpit House and back into Top Barn, where they were working on the old byre for the Schofields.

  What part had Donna Schofield played in their scheme? The loyal aunt, who would do anything to help out her family, even if she felt guilty about it afterwards. What role had they chosen for her?

  People often chose burning as a means of disposing of evidence. But the Schofields had no open fires in their house, only oil-fired central heating. And there were no signs of a bonfire outside. The smoke would have been noticed, the remains would still be visible on the ground. You couldn’t burn a knife anyway. So where might Donna Schofield have disposed of the weapon?

  Cooper laughed suddenly. It was a genuine laugh, the first time he’d felt like laughing for days. It was a laugh of relief, but of amusement too. How ironic that the factor which had seemed such a headache at the beginning of this inquiry might now provide the final piece of evidence in his case against the Flynns.

  Shawhead looked no different. But the light was going, with the first hint of colour in the sky where the sun would set over Cheshire. They didn’t have much time to get the job done today.

  ‘If the Flynns left the murder weapon with Mrs Schofield on Monday night, it will be long gone by now,’ said Dev Sharma as they gathered outside Top Barn.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Cooper.

  He had a warrant to search the Schofields’ property for the knife, but he was hoping a full-scale search wouldn’t be necessary. As the rest of the team went into the house under the angry glare of Donna Schofield, Cooper turned to Luke Irvine.

  ‘I’ve got a special job for you, Luke,’ he said.

  Irvine’s face fell. No doubt he was thinking that he was being kept away from the main activity for some reason.

  ‘What is it?’

  Cooper pointed at the black bin standing at the side of the road near the Schofields’ gate.

  ‘These wheelie bins are the most public aspect of Shawhead. People have no idea what you get up to inside your own house – but if you came out and started picking through the rubbish in your own wheelie bin, someone would notice and wonder what was going on.’

  ‘If it was this wheelie bin, Mrs Swindells would certainly notice,’ said Irvine. ‘She’s watching us right now.’

  ‘I hope she enjoys the show then,’ said Cooper. ‘Get the gloves on, Luke.’

  ‘Oh, great.’

  The search didn’t take long. As Cooper had hoped, Luke Irvine was the one to make the find. He pulled out a Tesco carrier bag wrapped round something long and narrow. When he unwrapped it carefully, the blood stains were obvious to everyone.

  ‘How did you k
now it would be there?’ asked Sharma in surprise.

  ‘I was betting that Donna Schofield panicked,’ said Cooper. ‘Obviously, she knew her nephews were involved in the murder. But she was on her own and she didn’t know what to do for the best. So she dropped the knife into the wheelie bin and put it out for collection, thinking it would be taken to landfill that morning.’

  ‘Then she shut herself in the house, refused to answer the door and tried to pretend she wasn’t at home.’

  ‘Exactly. She was hoping it would all just go away and disappear, along with the contents of her wheelie bin. She hadn’t anticipated that the road would still be blocked the next day and the bin men wouldn’t get through.’

  ‘And how lucky that the bins are still standing here now,’ said Sharma.

  ‘We have the refuse department of High Peak Borough Council to thank for that. They either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, organise a special collection for these five properties.’

  ‘Not for little Shawhead.’

  Cooper nodded.

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘everyone who lives in this area knows the rules about what goes in your wheelie bin. And cutlery goes in the black bin.’

  An hour later Cooper sat in his office at West Street with Dev Sharma to wind up the day as everyone else went home to continue their interrupted weekend.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Sharma. ‘Aidan Flynn has confessed to killing Malcolm Kelsey and we have the murder weapon. Jason Flynn is beyond the reach of justice. And Scott Brooks took his own life.’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s that.’

  But he couldn’t put the same confidence into his voice that Sharma did.

  In fact, Cooper wasn’t thinking of Scott Brooks, or of the Flynns. He was recalling Lucy Armitage’s account of that fatal collision eight years ago, as she’d seen it from her cafe across the A6. She hadn’t been the closest of witnesses and she hadn’t actually seen the crash itself.

  But at least she hadn’t been moving at fifty miles an hour. And she hadn’t been asleep, like the Polish driver. Her view of events had clearly made an impression on her. And despite her reticence – or perhaps because of it – Cooper believed her.