The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery

by Stephen Booth

  It was clear to him that Ashley Brooks had been having an affair. Pat Turner had said so, and her brothers had thought so too. Perhaps even Scott had suspected it, deep down, but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it to himself. It would explain that odd message among all the Love Heart notes. Come Back to Me. Maybe Scott thought he’d lost her, even before she died. He wanted her back.

  And no one had ever explained why Ashley was parked in a lay-by on the A6 at eleven o’clock that night. Or why Malcolm Kelsey was in the lay-by either. There was a fairly obvious conclusion.

  Cooper opened the post-mortem report lying on his desk. It wasn’t the report on Mac Kelsey. It was an older report – eight years older, in fact. It was the result of the examination by the late Professor Webster on Ashley Brooks. Severe burns to the body had made it difficult for the pathologist to reach a firm conclusion. But her underlying injuries were consistent with the nature of the collision – bruising from the impact, cuts from a shattered windscreen and lethal shards of broken metal.

  Professor Webster had been hugely experienced. As well as providing forensic pathology services to coroners and police forces in the East Midlands, in his later years he’d been a member of the Council of the Royal College of Pathologists and served on advisory committees. He’d published scores of papers, as well as writing a book on forensic pathology, with another in production when he died. Not forgetting that MBE, which wasn’t awarded lightly. He had official approval from the Queen herself.

  So it seemed disrespectful to be doubting Professor Webster’s conclusion in a case like this. But Cooper knew the results of a post-mortem were always open to interpretation. Even the most expert witness could be wrong. It had happened many times.

  Having reassured himself, Cooper turned to another stack of papers. He was aware of Sharma watching him curiously. Perhaps his new DS had learned by now to wait to see what happened and not to ask too many questions.

  Next to the post-mortem report on Cooper’s desk was Wayne Abbott’s file on the contents of Mac Kelsey’s cab, those items found in the DAF curtainsider jammed under Cloughpit Lane bridge. A Taser, a baseball bat and a retractable shark knife.

  Cooper nodded silently to himself. Yes, Ashley Brooks’ injuries were consistent with the collision, as Professor Webster said. But they could also be consistent with an assault by someone armed with a baseball bat and a shark knife.

  Pat Turner and Aidan Flynn had both told him that Ashley was under pressure to end her affair. Cooper particularly recalled Mrs Turner’s words: ‘Well, she never got the chance, to be fair. It was just before she was killed in that crash.’ But had Ashley just ended it? As she sat in that lay-by, had she told the man she was meeting that it was all over? Did he react the way so many people did when they were rejected – with anger and perhaps even with violence?

  Reluctantly, Cooper closed the report. He wondered if that informal jury in Sally’s Snack Box had been right about Mac Kelsey’s guilt, but just not right enough.

  One thing seemed to be beyond doubt. Eight years ago Kelsey had stood in that lay-by on the A6 and watched Ashley Brooks burn, without making any attempt to pull her from the car. That might not have been because he was a coward. It might have been because he knew perfectly well that Ashley was already dead when the crash happened.

  Cooper didn’t know how to prove what he suspected about that collision eight years ago. And, even if he could, what purpose would it achieve? Everyone had spent the intervening years seeing things in just one way. They would have to alter what they thought they knew, abandon notions they’d taken for granted as truths. No one found that easy. Jack Lawson in particular might find it very hard to deal with the suggestion that he hadn’t been guilty of Ashley Brooks’ death.

  But there was one person who had never seen things in the same way as everyone else. He’d only been pretending. That one person had known the real truth all along. Malcolm Kelsey.

  Justice was a strange thing. For Ben Cooper, sitting in his office in Edendale, the concept was hard to come to terms with. Mac Kelsey might have been guilty of many things. Just not the one he was executed for.

  Dev Sharma couldn’t keep quiet any longer. He tried to make a guess at what his DI was thinking.

  ‘People are capable of making such a mess of their lives,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Cooper. ‘Believe me, I know.’

  32

  Sunday 15 February

  ‘A successful inquiry, then?’ said Fry when he phoned her first thing on Sunday morning.

  ‘I suppose so. There’ll be a conviction anyway.’

  Fry knew him too well not to sense the ambivalence in his tone.

  ‘No doubt you’ve come up with some theory that no one else has thought of,’ she said.

  Cooper smiled. She didn’t say it with quite the sarcasm that he was used to. Was it resignation? She’d known him a long time after all. Or perhaps it could finally be called acceptance.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you would probably say that I have. But I don’t know how I’m going to prove it. It’s all circumstantial.’

  ‘Naturally. Your best theories are always the ones that can’t possibly be proved. So what do you think happened to this driver, Kelsey?’

  ‘I think he was killed out of revenge.’

  ‘For what?’

  Cooper paused, anticipating her response before he’d even shared his idea.

  ‘For the murder of Ashley Brooks,’ he said.

  ‘Are you joking?’ she said. ‘That was the woman who was killed in the fatal collision eight years ago. Haven’t I got that right?’

  She always had the details right. It was Cooper’s interpretation of the details that was sometimes at odds with the accepted facts.

  ‘When I read the accounts of that accident,’ he said, ‘I expected to find that the other lorry involved in the crash was being driven by Kelsey.’

  ‘Which other lorry?’

  ‘There was one parked in the lay-by at the time. Ashley Brooks’ Honda was smashed into by James Allsop’s Iveco Stralis. In fact, her car was crushed between the two HGVs. She had been sitting in the lay-by right behind that lorry. It was a forty-ton Volvo belonging to a haulage company in Poland. I thought she and Kelsey were having a . . . what would you call it?’

  ‘A rendezvous? An assignation? A tryst?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But the Volvo wasn’t being driven by Malcolm Kelsey.’

  ‘No. The driver’s name was Borzuczek. Artus Borzuczek. He was Polish,’ said Cooper. ‘And he’d stopped for a rest break.’

  ‘So you were wrong.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘How can you be “not quite wrong”?’

  Cooper smiled. It didn’t sound logical when Diane Fry said it. But that was exactly how he felt most of the time.

  ‘I think Ashley was already dead when the accident happened. I believe she’d been having an affair with Kelsey and she’d arranged to meet him in that lay-by.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty certain. It’s a pity the original inquiry was so focused on the calls Jack Lawson had been making and the texts he’d been sending. If only they’d checked Mac Kelsey’s phone, or even Ashley’s, we might have some proof of the relationship.’

  ‘But there was no reason to do that at the time.’

  ‘There didn’t seem to be,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m not blaming anyone. No doubt it was the right call in the circumstances. But in retrospect, well . . .’

  ‘Everything seems different in retrospect,’ said Fry.

  Now, that was said with genuine feeling. Cooper wondered what was going through her mind, what aspect of her life she was regretting so much. There were quite a few possibilities, he supposed. But it was better not to ask her what suddenly looked so different and so regrettable. It might involve him.

  ‘And the lorry driver who went to prison for dangerous driving. Allsop?’

  ‘Yes, thoug
h he changed his name to Lawson when he came out.’

  ‘Why did he worry about it so much? He’d served his sentence. For him it was all over.’

  ‘He was concerned about what people would think of him,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, that’s stupid, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s no point in worrying about what other people will think of you,’ said Fry. ‘If you believe your life has been ruined because you never became wealthy and successful, never achieved your dreams, never became a great footballer or whatever, that’s all within yourself. It’s just you, creating your own pain. The reality is, most people don’t think about you at all. They’re too busy thinking about themselves.’

  It was a long speech for Fry. Cooper took a moment to let it sink in.

  ‘I suppose Jack Lawson made a mistake, that’s all.’

  ‘One mistake can ruin your life,’ said Fry, with feeling.

  Cooper had been listening carefully to the tone of her voice all the time they’d been talking. Sometimes it was the only way he could get an idea about what she was thinking. When she didn’t say anything, that was worse. It meant she was thinking something she didn’t want to tell him.

  And today there was something wrong with Diane Fry’s voice. It sounded brittle, restrained. She sounded as though she was choking something back, a spurt of bile that she was fighting to swallow down. What was bubbling inside her that was making her so tightly wound up?

  Cooper was thinking about Love Hearts, the sweet smell hanging over New Mills, the sugar coating the windows of the factory, the saccharine messages left all over Scott Brooks’ house in Peak Road. When he and Becky Hurst had stood in the house, Becky had said the messages obviously weren’t intended for them. But perhaps they had been, in a way. They were part of Scott Brooks’ suicide note, his explanation for what he’d done. It was all about his love for Ashley.

  ‘Diane, we need to get out,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Come and get a breath of fresh air, away from the city.’

  When she didn’t answer straight away, Cooper thought he could almost hear the traffic noise in the silence at the end of the phone. He wondered if she was gazing out of the window of her apartment at the streets and suburbs of Nottingham, weighing up the options.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘There’s a place,’ said Cooper, ‘that I’ve been thinking about all week.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  Kinder Scout was a daunting place for walkers. There was no easy way to scale the flanks of that brooding hump of mountain. The ascent of Kinder was the first stage of the Pennine Way, one of Britain’s most popular long-distance paths.

  But within a couple of hours of leaving the dale below, many walkers were left exhausted, blistered and frequently disorientated in the lightest of mists. And when they finally reached the plateau, the moorland appeared unrelentingly bleak.

  But for Cooper that was the appeal of moorland. Despite its physical challenges, Kinder held a special place in his heart, as it did for all walkers. Eighty years ago this stretch of land, then out of bounds to the masses, became the focus for the campaign for access to the countryside.

  There was a reason this area was known as the Dark Peak. Acres of wet, black peat were the most distinctive feature of the plateau.

  Although the Kinder moorland had evolved from prehistoric times, it was surprisingly vulnerable. Overgrazing by sheep, industrial pollution, wildfires and thousands of walkers had taken their toll. The peat was drying out, threatening many species of animals and birds that lived there.

  The National Trust, which owned most of Kinder, had fenced much of the moorland off from sheep, though not from walkers. Gullies were being blocked to prevent water from draining off and cotton-grass was being planted by dropping hundreds of thousands of seed pods from helicopters.

  On the top moorlands filled the horizon to the north. To the west was Manchester, with the small towns of New Mills and Whaley Bridge sitting in the valley between.

  Eastwards you found yourself in a different landscape altogether. On an Ordnance Survey map the plateau of Kinder Scout looked like a spider’s web of blue lines, the streams and drainage channels feeding in every direction to fill the brooks running off Kinder’s slopes. Grinds Brook, Crowden Brook, Far Brook – and the River Kinder itself. Many of those streams were so close together that the result on the ground was a boggy morass under foot. The tangle of lines was scattered with black dots – hundreds of them, like tiny flies caught in the web. They were the rocks of Kinder.

  It was such an alien place that it looked like something from the set of a science fiction film. This was a moonscape of freakish, isolated rocks sculpted by the weather. Boulders and distorted stone columns seemed to have fallen from the sky. With a bit of imagination, they could easily resemble monstrous creatures or massive broken teeth. Each stone had its ancient name and a legend to go it with it. The Giant’s Club, The Bird Stone, The Druid’s Stone, The Woolpacks, Ringing Roger, Pym’s Chair, Madwoman’s Stones.

  It was also the area where walkers got lost and injured every year and had to be rescued from the moor. When the weather turned bad or darkness fell, Kinder Scout became a terrifyingly hostile place. Without the volunteer mountain rescue teams, there would be a lot more fatalities on Kinder.

  They met at the car park just outside Edale village. From there they walked up through the village and turned on to the Pennine Way opposite the Nag’s Head pub. Past Upper Booth Farm, they followed the River Noe through ancient woodland and climbed the Jacob’s Ladder footpath, which had been rebuilt by the National Trust using gritstone boulders. At the top Kinder Plateau opened out. They could see the giant anvil-shaped rock known as Noe Stool, sitting amid areas of exposed peat.

  ‘So how are you getting on with your new DS now?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Dev Sharma? He’s okay. We went for a meal together in Edendale last night. We had a good chat. We’ve had a few teething troubles, but I think we’ll be able to work things out.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘For dinner? The Mussel and Crab on Hollowgate.’

  ‘Nice. I wondered where you were.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Diane. I should have phoned.’

  She hunched her shoulders against the cold. ‘Actually, I’m glad you didn’t.’

  Before he could ask her what she meant, she was striding off again. For a moment she looked like a born hiker, setting off at the start of the Pennine Way with two hundred and sixty-seven miles of hills and dales in her sights. But then she stumbled on a ridge of peat and almost fell flat on her face. He heard her cursing peat moors, Kinder Scout, the Peak District – and nature in general. That was more like it.

  On the way back down they took a different route, skirting a plantation of conifer trees on the edge of the moor. It looked like grouse shooting country to Cooper. There were probably rearing pens in the woodland.

  Most of Kinder Scout belonged to the National Trust, as did 26 per cent of the national park. But they were entering privately owned land now.

  You could recognise upland grouse moors from the map. If you looked for an isolated patch of woodland bordering the moor, you’d often find locations marked as ‘shooting huts’ or ‘grouse butts’. You were likely to find snares on the edge of the woodland. They were often placed on fence lines, or against holes in walls.

  Cooper immediately became more alert. In Derbyshire there were concerted efforts to achieve convictions for offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. It could only be done by people keeping their eyes open.

  ‘Oh God, what’s this?’

  Fry had her hand over her mouth as she stared at the ground.

  Cooper moved to her side. He saw a couple of dead foxes, a crow, a magpie, a hare. All piled up and left to rot.

  ‘It’s a stink pit,’ he said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A stin
k pit.’

  ‘Stink is right anyway.’

  ‘The smell of rotting animals lures animals into the area and straight into snares,’ said Cooper. ‘They usually leave hares and foxes, or birds like these. But sometimes you see a sheep or a deer.’

  Branches had been cut down from the surrounding trees and arranged on the ground to make a wall around the rotting animals. Gaps were left in the wall, where snares had been placed. Although stink pits were legal, they were indiscriminate as they could attract all kinds of different species as well as their main target, the fox. Any predator might be attracted, including badgers, pine martens, or even pet cats and dogs.

  By a dry-stone wall Cooper found a spring cage trap. The cage was split into two and held open by a piece of wood. A dead hare had been placed on the bottom of the cage as bait. When a bird landed on the wooden perch it would collapse and the cage would close, capturing the bird. Another indiscriminate method, which could easily catch protected raptors.

  For once Fry seemed lost for words.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  It didn’t take them long to discover three dead birds of prey. All of them had been buried in shallow graves on the edge of the woodland. From the state of decomposition, Cooper guessed they’d been dead for six months. It was impossible to say how they’d died, but it was clear that somebody didn’t want them found.

  There had been a case recently in which a gamekeeper had staked the carcass of a dead rabbit to the ground, baited with a highly toxic poison called carbofuran. Any animal eating carbofuran would die an agonising death. For a human just touching it could cause serious illness.

  Cooper took out his phone.

  ‘I’ll alert the wildlife crime officer. Some of these snares may be illegal.’

  ‘May be?’ said Fry.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell sometimes. These snares are empty, so the gamekeeper may be doing his job properly and checking them within twenty-four hours.’