Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Not tonight.’

  Cooper sighed. He looked forward to speaking to her every evening, but it was so much better to actually see her face to face. There was something missing from his life when he couldn’t be with her. But he was in no position to question Chloe Young’s workload. He’d been forced to skip dates himself when he was called out to a crime scene. Some weeks they were in danger of becoming strangers.

  Chloe heard his sigh.

  ‘I know, Ben,’ she said. ‘But it will get better. I’m free later in the week.’

  ‘That will have to do, I suppose.’

  ‘Come on, look on the bright side,’ she said cheerily.

  He knew she was probably in her office, but he always pictured Chloe in the mortuary, with a dead body on the stainless-steel table and a scalpel in her hand as she smiled at him from behind a surgical mask. That was the way she’d looked when they’d first met. It was a difficult image to get out of his mind, even now.

  ‘Oh yes, the bright side,’ he said. ‘I guess there must be one.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I mean, you are the man who owns a cat called Hope.’

  Cooper laughed. ‘It was probably a bad choice,’ he said. ‘It’s just, when I picked her up from the rescue centre . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘Yes, she must have been given a name at the centre. You could have kept that if you really weren’t able to think of anything else.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  Then he heard someone speaking to Chloe in the background, a colleague calling her away from the phone.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said hastily.

  ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow, then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Cooper stood for a moment on the village green. He saw that some of the notices behind the glass in the village noticeboard had faded completely. What might they have been announcing? He could see a date for a parish meeting at Burdekin Hall, a planning application for a caravan park, an advert for the Silence heritage site on the old lead workings at Hucklow Edge. The rest were . . . well, a mystery.

  He unlocked the front door of his house and waited for the familiar bang of the cat flap as Hope came home. He didn’t know where her vantage point was, but she always spotted his car returning.

  She fussed around his legs while he opened a tin and changed her water. Then he watched her eating for a while. It was strangely calming and reassuring after a day at work. It was nice to stand in a kitchen where the floor wasn’t splattered with blood.

  ‘Hi, Hopes. We were talking about you just now.’

  The cat didn’t look impressed. But then, she never did. His life outside the house was totally irrelevant to her. As far as she was concerned, he ceased to exist once he walked out of the front door. And yet he always found her waiting patiently for him to reappear each evening. Was it just the prospect of food that kept her interested, or did she feel more affection than she was able to show, because she was a cat?

  Cooper glanced out of the window and saw all his neighbours had their wheelie bins out for collection next day. That was how he remembered to do it. He wondered if it was how everyone else remembered too. Perhaps there was someone in the village who was frighteningly efficient and always put their bin out first, with everyone else following their example. It only needed one person to get it wrong and the system would fall apart.

  He wasn’t going to cook anything for himself tonight, and he had nowhere else he needed to go. The Bull’s Head in Foolow was often full of dogs at lunchtime, but in the early evening he could nip in for a Peak Ales Bakewell Bitter and a bully burger with Stilton and sweet potato fries on the side.

  In Foolow, the pub was also the place to buy fresh eggs, bacon, milk and postage stamps. The first time he went into the Bull’s Head, Cooper remembered noticing a lethal-looking carving knife set that had been hung in a leather scabbard over the log fire as decoration. Probably no one else thought of it as a dangerous weapon. His job gave him a perspective that he couldn’t always put aside. And that was especially true today, after standing in the Athertons’ bloodstained kitchen in Edendale, examining the consequences of a handily placed knife.

  The image of that log fire made Cooper think about the woman still out alone on Kinder Scout. The last news he’d heard from Carol Villiers was that one walker was still missing and unaccounted for. The Mountain Rescue teams and the SARDA dogs would have been stood down for the night by now. Tired team members would eventually manage to get to bed in the early hours of the morning after returning the MRT vehicles to their bases.

  Cooper could think of very few places that were worse to spend a night alone than on Kinder Scout.

  That decided him to make one last call to Carol Villiers.

  ‘Sorry, Ben,’ she said. ‘They’ve had the search dogs out on Kinder for hours now.’

  ‘And there’s no sign of the missing woman?’

  ‘No. And it’s getting dark. They’ll be calling off the search for tonight.’

  ‘Let’s hope she was properly equipped and had the sense to take shelter.’

  ‘It’s odd, though,’ said Villiers.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The casualty, Mr Sharpe, was on his own when the dog found him.’

  ‘You mean the others left him there injured and alone?’

  ‘That’s just it. They say they didn’t. The missing woman was supposed to have stayed with him. Her name is Faith Matthew.’

  Cooper could picture Villiers looking up at the bulk of Kinder in the failing light. There was very little shelter up on the plateau. A night spent on Kinder in the cold could be fatal, and everyone knew it.

  Diane Fry felt numb by the time she arrived at her flat in Wilford, on the southern outskirts of Nottingham. She’d been told she was due for a meeting with a police staff investigator tomorrow. ‘Meeting’ probably wasn’t the right word, from her point of view. She was due to be interviewed, perhaps even interrogated.

  The Professional Standards Department dealt with matters of gross misconduct. That meant there had either been a complaint from a member of the public or an allegation had come to them internally. Most worrying was that the PSD was able to conduct covert investigations into complaints of misconduct and corruption against police officers. The thought that someone she’d been working with might have been investigating her already was very unsettling.

  For once, she wanted to tell someone about it. Normally she preferred to keep things to herself, but tonight she felt as though she would burst if she couldn’t talk. She needed to get the words out at least, to make them seem real to herself. But who could she call? Who could she share something like this with?

  Fry looked at the numbers on her phone for a few minutes, rejected some possibilities, then dialled.

  ‘Jamie?’ she said when the ringing was answered.

  ‘Yes. Is that Diane? What’s up? I’m not on call.’

  ‘No, it isn’t work,’ she said. ‘Well, not really.’

  She could almost see DC Jamie Callaghan frowning. She sounded uncharacteristically uncertain, even to herself. Callaghan would never have heard that tone before. Since he was a detective constable at EMSOU’s Major Crime Unit, she was his immediate supervisor.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he said.

  Fry could hear voices in the background. It sounded as though Callaghan was in a bar already, perhaps just starting a night out with his mates, or maybe a date. She wondered who he was with and wished she could see him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  And then she explained to him why she wasn’t. Callaghan listened to what she had to say and whistled quietly when she’d finished.

  ‘Bad Apple?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  She’d thought of that, of course. Derbyshire Constabulary employed a confidential system for members of staff to report suspected wrongdoing by their colleagues. No one had yet come up with a clever acronym for it. So that was
how it was officially known, and the name said it plainly. Bad Apple.

  On the other hand, the term ‘whistle-blower’ was never spoken. It had been banned under force policy because it might be offensive to those who reported wrongdoing by their colleagues. The preferred term was ‘professional standards reporter’.

  ‘If you want a friend . . .’ said Callaghan tentatively.

  ‘Thanks, Jamie,’ she said.

  Fry knew he didn’t mean it in the usual way of friendship. ‘Friend’ was the technical term for a colleague or Police Federation representative who was allowed to accompany her in disciplinary interviews.

  ‘Though you might be better with a Fed rep,’ he said.

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘Let me know how it goes anyway.’

  ‘If I’m allowed to.’

  Fry ended the call. He was right: she would probably be better asking for a Police Federation representative as a friend. After all, there was no way of telling who had reported her and what for. It could be anyone, including Jamie Callaghan.

  She looked at her phone and thought about calling her sister, Angie. But what would be the point? Angie might be her only blood relative, or the only one she acknowledged, but as a friend she was pretty much useless.

  Fry blinked in surprise as she remembered that she now had two blood relatives since the arrival of Angie’s baby, Zack. She still hadn’t got used to that idea.

  There wasn’t much for her to do at home in the evening, except re-watch old films on Netflix. She avoided reading the papers or watching the TV news. There was too much about politics and political scandals. Politicians often lectured the police on the importance of transparency, integrity and ethics. But she supposed they were well beyond irony now.

  Fry found half a bottle of Chablis in the fridge and poured herself a glass. She spent the rest of the evening wondering what it was she’d done wrong.

  And she spent most of that night going over and over the incidents in her mind, trying to work out which one of them she’d been reported for.

  8

  Monday

  Ben Cooper had heard talk of replacing the old E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale, with a new building. In fact, people had been talking about it for the past thirty years or so.

  Too many decades of mouldering paperwork, half-smoked cigarettes and junk food had left their mark, and the 1950s building was considered unfit for purpose now. Whenever he entered the CID room, the rows of computer screens looked strangely anachronistic. Downstairs, the custody suite was due to close soon. Conditions at West Street were unsuitable for prisoners, though officers and staff would have to continue tolerating them for a while longer.

  Every day the same kind of reports crossed Cooper’s desk. Details of some of those thousands of dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts.

  So what was new this morning? A scattering of overnight burglaries and assaults outside pubs and nightclubs. An early morning raid had been conducted on an address in Edendale, resulting in two arrests and the seizure of a quantity of Class-II drugs. And there had been several complaints from tourists over the last few days about youths throwing stones at their cars on the descent into Hartington, the latest incident resulting in a smashed windscreen and bad publicity for the tourism business.

  A memo was on his desk from a team that had been set up to review recent rape convictions, in case significant evidence had been ignored or not disclosed to the defence. They were asking for files from cases his department had dealt with during the last five years. That would take time.

  An operation was still ongoing to target the use of Peak District holiday homes as pop-up brothels by slave gangs. A gang master would rent a secluded property, install a group of trafficked women, then move on somewhere else after a month or so, before anyone became suspicious about what was going on. A difficult one to deal with without an early notification when a new brothel popped up.

  What else was there? An email in his inbox informed him that an officer serving in Edendale Local Policing Unit had been shortlisted in the Police Twitter Awards for Best Tweeting Individual Police Officer. Apparently, there were sixteen categories, including Best Tweeting Police Horse and Best Tweeting Police Dog. Old-fashioned bobbies like his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, would be turning in their graves at the thought of community policing by smartphone.

  Cooper leaned back in his chair and fingered the lanyard with his identity badge, staring at a shelf of box files with the Derbyshire Constabulary starburst logo on them. His office was in a flat-roofed 1970s extension, with the inevitable damp stains on the polystyrene ceiling tiles.

  Down in Scenes of Crime, Gary Atherton’s bloodied clothes were hanging in a locker to air-dry before being packaged in paper bags. Recovery of DNA evidence was vital. The CSIs would have gathered everything from the scene, though. A flake of paint, a plant seed, a trickle of soil, a fragment of broken glass, a tiny scrap of paper. Any of them could play a crucial role in confirming the identity of a suspect.

  Meanwhile, on Kinder Scout, the search for Faith Matthew had resumed at first light. Cooper expected news soon. The SARDA dogs were bound to find her.

  In the CID room, Ben Cooper’s team were sitting in front of their computers under diffused lighting from panels set into the ceiling. In one corner were a series of blue screens where no one was working. Half hidden by a pillar in the middle was Gavin Murfin, his civilian investigator, once a fixture in the department as an old-school DC.

  Cooper’s sergeant, Dev Sharma, had proved more than capable of taking responsibility and running the team of DCs. Since his arrival in Edendale from Derby, Sharma had taken on a lot of the workload and Cooper had come to rely on him heavily.

  It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever did in this job. DS Sharma was here in North Division to gain experience and add a few paragraphs to his CV. Cooper didn’t have any illusions that he’d be keeping Dev for long. His DS was destined for better things.

  Cooper moved quietly into the middle of the room and was rewarded with the familiar sight of Murfin dipping his fingers into a paper bag for an Eccles cake he’d bought on the way into work. He was speaking to DC Luke Irvine, seated at the opposite desk.

  ‘Apparently she ran a dominatrix dungeon in a disused building at the back of the old post office,’ Murfin was saying between bites. ‘No one knew about it until Open Gardens weekend, when people heard the screaming.’

  ‘The dominatrix was squatting?’ asked Irvine.

  ‘I think she usually stands up,’ said Murfin.

  Across the room, Carol Villiers was telling Becky Hurst and Dev Sharma about a new vicar who’d arrived in her village.

  ‘Well, when I say “arrived”, you know what it’s like these days – she’s in charge of about seven parishes, and she’s based ten miles away,’ said Villiers. ‘She has a team ministry, with three curates or assistant vicars scattered around. But when she did come to St Mark’s, the locals didn’t like her.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Hurst. ‘Because she’s female, I suppose?’

  ‘No, because she’s an evangelical. They’re old-fashioned in our village. They want to do things the same as they always have, like they did under the old vicar before he retired. The new one wants to modernise everything. Readings aren’t from the King James version any more, and she got rid of the organist and brought somebody in to play CDs through a sound system. And there was a wedding . . . One of the oldest families in the village. They had the church booked for months, all traditional style. And then the new vicar put the mockers on everything.’

  ‘What are mockers?’ asked Sharma with a puzzled frown, listening to their conversation.

  ‘Well—’

  Cooper cleared his throat. ‘Morning, everyone.’

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Dev, do want to bring me up to date on the Atherton murder inquiry?’

  Sharma stood up and gathered some papers together. Then
a call came through and was answered by Villiers. She looked across at Cooper.

  ‘They’ve found her, Ben.’

  Cooper didn’t need to ask who. He could tell from the tone of her voice.

  ‘Faith Matthew? Dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed. ‘It took too long to find her. Where was she?’

  ‘Near Kinder Downfall,’ said Villiers.

  He could picture the place. A narrow track between high rocks was called Kinder Gates, a landmark for walkers coming off the moors to the steep descent towards the Mermaid’s Pool. The Downfall lay a few hundred yards away. There, water streamed off the gritstone edge and sprayed horizontally as the incessantly buffeting winds battled against gravity. Sometimes the wind won and the water flowed upwards, back over the edge. It was a spectacular place, but dangerous.

  ‘She was found at the foot of one of the highest rocks,’ said Villiers. ‘It has its own name on the OS map.’

  ‘A lot of them do.’

  All across Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, rock formations had been given imaginative names, often due to their shape, or their connection to an old story from Derbyshire history and legend. The Woolpacks, the Seal Stones, Pym Chair, the Druid’s Stone.

  ‘Which rock?’ he said.

  Villiers hesitated. ‘They call this one Dead Woman’s Drop.’

  Diane Fry left her apartment in Wilford a little later than usual that morning. She had no idea when the post came on her road, because she was always out, so she thought of checking her box outside the communal entrance. For some reason she’d never understood, the boxes were all named in German – Briefkasten.

  There was a small pile of junk mail in there. Life insurance, a clothing catalogue, an offer of a specially minted crown coin commemorating the latest royal wedding. And three envelopes full of Christmas raffle tickets for various charities.

  She felt like throwing the whole lot into the brambles that grew behind the beech hedge on the other side of the parking area. But instead she dropped them onto the passenger seat of her black Audi, where they’d sit until she could find a litter bin.