Fall Down Dead

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Diane,’ he said.

  And then she’d remembered him. It was the voice that did it. She and Gareth Blake had worked together years ago, on the same uniformed shift in the West Midlands. But he’d been ambitious and got himself noticed, earning an early promotion. He was more mature now, better dressed, with a sharper hairstyle. The reek of ambition still hung in the air around him.

  So what was Blake’s specialty now?

  Cold-case rape inquiries. Well, of course.

  And then there had been Rachel Murchison, smartly dressed in a black suit and a white blouse, dark hair tied neatly back, businesslike and self-confident, but with a guarded watchfulness. A specialist counsellor, there to judge her psychological state.

  Some of the phrases leaped out at her from the conversation that had followed.

  ‘Obviously we don’t want to put any pressure on you, Diane.’

  That was Blake, pouring a meaningless noise in her ear.

  ‘It’s understandable that you feel a need to be in control. Perfectly normal, in the circumstances.’

  Murchison’s contribution. Well, Fry hadn’t wanted this woman telling her whether she was behaving normally or not. She didn’t want to hear it from anyone else, for that matter.

  Just the sound of her name from Blake’s lips had brought back the memories she’d been trying to suppress, but which would now for ever bubble up in her mind. She remembered how both of them, Blake and Murchison, had watched her carefully, trying to assess her reaction.

  In the days that followed, others had seemed to be watching her in that same careful manner. But they could never comprehend the painful attempt to balance two powerful urges. The need to keep her most terrible memories safely buried now had to be set against this urge she’d suddenly discovered growing inside – the burning desire for vengeance and justice. No one could understand that.

  Blake and Murchison had brought the news of a DNA hit that would enable them to reopen the inquiry in which she was the victim. All they needed was her decision, whether she wanted to go ahead with a fresh inquiry or close the book and put the whole thing behind her.

  Blake’s words still echoed in her mind.

  ‘When we get a cold-case hit, we consult the CPS before we consider intruding into a victim’s life. We have to take a close look at how strong a case we’ve got, and whether we can do something to strengthen it.’

  ‘With the help of the victim.’

  ‘Of course. And in this case . . .’

  ‘This is personal. Don’t try to pretend it isn’t.’

  But she’d said yes to a fresh inquiry. Perhaps that was it. That was her mistake. She should have closed the book on it. Instead, she’d reopened too many difficult chapters that didn’t make comfortable reading.

  She’d never been one to do what was expected of her. And here were the consequences, coming back to catch up with her with a vengeance.

  25

  Ben Cooper stood in a small clearing in the woods with Carol Villiers. The trees had encroached onto the site of the old Primitive Methodist chapel since it was abandoned, but the area immediately around it had been kept reasonably clear of weeds. Perhaps another job for the Roths’ gardener?

  Cooper realised he had no idea who that was. He made a mental note to find out the man’s name and speak to him. Like servants, gardeners were often the people who observed small details and knew most about their employers. There was just a chance he might have noticed something useful.

  In front of him stood a plain stone building. It had no fancy carvings or stained-glass windows. And certainly no spire or steeple. There was no reaching up towards God with ambitious building projects for these worshippers. At this church, each man must have had to find God within himself.

  The main door of the chapel had been secured with deadbolts, and Cooper could see that some work had been done on the roof to make it watertight. Missing lead was still one of the biggest threats for old churches in rural areas, even those that were still in use. Thieves could strip a roof in a single night, leaving the interior awash with rain by the next day.

  Villiers was walking round the walls of the building.

  ‘Can you see anything through those windows?’ called Cooper.

  ‘No, they’re too high.’

  ‘Same on this side.’

  The windows were small too. Not much light had penetrated this church.

  ‘It’s handy, isn’t it?’ said Villiers. ‘Anything could be going on in there. Unless there was some reason for an official inspection, no one would know about it.’

  ‘Can you see a water supply, or electricity?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then the last official visit might have been by a planning officer when the approval for conversion was given. It’s clear there’s been no attempt to convert it to residential use, anyway. The building inspectors probably lost interest after a while. They have better things to do with their time.’

  ‘Lucky for Darius Roth, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think anything comes to Mr Roth by luck, Carol.’

  Cooper decided to call Darius Roth’s mobile number.

  ‘Mr Roth,’ he said, ‘we’re here at the old chapel next to your property. I’d like to take a look inside, with your permission.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As part of our inquiries.’

  ‘I don’t see what relevance the old chapel can have.’

  ‘Is there some reason you don’t want us to see inside, sir?’

  ‘Don’t you need a warrant?’

  ‘Not if we have your permission.’

  Roth had sounded anxious, his voice a few notches higher than normal. But he paused, seemed to gather himself together, and his voice was back to its usual smoothness when he spoke again.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll send Will up with the key.’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘Will Sankey. My gardener.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  When he arrived, Will Sankey wasn’t as old as Cooper had imagined. For some reason, he pictured professional gardeners as middle-aged men with weathered faces and tweed jackets. Stereotypes. They always caught you out.

  Sankey was dressed in a quilted body warmer and wore a baseball cap with his company logo on it. He was quietly spoken and polite, the sort of man who’d you like to come and do your gardening, who’d arrive and do the work without any fuss.

  Cooper could imagine this man going practically unnoticed by the Roths as he went about his business. But if there were secrets being hidden at Trespass Lodge, Sankey might also be the man to know about them.

  ‘Do you ever see anyone down here at the old chapel?’ Cooper asked him as he produced the key.

  Sankey looked shocked at the question. ‘It’s not for me to report on what my clients do on their own property.’

  ‘So you do see people here?’

  ‘Once or twice. I think they come here at night now and then.’

  ‘And what are you doing here at night, Mr Sankey? Mowing the grass in the dark?’

  Sankey smirked. ‘No, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Of course I’m not here at night. I come early in the morning to start work. I’ve got a lot of jobs on, so I’m busy as soon as it gets light. Once or twice when I’ve made an early start at the lodge, I’ve seen them leaving.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Coming from the old chapel, like you said. I’ve seen them leaving early in the morning. It’s pretty obvious they’ve spent the night in there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, I can’t say who they are. I don’t know Mr Roth’s guests. I’m only the gardener.’

  ‘Would you recognise them if you saw them again?’

  ‘Some of them, maybe,’ said Sankey.

  ‘I might get someone to show you a few photographs. Would that be all right?’

  ‘I’m not sure Mr Roth would approve of that. You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘OK.’

&nb
sp; Sankey stood for a moment rattling his bunch of keys, choosing a large, old-fashioned key.

  ‘What do you think they’re up to, then?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Do you?’

  Sankey shrugged. ‘A bit of funny business, I suppose. But my dad always told me not to ask too many questions. People don’t like it, do they?’

  ‘It depends what they have to hide,’ said Cooper.

  Sankey opened the door of the chapel. It swung back on his hinges with a creak and a scrape of wood against stone flags.

  Inside the chapel, the wooden benches were still in place, rows of them worn and shiny from decades of use. They couldn’t be called pews – they were too plain, with no ornamentation.

  Cooper stepped over a pile of hymn books left on the floor. Some of them had lost their covers and pages were showing signs of mildew. They were well used in their day, but had been abandoned along with the chapel itself.

  A plain wooden pulpit was raised above the body of the church, with a lectern where an enormous Bible would once have lain open. At some time, the congregation must have grown larger. A gallery had been built onto the rear wall, right over the furthest rows of benches. It was reached by a set of stairs through a trapdoor, and might have held another twenty or thirty people. Cooper wondered which of the worshippers had the privilege of looking down on the preacher from that height.

  Sunlight crept in through the high windows, glittering off strands of ancient cobweb. The stonework was streaked with damp where water had come in through gaps in the roof tiles, and some of the flags in the aisle were sunken and uneven. Whatever had been Darius Roth’s intention when he bought this building, he had never completed the work.

  Cooper reminded himself that not everything was the way it seemed. And certainly not how Darius Roth tried to present it. His original planning application for the old Methodist chapel could have been camouflage. The condition this building was in now might have been his real intention all along. Perhaps it had been designed as a stage for Darius’s ego, just as Kinder Scout was. Did he rehearse his dramas here, or invite members of his group into this sanctuary to work on them separately?

  He turned back to the pulpit again. He had no trouble imagining who stood there when the club had meetings here. Darius Roth had the look of an evangelist, a man with a mission and a powerful belief in himself.

  And then Cooper was struck by something odd where the altar had once stood. He strode down the aisle, past the pulpit, wondering whether he could believe what he was seeing.

  ‘Carol, look at this.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Villiers, sensing the sudden shift of his attention.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  Villiers came to join him. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  On a bare oak table against the far wall of the chapel, an ancient teddy bear had been duct-taped to a crude wooden cross in an imitation of a crucifixion. The detail that had stood out most from the far end of the aisle was a red bow tie the teddy bear was wearing. When Cooper bent to examine it, the bear’s glass eyes seemed to wink at him as they reflected the light from the high windows.

  Villiers seemed to be about to reach out and touch the bear, perhaps to take it down from the cross. It was an instinctive reaction to what looked like an act of sacrilege.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ said Cooper. ‘There might be latent prints on the duct tape.’

  She flinched back. ‘Sorry.’

  Cooper turned at the sound of footsteps on the flagstones. Darius Roth himself was standing in the aisle of the chapel, a horrified expression on his face as he stared at the teddy bear.

  ‘Who did this?’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t you seen it before, Mr Roth?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Of course not. It’s horrible.’

  ‘Perhaps one of your group has a sense of humour that’s in bad taste.’

  Roth looked at him, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘You don’t believe that, Detective Inspector Cooper. Just a bad joke? Really? This looks malicious to me.’

  ‘Is there a particular significance to the teddy bear, sir?’

  Cooper waited patiently for the answer. Both he and Villiers had heard Elsa Roth use that affectionate nickname for him when he was upset, as if he was a child who needed placating.

  ‘Yes, my wife calls me that sometimes,’ said Roth, slightly embarrassed.

  ‘And who else would know that?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. Anyone who’s ever seen us together, I suppose.’

  ‘So all the members of your walking club, then.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And what is this chapel used for now, Mr Roth?’

  Roth dragged his gaze away from the teddy bear and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Cooper. Roth wasn’t stupid. He would have worked out by now that Cooper already had the information but was asking the question to see whether he got a denial.

  ‘We use it as a kind of clubhouse sometimes,’ said Roth, evidently recognising when there was no point in evasion.

  ‘Do you?’ said Cooper. ‘So who would have access to the building?’

  ‘When the club are meeting for a walk, the chapel is left open. Anyone can come in here for a quiet moment.’

  ‘But it was locked today,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, after what happened with Faith, you know . . . I didn’t think anyone would want to come down to the chapel. So I asked Will to lock it up.’

  Cooper gestured at the bear. ‘And he didn’t mention this to you?’

  ‘I don’t suppose he looked round the interior.’

  Cooper wondered if that was true. Sankey had left pretty quickly after unlocking the chapel for them. Did he really have so little curiosity about what was inside?

  ‘Mr Roth, do you keep records of your members?’ asked Cooper. ‘I’m thinking about previous members of the club who’ve since left.’

  He shook his head. ‘We’re a very informal group. We keep a list of who we’re expecting on the walk, so we can make sure they’ve got transport or accommodation if they need it. We tick them off when they arrive, that’s all. Previous members? We tend to forget about them once they drop out and disappear. At least, I do.’

  Cooper could see that last statement was likely to be true. Darius Roth would have no interest in anyone who turned their back on his group and escaped his influence. It made Cooper feel even more anxious to speak to a former member or two.

  ‘Are there any of the current group you don’t know very well?’

  ‘Jonathan Matthew,’ said Roth straight away. ‘Faith’s brother. She brought him into the group, for some reason.’

  ‘Yet you had him staying at your house the night before the walk. Didn’t you, sir?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s why, you see. We wanted to get to know him better. It didn’t really happen, though. He said very little over supper. No, Jonathan will take a bit more work, I’m afraid.’

  More work? Cooper thought that was an odd way of putting it. Jonathan Matthew had presented a bit of a challenge for Darius, then. He could expect to be worked on more.

  ‘Do you think he’ll be coming back?’ asked Roth.

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Oh well. And there’s Nick Haslam too. Nick is still a bit of an enigma to us. Sophie introduced him to the group. She used to come with her previous partner, Jake, but Nick is more recent. I don’t mind that – we encourage new members, of course. But it means we don’t always know much about them.’

  ‘Does he have an interest in the history of the Mass Trespass?’

  Darius shrugged. ‘If he has, it isn’t obvious to us. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’ll have to ask Sophie about him.’

  ‘I will.’

  Something else seemed to strike Roth, and he looked towards the teddy bear again.

  ‘Nick does have a peculiar sense of humour,’ he said. ‘He likes to pull my leg about the original organisers of the Kinder Mass Trespass being C
ommunists. On Sunday, he arrived for the walk wearing a Russian Army hat. I imagine that was meant to be a joke at my expense.’

  ‘I’ve seen that on the photographs,’ said Cooper.

  ‘As I say, a peculiar sense of humour.’

  The steam seemed suddenly to be gone out of Darius Roth. His shoulders slumped, and a lock of hair fell over his eyes.

  ‘What does this all mean?’ he said. ‘Is someone threatening me? Do they mean to do me harm?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t stand on any high places or sudden drops for a while.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  Roth produced his own set of keys to lock the chapel door.

  ‘Will you want to examine the scene for evidence? The bear . . . ?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we’ll send someone along to check for fingerprints, which might help. We’ll let you know when to expect them.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘So what will happen next to the club?’ asked Cooper as he watched Roth turn the key in the lock.

  ‘Happen? Well, we’ll have to set a new date.’

  ‘A new date? You mean you’re going up onto Kinder again?’

  ‘Of course. It’ll be a way of honouring Faith.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Besides, we didn’t complete the walk. We haven’t fulfilled the tradition.’

  That sounded honest too. But Cooper wondered how long you had to do something before it became a tradition. Was eight years enough? It was as if Roth believed he’d been doing the walk every year since 1932, a beacon of tradition for most of the last century, literally following in his ancestor’s footsteps.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’ asked Roth.

  ‘It’s hard to say. Will it be the same group as before?’

  ‘Yes. Well, with the one obvious exception. Poor Faith. So what do you think?’

  Cooper hesitated. It was a strange idea. If he knew that one of his party was a killer, would he want to venture out onto the moors with them? Most people would have said no. But it didn’t seem to bother the Roths.