Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  He squinted at the headlights still reflected in his rearview mirror and waited for the other car to pull out and pass him. A minute passed. Then two.

  ‘What the hell is he doing? Is he waiting for me to go first?’

  Dean felt uncomfortable about the idea of setting off with the other car behind him. What if this man followed his BMW into Wirksworth, maybe all the way back to his house? He didn’t want anyone knowing where he lived. He certainly didn’t want him knowing.

  Finally, the headlights swung across his mirror. But instead of passing, they suddenly lit up the opposite side of the road. Dean looked over his shoulder, saw vertical sheets of rain illuminated into a glittering curtain, pools of water forming on the roadway, alive with light and fresh raindrops pouring in their surfaces. The stranger’s full beam had turned the road into a stage set. What was the next act going to be?

  ‘He’s turning round,’ said Sheena.

  ‘So he is.’

  The other vehicle twisted across the road and straightened up. Its tyres hissed on the wet tarmac as it accelerated away. Dean stared into his mirror, but the rear window was blurred by rain and he could see nothing of the car but two smudges of red light moving away. By the time he got the rear wiper working, the vehicle was too far away to make out clearly.

  ‘Oh, well. That’s it, then.’

  He wondered why he didn’t feel a lot better, now that the car had gone. The uneasy feeling had been just too strong. It would take time for it to pass. He’d need a few drinks, in fact. He had a hip flask tucked into the back of the glove compartment. Good quality brandy too. But maybe this wasn’t the time to get stopped by the police and breathalysed for drink driving.

  It turned out that Sheena was even jumpier than he was. Before he could get the car into second gear, she cried out.

  ‘Wait. What was that?’ she said.

  Dean slammed on the brakes. ‘What was what?’

  ‘By the side of the road. There was something … Oh, I don’t know now.’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t see it, whatever it was. A fox? A dead badger?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then sagged back in her seat. ‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose.’

  Dean released a long breath and put the BMW back into gear.

  ‘Don’t do that, Sheena. Just don’t do it. You nearly frightened me to death.’

  Glen Turner could sense that his mind was failing now. His body had already let him down. He’d been unable to move more than a hand, and now the water had risen until it was creeping over his face.

  He was incapable of forming logical thoughts any more. Just one phrase kept running through his brain, over and over and over.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

  They said your whole life flashed in front of your eyes when you were dying. Yet his immediate past was a complete blank to him. His life was a desperate nightmare in which nothing had happened, and nothing ever would. When he looked into his own mind, he saw only a void. It was like standing in an echoing cave, a place as cold as rock and just as lifeless.

  As the hours passed and the water rose, it stayed that way. Right up to the moment Glen Turner stopped breathing.

  Chapter Two: Wednesday

  By Wednesday morning, the reality had become undeniable. In the CID room of Derbyshire E Division headquarters, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry felt herself tense with anger as she stared across the desk. She couldn’t believe what she was looking at. It was like being trapped in a twisted dream. Fry felt as though she’d never be able to escape, that she would always end up back in the place she started from, no matter how hard she tried to flee, or in which direction she ran.

  She chewed her lip until it hurt, tugged at her hair with clenched fingers, fought a physical urge to strike out at something, anything she could find, and smash it to pieces. How could such a disaster have happened to her? How long would the torment go on? There had to be an end to it, before she went completely mad.

  Finally, she couldn’t stand it any more. She had to break the awful silence.

  ‘I’m not going to be here much longer, you know,’ she said.

  Her statement didn’t seem to have any effect. From the other side of the desk, DC Gavin Murfin merely gazed back at her, chewing slowly. His face was pink and faintly damp, like an over-ripe pomegranate. His thinning hair showed tracks of pale scalp where he’d flattened it against his skull with the waterproof beanie hat he insisted on wearing when he had to go outdoors.

  ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  Fry tried again. ‘I mean, I’m only in E Division until everything is sorted out and back to normal. Then you won’t see me for dust. I’ll be out of here for good.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Murfin.

  ‘No one could make me stay a second longer than I need to,’ insisted Fry. ‘Not a second. Do you have any idea of the caseload waiting for me back at St Ann’s? There’s a live murder inquiry in Mansfield, for a start. Two rapes, a series of armed robberies around Derby, and a suspected human trafficking operation under surveillance in Leicester right now. That one could blow up on us at any moment.’

  ‘I’ve got some jobs to do around the house,’ said Murfin.

  Fry stared at him in outrage. ‘You what?’

  ‘Jean says the roof is leaking on the conservatory, and I’ve got some decking to lay when the weather clears up.’

  ‘Decking?’

  ‘You have no idea. My work is never done.’

  ‘Decking, Gavin?’

  Murfin sighed, and eased his backside into a more comfortable position in the office chair he’d been complaining for years wasn’t big enough for him. ‘I know, I just can’t wait. If only I wasn’t stuck here being a monitor.’

  ‘Mentor,’ said Fry, spelling it out in separate syllables like an elocution teacher with a slow student. ‘You’re a men-tor.’

  But Murfin took no notice. She might as well have been talking to the desk. Fry had never been quite sure whether it was all a deliberate act with Murfin, or if he wound her up like this without even trying. Whichever it was, she had to admit it was the one thing he was really good at.

  ‘I wasn’t even allowed to be a milk monitor at primary school,’ he said. ‘Well, they only let me do it once. They complained there were fewer bottles of milk handed out to the kids than were delivered at the school. How was I supposed to know where they’d gone? The fact that I was collecting milk bottle tops for Blue Peter was a sheer coincidence.’

  Fry looked around desperately for a more intelligent response. As usual, the younger DCs, Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst, had their heads down keeping out of trouble, though she thought she could see Irvine’s shoulders shaking behind his computer screen. Even Carol Villiers would have provided a bit of relief. She was at least mature in her attitudes, had gained her experience in the RAF Police, where perhaps they didn’t have the same tolerance for the Gavin Murfins of the world. But Villiers was out of the office on a temporary attachment to C Division, where they were short of staff for a major fraud inquiry. She was expected back in the next day or two. But right now, this was it. Fry shook her head in despair. God help her, and the law-abiding citizens of Derbyshire.

  She swung her chair back, and banged her knee on the side of the desk.

  ‘Oh, give me strength,’ she said under her breath.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Murfin stop chewing and smile. Perhaps it hadn’t been all that under her breath after all. But she didn’t care.

  Biting her lip, Fry examined the paperwork in her in-tray. Brief as it had been so far, her time with the major crime team at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit had spoiled her for this job in Divisional CID. It was endless volume crime – house burglaries, car thefts, run-of-the-mill assaults, and the odd street robbery to add a bit of excitement. The latest reports said that a teenager walking through Edendale town centre late last night had been robbed of his iPod by a trio of youths. What action should she take? Set up checkpoints on
all the major roads? Close the airports? Call out armed response? Send in a SWAT team? It was a tricky one.

  But this was only a short-term assignment. She’d been promised that. Absolutely promised. Her DCI on the major crime team, Alistair Mackenzie, had seemed genuinely sorry to lose her, even for a few months. But there was no one else to do the job, they said. It was funny how often there was no one else.

  Fry surreptitiously rubbed her leg, and removed a small splinter of wood from the fabric of her trousers. It wasn’t as if she had a good environment to work in. In Edendale, the old Divisional headquarters building on West Street was looking exactly that now – old. It had been built in the 1950s, and though it might have won an architectural award once, the past sixty years had left their mark. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget no longer stretched to structural maintenance, unless it was considered essential. Like Murfin’s conservatory, there was a leak somewhere in the roof. When it rained, the water ran through the walls, leaving damp stains in the plaster over the filing cabinets.

  And it had rained a lot in Derbyshire recently. It was almost certainly raining now.

  Well, she supposed she’d have to make the best of the situation. Some new blood in the division would have been ideal, of course, but Fry knew that was too much to hope for. There were fewer young officers applying for a transfer into CID. Why would they, when there was no extra pay, no promotion, no recognition of the extra responsibility? It just meant a lot more work to do, exams you could only study for in your spare time at the end of a long shift, a bigger and bigger caseload, a role as the muggins everyone turned to for help with their own investigations. You could be the entire CID representation on a night duty, called out to any incident the uniforms felt like passing the buck on. Not that there were many vacancies any more. But when they did get a recruit, they had to be pitched in at the deep end. Without a mentor, they would sink without trace, every one of them.

  ‘In my day, they were called tutors,’ said Murfin, as if reading her mind. ‘When I was wet behind the ears in CID, I was sent to some fat old DC who basically just told me to watch my back and not volunteer for anything.’

  ‘Not everything changes, then,’ said Fry.

  Of course, Gavin Murfin should be gone by now. His thirty years’ service were up, and he could claim his full pension. His wife had been planning a Caribbean cruise for months. But Murfin had been pressed to stay on as a temporary measure in the current circumstances, and Fry had been presented with the fact as if management were doing her a favour by giving her someone with experience. He’d been bribed with more money, she knew. And probably with an endless supply of jelly babies, judging by the white powder on his fingers and the empty packets in his waste-paper bin. Yes, Murfin had experience. But it was mostly of the kind you wouldn’t want passed on to posterity.

  She wondered how much the changes in police pay had affected the service. In the 1980s, pay and conditions had been good, compared to similar professions. Police forces were finding it difficult to recruit the right people in those days, and they had to offer inducements to attract decent candidates. Now, though, it seemed they didn’t want to be bothered by too many applicants at all.

  Fry cast her eye over the room again. Becky Hurst was the most willing member of the team, never thought any job too routine for her to tackle. She was like a little terrier, kept at a task until she produced a result. Her hair was very short and its colour seemed to vary week by week, though right now it was a sort of coppery red.

  ‘Becky,’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, Sarge?’

  Hurst came over clutching her notebook, her expression just a bit too alert and eager for Fry’s liking. She was always suspicious of those who seemed a bit too good to be true.

  ‘How are we doing with the cannabis farm?’ she said.

  It was the only interesting case they had on the books, a standout inquiry among the mass of run-of-the-mill volume crime.

  ‘Those reports coming in from the public about a property in Matlock were out of date,’ said Hurst. ‘A Vietnamese cannabis gardener got scooped up when the premises were raided last year. He was given eighteen months inside – and he’ll be deported when his sentence comes to an end. He’s not our problem now, Diane.’

  ‘He was just the gardener, though. What about his employers?’

  ‘They were never located. The property was handled by a rental agent, and the actual tenant never lived there. They created a couple of steps to remove themselves from the gardener.’

  ‘A dead end there, then?’

  ‘Yes, we don’t seem to be getting the breaks that C Division benefited from. Their operation was a gift from start to finish.’

  Fry nodded. Like so many successful inquiries, the recent drugs case had started with a bit of luck. A nineteen-year-old Chesterfield man had been involved in a serious RTC, when his Renault van had skidded, gone off the road and crashed into a tree. While he was being taken to hospital with a broken leg and internal injuries, officers at the scene had examined the damaged Renault. They discovered that he’d been working as a delivery driver for a drugs gang, carrying small bags of cannabis in a cake tin under the dashboard. He had three mobile phones on the passenger seat of the van – one phone to take orders from customers, one to contact his employers, and a third to call his mum to tell her he’d be late home for his tea.

  A full-scale operation had been launched after the trail led to a cannabis factory in a house in the eastern borders of Derbyshire, which turned out to have links to growers across the country. A search of the house found more than four hundred cannabis plants being tended by an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese man, who tried to hide in the attic when police arrived. Officers guarding the house on the night of the raid had noticed a suspicious car which drove past several times. They stopped the vehicle and found eight thousand pounds in cash, as well as more mobile phones and SIM cards. Phone records and text messages linked the people in the car to the cannabis gardener and other members of the gang. Warrants had been executed at two other addresses, in each of which a Vietnamese teenager was found hiding out with hundreds of cannabis plants he’d been responsible for.

  As a result, a gang involved in growing hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of cannabis across four counties had been jailed for a total of twenty-two years between them. They had more than a thousand plants under cultivation at addresses in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and even down in the West Midlands. Their assets had later been confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

  But the operation had left a few remnants of the drug trade still in existence. Somewhere in their area, at least one more Vietnamese was believed to be holed up in a house full of plants. The sad thing was, those cannabis gardeners were at the lowest end of the food chain in the illegal drugs trade, forced to live in squalid conditions and working practically as slaves for their masters. Fry couldn’t imagine what it would be like for him now, with his contacts gone, his supplies dried up, just spending his time waiting for a knock on the door.

  ‘So have we got any new leads?’ she asked.

  ‘No. But Special Operations Unit have got appropriate resources deployed in the Vietnamese community to gather information,’ said Hurst, as if she was quoting from an emailed memo.

  ‘Appropriate resources?’

  ‘CHIS, I should imagine.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Covert Human Intelligence Sources. They used to be called informants, snouts, narks or grasses – at least until political correctness became the rule, rather than the exception. They were part of an age-old tactic. Get your information direct from the horse’s mouth.

  ‘So we’re waiting for SOU?’ said Fry.

  ‘Unless you have any other suggestions?’

  ‘Just keep on it.’ She paused. ‘Is there actually a Vietnamese community in Edendale?’

  ‘Not that you’d notice.’

  Murfin raised a hand like the clever child in class.

  ‘I’m t
rained in multiculturalism,’ he said. ‘In fact, I was on duty at Mix It Up in June.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Mix It Up. The community festival, you know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s all about the meeting of cultures, experiencing the differences. We were there on a community relations exercise. But you get the chance to try things out too.’

  ‘So what did you try out, Gavin?’ asked Hurst.

  ‘Cossack dancing.’

  ‘Really? So there’s a thriving Cossack culture in the Eden Valley, is there?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  Fry clenched her fist in her hair, wishing she’d kept it longer and had more of it to tear out.

  ‘Luke,’ she said.

  Irvine’s shoulders had stopped shaking by the time his head appeared from behind his computer screen. In one way, Fry had something in common with Irvine. He wasn’t local. At least, he wasn’t Derbyshire through and through, the way a lot of their colleagues in Edendale were. He came from a Yorkshire mining family, but had Scottish blood a generation or two back and liked to talk about his Celtic heritage. Maybe he was the one who ought to be a redhead, but he wasn’t – he had a much darker look, as if one of those Spanish sailors who’d landed in Scotland from the doomed Armada was also in his bloodline.

  ‘Yes?’ said Irvine.

  A less eager response. Fry suspected he might turn a bit bolshie, if he wasn’t reined in soon enough. She’d overheard political arguments between him and Hurst, and Irvine was definitely out on the left wing.

  ‘Luke, I want you to get out and interview this youth who had the iPod stolen,’ said Fry. ‘Poor little sod must be traumatised.’

  Irvine sighed. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’d lay ten to one he knew the lads who took it,’ put in Murfin. ‘I reckon he probably swapped it for some E.’

  Fry turned back to him, only now remembering that he was there.

  ‘And why would you jump to that unfounded conclusion, Gavin?’ she said.

  ‘It’s the way things go down on a Tuesday night in Edendale. You have no idea what it’s like out there on the streets.’