Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  Fry looked again at the officer in rubber gloves, now on his knees in the opening to the culvert. There might be a decision to make at some point in the search operation. If no useful evidence was found near the site of the body when the water level was lowered, and nothing turned up that might have been dragged a few yards downstream, then these ditches and the culvert would become the focus of examination. In the end, the road might have to be dug out to open up the culvert. She was glad she wouldn’t be the one to make that call.

  Wayne Abbott greeted her at the inner cordon. He’d just changed into a new scene suit, and his hood was pulled up over his head, though his mask was left dangling. He was disposing of the old suit in a plastic bag as Fry arrived, and she could see that it was heavily caked in mud. She wondered if she’d missed him slithering down the slope and falling on his arse in the stream bed. If so, she was sorry not to have been here at the right time. She’d have to ask one of the SOCOs later for details.

  ‘How do you like this weather, then?’ said Abbott when he saw her.

  ‘It’s lovely. It means I can see less of the scenery.’

  He laughed, and gave her a twinkly sideways look from under his hood as if he was appreciating her joke.

  ‘I’m not joking,’ she said. ‘I just thought I’d make that clear. The fewer times I have to set eyes on this place the better.’

  ‘You mean this wood,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean the whole damn Peak District.’

  ‘You know people travel from all over the world—’

  ‘More fool them. It’s always been a wasteland. And now it’s a wet wasteland. It’s like being in the middle of the North Sea. We’ve got about the same chance of drowning.’

  Abbott held up a hand. ‘All right, all right. It takes all kinds.’

  As the water level fell, a scattering of mud-covered detritus was being revealed around the body. Some of it was incongruous – a plastic two-litre Coke bottle, long strands of bright blue baling twine, the torn pages of a free local newspaper. No doubt most of these items were just rubbish, washed downhill by the water. But it would all have to be examined by someone. Fry felt glad that someone wasn’t her.

  Further down, there was more stuff – indistinguishable lumps and enigmatic shapes, all covered in a layer of mud.

  ‘So what have you found?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Quite a selection. Take a look for yourself.’

  There were evidence bags full of the stuff. Bags and bags of it. Most of it was just the general rubbish thrown out of cars or dropped by careless hikers. Crumpled cans, a Snickers wrapper, a supersize McDonald’s carton.

  Fry picked up the last bag. Who would come all the way out here to eat a portion of McDonald’s fries? There were no golden arches in Wirksworth, and certainly none anywhere in the national park. The nearest place to get a Big Mac must be Belper or Ripley. But then, maybe someone had just brought an empty carton with them and thought these woods looked like a convenient place to dispose of it.

  ‘We also found two towels,’ said Abbott. ‘They’re just small hand towels, a fairly cheap make. They probably came from a pound shop. One of them was caught in the roots of a tree further down, the other was in the ditch at the side of the road.’

  ‘Any manufacturer’s name on them?’

  ‘Someone called Made in China.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘If you’re expecting to get any quick results out of this lot … I mean, what sort of connection are we going to make between a Coke bottle and a cheap towel?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘”Probably none” is the correct answer.’

  ‘What hopes do we have of some quick results from the forensics?’ she asked.

  ‘Good for identification evidence, if we can find some. Anything else … well, you know what it’s like now.’

  Fry sighed. ‘Yes, of course.’

  She knew there was no point arguing. Trying to demand faster results would be a waste of her breath.

  In Derbyshire, as in the rest of the country, the Forensic Science Service was badly missed. Since the dismantling of the FSS, the procurement of specialist forensic services had become a shopping trip. Senior police officers ordered tests by price from a menu, as if they were visiting a Chinese restaurant. Often there was no one to take an overview of a case and assess what was actually needed and might produce useful results. It was all about what could be afforded in the budget, which evidence might convince the Crown Prosecution Service to take a case forward.

  Fry stirred the toe of her shoe in the muddy water that streamed past her feet into the crime scene. Paramount among those forensic menu items was DNA. It was the chef’s dish of the day, chosen by every customer who couldn’t decide what else to order. Well, DNA persuaded juries, all right. Every juror on the bench had watched a series or two of CSI: Miami and knew you needed DNA analysis to prove a person’s guilt beyond doubt. Without it, juries were reluctant to convict, believing the police and prosecution had fallen down on the job. They didn’t understand how flawed DNA evidence could be, and how difficult to interpret accurately. And they didn’t know it was impossible to obtain it from a waterlogged crime scene.

  She noticed a civilian standing at the outer cordon. A small, wiry man in his sixties, wearing an old-fashioned oilskin, steel-toecapped boots and a tweed cap.

  ‘Who is that?’ she asked.

  ‘The landowner,’ said Abbott. ‘A local farmer. He’s keen to help, he says.’

  ‘That makes a change.’

  Fry went to introduce herself. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Fry, Edendale CID.’

  He shook her hand. A firm, rough grip.

  ‘Bill Maskrey.’

  ‘Thank you for offering your co-operation, Mr Maskrey. It’s appreciated.’

  ‘We have to do our bit where we can. Your lot have helped me in the past.’

  ‘They have? Well, good. And are these woods yours?’

  ‘This part is. The bigger section over yonder is National Trust property, but on a long lease to the Forestry Commission.’ Maskrey peered at the activity in the stream bed. ‘I see your chaps are finding a lot of rubbish. That’ll have washed down the stream, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you get much litter left in the woods?’

  ‘Oh yes, I find all kinds of things,’ said Maskrey. ‘I try to keep my livestock out of here, because you never know what they might pick up that would get stuck in their stomachs. Just a small plastic bag can be lethal.’

  ‘So you must get people coming in. Hikers, perhaps?’

  ‘A few. There’s a public footpath from the road that goes up to the rocks.’

  ‘Rocks?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen them? Eagle Rocks. Top of this hill. That’s where people walk to. But the path skirts the edge of the wood. The hikers aren’t a problem.’

  Fry looked at him, wondering if she should revise her view of his co-operativeness. Would he turn out to be one more enigmatic local with a penchant for baffling hints and sudden silences?

  ‘If not the hikers, then – someone else?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, we have the big problem,’ said Maskrey.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Off-roaders, of course. Don’t you know about them?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘We’ve reported them often enough. Trail bikes, but four-wheel drives as well sometimes. They’ve been churning the place up. Making a right mess.’

  He gestured at the woods. Fry didn’t see how they could be any more of a mess than they were now.

  ‘I’ll see what we have on record.’

  ‘You should. They can turn nasty. That poor bugger down there might just have crossed them the wrong way.’

  Fry’s phone rang. It was Luke Irvine.

  ‘Mr Turner’s car has turned up,’ he said. ‘The blue Renault Mégane. It’s in a car park at a pub in Brassington. The nearest village to your scene.’

  Fry took a last look at the scene befor
e she left. As the level of the water around the body dropped, the fingers of one hand had begun to protrude above the surface, along with a blue-veined foot. Streaks of dark blood made the white skin look like scoops of ice cream, drizzled with chocolate.

  Available officers had been allocated to canvass any properties they could find in the area near Sparrow Wood, though Fry could see as she passed through that there weren’t many of them. A couple of farms, the odd small cottage, a quarry company with a site access near the junction for the Brassington road.

  The pub was only ten minutes’ drive away. It stood a couple of hundred yards before the main street in Brassington, which seemed to be called Dragon Hill. According to a sign on a wall, the lane opposite was Maddock Lake. Fry realised it was going to be one of those villages where nothing was quite right.

  Luke Irvine and a couple of uniformed officers were standing by a blue Renault Megane a couple of years old, parked at the back of a small car park behind the pub. The car’s doors had been opened, presumably without the benefit of Glen Turner’s keys, since they were still in an evidence bag from the crime scene. Probably best not to ask.

  ‘I’ve already checked at the pub,’ said Irvine. ‘They don’t know Mr Turner, and they don’t remember seeing anyone like him in the bar on Tuesday. But they say customers sometimes leave their cars here overnight if they’ve had a bit over the limit. They try to discourage drinking and driving, so they don’t object.’

  ‘Very responsible of them,’ said Fry. ‘But the Mégane must have been here since Tuesday if Mr Turner left it himself.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. They saw it here on Wednesday morning.’

  ‘About the time Mrs Turner was reporting her son missing.’

  Irvine nodded. ‘I see what you mean, Diane. We might have organised a search for him on Wednesday if we’d known his car was abandoned here.’

  ‘Yes, we might. But it’s no use wishing for anything different now. Have you gone over the interior?’

  ‘It didn’t take long. There’s not much to see. Mr Turner wasn’t one for carrying his whole life around with him in his vehicle.’

  ‘Is there a laptop?’

  ‘Yes, a Dell Latitude. Looks a tough little bugger.’

  Fry could see that the laptop casing was reinforced for hard use, as Nathan Baird had described. Glen Turner must have had some rough claims to deal with, or a few unruly customers.

  ‘We need to get that into the lab so forensics can check it out. We might get something off it. Anything else?’

  ‘A bit of equipment in the boot. A pair of wellies, a fluorescent jacket, a folding stepladder. Only what he might have needed for the job. Oh, and there was this on the passenger seat.’

  Irvine unwrapped a paper package. Fry looked at the contents, but couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was seeing. It looked like a lump of stone, but embedded in the centre of it was a curled shape like the shell of a sea creature.

  ‘And that is…?’

  ‘According to the label, it’s a fossil. An ammonite. There’s a receipt in the bag. It was bought at the National Stone Centre on Monday.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The National Stone Centre. It’s not far away, just outside Wirksworth.’

  ‘I said “what”? not “where”?’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s a sort of visitor centre where you can go to look at, well, er…’

  ‘Stones?’

  ‘In a nutshell.’

  ‘Why would Glen Turner have been there? Was he interested in geology? Mineralogy?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

  ‘We need to get Scenes of Crime here to go over the car. Fingerprints, trace evidence – any signs that someone was in the car with him, or anyone was near enough to touch the car. In fact, I want everything.’

  Irvine clamped his phone to his ear. ‘I’ll arrange it.’

  Fry looked at the fossil again, and sighed. ‘My God, this man lived a boring life. So far, the most fascinating thing about him is the way he died.’

  When she received confirmation that a family liaison officer had finally arrived at the cottage in St John’s Street, Diane Fry called and asked Mrs Turner’s permission to examine her son’s room. She didn’t seem to care very much by then.

  Fry took Becky Hurst with her, and they got to work after a few words with Mrs Turner and the FLO. It was difficult to make polite small talk in these circumstances, but equally it seemed rude simply to walk through someone’s house and go upstairs, even when they’d given you permission. Members of the public got upset about things like that. And no one wanted complaints.

  Upstairs, it was obvious that Glen Turner had used the biggest bedroom in the cottage as his own. It was remarkably tidy for a single man. Fry wondered if his mother did all the tidying and cleaning in here. In which case, he might not have left anything too interesting lying around to be found.

  Apart from a king-sized bed and a wardrobe, the room was dominated by a computer work station with two monitors side by side. The screens were blank, and the computer was switched off. No doubt it would require a password to access it anyway. Fry sighed when she realised she was likely to need specialist forensic services if she hoped to get anything off the hard drive. She would have to arrange for the equipment to be removed from the house as soon as possible.

  ‘Red striped curtains,’ said Hurst.

  ‘So?’

  ‘They don’t seem to fit.’

  ‘He probably didn’t choose them himself.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Check some of those drawers. See what documents you can find. Letters, bills, bank statements.’

  ‘I know. I’ve done it before.’

  Fry examined the clothes in the wardrobe. Glen Turner didn’t have much fashion sense, or even a wide-ranging taste in styles. A few dull suits, some casual jackets and trousers that were only slightly less dull. On a shelf, she found a small pile of sweaters and cardigans with bright Scandinavian designs. They didn’t look as though they’d been worn, though. When she sniffed them, they still smelled new. Christmas gifts, perhaps. Wrap up warm, son.

  There were a few personal items in the drawers of the dresser. An electric shaver, a small Kodak digital camera, an iPod, an Xbox 360. She wasn’t surprised that Turner was the type to be playing on a games console well into adulthood. There were a surprising number of adults using Nintendos and Game Boys. Mostly men, of course. It was a sign of the failure to grow up properly.

  She switched on the camera, hoping the battery was charged up. There had been a higher specification camera in his briefcase, which presumably he’d needed for his work. This must have been for personal use. When the display came up, she pressed REVIEW on the menu and scrolled through the images stored on the memory card. Fry sighed when she saw them. Glen Turner was becoming so predictable. All she saw were pictures of stately homes and show gardens – among them, she thought she recognised Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall, two of the best-known attractions in the Peak District. Some of the shots were general views of an elegant facade or a colourful flower bed. But many of them included Glen’s mother, Ingrid Turner, smiling for his camera as she posed against a picturesque backdrop. So that was how the two of them had spent their weekends in the summer.

  ‘There are a few statements and receipts in a box file here,’ said Hurst. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. They’re household bills, mostly – he seems to have kept about five years’ worth. Very organised of him. And it looks as though the majority are printouts from the internet, Diane.’

  Fry nodded. ‘So he did most things online. We’ll need to look at his emails.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Hurst.

  ‘Any indication of who he’s been in touch with recently, and why. He must have had some contacts, apart from work and domestic affairs. He had dealings with someone who met him in those woods. And if there’s no obvious sign of them, Mr Turner must have had a reason for hiding the
traces.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tonight, Ben Cooper was driving in the south of the area, in the district known as the Derbyshire Dales. And he was there for a good reason.

  This was where Josh Lane lived. The former barman at the Light House had moved into a park home located a few hundred yards off the A6 near Cromford, just east of the river Derwent.

  Lane’s home had a small conservatory and an area of decking which reached into the surrounding woodland. From the months he’d spent looking at estate agents websites trying to find an affordable property, Cooper knew that some of these park homes sold for around ninety thousand pounds. From what he’d heard, there was one park nearby where the rules excluded children. That was probably a big attraction for some people. Though how anybody could object to children, he didn’t understand. It was part of the life he and Liz had been planning for themselves.

  For a moment, he thought he was going to faint. The sky whirled around him, and his feet stumbled on the tarmac. He stopped for a few minutes at the entrance to the park, taking deep breaths until his head stopped swimming. This happened sometimes. He wasn’t sure whether it was his body letting him down, or his mind. No matter how often he told himself to think only about safe subjects, to steer his thoughts away from dangerous territory, it still happened. It struck him out of the blue, like lightning from a clear sky. This would go on for ever, he knew. He could never be entirely confident that the lightning wouldn’t strike at any moment, when he was least expecting it. He could understand why people gave up the struggle, if they believed it would be like that every day of the rest of their lives.

  He looked up at a St George’s flag flying over the entrance to the park. Two rows of mobile homes and small bungalows curved away from him into a wooded dell formed from the site of a small disused quarry. He could hear traffic passing on the A6 between Cromford and Ripley, but he guessed it would be quieter once he entered the park, the trees and quarry walls providing insulation against the noise.