He kept his eyes fixed on the figure picking its way gingerly over a patch of muddy grass. Lane circled the Calendar Stones and stopped. Then Cooper knew he was visiting the StarDisc.
This was just the sort of thing that his sister Claire became enthusiastic about. She loved anything with the kind of New Age atmosphere she’d tried to create in her shop in Edendale. The StarDisc was on a different scale from her crystals and pendulums. It had been created here in Stoney Wood as a twenty-first-century stone circle. A celestial amphitheatre thirty-five feet wide, a temple without walls. Carved into black granite to evoke the darkness of deep space was a star chart mirroring the night sky, its surface inscribed with the constellations. Around the perimeter stood twelve seats denoting the months of the year. Scores of lights illuminating the StarDisc at night were powered by the nearest star – the Sun.
Claire had dragged him to the opening of the StarDisc a few years ago. She must have had no boyfriend in tow at the time, and of course she knew it was a waste of time trying to rope Matt in for something like this. It had been quite an extraordinary event, Ben had to admit. More than a thousand people had turned up to watch an outdoor screening of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and listen to a specially recorded message from the astronomer Patrick Moore. The old lead miners and quarrymen could never have imagined that.
Josh Lane was moving around the StarDisc, walking over the constellations, crouching occasionally to read the name of a star system. He turned slowly to gaze over the scenery in all directions, and Cooper made sure he was standing completely still behind trees. Wearing his green waxed jacket, he wouldn’t be noticeable as long as he didn’t move.
Then Lane began to slither back down the hill to his car, and Cooper turned to make sure he could get to his Toyota in time before he pulled out on to Middleton Road.
Now they were definitely heading into Wirksworth. Down Hutchinson’s Drive, past the Bailey Croft service station and the BP petrol forecourt, and under the arched footbridge that carried a pathway high over the road between Green Hill and Chapel Lane.
A maze of narrow streets and alleyways sprawled on both sides of the main street, some of them leading to an old church set in its own close like a cathedral. On Cooper’s right, the limestone cottages of The Dale and Green Hill clung precariously to the hillside, as if Wirksworth was a Cornish fishing village with only the sea missing. In places it was possible to walk from the garden of one house on to the roof of another. Some residents had even erected greenhouses on their garage roofs in the absence of available space at ground level.
In the centre of town, Lane turned his Honda away from the tea rooms in Coldwell Street and squeezed his car through a narrow archway entrance into the car park of the Red Lion.
Cooper couldn’t risk parking at the pub, but he found a space close by in the Barmote Croft car park, facing the old Temperance Hall. He didn’t want to attract attention by getting a ticket on his windscreen, but the ticket machine wasn’t working. And a passing Wirksworth resident said they never paid it anyway.
He walked a few yards to the Red Lion, wondering who Josh Lane might be meeting inside. And wondering even more what he himself was doing here. Why was he obsessing about Lane’s movements? What could he hope to learn?
Cooper shook his head and tried to take in his surroundings. The old Wirksworth Town Hall stood directly across the street from the Red Lion. Golden stone, ornate pillars, an Italianate facade, even a clock tower. It was a Victorian creation for use by the local Freemasons. But now it housed the library and an Age UK charity shop. A whitewashed cast-iron milestone on the corner of the building told Cooper that London was a hundred and thirty-nine miles from the centre of Wirksworth. It felt an awful lot further away than that.
Charlie Dean cruised the BMW up Harrison Drive on the way out of Wirksworth, automatically glancing up at the footbridge over the road, checking for anyone watching him. There was no one on the bridge, of course. He was just getting paranoid.
And that was Sheena’s fault. He was quite sure that she was wrong about Jay getting suspicious. They’d been much too careful up to now. They never phoned each other at home, only ever sent texts, and then deleted them at once. They had never risked being seen together too close to where they lived or worked. They’d made certain they had plausible reasons for all their absences.
But Dean had a sudden thought as he indicated to pull into the Bailey Croft service station. He knew that he’d always done those things himself. What about Sheena? He only had her word for it. What if she’d just been telling him what he wanted to hear? Had she been forgetting to delete his texts? Had she let drop some incriminating remark? Had she, God forbid, confided in one of her friends at the hairdressing salon? He knew she could lie. She’d been lying to Jay all this time, after all. Couldn’t she just as easily be lying to him?
A worm of unease crawled in his stomach. Just when he’d been convincing himself that everything was fine and no one was going to ask them any questions, suddenly he wasn’t so sure that everything was fine at all.
He turned in past the petrol station forecourt and the Spar shop, his foot on the accelerator pedal, ready to drive away again if something went wrong or he lost courage. They didn’t know him here because he always filled up his car at a service station in Ashbourne, where the company had an account. But you never knew who you might bump into in Wirksworth. It was a small town.
Then he saw Sheena standing in the corner of the car park and the sight of her made him forget his worries. At least for a while. He opened the door and Sheena climbed into the BMW.
Half a mile further on, a Vauxhall Astra had skidded on the wet surface and gone off the road, ending up with its nose in a shallow ditch. Other motorists took no notice of its fate, hurtling on by to wherever they were heading so urgently.
Dean looked at the cars whizzing past, and the rear end of the Vauxhall in the ditch. ‘I bet not one of them has been on a speed awareness course,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
His head still ached a bit from his session in the pub last night. It had been good to be able to relax, though.
Suddenly, Charlie Dean felt reckless. It was a tendency of his that Barbara had complained about often in the past. She said it was incredibly juvenile, this instinct to react to danger by confronting it head-on. Tempting fate, she called it. But he had better descriptions. Facing up to a risk. Showing the world he wasn’t afraid. That was more like it. Charlie Dean wasn’t a man to be cowed by threats.
‘I’ve got a great idea,’ he said. ‘A bit of a treat for us today.’
‘What are you on about, Charlie?’ said Sheena, with that scornful little laugh of hers.
He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and jingled them in front of her eyes.
‘There’s a property I’m handling. We’ve just put it on the market this week. But the owners have moved out already and it’s standing empty.’
‘So?’
‘Well, when I say “empty”, I just mean no one’s living there. The vendors have bought a villa in France and they’re fitting it out locally. So they’ve left most of their furniture in place in the old house. It’ll go into storage eventually of course, or get sold off. But it’s easier for us to market a furnished property than an empty shell, you see.’
‘Why are you talking about furniture?’
‘Furniture. You know …’ Dean winked. ‘Beds, for example.’
‘Oh. Where is it?’
‘Right here in Wirksworth. Green Hill.’
‘Isn’t that a bit close, Charlie? You always told me we had to be careful.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said.
Dean smiled as he pulled into the entrance to the Wirksworth Industrial Centre to do a U-turn. It was exhilarating, this living dangerously. It made him feel really alive, gave him a buzz that he never experienced in any other way. Certainly not in his job at Williamson Hart. These days he
spent all his time dealing with frustrated vendors who couldn’t find a buyer, and time-wasting buyers who wanted a property dirt cheap. Why not make use of the opportunities of the job when they came up? He’d heard of people doing this before with empty properties. He was pretty sure one of the senior partners, Gerry Hart, had done it in the past. So where was the harm?
‘Is it a nice house?’ asked Sheena. As if that mattered.
‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ he said.
Chapter Nineteen
Diane Fry stared at Ralph Edge, wondering why he was laughing so hard at the idea of his friend Glen Turner getting killed. And what did he mean by ‘over and over again’?
Edge just laughed even more when he saw her expression.
‘Team building,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘We were taking part in a team building exercise at the weekend. They took us to a place up in the north of the county. It’s an enormous site, with all kinds of activities, and we stayed there the whole two days. Motivational talks, orienteering, lots of role playing. Even blind driving. You know the sort of thing.’
Fry did. Except for … ‘Blind driving?’
‘You don’t know how that works? Well, they put two of you in a car, and the driver is blindfolded.’
‘What’s the point of that?’
‘The idea is that if you’re the one driving you’ve got to have complete trust in your navigator. If you’re acting as navigator, you have to be able to communicate clearly. It’s a metaphor for a good relationship in the workplace. Or something like that.’
Fry recognised the slightly jaded tone of someone who’d taken part in too many team building exercises, been sent on too many personal development courses. She’d heard the same tone in police locker rooms.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Irvine. ‘I know that place. Did you go paintballing too?’
‘Of course we did. They have a massive paintballing set-up. About a dozen different arenas. A paintballing session is always part of these things. You’re working as a team under pressure, focusing your efforts on achieving a collective goal. And getting to splatter your boss with paint at the same time. It’s brilliant.’
‘And Glen Turner took part in this?’
‘Everyone has to join in. In fact, we were on the same team. Green team, the claims adjusters. Glen was completely useless, of course. He got shot to bits by the red team. Some of those women in Sales are merciless. I bet he was sore for days afterwards.’ Edge began to laugh again, then coughed to a halt. ‘Well, I mean…’
‘Yes. He was only sore for a couple of days. And then he died.’
Diane Fry looked at Nathan Baird. He appeared to be shocked, even outraged – which pleased her more than it should have.
‘We need a list of the claims that Glen Turner was working on,’ she repeated.
‘You’re … you’re suggesting one of our policyholders might have been responsible for Glen’s death?’ said Baird.
‘I’m sure you get plenty of dissatisfied customers, don’t you, sir?’
‘Well, of course. It’s in the nature of our business.’
‘People who believe they’ve lost out on quite a large amount of money they were expecting to receive on an insurance policy?’
‘We do have some large claims to deal with, of course.’
‘Yes, large amounts of money that might make all the difference to someone’s life, whether they can cope with their problems and carry on.’
‘That’s not our concern, though.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean it probably becomes very clear to people that you don’t feel it’s your concern, that you just don’t care about them.’
‘It’s very unfair to portray our company like that.’
‘Maybe. But I’m sure it must be a perception.’
‘So much for the torture theory,’ said Irvine a few minutes later when they were back in the car. ‘Turner had multiple paintballing injuries on his body, that’s all. He obviously wasn’t wearing enough padding.’
‘It sounds like a dangerous activity. Are we sure it’s legal?’
‘Properly organised venues are. They give you helmets and face masks. Padded gloves too. Most of the serious injuries have happened when someone gets a paintball in the face at close range. You can lose your sight that way. But if you’re wearing the right gear, all you risk is a bit of bruising. And you have to be unlucky for a ball to hit you somewhere unprotected.’
‘Turner was hit more than once. Mrs van Doon recorded fifteen injuries on his body.’
‘True.’
Fry was on automatic pilot as she drove back through the centre of Edendale towards West Street. She found herself stopped at traffic lights on Buxton Road.
‘I know it’s all supposed to be about team building. But Mr Edge dropped in a comment about being able to splatter the boss with paint. So it’s surely an opportunity to take out grievances on each other. And to create new ones too?’
Irvine nodded. ‘Was Glen Turner very unpopular, do you think?’
‘It’s starting to look as though he was.’
As they drove on, Fry glanced at Irvine. He still looked too young for the job. He had a bit too much of the adolescent about him to give much confidence to the law-abiding public. He’d yet to gain the self-assurance that came from experience, though he must have dealt with a wide range of incidents during his time in uniform. But he had enthusiasm, didn’t he? A sharp eye, a few new ideas to offer? A different interpretation to share?
‘What did you think of Ralph Edge, then?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t like him.’
Fry waited, but nothing else was offered. ‘Is that it?’
Irvine blinked. ‘I don’t know what else you want me to say.’
‘Great.’
She found herself wishing that Ben Cooper was in the car with her, instead of Luke Irvine. If she’d asked Cooper for his opinion, he would have given it without hesitation. In fact, he would have shared his views even if she didn’t ask. Stopping him was the problem. And it would have been a thoughtful, considered opinion he’d formed of the man they’d just interviewed. He might have had an instinct about him … Instincts weren’t always right, but sometimes they were. A balanced judgement, a useful insight. That was what she wanted. Fry was surprised how much she’d come to depend on it. Irvine couldn’t hope to compete, or didn’t want to. Perhaps he was too nervous to express an honest opinion when she gave him the chance. Was she so intimidating? Surely not.
Back in the office, Fry opened the personnel file that Nathan Baird had given her at Prospectus Assurance.
She could see from a glance at his CV that Glen Turner had been very serious about a career in insurance. Much more so than some of his colleagues, probably. It was the same in every profession. Some people just coasted along, doing the job and nothing more. But others were ambitious, always stepped forward to volunteer for new opportunities, and liked to get the appropriate training under their belt, just in case. Fry could sympathise with that.
But this was different. She wasn’t sure why, but she got the impression in Turner’s case that he might have been too obsessive, a man so focused on the job that he didn’t have time for a social life, or any outside interests. That wasn’t healthy. Lack of balance could lead an individual down the wrong path. It was possible to get things out of proportion, or out of perspective, and forget what was truly important in life. She’d seen it in so many case files, heard it in the story told by perfectly ordinary people who’d ended up in an interview room trying to explain their actions. She wondered if Glen Turner had been one of those people.
It wasn’t clear at what point Turner had decided insurance was the ideal career. His father, Clive, had been a railway engineer. But it must have been quite early on in his education that he started to drift in that direction. Following an HND in Business and Management at the University of Derby’s Kedleston Road
campus, Turner had gained an MSc in Insurance and Risk Management from Glasgow Caledonian University, a three-year distance learning course, which had no doubt allowed him to remain living at home with his mother.
Then, while working at Prospectus Assurance, he’d received an Insurance Diploma from the Chartered Insurance Institute, and was studying for an Advanced Diploma when he died. He’d definitely been serious. He’d probably wanted to get on.
But qualifications weren’t everything. That was certainly true in the police service and Fry had no doubt it was the same in the insurance industry. You needed to demonstrate a lot of personal qualities. Drive, enthusiasm, initiative, an ability to work under pressure. And an aptitude for teamwork. You had to be the sort of person who got on well with your colleagues.
Was that the problem here? Turner hadn’t exactly been the life and soul of the party, by all the accounts. He didn’t chat to his colleagues much, and none of them knew anything about his life outside the office. He didn’t go to the pub after work, or socialise in the evenings. He was everyone’s target during the team building weekend. That wasn’t a picture of Mr Popular. That was the geeky guy who didn’t fit in and was laughed at behind his back. Turner really must have been good at his job to survive in that sort of environment, where it was obvious every day that he wasn’t considered part of the team.
Of course, none of that was in the copy of his personnel file she’d been given. There must have been a regular appraisal or performance review. Didn’t everybody do staff appraisals these days? Turner would have gone through one every twelve months probably. That would have been the task of Nathan Baird, or whoever had been his line manager before that. Appraisal reports were where this sort of issue would come up. Working as part of a team? Room for improvement there, Glen. I’ll have to rate you an E. Let’s set some personal targets, shall we? Any concerns on your part? Bullying? Surely not. But appraisals were confidential, and they’d been removed from his personnel file before it was copied.
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