Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  She turned another sheet, and discovered that Glen Turner had earned twenty-six thousand pounds a year. Less than a detective sergeant’s pay. So all his hard-earned qualifications and his twelve years’ experience in the insurance industry hadn’t got him very far up the ladder.

  There must be individuals in his company pulling in a much higher salary than that – even in Edendale, which wasn’t known for its high pay levels. If she had to take a stab, she’d guess that the Chief Executive of Prospectus Assurance was getting a better remuneration package than Derbyshire’s Chief Constable, who was said to be paid around £140,000. There would be perks too. A company car, private health insurance, a final salary pension scheme. And bonuses? Ralph Edge had mentioned that bonuses were no longer paid to the staff. But did that apply to senior executives?

  In Fry’s experience, there was a different rule for the bosses. The individuals with the highest salaries and the best benefits also got the biggest bonuses. That was always the way, wasn’t it? She couldn’t imagine a more effective recipe for creating resentment.

  ‘Where’s Becky Hurst?’ she said, without looking up.

  ‘I’m here, boss,’ said Hurst.

  ‘Check out this paintballing centre. Luke will give you the name.’

  ‘The Eden Valley Adventure Centre,’ said Irvine.

  Hurst didn’t look happy at the assignment, but she repeated the name.

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ she said.

  ‘Find out what they remember about the team building weekend for Prospectus Assurance. And in particular the injuries sustained by Glen Turner.’

  ‘Okay, no problem.’

  Fry unclipped a photograph of Turner. It confirmed what she’d already observed at the crime scene, before his body was removed. He was a stone or two overweight. He’d been carrying a layer of fat over most of his torso, marking him as flabby and unfit. Too much of Mum’s cooking, she supposed. Mrs Turner had probably stuffed her son with home-made cakes and cooked him pie and chips on a regular basis. Anything to keep him content, and less likely to strike out on his own, to hanker after living independently, when he might have to cater for himself.

  All at once, she felt a pang of sympathy for Ingrid Turner. The loss of her son might have taken away her main purpose for living. Suddenly she would have no routine to follow, no structure to her day, no requirement to see him off to work in the morning and watch for him to return in the evening to a meal ready and waiting for him in the oven. There must be a huge hole in her life – a void that no amount of WI meetings would be able to fill.

  Fry put the photo back and closed the file. She might be reading the situation wrongly, of course. It was possible she was misjudging these people, making false assumptions based on her first impressions. At this stage, she would value a different opinion, a sceptical voice to question her judgement.

  She looked around the CID room again, feeling that she was constantly searching for something that wasn’t there. No questioning voice came to her. Just Gavin Murfin’s tired rasp.

  ‘What are you lot talking about?’ he said as he ambled into the room and looked around at the assembled faces. ‘You look a bit too flippin’ serious for my liking. All those long faces are scaring me.’

  ‘We’re not talking about you, Gavin, anyway,’ said Hurst.

  ‘That’s a relief. For a minute there, I thought I might be dead or something.’

  ‘No such luck.’

  ‘You’ve got yourself confused with Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense,’ said Irvine.

  Murfin sat down and poked through his desk drawers. ‘Well, it’s an easy mistake to make.’

  Fry was watching him impatiently. ‘Have you got anything for me, Gavin?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ll want to know. I’ve got a result on one of the cars seen by the motorist on Tuesday night. It was a BMW 5 series, with two people in it, a man and a woman. The registration number included the letters KK. The lady noticed that particularly because she’s Irish.’

  ‘Because she’s Irish?’

  ‘Apparently, in Ireland a number plate tells you which county a car was registered in. And KK stands for Kilkenny, which is where our witness is from.’

  ‘Do we have any matching vehicles in this area?’

  ‘Only one,’ said Murfin. ‘A red 5-series model with TKK in its reg. I’ve just got a name and address from the Vehicles database on the PNC.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a red car seen in the area at the time?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Yes, there was.’

  ‘Well, get out there and bring the owner in, Gavin. And take DC Irvine with you.’

  Forty minutes later, Luke Irvine was sitting in the CID pool car on The Dale in Wirksworth. Gavin Murfin was in the driving seat. And from the scuffed look of its interior, Murfin had driven this car before.

  ‘So what do you say, Gavin?’ asked Irvine.

  Murfin scowled at him and gave a petulant yank at the wrapper of his Snickers bar, ripping the plastic away from the chocolate like a man who wanted to commit murder.

  ‘I’m your mentor, not your minion,’ he said.

  ‘I’m just asking you. I’m appealing to your … well, your better nature.’

  ‘You don’t appeal to me at all. You’re not my type.’

  ‘Come on, Gavin. You’re being a pillock.’

  ‘That’s more like it. Now I know you mean it.’

  Irvine slumped back in his seat. Was he the only one to be concerned about Ben Cooper? That night in the pub, Diane Fry and Becky Hurst had been nominated for the job of checking him out but had returned without any information. Hurst had seemed more worried about whether the cat had been fed. And of course Fry was just relieved to have gone through the motions, as if that excused her from doing anything else. Now Murfin was proving a washout.

  They were waiting for a red BMW to appear. They knew they had the right house for the owner of the vehicle, because they’d spoken to his wife, who’d told them he was expected back home any time. When they got back to the car, Irvine had suggested to Murfin that she might phone her husband on his mobile and warn him not to come home while the police were there.

  ‘No,’ Murfin had said. ‘Didn’t you notice the smile on her face? I bet she can’t wait to see him in handcuffs in the back of a squad car. There won’t be any tears from her as she waves him off to the cells.’

  ‘What, her own husband?’ protested Irvine.

  Murfin had snorted derisively. ‘You kids,’ he’d said. ‘You know nothing about marriage. Trust me, she’ll be the last one to think of warning him.’

  They’d been waiting almost a quarter of an hour since then, and Irvine was starting to get impatient. Murfin wasn’t exactly fascinating company. In fact, Irvine wasn’t entirely sure he was awake most of the time. He seemed to have developed an ability to sleep for a few minutes at a time, with his eyes wide open. At first glance it looked as if he was fully alert, until you tried to make conversation with him. Then it was obvious that his brain was switched off. Irvine supposed it was a trick he might learn after another ten or fifteen years doing this sort of job.

  Murfin grunted and began to fish around in his pockets for something. Evidence that he was present in spirit as well as body.

  ‘Do you know Wirksworth, Gavin?’ asked Irvine.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I thought you knew everywhere and everything. You’ve been around long enough.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Since I landed off the Ark.’

  ‘So why don’t you know this place?’

  Murfin glanced around the houses in The Dale. ‘Probably because they don’t have any crime.’

  ‘There was the counterfeit currency case,’ said Irvine.

  ‘Forged notes? Not my speciality.’

  Irvine remembered the case because the counterfeit banknotes had been Scottish. The inquiry had involved several businesses in Wirksworth after fake currency was used at shops all along St John’s Street. It turned out t
o be a technique used in a number of towns up and down the country. A few months later, a counterfeiter in Glasgow had been arrested with fifty thousand pounds’ worth of fake tenners in his car. He’d used digital images of genuine notes from his iPhone and reproduced them on an inkjet printer.

  With a sigh, Irvine wiped condensation off the passenger window of the car. Now, shopkeepers in places like Wirksworth were suspicious of Scottish currency. Well, even more suspicious than they’d been before. If Scots voted in their referendum to become independent, those Bank of Scotland notes would probably cease to be legal tender in England anyway.

  ‘Some of these houses are quite nice,’ he said.

  ‘Parking,’ said Murfin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no damn parking. Look where I’ve had to stick the car. Every time something comes past it nearly takes the wing mirror off on your side.’

  Irvine glanced automatically into the wing mirror.

  ‘Heads up, Gavin,’ he said. ‘There’s a red BMW coming.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Carsington Water had a very low dam wall, nothing like the structures holding back the waters of the Upper Derwent further north. Reservoirs like Ladybower and Howden had been built in a different time and to a different scale, matching the size of the hills around them. Their history was dramatic too, the scene of training runs for the Second World War Dambusters squadron and their bouncing bombs.

  But Carsington was a product of the 1990s, the last big reservoir built in Derbyshire. With its visitor centre, sailing club, water sports centre and nature reserve, the emphasis was firmly on leisure activities. That was surely a clear sign of changing times. It wasn’t considered acceptable any more to flood vast tracts of land without any regard for the interests of local people. Villages were no longer destroyed to provide a water supply for the inhabitants of a distant city. Carsington was as much a symbol as a utility.

  Ben Cooper slotted his Toyota into a space in the main car park for the visitor centre. The first thing he noticed as he walked towards the building was a display of drought-tolerant plants. Mimosa, calendula, juniper. He supposed it was part of the centre’s overarching message about the pressure on available water supplies and the need for conservation. How to manage your garden during a hosepipe ban. Right now, it looked like a laughable irony. Flood-tolerant plants would have been more appropriate.

  He stopped to check his phone. Had he remembered to charge it up last night? The screen glowed when he touched the button at the bottom, and a series of icons appeared. Yes, he had. He felt unduly pleased with himself. Those little coloured squares on the screen labelled Phone, Mail, Safari were symbols of his reconnection with the world. He didn’t intend to use them, but the fact that they were there signified an achievement.

  He ran a hand across his face to see how it felt. Not brilliant, but a lot better since he’d found the charger for his shaver. He’d even found a set of clean clothes, since there was nothing he could do about the ones he’d taken off earlier in the week. He was wearing his old waxed coat with the poacher’s pockets. It had seen a lot of muck in its life, and a bit of blood too. But he thought he would pass. As satisfied as he could be, Cooper walked round to the rear of the visitor centre to enter the courtyard.

  Unlike most reservoirs, Carsington wasn’t used as storage capacity for the supply system. Its function was to pump water in and out of the River Derwent, taking it out at times when the river was high and putting it back again when levels were low. There was an overflow in the dam wall, which had been planned to cope with the worst flood conditions that its designers could envisage occurring in a ten-thousand-year period. Looking at the weather forecast, those conditions could happen this week.

  A time capsule was said to be buried in the reservoir floor near the value control tower. He supposed it would only be discovered when Carsington was emptied in the distant future. The area was certainly changing beyond recognition. Not more than a mile away from Carsington Water was an organic farm, where some friends of Claire’s had once stayed in an EcoPod, with a solar powered shower and a compost toilet, and inquisitive goats wandering in and out from the surrounding fields.

  Around the courtyard there were shops, an ice cream parlour and an RSPB outlet. Cooper bought a filter coffee from the Watermark café and sat under a glass canopy in the courtyard, watched hopefully by a small flock of sparrows who perched on the tables and a magpie that eyed him from the safety of the edge of the roof.

  For him, the highlight of this courtyard was the Kugel Stone. Three feet in diameter and weighing over a ton, it was a large black granite ball that floated almost magically on a thin film of water. Two pumps supplied jets of water at different speeds, causing the stone not only to float on the surface, but to rotate slowly. The lightest touch of a finger made the Kugel revolve in a different direction.

  He looked up just as Carol Villiers entered the Watermark café. She was looking smart as always, that extra attention to detail making her stand out from the crowd, especially in CID. Her clothes always seemed to fit better, her shoes were less scuffed, she moved with a physical confidence that others lost when they spent so much time at a desk job. She even seemed to have reached the courtyard from the car park without getting wet or dishevelled, as if she’d simply materialised from a teleportation machine.

  ‘Hello, Carol,’ said Cooper.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She gave him that concerned look he’d come to expect. He’d seen it so often over the last few months. Cooper wondered if this was what disabled people sometimes complained about – the way people stared at them with an expression of mixed curiosity and pity. Each time he saw that look, it felt as if everyone was trying to fix him into a role of pitiable victim.

  He ordered more coffee, and she sat down across the table. She hardly took her eyes off him, as though she was afraid that he would try to escape if she looked away even for a second.

  ‘So what’s happening at the moment?’ asked Cooper. ‘Anything exciting?’

  Villiers didn’t answer directly. ‘You know we want you back, Ben. We need you at West Street.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think Diane Fry would want to see me back.’

  ‘Yes, she would. You’d be surprised. She doesn’t want to be there any more than we want to see her.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘I just can’t come into the office, Carol.’

  Villiers sighed. ‘So then,’ she said, ‘does it have to be unofficial?’

  ‘I can be unofficial,’ said Cooper.

  Villiers regarded him steadily. ‘You know, while you’re on extended leave, you’re just another member of the public.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘It has its advantages.’

  When Villiers had returned to Derbyshire she’d been that much older and leaner than he remembered her, with an extra assurance in the way she held herself. When they were younger, they’d gone to school together, studied for their A levels at High Peak College at the same time. She’d been a good friend, a bit sports obsessed perhaps, really into swimming and running half marathons. She’d been Carol Parry then, the daughter of Stan and Vera Parry, who ran a bed and breakfast in Tideswell High Street.

  But there had been another dimension behind her new self-confidence – a shadow in her eyes, a darkness behind the facade. Cooper had noticed it then, and he couldn’t mistake it now. Part of that darkness might be explained by the loss of her husband, killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. But perhaps there were other experiences too, episodes in her life that she would never talk about.

  ‘Well, you know we have a murder case?’ she said. ‘It happened not very far from here, actually.’

  ‘Yes, I did hear that.’

  ‘You’re not completely out of the loop, then.’

  ‘It’s the front page headline in this week’s Matlock Mercury,’ said Cooper. ‘I noticed it when I was in the petrol station this morning.’


  Villiers nodded. ‘That’s good.’

  She made it sound like an achievement, as if he was a spinal injury patient attempting to move a finger for the first time, or a baby wobbling upright for a half a second before falling flat on its face again. Was he supposed to feel a warm glow that he’d pleased her with his powers of observation? Immediately he felt an unkind urge to puncture her expectations.

  ‘But I didn’t read the story,’ he said. ‘So, apart from that, I know nothing.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’ve been away in Chesterfield for a few days assisting C Division, so I’m only just catching up myself. But the victim’s name is Glen Turner. There’s nothing of any interest in his background. Not that we’ve found so far, anyway. He worked in insurance. A claims adjuster, employed by Prospectus Assurance. Unmarried, thirty-eight years old, lived with his mother in Wirksworth.’

  Cooper felt a jolt of excitement so completely unexpected that he thought for a moment he’d been electrocuted. He put his cup down in its saucer with an unnecessary clatter. He’d suddenly seemed to have lost proper co-ordination.

  ‘Prospect Assurance?’ he said.

  Villiers brightened visibly at the tone of his response. ‘Yes. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Oh … I think they have offices in Edendale.’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  Villiers’ coffee arrived, and Cooper took a moment to steady himself. His hand was shaking again, and he hid it under the table where he hoped she wouldn’t see.

  ‘So what happened to him?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Turner was found dead in a shallow stream. Well, the stream wasn’t quite so shallow as it normally would be…’

  ‘Because of all the rain,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes.’

  She gave him that look again.

  ‘Don’t say “good” again, Carol. I’m not a dog to be patted on the head every time I fetch a ball.’

  Villiers had the grace to flush a little. Not that it didn’t suit her. It took the edge off that hard exterior she’d come back to Derbyshire with, the tough shell of a woman who’d seen active service overseas and had gone through an unsuccessful marriage at the same time. It made her a bit more like the Carol Parry he remembered from their school days. It was a transition he’d been hoping to see signs of for months now. He wondered if she’d decide to revert to her maiden name at some point.