Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  Stephen Booth is the internationally bestselling, CWA Dagger-winning author of the acclaimed thrillers featuring Cooper and Fry. The series is in development as a TV programme. Booth lives in Nottingham.

  Find out more at www.stephenbooth.com or follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenbooth.

  Also by Stephen Booth

  Black Dog

  Dancing with the Virgins

  Blood on the Tongue

  Blind to the Bones

  One Last Breath

  The Dead Place

  Scared to Live

  Dying to Sin

  The Kill Call

  Lost River

  The Devil’s Edge

  Dead and Buried

  Already Dead

  The Corpse Bridge

  The Murder Road

  Secrets of Death

  Copyright

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 978-0-7515-6760-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Stephen Booth

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Lesley, as always

  Contents

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Stephen Booth

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  1

  No one wants to die in the dark. To lie alone in the blackness, feeling the chill of death creep slowly over you. Shut away from the light as the fear numbs your limbs and chokes the breath in your throat. The long, long sinking into the cold depths. And then to sense that slipping away. The final slipping away into nothing.

  Do you feel that stab of pain as it shoots through your chest? Try to make your breathing more shallow. You have several broken ribs, a fractured arm, perhaps a punctured lung. You can hardly know, in the dark. But you can feel the internal bleeding, the seeping blood as it squeezes your internal organs, bloats your stomach and intestines. You know your injuries are fatal.

  That fear of the dark is overwhelming. Because this is true darkness, an eternal night in which your eyes have become useless. Your heart thumps uselessly as you strain to see where you’re lying. You can sense space around you, a slight movement of icy air, a shifting of heavy masses, a solid weight way above your head. A sharp, stabbing pain is in your back from something hard you’re lying on. This isn’t a grave. But it is your tomb.

  Does your fear of the dark make any sense? When you’re dead, you go into endless blackness. Yet you’ve always hoped you would get one last glimpse of the light, always prayed that you wouldn’t die alone.

  Well, that’s not going to happen. There’s nothing for you to see here. Not a glimmer of light, not a flicker of hope. Only the darkness.

  A creak and a rattling makes you freeze. Is someone here? Or some thing? But no … you breathe out and release the pain. The noise has quite a different meaning. It’s something huge shifting overhead. It signals the end, the approach of your death. You’re about to be crushed completely.

  2

  Day 1

  Flies buzzed around the armchair. A mass of them covered a tiny window, like a moving black curtain. Detective Sergeant Diane Fry watched from the doorway as figures in scene suits moved around the overheated sitting room. Apart from the chair, there was little other furniture. A small table in one corner, a TV set on a stand, a stack of shelves containing two candles, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a half a dozen books in Polish.

  In a tiny kitchen area, there was barely enough room to turn round between an ancient gas cooker, a fridge and a sink. The off-white paintwork was scuffed, and the wallpaper looked damp, with a sheen of black mould under the window. Dust had gathered along the skirting boards and a trail of mouse droppings lay scattered near the bin.

  Fry sniffed. The smell in the flat wasn’t the stink of death, though it soon would be. The aroma was a mixture of rancid pork and fried onions. A thin, half-eaten sausage lay on a plate. The door of a wall-mounted cupboard hung open, revealing a row of cans and a few cups and plates. A plastic bag stood near the door. Fry glimpsed a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, some pots of yoghurt. Somebody’s shopping.

  The body itself lay curled in an awkward position, its head tilted back, one arm hanging towards the floor. Where the tips of the fingers touched the carpet, the skin was a livid purplish red. Blood had pooled to the lower parts of the body, red cells sinking slowly through the serum in the arteries when the victim’s heart stopped pumping. The carpet was so thin that the blood from the victim’s head wound would soon have soaked through to the floorboards and dripped on to the ceiling of the shop below.

  ‘There’s a trail of blood all the way from the alley, Sergeant. As far as we can tell, that must be where he was attacked.’

  Detective Constable Jamie Callaghan was standing outside in the yard, looking up at her from the bottom of a narrow metal stairway. Yellow evidence markers had been placed on the steps, marking the blood spatter left by the victim as he climbed unsteadily up to the flat. A smear of blood left on the handrail halfway up showed the clear impression of a palm print.

  From her position above him, Callaghan looked tall and lean, the darkness of his eyes emphasised by the yellow glare of a security light overhead. It had been daylight for a couple of hours, but it still hadn’t gone off. Perhaps something had triggered the motion sensor.

  ‘So instead of seeking help, he came back here and sat in his chair to die,’ said Fry. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  Callaghan shrugged. ‘He probably didn’t realise how serious his injuries were.’

  Fry looked at the splatter on the stairway. ‘Perhaps. But he must have seen how much blood he was losing.’

  ‘Shock?’ said Callaghan. ‘You can’t expect people to use sensible judgment in those circumstances.’

  ‘Are there any witnesses, Jamie?’

  ‘We’re still looking. Nothing so far.’

  ‘Well, keep trying. It seems very unlikely that no one would have seen either the attack itself or an injured man bleeding his way back to this flat. The distance between the two scenes is … what? A hundred yards or so? And right in the middle of town.’

  ‘We’ve got some local officers on it,’ said Ca
llaghan. ‘No one is being very helpful at the moment.’

  ‘Isn’t that always the way?’

  ‘In this part of the world, yes.’

  Fry turned back to the room. The victim was a man in his late thirties, heavily built around the shoulders and thickening at the waist. His fair hair was cut short, and he had at least a day’s growth of beard. He was dressed in jeans and a bloodstained blue T-shirt, and he was still wearing trainers, which had left damp prints on the carpet. A padded jacket lay where it had been dropped on the floor by the armchair.

  Fry’s boss, DCI Alistair Mackenzie, was deep in conversation with the crime scene manager, who she didn’t recognise. The forensic medical examiner straightened up from her examination of the body and turned to the doorway, narrowing her eyes as she peered at Fry’s face. She looked as though she was about to diagnose an unusually serious medical condition from her appearance.

  ‘Do you want my initial assessment, Detective Sergeant Fry?’ she asked.

  The FME was an Asian woman wearing a hijab below the hood of her white scene suit. Fry vaguely recalled meeting her in the Accident and Emergency department at Edendale General Hospital once, when a recently arrested suspect had required urgent medical attention. As a doctor, she must have become tired of the day-to-day stress of A & E, so had moved to something more stable, like sudden death and the examination of detainees in police custody. Fry couldn’t remember the doctor’s name, though. She could have asked, but it probably wasn’t important.

  ‘That would be helpful,’ she said. ‘I imagine that’s why you’re here, doctor.’

  The FME began to strip off her latex gloves, carefully peeling them from one finger at a time.

  ‘Well, the cause of death appears to be a substantial loss of blood from the stab wound in the left side of the thorax. The weapon entered through the ribs here, as you can see from the extent of the bloodstains on the clothing. But there’s also an extensive head injury, which is serious enough in itself to have caused concussion.’

  ‘So he may have been in a confused state after the assault?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  Fry pointed. ‘And the blood on his hands?’

  ‘His own, probably. Most of the blood is on his left hand. I imagine he would have clutched it to the wound. It wouldn’t have done much to reduce the flow. On the other hand, if he’d received immediate medical attention, it would have been a different matter.’

  ‘So he could have been saved?’

  The FME nodded. ‘A paramedic would have been able to reduce the loss of blood. An ambulance could have got him to A & E in ten or fifteen minutes. King’s Mill Hospital is only seven miles away.’

  Fry looked at the dead man’s blank eyes. Seven miles was a long way when you were dying on your own, weakened by loss of blood as it pooled on the floor around you. And there was no sign of a phone for the victim to have dialled 999. No landline, which wasn’t so unusual. But no mobile either. That was odd for a man of this age.

  ‘I see there’s post-mortem lividity,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, particularly noticeable in the right hand where it’s close to the floor. If the pathologist finds similar lividity in other areas of the body, it will confirm that the victim died in situ and hasn’t been moved since.’

  ‘What does it tell us about time of death, doctor?’

  ‘Well, livor mortis starts from about twenty to thirty minutes after death, but it isn’t usually observable to the human eye for two hours or so. The pathologist may be able to give you a more accurate estimate after she’s assessed the point of maximum lividity.’

  ‘So he’s been dead for two hours at least?’ persisted Fry.

  ‘Yes, at least.’

  ‘But how long did he take to die?’

  ‘Now, that’s an impossible question to answer,’ said the FME. ‘He looks a strong, healthy individual. It could have been several hours.’

  On the victim’s dangling arm, the purplish-red colour of the hand was very noticeable. But Fry was looking at the fingers where they touched the floor. The tips were oddly pale in comparison to the rest of the hand. Strange, when the fingertips were the lowest point of the body.

  The doctor followed her gaze.

  ‘Of course, the discolouration of livor mortis doesn’t occur in parts of the body that are in direct contact with the ground. The contact compresses the capillaries.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Fry.

  The FME flapped a hand in front of her face, as if waving away Fry’s thanks. But that wasn’t what she was doing.

  ‘I must say, these flies seem to have found the body very quickly,’ she said.

  Fry looked around the flat. ‘No, doctor,’ she said. ‘I think they were here already.’

  For a few days the weather had been unseasonably warm for September. But on the previous night a storm had hit after darkness fell. Heavy rain and gusty winds had battered the Peak District for six hours until daylight came.

  This morning, the roads were littered with broken branches as Detective Inspector Ben Cooper drove from his home in Foolow. In lowlying lanes, soil and leaves had been swept into the middle and piled up on the bends as road surfaces turned temporarily into rivers.

  Cooper was feeling optimistic this morning. He couldn’t explain why. It was a sensation he wasn’t used to experiencing as he headed to work. Not recently, anyway. Since he’d become a DI and taken on management responsibilities, the burden on him had increased rapidly. Sometimes he felt as though the ground was constantly shifting under his feet and he didn’t know what to expect next.

  On the descent into Edendale, a farmer was cutting a fallen chestnut bough to clear a field entrance, the whine of his chainsaw sounding angry and spiteful in the bright, clear air. Cooper slowed the Toyota as he edged past the obstruction. He gave the farmer a friendly nod, but got only a blank stare in return.

  He had a new CD in the player that someone had asked him to listen to. He liked discovering new music and new bands. And this one was certainly different. They were called Stary Olsa, a Belarusian folk band who covered classic rock tracks on medieval instruments. It shouldn’t have worked, but Cooper found himself singing along to a version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ played on flute and Belarusian bagpipes. That was definitely new.

  In Edendale, the police station in West Street looked much the same as it had when it was built back in the 1950s. But nothing stayed the same in policing. There were only two divisions of Derbyshire Constabulary now, where once there had been five. The old alphabetical system had been abandoned completely. In the latest reorganisation, E Division had been become just one part of North Division, which covered all but the city of Derby and the southern fringes of the county. It was properly known as the Eden Valley Local Policing Unit, neighbouring the LPUs of North East Derbyshire, High Peak, and Derbyshire Dales.

  Stary Olsa were getting into Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ as Cooper drew into the secure car park at West Street and keyed the code number to enter to building. After so many years based here, he found it strange and disorienting to realise there was no longer a divisional organisation in Edendale. He didn’t even have direct access to his boss. Detective Superintendent Hazel Branagh was now based twenty miles away in Chesterfield. In some ways it gave him more autonomy and freedom, but he’d come to rely on the guidance of Superintendent Branagh. A more distant physical relationship changed things for everyone.

  The corridors of the station had been feeling empty for months. Cooper supposed it was only a matter of time before someone at headquarters in Ripley decided it would be a good idea to sell off some of the buildings. Disposal of surplus assets to meet a revenue shortfall. He could see the words quite clearly at the head of a report. Yes, an email would drop into his inbox one day. And it wouldn’t be long before it happened.

  But that seemed to be his job now. Every day of his working life was spent adapting to change.

  When he reached
his department, Cooper went straight into the CID room. As usual, Detective Constable Carol Villiers and Detective Sergeant Devdan Sharma had arrived before him. It was as if they were engaged in an unspoken competition to see who get could into work first.

  ‘DS Sharma. What’s happening this morning?’

  ‘Not much, sir,’ said Sharma gloomily. ‘It’s pretty dead around here as usual.’

  ‘Not dead. Just under control,’ responded Cooper.

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  Cooper laughed. But Sharma just gazed at him, his dark brown eyes unblinking. Sharma was about as impenetrable as anybody he’d met. This was hard work.

  When asked, Cooper had said several times that DS Sharma would fit in. But he wasn’t sure it was true, rather than just something you said when you were asked. He knew a little about Sharma, but it was only superficial information. Though he’d been born in the Peartree area of Derby, Sharma’s family were from the Punjab, where Hindus were in a minority to Sikhs. Cooper had learned that his wife’s name was Asha, that they had no children yet, that they attended the Geeta Bhawan Temple on Pear Tree Road in Derby. But he still didn’t feel that he knew the man, even though he’d been based in Edendale for several months. Perhaps it would take longer.

  But would his DS stay that long? For months now, Cooper had been trying hard to be positive about him, but he couldn’t resist a niggling doubt, a suspicion that he and the Eden Valley LPU were being used, treated as a stepping stone to something else, something better. DS Sharma was destined for higher things.

  He recalled Sharma telling him that he’d applied for a transfer to EMSOU’s Major Crime Unit from D Division, but didn’t get it. Cooper had wondered whether he knew Diane Fry. He’d denied it at the time, but they had worked together since. Cooper mentally corrected himself. By ‘worked together’, he meant Fry had used Sharma for her own reasons. She had a habit of doing that. It meant nothing to her that an officer was a member of someone else’s team.