Dead in the Dark

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper looked at her, wondering that she didn’t look happier. But Fry was never satisfied. From her manner, you would think someone had stolen all the glory.

  When the glove came off her right hand, Cooper noticed some fresh grazes on her knuckles. They looked raw and had been bleeding quite recently.

  ‘How did you do that to your hand?’ he said.

  She looked down and shook her hand, as if she hadn’t even been aware of it until now.

  ‘Oh, I think I must have banged it on something during the search. There’s a lot of rubbish stacked in that storeroom.’

  ‘But you had gloves on,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Of course I had gloves on. What did you expect?’

  Cooper watched her curiously. He prided himself on that sense of knowing when someone was lying, or trying to hide the truth from him. He couldn’t remember getting that feeling with Diane Fry before. She was more likely to blurt out the truth, even if it wasn’t very palatable.

  ‘So did you bring the information I asked for?’ she said. ‘Or did you just come to do your shopping in Shirebrook market? They do a good burger at the fast-food stall, DCI Mackenzie tells me. But if you’re having fried onions, stay well away from me.’

  ‘I brought the information,’ said Cooper.

  He passed her the folder.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She opened her car door and threw it on to the passenger seat without looking at it.

  ‘Everything’s working out okay, then?’ said Cooper, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m sure everything is working out fine for you,’ said Fry.

  ‘Diane, are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve just been having a bad week,’ she said.

  Cooper laughed. If it had been him, if he was going through a really bad week, he would have gone for a drive over the Snake Pass, or taken a long walk on the moors, whatever the weather. There was nothing like a good blow to clear the mind and make you feel better. There wasn’t any point in suggesting it to Diane Fry, though.

  Fry looked out at the streets of Shirebrook – a few parked cars and a deserted market square, dark but for the lights of the polski sklep.

  ‘I’m still trying to understand the real nature of this place,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit late now,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You’ll be going straight on to something else, won’t you? You’ll have another case to deal with, somewhere else in the East Midlands. So you’ll soon forget about Shirebrook. There’ll be a new challenge.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘you’ve never understood the real nature of any part of Derbyshire.’

  Fry was silent for a moment. ‘Or of anything in it,’ she said.

  Cooper stared straight ahead. By ‘anything’ did she mean ‘anyone’? It would be a startling admission coming from Diane Fry. But she hadn’t said that, had she? No, not quite.

  ‘You do understand the way back to Nottingham, though?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Have a safe trip, then.’

  Fry got into her car and slammed the door. Cooper watched the black Audi drive away. He didn’t need Dev Sharma to tell him who had been given the promotion at EMSOU. The credit for a successful conclusion to the Krystian Zalewski murder hadn’t all gone to Sharma.

  Well, that was the way it worked sometimes.

  34

  But how did you end up here, in the dark? The details are vague in your mind now, and hardly seem important. When you’re about to die, the reasons for your death become strangely irrelevant. They’re questions for someone else to answer, problems for those you’re leaving behind to sort out for themselves. Once you’re gone, it’s all going to happen without you.

  But will those people be in the dark, as much as you are now? The thought makes you groan and twitch with anxiety. At least there should be justice, a retribution of some kind. You pray silently for a reckoning. Without it, your death will be such a waste.

  You open an eye, but you can still see nothing. The creaking has become a rumbling, like a mountain moving under its own impetus. You feel water seeping into your clothes, cold and clammy. It’s flowing round you, coming higher and higher. It parts around your body like the waves of the ocean breaking against an island.

  Now you think you might drown first, before the final crushing fall. Your breathing gets faster until you’re gasping for air, your pain released in an animal grunt. You’re lying on the hard rock, panting like a beast. And this is how your life will end.

  A question stays in your mind, surfacing now and then in the blackness, a bursting rocket in the dark. Why has no one come? Why did he leave you here? You know the answer, of course. But the question keeps coming, the words playing over and over in your head. The answer is important to you.

  A sudden, deafening roar and a cascade of dust. A rock crashes on to your leg. You feel the bone shatter. You’re too exhausted to cry out now, too close to the edge to respond to the pain. Your mouth is full of grit that chokes your breath and trickles into your lungs. You have only moments left.

  Will anyone else know the answer to your questions now? Or will you be lost and forgotten, written off for ever, a person who might never have existed? Perhaps no one will ever care. No one will come to find you, here in your tomb in the darkness.

  Yet that’s your final, dying hope. That someone will come to look for you one day. Even after you’re dead in the dark.