‘Sorry.’
‘Well, it falls bang in the middle of our time scale, anyway. So it helps a bit, I suppose.’
‘We’re no closer to filling in details of Miss Shepherd’s background, though,’ said Fry.
Hitchens shook his head. ‘Not much nearer. Although the owners of the village shop think Rose Shepherd’s accent might have been Irish.’
‘Do they? But her passport says she was British. Born in London.’ Fry laughed. ‘It’s possible, though. Irish is foreign enough for folk round here.’
‘Why don’t we put it to Bernie Wilding?’ suggested Cooper.
But Hitchens shook his head. ‘It would be leading him too much. At the moment, he can’t identify Miss Shepherd’s accent, but if we suggest a particular nationality, he might try to make all his recollections fit in with the suggestion. I bet we could get him to agree that Rose Shepherd was an Iraqi or an Australian — anything we like the sound of.’
‘The name Shepherd sounds more Australian than Iraqi,’ pointed out Cooper.
‘I meant those as examples,’ said Hitchens. ‘Wake up, Ben.’
‘I was joking.’
‘Right. Well, it hasn’t been a laugh a minute round here, I can tell you — not with Mr Kessen in the mood he’s in. We have found a laptop, though. It was in the bottom drawer of the victim’s wardrobe.’
‘Well, that’s good news,’ said Fry. ‘Has it been checked out yet?’
‘We haven’t had time to go through the files, but Miss Shepherd definitely had internet access. It looks as though she used an ordinary modem dial-up connection, so she could have used the laptop right there in the bedroom, plugged into the socket for the bedside phone.’
‘Any interesting email correspondence?’
‘Nothing obvious, apart from some junk mail. God knows why she kept that. But it looks as though she might have joined some online groups, because there were different aliases and screen names. It seems Rose Shepherd did have a social life, of a kind. But it was all online.’
‘By the way, I’ve got the package that the postman was trying to deliver,’ said Cooper. ‘It isn’t all that big, but it’s heavy for its size.’
‘Open it up. But be careful.’
When the cardboard packaging came off, they were looking at three books from an internet bookseller. Maeve Binchy, Danielle Steele, Josephine Cox.
‘Does that give us any clues?’ asked Hitchens.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper. ‘I once saw a Muslim woman in full chador buying a Danielle Steele novel in a supermarket, so I don’t think we can make any assumptions.’
‘The only surprise to me is that she ordered three books at once, since it meant they wouldn’t go into her letter box,’ said Fry.
‘Maybe they were on special offer,’ said the DI, moving away to answer his phone.
Fry waited for a quiet moment, then approached him between calls.
‘Sir, I’m going to need to review the house fire enquiry. You know, the triple death?’
‘Not now, Diane.’
‘But — ’
‘Well, not unless you have firm evidence of malicious intent. Do you?’
‘No, sir. Not yet.’
‘Come back to me when you do, then.’
Fry bit her lip. She obviously wasn’t going to get a look-in on the Rose Shepherd enquiry. She was too junior in this company. But she had an enquiry of her own that she could make a mark with — if she could find the time to work it properly. The Darwin Street fire was low priority until malicious intent was proved. But there were ways around that problem.
She went outside and found Gavin Murfin. Ben Cooper would have been more useful, but his absence was likely to be noticed, so Murfin would have to do.
‘Ah, Gavin, you’re not doing very much,’ she said, taking hold of his arm and steering him towards her car.
‘Well, actually — ’
‘Good. You’re with me.’
Somehow, Murfin had obtained a pork pie, which he was eating out of a paper bag. He’d got into the habit of bringing food with him if he thought he was going to be away from civilization for a few hours.
‘But if you drop bits of that pie in my car, Gavin, you know what’ll happen. And it won’t be pretty.’
Fry had to negotiate the lines of vehicles in Pinfold Lane to find somewhere to turn round. The only space was the entrance to the Birtlands’ driveway.
As she reversed to do her three-point turn, she saw Ben Cooper standing in the gateway of Bain House. He’d stopped to speak to one of the SOCOs, Liz Petty. It wasn’t clear whether she was working the scene, because she was still wearing her navy blue sweater with the Derbyshire Constabulary logo rather than a protective scene suit. Fry watched them for a moment as she changed gear. She saw Petty push back her dark hair and confine it in a clip behind her head. Her cheeks looked slightly pink as she laughed at something Cooper was saying.
‘They make a grand couple, don’t they?’ said Murfin, picking crumbs off the seat. ‘Ben and Liz, I mean,’ he added, as if it needed explaining.
‘Are they sleeping together?’ asked Fry, as casually as she could manage.
Murfin stopped hunting for crumbs. She could feel his eyes on her, wary and suspicious.
‘I dunno,’ he said.
‘You’re his friend, aren’t you, Gavin?’
‘Me and Ben? We go back years.’
‘You must know, then.’
Murfin shook his head. ‘It would only be gossip.’
He lowered his head between his knees, as if searching the floor for more debris.
‘I just wondered,’ said Fry.
In reply, all she got was a mumble from somewhere under the seat.
‘What did you say, Gavin?’
‘I said I can’t hear you.’
Fry let out the clutch suddenly. As the car jerked forward, Murfin’s head shot up from the footwell. His face was beetroot red from the blood rushing into it.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to kill me.’
Cooper went into the back garden of Bain House to look at the field where the SOCOs were still working under a white tent. Liz Petty had confirmed what he’d already guessed — the Foxlow shooting had put a lot of extra pressure on Scientific Support.
One of the complications was obvious. In effect, there were four separate crime scenes to be examined. For a start, there was Rose Shepherd’s bedroom, and the other rooms of her house. Officers conducting the search might hope to learn something about the victim’s life that would lead to her killers, or at least suggest a motive for her murder. But if, as they suspected, the attacker hadn’t entered the victim’s home, or even made direct contact with her, there would be no traces of him in the house. No DNA or fingerprints; no fibres or evidence of any kind.
Then there was the field. That at least had yielded some tyre marks. How clear they were would depend on how soft the ground had been, whether it had rained before the incident, and what the weather had been like since. Cooper looked at his watch, and pictured DCI Kessen doing the same thing, cursing the delay in the body being found. There wouldn’t be much else in the field, of course. If there were no shell casings or footwear impressions, then there wouldn’t be any dropped matches or cigarette ends either. But the suspect’s car had been driven close to the edge of the field. A tiny flake of paintwork left on a branch of the hawthorn hedge, maybe? A bumper scraped on the corner of a stone wall? But in a fifty-acre field? From dark paintwork? Needles and haystacks came to mind.
The most useful scene might be the third one: the suspect’s vehicle. If they ever found it, of course. There should be fibres on the seats, fingerprints on the door handles, sweat stains on the gear stick.
Cooper turned at a sound in the garden. A squirrel ran across the lawn and scuffled among the dead leaves on the flower beds. It was burying nuts before hibernation time came. Across the garden, another squirrel chattered with that strange cry they had, somewh
ere between the call of a bird and the mew of a cat.
From what Diane Fry had said, Mr and Mrs Ridgeway would hate this, if they saw it. If they were breeding here, there’d be a continuous supply of them to raid her neighbours’ gardens.
Cooper was approaching the end of his shift. His DI seemed to have forgotten him, Fry had already left Foxlow, and no one had mentioned overtime. Tomorrow would be hectic, though. By then some lines of enquiry would have emerged. Suddenly, there would be an insatiable demand for resources, and everyone would be rushed off their feet. He might as well take advantage of the lull.
He walked back into the house. Downstairs, the rooms were full of people. He could hear them opening drawers, taking photographs, rustling papers, talking and laughing among themselves. There were probably more people inside Bain House at this moment than had been over the doorstep in the whole of the last year. If Rose Shepherd walked in now, she wouldn’t recognize the place. She’d be like a shocked parent who’d come home unexpectedly to find the teenage children had moved the furniture, rolled up the carpets, and thrown a party that got out of hand.
The image of her bewildered reaction brought Cooper to a halt as he remembered the fourth crime scene. At this moment it was lying in the mortuary, waiting to be examined for whatever information it could yield. It was Rose Shepherd’s body.
After Fry had dropped Gavin Murfin off at West Street with his instructions, she drove straight back to Darwin Street. Things were happening here, at least. All the appropriate people were gathering, including the fire service’s divisional officer and his investigation team. Their brief was to work with the appointed investigating police officer — which was her, for now.
Her next job would be to decide whether the attendance of a forensic scientist was needed. Of course, she’d be mad to try to manage without an expert when three deaths were involved. It would be too late to change her mind once the scene had been compromised. But there was a procedure to be followed before she could commit resources.
Right now, the fire service had taken possession of the scene. They’d brought in their own dog team from Alfreton, and a chocolate brown Labrador bitch wearing blue protective boots and a reflective harness was being deployed by her handler in the ground-floor rooms of the Mullen house. A firefighter told her the dog was called Fudge, though her official title was ‘post-fire search tool’.
Never mind the fancy names. The important fact was that the dog could search the scene faster than any conventional equipment. It had been trained to locate the presence of flammable liquids that could have been used to start the fire, and then give a passive alert to the handler, so that evidence wasn’t disturbed.
To the dog, it was all a game. There’d be a reward when it found what it was looking for. More than Fry would get, probably. No one would be waiting to pat her on the head and give her a chicken-flavoured Schmacko.
Well, she didn’t like animals much, but she had to admit the Labrador’s expertise was a good example of focus, considering all the other smells that must have bombarded the dog when it entered the house. Lucky animal, not to have to worry about what these humans had been up to inside 32 Darwin Street.
Fry’s mobile rang. It was Murfin, his voice sounding slightly muffled as usual. If he wasn’t actually eating, he was salivating at the thought of his next snack.
‘Hi, Gavin.’
‘I called the hospital, like you told me. They say Brian Mullen is awake. He’ll be fit to be interviewed in the morning.’
‘Great.’
‘I suppose you’ll want to do that after the morning briefing?’
‘Yes, I want to get to him as soon as I can.’
‘Want me to come along?’
‘Er … no thanks, Gavin. There’ll be plenty for you to do on the Shepherd enquiry.’
‘OK. I don’t like hospitals anyway.’
As she ended the call, Fry saw the fire service dog padding across the debris in its blue boots. The animal was wagging its tail, happy to have done its bit. Was it Schmacko time already?
‘So what’s the result? Did the dog find anything?’
‘Yes. She identified accelerant in two locations in the sitting room,’ said the handler. ‘I’ve marked the locations for further investigation by the DO — or the forensic scientists, if you’re calling them in.’
‘Great job. Thanks.’
Fry was already reaching for her phone again. Traces of accelerant were evidence of malicious intent. A chocolate Lab called Fudge had just upped the stakes in this enquiry.
9
Below the hill, most of the fields at Bridge End Farm were still good grazing land. But much use that was to anybody now.
According to Matt, he would soon be a glorified park keeper instead of a farmer. Without headage payments, there was no way he could raise sheep, for a start. In future, British lamb would cease to exist, and everything the consumer bought would be flown in from New Zealand. It would happen the same way it did with Brazilian beef and Danish pig meat, he said. Countryside Stewardship schemes were all very well. Maintaining the landscape and conserving biodiversity? Fair enough. But Matt was baffled that the country didn’t see any value in an ability to feed itself.
Ben drew his car into the yard in front of the farmhouse, trying to imagine the place empty and deserted, cleared of its animals. Not just a silent spring, but silent all year round.
Bridge End had been one of those traditional mixed farms that had once characterized British agriculture. Animals were fed with crops grown on the farm, and in turn they fertilized the fields with manure for the next crop. For Ben and Matt, growing up on the farm, it had seemed such a logical and natural cycle that they assumed it would go on for ever. But even by the 1990s mixed farms had already become a quaint eccentricity.
Perhaps his father wouldn’t have cared too much. Joe Cooper had never really been interested in the farm. True, he had occasionally rolled up his sleeves to help. With his shirt open at the neck, he would reveal a rare, vulnerable flash of white skin and a proud smile at working alongside his two sons. It was one of the abiding images that Ben still carried — though, at the time, he hadn’t thought of his father as remotely vulnerable. Like the farm, it had seemed that Sergeant Joe Cooper would go on for ever.
He’d been trying to train himself to remember those happier images, instead of the one that had tormented him for years: the bloodied body on the paving stones that he’d never actually seen. Some of the youths responsible for Joe Cooper’s death were already back out in the world at the end of their sentences. Two years for manslaughter, that was all. First-time offenders, of course. Ben knew he was bound to run into one of them some day soon. It was probably futile to hope that he wouldn’t recognize them.
‘Bad do about that family in Edendale,’ said Matt when he greeted his brother in front of the house. ‘The fire, I mean.’
‘Yes, really bad.’
‘Are you working on that?’
‘We don’t know if it was malicious or not yet.’
‘It’s not good when kids are involved, whatever it was.’
Matt removed his boots and stripped off his overalls in the porch. A tabby cat immediately jumped up and inspected the overalls to see if they’d make a decent bed.
‘Actually, I was down at Foxlow earlier,’ said Ben. ‘We had a shooting.’
‘Oh, I heard,’ said Matt.
‘Did you?’
‘It was Neville Cross who found the body, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, not quite. But he made the call.’
‘Neville’s the NFU rep, you know.’
‘So the farmers’ grapevine has been busy, has it?’
‘Something like that.’
Matt stroked the cat absent-mindedly. His hand was huge, so it covered the animal’s head completely. Only its ears protruded, trembling with the vibration of a deep purr.
‘Come into the office, Ben. There’s something I want to show you.’
‘Is ther
e room for two people?’
‘As long as you don’t mind sharing your breathing space with a smelly old dog.’
The farm office was cramped and untidy. It was the aspect of the farm that Matt paid least attention to, because it meant being indoors. Occasionally, Kate came in to help out with the paperwork and sort the mess into some kind of order, so they muddled through year by year, driving their accountants up the wall. ‘I’m a stockman, not a filing clerk,’ Matt would say. But deep down, he probably knew that this failing was the reason he was doomed. These days, farmers had to be business managers and entrepreneurs above anything else, if they wanted to survive.
Matt eased himself on to the office chair in front of the computer. He was filling out so much as he got older that he looked too big for the desk, like an adult sitting in an infants classroom.
‘I’ve been looking at the internet,’ he said.
‘Blimey, we’re going to have to watch you. At this rate you’ll be catching up with the twenty-first century.’
Matt scowled. ‘Most of it is a load of crap.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘In fact, I’ve never seen such crap.’
‘You have to learn how to filter out the rubbish to find the useful stuff.’
‘I’m a livestock farmer, so I know what crap is.’
‘Yes, Matt.’
Ben perched on the arm of a deep armchair. The chair itself was already occupied by an aged Border collie called Meg, who didn’t even bother opening an eye. She was there by right, and wasn’t moving for anybody. Ben wouldn’t have dreamed of booting her off.
Matt booted up and frowned at the screen as he waited to enter his password. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been looking at ideas for diversification again? What is it this time — rock festivals? You’ve got the fields, and the mud.’
‘That’ll be the day, when I let thousands of hippies camp on my land.’
‘It worked for Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.’
‘No, it didn’t. He had riots between gangs of rival jazz fans.’
Ben laughed. ‘What is it, then?’
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