Scared to Live bcadf-7

by Stephen Booth

  It was Lindsay Mullen who lay on the dissection table. The mark of the incision where the pathologist had opened her up glared a startling red against her waxy skin. Fry was glad she hadn’t witnessed the removal of the skull for examination of the brain. The noise of the saw and the smell of singed bone were the worst part of a postmortem for her. Well, there was one other stage that was as bad — the moment when the loosened scalp was folded forward over the corpse’s face with the skin inside out, like a towel thrown over the beer pumps at closing time.

  ‘A well-nourished Caucasian female, physical condition consistent with a stated age of twenty-nine. Sixty-one kilos, one hundred and seventy-three centimetres.’ The pathologist looked up. ‘That’s about nine stone nine pounds, five feet seven inches.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Physical injuries are all superficial. No signs of external trauma.’

  ‘Any signs of recent sexual activity?’ asked Fry, to take her mind off the smells.

  Mrs van Doon pursed her lips and flicked back her sleeves. ‘You have all the best ideas, don’t you?’

  ‘I need any indication I can get of whether there was another person in the house that night.’

  ‘Yes, I understand where you’re heading. I can see why they employ you on these cases. I imagine you don’t leave any bit of dirt unexamined.’

  ‘We have a lot in common, then,’ said Fry coolly, surprised by the sharpness of her tone. But she supposed even pathologists were human sometimes.

  ‘No, no signs of sexual intercourse. This is the only item that’s of real interest — ’

  The pathologist held up a body part that had been cut free and sliced open with a scalpel. Fry didn’t recognize it, which was probably what Mrs van Doon expected.

  ‘This is the oesophagus. The black stains you can see on the inside are soot. They suggest that your victim was alive when the fire started, because she breathed in smoke. There’s enough in the oesophagus to have resulted in asphyxiation.’

  ‘So that’s the cause of death?’

  ‘Possibly … There’s a sort of triple whammy in these cases. Inhalation of soot particles damages the airways, because the particles are super-heated and contain toxic agents. Hot air burns the upper passages, too, and can cause vagal inhibition. But there’s a third factor. Carbon monoxide is normally associated with soot inhalation, and I can deduce some CO poisoning from the cherry pink discoloration on the torso. We’ll get blood samples analysed for carboxyhaemoglobin levels. But anything above fifty per cent is fatal.’

  ‘I presume there’ll be a report soon.’

  ‘When I get time.’ The pathologist began to strip off her gloves. ‘The other two fire fatalities are children, I see.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know, the children look almost undamaged, but for the carbon monoxide discoloration and some smoke staining.’

  Fry searched for something to say. ‘That makes it worse, I suppose. They don’t look as though they should be dead, do they?’

  ‘On an emotional level, that’s true.’

  She watched the pathologist drop her gloves into a bin, wondering if she’d just been the object of a subtle insult, or a slur on her professionalism. On an emotional level? But perhaps it had been a moment of personal confession. It was difficult to tell with Juliana van Doon.

  13

  In Matlock Bath, houses seemed to climb on top of each other in their haste to escape the valley floor. Above them were the two Victorian pleasure grounds on Masson Hill — the Heights of Jacob, the Heights of Abraham. Their biblical slopes were occupied by modern leisure parks now, the fairy-tale shapes of castles and towers poking up among the trees.

  For the past twenty years, there had been no need for anyone to slog up the winding paths to reach the hilltop park at the north end of the village. Strings of white cable cars now rode high over the valley from a base station near the railway line, carrying visitors up to enjoy the play areas, the Treetops gift shop, the Hi Cafe and the Summit Bar. A grey stone tower was visible on the summit, a flag fluttering in the breeze.

  The weather had been warm right through into October, which felt wrong in the Peak District. After another dry summer, the trees had burst into an explosion of yellows and golds. Where the turrets and battlements of Lilliput Land Castle had lurked among dense foliage all summer, now they were emerging slowly from a sea of reds and golds. Some of the other features of Gulliver’s Kingdom were being revealed, too, like the chairlift and the campanile on Fantasy Terrace.

  Cooper could see the new indoor facility standing out prominently on the hillside. It was designed to stay open during the winter, and it housed everything from Wild West shoot-outs to an ice palace. Or so his nieces told him. He supposed he’d have to take them there one day, when he got some time off.

  Turning left out of the aquarium, he called at the neighbouring properties, which happened to be the two villas housing B amp;Bs. There was a chance that Rose Shepherd had come into Matlock Bath to meet someone who was staying here, although there didn’t seem to be any reason why she should have killed time next door in that case.

  Drawing a blank, he walked a bit further up North Parade, where he found another amusement centre and a shop selling hand-made chocolates, both of which were closed.

  Across the road was the Jubilee Bridge — wooden planks and iron girders, with an old gas lamp on a central arch. It led across the river to a bandstand and the remains of a switchback. There were more wooded slopes lying above Lovers’ Walk. Their steepness called for erosion controls: log revetments, brush and board hurdles, a dead hedge. Here and there, sycamores and beeches had been felled, no doubt condemned because they weren’t native to Derbyshire.

  An artist had set his easel up on the bridge, trying to capture the scene downriver towards the Pavilion, with trees reflected in the moving water. Cooper often came across painters, though usually in the summer. He had to admire the effort they put in, if only to carry their equipment from the car. But they were setting themselves a hopeless challenge. This landscape was constantly changing. No set of watercolours was going to preserve it on a canvas.

  He noticed that Life in a Lens stood on the other side of the aquarium, with a Victorian tea room on the ground floor. This was his chance to call in and ask about the webcam.

  When he came out a few minutes later, a school party was queuing to enter the mining museum further down the road. There were two cameras on the outside wall nearby, but they were focused on the entrance to Brody’s nightclub. When he was a teenager, Brody’s had been known to the local kids as ‘The Pav’, because it was located on the upper floor of the Pavilion, above the mining museum and the tourist information centre.

  But where the heck was Gavin Murfin? Cooper stood by his Toyota for a while, looking up and down the street. Then he walked a few yards along South Parade, past the ice-cream parlour and the antiques centre to the corner, where he found that a science-fiction bookshop he remembered had closed down. He supposed it had been a mistake to let Gavin take the interview with the waitress at the tea rooms. The smell of fish and chips on the promenade was so inescapable that he must be giddy with hunger by now.

  Finally, Cooper pulled out his phone and called Gavin’s number. Strangely, the ringing tone seemed to be echoed by a tune playing somewhere nearby. He turned and looked into the windows of the building behind him. There was Gavin, eating a choc ice. And waving.

  ‘OK, I did the waitress at the Riber Tea Rooms,’ said Murfin when Cooper got him away from his choc ice. ‘Nice lass, name of Tina. Get this — reckons she saw Rose Shepherd talking to two other people at a table in the cafe on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Wow, you got more than I did,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s why I thought I deserved a reward.’

  ‘What time was this, Gavin?’

  ‘Around two thirty, she thinks.’

  ‘That must have been after Miss Shepherd came out of the aquarium.’

&nbs
p; Murfin used the tip of one finger to wipe a bit of chocolate from his front teeth. ‘I chatted Tina up a bit, and I got her to do her best with descriptions. But the tea rooms were full that afternoon. She did say the woman she recognized from the paper was wearing a dark jacket.’

  ‘That fits. What about the other two?’

  ‘Ah, there she was struggling a bit, poor lass. She says they’d come in earlier, a man and a woman. But she had no reason to take particular notice of them. The Shepherd woman came in about a quarter of an hour later, and she was on her own, which is more unusual. She ordered a coffee, paid for it, then took her time looking round, and went and sat at the couple’s table.’

  ‘Did she seem to know them?’

  ‘That’s what Tina’s not really sure about. There were no empty tables, so Miss Shepherd would have had to sit with someone, and she chose those two.’

  ‘Right. We don’t know why, though?’

  ‘Maybe because they looked the most harmless. All Tina can say is that when she took the coffee to the table, the three of them weren’t talking and the atmosphere seemed cool. But they did chat a bit later on. The couple left the cafe first, and Miss Shepherd went out right after them. The money for the couple’s bill was left on the table.’

  Cooper unlocked the car. Standing at the kerb behind it was an entire family of bikers — mum, dad and two small children, all dressed in matching leathers and gathered round a pair of purple Suzukis.

  ‘Well, it’s something at least, Gavin,’ he said. ‘She must have come down into Matlock Bath for a reason.’

  ‘Oh, and I did a couple of shops,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Yes, the ice-cream parlour. I saw that.’

  Murfin groaned theatrically. ‘You know, Ben, you’re getting as bad as Miss.’

  ‘Get in the car, Gavin. We’ve got to call at Masson Mill.’

  Masson had been the world’s oldest working textile mill until production stopped fifteen years ago. Here, in the middle part of the Derwent Valley, was where industrial history had changed. It had all started for Sir Richard Arkwright at Cromford Mill, just downstream. But Masson was his great flagship.

  Cooper couldn’t remember details of the innovations that led to Arkwright’s success, the industrial secrets German manufacturers had gone to great lengths to get hold of. But he could see how Arkwright’s status had risen purely by looking at the building. This mill hadn’t been built, but designed. Instead of a dark, cavernous shed, it was an edifice intended to impress. The three central bays were built out towards the road and decorated with half-moons of glass between Venetian-style windows. Above the windows stood a shuttered cupola, and Sir Richard’s name spelled out on the brickwork in proud capital letters.

  One of the later extensions to the mill had been converted into a car park. Cooper drove up a ramp and parked on the roof near a side entrance to the shopping village. Over the wall, he could see the convex weir built to take advantage of an outcrop of rock on the opposite bank of the river. From there, the water ran into a goyt, the fast-flowing channel that had driven the mill’s waterwheels.

  ‘What are we looking for here, Ben?’

  ‘Eva Hooper. She runs a retail unit on the road level.’

  Murfin opened the door into the shops. ‘Mmm, cakes.’

  There were four open-plan retail levels, accessed from a central staircase like an old-fashioned department store. Each floor was divided into areas selling discount designer clothes, furniture, food, golf equipment. The mill clock was still on the wall at road level, but for some reason it had stopped at twelve noon. On the lowest level was a restaurant, lined with windows overlooking the river. A patch of brown scum had formed on the water, as if a few gallons of coffee had been spilled there.

  ‘Gavin, why don’t you find the offices and ask about CCTV footage? There’s a camera over the main entrance.’

  ‘All right.’

  Cooper had seen signs on this floor for the working textile museum. Could it have been part of Miss Shepherd’s afternoon out, before her visit to the aquarium? Perhaps Arkwright’s legacy had some significance for her. Come to think of it, she was old enough to have worked here at the mill. Had she been revisiting old haunts, re-living memories one last time?

  Cooper shook himself. He’d begun to imagine the victim having some kind of premonition that she was about to die. But no one knew the time of their death in advance, unless they had some terminal illness. Or they were intending to commit suicide. That was the only way to be really sure.

  The museum was reached by leaving the shopping area and passing through an echoey room over uneven wooden floors that creaked and shifted underfoot, worn by decades of use by Arkwright’s millworkers. Bobbins and shuttles were on sale here, along with other mementoes of the textile industry that had once employed so many.

  He found a man taking money on a flight of stairs that led down into the spinning and weaving sheds.

  ‘Do you issue admission tickets here?’ he asked.

  ‘No. You get a leaflet with a map of the route through the rooms of the museum — see?’

  ‘Were you working on Saturday?’

  ‘In the afternoon.’

  ‘Do you remember this woman coming in?’

  The man looked at Cooper’s photograph.

  ‘No, sorry.’

  In the rooms below, two enormous machines rattled away unattended, and stacks of shuttles sat in alcoves along the walls. There were wicker baskets and wooden trolleys, shelves full of old tools and equipment. An ancient typewriter, dusty cardboard boxes. Cooper could smell lubricating oil and hear the chug of the looms, leather belts spinning over wheels in the glass-roofed sheds. A tiny cubicle looked to be an overseer’s office, dusty ledgers still open on the desk, wire-framed glasses poking out of an ancient spectacle case. Visitors’ direction signs pointed towards a distant doorway — the bobbin room.

  Cooper turned back. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said.

  In a distant corner of the shopping village, he found Eva Hooper. Her unit sold prints of Peak District landscapes, ethnic gifts, pottery, leather-work, gemstones. And, of course, a range of postcards, calendars and greeting cards — anything that tourists might be interested in.

  ‘Yes, I think she was here,’ she said. ‘It was Saturday, so we were quite busy.’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  ‘If it had been during the week, I might have remembered her better.’

  ‘Did she buy anything?’

  ‘I’m not sure. If she paid by cash, there won’t be any record of her name.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You could ask my assistant, but she’s not here today. She works for me part-time when I’m busy.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Frances — we call her Fran.’

  Cooper paused with his pen poised over his notebook. He’d spoken to a Frances very recently. It wasn’t a common name, but coincidences did happen …

  ‘Frances what?’

  ‘Birtland. She lives a couple of miles away, in Foxlow.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘I know.’

  Fry was satisfied that she’d done everything she could to prevent any further loss of evidence from the house at Darwin Street. She’d taken all the actions necessary to preserve the scene and create a log. The examination had been thorough. True, in an ideal world, it could have happened a bit sooner. But since when had this world been ideal? At least it had been done before any cleaning up or salvage operations started.

  Now she was anxious to get Brian Mullen back at the scene as soon as she could, in case any more items came to light that needed to be recovered. Once that had been done, she could relax and let the clean-up get under way.

  The good news from the fire officer was that significant evidence often remained, even after the most destructive of fires. She recognized some of the terms he used, but mostly his optimistic tone. The experts had even agreed on where the fire started, though apparently Quinton Downie had
insisted on defining a radius of error about a metre around the likely source.

  One of the SOCOs assigned to Darwin Street was Liz Petty. Some people turned up everywhere. Inside the hallway of the house, Petty was unpacking another holdall full of stepping plates.

  ‘Watch where you’re walking,’ she said, without looking round.

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  She looked up then. ‘Oh. Hi, Diane. How are you doing?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Making progress on the enquiry?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘There’ll be some publicity on this one, I suppose. There was a TV news van outside earlier. I don’t know what they were filming.’

  ‘They can film what they like. There’s nothing for them to see.’

  She was aware of Petty watching her as she moved around the room. But after a moment, Fry became focused again. She was noticing all the changes that were taking place in the house — the plastic sheeting, the evidence containers, the yellow markers and flags that decorated the carpet, creating a bizarre new pattern on what had once been Lindsay Mullen’s cream Wilton.

  ‘Actually, I heard you weren’t getting on well with Quinton Downie,’ said Petty.

  Fry turned. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘People talk. Even firefighters have ears, you know. Otherwise, their helmets would fall off.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  Petty looked up at her from her position crouched over a stepping plate. ‘Downie is very well respected in his field. He lectures regularly at Centrex.’

  But Fry wasn’t impressed by the mention of the police training centre. ‘That doesn’t mean he has any right to lecture me.’

  Downie was in the sitting room packing his equipment away. He looked satisfied with his efforts, reminding Fry of the fire service dog, the chocolate Labrador. He wasn’t quite wagging his tail, but it was a close-run thing.

  ‘Liquid accelerants are volatile, so it’s good that we collected debris samples early,’ he said when Fry entered. ‘Arsonists tend to use petrol products, because they’re easy to obtain and have a low flashpoint. But petrol has rather a narrow flammability range — it stops burning when the oxygen level is reduced. Hydrogen and acetylene are far more dangerous.’