Ben Cooper and Diane Fry 11 - The Devil’s Edge

by Stephen Booth

  Fry was standing by the back door of the farmhouse when Cooper rang. Even without his name coming up on her screen, she would have recognised his mobile number straight away. They had called each so often when they worked together.

  She hesitated with her finger over the reject call button. He shouldn’t be phoning her, not now. He shouldn’t be trying to influence the inquiry. Proper procedures had to be followed, a complete forensic examination of the scene and interviews with witnesses. She mustn’t let Cooper try to put preconceptions in her mind.

  Fry looked up to see where the DCI was. She felt sure he was somewhere in the house, perhaps upstairs checking the view from the bedroom window where Kate Cooper had been. One of his DCs was in the yard, watching the forensic team at work.

  She pressed a button. ‘Ben, you shouldn’t be calling. Give me one good reason why I should talk to you.’

  ‘You won’t understand the evidence,’ he said.

  ‘Won’t understand? Who do you think you’re talking to?’ Fry saw the DC glance towards her. With an effort, she lowered her voice. ‘Ben, this is wrong.’

  Cooper heard the warning tone, but wasn’t deterred. He tried to get the words out as quickly as possible while he had the chance.

  ‘Did they find any cartridge cases or wads at the scene?’ he said.

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Foxes were Matt’s main worry. They’re getting overconfident these days since the hunting ban, so he often gets close to them. He would have gone for cartridges with a big load, and big pellets. Something like Express Super Game firing number one shot. It makes for a humane kill.’

  ‘Express Super Game? Yes, they found an opened box of those in his gun cabinet.’

  ‘You see? He was never planning to shoot a person. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind.’

  ‘But if he’s disposed of the cases and the wad …’

  ‘The only people who leave their cartridge cases on the floor are those who can afford to employ someone else to pick them up. And plastic wads can be lethal to livestock if they fall on grazing land. So Matt would automatically pick up the cartridge case and the wad. I don’t care what else happened, he would have picked them up. Didn’t he tell you that?’

  ‘He’s been telling his interviewers that he can’t remember. He doesn’t seem to be able to remember much at all, if he’s telling the truth.’

  Cooper bit his lip, holding back the automatic response. There was no point in saying that of course his brother was telling the truth. Matt was a man incapable of lying. He wouldn’t know how to start, even to save himself. But the inquiry team had to find that out for themselves. Hearing it from his brother would only prejudice them against the idea. It was all about balance and fairness.

  His emotions told him it wasn’t fair at all. But his training told him this was the way it had to be.

  ‘I’m telling you, Diane, he picked up the cartridge case and the wad. He wouldn’t even have been thinking about it. He would do it instinctively. You’ll find them in his pocket. And another thing …’

  ‘No, stop.’

  ‘Matt had been called away to deal with some stray sheep last night, and he hadn’t finished washing the yard. He would have left the job until morning. No choice, really.’

  ‘It doesn’t …’

  ‘Think about it, Diane. Just think about it. That’s all I ask.’ As he ended the call, Cooper heard the echo of desperation in his own voice, and wondered what Fry had made of it. Probably she would treat his call with nothing but contempt. But he had to try.

  DI Hitchens met him at the top of the stairs in West Street, no doubt having been alerted by someone that Cooper was on his way up.

  ‘Ben, I know how difficult this must be for you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to take some time off. Go home and support your family. Everybody will understand.’

  Cooper hesitated only for a moment.

  ‘Thank you, sir. But no. The division is too short-staffed as it is, with everything that’s happening right now.’

  ‘We’d cope without you for a while. Seriously, Ben.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll stick with the job.’

  Hitchens frowned a little now. ‘Okay. Well, it’s your decision. If you’ve got work to clear up, do it. But stay away from your brother’s case.’

  ‘I—’

  The DI held up a hand. ‘I know – you’ll tell me that goes without saying. But I have to say it anyway. It’s important, Ben. Important for everyone concerned, I mean. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand. There is one thing I’d like to ask, sir.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I’d like permission to interview Sarah Holland again.’

  Hitchens opened his mouth to refuse, but hesitated. Cooper knew that if he’d asked Superintendent Branagh, the refusal would have been immediate. But the DI was a different matter. They’d worked together for a long time, and Hitchens had surely learned by now that Cooper’s instincts could often be trusted.

  Nevertheless, Cooper kept his fingers crossed out of sight until Hitchens answered.

  ‘Okay, Ben. In a day or two, yes? And do it sensitively. Who will you take with you?’

  ‘Carol Villiers.’

  The DI nodded. ‘Are you happy with her?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Some of the team were at their desks in the CID room when he walked in. Becky Hurst, Gavin Murfin. He could sense their embarrassment, their difficulty at not knowing what to say to him. For once, Murfin was without a wisecrack or a cynical comment.

  They were all good people. But who could he actually rely on for help? At one time he might have gone to Diane Fry. Despite their ups and down over the last few years, Fry had come through when he needed someone to believe in him. Now, she had pretty much written him out of her life.

  In the end, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He picked up his jacket and went down to the car park. Back out in the open air, he stopped to take some deep breaths. He heard a footstep behind him, and turned to see Carol Villiers.

  ‘Ben, you look dreadful,’ she said. ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘Is there anything …?’

  Cooper kicked at a loose stone, turned, and walked away a few feet. He stared unseeing at the rooftops of Edendale spread out in front of him, then walked back again. He was feeling lost.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘What do other people do at a time like this?’

  ‘Focus,’ said Villiers. ‘Focus on something useful, a practical objective. Think about how you can help your brother and his family.’

  ‘The family. Yes, Amy and Josie. Oh God.’

  ‘Ben …’

  ‘Okay, yes. Focus on something. But what?’

  ‘Well, how about this? There was another incident on Tuesday night, somewhere on the outskirts of Sheffield. Dore, I think. The MO fits the Savages exactly. Word is that South Yorkshire have made some more arrests.’

  ‘Tuesday night? Close to the time of the attack on the Barrons?’

  ‘Close enough to make it impossible for the same offenders to be responsible for both. Even Robin Hood and his Merry Men couldn’t be in two places at the same time.’

  ‘No.’

  She patted him on the shoulder. ‘So it looks as though you were right. Your feelings were spot on. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Villiers was looking at him as though she expected jubilation. And he supposed he should be pleased, ought to be experiencing a sense of vindication right now. But the feeling didn’t come. Inside, he just felt dead. Being right no longer gave him any pleasure.

  23

  Even more than the neighbouring villages of Curbar and Froggatt, Riddings was dominated and constrained by its edge. There was nowhere in the village that the edge wasn’t visible, except from inside the houses – and only then in a room where the windows faced away from it.

  To Cooper’s eyes, the people here seemed to have tried
to keep the world out, in their own way. Maybe at a subconscious level they saw the edge as a form of protection, a psychological barrier. It symbolised their desire for privacy.

  Yet the world couldn’t be kept out, could it? You could never escape it, never get away from people altogether. No gates or fences would keep them at bay. The world was right here, in Riddings.

  In some villages he knew in Derbyshire, superstition would be taking hold by now. Grandmothers would be trotting out well-worn stories of past supernatural events, and aged regulars in the local pub would be retelling folk tales about hobs and demons, hideous creatures who came down from the moor at night to spread terror and destruction among God-fearing folk.

  But the inhabitants of Riddings weren’t the type to give in to superstition. They were more likely to put their faith in burglar alarms and electronic gates. Right at this moment, the residents were probably phoning each other to discuss the employment of private security guards. Their demons would be kept away by a man in a uniform with a two-way radio and a German Shepherd. If they were lucky.

  Cooper looked at his phone for the hundredth time that morning. It had become a compulsion since leaving Bridge End Farm. It was far too early for any news, of course. He didn’t even know who he was expecting to call, or what he was hoping to hear. There would be no news yet. All he could do was wait. And waiting, as everyone knew, was the most difficult thing in the world.

  He had to try to think about something else. That was the only way.

  ‘Let’s try to get things into a logical order,’ said Villiers. ‘Focus, remember? If you’re going to be here, Ben, then concentrate your mind.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m okay. Let’s do that.’

  ‘Let’s start with Tuesday night, then – and the Barrons. Why would anyone attack them, if it wasn’t a robbery?’

  ‘They had fallen out with the Chadwicks. Jake Barron had an unpleasant confrontation with William Chadwick.’

  ‘And we know Chadwick has a temper, from the incident at his school,’ said Villiers.

  ‘He admits he was under stress at the time he spoke to Jake.’

  ‘Absolutely. But the Barrons had also been involved in a long-running dispute with Richard Nowak.’

  ‘Mr Reasonable.’

  ‘So he says. That’s not the impression he gives, though.’

  ‘He has no record of violence,’ pointed out Cooper.

  ‘True. But there comes a point when anyone might cross the line.’

  That was true. Cooper had seen it many times – examples of perfectly ordinary people who had lost perspective and cracked under intolerable pressure. No one was immune. No individual could be sure that they would never find themselves in those circumstances.

  ‘Their dispute was over the piece of land in Croft Lane. But it had been settled in court.’

  Villiers shook her head. ‘Not to Mr Nowak’s satisfaction.’

  ‘Okay. But the Barrons’ closest neighbours are the Hollands at Fourways, Tyler Kaye at Moorside House, and Russell Edson at Riddings Lodge. Mr Kaye wasn’t even in the country. And no one seems to have anything against the Hollands.’

  ‘Not that we know of. Not that they’re telling us about.’

  ‘All right.’ Cooper glanced automatically at his phone, then shoved it deliberately into his pocket. ‘And of course we have Mr Gamble.’

  ‘Ah yes, Barry Gamble. If I’ve got this right, at the time of the attack Mr Gamble is out nosying around the village, as is his habit. He’s close to Valley View when he hears a suspicious noise. He sees a light on – and because of his previous observations, he knows this is unusual.’

  There was a sceptical tone to her voice as she spoke the last sentence, an upward inflection that made it sound more like a question. Cooper realised she had put her finger on a point that had bothered him very early on in the inquiry.

  ‘He couldn’t possibly have seen the light from the lane. I checked that out. He must already have gone on to the Barrons’ property.’

  ‘And maybe he was already in their garden when he heard the noise,’ said Villiers. ‘But he doesn’t want to admit that.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘I think it’s very probable.’

  ‘What is Mr Gamble up to, then? Is he a voyeur, a peeping Tom? Hoping for a glimpse of Zoe Barron in a compromising position?’

  ‘Possibly. But I think it’s more he’s just obsessively nosy. He seems to have appointed himself as a one-man unofficial Neighbourhood Watch. Except he’s keeping surveillance on the local residents, instead of watching out for potential intruders as he would have us think.’

  ‘He spends an awful lot of time trying to keep an eye on what his neighbours are doing.’

  ‘He gets around the village quite a bit. He claims to be watching out for intruders and so on. It sounds like a reasonable excuse just now. But Gamble knows these tracks around here better than anybody. I bet if we mapped them in detail, it might be surprising how many properties they border.’

  ‘Well, he’s the man who would know about any disputes between his neighbours, if anyone does.’

  ‘Right.’

  Cooper thought about the neighbouring families in Riddings. They were all here in the village – all those nightmare neighbours that people talked about. The noisy ones who played loud music or left their dogs barking all day, the aggressively territorial ones who argued over boundaries, the obsessively nosy ones who watched every movement you made, the lazy or inconsiderate ones who brought down the value of your property. All human life was here, in its own way. The amount of money some of these individuals possessed made no difference, except on the surface. Underneath, they were still just animals, marking their territory and screaming at intruders.

  Villiers was in full flow now. Cooper could see that she was trying to distract him, to occupy his full attention with her precise rundown of events in Riddings. And he had to admit that she was succeeding. For a few minutes, he’d forgotten what might be happening at Bridge End, or in an interview room at West Street. He fingered his phone in his pocket, then abandoned it again as she continued.

  ‘So,’ said Villiers, ‘whatever the reason he’s there, our Mr Gamble pulls his cowboy hat down over his ears and bravely goes up to the house to see if there’s anything wrong. He looks through the kitchen window …’

  She paused, and frowned.

  ‘Yes?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Why didn’t he knock on the door?’

  ‘Good question. I’d say he didn’t want the Barrons to know he was there, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Do you think there might have been bad blood between them and Mr Gamble too?’

  ‘Almost certainly. They must have been aware of him hanging around. And with the children in the house … well, parents get wary. Protective.’

  Cooper swallowed. It was bound to happen that small things would remind him directly of his brother’s situation. There were obvious parallels between the attack on the Barrons and the incident at Bridge End last night. The difference was that in the first case the householders had become the victims of violence. Matt had not let that happen.

  Villiers was watching him carefully. She didn’t miss much.

  ‘We’re thinking that if Mr Gamble had made a nuisance of himself previously, he might have been nervous of encountering Jake Barron. Yes, I see that. But when he looked through the window and saw Zoe’s body, he still didn’t knock on the door, did he?’

  ‘He told the officers who responded to his 999 call that he was frightened the attackers might still be on the premises,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Mmm. That’s reasonable, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, he couldn’t have known who’d attacked her. It might have been her husband, for all he knew.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Cooper was interested to hear the doubt in her voice again.

  ‘And then there’s the call itself,’ she said.

  ‘He claimed he couldn’t get a mobile phone signal at Valley Vie
w. That’s quite feasible in this area. But I suppose it’s equally likely that he wanted to get away from the scene, for his own safety.’

  ‘Because the attackers might still have been around, yes. But it still seems a bit odd to me that he would run to Riddings Lodge.’

  ‘I guess he went there to use a landline to make the 999 call, as he said – or else he was seeking safety and ran to one of the nearest properties.’

  ‘Mmm. He would have run to Russell Edson for protection, you think?’

  ‘He wouldn’t be my choice,’ admitted Cooper. ‘But he must have known that Tyler Kaye wasn’t in residence. So it was a rock or a hard place. There was nowhere else to go.’

  Villiers smiled. ‘You’re making a good job of justifying his actions.’

  ‘Just trying to put myself in his place.’

  ‘Very good. And who else was out and about that night, apart from Mr Gamble?’

  ‘The Chadwicks were up on Riddings Edge, watching for the Perseid meteor shower. The Hollands had been balsam bashing and called in at the Bridge Inn for a few drinks on the way back. The Edsons had been out for dinner at Bauers restaurant.’

  ‘But they were back home when the attack took place.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Villiers held up a finger. She had a bright, animated expression on her face, like a primary school teacher trying to enliven a class of sleepy children.

  ‘What else do we know about Tuesday?’ she said. ‘Around the time of the attack on the Barrons?’

  ‘A party of walkers saw someone in the phone box, a few yards from Valley View.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Villiers looked round. ‘Well, it’s a place to start.’

  The phone box in the centre of the village was one of the old red ones designed by Gilbert Scott. As a result of a decline in their use, they were preserved in many areas for purely decorative purposes. Cooper crossed The Green to peer through the windows. Yes, totally empty. Stripped of its phone, coin box, information panel, everything. No one used public phone boxes any more. They were heritage.

  ‘Who would be standing in the phone box, then?’ said Villiers. ‘Not some visitor who thought there was going to be a phone in it. They’d be straight out again.’