Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  ‘No, of course not. In fact, it might help you, Diane. Help to put things behind you, I mean.’

  Was it her imagination, or did he put a little more emphasis on the phrase ‘behind you’ than was strictly necessary, or natural? Fry felt she was being given a hint. A gentle hint for now, but it might turn into a warning very quickly.

  ‘You know what it’s like with people from your past. When you meet them again, you remember why you didn’t keep in touch with them. You realize you have nothing in common.’

  ‘That’s right. You’ve moved on, Diane. That’s good. A nice, clean break is probably best for all concerned.’

  Fry opened the door and stood on the pavement. She watched them drive away before she went back to her own car. Best for all concerned? Was it? She was sure there were some people who’d be very happy if she just gave up and walked away. DI Gareth Blake might be among them. So why was he warning her off, yet helping her covertly at the same time?

  And how could Blake have known that she would be in Edgbaston? Surely he wasn’t having her followed? She would have noticed — her guard wasn’t down that much. And besides, he would never have got surveillance approved. She knew how these things worked. There was no justification for such an operation, let alone enough spare cash in the budget. Unless Blake had been following her himself on some lone crusade, it was impossible. And he wasn’t the loner type.

  So who was he in contact with who might have been giving him information?

  Well, there was only one person. And if she couldn’t trust her own sister, who could she trust?

  The frustration that was growing inside her made Fry feel reckless. If she wasn’t very careful, she would do something stupid. There was no one here to restrain her, to offer the quiet word of advice, or make the sensible suggestion.

  In Derbyshire, a Traffic unit had taken a shout on the Ml. Several calls had come in that night reporting an obstruction on the northbound carriageway, midway between junctions 28 and 29.

  Ben Cooper heard the news on his radio as he was leaving West Street. He’d been working late into the evening, trying to catch up with all the jobs he hadn’t done, and perhaps not wanting to go home. He’d phoned Mrs Shelley and asked her to go round and feed the cat. At least that was one thing he wouldn’t have to feel too guilty about.

  But the message about the motorway incident caught his attention. Last time an obstruction was reported on the Ml, it turned out to be a human body. Admittedly, it would have been almost unrecognizable by the time the later callers saw it. The log had showed eight minutes thirty seconds between the initial call and the final one, when the first response car was already on the scene.

  Cooper had still been in uniform then, just on the point of transferring to CID. He and his partner had been diverted to the scene to help out. It had been evening rush hour, he remembered. From the squashed and bloodied look of the body, it seemed that every vehicle in the middle lane had hit it before Traffic officers managed to close the carriageway. By then, it was just another bit of roadkill stirring gently in the slipstream of a lorry.

  ‘A drunk,’ one of the Traffic officers had said. ‘Drunks and motorways are a bad mix.’

  Then Cooper found himself being called up on the radio by the control room.

  ‘Traffic have an incident on the motorway, between junctions 29 and 30.’

  ‘I heard,’ said Cooper. ‘But that’s C Division. What has it got to do with me?’

  ‘Your attendance has been specifically requested, DS Cooper.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  Cooper jumped into his car and headed out of Edendale. Frowning, he contacted the Traffic officer whose name he’d been given by Control, the officer in charge at the scene. It was a man he knew, a long-serving member of the Roads Policing Unit who had probably been present at similar incidents, possibly even the one that Cooper remembered.

  ‘Another one?’ he said. ‘A jumper? Between 28 and 29?’

  ‘It’s that bridge on the B road near Tibshelf Services. Do you know where I mean?’

  ‘Newton Wood Lane?’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s the one. It’s the quietest spot you can pick, if you’re really going to do it. The bridge on the A3 8 is bigger, but it’s much too busy. You’re likely to get some Good Samaritan stopping and interfering.’

  ‘It still has nothing to do with me,’ said Cooper, but less certainly.

  ‘We were lucky. We got an ID straight away.’

  ‘An ID on the body?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t actually jumped yet. You know what it’s like, Ben — we got a load of contradictory reports and it came out all garbled. We arrived expecting a dead one, and he’s very much alive.’

  ‘And now…?’

  ‘And now he’s on the bridge, and he’s threatening to jump any minute. He says his name is Sean Deacon.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cooper. ‘So it is to do with me, after all.’

  Sean Deacon had resisted all attempts to talk him down from the parapet of the bridge. He was precariously balanced, and everyone could see that a move too close would send him over. Bizarrely, Deacon had a briefcase clutched in one hand, the other braced against the top of the parapet, which was barely wide enough to stand on.

  ‘We’ve closed the outside lane underneath him,’ said an officer in a yellow high-vis jacket. ‘But it won’t do him much good if he goes over.’

  A few yards away, paramedics were waiting, and a crew in a fire-and-rescue appliance. It was clear that Deacon had been waiting for Cooper to arrive. He smiled briefly when he saw Cooper approaching the bridge, walking into the headlights of a police car.

  And then Deacon jumped to his feet, ran ten yards towards the opposite carriageway, balancing like a tightrope walker, before leaping out into the air over the motorway. He seemed to glide through the air, his silhouette caught in the flickering lights of the oncoming traffic, his jacket opening out around him like wings. For that one moment, he was a bird soaring.

  Cooper began to run across the bridge, footsteps pounding after him. He saw Deacon’s briefcase falling into the traffic, picked out by the headlights of a lorry, bouncing and cart-wheeling, forcing cars to swerve in a terrible cacophony of horns and screeching tyres.

  Deacon had taken them all by surprise. He’d run so far along the parapet and jumped so hard that he’d landed on the grass banking just beyond the hard shoulder. For a moment, Cooper glimpsed him, crumpled against the base of a tree. Incredibly, he still seemed to be alive. Perhaps the undergrowth had softened his landing. Cooper saw him beginning to move, to sit up against the trunk, a hand pushing himself off the ground, his white face staring into a blinding light.

  Then something hit the tree with a shocking impact. Cooper could tell from the noise that it was more than just metal hitting solid wood. It was more like the crunch of a boot crushing a snail. Splintered shell and ruptured flesh. The sound turned his stomach.

  When they scrambled down the banking, the emergency services found Sean Deacon pinned to the tree by the grille of a Transit van that had swerved off the carriageway. A paramedic went to him, shook her head at Cooper, opened her kit, and injected Deacon with painkiller.

  ‘Why did you do this, Sean?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘I just came to the end of the line,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in going on. It’s better this way.’

  Cooper didn’t know what to say. Deacon gripped his arm.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ he said.

  ‘Of course. Anything.’

  ‘I never intended to do any harm.’

  And somehow, Cooper knew that he meant it.

  He held Deacon’s hand so tightly that it would have been painful, if it hadn’t been for the diamorphine flooding through the man’s collapsing veins.

  ‘Let it go, Sean,’ he said. ‘Let it go. It’ll be all right.’

  Finally, he felt the grip relax. Deacon released a long, rattling breath that came from deep inside his body somewher
e. It was more than just carbon dioxide escaping from the lungs, more than just a simple exhalation. It was the dying breath.

  ‘Let it go. Don’t struggle, just let it go.’

  Cooper looked up at the paramedic and stood aside for her. His mind numb, he began to walk away, with no idea where he was heading, just walking away from the scene. Don’t look back, he thought. There’s no need to look back.

  Behind him, he heard the fire and rescue service start up their cutters. It was too late for Sean now, but it had to be done. All these things had to be done.

  At the top of the banking, he reached a fence, and stopped. The Derbyshire landscape stretched out in front of him — the village of Tibshelf, Woolley Moor, and the higher hills around Matlock in the distance. Roads glittered like strings of jewels as they snaked across the moors. Villages lay sleeping in the darkness all across the Peak District.

  Cooper wondered whether Sean Deacon was flying now, or falling. Was his spirit whispering across the sky, somewhere high above those night-time hills? Or was that Deacon’s voice he could hear, screaming faintly in the dark as he plunged into a deeper blackness?

  Flying, or falling?

  Well, perhaps it was all the same, in the end.

  A 1920s red-brick pub stood on the corner of Warstone Lane and Vyse Street in the Jewellery Quarter, near the Chamberlain clock. The Rose Villa Tavern, it was called. A Mitchells amp; Butlers pub, drinkers sitting among decorative tiles.

  Fry looked at her watch again. Andy Kewley was late. That was unlike him. But maybe he’d needed a stiff drink before their meeting. She glanced up Vyse Street towards the Rose Villa, considered walking up to see if she could find him propped in the corner of the bar with a whisky, staring morosely at the tiles.

  But that picture wasn’t right. It didn’t fit Kewley’s personality. He was much too careful for that. Much too cautious.

  Fry entered the Warstone Lane cemetery. Hundreds of Victorian gravestones marching across the slopes, lurking in the hollows, hiding beneath shrouds of ivy. Tiers of catacombs, defaced angels, tombs blackened with soot. And that powerful, sickly sweet smell, still strong on the night air.

  An engine revved noisily nearby, and a car raced away on the Middleway. It was very dark away from the streetlights, and Fry pulled a small torch from her pocket. She looked down from the top tier of the catacombs to the grass circle below, the centre of the amphitheatre.

  For a moment, Fry thought the vandals had struck again since her last visit to the cemetery, that another memorial angel had been toppled to the ground. In the light of her torch, she saw blank eyes pressed into the grass, a face mottled with damp.

  But when she looked again, she knew this was no angel. The face was pale, but it wasn’t stone. The eyes were blank with the stare of death. And the mottled dampness was much too dark. It was dark as clotted blood.

  21

  Friday

  The next morning, Ben Cooper drove through endless red-brick suburbs, streets so identical that it made him wonder how thousands of Birmingham commuters ever found their way home.

  On the map, Birmingham looked like a giant spider’s web, a dense network of roads radiating out in a ragged pattern to absorb the surrounding motorways, M42, M5 and M6. Between the roads, the ground was thick with houses.

  Cooper took a wrong turning somewhere as he left the Expressway. He thought he’d probably come off too soon, and was driving through some apparently nameless suburb. He stopped to look at the A to Z and turn round, and found himself sitting in front of a bay-windowed semi in an empty, tree-lined street. Cooper looked around him. Acres of brick and leaded glass. Bitumen-stained fencing, and flower beds full of pansies. This place was so suburban it was almost a caricature of itself. It might look comforting if you belonged here. But it was pretty damn weird if you didn’t.

  He knew there must be thousands and thousands of homes like this, out there in the spider’s web. Suburb upon suburb, making up a vast brick blanket that covered most of the West Midlands. Warwickshire had been here once, and part of Staffordshire. Now great chunks of them had been absorbed into the urban sprawl.

  While he was stopped, he called Fry’s mobile number.

  ‘Diane, are you at the hotel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘What do you want to know for? What’s going on, Ben?’

  ‘I’m coming to see you.’

  ‘What? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Birmingham. I’m not sure exactly which part.’

  ‘At the risk of sounding dim — why?’

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘And you couldn’t do it on the phone? You’re not turning into another paranoid, are you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Never mind. Come to Hockley. Warstone Lane, in the Jewellery Quarter. You’ll find it easily enough. Just follow all the police cars.’

  A few minutes later, Cooper finally reached the city centre. Its tower blocks, streams of traffic and crowds of pedestrians made him feel he was nothing but a single ant in the middle of a seething ant heap. Well, one insect might be insignificant. But at least that meant it went pretty much unnoticed by the rest of the heap.

  It had always seemed to Cooper that city people lived in a permanent sodium twilight. It never really grew dark here, and the stars were invisible. The sky was only a dim void, way up there beyond the tower blocks. And in the daytime, it didn’t seem to get properly light in the shadow of those high-rise buildings. The streets running west to east were too narrow for the sun ever to reach the pavement. So shoppers and office workers gravitated to the open spaces to soak up some rays in their lunch breaks. The cathedral gardens were crowded with people escaping the shadows.

  His departure on his rest day hadn’t been popular, particularly when he’d told Liz about it.

  ‘I’ve got to get right away for a few hours,’ he said. ‘The incident last night really shook me up.’

  ‘I understand, Ben. It’s been a tough week.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to take more time off than just a few hours.’

  ‘No, I’ll be all right. Too much to do.’

  ‘So where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Birmingham.’

  ‘Birmingham? You’re kidding. Is this actually work?’

  ‘Well…I can’t say, really.’

  And she didn’t sound happy with the reply.

  ‘Ben,’ she repeated, ‘why are you going to Birmingham?’

  ‘Liz — ’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that Diane Fry is there?’

  Cooper could have kicked himself. Of course she would know that. He bet that Fry’s trip had been the subject of office gossip for days. It might have been better if he’d lied. She would have found him out though, and then it would have been even worse.

  But what could he say to Liz now that would smooth things over, yet wouldn’t be a lie?

  ‘Diane needs my help,’ he said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Simple? You might think so, Ben. But I’m not sure it is.’

  DI Blake looked seriously troubled now. His face was creased with disappointment, as if Fry had let him down somehow.

  ‘Diane,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I remember you as a first-class colleague when we worked together in Aston. Straight as an arrow — that was DC Fry. Always going by the book.’

  Fry said nothing. He hadn’t asked a question, so there was no need for an answer. Silence was a weapon that worked both ways.

  She’d already been interviewed by members of the Major Incident Unit attending the scene of Andy Kewley’s death. Blake must have been alerted at an early stage, because he arrived before she’d even finished making her initial statement.

  Fry watched the West Midlands forensic scene investigators in their white scene suits and blue latex gloves combing through the cemetery, picking among the cider bottles on the moss-covered tombs
tones. They would be looking for fingerprints, fibres, blood or hair, searching for footprints or weapons. She wished them luck in the tangled undergrowth and broken memorials.

  She and Blake were standing at the outer cordon near the RV point. They were prohibited from the scene itself, excluded as unnecessary personnel.

  Fry thought of the three principles of crime-scene management — protect, record and recover.

  The potential for contamination must be immense. If an item of evidence was vulnerable, the chances were that everyone was going to walk over it. She might have walked over something herself, crushed some fragment of vital trace evidence into the dirt.

  ‘How was he killed?’ asked Fry. ‘It looked like a head injury to me. But they won’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Yes, blunt instrument.’

  ‘He can’t have been dead for long. He liked to be on time.’

  ‘And you didn’t see anybody?’ asked Blake.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So was there some particular reason you were meeting him?’

  ‘Because he called me and asked me to, that’s all. I covered it all in my statement to the MIU.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right — it’s not my enquiry. But I worked with Kewley for a while too, don’t forget.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Who would want to attack Andy Kewley?’

  ‘Well, we get all kinds of people hanging around in places like this. Sociopaths, drunks, drug addicts. Individuals who ought to be in secure accommodation, but who’ve fallen through cracks in the system. They’re drawn to disused areas like old cemeteries.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean it was a random assault? Just some harmless homicidal crank?’

  ‘I don’t know, Diane. I don’t have any information. What do you think?’

  Fry didn’t answer the question. ‘Somebody must have seen Andy arrive, at least.’

  ‘Uniforms are doing a trawl for witnesses, but my guess is it will be a short list.’

  Fry saw Ben Cooper arrive at the outer cordon, looking be-wildered by the extent of the activity in and around the cemetery. She also thought he appeared particularly dishevelled today. His hair fell untidily across his forehead, and she wasn’t sure that he’d even shaved properly this morning.