Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  Seeing it reminded Cooper of the previous night, when he got home to Edendale. In his flat, it had occurred to him to log on to his War Tribe account, to see if he’d been accepted into a tribe. But he’d been punished for being such a noob. SmokeLord had already slaughtered his soldiers, knocked down his wall, and conquered his city. It was now part of Alex Nield’s growing empire. He’d renamed it Powder Hut. That was probably some obscure insult.

  The drive from the village down to Wetton Mill was quite a white-knuckle ride. Cooper found a narrow single-track road all the way, through dense banks of cow parsley and meadow buttercup, camouflaging the dry-stone walls on either side. The road was barely wide enough for the Toyota to pass without swiping lumps off the vegetation. On this kind of road, it was best to keep an eye out for passing places. And pray that you didn’t meet a car coming the other way.

  At the bottom of Leek Road, he drove over the bridge at Redhurst Crossing and through the open pastures below Ossoms Hill to the Manifold Trail. It was incredible to think that this narrow pathway alongside the Manifold had been a rail line once. It was a re-surfaced section of the old Leek and Manifold Light Railway, which had carried milk churns from Ecton Diary and passengers to the tourist attractions along the route. High on a limestone crag, he glimpsed one of those attractions — the dark mouth of Thor’s Cave.

  Cooper pulled the car over at the first bridge and parked it off the road. He would have to walk from here to see the river properly.

  As soon as he got out of his car, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck go up. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The scene was very quiet and peaceful. The only sounds were the chattering alarm call of a blackbird that he’d disturbed from the bushes, and the whirr of a pheasant on the hillside above.

  He looked around, wondering if he was sensing the presence of someone else nearby. But there was no one around, not a soul. Not a car, nor even a bicycle. No one walking the Manifold Trail — not within sight or earshot, anyway. So why did he feel so uneasy?

  Walking towards the first bridge, he couldn’t shake the feeling off. His own footsteps on the trail sounded wrong. It was as if the whole of the valley was holding its breath, waiting for him to do something, to speak, shout, make some kind of noise to break the spell.

  Then he came round the bend and looked over the parapet of the bridge, and saw the reason for it. The absence of noise should have warned him earlier. It wasn’t exactly a silence, but a sound that had been missing from the background for the past few minutes. And now it was absent from the foreground too. Without the sound of rushing water, the call of the blackbird sounded more piercing, the whirr of the pheasant so much louder. It was unnatural.

  In Wetton, Mrs Challinor had talked about the River Manifold running through here. But Cooper could see there was a problem. He was looking at an empty river bed. It was bone dry, littered with desiccated branches and dried-out boulders. Its stones were as dry as if they’d never seen water.

  The muddy edges told a different story, of course. There had been water here once. But right now, the fact was inescapable. The river had gone.

  26

  Diane Fry sat on the bed in her hotel room, trying to work out how she felt. Somehow, she’d slept through the bad hours. As a result, she’d woken this morning feeling disorientated, and strangely deprived. It was as if something was missing from her regular routine, that jolt of fear that she usually woke to, the dry mouth and tangle of bed clothes. She opened her eyes and saw not only a strange room, but a different psychological landscape.

  And now, after a shower, she felt much better. Her muscles ached, and the skin was scraped off the knuckles of one hand. But she felt positive, energetic, and ready for more action. The world out there was waiting for her to make decisions.

  Having got hold of William Leeson’s address, she wasn’t sure what she intended to do with it. She was reluctant to confront anyone on their doorstep. She was too far out of her patch, and too exposed. But she’d already taken plenty of risks. She’d reached that point of no return. There was no turning back from the truth now.

  One decision had to be made quickly. A message was waiting for her on her phone. An officer from the Major Incident Unit would like her to come in again to help them with their enquiries into Mr Kewley’s death. They had some more questions to ask her. Would this morning suit? Well, actually, no.

  The address that Eddie Doyle had given her was way out in the leafier suburbs near Solihull, where the trees grew denser and street signs were few and far between.

  Fry pulled her car on to the grass verge near a field gate and looked at the sweeping drive beyond the wrought-iron gates. She could see a CCTV camera and an entry phone. This was a man who took his security seriously, then. It suggested a past that might be expected to catch up with him one day. An uneasiness about who might come calling.

  Well, she could sit right here in her car until Leeson decided to emerge from his house, which might be hours or days. Or she could try the field, and see what security was like at the back.

  There were cows in the field, a black-and-white herd, lurching ponderously about and munching the grass. But Fry had seen plenty of cows before, thanks to her time in Derbyshire. She knew all about cow pats and dung flies, midges and thistles. She knew to be wary of mad-eyed bovines whose rear ends gushed like fountains. These things held no mystery for her any more.

  The animals watched her with lethargic movements of their huge heads, jaws rotating slowly, ears and tails twitching to keep off the flies. Fry reached a small copse of trees fenced off with barbed wire to keep the cows out. She could see that the far side of the copse overlooked the back garden of William Leeson’s house. Another fence there, of course. But the undergrowth was dense enough to give her a concealed vantage point.

  When she reached the back fence, she realized that one of the trees was close enough to provide a handy overhanging branch. That was remiss of someone. Whoever was responsible for maintenance should have been doing some trimming back to maintain the security of the premises. If she was the local crime prevention officer following up reports of a burglary, she’d have words of advice to give. Now, she considered their oversight from a different angle.

  A few minutes later, Fry felt gravel crunch under her feet as she reached the edge of the drive. Ornamental shrubs had provided cover most of the way across the sloping lawn, closemown grass muffling the sound of her feet. She hoped Leeson didn’t possess a guard dog. She didn’t like dogs, especially those big ones with teeth like tombstones.

  From here, the drive swept around the back of the house towards a row of garages. The doors of one garage stood open, revealing a soft-topped sports car of some kind. Fry’s mind was completely blank on models of sports car, but this one looked old. A classic car, she supposed. Something with leather seats and a noisy exhaust. Not the sort of car you’d leave parked on a street in Handsworth.

  She found a set of French windows looking on to a patio. They stood open, too. The warm weather was working to her advantage, the way it did for burglars.

  Fry slid through and surveyed the room. It had a desk and bookshelves, a laptop standing temptingly open. Then she heard the creak of a handle as a door swung slowly open.

  When she turned, she was staring into the barrel of a handgun. William Leeson was pointing it directly at her head. He held the weapon professionally, in two hands, his body braced to achieve a steady aim. Someone had given him training.

  ‘So you’re going to shoot me, Mr Leeson?’ she said. ‘Seriously? That will look good.’

  ‘I have special protection measures in place at this property,’ he said. ‘There’s an alarm which links directly to the police station.’

  ‘And have you activated it?’

  He hesitated. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Which means you’re not going to. Put the gun down, Mr Leeson.’

  He lowered the weapon.

  ‘It was perhaps a bit melodramat
ic,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting the intruder to be you. Not our Detective Sergeant Fry. You’re not known for breaking and entering. You’re supposed to be the one who goes by the book.’

  ‘I think that was the old me.’

  Leeson put the gun in a drawer, and sat down at his desk.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps your gates are open. Have you checked them recently?’

  She watched his skeletal hands. When she looked a bit more closely, Fry could see that his face was even greyer than his hair. The skin looked fragile — brittle, as if it might flake away at any moment and expose the bone. She wondered what was wrong with him, what pernicious illness was sapping his energy and draining the colour from his skin.

  But then she realized that she didn’t actually care.

  ‘I suppose I should have talked to you at the prison yesterday,’ he said. ‘It was inevitable, really, that we would end up having this conversation. But you took me by surprise. I don’t like that.’

  ‘And what do you think our conversation is going to be about?’ asked Fry.

  Leeson gave her a small smile.

  ‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s what we have to talk about, you and I. It’s all about blood.’

  She looked at his grey skin and skeletal hands, and remembered Darren Barnes calling Leeson a coke head. She pictured him snorting cocaine through a rolled-up twenty-pound note, absorbing it through his mucous membranes. A more direct hit than smoking it, the way Vincent Bowskill did.

  ‘What blood?’ she said.

  ‘Mine. It was my blood at the scene of your assault in Digbeth.’

  ‘So, what? You got a nose bleed from snorting too much cocaine?’

  ‘The first thing you don’t know, Diane, is this — I was trying to help you.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘It was my blood at the scene. My blood the police got a DNA profile from. I pulled one of those boys off you, and he punched me in the face. I cut my hands on the fence, on the barbed wire. It was my blood, Diane. My blood was on you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You know what they say, Diane. Blood is thicker than water. You might not believe it right at this moment. But you’ll learn the truth soon enough.’

  The truth? Fry didn’t expect to be overburdened with too much of that. But if she got a straight answer, it would be a start.

  ‘Mr Leeson, what is your relationship with Darren Barnes and Marcus Shepherd, and their crew?’

  ‘Relationship? That’s not exactly it.’ With one thin hand, he made a gesture which seemed to encompass the whole of Birmingham beyond his wrought-iron gates. ‘There’s a very delicate balance of power on the streets of this city at the moment. The m1 Crew are in danger of being wiped out, if it gets out of control. They’ve made themselves a target for rival gangs, who have far more firepower at their disposal. They’ve been encroaching on other people’s territory. That just isn’t done.’

  ‘I won’t weep for them,’ said Fry.

  ‘They’ve been very useful to us.’

  ‘Us?’

  Leeson folded his lips closed as if he’d already given away too much.

  ‘There are people on your side, Diane,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been told that. But I haven’t seen much evidence of it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, then. There are bigger issues to be considered.’

  ‘I’ve heard that somewhere before, too.’

  ‘Seriously, Diane. You could ruin everything. Don’t interfere with Barnes and Shepherd and the m1 Crew.’

  Diane felt the rage building inside her. Who was this man to dismiss her so casually, to tell her not to interfere? Her hands trembled as the adrenalin surged through her body, her fingers itching to latch on to a target.

  ‘Perhaps you should call the police, after all,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re in real danger now.’

  But Leeson made no move. ‘You have no idea what’s going on, do you? You’re totally focused on yourself.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘No, you were always worse than anyone else. That single-minded ambition you had, that drove you for years. A pity it came to this.’

  Fry stared at him. How was it that this man seemed to know her so well?

  ‘As I said, there are more important issues at stake. Control of the streets, preventing more young people from dying, I can’t say any more.’

  ‘So you’re some kind of crime-fighting super hero?’

  ‘No. I’m just a flawed human being who found himself in these circumstances.’

  ‘Barnes and his crew think you’re their man.’

  Leeson smiled then. ‘Everyone thinks what they want to think. That’s the reason we so often put our trust in the wrong people.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Fry. ‘I think you’re the cause I was sacrificed for, the reason my case will never go ahead. I think this whole charade has been about saving your pathetic skin. Well, I guess you must have the right bits of dirty knowledge about the right people in this city. Am I close?’

  But Leeson was gaining confidence now. He stood up from his desk, and looked over her shoulder towards the French windows. Fry’s muscles tightened. She hoped he would make a wrong move, so that she could react. She only need one ounce of justification.

  ‘Didn’t you bring Angie with you?’ he said. ‘That would have been nice.’

  And that was the final straw.

  ‘What do you know about my sister?’

  Fry found she had hold of his arm and was twisting it. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but now that she’d made physical contact with him, she wanted to punish him, to make him bleed, to see that blood flow again that he talked about.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ he said.

  ‘Good. I could hurt you a lot more.’

  She spun him round and bounced his face against the wall. She saw the blood then — a trickle of it running from his nose, bright and shockingly red.

  ‘You know, Diane, I always thought Angie was the ruthless bitch of the family. But I got that wrong, didn’t I?’

  His face twisted with pain, as she unconsciously tightened her grip.

  ‘Do you know what? I think she’s actually worse than me.’

  ‘No, she’s a pussy cat compared to you. You’d kill me, if you could. If you thought you could get away with it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, don’t pretend. You’re no different from the rest of us. Everyone has it in them.’

  Fry bit her lip. It was something she’d thought herself often enough. Everyone had the ability to commit murder, in the right circumstances. Or the wrong circumstances. Perfectly ordinary people could be pushed over the line by the most trivial of provocations. Some of them did it, and regretted it. Others would go through their entire lives without encountering the right situation. Those were the lucky ones.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said.

  He smiled, as if he’d struck a blow home and achieved some kind of satisfaction.

  ‘The trouble is, Diane, you’re too familiar with the consequences, aren’t you? You can’t help thinking about what happens afterwards. How you’d ruin your career, and all that stuff. It’s thinking too much that stifles the real you, that kills your emotions. It’s what makes you less than human.’

  ‘I told you to shut up.’

  ‘Go on, go on. Do it. You know you want to.’

  Fry tensed, but held back. His almost insane grin was the only thing that stopped her. She recognized a desperate attempt at provocation when she saw it. This man wanted her to hurt him. Really wanted it.

  She let him go and took a step back.

  Fry knew it was time for her to leave the house. She could sense some awful event about to happen, something that was completely out of her control. She made her way towards the French windows, checked the patio and the drive. The garage door stil
l stood open, and the car was inside. No sign of security guards, or armed police. Not even the dog with tombstone teeth. It all seemed quiet. She stepped out on to the gravel.

  And then her phone rang. It was Ben Cooper.

  ‘Ben, your timing is terrible. This had better be really important.’

  ‘Yes. It’s very important, Diane. It can’t wait.’

  ‘Out with it, then.’

  ‘That familial DNA match. I got some more information from my friend. This took quite a bit of arm-twisting on her part. I think.’

  ‘So? Do we know whose the third DNA profile at the scene was?’

  ‘No. Like I said, there was no CJ sample on the database to make a direct comparison with or the third person would have been identified immediately. But that third person had a relative who was on the database. That means he was a close family member, Diane. A brother, father, or son.’

  ‘And do we know whose DNA this familial match was made to?’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘The victim’s.’

  ‘What?’

  Though she got him to repeat what he’d said, the words still didn’t seem to make sense to Fry. The victim wasn’t some unconnected person, not in this case. It was wrong, completely wrong. An error in procedure. Contamination. Was this why the prosecution had been dropped?

  ‘What are you saying, Ben?’

  ‘The third DNA profile was a familial match to the victim’s. It belonged to a close family member. The familial DNA — it was a match to you, Diane.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a brother, or a son. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Reading the rest into his silence, Fry went slowly back to the French windows and looked at William Leeson.

  ‘Now she was feeling the memories collide and merge. A presence in her room as a small child, the smell of shaving foam, the creak of a door handle, a figure held in a shaft of light from the landing. A form crouching over her in the darkness of a patch of wasteland in Digbeth, his features blurred against a barbed-wire fence, but a familiar smell and touch. Too familiar.