Already Dead (37 page)

He leaned over the low parapet. Josh Lane’s Honda was firmly jammed against the side of the bridge, its roof touching the top of the arch. The immense pressure of the torrent rushing downstream was pinning it against the stone like an insect crushed by a giant hand. The driver’s side window was partly wound down, and Cooper saw a struggling figure, arms flailing against the white blanket of an airbag inflated by the impact.

As Cooper watched, Lane managed to get his head and part of his upper body through the window, then became stuck. The electrical wiring was dead, so the window wouldn’t wind down any further. And the pressure of the water was too strong for him to push against, even if there had been room to open the door against the stone arch. From here, he looked no more than a bundle of clothes, the material of his anorak billowing out in the water.

Looking down from his vantage point, Cooper realised this was his best opportunity. Josh Lane was at his mercy. It was the moment he’d been dreaming of for months, his chance to take revenge for the death of Liz. On this bridge, he’d been presented with the possibility of achieving justice, at least a kind of justice that would make sense in his own world. All his thoughts and nightmares had been concentrated on the arrival of this moment. What was it Matt had said?
For God’s sake, do something about it, or move on
.

He felt as though everything had led him to this point. The system had let him down all the way along the line. It had been made clear to him that Josh Lane would never face real justice. It was as clear as it could possibly be. And yet chance had presented him with this opportunity. If this wasn’t fate, he didn’t know what was. Destiny had put him on this bridge at this moment, and he knew what he had to do.

With slow deliberation, Cooper opened the boot of his Toyota. Thanks to Matt, he had exactly what he needed.

Diane Fry’s Audi ploughed into the water, sending up great tidal waves on either side. The surge hit the stone walls edging the road then was forced back towards her, water swamping her bonnet and lapping right up against the windscreen. Suddenly, the engine coughed and died.

Fry tried her key in the ignition, but could get no spark. She looked down, and saw water creeping under the door sills and trickling from the engine compartment below the dashboard. The carpet behind her accelerator and brake pedals was already glistening with damp. The floor squelched when she moved her foot.

‘Damn.’

Ben Cooper stood in the torrential rain. He was without his waxed coat now, had nothing to cover his head, but was apparently oblivious to the water soaking his clothes and plastering his hair to his skull. His shirt darkened, the rain ran down his arms and dripped from his fingers. He raised his hand slowly and looked at his wet palms, stared down at the widening pool at his feet, the stream gushing down the side of the road in front of him.

His face was wet, and he blinked his eyes to clear his vision. But all he could see was water. He was surrounded by a world of it, rain falling all around him and covering the earth. If he stood still long enough, he imagined, it would continue to rise steadily until it was over his head. And he’d be standing in ocean where once the Peak District had been.

He recalled being taught in school that three hundred million years ago Derbyshire had been covered by a series of shallow tropical lagoons, that the crags of Winnats Pass were formed from coral reefs: fossilised sea creatures could still be dug out of the limestone slopes. It had been impossible to imagine then.

But standing in the centre of the deluge, he knew that everything came full circle, that human existence was no more than a few hours in the history of the earth and the life of one human being over in a second.

His superstitious ancestors had dreaded fire and flood. But they’d been frightened of a lot of things. Every bump in the night was a devil at the door, every stranger a spy, every bird an ill omen. They lived in terror of the natural and the supernatural until finally they faced their greatest fear of all – death itself.

Gradually he became conscious of a voice. Someone was shouting. As his awareness returned, he began to shiver. This was no tropical sea he was standing in. The rain was freezing.

Diane Fry was wading through water that came almost up to her waist. Finally, Cooper saw her and shouted.

‘Diane, what are you doing?’

‘I came to find you.’

‘For God’s sake, if you lose your footing, that water will sweep you away. You could be killed.’

‘Well, help me out, then.’

When he pulled her up to the bridge, she saw a body on the ground, streaming water.

‘Josh Lane,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘What have you done?’

Fry gripped the edge of the parapet and stared down at the trapped Honda. The flood water was up to its roof now, but she could see the smashed windscreen. She could also make out a sledgehammer wedged through the broken glass.

She turned back and looked at Cooper, noticing now his sodden clothes, the blood trickling from half a dozen cuts on his hands. The body on the ground groaned, coughed out a gush of water, and gasped for breath.

‘You pulled him out of the car,’ said Fry.

Cooper looked down at the ground, as if baffled by what he saw.

‘Of course I did,’ he said.

35

Tuesday

Ben Cooper had become a hero. No one quite knew how that had happened, least of all Cooper.

When he came into West Street on Tuesday morning he looked almost the old Cooper, clean shaven and upright, though he was several pounds thinner and the shadow in his eyes was still there, the way that Fry had seen it in Wirksworth a few days ago.

She watched Cooper shaking hands with everyone – Gavin Murfin, Luke Irvine, Becky Hurst. And of course Carol Villiers, though that was hardly necessary. Fry felt sure that none of them needed to be quite so enthusiastic about his reappearance.

No matter what had happened, and what anyone else said, she didn’t feel able to treat Cooper like a hero. She was aware of what had been in his heart, if not in his mind. And she knew how close it had come to ending completely differently.

But with the shotgun safely back in its locked cabinet at Bridge End Farm, there seemed to be no reason to mention it to anyone now. It felt strange to be sharing a secret with Matt Cooper, but there were stranger things in life.

Detective Superintendent Branagh came through the office to greet Cooper. Another handshake there. Branagh stopped at Fry’s elbow, and smiled.

‘It was good to have DS Cooper’s input, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘If only unofficially.’

Fry swallowed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

No need to ask where that intelligence came from, then.

By the time Fry finally got Cooper on his own she was fighting conflicting emotions. That always made her say the wrong thing.

‘Ben, I know you’ve been talking to members of my team,’ she said. ‘Trying to get information out of them. Don’t do it again. I don’t need to remind you – while you’re on leave, you’re just another member of the public.’

Cooper gazed back at her, unblinking.

‘If you mean Carol, she’s my friend,’ he said simply.

Fry bit her lip. For some reason, that reply hurt her more than anything else he might have said. She didn’t understand the sudden welling of pain it had caused, a confusing ache in her stomach as her diaphragm spasmed. She was overwhelmed by a desire to lash out in retaliation, as if she’d been physically attacked.

As Cooper walked away, she remembered Carol Villiers saying that it was the name of Turner’s employers Prospectus Assurance that had sparked Cooper’s interest in the first place. At the time, she’d thought it was just familiarity, that he’d heard of the firm before. They had offices in Edendale, after all. But then, Ben Cooper had heard of everybody. He was the fount of all local knowledge. The name of one specific Eden Valley firm shouldn’t have made a particularly deep impression on him. There was more to it than that. There always was.

Fry shook her head. It ought to have dawned on her before. Why hadn’t she figured this out earlier? She’d failed to see that something else might have been going on in Cooper’s mind. Something much more devious and worrying. Perhaps an indication of how close he was to tipping over the edge, how dangerously unbalanced he’d become.

Fry sat down with Luke Irvine. The job wasn’t done yet. She reminded him about the interviews they’d done with Charlie Dean and Sheena Sullivan when Dean’s BMW was first traced. There was that frightening stranger in the red, hooded rain jacket.

‘Luke – in her statement, Sheena Sullivan said something about the stranger breathing heavily.’

‘He was helping to push their BMW out of the mud,’ said Irvine. ‘It’s a heavy vehicle. I think anyone would be a bit out of breath—’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘Before that. When he first got out of his car. And she mentioned his voice. Where are those statements? Can you dig them out?’

‘Here.’

Irvine passed across the files, and Fry flicked through them until she found the page she was looking for. It was a small detail, so apparently unimportant that it might have been left out of Sheena’s written statement altogether by another interviewing officer. But Becky Hurst had recorded it word for word.

‘
And there was something about his voice
,’ she read.

Irvine shrugged. ‘What does that mean? Nothing.’

He was right, of course. Hurst had done the right thing, recording the comment on the statement form, but she should have followed it up. Perhaps she’d thought it was just a bit of imaginative over-dramatisation on Sheena Sullivan’s part, trying to make the stranger sound more menacing in hindsight. But still, Hurst ought to have asked the obvious question.
What was it about his voice?

‘Has Ben Cooper left yet?’

‘Yes, I’ve just seen him driving out of the gate.’

Ben Cooper had barely been in his flat for five minutes, when there was a banging on the door. He opened it and was astonished to find Diane Fry standing on his doorstep again.

‘We must stop meeting like this,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘Do you want to come in?’

‘Just for a few minutes.’

‘I was going to ask why you didn’t phone first this time,’ said Cooper. ‘But there doesn’t seem much point. It’s not twenty minutes since I saw you.’

‘No, that’s right.’

‘I suppose you forgot something? Is there…?’

Cooper hesitated. Fry was looking at him oddly, her head cocked slightly to one side as if she was listening hard, waiting for him to speak again. He’d never known her to be so intent on his words, so eager to hear what he had to say. Normally, she treated him like an idiot. She dismissed his ideas instantly and just went her own sweet way no matter what he said.

So what had changed? Was she humouring him because she thought of him as an invalid? He could almost work out her thought processes.
Poor old Ben, still on extended sick leave. You’ve got to feel sorry for him.
Shut up in here, he’s probably desperate for someone to talk to. I’d better pretend I’m interested in what he has to say.

‘Diane, was there something you wanted to ask me?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s just good to hear your voice.’

Cooper laughed. And, as so often happened, the laugh caught the rawness in his throat and turned into a cough. It was the dry, irksome hack that made him step into the kitchen for a drink of water to ease the irritation.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Fry when he returned.

‘Fine. It’s nothing.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re still suffering a few after-effects, I suppose. From the smoke inhalation.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s what causes the cough now and then.’

Fry tilted her head, waiting for him to speak again, listening for his voice. Sheena had said:
There was something about his voice. It wasn’t right. It made me shudder
.

‘But it will pass,’ he said.

Fry opened her mouth to speak again, but her phone rang. She answered it automatically. She always did during a major inquiry. Nothing reflected more badly on you than being out of touch when you were needed. It was Gavin Murfin.

‘I thought you’d want to know, Diane. We’ve got test results.’

‘I’m on my way,’ she said.

Fry looked out of the door of Cooper’s flat. His Toyota stood at the kerb. She’d seen his car often enough. So why had she forgotten that it was red?

‘Ben, did you say that you sometimes drive around the area at night?’ asked Fry.

‘Yes. So?’

‘Even in the rain? And you don’t really know where you are, or where you’ve been?’

‘When you put it like that, it makes me sound a bit crazy.’

‘Yes.’

Fry looked down at the cat as it walked into the room. It gave her a hard stare and turned its back on her. It was time to leave.

‘Okay. Well, I suppose that’s all.’

Cooper shrugged. ‘Whatever it was.’

‘I hope we see you back permanently before too long.’

‘I think it will be soon now.’

But before she reached the street, Fry stopped in the hallway of the flat. A coat rack was fixed to the wall just inside the door. It was an unusual design, made of polished steel and shaped like the head of an upturned rake. Over the prongs were hooked jackets, a scarf, even a set of keys.

‘It was a flat warming present from my uncle when I first moved in,’ said Cooper, noticing her interest.

‘I think I remember.’

Fry had been here that day herself, briefly. She’d called in at the flat with a gift for Cooper, thinking it was something you were supposed to do, a gesture to a colleague, a minor effort to oil the wheels of social interaction. A nuisance, but not a huge commitment of her time. She’d bought him a plant, she recalled. No idea what species. She almost looked round to see if it was still there in his flat, thriving. But in the next instant it dawned on her that she couldn’t remember what she’d bought, and wouldn’t recognise it if she saw it.

‘It’s a bit of a joke, I suppose,’ said Cooper. ‘The design is called Harvest. I moved here from the farm, you see—’