Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) (37 page)

Cooper went to collect his jacket and car keys from his desk in the CID room. He found Gavin Murfin filling a waste-paper bin with the contents of his drawers, and Becky Hurst looking at him expectantly, waiting for news of progress.

‘It seems you were wrong after all, Gavin,’ said Cooper.

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Murfin casually.

‘So
Maurice Wharton killed the Pearsons, is that right?’ said Hurst. ‘But he must have had some help afterwards.’

‘Some of his regulars, we think.’

‘They helped to cover up for him?’

‘So it seems.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Hurst. ‘How did Wharton inspire such loyalty? I mean, by all accounts he was a complete pain in the backside, who liked nothing better than insulting and abusing his customers.’

‘True. And anyone who didn’t know him took offence and never came back. But those others, the regulars – they must have seen through all that nonsense and recognised a different Maurice.’

‘If you ask me, they just didn’t want to see the pub closed down,’ said Murfin. ‘One thing you have to say about Mad Maurice – he kept a very good cellar. His beer was always top-notch. You can’t say that about any of these keg places you see all over the shop now. Besides, he wasn’t averse to a good lock-in when he was in the mood.’

‘Not that you ever went to one, Gavin, considering it’s illegal.’

‘Course not. I just heard.’

‘Well, it’s right that his regulars were the people who kept him in business all those years,’ said Cooper. ‘They were the ones who kept coming back month after month, who spread his reputation far and wide. He owed a lot to those customers. Without them, he was nothing. And I don’t suppose he wanted to let them down by closing the pub.’

‘Is this all a question of loyalty, then?’ asked Hurst, still puzzled. ‘Maurice Wharton being loyal to his customers, and his regulars being loyal to him?’

‘Yes, but loyalty is where it went wrong,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s always a mistake involving someone else in an act like
that. Most people can’t even rely on themselves to keep a secret. But the suspicion that you can’t trust a person who shares your guilty knowledge will really eat away at you over time. These people had more than two years of it. Frankly, it’s a wonder they didn’t try to kill each other long before now.’

DI Hitchens strolled into the room and put his arm on Cooper’s shoulder as he listened to the end of the conversation.

‘And the fires?’ he said. ‘The same people are responsible for those, I gather.’

‘There’s been a coordinated campaign going on,’ said Cooper. ‘The fires on Kinder were started deliberately and the temporary reservoir was sabotaged, but only as part of a diversion – to draw away firefighting resources. The real target was always on Oxlow Moor. Specifically, the Light House.’

‘The chief fire officer is happy anyway,’ said Hitchens. ‘They like to identify people who start wildfires on the moors. Normally it’s far too difficult for them to prove a fire was started deliberately, even when there’s no doubt in their own minds. Even if there’s no prosecution, they’re glad to get a confirmed arson.’

Cooper nodded. He wondered if he should mention the irony that it was the chief fire officer himself who’d given the Whartons the idea of starting the fires. His comments in that TV interview had been well intentioned, but had fallen on the wrong ears. He might have thought he was doing good PR for the fire service, but mentioning the threat to isolated buildings had been a fatal suggestion to insert into the minds of desperate people.

He rattled his car keys as he was about to leave the office with Villiers, but turned back for a moment.

‘Gavin …’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Why is it that you never mentioned the word “cellar” until now? It could have saved a lot of trouble.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘It’s funny how that goes, like. It only came into my memory just now, when I started thinking about beer. I mean, you don’t have any other reason to think about the cellar in a pub, do you? Not when you’re just a customer. It’s there under your feet, but you don’t need to know about it.’

‘A wonderful thing, the memory,’ said Villiers. ‘It can trawl up the most unexpected things. Details you were convinced you’d forgotten just pop into your mind from somewhere. And no one really understands how it works.’

‘Don’t they?’

‘Nope. It’s one of the great mysteries of the human mind.’

‘I can’t even remember what I had for dinner last night,’ said Murfin.

‘That’s old age, Gavin,’ put in Hurst. ‘I bet you remember every day of the Blitz, though.’

Still Cooper hesitated. He’d known Murfin for quite a few years now, and he thought he could read below the surface of his words.

‘Gavin, you didn’t really believe that the Pearsons had skipped the country, did you? Not as much as you made Diane Fry think you did.’

Murfin smiled. ‘You can’t let someone like that have it all her own way, Ben. She needs someone to take the opposite view. It focuses her mind, see. After I’d said all that, she was dead set on proving me wrong and showing everyone that the Pearsons were victims of a violent crime. And so she did.’

‘I told her I thought you might be right,’ said Cooper. ‘I was standing up for you, Gavin.’

With his smile developing into a satisfied smirk, Murfin
leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, like I said before, we’ve all learned something, then.’

‘So – Mad Maurice,’ said Villiers a little while later, as Cooper’s Toyota headed out of Edendale. ‘It seems he wasn’t a lovable eccentric after all. He actually
was
a psychopath.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re not sure? But he killed two perfectly innocent tourists.’

‘It’s a bit too convenient, Carol.’

‘What is?’

‘The fact that he’s dying. It’s too convenient that Maurice Wharton will soon be dead and buried himself. It seems to me that that’s what everyone has wanted all along – to be able to sweep the whole thing under the carpet and forget about it. And it’s not going to happen.’

Villiers gave him a quizzical look. ‘What’s made you take this attitude?’

‘I was thinking about Maurice Wharton, when he talked about how painful it was watching his pub closed down for the last time. Seeing the windows go dark one by one.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it’s no wonder he found it painful, knowing what he did, and what had been hidden there. He must have realised the truth would be uncovered eventually. And there was nothing he could do about it by then, when he was sitting in that car in the dusk. It must have been like watching his own future being slowly snuffed out.’

‘I see. And is that all?’

Villiers knew him too well. But Cooper didn’t want to share all his thoughts. As so often was the case, they didn’t come anywhere near to amounting to evidence.

In fact, he’d also been thinking about what Fry had told
him of Henry Pearson’s reaction to the discovery of the two bodies. The collapse of the pretence, the crumbling facade. Everyone had their public face, the image they presented to the world. Even Gavin Murfin had cultivated a persona, a role that he played up to, so that everyone would remember him, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. It didn’t reflect the real Murfin, the one behind the facade. And wasn’t that the same with Maurice Wharton? It was all about image.

In the CID room today, the comments had been all about the Wharton of legend. The notorious Mad Maurice, the man who was known for his short temper and angry outbursts. He had a reputation for miles around as being irascible and unpredictable. Anyone with that idea in mind would have no difficulty picturing Wharton losing control, flying into a rage, and killing two people.

A reputation, yes. But reputations were built up over time. And surely it had been mostly an act in Wharton’s case? He’d known perfectly well the appeal his eccentricity had for visitors to his pub. Many of them were drawn in to watch his performance. Of course, he had played up to the nickname. And so had everyone else. Even now, the whole of Edendale still called him Mad Maurice. Yet it was the way he wanted to be remembered. He’d said so himself, right there in the hospice.

In a way, it was almost like the story of the Light House itself. A brightly lit exterior, distracting attention from the darker corners within.

Yes, a reputation was very useful. A nickname created expectations in the people who heard it. Cooper wondered about his own response to that name. Had he been guilty of forming preconceptions about the way Mad Maurice Wharton would have behaved? Was he, like everyone else, being manipulated through his prejudices?

‘Still bothered by the memories?’ asked Villiers.

Cooper
laughed. ‘They haven’t done me much good so far. The general impressions are right, but the details always seem to be wrong.’

‘It’s not a joke,’ said Villiers. ‘No matter how good your memory is, you can’t recall every detail. So your mind fills in the gaps by using bits of other memories. You ask your inner eye to create a picture for you, but it can’t show you blanks where faces should be, so it uses whatever material it can find. If we could analyse the images in your brain, we’d find that the man at the bar looked a bit like the person you arrested yesterday, his clothes were those of someone you just passed in the street, and his face was reminiscent of Brad Pitt.’

‘Robert Redford,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You get my point, though. One person’s memory is too unreliable as evidence. Recollections become polluted by imagination.’

‘So instead of imagination, what we need is a bit of illumination, some light to shine into those dark corners where we can’t see.’

‘Absolutely,’ she said.

But as they crested the rise on Bradwell Moor, Cooper saw the smoke on the skyline. He remembered the devastating moorland fires, their flames rising twenty feet into the air as they swept across the landscape, scorching the earth bare to reveal what lay underneath. Those flames were illuminating places where perhaps there should have been no light.

When Cooper had left with Villiers, Fry decided to let Nancy Wharton cool for a while. She was given a cup of
tea, allowed to go to the bathroom, asked again if she wanted a solicitor to be present with her in the interview room.

Nancy hadn’t been arrested, but she must realise there was a possibility she could be charged with perverting the course of justice, perhaps assisting an offender. It might even come to conspiracy to murder, which carried a potential life sentence. But that was all in the future.

‘What actual forensic evidence do we have?’ DCI Mackenzie asked when Fry briefed him.

‘The blood on David Pearson’s anorak isn’t his.’

‘Yes, I know that. But we don’t have a match.’

‘Could we get a DNA sample from Maurice Wharton?’ asked Fry.

‘A dying man? We’d need very good justification for a thing like that.’

‘It’s insensitive, I suppose.’

‘I’ll say.’

‘But if there was compelling evidence against him, it might be a different matter?’

‘It would never come to trial anyway. Not in his condition. Even if he survived long enough, the CPS wouldn’t put a dying man in the dock.’

‘No, I’m sure you’re right.’

It pained Fry to say it, especially when she couldn’t help feeling that she was telling Ben Cooper the same thing.

‘What’s next then, Diane?’ asked Mackenzie.

She looked at her watch. ‘I have to pay a visit to the mortuary.’

Forensic pathologist Juliana van Doon had a long relationship with Diane Fry. For some reason, they had never got on. Fry had found herself at a disadvantage many times,
put down by the pathologist without being able to take any retaliatory action.

But today seemed to be different. Mrs van Doon was either too busy to bother patronising her, or she’d heard that Fry had transferred from E Division and was hoping it would be the last time they met. It wasn’t exactly a friendly greetings card with
Sorry you’re leaving.
But some of the tension had gone from their relationship.

‘The bodies aren’t decomposed enough,’ said the pathologist, brushing a stray hair back from her forehead.

‘The peat slowed decomposition?’ asked Fry.

‘Peat? No, these bodies weren’t actually buried in peat. From the photographs of the scene, it’s clear they were lying in a disused mine shaft. With a bog body, it’s the absence of air and damp, acidic conditions that slow decomposition.’

‘Okay.’

‘In this case, the heavy plastic wrapping would have slowed the rate of decay on some areas of the bodies, but not others. Those parts were exposed to the air and moisture, as well as to insects and so forth. But they still don’t show anything like the rate of decomposition we’d normally expect. Not a rate that corresponds with a time of death more than two years ago.’

‘Only one possibility, then.’

‘Yes, I think someone must have done what we do in the mortuary – lowered the temperature sufficiently to stop the process of decomposition altogether. The bodies were frozen.’

Fry wasn’t surprised by the news. ‘Would that have been at an early stage after they were killed?’

‘If you were going to get a human body into a chest freezer, it would have to be flexible,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘Rigor mortis starts between three and six hours after death. That would catch most people out. Once rigor has set in, it
becomes much more difficult to transport and dispose of a body. So I’d say they were frozen when they were still at the fresh stage, before the onset of rigor mortis. When they were unfrozen, decomposition would have restarted. Some of the exposed areas are just entering the advanced decay stage.’

‘Cause of death?’ said Fry hopefully.

‘Oh, the number one on the pathologist’s hit parade. Blunt force trauma.’

‘For both victims?’

‘Yes. Both suffered head injuries. The male victim has a number of other contusions and abrasions on various parts of his upper body, and notably on his hands. He also has some internal injuries, including a couple of broken ribs.’

‘Were there any signs of bite marks?’