Scared to Live

‘A bit of a teacake,’ said Murfin.

‘What?’ said Fry, thinking he was talking about food, as usual.

‘That Lowther bloke. He’s a bit of a teacake.’

‘You mean John? Come on, Gavin, you just didn’t like him because you thought he was gay.’

‘What if he was?’ protested Murfin. ‘I don’t judge people like that. Well, not any more. I’ve done the course.’

‘Yeah, right. You’ve learned not to say out loud what you’re thinking, that’s all.’

Murfin sniffed, but didn’t deny it.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be gay to admire my tie.’

‘No, just colour blind.’

‘Well, did you like him?’ asked Murfin.

‘He was a bit odd, I suppose.’

‘Two sandwiches short of a picnic, more like.’

Fry sighed. ‘Is it getting near lunchtime by any chance?’

‘Well, now you mention it –’

‘All right, all right.’

Fry knew when to give in to necessity. She couldn’t understand the way Gavin lived to eat, instead of the other way round.

Sometimes she thought that most of the people around her had life upside down, or back to front. Take the Lowthers, for instance – they had a garden full of furniture, and a house full of plants. Something wrong there, surely?

In Foxlow, a police patrol arrived outside the gates of Bain House at about a quarter past one that afternoon. Thirteen sixteen hours, according to the incident log. PC Andy Myers pressed the intercom button on the gatepost a few times, but got no response.

‘Maybe it’s not working,’ said his partner.

‘I can hear it buzzing.’

‘Well, Control can’t give us a phone number for her.’

‘She must be ex-directory.’

‘So what do we do, then?’

Myers looked at the wrought-iron gates and the stone pillars on either side. ‘One of us has to get his arse over these gates. There should be a release on the other side. Mind the spikes when you get on top, Phil. They look lethal.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot. Don’t strain yourself, will you?’

‘I’m the driver. I have to stay with the car.’

Myers watched his partner struggle over the gates, grumbling all the way as he tried to avoid ripping his uniform or impaling his hand on a spike. Finally, his boots crunched down on to gravel at the other side and he found the release button to open the gates.

‘The bloke who phoned in was a farmer name of Cross,’ said Myers from the window of the car. ‘He says there’s a bedroom window open round the back somewhere, and a light on.’

‘Why didn’t he climb over the bloody gate, then?’

‘Him? He’ll be long gone, ploughing his sheep or something.’

‘You don’t get out into the country much, do you, Andy?’

The two officers went up to the front door and knocked. They still got no reply. Myers began to walk round the side of the house.

‘Yes, I can see the open window,’ he called. ‘I’m trying the back door.’

‘Anything?’

‘No.’

‘Nor here, either. Think we ought to go in?’

‘I don’t like this open window,’ said Myers. ‘There’s a burglar alarm – you can see the box up there on the wall. And security lights, too. She’s not some careless householder who’d leave her property insecure.’

‘I’ll call in and let Control know what we’re doing.’

‘OK, Phil. Then you’ll have to find a window to get through on the ground floor. I wouldn’t give much for your chances of reaching that open one.’

‘Hey, wait a minute –’

When Fry and Murfin arrived in Darwin Street, a man was standing in the garden of number 34. He seemed to have appointed himself some kind of supervisor, checking that everyone attending the fire scene did their job properly. He was holding a small digital camera and squinting through the viewfinder at a SOCO in a scene suit carrying two bulging plastic bags towards a van.

‘Hoping to sell some photos to the press, sir?’ asked Fry.

He glowered at her. ‘No such luck. They’ve all been here and done their own pictures, TV cameras and all. These are for my records.’

‘Records?’

‘I’m in Neighbourhood Watch. This’ll come up at the next meeting, you can bet. I was right here from the start, you know. In fact, it was me that rang 999.’

‘Would you be Mr Wade?’

‘That’s me: Keith Wade.’

He was either overweight or so bundled up in sweaters that it was impossible to judge his shape. He was sweating a little, but whether that was from excitement or exertion, she couldn’t tell. Keith Wade looked like a man who’d spent all his life in the driver’s seat of a lorry, eating egg and chips at truck stops and gradually turning pear-shaped.

‘Did you happen to take any photographs during the fire, sir?’ she asked.

‘’Course I did. Look –’

He turned the camera round and held it up as he fingered the controls. A picture appeared on the LED screen. It was very dark – almost black, but for a dull, reddish glow. Only the faint outline of a roof and chimney stack could be made out at the top of the picture.

‘Are they all like that?’

‘I followed the progress of the fire, and recorded how quickly the emergency services arrived. I took some with the flash when the firemen were here, but all I got was a lot of glare off the reflective strips on their jackets.’

‘We’d like copies of any shots you took during the fire.’

Wade looked pleased, then his face fell. ‘I haven’t got a colour printer.’

‘That’s all right. Have you got internet access? You can email them to us.’

‘Yes, I can do that.’

Fry gave him her card, and he fingered it happily.

‘Detective, are you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘What?’ said Fry, ready to react to some sexist remark.

‘Sending a detective to a fire.’

‘When there are fatalities, yes.’

‘Fatalities, right. The two kids were killed, weren’t they? Never stood a chance, they reckon.’

‘And their mother, of course.’

He nodded. ‘Tragic. I knew Lindsay and Brian pretty well. We’ve been neighbours for six years.’

Wade’s house was so close to the Mullens’ that the smoke had stained his walls, too. Pools of water lay in his garden, and someone had trampled a flower bed on their way to the fire.

‘Mr Wade, has anyone been around in the last few weeks asking questions about the Mullens?’

‘Asking questions? Other than you lot, you mean?’

‘It’s a serious enquiry, sir.’

‘Sorry. No, there hasn’t been anyone.’

‘Think carefully, please. It might have been someone who appeared perfectly innocent at the time. A market researcher calling at the door, then dropping in a casual question about your next-door neighbours?’

‘No, I’d remember that.’

‘What about your wife? She might remember someone being around while you were out.’ Seeing Wade hesitate, she probed further. ‘I’m sorry. Are you married, sir?’

‘I’m divorced,’ he said.

‘OK. Tell me again what made you first notice the fire.’

‘Well, I think I smelled the smoke. I suppose the smell of it must have been strong enough to wake me up. At first, I reckoned it must be someone’s bonfire that had been set alight. Kids do that around here, you know – they think it’s fun to see the fire engines arrive. But when I got out of bed, I saw a funny light on the bedroom curtains. It was sort of flickering, like someone was watching a huge TV screen outside. Do you know what I mean?’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I put some clothes on, went outside to have a look, then made the emergency call.’

Yes, and that sweater was probably the first thing he’d put on. It looked as though he’d been wearing it for months. The thing was brown and shaggy, with little threads of wool springing out everywhere.

‘Did you see anyone outside at that time, Mr Wade?’

‘No, not a soul. But I wasn’t looking up and down the street, just at the fire. It had broken the sitting-room window by then, and there were flames going up the wall. Come to think of it, I suppose it might have been the sound of the window breaking that woke me up, not the smell of the smoke.’

‘Why do you think that, sir?’

‘Well, like I said, I’m in Neighbourhood Watch. I’ve sort of trained myself to hear the sound of breaking glass at night. We’ve had some burglaries round here, as I suppose you know. So I have to be on the alert.’

‘I see. But you don’t actually remember hearing glass breaking last night?’

Wade looked disappointed. ‘No, not really.’

He was so transparent. Fry imagined he was a bit of a nuisance at Neighbourhood Watch meetings, always claiming to have seen something that he hadn’t, to make himself more interesting. She wondered whether Wade was a member of other organizations, too. The Police Liaison Committee, the Keep Edendale Tidy Group – anything that would let him stick his nose into other people’s lives.

‘What about traffic, Mr Wade? Were there any cars going by when you first saw the fire?’

‘Not that I noticed,’ he said. ‘Just a minute.’

He raised his camera to his face and focused on something past Fry. She turned to see a liveried police car pull up outside number 32, and the driver spoke to a uniformed officer on duty outside.

‘Would it be all right if I took your photograph as well?’ asked Wade. ‘I don’t think I’ve got a detective.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be all right.’

He sighed. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Mr Wade, did you make any attempt to get into your neighbour’s house when you saw the fire? Or were you too busy taking photographs?’

He looked hurt. ‘Of course I tried to get in. After I’d made the call, I ran back out and went over the fence to their house. But there were already flames coming out of the windows, and I couldn’t see a thing for the smoke.’

‘You must have seen Brian Mullen arrive home later.’

He shoved the camera away in a pocket and wiped the palms of his hands on his sweater.

‘Yes, poor bugger. He was going out of his mind. Is Brian all right, do you know?’

‘His injuries are only minor.’

‘That’s something, anyway.’

Even out here, the smell of smoke and charring was very strong. Mr Wade himself seemed to reek of burning, like a smoked kipper. If he’d stood in his garden wearing that same sweater while the fire was burning, it was probably impregnated with the smell: smouldering wood and singed flesh.

‘Are you normally at home during the day, Mr Wade?’

‘Sometimes I work late shifts,’ he said. ‘I make deliveries for the supermarkets.’

‘I see.’

‘I ought to be in bed now. But I couldn’t sleep with all this excitement going on.’

Fry looked across the fence at number 32. The SOCOs had erected a crime-scene tent over the doorway, so it was impossible to see inside the house now, except for a vague shape moving past a blackened window now and then. The bodies of the victims had long since been removed, and the firefighters had finished damping down, leaving nothing but a few streams of muddy water running into the gutter.

‘Yes. Riveting, isn’t it?’

By the time she got back to E Division headquarters in West Street, Fry had a headache. She looked in her desk for some Paracetamol, but found only an empty box, not even a broken foil strip. She glared angrily around the CID room. Light-fingered bastards. She never let herself run out of Paracetamol, so someone in the office had been nicking them from her drawer without asking. In this place, they’d steal your fillings if you left your mouth open too long.

She took a few deep breaths instead and drank a cup of water. She had to be fit and on the ball. This wasn’t a time to screw up; it was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate her ability. Had she done everything that needed to be done right now?

She’d left Gavin Murfin at Darwin Street to liaise with the fire investigator and chase up the SOCOs. She’d also asked for a search team to examine the vicinity of the house. What she needed was some indication of malicious intent, so she could go to the DI with a view on the case. That would show she could deal with a challenge.

The pain tightened across her forehead. She ought to have asked Cooper to bring her a new supply of Paracetamol from the supermarket. The day was about to begin in earnest, and there were bound to be more problems coming her way before long. It was going to be one of those weeks, all right.

The dead body lay at an awkward angle, half on a rug by the bed. It had been a nice sheepskin rug once, soft and white – until it soaked up most of Rose Shepherd’s blood. Now it was stained dark red and caked into stiff clumps. When Miss Shepherd died, she’d been wearing her nightdress, a cotton one designed for comfort rather than style, with enough folds to conceal the source of the blood.

PC Myers raised a hand to the light switch, but remembered the light was already on. His partner stood in the doorway, tugging at his radio.

‘What do you think she’s done to herself?’

‘Can’t tell,’ said Myers. ‘She’s dead, though.’

‘Back off, then. Don’t touch her.’

But Myers was crouching closer to the body, and he could see the circular hole punched neatly through the cotton near Rose Shepherd’s heart.

‘Bloody hell, Phil,’ he said. ‘The old bird’s been shot.’

5

Ben Cooper drove out of the Somerfield’s car park before the plastic crime session was over. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He didn’t think Steve Judson would be sorry to lose him, either. Two calls on his mobile were two too many.

As he accelerated his Toyota into Fargate and crossed the junction towards Chesterfield Road, Cooper considered phoning Diane Fry to let her know where he was heading. But if she hadn’t heard about the Foxlow incident already, she’d find out soon enough.

But, wait … a triple death, she’d said, in a house fire. If that turned out to be malicious intent, E Division would have its work cut out. Caseloads were always a headache when a major enquiry cropped up. There were only eighteen DCs on the division, most of them scattered across the sections. Every officer in Derbyshire Constabulary had an average of three crimes on his desk at any one time – well, except in Glossop section, where they claimed to have five. But then, Glossop always had been a world of its own.

Oh well, it looked as though his social life might be put on hold again. And just when it was getting more interesting.

He crossed the bridge over the River Eden and hit the A623 into Calver. To the west, beyond Abney Moor, was his old home, Bridge End Farm. The town of Bakewell was a little further on, and then it was a straight run down the A6 to Matlock.

This was one of his favourite parts of the Peak District, because it seemed to have the best of both worlds. The high gritstone edges rose to the east – Curbar Edge and Baslow Edge. Dark, bare and ancient. But down here in the valleys, the dense woodland gave the landscape an entirely different character. At this time of year, he could start to think of it as his own world again, almost free of tourists, settling under its blanket of fallen leaves.

And beneath the trees, among the fields and the drystone walls, were the small farms. Each one, like Bridge End, trying to face up to its future.

Finally, he reached Foxlow. It was one of those villages that looked as though nothing ever happened, but where the worst things often did. Not much traffic during the day, and no one out on the street. The residents were all at work, or in their gardens, or shut away in their front rooms, wondering what all the activity was outside.

The scene at Bain House was already swarming with personnel and vehicles. When Cooper reported to the RV point, he was amazed to see officers from the Firearms Support Unit patrolling the outer cordon with their automatic weapons cradled across their bullet-proof vests. That could only mean one thing.

His DI, Paul Hitchens, was coming across the garden with the crime-scene manager, Wayne Abbott. Hitchens was dressed in a dark suit and tie, keeping up his image as one of the smartest detectives in E Division. Abbott was wearing his pale blue crime-scene coverall, and neither the colour nor the shapeless outfit suited his muscular build and stubbled jaw.

Waiting patiently for them at the incident control unit was the divisional head of CID, Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Kessen. Until potential forensic evidence had been preserved and recorded, the scene was Wayne Abbott’s domain, and crime-scene managers were jealous gods. Everyone had to wait for his permission to enter.

It was somehow reassuring to see Kessen at a crime scene, though it indicated the seriousness of the incident. Although he wasn’t a big man, the DCI had the ability to become a focal point for activity wherever he happened to be. He was the still centre at the heart of events that might otherwise descend into chaos. Today he looked as calm as ever, using his mobile phone to deal with some administrative problem at the office as he waited for Hitchens and Abbott to reach him.

Cooper admired that. Better to be calm and unhurried than to rush around doing all the wrong things in the early stages. It was the way he’d like to be himself, if he ever made it to a senior level. But he wasn’t sure he had the right temperament. Maybe that was why he was still a DC.

He joined the fringes of the group, hoping for more information. The details he had so far were scanty. A woman found dead in her home, possible signs of an intruder.

The DCI took his time ending his call. ‘Definitely a shooting?’ he said finally, turning his gaze on Abbott.

Abbott pulled the hood and collar of his scene suit away from his neck and peeled off his gloves. ‘Absolutely. At least three shots were fired, I’d say.’

‘Why would you say that, Wayne?’

‘You can see for yourself. We’ve got the video, of course. But I can let you do a walkthrough on this one, if you like.’

The DI was signalling. Cooper fell in step alongside him as they headed towards the house.

‘The victim’s name is Rose Ann Shepherd. Unmarried, so far as we can tell. It appears she lived completely alone – no other family members, and no staff. She’s been resident in the village for about ten months.’

‘Who found her?’ asked Cooper, pulling out his notebook.

‘Well, a neighbouring farmer raised the alarm, but it was actually the postman who first noticed something wrong – his name’s Bernie Wilding. Mr Wilding could see that the victim hadn’t emptied her letter box.’

‘So she’s been dead since yesterday?’

‘At least.’

They followed the path marked out for them to climb the stairs and reach the master bedroom. The victim’s body still lay where PC Myers had found it, half on and half off the rug, twisted at an unnatural angle. She looked as though she’d been turning towards the door, one arm outstretched, but bent awkwardly by the fall. The red stains on the sheepskin ran on to the carpet and soaked the victim’s nightdress. Cooper noticed that the nightdress was blue, only a shade or two darker than Abbott’s crime-scene suit.

The bedroom was noticeably cooler than the rest of the house. And there was an obvious reason for that – the casement window stood open. A cool breeze blew through the back garden of Bain House, and a few dead leaves had drifted on to the window ledge.

‘So,’ said Kessen. ‘Three shots, you said?’

Abbott stood over the body. ‘Well, two shots hit the victim. The medical examiner says either one of them might have been enough to kill her. Certainly enough to put her on the floor.’

‘So where did the third shot go?’

‘That was a miss. The bullet embedded itself in the bedroom wall there, high up near the ceiling. See it?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll be able to give you an idea of the weapon once the bullets have been recovered.’

‘Time of death?’ said Kessen, without much sign of optimism.

‘Between thirty and forty hours ago, according to the ME. Rigor mortis was almost gone when he examined the victim, but for a bit of residual stiffness in the abdomen.’

‘My God, forty hours?’

‘At the maximum.’

Hitchens looked at his watch. ‘That would put the earliest time of the incident at nine p.m. Saturday. And the latest at seven a.m. Sunday.’

Kessen shook his head. ‘For heaven’s sake, how does a woman get herself shot and then lie dead for nearly two days without anyone noticing? Why didn’t someone somewhere miss her? Why didn’t they get worried when she wasn’t out and about doing all the things she usually did?’

‘The time is just a temperature-based estimate, of course,’ said Abbott. ‘You’ll need some other evidence to pin it down more closely.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Well, temperature-based methods of calculating time of death are the most prone to error, you know. Newton’s Law of Cooling isn’t the most modern approach.’

Ah, Newton’s Law of Cooling. It was a familiar phrase, one that had stuck in Cooper’s mind from his training. When he first heard of it, he’d pictured some seventeenth-century eccentric sitting under a tree with an apple bouncing off his head. He didn’t know the mathematics behind Isaac Newton’s theory, but he knew it was almost always inaccurate – hence the medical examiners hedging their bets and stretching out time scales like Play-Doh.

Like everyone else, he’d been taught that rigor mortis in a dead body was complete by twelve hours and gone by thirty-six. But later he’d discovered that there were as many differences of opinion as there were experts, and too many factors involved. Time of death should be based on witness reports, not physical evidence. But he hadn’t heard a hint of any witnesses yet.

‘Surely we can send FSU home?’ said Hitchens. ‘Whoever did the shooting will be long gone.’

‘Not until we’ve completed a sweep of the area and done door-to-door in the village,’ said Kessen. ‘For all we know, he might be holed up somewhere nearby.’

‘Yes, understood. It just seems to be making the residents a bit jittery, seeing armed police officers on the street. They’re not used to it around here.’

Kessen shrugged. ‘Point of entry, Wayne?’ he said. ‘On the face of it, this open window looks like the way the assailant came into the house.’

‘Perhaps. But it wasn’t forced – there are no tool marks on the frame. We lifted several latents, though. I should get results on those within the hour.’

‘The first officers to arrive came in through a side window,’ said Hitchens. ‘But they had to smash it themselves, which set off the intruder alarms – Control got a call from a monitoring room somewhere, but we were already on the scene by then. The alarms were still going like crazy when I got here.’

‘Our officers set off the alarms? They weren’t activated by the assailant?’

‘No, sir.’

Kessen walked out on to the landing and looked down the stairs. A SOCO was crouched over something in the hallway.

‘What have you got there?’

‘A video intercom system. It must be connected to the unit on the front gate.’

Hitchens came over to look. ‘I don’t even have a gate at my house, let alone an intercom. I live on one of those open-plan estates. Any bugger can run across my front lawn, or up my drive.’

‘They call that community living,’ said Abbott.

‘I know what I’d call it. So how does that thing work?’

The SOCO picked up the handset. ‘When someone presses the button at the gate, there’s a tiny camera in the unit on the gatepost that shows their image on the screen here.’

‘So the householder can see the postman in the flesh, and know he’s not an impostor.’

‘That’s it.’

Cooper looked down at the body again as the exchange went backwards and forwards around him. Voices echoed strangely in the house, as if it wasn’t fully furnished. Actually, the furniture was fairly sparse. Nothing unnecessary or frivolous cluttered the rooms that he’d seen. It made him think of his flat in Welbeck Street when he’d first viewed it. Furnished, but empty. Empty because no one lived there.