The Dead Place. Stephen Booth
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Edendale’s Devonshire Estate, they expected it to be another domestic. A killing in the family, a Grade C murder.
‘You know, it never ceases to amaze me how often the offender calls in the incident himself in a case like this,’ said Fry, checking through the files Gavin Murfin had gathered for her. ‘They can’t think what else to do when they see the body on the floor, except dial 999.’
‘Well, I think it’s very considerate of them to worry about our clear-up rate at a time like that,’ said Murfin.
‘Is everything there, Gavin?’
‘All tied up with a neat bow. Fingers crossed for a short hearing, then,’ said Murfin as she closed the top file. ‘I hear Micky is pleading guilty, so it should all be over by Christmas. Not that he had much choice in the matter.’
‘It was just a walkthrough,’ said Fry.
‘The best kind. I hate the whodunits, don’t you? All those computers thinking they can tell me what to do, and every bugger in the building complaining about my paperwork.’
‘I presume you’re referring to the HOLMES system.’
‘HOLMES – who thought up that name? Some Mycroft down in Whitehall, I suppose. One day they’ll sack all the dicks and let the computers out on the streets.’
‘When is your tenure up, Gavin?’
Murfin said nothing. He worked in silence for a while. Out of the corner of her eye, Fry could see his mouth still moving, but no words came out.
‘Only a few months left now, aren’t there?’ she said.
‘Could be.’
‘Back to core policing for a while, is it?’
‘Unless I get promoted,’ said Murfin bitterly.
‘Let’s hope for the best, then.’
Fry was aware of the look that Murfin gave her. Of course, they might have different ideas as to what the best might be.
Ben Cooper was still smiling as he cleared the outskirts of Sheffield and dropped a gear to start the climb towards Houndkirk Moor. At the top of this road was the Fox House Inn, where he crossed back into Derbyshire and entered the national park. As soon as he passed the boundary marker at the side of the road, Sheffield seemed to fall away behind him quite suddenly. And when he saw the moors opening out ahead of him, burning with purple heather, it always filled his heart with the pleasure of coming home.
Cooper looked again at the file on the passenger seat. In all likelihood, the area he was entering had been home for Jane Raven Lee, too. Somewhere in the valleys and small towns of the White Peak would be the place she’d lived, a house full of her possessions, perhaps a family who still missed her and wondered what had become of her. But a family who loved and missed someone reported them missing, didn’t they?
The previous weekend, Cooper had spent a couple of days walking in the Black Mountains with his friends Oscar and Rakesh. There had been plenty of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs, and a chance to forget the job for a while. But there had been an undercurrent of unease that he hadn’t been able to identify until they were on their way home, driving back up the M5 from South Wales.
It had been Rakki who dropped the first bombshell. He was due to get married next April, and he’d started to talk about moving back to Kenya. His reasons had seemed impractical, even to Cooper – something to do with the smell of lemon chilli powder, tiny green frogs in the grass, and the moonlight on the beach at Mombasa. But Rakki had been five years old when his family emigrated to Britain in the late seventies, and those were the only memories he had. Later, when they stopped off at Tamworth Services, he’d mentioned Gujarat, the Indian province his grandparents came from. Rakki had never even seen it, but his brother Paresh had visited last year. There were endless opportunities for the educated Gujarati, apparently.
And then it had occurred to Cooper that Oscar had been in a serious relationship for almost a year. He could sense his old High Peak College friendships slipping away, a process that had started when they went their separate ways and took up different professions – Oscar to become a solicitor and Rakki to go into IT. Points of contact were becoming difficult to maintain. And one day soon, as they stood on top of a hill somewhere in the country, they would quietly agree. It would be their last weekend together.
Cooper put his foot down a little harder on the accelerator as the Fox House came into view, outlined against the evening sky. He sensed the Toyota surging forward, eager to cover the ground. An irrational feeling had come to him, one probably born of relief at getting out of the city. It was a sudden burst of confidence, a certain knowledge that he was going to achieve his task.
The facial reconstruction had given him the chance he needed, and he was sure it was going to work. Once he crested that hill, Jane Raven Lee would be coming back home, too.
With a sharp backwards kick of her right foot, Diane Fry slammed the street door of the house. But the noise from the ground-floor flat didn’t even falter. Disco-house with urban drum loops at full volume. No matter how hard she slammed it, the damn students wouldn’t hear the sound of the door over the din of their stereo system.
For a moment, she thought of ringing their bell and complaining. It might give her a brief feeling of satisfaction to shout at them. But she knew she’d be wasting her time, and she’d only get herself wound up unnecessarily. Coming home from work was supposed to help you relax, not pile on more stress. Wasn’t that right?
Fry looked up the stairs at the door of her own flat. Yeah. Some hopes.
Inside, there was no noise but for the thud of the drum loops through the floor. So Angie was out. There was no note, nothing to indicate when she might be back. Fry opened the door of her sister’s room and looked in. If it was anyone else, she might have been able to tell by what clothes were missing whether the person who lived there had gone to the pub, gone out for a run, or set off for a job interview. But not in Angie’s case. One T-shirt and one pair of jeans would do as well as any other, whatever the occasion.
Since her sister had moved into the flat with her, Fry found herself worrying about her almost as much as she had when Angie was missing. Perhaps more. During all those years when they were separated, Angie’s whereabouts had been a generalized anxiety, deep and nagging, but an aspect of her life she had learned to accept, like an amputated finger. Now, the worry was sharper and more painful, driven in by daily reminders. By her sister’s presence in the flat, in fact.
Fry found a cheese-and-onion quiche in the freezer compartment and slid it into the microwave. Then she opened a carton of orange juice, sat down at the kitchen table and turned to the Micky Ellis file. She’d appeared in crown court to give evidence many times, but always found it a difficult experience. Defence lawyers would be waiting to pounce on her smallest slip, the slightest hint of doubt in her manner, the most trivial inconsistency between her oral evidence and written statement. A case could so easily be lost on a suggestion of failure in procedure. Forget the question of innocence or guilt. That was yesterday’s justice system.
And yet this defendant was certainly guilty. There couldn’t truly be any doubt.
There was an old joke on Edendale’s Devonshire Estate that you had three options when someone in your family died. You could bury them, cremate them – or just leave them where they fell when you hit them with the poker. Micky Ellis had chosen the Devonshire Estate third option.
When Fry had arrived at the scene, the body of Micky’s girlfriend had still been sprawled right where she’d fallen, half on the rug and half under the bed on the first floor of their council semi. She remembered that the bedroom had lemon yellow wallpaper in pale stripes, and a portable TV set standing on the dresser. She’d noticed a series of cigarette burns on the duvet cover close to the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed, where a personal stereo and a half-read Bridget Jones novel lay on the bedside table. Fry had looked up at the ceiling for a smoke alarm then, but there wasn’t one. And she remembered thinking that maybe Denise Clay had been lucky to live