Already Dead

11

It was an old cottage, with walls that bowed outwards to an alarming extent. Its roof seemed ready to collapse, its upper windows about to drop into the street if someone didn’t push them back pretty quickly. In any other structure or object — a car, a bridge, an aircraft — this would be considered a dangerous level of deterioration and would call for immediate repairs, perhaps even demolition and replacement. But people loved that sort of thing in property. It was called having character.

Inside the house, Ingrid Turner was showing a bit of wear and tear too. She must have been in her sixties, which wasn’t a great age. She would only recently have starting claiming her state pension. Many people were ridiculously fit and healthy well into their seventies these days — Fry saw them striding about the Peak District in their shorts and bush hats every weekend. But Mrs Turner had been worn down over the years, and looked an old woman. No doubt the worry about her missing son hadn’t helped.

She was holding herself together, though. When she appeared at the door she was hugging her arms around her body as if afraid her disintegration could start at any moment and there would be no one around to pick up the pieces.

Mrs Turner invited Fry and Hurst in straight away, and sat them down in her little sitting room, around a small table covered in a white lace cloth. Place mats were already laid out as if she was expecting visitors at any minute.

Fry broke the news in the best way she could. There was never a right way, she’d found. People had so many different reactions to this kind of situation that you could never hope to anticipate every one. In Mrs Turner’s case, there was stone cold denial. She’d turned a deaf ear to what she was being told. She was still waiting for someone to find her son and bring him home.

‘Do you live here alone?’ asked Fry, wary about what the next stage of her reaction might be. It was always best to keep people talking. A family liaison officer would be in Wirksworth shortly. But, like everyone else, the FLOs were busy, their services too much in demand for the staff available to cope with. For now, it was just her and DC Hurst trying to deal with it.

‘There’s just me and Glen,’ said Mrs Turner. ‘It’s been that way for years, just the two of us. Why would he want to live anywhere else? I’m his mum, after all. I look after him well.’

‘What was Glen’s job?’

‘He works for an insurance company in Edendale. Prospectus Assurance, they’re called. He’s been there about twelve years. He’s very good at his job, Glen. Very good. Everybody appreciates his work.’

‘I’m sure they do. What exactly did your son do?’

‘He’s a claims adjuster. It’s a very responsible position.’

‘We’ll have to talk to his employers.’

‘They’re in the address book. I phoned them, but they haven’t seen him today. I suppose he’ll be in trouble when he gets into work tomorrow.’

It was so disorientating, this way of holding a conversation in two different tenses. Every time she mentioned Glen Turner in the past tense, his mother answered as if he was still alive and about to walk through the door at any moment. It was like being a time traveller, living in the past and present simultaneously.

Fry looked at the white tablecloth. There was an extra place mat laid, an extra coaster, another cup and saucer, standing waiting for tea to be poured. None of them had taken sugar, but the bowl was there, filled and ready. She would take a bet that Glen had taken at least two spoonfuls in his tea.

‘What about friends?’ asked Fry.

Ingrid looked round, puzzled. ‘There’s Mrs Jones across the road. Or Pat Mercer. Pat and I go to the WI together. She’s got a little car. All I have is my Mango card for the Sixes bus. I often use the 6.1 service to Derby via Belper.’

‘No, I meant friends of your son’s,’ said Fry impatiently.

Hurst leaned forward to speak to Mrs Turner. ‘It is something we ask, you know. I mean, when we have to give news of a death. We suggest contacting a friend to come and sit with the bereaved relative-’

Fry stared at her. ‘Yes. Thank you, DC Hurst…’

Mrs Turner was looking from one to the other. ‘He is dead, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Yes, Mrs Turner. I’m afraid so. That’s what we told you.’

The last thing Fry wanted was to let Becky Hurst take over the interview. But Ingrid Turner seemed to respond to her. It was as if the woman hadn’t heard anything that Fry had said to her when they arrived at the house. Yes, your son is dead. She must have imagined something like this when she decided to report him missing.

‘I’m all right,’ said Mrs Turner. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Do you have any family, other than Glen?’

‘He’s my only child. We never had any more kids. And his father died a few years ago. Heart attack, you know. The usual.’ She looked at Hurst brightly, as if she was trying her hardest to be helpful. ‘I do have a sister in Manchester. She’s got children.’

‘Perhaps we should call your sister for you,’ said Hurst. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own.’

‘Or Pat Mercer,’ said Fry.

Mrs Turner began to shake her head, looking thoughtful. ‘No, Glen doesn’t really have any friends,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but he’s turned out a bit of a loner. There’s nothing wrong with that though, is there? A lot of people are happy with their own company. It doesn’t mean anything.’

Fry could see that the initial shock was starting to wear off. The impact of what Mrs Turner had been told was about to hit her. She was running their conversation backwards in her mind until she reached the moment when she opened the door to two police officers and was told that her son was dead. But before she reached that point, it seemed that she’d finally heard Fry’s question.

‘He’s single?’ she asked. ‘No girlfriends?’

‘None that I know of. And I’m sure I’d know.’

‘No girlfriends, then. So perhaps a boyfriend…?’

Mrs Turner began to shake her head emphatically.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Fry. ‘Not these days. It’s all fine.’

‘No, you don’t understand. His father wouldn’t have liked it. Clive was dead set in his views on the subject.’

Fry sat back in frustration. Yes, some fathers still cast that shadow, no matter how absent they were. Even the dead fathers, it seemed. Clive Turner wouldn’t have liked his son to be gay, so he wasn’t. It was as simple as that for Ingrid.

But perhaps it wasn’t at all simple for poor old Glen.

‘Did Glen have any enemies, then? Had he fallen out with anyone recently? Got himself into trouble of some kind?’

But it was too late. Mrs Turner’s mental rewind had reached the critical juncture. Her body sagged, the lines of her face began to crumple and blood suffused her cheeks as her veins swelled with an enormous pressure.

Just like her house, Ingrid Turner seemed about to collapse.

Charlie Dean thought he must be getting paranoid. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to see a hooded figure with staring eyes. He glimpsed it on every street corner in Wirksworth, lurking in every entrance in the area of narrow alleyways people called the Puzzle Gardens. He saw a dark shape at the bottom of the garden when he was showing a young couple round a semi-detached house in Brassington. He felt as though someone was standing waiting in every room of an empty property he’d been asked to value in Cromford.

It was ridiculous, of course. He’d never been the over-imaginative type. Down to earth and reliable, that was Charlie Dean. He left the flights of imagination to the women. Sheena was good at it. And Barbara, too — though the ideas that ran through her mind were always the worst things she could imagine about him. She loved to torment herself like that, creating entire fantasy scenarios in which her husband was always the villain, the cold-hearted monster. She probably pictured herself taking revenge on him for whatever she dreamed he’d done.

Because it had been like that at home since Barbara had convinced herself so firmly of his guilt, Charlie had decided a long time ago that they might as well enjoy some of the things he was considered guilty of. He might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat. Or something like that.

But that Thursday morning, as he drove back from Cromford to his office at Williamson Hart, the unsettling anxiety that dogged his working day was undermining Charlie Dean’s confidence. He wondered once or twice whether Barbara had hired someone to follow him, some thug who’d been given the job of scaring him. If that was the case, he was doing a really good job.

But it was probably a bit too subtle for Barbara. She was the sort of woman who was more likely to cut up his clothes and pour paint over his BMW. He’d promised her the new kitchen extension she’d been nagging him about, and the builders had started delivering materials this week. But no matter how much money he spent, he knew it would never be enough for Barbara.

Charlie pulled into a side road between Steeple Grange and Wirksworth, recognising three little terraces of stone cottages that had been cleaned up and sandblasted, and separated with wrought iron railings. When he’d parked, he dialled a number on his mobile. But when it was answered he found he didn’t really know what to say.

‘Hi, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Charlie Dean. How are you doing? Yeah, great. Well, you know … not that great, actually.’

Confused by his own indecision, Charlie stared out of his car window at the rows of cottages. Each door was painted a different colour, but all had the same brass knocker. He wondered how he would market one. He liked each of his properties to be unique, with its own special character. That was Charlie Dean’s style. He felt it reflected his personality.

‘I need you to help me with a little matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit delicate, so … Oh yeah, funny. You’re such a scream.’

He looked down the road towards Wirksworth. He pictured Green Hill and The Dale winding their way up the slopes to the right until they were stopped by the walls of the abandoned quarry. Barbara might be up there at the moment, in their house on The Dale. That is, unless she was out visiting one of her friends, gossiping about him in a sitting room or yakking over a cappuccino at PeliDeli in St John’s Street.

‘Meet me for a drink,’ said Charlie. ‘Then we can talk about it.’