Already Dead

31

Sitting opposite Diane Fry in his own flat, Ben Cooper began to feel that familiar sensation of unreality. The moment he mentioned the Light House, his head swam and he felt the stirrings of that tremor in his hand, the ache in the back of his throat. But they were fainter now, as if they were fighting a losing battle for control of his body. His mind felt clearer than it had for a long time. Though that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

‘Well, despite the takeover,’ he said, ‘many of the staff are still there in some departments. Call handlers come and go, but experienced people tend to stay on. They’re better paid, and they might find it more difficult to get the same level of salary elsewhere. Ralph Edge was working in the side of the business providing financial advice. He’s a fraud analyst. He knows what methods of fraud work, and which bring in the largest amount of money with the least risk. In fact, he was in a position to cover up fraud, if he wanted to. A gamekeeper turned poacher.’

‘How did he get away with that?’ asked Fry.

Cooper smiled. ‘How did people get away with losing billions of pounds for the banks? Well, they get put into positions of trust, where they’re left to handle huge amounts of other people’s money every day. As long as everything seems to be going okay, no one asks any questions. It’s only when it all goes wrong that people start saying there ought to be more regulation. And by then it’s too late.’

‘And poor old Glen Turner? Turner was pretty weird. He lived a strange life. But he was getting money from somewhere.’

‘Yes. From Ralph Edge,’ said Cooper. ‘Turner had been roped into his fraudulent money making schemes somehow.’

Fry nodded. ‘He was probably very willing at first. God knows, Turner had little enough excitement in his life. I can just imagine him hugging that secret to himself, knowing he’d broken away from his mother’s expectations of him. Then he bought her the greenhouse with the money.’

‘He sounds a sly beggar on the quiet.’

‘But still weird,’ said Fry.

‘And then I suppose he must have begun to feel he still wasn’t appreciated. He was still getting pushed around and disrespected at work. I bet he resented that even more when he’d just begun to feel he was a cool, edgy sort of guy underneath.’

‘After the incident at the paintballing session that Sunday, it all changed, though.’

‘That incident would have been the last straw for Mr Turner,’ said Cooper. ‘The final humiliation. Not only was he the butt of the joke yet again, but his humiliation was orchestrated by Ralph Edge, who he thought was his friend. Perhaps his only friend. But everybody has a limit. Even Glen Turner could only be pushed so far. I think he told Edge exactly that on Tuesday.’

‘He stood up for himself,’ said Fry. ‘Finally, the worm turned. He probably felt in a stronger position after he’d been to the solicitor, and believed he could sue Edge and Baird, even get them prosecuted for assault. I bet Mr Turner came away from that consultation with Mr Chadburn feeling happier and more confident than he had for a while.’

‘And he went straight off to confront Edge the next day.’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘First he went and bought himself a fossil.’

Cooper hadn’t known that. ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said. ‘Some people would have gone a for a drink, or a slap-up meal, or bought themselves a box of chocolates, or whatever.’

‘Are we saying that it was feeling better about himself suddenly that got Glen Turner killed. Is that it?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Cooper. ‘Yes, pretty much. I imagine he went to see Mr Edge on Tuesday and told him he was going to pull the plug on the insurance fraud scheme.’

‘Or he demanded a bigger share of the proceeds,’ suggested Fry. ‘So he could buy his mother more presents.’

‘Possibly. Either way, Edge and his associates must have realised they’d misjudged him. Glen Turner wasn’t to be trusted any more.’

‘So they decided to kill him, to get rid of the problem? There must have been an awful lot of money at stake to justify that solution.’

‘Oh, yes, I think there was,’ said Cooper. ‘When you follow up all the cases they were involved in, I bet you’ll find the total just keeps mounting up and up.’

‘It will be the Major Crime Unit who do that,’ said Fry. ‘In fact, I suppose they’re doing it right now.’

She looked at her mug, and realised she’d drunk her coffee without noticing. She put it down empty on the table.

‘And the Gibson brothers …’ she said.

‘The strong-arm boys of the operation. I’m not sure how much control Ralph Edge, or anyone else, ever had over the Gibsons.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘You know, it’s been very strange these past few months. I told you once that I’d been driving around at night, didn’t I? Often I couldn’t remember where I’d been, or what I’d been doing. But I saw that sign one night. A.J. Morton and Sons. And I remembered Ryan Gibson. He was one of the first suspects I ever dealt with when I joined CID. PC Stanley Walker was the bobby with the local knowledge back then. He still is — except, of course, they’ve retired him. That was lucky from my point of view. Old Stan had become just another member of the public. Like me.’

‘What’s the connection between Ralph Edge and the Gibsons?’

‘Josh Lane is the connection.’

‘Josh Lane. The barman at the Light House.’

‘Yes, Josh Lane. My obsession,’ said Cooper.

He waited for Fry to make a sarcastic comment, but it didn’t come. He noticed the cat slink back into the room and sit watching them curiously, her whiskers twitching as if trying to detect something in the air.

‘According to the intelligence at the time, Lane was involved in the drugs trade on a small scale. He even supplied Ecstasy from behind the bar at the Light House. Selected customers only, of course. But you have to be very careful when you play that game.’

‘You certainly meet some unsavoury characters when you get involved in the drugs business,’ said Fry.

He was glad she understood that, at least. ‘Yes, it’s easy to get yourself in too deep. Those people have no hesitation in putting pressure on you, forcing you to do what they want. You have to go along with them. So you find yourself drawn in deeper and deeper. And then it’s too late. It was too late for Josh Lane. The only wonder is that he’s still out and free.’

‘Obsession,’ said Fry, surprisingly gently.

‘All right. Well, Lane knew the local drug dealers,’ said Cooper. ‘He had no choice but to acknowledge them. Sean Gibson introduced him to Ryan. Now, Ryan Gibson was in the army. He always claimed that he’d been a member of special forces. SAS, you know.’

‘They all claim that.’

‘Ryan either genuinely had been, or he’d mixed with people he learned things from. He was one of those men who was never able to go straight once he was out of the services. He’d learned so much discipline, and taken so many orders. Some men can’t adapt to civilian life, you know. They go to pieces without the discipline and structure, without all their mates around them. They can never hold down regular jobs, because they can’t tolerate taking orders from people they don’t respect, and don’t like dealing with members of the public.’

‘He drove a forklift truck, though.’

‘Yes, out in the yard at the depot, thinking his own thoughts, not having to listen to pointless chatter because of the noise of the truck.’

‘Did he crave a bit of excitement?’

‘Of course.’

‘I suppose Carol Villiers told you all about this sort of thing,’ said Fry. ‘The effect on individuals who’ve left the forces?’

Fry’s tone of voice was one Cooper was familiar with, a tone that he felt could lead to unpredictable results.

‘She understands,’ he said cautiously.

‘Mmm.’

‘So Josh Lane. He met Ralph Edge through the Gibson brothers. They had this little scheme going between them. Well, quite a big scheme, I imagine. Edge identified fraud cases, and the Gibsons put the squeeze on the parties involved, blackmailed them for a share of the money. Insurance fraud attracts big penalties these days. And who’s going to admit they’re being blackmailed for the proceeds of a crime? The Gibsons thought they’d hit lucky. They had the best inside information they could get. They had Ralph Edge.’

‘Until Glen Turner threatened to put a spoke in it.’

‘That’s it,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s the whole thing. By the way…’

‘What?’

‘Are you looking for anyone in connection with a drugs inquiry at the moment?’

‘As it happens, yes.’

‘You could try talking to Sean Gibson about it. There’s a good reason he was lying low and getting his brother to lie about him.’

Cooper broke off and went into his kitchen to take a long drink of water. His throat was getting sore. He could sense the approaching spasms of pain and dizziness that he always experienced when he was forced to relive his memories.

‘What you call my obsession,’ he said, when he sat back down again. ‘It was all about the fire. The fire that Liz died in-’

‘I know,’ said Fry.

Cooper nodded, grateful to her for not making him spell it out.

‘Well, it always seemed too convenient to me, the arson,’ he said. ‘I mean, when you think about all those moorland fires they started beforehand. It was obviously part of a bigger plan. I think it was always part of their plan to burn down the Light House.’

‘For the insurance money?’

‘Yes, Diane. The Whartons were desperate for money. You remember them living in that grotty little council house on the Devonshire Estate? And Maurice Wharton, dying in his hospice bed?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Maurice was tormented by the fact that he’d left his wife and children with nothing. But they had that last resort. Stage a fire that would burn down the Light House for the insurance money. It had to be done before the auction or the building would have passed to new owners, and the bank were waiting to take the proceeds from the sale. They had one chance to do it. And we just got in the way, Liz and I. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eliot Wharton was too hot-headed to consider a change of plan. He did it because he was angry. But Josh Lane…’

Cooper stopped talking. He was fighting to control a surge of anger that burned through him so fiercely that his voice was reduced to a charred croak. It seemed to be a long time before he found the ability to speak again. Then the words were spat out like hot coals from the fire.

‘Josh Lane,’ he said. ‘He did it for the money.’

For a moment, he thought he was going to break down in front of Fry. He covered his face with a hand to hide his eyes. But she seemed as stressed as he was, shifting uneasily in her seat, clearing her throat anxiously, finally getting to her feet and pacing the short distance to the window.

‘They’ve brought Ralph Edge in,’ she said. ‘He’s obviously no hardened criminal. He knows what will be found when they start looking into his computer files and emails. The Gibson brothers are already under arrest.’

‘So they will be the focus of the MCU’s case But not…’

‘Not Josh Lane,’ said Cooper.

Fry shook her head. ‘There’s no evidence, Ben. The CPS won’t even consider amending the charges against him.’

‘So he stays out on bail.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. Really sorry.’

‘So am I,’ he said.

There was another long silence. Thoughts were going through Cooper’s head that he didn’t want Diane Fry to know about, that he didn’t want to share with anyone. They were too awful. He didn’t want these thoughts in his own head, but he knew he’d never get them out now. Securely entrenched, they were dug in like an army of barbarians, wild eyed and with blood in their hearts.

But with an unerring instinct, Fry put her finger right on those innermost thoughts.

‘So what are you going to do next?’ she said, turning back to him.

‘Is that any of your concern?’ snapped Cooper.

Fry flushed angrily. She strode into the little kitchen and in a sudden burst of rage ripped a handful of cuttings off the wall and threw them to the floor.

‘Whatever you do next, it’s got to be better than this!’

Cooper looked at the torn paper on the carpet. He leaned forward and picked up a drawing pin, placing it safely on the table, out of the way of the cat. As she watched him, Fry’s spasm of rage drained away as suddenly as it had come.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘It won’t help Liz if you do something stupid.’

‘No,’ said Ben quietly. ‘But it might help me.’