Already Dead

36

Sheena Sullivan twisted her hands anxiously on the bed. Watching her, Fry guessed she was probably longing for a cigarette, if only to give herself something to do with her fingers. But there was no smoking in a hospital ward. This was one place the law couldn’t be overlooked.

Sheena had one leg in plaster as a result of a compound fracture, and a few broken ribs. She’d been under observation for a possible concussion, but now the bandages had been removed and a series of stitches were visible running through her hair where her scalp had been lacerated by broken glass. Her eyes were blackened, but Fry could see that the bilirubin was already starting to turn the bruises yellow. Mrs Sullivan had been very lucky that her face was otherwise untouched.

‘Charlie Dean had a good scam going,’ said Fry. ‘And Williamson Hart seem to have known about that. They were about to sack him.’

‘Were they?’

‘What they didn’t know is that he was being blackmailed. His activities came to the attention of Ralph Edge at Prospectus Assurance. That would all have come apart when he lost his job, wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s so difficult to avoid getting drawn further and further in when someone is able to put pressure on you like that. Before you know it, you’re in too deep, and it’s too late for you. Charlie was given a role in what happened to Glen Turner, wasn’t he?’

Sheena stared at the wall. She was pale, but Fry couldn’t be sure whether that was from the pain of her injuries, or the shock. It didn’t matter. She was happy to carry on talking for a while, sorting out the facts in her own mind.

‘I bet Charlie thought they were just trying to get information,’ she said. ‘But maybe the Gibsons always intended to kill Turner, or didn’t care. How was Charlie involved exactly, Sheena? What was he supposed to do? Whatever it was, the man in the red rain jacket turned up and scared him so much that he cleared off and didn’t go back. He was terrified that there was a witness who’d be able to identify him. So he just drove away and prayed.’

Sheena blinked a little. Fry thought she might be getting close to the truth.

‘So — Charlie. He sounds like a man who was able to compartmentalise his life pretty well. He had everything separated out, didn’t he? His job, his wife, his mistress, his criminal activities. He must have worked out a set of roles for himself, changing into a different Charlie Dean according to the circumstances. Who said men can’t multitask, eh?’

Sheena even smiled a little at that.

‘The only wonder is that he managed to juggle all those balls for so long,’ said Fry. ‘His wife was getting nearer and nearer to the point where she would have divorced him, I think. That would have been a shock for Mr Dean. I bet he thought he was the only one who could do that, and his marriage would last for as long as he decided it would. And there were his employers at Williamson Hart. Ursula Hart told me they were planning to sack him. That would have brought the whole pack of cards tumbling down too. But your husband Jay got to him first.’

Sheena had listened long enough. Finally, she decided to talk. Perhaps Fry had just driven her to it.

‘There were these two men that Charlie met,’ said Sheena.

‘Yes, the Gibson brothers.’

‘That’s them. Ryan Gibson was on a driving course that we both did in Chesterfield. I didn’t like him at all. And his brother was even worse. I can’t remember his name, but he was horrible.’

‘The brother is called Sean,’ said Fry.

‘Well, they were doing the job on this Glen Turner character. Charlie and me, we were supposed to go back and get him after a while. We were only going to scare him, you see. Charlie said what they were doing was only like waterboarding. No worse than that.’

‘Waterboarding?’

‘The CIA do it with al-Qaeda suspects. Turner would never have gone to the police and reported us. He would have had to explain why it happened. Charlie had all that figured out. He’s a clever bloke, Charlie. I mean, he was.’

Fry stared at her. Yes, waterboarding was clever, but simple. Among torture methods, it had a history as old as civilisation itself. She had no idea who invented it, but she knew it had been popular across the world, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Khmer Rouge. The Americans had executed Japanese soldiers on war crimes charges for using it during the Second World War, then decades later had used it themselves. It needed so little equipment. Just a cloth and a bucket of water — and someone to hold your victim down.

Layers of cloth were placed over the face, the head tilted back and downwards, and a slow cascade of water was poured over the cloth. You would hold your breath for a while, and then you’d have to exhale. The next inhalation brought the damp cloth tight against the nostrils. She imagined it would feel something like a huge, wet paw suddenly clamped over her face. They said you were unable to tell at that point whether you were breathing in or out. You were flooded more by sheer panic than by water. No one lasted long, they said. You would pray for the relief of being hauled upright and having the stifling layers pulled off.

As the prisoner gagged and choked on the water, they said, the terror of imminent death was overwhelming, with all the physical and psychological reactions. An intense stress response, a rapid heartbeat, the gasping for breath. There was supposed to be a real risk of death from actually drowning, or from a heart attack, or from damage to the lungs by the inhalation of water. As a result of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the victim might simply give up, losing consciousness as water was allowed to fill the airways. Waterboarding could cause the sort of ‘severe pain’ prohibited by the United Nations Convention against Torture. Long-term effects for survivors included panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. People would panic and gasp for breath whenever it rained, even years afterwards.

There were instructions for waterboarding on the internet now. You could even watch a video of the journalist Christopher Hitchens going through it himself and managing to last only sixteen seconds before he capitulated — but at least he’d volunteered for the experience. Once you made information like that generally available, people were bound to use it. Not long ago, in another part of the country, burglars had broken into an expensive house and waterboarded an elderly woman to get the combination of her safe.

Like them, Charlie Dean and his associates hadn’t felt bound by the United Nations Convention. Who did, these days?

Fry thought about the position of the body, the doubt over whether Glen Turner might have died from drowning. There had been a two-litre Coke bottle, perfect for pouring a controlled flow of water. And the towels. Oh, God the towels. They would have been put over Turner’s face and soaked with water. When he was finally forced to breathe in, his body would tell him he was drowning, whether he was or not.

‘Like waterboarding?’ she said. ‘It undoubtedly was waterboarding.’

‘You know what it is?’

‘Yes, I know what waterboarding is. But…?’

‘What?’

‘Glen Turner. He was hardly a terrorist. Did he really deserve what you did to him?’

She turned her face away and stared at the wall. ‘We thought so at the time. I suppose things look different when you think about them afterwards.’

‘You said you were supposed to go back after a while to rescue him. But you didn’t go back, did you?’

‘Not then. Not straight away. It was the man in the red rain jacket-’

‘He scared you. Yes, you said so. But it turns out he should have been more scared of you, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’

Fry sighed. She could see it was true. The woman really didn’t know what she meant. So often, people couldn’t see how dangerous they were.

‘But you did go back later? Is that what you’re telling us?’

‘Charlie said he went back.’

‘On his own?’

She gave a melodramatic shudder. ‘I couldn’t have faced it.’

‘Oh? You couldn’t face the reality of what you’d done?’

Sheena clamped her lips tightly shut and stared back at Fry mulishly. ‘Charlie went, anyway. Like I said, we didn’t mean him to die. So Charlie went back to the woods when it was safe. But he was too late. He said it was obvious that Turner was, well, already…’

‘Yes.’

‘But he couldn’t have drowned? Not in so little water. We made sure it was shallow.’

‘You didn’t take into account the amount of rain that’s fallen in the last few days,’ said Fry. ‘Haven’t you noticed the flooding? That stream started off shallow, but the water became deeper and deeper while you were sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘That’s horrible,’ she said. ‘Drowning.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Fry.

‘Oh God,’ said Sheena. ‘Did we let him drown?’

Fry shook her head. ‘As matter of fact, you’re right,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t clear, but I got the final post-mortem report only this morning. Glen Turner didn’t drown. It turns out he had an undiagnosed heart condition. Mr Turner’s heart gave out on him before the water killed him.’

‘Oh.’

‘Does that make it better?’ asked Fry.

Sheena didn’t answer. But Fry could see from her face that it did. Somehow the fact that their victim had died from some other cause lifted part of the guilt from her shoulders.

‘But here’s the bad news,’ added Fry. ‘It won’t make any difference to your sentence. In the eyes of the law, you’re still guilty of murder. And that means life.’

‘Prison?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Sheena groaned. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now anyway. I’ve lost everything.’

Fry stood up to leave.

‘One last thing. Where did the blood come from? Who caused that?’

‘I think it was Ryan Gibson who hit him a couple of times,’ said Sheena, as if it was an everyday occurrence. ‘Just a few slaps, that was all. But Turner’s nose was bleeding a bit afterwards.’

‘When noses bleed, they tend to produce quite a lot of blood.’

‘I suppose so.’

It wasn’t important. There hadn’t been much blood evident at the crime scene. Just those few traces she’d glimpsed on the parts of the body above the waterline. The amount lost in a nosebleed would soon have been washed away by the running water. Charlie Dean had taken some of it away on his hands, though. And one of his hands had transferred that blood to the paintwork of his car when he was trying to push it out of the mud. That was what forensics relied on — the transfer of traces from every contact.

‘Charlie did have some blood on his hands,’ said Sheena. ‘I saw it after the man in the red rain jacket got back in his car. I wondered if the stranger noticed it. I imagined him phoning the police as soon as we’d left, to report what he’d seen.’

‘I don’t believe he noticed anything,’ said Fry. ‘And, even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have thought to phone the police.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘Well,’ said Fry. ‘I think he was the police.’

After the interview was finished and the tapes had been sealed and signed, Fry went back to her desk in the CID room and phoned Ben Cooper to arrange another meeting. It would be best to do it now, rather than leave it. He would only hear the details from someone else, anyway.

But Fry wondered how she was going to break it to him. How was she going to tell Cooper the truth? She knew what he was like, and she had to explain a fact to him that he’d never be able to live with.

In his own helpful, Good Samaritan way, Ben Cooper had been responsible for the death of Glen Turner.

Ben Cooper was sitting on a bench by the River Eden, where it flowed shallow and fast through the centre of town. This stretch was wide enough to accommodate the extra volume of water that had come down from the hills. There had been some overflow on to the walkways, and the mallard ducks which nested in the undergrowth on the little island had been flooded out.

The rain had stopped hours ago, and the sun was breaking through in a patch of blue sky. The Eden was almost back to its normal levels, and sunlight glittered on its surface. But the mallards were still complaining. They splashed about frantically among the debris of their nests and a tangle of mud-covered rubbish dragged down from upstream.

Cooper felt as though he’d been like those ducks for a while now, splashing about in the wreckage of his life with no real hope or sense of purpose. He’d been in danger of watching everything get washed away downstream for ever.

Of course, you always brought along a lot of baggage as you went through life. Some of it clung so persistently that it could weigh you down for years. But surely there was even more baggage that you left behind, wasn’t there? Memories and experiences, and failed relationships, that you shrugged off and left at the roadside when you moved on. Cooper pictured a mass of sagging cardboard suitcases, all sealed with grubby parcel tape and bulging at the corners. He could imagine a long row of them, standing at the edge of a pavement, awaiting collection by the binmen. There was no point in going back and poking open the lids to look at what you’d left behind. The accumulated mould was likely to choke you, the dust would get in your eyes.

But he was over that now. He really was feeling different today. Perhaps it was time to leave the debris behind.

Cooper looked up, and saw Diane Fry coming towards him. When she realised he’d spotted her she seemed to slow down, her feet dragging as if she never wanted to reach him. And he saw straight away that she had that look again.

From her expression, he knew without doubt that Fry expected the worst of the world. Even today, she couldn’t see any blue sky.