Dead and Buried

30

Henry Pearson held himself stiffly as he peered through the plate-glass window. In the tiled room on the other side of the glass, the body of his son lay on a stainless-steel table. Fry watched him as a mortuary attendant drew back the cover slowly, careful not to expose parts of the neck and shoulder that had suffered more advanced decomposition.

‘Yes, of course it’s David,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

His eyes remained fixed on the pale face, barely acknowledging Fry’s presence. According to Ben Cooper, David Pearson had once resembled a well-known actor, some old Hollywood heart-throb. Fry hadn’t been able to see the resemblance from the photographs. She certainly couldn’t see it now.

‘What about Patricia?’ said Pearson, still without moving.

‘We can do the identification from DNA,’ said Fry.

Henry Pearson turned to look at her then. ‘But why …?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. Decomposition. They were wrapped differently. So her face …’

Pearson swallowed, and rested a hand lightly on the glass to support himself.

‘If I could get hold of the person who did this, I’d kill him and bury him myself. Then I’d dig him up and kill him again.’

The attendant drew the cover back over David’s head. When they’d gone, the body would be returned to the drawer where it was being stored. David Pearson would go back into the freezer.

When Fry had escorted Pearson from the mortuary and seen him leave, she knew it was time to talk to Nancy Wharton again.

It was only a short drive from the hospital to West Street. Fry spent the time working out what she needed from Mrs Wharton. Names, of course. She had to break down any sense of loyalty and solidarity with her accomplices. Loyalty had no place in the interview room.

To help her think, Fry turned on the CD player. Annie Lennox was still there, waiting for her, the one person she could trust in an unreliable world. Lennox’s voice came in over the first chords to an acoustic version of ‘Dark Road’. She was singing about emotions she wasn’t feeling, a meaning she wasn’t listening to. Fry nodded her head to the song. She knew that particular dark road.

Between the two distractions, she managed not to notice much of Edendale until she was turning off Greaves Road into West Street. She reported to DCI Mackenzie, then called in to the CID room and collected Becky Hurst to sit in with her when she reopened the interview with Nancy Wharton.

‘Poor Maurice,’ said Nancy, her arms still wrapped tightly round her body. ‘It was horrible. But he was out of control. He wasn’t responsible for his actions. That’s what I’ll say, you know. That’s what we’ll all say.’

‘But it isn’t as simple as that,’ said Fry. ‘There was only one person who was capable of organising the clean-up. It needed a level head, clear thinking. Only one person was in any condition. And you don’t drink, do you, Nancy?’

‘I did that night,’ she said. ‘But not until much later.’

Nancy continued to tell the story. She no longer needed much prompting. Now that she was halfway there, she wasn’t going to stop.

‘Afterwards … well, some of the lads rallied round, and we all agreed on a story.’

‘The lads?’

Her jaw was set in a hard line. ‘I wouldn’t tell you their names. Not for anything.’

Fry recognised a dead end when she saw one. But there were ways round it. More routes than one to the truth.

‘Go on, then,’ she said.

‘At one time, Maurice only really felt at home in one place. Where the heart of the Light House was — in the cellar. So that’s where we chose. We knew we’d have to move them, but it was the best place for the time being. The mine shafts were searched at the time, but the pub wasn’t.’

Nancy nodded slowly. ‘Well, it was strange, but it was only when we saw the fires on the moor and started to worry about the pub getting damaged that it suddenly occurred to us that there would be new owners going in. They would be sorting everything out, looking through the records. We’d put the old filing cabinets down in the cellar and forgotten all about them. It was the place we always put things we didn’t want.’

‘And when the inquiry ground to a halt …?’

‘We thought it was all dead and buried.’

‘Dead and buried? Not really. It must always have been in your mind.’

She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Well, you’re right. It was always in my mind. I was always wondering when something might happen, whether someone would talk. I knew it would only take a slip of the tongue, a careless remark.’

Fry couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with that sort of fear, the terror of a secret slipping out. No matter what Nancy Wharton said, it must fill every minute of your day, until you suffered from an unremitting paranoia about every little thing.

‘Later on, we moved everything,’ said Nancy. ‘They buried the anoraks and stuff, but the bodies … well, have you ever tried shifting a body? It took a couple of quad bikes to get them well away from the pub on to the moor. Then a few fires were started to draw attention away. That nearly went wrong. The wind changed direction, and the fires moved towards the pub instead of away. My God, watching that smoke coming nearer and nearer, we panicked. We had to get the freezers out of the cellar. We knew there’d be evidence — blood, and so on. We’d already cleaned up in the bedroom, scrubbed the floor with bleach, replaced the carpet and the bedding, even stripped off all the wallpaper and redecorated. It never came to an end, the clearing up and covering over. The blood always seemed to be there.’

‘Talking to yourself again, Ben?’

Cooper turned and found Villiers watching him. He had been so absorbed that he hadn’t heard her coming down the steps into the cellar.

‘No one else will listen to me,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Liz Petty is working in the Bakewell Room, where the Pearsons stayed. She says there’s blood residue everywhere.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘It’s going to keep her busy for a while. She ought to have some help, Ben.’

‘I know. I’ll call in and chase someone up. Well, I will when I can get a signal on my phone.’

‘I’m off network too,’ said Villiers.

‘It’s these cellars.’

‘Don’t you start to feel a bit uneasy when you’re out of touch? Or is it just me?’

‘It used to be like this all the time when I was in uniform. We didn’t have mobile phones, and the old analogue radios were almost useless in parts of this division.’

Villiers stepped into the office area. ‘What are you doing anyway?’

Cooper showed her the guest record. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘It’s a turn-up. But it doesn’t mean Mad Maurice wasn’t responsible for the deaths.’

‘It shows that Nancy wasn’t telling the truth, about that part of the story at least. And what was it she said in the interview? You can’t blame us for trying to protect our family. Anyone would have done it. That word “family” suggests more than just Maurice to me. It sounds like a mother talking about her children.’

As he spoke, Cooper moved back into the main part of the cellar and stood under the delivery hatchway that led outside. Stepping up on to the stone ledge, he heaved at the hatch. He managed to raise the edge of one door an inch or two before the weight of the furniture stacked on top prevented it moving any further. If he tilted his head at an angle, he found he could just see through the inch of space he’d created. He saw a rusty table leg in the foreground, a patch of burnt earth, and a length of concrete stretching away from the building.

Then he blinked in surprise. A white pickup stood by the garages, next to his own car. A Mitsubishi L200, if he wasn’t mistaken. But before he could see any more, the weight of the door proved too much for his bruised shoulder, and he had to let it down.

‘Whose is the pickup?’ he said.

Villiers stared at him. ‘Pickup? I’ve no idea.’

‘Has Josh Lane left?’

‘I think so. I saw him out of the building.’

‘Well did someone else arrive, then?’

‘I don’t know, Ben. You can’t hear anything from down here.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

Worried now, Cooper checked his phone for a signal and saw that it still read Network lost. Blasted cellar walls.

But he saw from the display that he’d received a text message before the network dropped. He tapped the messages icon and found a text from Diane Fry. You need to know this. DNA match confirmed from blood. Call asap.

‘Mmm. But who is it a match to?’

‘Sorry, Ben?’

‘It’s okay. I’m talking to myself again.’

‘Liz will have to cure you of that. We don’t want you getting a reputation as an eccentric.’

Cooper turned slowly and took in the cellar — the empty kegs, the abandoned equipment, the beer lines snaking upwards. He gazed at the ceiling, where the lines disappeared into the bar to connect to the pumps.

‘We’ve missed something, haven’t we?’ he said.

‘Have we?’ said Villiers. ‘We’ve been through every room — the kitchens, the bedrooms, all the stores and outbuildings. And now the cellars.’

But there was something lodged in the back of Cooper’s mind — the part of the brain that most resembled a landfill site, full of unwanted debris. If you poked around in the detritus long enough, you sometimes unearthed a valuable item you’d thought was lost.

‘Of course we’ve missed something,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed who the Pearsons talked to that night at the Light House.’

‘The night there was an argument with Gullick and Naylor?’

‘No, no — the next night, when it was the Young Farmers’ party.’

‘But we have lots of witness statements to show that, apart from the other tourists, the Pearsons didn’t speak to anyone in the bar that night. No one local.’

‘Of course they did,’ said Cooper.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

She threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘So you know better than all those witnesses?’

‘No. But I think they just weren’t asked the right questions. Of course there was someone they talked to.’

‘How?’

Cooper had that picture in his mind again of the people in the bar — the three middle aged men sitting on a bench discussing the quality of their beer, two young couples laughing at a table full of vodka bottles, an elderly woman on her own in the corner with a glass of Guinness and a plastic carrier bag. They all had one thing in common, and it was maddening that he’d missed it.

‘Well, David and Trisha Pearson didn’t sit in the bar all night without ordering any drinks, did they?’ he said.

Villiers looked at him open-mouthed. ‘Well, no …’

‘So they talked to …?’

‘The barman.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, a nice, friendly barman who liked to chat with his customers. A barman called Josh Lane.’

Because of his job, Josh Lane might have known most about the Pearsons. And without being asked, Lane had volunteered the information that he wasn’t here at the Light House on the day the Pearsons disappeared. That was almost certainly true. But he must have been here later, helping to cover up what had happened, and moving the bodies.

Josh Lane. Just like one of the family. Who had said that? The chef, Maclennan. Had Maclennan been closer to the truth than he thought?

And maybe Lane had helped to remove those freezers he’d been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of. If that was his Mitsubishi pickup, it would have been the perfect vehicle for the task. It also answered the description from the firefighters.

So Gullick and Naylor might have been part of a smoke-screen after all. Their names had cropped up several times. But they had most cleverly been floated by Josh Lane, with that pretence of loyalty to customers that now, in hindsight, seemed artificial and coy. Cooper couldn’t believe that he’d fallen for it. He’d turned into a sucker over a cup of espresso and steamed milk.

In retrospect, it should have been clear the exact moment when Lane changed from a friendly, helpful member of the public to the more cautious former employee who couldn’t quite remember what had stood against the wall. It had surely been when Cooper brought him down to the cellar and mentioned the Pearsons. The combination of the two must have made him feel as though he’d been led into a trap. If only, Cooper thought, he’d been so clever.

‘Damn it,’ said Cooper. ‘Why have I been so stupid?’

Then he sniffed. His sense of smell had been on the alert for days. Now his nostrils were sending an urgent message.

‘Can you smell that?’ he said.

Villiers looked up. ‘Yes, it’s smoke. You must have smelled it before, Ben. It’s been burning all week out there.’

‘No, this isn’t burning heather. It’s something different.’

Cooper went to the hatch and tried to push it open. It didn’t budge.

‘Stuck?’

‘I don’t know.’

He rattled the handle without success, tried putting his shoulder against the trapdoor, thumped it hard in growing frustration.

‘I can’t believe this.’

‘What’s the matter, Ben?’

Villiers came across the room to join him. She didn’t sound worried yet, and he tried to keep his voice calm to hide his steadily increasing anxiety.

‘Okay, it does seem to be jammed. Just a bit rusted up probably. I don’t suppose it’s been used much for a long while.’

‘We had no trouble with it coming in,’ said Villiers doubtfully.

Despite her apparent calm, he could hear the beginnings of anxiety in her voice. She tried so hard not to let it show when she was at work, but he knew her too well to be fooled. It was his job now to keep her calm and give her the reassurance that he didn’t actually feel.

‘It’ll just take me a moment.’

‘That smoke, Ben …’

‘What?’

‘It’s coming through the trapdoor.’

Cooper looked up. She was right, of course. No wonder the smell was so strong. The fire was close. Very close. But there was no way the smoke from the blazing moorland could have reached this far and come right into the building, not through locked doors and boarded-up windows.

There was only one possibility. The pub itself was on fire.