Fall Down Dead - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Stephen Booth (18) #18

18

Diane Fry stared across the table at her interviewer. The smile had gone from his face now. His eyes were sharp as he waited for her answer. He thought he’d caught her off guard.

‘I don’t know what you mean by my “relationship”,’ said Fry. ‘Angie is my sister. That seems a pretty straightforward relationship to me.’

Martin Jackson remained impassive, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.

‘DS Fry, you do know the rules about the business activities of a police officer’s immediate family members?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘And you must surely be aware of what “business” your sister has been involved in for a number of years now?’

Fry swallowed. Martin Jackson was an expert in the use of verbal quotation marks. ‘Relationship’ and now ‘business’. His change of tone when he said those words made them sound like accusations of depravity.

‘No, I know nothing about that,’ she said.

Jackson raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I find that hard to believe. This is your sister we’re talking about.’

‘We lost touch for a long time,’ said Fry.

‘Ah yes.’ Jackson shuffled papers in his file. ‘That would be when you were both living with foster parents in... Where was it?’

‘Warley, in the West Midlands.’

‘But you were only teenagers then.’

‘Angie ran away from our foster home. It was years before we met again.’

‘Would you like to tell us how that came about?’

She frowned at Jackson. ‘It involved another police officer,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you know that already.’

‘Detective Inspector Cooper.’

‘Ben was only a DC then,’ said Fry.

Jackson was alert again, and she realised she’d given something away in her tone.

‘It sounds as though it might be a difficult memory,’ he said.

‘It was a surprise.’

‘And not a pleasant one?’

‘It was hard, as it turned out. We were very close when we were kids. As I’m sure you know, we were both taken into care as children. I was nine, and Angie was eleven.’

‘For your own protection?’

‘Social Services said my parents had been abusing my sister. They said it was both of them.’

‘So your childhood was spent in foster homes?’

‘Yes.’

At first, they’d kept moving on to different places. So many different places that Fry couldn’t remember them. It was a few years before she realised that they didn’t stay anywhere long because of her sister. Angie was trouble wherever they went. Even the most well-intentioned foster families couldn’t cope with her. But Diane had worshipped her sister and refused to be split up from her.

‘But you were separated from your sister at some point?’

‘When she was sixteen, Angie disappeared from our foster home and never came back.’

The small details were impressed on Fry’s mind. The last memory that she had of her sister, Angie unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. There was a boy who was picking her up. She was off to a rave somewhere. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out that night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then and was getting out of hand.

Looking back, Fry knew she had been unable to believe anything bad of Angie then. Every time they’d been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents’ fault, not Angie’s.

And when Angie had finally disappeared from her life, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealised image of her, like a final, faded photograph. The memory still brought the same feelings of anger and unresolved pain. Feelings that revolved around Angie.

‘But it all fell apart,’ said Diane, ‘when—’ She stopped, wondering exactly how much Jackson knew. He was giving very little back so far. Would he complete her sentence?

‘When your sister started using heroin?’ he said.

‘I was going to say when she ran away from our foster home.’

But that was what Fry had been wondering. Jackson knew about the drugs. It suggested he probably knew an awful lot more too.

When he got back to West Street, Ben Cooper smiled with satisfaction to find the outlines on his desk. Carol could always be relied on to get the job done. Not for the first time, he wished that she was his DS. Maybe one day.

He looked at the pile in front of him, wondering who to start with. Which member of the New Trespassers Walking Club might have had a reason to send Faith Matthew that note telling her to ‘fall down dead’ — and perhaps even a motive to push her to her death on Kinder Scout?

The note itself had been bagged and sent for analysis, but developing fingerprints from a porous surface like paper required processing with chemicals in the lab. They used ninhydrin to react with the amino acids and inorganic salts left in print residue. It would take days to get a result back. In the meantime, he could ask for handwriting samples from all the members of the group for comparison. But that would take time too.

In the absence of any evidence, he had to make a choice. So who should he take first? It had to be Darius Roth, he supposed. He could almost hear Villiers saying that Darius would expect it. OK, then.

Darius Roth

Mr Roth is aged thirty-five, born in Manchester from a Jewish family, though the last two generations have been non-practising. His great-grandfather originally came from Lithuania and settled in Manchester with his family. He’s chairman of Roth Developments, though seems to be fairly hands-off and leaves the day-to-day running to a management team. There’s a large portfolio of properties in Manchester and throughout the North-West, mostly business units and office conversions. The company has invested a lot of money buying up derelict mills and factory premises.

Mr Roth’s father died a few years ago, but his mother is still around, living in a retirement village in Cheshire. There was an older brother, Magnus, who was killed in a climbing accident in the Alps.

Darius’s interests seem to be fancy cars and golf — he’s a member at New Mills and Disley golf clubs. He married Elsa eight years ago. They moved into their property in Hayfield and changed the name to Trespass Lodge. Darius’s obsession is with the Kinder Mass Trespass of 1932, in which his grandfather took part.

‘Mmm.’ Cooper nodded to himself. There must be a lot of people descended from the mass trespassers, like the number of Americans descended from the Pilgrim Fathers. Most of them didn’t make a big fuss about it.

He turned to the next sheet.

Elsa Roth

Mrs Roth is aged twenty-seven. Her maiden name is Montgomery. Elsa’s family are from Connah’s Quay in North Wales, but she came to Manchester when she was eighteen to attend college. She holds a Level 2 Diploma in animal care from Coleg Cambria in Northop. Her ambition was to study for a degree in veterinary medicine at Manchester Metropolitan University, but she never completed her training. She met Darius Roth at a corporate event while she was working part-time as a waitress to earn some extra money to support herself in her studies. They married fairly soon afterwards, and they’ve been together now for eight years.

Mrs Roth is an animal lover and owns a Maine Coone cat and two pedigree French bulldogs called Buddy and Barkley.

Cooper was struck by the contrast between Darius and Elsa, even in those brief summaries. Wealth and success seemed to have come to Darius without much effort on his part, while Elsa had never achieved her ambitions. Buddy and Barkley were the last traces of her hopes of being a vet — not forgetting the Maine Coone, who didn’t seem to have a name. Nor had the cat been evident on Cooper’s visit to Trespass Lodge.

Jonathan Matthew

Jonathan is aged twenty-six and is a graphic designer. He works for a large advertising agency based at the Digital World Centre in Salford Quays. He was born in Stockport and educated at Kingsway School and Stockport College. His parents live in Stockport. His father, Jack Matthew, is a partner in a local firm of solicitors, and his mother, Jennifer Matthew, is a charity co-ordinator.

Jonathan rents a flat in Whalley Range, Manchester. He drives a Subaru Impreza but commutes to work in Salford Quays by bus and Metrolink tram.

He’s the younger brother by four years of the victim, Faith Matthew. He was close to his sister, but not his parents.

Jonathan plays bass guitar with a band recently set up, and he hopes to be a full-time musician, an ambition his parents disapprove of.

Cooper read through Jonathan Matthew’s summary again. There was something about Jonathan that didn’t ring true for him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps it was his feeling from these first three summaries that everyone was living behind a façade, or aspiring to be something else.

But here was one he could be sure was different.

Sophie Pullen

Miss Pullen is aged twenty-eight, a teacher at St Anselm’s Primary School in Buxton. She teaches year five, preparing pupils for Key Stage 2. She only started teaching there this term. Before that, she worked at a school in Stockport.

Sophie was married briefly when she was twenty-one, but divorced and reverted to her maiden name. After the divorce, she became eligible for a shared-ownership scheme with a housing association and now occupies a two-bedroom semi on a new development off Manchester Road in Chapel-en-le-Frith.

She’s local, born in Buxton, where her parents still live. There are two sisters, one older and one younger, both married with families and living in the area. Her mother is also a teacher and works at Lady Manners School in Bakewell. Her father is a GP. Sophie is a volunteer at the Chapel-en-le-Frith Playhouse.

Cooper was surprised that Sophie Pullen had been married previously. But he moved straight on to the next summary.

Nick Haslam

Mr Haslam is aged twenty-nine. He works as an IT consultant with a company based on a business park off the M60 near Manchester. He helps businesses set up IT networks, so he frequently travels around the area. He lives in New Mills, where he shares a house with two other young professionals.

Mr Haslam met Sophie Pullen at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Buxton, and they’ve been in a relationship for about two years. He faced a drink-drive charge a couple of years ago but escaped a disqualification.

So Nick Haslam was the first one of the group who had a criminal record. He didn’t come across as the most responsible of people. What did Sophie Pullen see in him?

Well, that was the eternal puzzle, wasn’t it? No one could analyse the mysteries of mutual attraction. Often couples seemed to be complete opposites of each other. There was no point trying to figure that out.

The next two had been grouped together.

Sam and Pat Warburton

Mr and Mrs Warburton are both retired, aged sixty-seven and sixty-four respectively. Sam was a firefighter with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue, and retired as a station officer, while Pat was a care worker for many years in nursing homes. They’re from Manchester and live in the quiet suburb of Didsbury.

They spend their time cruising, touring with their caravan and visiting grandchildren. They particularly like Scandinavian cruises — the Norwegian fjords, Icelandic glaciers, etc. They have a son and a daughter. One lives in London, and the other emigrated to Australia. There are several grandchildren. Mr and Mrs Warburton are planning to fly to Australia next year to see the daughter’s family. They’re keen walkers, but Sam has a history of heart problems. After the incident on Kinder Scout, he was diagnosed with low blood sugar.

Was a connection emerging? Darius Roth and the Warburtons were from Manchester, Elsa had moved there for college, and Jonathan Matthew lived there. But it was hardly significant. Manchester was the nearest big city to that side of the Peak District, a huge urban sprawl. Half of the people who lived in the Hayfield area would have a link to Manchester in one way or another. It was statistically irrelevant.

Theo and Duncan Gould

The Gould brothers are Derbyshire people from a farming family. They run a small-scale plant nursery just outside Chinley. Neither of them has ever married and they have no immediate family. They share an old farmhouse next to the nursery. It’s a bit run-down, left to them by their parents, who were farmers. Most of the land was sold off when their father died and their mother went into a nursing home. They kept the land and the buildings they needed to establish the business. They also do a bit of landscape gardening on the side. But it’s seasonal work, as is the nursery.

The Goulds have a Land Rover Discovery but turned up for the walk on Sunday in the Renault Trafic van they use for the business. Theo is the elder of the two by a few years. He’s fifty-two, and Duncan is forty-eight. Theo has hearing loss, wears a hearing aid.

No story of wealth and success there. If the nursery was small-scale and their landscape gardening seasonal, it was hard to see how they made enough profit for the two of them to live on, even without families to support. It sounded as though the Goulds didn’t live a very lavish lifestyle. In fact, their existence sounded a bit precarious.

Liam Sharpe

Mr Sharpe is aged thirty, a check-in supervisor at Manchester Airport. He recently moved into a penthouse apartment in Bramhall, close to the airport. He’s in a relationship with a Hungarian chef called Tamás Horváth, who he shares the apartment with.

Mr Sharpe comes from a big Liverpool Irish family, with five siblings, but he doesn’t seem to have much contact with any of them as far as we can tell. He’s a graduate of Edge Hill University, Liverpool, with a BSc in business management.

Villiers had added a footnote to the reference to Bramhall. It said:

A very upmarket area where a lot of the Manchester United and Manchester City footballers live. Two-bedroom apartments go for upwards of half a million pounds. The rent on this one is two thousand five hundred pounds a month.

The unspoken inference was a question mark over how Liam Sharpe had been able to afford the expensive apartment. Check-in supervisors presumably didn’t earn huge salaries. So what about the Hungarian boyfriend? Just because he was a migrant worker from the European Union, it didn’t mean he was on the minimum wage or a zero-hours contract. He might be a celebrated chef in charge of the kitchen at a Michelin-starred restaurant, or from a well-off Czech family.

And finally:

Millie Taylor and Karina Scott

Miss Taylor and Miss Scott are both nineteen, students at Manchester Metropolitan University. They’re in their second year studying tourism management at the School of Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management on Cavendish Street.

Millie comes from Oldham, and Karina is a Yorkshire girl from Sheffield. They met at university and became close friends. They’re living in student accommodation at Daisy Bank. As part of their course, they’ve been studying the impact of tourism on national parks like the Peak District, hence their interest in Kinder Scout. They’ve done various part-time jobs working in bars and restaurants to make ends meet. They’re very environmentally conscious, support the Green Party, are members of the Manchester Metropolitan Environment and Geography Society, and do volunteer work for Hulme Community Garden Centre. Millie wants to be a chartered environmentalist, and Karina plans to work in sustainable tourism.

And that was the lot. Manchester again, but that was the only evident connection. Besides, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott had the most credible motive for being on Kinder Scout that day. It was just a pity for them they’d linked up with Darius Roth’s walking group.

And yet... there was one among them who hadn’t linked up with Darius through the walking group or through any interest in the Kinder Trespass. One individual had a link to him that was much more personal.

That interested Cooper. It was like finding the odd one out in a puzzle. And of course, personal feelings were a much more credible motive for a violent crime. If financial and emotional stability were threatened, anyone might lash out to defend their position. Even the quietest of women.