Fall Down Dead

36

Sometimes a solution was all about knowing where you were, and where everyone else was too. Ben Cooper realised he had never known that in this case.

He went back to study the satellite view of the Kinder Scout plateau on Google Maps. The peat groughs feeding into the River Kinder showed as meandering reddish-brown streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Eroded tracks were visible in a way they wouldn’t have been for walkers on the ground, and the Mermaid’s Pool was no more than a dark blob on the greenish-brown of the western slopes.

But the Downfall stood out as an eruption of broken rock, twisted and spattered on the hillside, the abandoned shell of a reptile skin. It was shadowed by a darker outline, the deeper chasm where water blew over the edge, where Faith Matthew had fallen from Dead Woman’s Drop.

Cooper printed out a new copy of the image and laid it on his desk. Thoughtfully, he took a yellow marker and tried again to locate the position of each of the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club at the time Faith had died.

Several times he had to refer back to the statements made by the group. He marked some of the positions with queries, crossed them out and started again from scratch, trying to get all the conflicting accounts to make coherent sense. After a lot of trial and error, he ended up with eleven markers identifying specific walkers, and one he placed roughly in the area where the search dog Dolly had located Jonathan Matthew. Finally, he took a red pen and drew a cross on the location of Dead Woman’s Drop.

As he stared at his map, Cooper became aware of Carol Villiers looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there watching him at work. He could see from her face that she had something to tell him.

‘I’m just back from Meadow Park Hospital,’ she said.

‘Success?’

‘I knew there was no point in trying the official channels, so I sniffed around and found some staff who’ve worked there for a while and remember her. One or two of them were willing to talk. Hospitals are a hotbed of gossip.’

‘And?’

‘Well, the talk is that Faith had an affair with one of the junior hospital doctors. He was working there as part of his training — they get assigned to different hospitals and various specialties. The trouble was, this junior doctor was married, and when it all came out, it wrecked his marriage. Faith was asked to leave, and that was when she took up agency nursing work.’

‘Did you get the doctor’s name?’

‘Yes. Dr Jake Gooding.’

Cooper wrote the name down and looked at it for a long moment. It meant something, didn’t it? There was a connection, he was sure of it.

‘Is this accurate?’ asked Villiers, looking at the map.

‘As near as I can make it, given the contradictions in the witness statements.’

‘If that’s where everyone was at the time, it only leaves one possibility,’ she said.

‘Yes, when you look at it this way, it seems obvious,’ said Cooper.

Yes, it was obvious. But perhaps too obvious? If you were planning to commit a murder, surely you would take more effort not to be the obvious suspect. Everything else had been planned. So why not this detail? It didn’t make sense. It was like presenting yourself on a plate as a prime suspect.

And yet he had rejected that obvious suspect.

And then he remembered. He heard Darius Roth’s smooth voice in his head, as clear as a bell. He was talking about Sophie Pullen bringing Nick Haslam to the walking group. She used to come with Jake. So who was Jake? Not just a previous boyfriend, as he’d assumed, but—

‘Sophie Pullen was married, wasn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘It was in your summary, Carol.’

‘Yes, she divorced and reverted to her maiden name.’ Villiers looked at him with her mouth open. ‘So—’

Cooper held up his hand. ‘Let’s not be too hasty. We need to find out her ex-husband’s name first.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Villiers. ‘Just in case it’s a coincidence.’

But this wasn’t a coincidence, and he knew it.

The perfect murder. Cooper recalled Sophie Pullen telling him that story about Darius Roth. The idea had been in Darius’s mind for some time, and the opportunity had arisen on Kinder. He thought the fog would mean no witnesses. Had he really believed he could get away with it? It seemed such a risk for a man like Darius Roth to take.

But what actual evidence had there ever been that Darius killed Faith Matthew? It all came down to one confused witness account. One that Cooper himself had insisted must be mistaken. But one that he’d believed nevertheless.

He remembered what Diane Fry had said to him. That’s often where it all goes off the rails, isn’t it? Trusting the wrong person.

‘Faith,’ he said. ‘It’s an interesting name. Faith. That’s what it’s been about all along.’

Villiers looked up. ‘What do you mean, Ben?’

‘I mean I can’t believe I had faith in the wrong person.’

It was the end of the school day in Buxton. Pupils at St Anselm’s were looking forward to the weekend. The teachers too, no doubt. Though one teacher might have to change their plans.

Ben Cooper and Carol Villiers were sitting in Cooper’s Toyota on the street watching the gates as parents collected their children. For a while, the road was choked with vehicles, with cars on the pavement, parked on double yellow lines, leaving barely enough space for traffic to pass.

‘You never saw Darius Roth as a murderer, did you?’ said Villiers.

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘He was all façade. If his businesses went bankrupt, he might have been capable of killing himself — an overdose, a pipe from his car exhaust — but not someone else. It wasn’t part of the image he worked so hard on.’

‘And I was wrong too,’ said Villiers.

‘Were you?’

‘I said the quiet ones were the worst. But there are some who talk and talk, and say all the right things, so that you believe them even when they’re lying.’

‘You’re right, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s exactly what I did.’

‘It isn’t like you.’

‘Thanks. But it doesn’t make me feel any better about it. I failed on this one. Well, almost.’

‘What was it that misled you?’ she asked.

‘Sophie Pullen said she followed someone wearing a blue jacket to the Downfall, right to the rock where Faith Matthew fell from. There was no other member of the party wearing a blue jacket apart from Sophie herself. So it seemed to me that it could only have been Darius Roth she saw — he had a long blue scarf. In the fog, Sophie could easily have been mistaken about the item of clothing, while the colour would have been obvious.’ Cooper sighed. ‘But Darius couldn’t have been there — all the members of his group are adamant that he never left them during that time. And I believe them.’

‘It’s unlikely for them all to agree on the point unless it was true.’

‘Not just because of that. Darius was the sort of person who liked to be the centre of attention. He would have been leading the way, giving instructions, chivvying his followers along. He would have been very much present.’

‘So there’s no way he could have just sneaked off for a few minutes without them noticing.’

‘No. On the other hand, there are some people you might not notice very much, so you wouldn’t realise if they’d slipped away. Then you couldn’t really be sure if they were there or not when you were asked later on.’

‘So it must have been someone else that Sophie Pullen was following,’ said Villiers. ‘Could she have been so easily mistaken?’

Cooper was shaking his head. ‘No, you’re still not getting it, Carol. We only have Miss Pullen’s word that she followed anybody.’

‘Oh.’

‘And yet, and yet... we do have her own testimony that she left her group. She told us that herself. She volunteered the information but misdirected us by claiming she’d followed someone. She cast suspicion onto someone else even as she drew it to herself. So clever. I should have known. She was always the smartest of the group. I recognised that and took notice of everything she said, all the details she claimed to have observed. I thought she was my most valuable witness. Now she’s made me feel an idiot.’

‘Was it Sophie who told Jonathan that Darius Roth killed his sister, then?’

‘Yes. I think he’ll confirm it now, when we put it to him.’

‘How do you know?’

‘When we interviewed him, Jonathan referred to Darius’s story about getting away with the perfect murder. Sophie Pullen told me about that story. But Sophie said only she and Elsa were present when Darius told it. That was a giveaway. Sophie must have passed it on to Jonathan in her efforts to persuade him of Darius’s guilt.’

‘Was it true? Did Darius tell that story?’

‘I don’t know. We can ask Elsa if she remembers it, but Sophie might have made it up. It didn’t really matter, as long as Jonathan believed her.’

‘All that stuff about the blue jacket...’ said Villiers.

‘She forced me to put two and two together and make five,’ said Cooper. ‘She led me by the nose, and I did exactly what she wanted me to do.’

Cooper groaned quietly. He could hear her now. Sophie Pullen had insisted it was a blue jacket that she’d seen near Dead Woman’s Drop. She’d listened politely as he contradicted her several times, told her it was impossible, that she must have made a mistake. She was the only person wearing a blue jacket that day, he’d said. Perhaps it was a blue hat or a scarf she’d seen. And she’d shaken her head at that.

To Cooper, it had seemed clear that she was wrong. Not lying, just mistaken. Sophie had seen things wrong in that fog, jumped to an inaccurate conclusion. In fact, he had been feeling frustrated that she couldn’t recognise her own mistake. She was such a good observer of the details in other ways. He’d so wanted her to admit it was a blue scarf, the kind that Darius was wearing. He’d almost tried to persuade her of the fact. That was a fatal flaw in his interview technique. It filled him with anger at himself that he’d made such an error.

He just hadn’t put two and two together properly. What should he have done? He should have pointed out to Sophie Pullen that if someone in a blue jacket was near that rock, then it must have been her.

It seemed so obvious now. At the time, it had been too obvious. Sophie Pullen had put the simple fact there, lain it right out on the table in front of him and watched him look the other way. How often had he seen stage magicians pull off that trick? It was the old distraction technique.

Sophie had known that another member of the group might have seen her, at least recognised the jacket through the fog.

She already had her explanation on record.

When she left St Anselm’s Primary School for that last time, Sophie Pullen seemed unsurprised to see Cooper and Villiers waiting for her at the gate.

‘You’re parked on the “no waiting” signs,’ she said.

‘I think we’ll get away with it this once.’

Sophie looked around at the school gates and the empty yard.

‘We waited until the children had all gone,’ said Cooper. ‘We thought it would be better that way.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s very considerate.’

They put her in the back of the car. Cooper looked at Sophie for a moment. She looked so composed, as if this was nothing unusual or unexpected. Perhaps it had been part of her planning. Option B: co-operate if arrested by the police.

‘Faith deserved to die, you know,’ said Sophie Pullen. ‘I knew it from the start that day. Right at the beginning of the walk. I could see what was going to happen. I could see what I was going to do. And I didn’t want to stop it from happening.’

She was in the same interview room that Jonathan Matthew had sat in the day before. Looking across the table at her, Ben Cooper thought she seemed a different woman from the one he’d admired for her power of observation, the detailed recollections she had of the walk on Kinder Scout. Apparently she’d reported everything she could remember, apart from the one most significant incident of all, the act of murder.

‘She wanted to take Nick off me,’ said Sophie. ‘It was so obvious that day on Kinder. It was the final straw.’

‘Were Nick Haslam and Faith Matthew having an affair behind your back?’ asked Cooper.

‘I don’t know that I’d call it that. They were certainly becoming closer. Faith knew things about me that I didn’t tell her myself, like my new job teaching at St Anselm’s. She must have got that from Nick. It explains why he was so awkward around her on the walk. He didn’t know how to behave towards her in front of me, couldn’t even make a joke of it. Nick was always such a joker.’

‘He doesn’t come across as a joker to me. Bad-tempered and sarcastic maybe.’

‘He wasn’t always like that,’ said Sophie, suddenly keen to defend him. ‘He’s changed recently. She did that.’

‘So it became obvious on the walk.’

‘She was more blatant, of course. But poor old Nick tried to hide their relationship and pretend he didn’t like her. He tried too hard, though. He always does. I saw straight through him.’

‘Miss Pullen, do you feel so strongly about Mr Haslam that you’d kill for him?’

She hesitated, taken aback at the direction of the question.

‘No, of course you don’t,’ continued Cooper. ‘But that’s not the point, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think we should talk about someone else entirely. About Dr Jake Gooding. That is your ex-husband, isn’t it?’

She shrank a little, deflated by his mention of the name.

‘You obviously know.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘I met Jake Gooding through my father. He’s a GP, you know,’ said Sophie.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I fell for Jake straight away. He was so good-looking, confident and charming. I was a complete pushover. We married within a couple of years. Perhaps it was too soon.’

‘And then you heard about his affair.’

‘Yes.’

She pursed her lips, as if she didn’t want to say any more, as though her ex-husband’s affair was the one subject she’d been hoping to avoid. If that was the case, it was the one subject Cooper was going to press her on.

‘You heard it involved a nurse at the hospital where Jake was working,’ he said. ‘Someone tipped you off, I suppose. They thought you ought to know about it?’

‘I dare say it sounds so mundane to you. You must hear this sort of thing every day.’

‘Quite often,’ said Cooper. ‘But it doesn’t always lead to such a tragic outcome.’

Sophie looked down at the table.

‘I never knew who the nurse was at the time,’ she said. ‘In every story you read, the wronged wife always demands the name of the other woman, doesn’t she? But it was one of those things I didn’t want to know, the sort of detail I would have felt tainted by. It was such a betrayal. Jake agreed to a divorce without a murmur. I thought he’d gone straight to her, you know. He was certainly living with someone soon after — everyone told me that. But it turns out it was a different woman. There could have been more of them when we were together, I suppose.’

‘Did you never meet her?’

‘No. I only saw her once, in the distance. I was so angry that I went to Meadow Park Hospital to confront him. I wanted to embarrass him at work. I suppose everyone knew what was going on anyway. He was frantic when I turned up. A nurse was just leaving the doctors’ office on the ward, and the guilt was written all over his face. I hardly needed to ask him if it was true.’

‘So when did you realise who Faith was?’

‘During the walk on Kinder Scout on Sunday.’

‘Actually during the walk?’

‘Yes. It was after we’d stopped, in fact. When were lost in the fog and Liam Sharpe fell and injured his leg. Everyone else went off to call for help, but Faith stayed with him. It was seeing her bending over Liam to tend to his injury, and someone saying, “Of course. You’re a nurse, aren’t you?” Just in that moment, I had a vivid flashback. It was like that figure I described to you, the monstrous shadow in the fog. I suddenly saw her in her nurse’s uniform walking down the ward and leaning over a patient. It’s the way someone moves that gives them away, isn’t it? Their walk, the angle they hold their head. With Faith, it was the way she pushed back that red woollen hat from her face. I’d seen her straightening her nurse’s cap and it was exactly the same gesture. That memory made such a lasting impression on me that I knew it was her. I was a hundred per cent certain. I could picture her with Jake and imagine what they might have been doing. The image hit me so hard I thought my legs would give way.’

Cooper let her replay the memory for a moment. It was ironic that Sophie Pullen’s imagination and her power of observation, which he’d valued so much before, appeared to have been too sharp for her own good. It would have been much better if she’d taken no notice of Faith Matthew at the hospital and had never recognised her on Kinder Scout. Better not just for Faith but for both of them.

‘I loved Jake,’ she said. ‘I still love him now. It was the biggest mistake I ever made, letting him go like that. If only I could have just let it pass.’

Sophie began to cry, the tears creeping slowly down her cheeks. Cooper had seen a lot of suspects burst into tears in the interview room. Sometimes it was through remorse at what they’d done. Often, though, it was out of pity for themselves. Even the most intelligent person could cling to a conviction that they were the victim. Sophie’s life had been destroyed, but largely through her own decisions. Faith Matthew had become the target for all her bitterness.

‘I couldn’t let her escape justice,’ Sophie said through her tears.

‘Justice is a subjective concept,’ said Cooper. ‘When we take it personally, we can get it very wrong.’

Sophie glowered at him.

‘She deserved to die a hundred times.’

‘That’s been said before, Miss Pullen.’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘Perhaps. But murder is still murder.’

She tossed her head dismissively.

‘And justice is still justice.’

Half an hour later, after Sophie Pullen had been returned to a cell, Nick Haslam slumped in the same chair. He looked a beaten man. There was no effort at a joke, sarcastic or otherwise.

‘Yes, it felt uncomfortable on the walk,’ he said when Cooper asked him about the day on Kinder Scout. ‘She was pestering me, playing some kind of game.’

‘She?’

‘Faith, of course. I knew Sophie would be jealous, so I tried to ignore Faith and pretend it was nothing.’

‘Sophie saw straight through it, you know.’

Nick cursed under his breath.

‘I should have known she would. She tends to over-imagine things at the best of times. But throw in a bit of jealousy and well...’ He gestured with his hands as if describing an uncontrollable explosion. ‘The fact is, though, Faith was just a nuisance. It would never have come to anything. I really like Sophie. I just have trouble saying it. I suppose I’ve completely messed everything up now.’

‘You would have been better telling her the truth from the start,’ said Cooper. ‘It could have saved a lot of trouble. It might even have saved two people’s lives.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

Haslam looked even more dejected. But would this knowledge change his behaviour in the future? Cooper doubted it.

Back in his office, Ben Cooper reviewed the evidence on his desk. What had he missed? Sophie Pullen’s prints had been taken and matched those finally retrieved in the lab from the threatening note. FALL DOWN DEAD, she’d written. So how long had Sophie been planning the murder of Faith Matthew? Was it longer than she said, her plan conceived well before the walk? More questioning was needed. It seemed Sophie was still lying, even now.

Well, the photographs taken on Kinder Scout had been pretty accurate, anyway. They showed a fog of confusion. Most of the witness statements had been truthful too, as far as they could be. But the group had been prone to visual and auditory hallucinations, illusionary memories that would be hard to get rid of. In the intricate structures of the human brain, the imagination lay next to the memory. It only took a single misfiring synapse for one to intrude on the other.

Sophie Pullen had no need to be too secretive about her movements. Nobody had any idea where they were.

And there had been no scream when Faith Matthew fell from Dead Woman’s Drop. It was one sound the walking group hadn’t heard on that foggy moor. Faith would have been too surprised to react as she made that half-turn and saw Sophie behind her.

Even the Kinder Mass Trespass was nothing more than a smokescreen. There was no connection to the death of Darius Roth’s brother. It wasn’t even linked to the imminent collapse of Roth’s businesses. At the end of the day, it was nothing to do with politics or principles, or even money. It was a much, much simpler story than that. A tale as ancient as time. It came down to one of the age-old reasons for murder. This was a story of jealousy.

He imagined the fall had been too sudden. The cold air would have snatched the breath from her throat as she fell. The impact on the rocks had been instantly fatal. Yet it, too, had been muffled by the fog, her body shrouded from sight by the dank miasma.

Cooper put the papers away in a box file and slid it onto the shelf of his office with the others. Yes, Faith Matthew’s ending was sad, rather than dramatic. She went with hardly a whimper, let alone a bang. And that was the way it usually happened. It was so simple to make one slip. So easy to meet your downfall.