Fall Down Dead

8 Monday

Ben Cooper had heard talk of replacing the old E Division headquarters in West Street, Edendale, with a new building. In fact, people had been talking about it for the past thirty years or so.

Too many decades of mouldering paperwork, half-smoked cigarettes and junk food had left their mark, and the 1950s building was considered unfit for purpose now. Whenever he entered the CID room, the rows of computer screens looked strangely anachronistic. Downstairs, the custody suite was due to close soon. Conditions at West Street were unsuitable for prisoners, though officers and staff would have to continue tolerating them for a while longer.

Every day the same kind of reports crossed Cooper’s desk. Details of some of those thousands of dysfunctional people who cluttered up the police stations and courts.

So what was new this morning? A scattering of overnight burglaries and assaults outside pubs and nightclubs. An early morning raid had been conducted on an address in Edendale, resulting in two arrests and the seizure of a quantity of Class-II drugs. And there had been several complaints from tourists over the last few days about youths throwing stones at their cars on the descent into Hartington, the latest incident resulting in a smashed windscreen and bad publicity for the tourism business.

A memo was on his desk from a team that had been set up to review recent rape convictions, in case significant evidence had been ignored or not disclosed to the defence. They were asking for files from cases his department had dealt with during the last five years. That would take time.

An operation was still ongoing to target the use of Peak District holiday homes as pop-up brothels by slave gangs. A gang master would rent a secluded property, install a group of trafficked women, then move on somewhere else after a month or so, before anyone became suspicious about what was going on. A difficult one to deal with without an early notification when a new brothel popped up.

What else was there? An email in his inbox informed him that an officer serving in Edendale Local Policing Unit had been shortlisted in the Police Twitter Awards for Best Tweeting Individual Police Officer. Apparently, there were sixteen categories, including Best Tweeting Police Horse and Best Tweeting Police Dog. Old-fashioned bobbies like his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, would be turning in their graves at the thought of community policing by smartphone.

Cooper leaned back in his chair and fingered the lanyard with his identity badge, staring at a shelf of box files with the Derbyshire Constabulary starburst logo on them. His office was in a flat-roofed 1970s extension, with the inevitable damp stains on the polystyrene ceiling tiles.

Down in Scenes of Crime, Gary Atherton’s bloodied clothes were hanging in a locker to air-dry before being packaged in paper bags. Recovery of DNA evidence was vital. The CSIs would have gathered everything from the scene, though. A flake of paint, a plant seed, a trickle of soil, a fragment of broken glass, a tiny scrap of paper. Any of them could play a crucial role in confirming the identity of a suspect.

Meanwhile, on Kinder Scout, the search for Faith Matthew had resumed at first light. Cooper expected news soon. The SARDA dogs were bound to find her.

In the CID room, Ben Cooper’s team were sitting in front of their computers under diffused lighting from panels set into the ceiling. In one corner were a series of blue screens where no one was working. Half hidden by a pillar in the middle was Gavin Murfin, his civilian investigator, once a fixture in the department as an old-school DC.

Cooper’s sergeant, Dev Sharma, had proved more than capable of taking responsibility and running the team of DCs. Since his arrival in Edendale from Derby, Sharma had taken on a lot of the workload and Cooper had come to rely on him heavily.

It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever did in this job. DS Sharma was here in North Division to gain experience and add a few paragraphs to his CV. Cooper didn’t have any illusions that he’d be keeping Dev for long. His DS was destined for better things.

Cooper moved quietly into the middle of the room and was rewarded with the familiar sight of Murfin dipping his fingers into a paper bag for an Eccles cake he’d bought on the way into work. He was speaking to DC Luke Irvine, seated at the opposite desk.

‘Apparently she ran a dominatrix dungeon in a disused building at the back of the old post office,’ Murfin was saying between bites. ‘No one knew about it until Open Gardens weekend, when people heard the screaming.’

‘The dominatrix was squatting?’ asked Irvine.

‘I think she usually stands up,’ said Murfin.

Across the room, Carol Villiers was telling Becky Hurst and Dev Sharma about a new vicar who’d arrived in her village.

‘Well, when I say “arrived”, you know what it’s like these days — she’s in charge of about seven parishes, and she’s based ten miles away,’ said Villiers. ‘She has a team ministry, with three curates or assistant vicars scattered around. But when she did come to St Mark’s, the locals didn’t like her.’

‘Why not?’ said Hurst. ‘Because she’s female, I suppose?’

‘No, because she’s an evangelical. They’re old-fashioned in our village. They want to do things the same as they always have, like they did under the old vicar before he retired. The new one wants to modernise everything. Readings aren’t from the King James version any more, and she got rid of the organist and brought somebody in to play CDs through a sound system. And there was a wedding... One of the oldest families in the village. They had the church booked for months, all traditional style. And then the new vicar put the mockers on everything.’

‘What are mockers?’ asked Sharma with a puzzled frown, listening to their conversation.

‘Well—’

Cooper cleared his throat. ‘Morning, everyone.’

‘Boss.’

‘Dev, do want to bring me up to date on the Atherton murder inquiry?’

Sharma stood up and gathered some papers together. Then a call came through and was answered by Villiers. She looked across at Cooper.

‘They’ve found her, Ben.’

Cooper didn’t need to ask who. He could tell from the tone of her voice.

‘Faith Matthew? Dead?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘It took too long to find her. Where was she?’

‘Near Kinder Downfall,’ said Villiers.

He could picture the place. A narrow track between high rocks was called Kinder Gates, a landmark for walkers coming off the moors to the steep descent towards the Mermaid’s Pool. The Downfall lay a few hundred yards away. There, water streamed off the gritstone edge and sprayed horizontally as the incessantly buffeting winds battled against gravity. Sometimes the wind won and the water flowed upwards, back over the edge. It was a spectacular place, but dangerous.

‘She was found at the foot of one of the highest rocks,’ said Villiers. ‘It has its own name on the OS map.’

‘A lot of them do.’

All across Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, rock formations had been given imaginative names, often due to their shape, or their connection to an old story from Derbyshire history and legend. The Woolpacks, the Seal Stones, Pym Chair, the Druid’s Stone.

‘Which rock?’ he said.

Villiers hesitated. ‘They call this one Dead Woman’s Drop.’

Diane Fry left her apartment in Wilford a little later than usual that morning. She had no idea when the post came on her road, because she was always out, so she thought of checking her box outside the communal entrance. For some reason she’d never understood, the boxes were all named in German — Briefkasten.

There was a small pile of junk mail in there. Life insurance, a clothing catalogue, an offer of a specially minted crown coin commemorating the latest royal wedding. And three envelopes full of Christmas raffle tickets for various charities.

She felt like throwing the whole lot into the brambles that grew behind the beech hedge on the other side of the parking area. But instead she dropped them onto the passenger seat of her black Audi, where they’d sit until she could find a litter bin.

As usual, Fry called at the BP service station on Clifton Lane and bought a few supplies at the Spar shop, along with a cappuccino. Something told her she would need to stay alert today. Opposite the service station was a piece of rough ground used as a car park for the Trent River Walk. She pulled off the road to drink her coffee safely.

She’d hardly slept last night. People talked about your whole life flashing in front of you just before you died. She’d always imagined that would be horrible. She had too many incidents in her life that she might regret, if she ever had to stop and think about them. Most of the time, she managed to push them to the back of her mind, bury them in the deepest parts of her subconscious, where they never troubled her.

But the summons to Ripley had changed that. It had forced her to review the last few years of her life, to work out what in particular Professional Standards might want to interview her about. Of course, they might want to speak to her as a witness in someone else’s disciplinary hearing. So why had her subconscious spent all last night pulling out incident after incident from her career for her to worry about?

Fry took a sip of her coffee as she watched the traffic passing along Clifton Lane towards the bridge. She had to accept the fact that she’d lived a charmed life in some ways. She’d got away with things she shouldn’t have done, strictly speaking. But no one had reported her. Perhaps it had given her a false sense of security. That was fatal.

Well, it seemed likely that someone had reported her now, made a complaint about her behaviour. A member of the public, or a fellow officer?

The second was far worse. The public made complaints against police officers all the time, but most of them were trivial or malicious, and very few of them were ever followed through to the stage of a disciplinary hearing. Police officers, on the other hand, were reluctant to blow the whistle on their colleagues. It was a world of ‘us and them’ out there. No one wanted to be a grass. So it had to be something serious.

In her head, Fry ran through a list of the people she might have offended or antagonised. After a moment, she realised it was pointless. An opposite list would be a lot shorter.

She drained her coffee and poked at the junk mail on the seat, as if something there might give her a clue. So what was it to be? Misconduct or gross misconduct? Honesty, confidentiality or fitness for work? Not a criminal offence at least or she would already have been arrested, wouldn’t she?

Or would she? She wasn’t entirely sure how the PSD operated. Perhaps they were waiting to arrest her when she arrived at Ripley. So maybe she should make a run for it and try to disappear, like any other criminal?

She laughed to herself. As if there was any other option but to see it through.

Fry spotted a litter bin at the edge of the car park. She gathered her junk mail together and took it with her empty coffee cup to dispose of. If only she could gather up the debris of her past life and dispose of it in the same manner.

But that wasn’t the way life worked, was it? Your actions had a habit of catching up with you.