Scared to Live

28

Georgi Kotsev didn’t seem at all disturbed to have left civilization behind. He waited patiently for Cooper to re-fold the map, gazing around the landscape as if he expected a few peasants to appear and direct them to the right place.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said Cooper.

‘Dobre. OK.’

It seemed to Cooper that traces of pagan legacy were still there to be seen at every turn in this area, though few people noticed. They didn’t see them because their attention was focused on shop windows and traffic, the obsessions of modern society that overlaid history and pushed ancestral beliefs into the background. Now it was as if these ancient objects existed in an extra dimension, where they were only visible if you knew they were there and you looked straight at them.

There was a representation of Sheela-na-Gig incorporated into the stonework of St Helen’s Church at Darley Dale. The goddess of creation and destruction. Few people noticed it, surely, or understood its meaning. If they did, they’d be campaigning for its removal.

A couple of miles down the road, a display cabinet in Matlock church still contained a set of crantsies. Time-darkened maiden’s garlands, each one commemorating the death of an unmarried woman. Their wickerwork frames were decorated with symbols of purity — ribbons, roses, flowers of folded white paper — set around a centrepiece of a collar, a pair of gloves or a handkerchief, something that had belonged to the woman.

‘Is folklore important in Bulgaria, Georgi? I imagine it is.’

‘Yes, certainly. When I was very young, my grandmother gave me a book of Bulgarian fairy tales. The stories had many supernatural characters — werewolves, vampires, wood-nymphs. Lots of pictures. They stay in your mind when you’re a child.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I remember one fairy tale in particular. It told about a man who finds himself on another earth, in a different world. The only way he can get back to his own world is by riding on the backs of two eagles. But he has to feed the eagles with his own flesh so that they will carry him.’

Fairy tales weren’t really Cooper’s thing. But he knew some of them were supposed to have profound symbolic meanings, if you could manage to figure them out.

‘And what did that story teach you, Georgi?’

‘That sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice everything, in order to get to where you have to be. Even to sacrifice your own flesh and blood.’

‘I see.’

Then Kotsev smiled, his dark eyes glittering. ‘Also, that you should never trust eagles. Even when they say they’re doing you a favour.’

The Shogun had been abandoned under a bridge that was left over from a disused mineral line. It wasn’t even a bridge any more, because the central section had been removed. But it had only crossed a farm track anyway. By the looks of the deep tread on the wheel tracks in the mud, the farmer had probably passed the Shogun several times this week without bothering to report it.

A Traffic car stood guard on the road side of the bridge. But someone had done a good job of torching the Shogun. It was difficult to tell what colour the scorched paintwork had been, but for a few streaks left on the boot and around the front wings. The interior, though, looked relatively undamaged.

Cooper looked around the area. The last glance at the map had given him an idea.

‘There’s not much we can get from the car until the SOCOs arrive,’ he said. ‘I’d like to take a look up this way, Georgi.’

‘Very well. Your sergeant says you know everything about this area.’

‘She does?’

‘Yes, indeed. Sergeant Fry must regard you very highly.’

Cooper laughed. ‘I don’t think you’ve known her long enough. It probably wasn’t a compliment.’

Though Kotsev’s stride was longer, he obviously wasn’t used to walking over rough terrain, and definitely not uphill. He was panting in minutes. That was a sign of too much city living, in Cooper’s view. No matter how big their muscles were, a forty-five-degree slope always sorted the men from the boys.

‘Where are we going?’ gasped Kotsev, stopping to rest and watching Cooper moving steadily away from him.

‘Just to the top of this rise.’

‘Chaga, chaga. Wait.’

‘What’s the matter, Georgi?’

‘I think the air is a little thin here.’

‘We’re not even a thousand feet above sea level.’

Kotsev began to move again, but awkwardly, planting his feet with great deliberation on the rough grass. His knees were probably hurting by now, if he never used the right muscles.

A moment later, Cooper was standing at the top of the slope, letting the breeze cool his forehead. To the north east, he could see a drystone wall running along the skyline, marking the road between Wirksworth and Middleton. He followed the wall a little further north — and there was the distinctive outline of a red phone box.

He smiled. When public phone boxes were first designed, they were painted bright red to stand out from a distance. For decades, it had been important to know where the nearest phone was, and these old kiosks would have been a welcome sight. They weren’t used a lot nowadays. But they were such an integral part of the landscape that they were kept in the countryside as a conservation measure, as much as for emergency use.

Finally, Kotsev struggled the last few yards and arrived alongside him, breathing heavily and wiping sweat from his forehead.

‘Georgi, how many people in Bulgaria have mobile phones?’ asked Cooper.

Kotsev stared at him. ‘Everybody, except for those who are too poor. And the very old, who don’t understand them.’

‘Yes, it’s the same here. And even if you don’t own a mobile, you have a phone in your house. Not many people are too poor or too old for that.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, it’s different, of course,’ said Cooper, ‘if you happen to live in a caravan.’

If he could have seen over the next hill, he might have been able to make out the red blob of a similar phone box in Bonsall Dale. That was the one Rose Shepherd had made two calls to. According to the map, it must be the nearest one to Lea Farm, where Simcho Nikolov had lived. Calls to the phone box by prior arrangement. Miss Shepherd had been in contact with Nikolov in the past three weeks.

Their connection supported speculation in the Bulgarian intelligence reports, a theory that Nikolov and Savova had been friends, or even lovers. Here was a link that had been more difficult to break than a mere business relationship.

Well, it was handy that rural phone boxes were marked on Ordnance Survey maps. But the box wasn’t what Cooper had noticed first. His eye had been drawn to the contour lines showing the steepness of the slope and the footpath above the bridge. It was funny the way things worked out sometimes.

He was turning to tell Kotsev that they might as well go back down to the burnt-out car, when two shots echoed across the hillside, one following quickly after the other. The flat smack of the first discharge sent birds scattering from the trees.

Kotsev looked around anxiously, and his hand went to his hip. ‘It’s stupid not to be armed. Why don’t they let you have guns?’

‘We don’t need them,’ said Cooper. ‘Most of the time.’

‘And the times when you do?’

‘We try to keep out of the way of the bullets.’

Kotsev snorted. ‘It’s stupid. You know this is the only police service in the world whose officers aren’t armed?’

‘No, there’s New Zealand too.’

‘New Zealand? But all they have to deal with are kangaroos. Here, you have armed gangsters, and terrorists. The IRA. Yardies. al-Qaeda. It’s stupid.’

Cooper laughed, and Kotsev glared at him.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘I think you just don’t understand us, Georgi.’

There was a movement in the field ahead, and two figures appeared, walking rapidly down from the direction of the phone box. When they passed a stretch of fallen wall, the figures became identifiable as two men wearing peaked caps and quilted body warmers. Both of them had double-barrelled shotguns tucked under their arms.

‘So,’ said Kotsev. ‘Do we run away?’

As soon as Cooper walked back into the office at West Street, Fry slammed the phone down and glared at him. ‘See, I took my attention off Brian Mullen. I let him know he was under suspicion, and then allowed him the chance to do a runner. I should have been completing the case against him by now so we could make an arrest. But I was distracted. Too much attention on the Rose Shepherd enquiry. How can anyone be expected to do two jobs at once, and do them properly?’

Fry paused, and looked at Cooper. He didn’t answer her, but she didn’t expect him to. He was only there for her to have someone to sound off at. Fortunately, he was good at that.

‘What’s happened, Diane?’

‘I need to talk to Brian Mullen again,’ she said. ‘He should be with his parents-in-law in Darley Dale, but they say they don’t know where he is today. And he has Luanne with him.’

‘That’s bad news.’

‘Bad news? It’s a total disaster. I’m sending Gavin out to speak to John Lowther, and to anyone else who might know where Mullen is. But I’ve a nasty feeling he’s done a runner.’

‘Are you still fancying Mullen for the arson? What would his motive have been?’

‘He and Lindsay had been having blazing rows. Loud ones, by all accounts. Their neighbour Keith Wade heard them arguing earlier that evening. The parents are being cagey on this one, so I don’t know how serious their marital problems were, but they could have been on the point of splitting up. Lindsay might have threatened to walk out on Brian, and told him he’d lose the children. That would have hit him pretty hard, I think.’

‘Oh, so he killed them?’

‘It happens, you know — some distraught dad decides to end it all, and take the family down with him.’

‘But Brian Mullen didn’t do that, did he? He was the one who survived.’

‘Well, he could have chickened out at the last minute. Once he saw the flames and felt the heat, and realized what he was doing.’

‘I suppose that’s possible.’

‘You sound doubtful. Tell me — you always seem to have some theory of your own that doesn’t fit with anyone else’s. Are you going to share it with me, Ben?’

Cooper shook his head. ‘I don’t have a theory. It’s just that …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, if what you’re saying was really the case, I’d expect Mr Mullen to be consumed with guilt right now. He’d be thinking that he ought to have died in the fire with his family, and blaming himself for his cowardice in not going through with it.’

‘That would explain his present attitude, wouldn’t it?’

‘No, I don’t think so, Diane. It doesn’t feel right.’

But Fry had stopped listening to him. She was staring at the photograph of the Mullen family — Lindsay and the two boys, with Brian holding baby Luanne. Three of them were dead, and two still survived.

But that wasn’t the way it was running through her head. The words she couldn’t get out of her mind were slightly different, a phrase she’d learned a long time ago in the playground.

Three down, two to go.

Fry could almost hear children’s voices chanting it in the distance, their tone a mixture of triumph and challenge. They summed up the feeling of a task half done, and the determination to complete it.

Three down, two to go.

The phrase filled her with a sudden sense of urgency, a conviction that an awful disaster could be taking place right under her nose while she was distracted by irrelevant detail.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘you know what? Right now, I bet Brian Mullen is thinking just one thing. That he ought to get on and finish the job.’

Of course, it was possible that the Lowthers were lying when they said they didn’t know where Brian was. They might only be trying to protect their son-in-law from further distress. Very admirable, but not when it got in the way of her enquiry.

Fry decided she would go straight to Darley Dale, to take the Lowthers by surprise. They wouldn’t find it easy to hide the fact that Brian and the baby were in the house if someone turned up on their doorstep.

First, she found the photograph again — the one of the whole Mullen family, Brian and Lindsay, the two boys and Luanne. This might have been one of the last pictures they had taken together. And they did look like a happy family, didn’t they? At least the Mullen children had been given a secure start in life, protected and safe, if only for a few years. It might seem the wrong way to be thinking. But there were a lot of kids who never experienced that sort of life at all, and Fry had been one of them.

There were sixty thousand children in foster care or local authority homes. It was hard for Fry to think of herself as part of a huge, anonymous mass. But that’s exactly what she’d once been — just another statistic in a depressing flow of unwanted children, shuttling to and fro through the back alleys of society; kids destined never to have a real family, or a real home.

At least for a while it had been Angie and Diane together. That had made fostering a bit more tolerable. But even that had come to an abrupt end.

Fry shut her eyes against the sudden stab of pain. It was a memory that tormented her, even now. That moment she’d realized the unbelievable: Angie had left for good, walked out of their foster home in Warley and disappeared. Ever since then, Diane had thought that she’d make things right by finding Angie. But perhaps the truth was that she had never forgiven her sister for that betrayal, and never could. It was a truth she hadn’t acknowledged until now.

Sixty thousand children. Fry knew the statistics. Half of those sixty thousand wouldn’t get a single GCSE, and would leave school with no qualifications, barely able to read or write, destined for dead-end jobs, if not a permanent place on the dole queue. Fry was one of the measly two per cent who made it to university. Many were consigned to a life on the street, holed up in a filthy squat or crack house, pissing away their existence. Some care-home children felt unwanted and unvalued for the whole of their lives. Many never formed a normal relationship, because they didn’t know how. They’d never been shown.

Two thirds of those children were in care because they’d already suffered abuse or neglect. One in eight moved foster homes more than once a year. And that was a problem, when there was already a shortfall of foster carers. Too many kids, and not enough places for them to go. Fostering was a tough job. Now she’d heard that the government was considering putting vulnerable children in boarding schools and paying their fees.

Fry turned back to the photograph of the Mullen family. But it wasn’t Lindsay Mullen and the two boys she was looking at now. They were dead, and past saving. Her focus had shifted.

She held the print up to the light from the window, trying to bring out the depth of colour that suddenly seemed so important. She was studying Brian Mullen and the carefully wrapped bundle in his arms. Luanne Mullen, aged about twelve months at the time the photo was taken. It was unusual, perhaps, for a child of that age to be held by the father in a family group. She might have expected Lindsay to be the one showing off the baby, with the father proudly flanked by his two sons. But that wasn’t the way the Mullens had posed.

That detail might have been what drew Fry’s attention. It was like a tiny fly twitching its wings in the ointment, a flaw in the normal expectations. Insignificant in itself, but still …

As she stared at the child’s face, Fry suddenly realized how extraordinarily beautiful Luanne Mullen was. She wasn’t the type to fall into a gooey heap every time she saw some unprepossessing infant with jowls like Winston Churchill. Not at all. Most babies were ugly as sin, except to the poor benighted parents, who couldn’t see the reality in front of them because their eyes were glued shut with bewilderment and exhaustion. But not Luanne. Churchill had never looked like this. In fact, Luanne Mullen was the most beautiful child she’d ever seen.

Then Fry was struck by the contrast between Luanne and her father. Not that Brian was repulsive, exactly, but he was fair-haired, angular and pale. Luanne, on the other hand, had black hair — so black that it was startling in a child of her age. Her eyes were dark, too, like little pools of black ink.

And there was another thing — the child’s skin was surely several shades more Mediterranean than Brian’s English pallor. So what about the mother? Well, there she was — blonde hair, showing light brown at the roots. And green eyes.

Of course, it was perfectly possible that the couple had produced a child who looked like that. English people weren’t exactly pure-bred Anglo-Saxons, after all. They were mongrels to a man, a mixture of Celts and Vikings, Saxons and Normans, and more exotic arrivals. In the North West of England, almost everyone had an Irish migrant or two lurking in their family tree. This child’s conception might simply have thrown up the genes of some Gaelic or Huguenot ancestor. Or her looks could result from a more recent influence — a Jewish refugee grandfather, or a Middle Eastern immigrant.

Yes, all of those things were possible. But none of them was the first thought that sprang to Fry’s mind when she looked at Luanne Mullen.