Scared to Live

33

By the station car park in Matlock Bath, a laurel hedge had dropped its big, black berries all over the path, where they’d been squashed by passing feet. No one picked these berries — well, not if they had any sense. Laurel berries looked very appealing, but they were poisonous.

‘We can go up on a cable car,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s a lot quicker.’

The alpine-style cable cars had replaced the zigzag paths up the hillside as the easiest way to get to the Heights of Abraham estate. The tower was visible on the summit near the cable-car station, its flag fluttering in the wind.

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

Cooper laughed. He’d bumped into Kotsev on the way out of the office at West Street, and the Bulgarian had somehow tagged along, promising not to be in the way. Sergeant Fry had told him to make sure he behaved properly, he’d said.

‘It’s fine, Georgi. You’re not scared?’

‘No, no. It’s no problem.’

They climbed into one of the cars. It was big enough to hold six people, but it was a quiet day. The doors closed, and the cars rotated slowly before suddenly swinging out of the station, into the light. They immediately began to climb steeply up the cable, soaring high over the river and the rapidly dwindling traffic on the A6. The sides of the car were clear perspex from ceiling to floor level, so it was possible to look straight down at the ground, already hundreds of feet below and getting further away by the second.

‘Dyavol da go vzeme. Oh, God.’ Kotsev covered his eyes and gripped the edge of the seat tightly.

‘Are you sure heights aren’t a problem for you?’

‘I’ll be OK. OK, OK.’ He risked a peep through his fingers. ‘Mamka mu!’

By the time they had reached the highest point above the valley, Kotsev was sweating and breathing deeply to calm himself. This was the point on the journey where the cars slowed down and hung stationary for a minute or two, high above the valley floor.

‘Are we broken?’ said Kotsev nervously. ‘Do we need rescue?’

But then the wheels whirred again, and the cars approached Masson Hill through an avenue of trees as the cable passed over the first gantry. From there, it was an easy coast in, past the base of the stone tower to the hilltop station.

‘You can look now,’ said Cooper.

Kotsev took his hand away and opened his eyes. ‘Yes, OK. It was a little too high.’

Fry found Jed Skinner in the garage at the distribution centre outside Edendale, where he worked as a mechanic. He was wearing disposable gloves like a scenes of crime officer as he worked on the engine of a large van. No more dirty rags and oily hands for car mechanics these days, then. Gavin Murfin had been exaggerating.

‘Do you happen to know where your friend Brian Mullen is right now?’ asked Fry when they’d taken him into the supervisor’s office.

‘He’s staying with his parents-in-law. They live at Darley Dale.’

‘He’s not there any more.’

‘Oh?’

‘When were you last in contact with him?’

‘Yesterday. They wouldn’t let me visit him while he was in hospital, but Brian rang me yesterday afternoon to say he was out. He was pretty fed up, so I went to see him in the evening.’

‘At Darley Dale?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he say anything to you about leaving to stay somewhere else?’

‘No, not a thing.’

‘You live at Lowbridge, don’t you, Mr Skinner?’

‘Yes, but you won’t find Brian there. He could have come and stayed with me, if he’d asked, because we’re mates. But he didn’t ask.’

‘All right.’

‘Phone my wife if you don’t believe me.’

‘We might do that,’ said Fry.

Skinner gazed out of the window of the office at a truck being backed out, its reversing alarm echoing inside the garage.

‘Has Brian got the baby with him? Luanne?’ he said.

‘We believe so, sir.’

‘Shit. I hope you find them.’

‘So do we.’ Fry paused. ‘Speaking of Luanne, we know about the adoption. Mr Mullen’s father-in-law has explained to us that Brian and Lindsay couldn’t have any more children, because Brian was infertile after a bout of mumps.’

‘Mumps?’ said Skinner. ‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Certainly. He said the illness caused physical damage that made Brian become infertile.’

‘Well, it’s not what Brian told me at the time. Mumps had nothing to do with it.’

‘So what was it, then?’

‘STD.’

‘A sexually transmitted disease?’

‘That’s right. I can’t remember the exact name, though. Something with “clam” in it.’

‘Do you mean chlamydia?’

‘Yes, that’s what Brian had. And it wasn’t the first time, either. Chlamydia was what caused the damage. He told me all about it. If you get it too often, it causes scarring and blocks the — you know, the passage.’

Fry stared at him, her mind adjusting to a series of new possibilities. ‘Not mumps?’

‘I wonder if mumps was what he told his in-laws,’ said Skinner. ‘I met Henry Lowther once. He’s the sort of bloke who likes everything to seem right and proper. Even his son-in-law — since he’s stuck with him.’

‘Does Brian not get on with the Lowthers?’

‘Well, you know what it’s like. He wasn’t really good enough for their daughter from the start. They’d have preferred Lindsay to marry someone loaded. A step up on the social scale, if you know what I mean. Not a few steps down, like Brian.’

‘Mr Skinner, were you aware of any problems in the Mullens’ marriage? Was there any trouble between Brian and Lindsay?’

‘Trouble? Why should there be?’

‘Well, for a start, I presume Lindsay knew about the chlamydia? That would make quite a difference to their relationship, I think.’

The idea seemed to strike Skinner for the first time. ‘You think she might have blamed Brian for the fact that they couldn’t have another child naturally? Lindsay really, really wanted a daughter, you know.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

Skinner nodded. ‘That would make her a bit upset with him, I suppose.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Fry. ‘And there are other things that might have upset her, too — like where her husband picked up an STD in the first place.’

‘Hey, you’re right. I imagine there were a few words exchanged.’

‘But Brian never mentioned anything like that to you?’

‘Do you know, there were times when he was a bit pissed off, and I reckoned he might have had problems at home. But he never explained why — we didn’t talk about things like that.’

Fry cursed to herself as she left Jed Skinner and got back in the car. Male friends, what a waste of time. To learn anything about the state of the Mullens’ marriage, she needed to talk to Lindsay’s mother. But she didn’t give much for her chances of getting information out of Mrs Lowther right now.

With a frown, Fry turned to her notes from the interviews with Brian Mullen, seeking the smallest clue. After a few minutes, she picked up the phone and called Cooper.

When his phone rang, Cooper was standing by the lid of a shaft into the hillside that had been sealed by a steel grille. A bush rustled, showering drops of moisture, and a small, grey shape slipped along a branch, stopping to pull off the berries.

‘Ben, what are these illuminations that Brian Mullen mentioned?’

‘Illuminations?’

‘I’m sure he said they were in Matlock Bath. The only illuminations I know of are in Blackpool.’

‘Well, they’re not quite the same. In Matlock Bath, there are some lights along the promenade and across the river, but when people talk about the illuminations they mean the parade of boats.’

‘Boats?’

‘They create designs out of lights and mount them on rowing boats. Then they parade up the river — when it’s dark, of course. So what you see isn’t the boat but something like, say … an illuminated London bus floating on the water. There’s other stuff, too — fireworks, entertainment. You can see it all from the pleasure grounds in Derwent Gardens.’

‘OK. So when does this happen?’

‘September and October, but only at weekends. They call them Venetian Nights. I don’t know why, it must be something to do with the boats. But they always attract big crowds. Why, what are you thinking?’

‘Brian Mullen. When I interviewed him in hospital, he said that he and Lindsay had promised to take Luanne and the other children to see the illuminations in Matlock Bath. It was supposed to be a special treat.’

‘Yes, but surely he’d have more sense than to …’

Cooper stopped speaking, and Fry laughed. ‘What was it you were saying earlier, Ben? About people acting in an irrational way?’

‘Emotions interfere with rational behaviour.’

‘That was it.’

‘Diane, why were you so sure about Mr Mullen being involved in the fire?’

‘He never seemed particularly grief stricken to me. Some of those people leaving flowers outside the house looked more upset than Brian Mullen did.’

‘He was probably in shock, Diane. Besides, a public show of emotion is unnatural for some people. He could well have been suppressing it while he was in hospital. Being discharged and coming home would be the time when the truth hit him hardest, don’t you think? I mean, finding just Luanne waiting for him, and knowing that he’d never see the rest of his family again. There must have been a moment when he couldn’t suppress the knowledge any longer. That would be when his world caved in, I imagine. If he talked to a counsellor at the hospital, he was probably warned about that.’ Cooper gazed down at the cap of the mine shaft thoughtfully. ‘Although I’m not sure when that moment would be — because Mr Mullen didn’t actually go home, did he? He went to his in-laws’ house when he left hospital.’

‘No, you’re wrong. He did go home,’ said Fry. ‘I took him there.’

Cooper paused. ‘Oh. So you did.’

‘I wanted him to see the house after the fire.’

He hesitated for a moment, wondering what the right thing was to say. ‘Well, it wasn’t your fault, Diane.’

She was silent for so long that Cooper thought her mind must have switched to a different subject altogether, the way it sometimes did. And when Fry did speak, he still wasn’t sure whether that was the case, or not.

‘Thanks a lot, Ben,’ she said at last.

And then she was gone, and Cooper was listening to the faint hiss of his phone.

A second later, Georgi Kotsev emerged from a summer house a few yards up the steep path. The building was made of tufa, with a thatched roof.

‘I don’t see him,’ said Kotsev. ‘What is this place anyway?’

‘A tourist attraction.’

‘OK, I believe you.’

‘When we’ve finished, we can walk back to the village, if you’re too scared of the cable car. All we have to do is press a button to release an automated gate near West Lodge.’

‘Let’s keep looking.’

Cooper followed Kotsev up the path. Next summer, he ought to bring Liz up here. They could have a goat’s cheese panini or a tuna melt in the Hi Cafe, or sit on the terrace of the Summit Bar with a table among the flowers, overlooking Matlock Bath.

That was assuming they were still together next summer, of course. He’d never gone out with anyone for as long as twelve months before.

For a moment, Cooper turned to look back through the trees at the view down into the valley. He recalled that the white building near the tavern was Upper Towers, where beer had once been served to lead miners. Inside, it had round rooms, so they said.

‘Hey, here!’

Cooper spun round and found Kotsev standing with a Heights of Abraham employee in a high-vis jacket.

‘Have you got something?’

Kotsev pointed up the hill. ‘He’s at the tower.’

The burnt-out Shogun was in the garage, covered in a tarpaulin. Wayne Abbott greeted Fry and Hitchens with a clipboard in his hand.

‘Yes, this is definitely the vehicle that was driven into the field at Foxlow. The tread pattern is an exact fit with the impressions we lifted. We matched soil from the tyres and the wheel arches. Luckily, the interior escaped the worst effects of the fire, and we found traces of gunshot residue on the seat covers. The fabric retains barium and antimony residue better than human skin.’

‘Well, that’s a positive development,’ said Hitchens. ‘We’ve got a definite lead at last.’

‘There’s more,’ said Abbott. ‘I didn’t expect this, but we got some prints off the underside of the dashboard, where it hadn’t been burned too badly. They’re in the system, too. Somebody’s been in this car who has previous form.’

Hitchens took the print-out. ‘Brilliant.’

Fry leaned closer to look. ‘Anyone we know?’

‘The name means nothing to me. Anthony Donnelly, aged thirty-seven, with an address in Swanwick.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He has several past convictions for theft from a vehicle and taking without consent, plus all the usual extras — no insurance, driving while disqualified, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘Just an average car thief,’ said Fry, feeling unreasonably disappointed.

‘Mmm, maybe. The most recent charge on his record was in connection with an organized lorry-jacking scheme. Truckloads of white goods diverted to new owners via a lay-by on the A1. I remember that case — five or six people went down for it. But it seems Donnelly was acquitted.’

‘So it could be that he’s gradually moving up in the world, getting involved with more serious operators.’

‘Driver for a professional hit man?’ said Hitchens. ‘Well, let’s go and ask him, Diane.’

‘If that information is from the PNC, then the first thing we have to hope for is that the address is accurate for once.’

The wheels and cables were still humming and rattling, but it no longer seemed to be merely the whir of machinery, the hiss of high-tension steel passing through the air. The noises formed words, murmuring and whispering, mumbling and chattering.

And then John Lowther looked down into the valley again. The fragile crystal of his mind had cracked. He could see the fragments lying on the ground, fading and turning brown, as if they were mere ordinary clay. Through the fracture in his consciousness, he heard the final voice. It was still faint, but he recognized it. Oh, he recognized it all right. In the past, this voice had forced him to do things that he had never wanted to do. And now the voice was back. He had no idea what it would make him do next.

‘Johnny, you know what you have to do.’

They would come for him soon. They would scent him out, sniffing the fear in his sweat. They would use dogs to listen for his voices when they became too loud. And they’d follow him when he left the house, track his movements wherever he went. And one day the searchlights would catch him on the corner of a street, and the lights would probe deep into his mind and see what was there. And the whole world would know his evil.

Cooper could see John Lowther on the platform at the top of the stone tower, leaning over the parapet. Even from this distance, he could tell that Lowther was trembling violently, as if he was no more than a leaf shaken by the wind blowing across the hillside. Strands of hair fell over his forehead, and his eyes were fixed on the horizon. He might have been listening for some distant call that would summon him away, an echo that would reach him from far in the south.

Lowther seemed completely oblivious to the knot of people beginning to cluster round the base of the tower. Their heads were tilted back to stare up at his silhouette, black against the sky. But not once did Lowther look down at the ground.

‘He’s been up there for some time now,’ said the staff member. ‘A visitor started to get uneasy about him. She said he was behaving oddly.’

‘All right. Thank you.’

‘Is there anything else I can do?’

Cooper looked at the concrete apron the tower stood on, and the rough boulders built into the base. ‘Right now, you could help us most by keeping everyone clear of the tower. Well clear — back as far as the play area.’

The man followed Cooper’s gaze, and turned pale. ‘You don’t think he might …?’

But Cooper put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you could just move these people back, sir.’

‘Of course.’

Georgi Kotsev was examining the doorway to the tower. It was arched, like the entrance to a church, but so narrow that Kotsev looked as though he’d hardly be able to squeeze through it. Signs either side of the doorway warned visitors to take care on the steps. And they gave the building’s name — the Victoria Prospect Tower. Right now, it seemed ironic. Cooper wasn’t looking forward to the prospect at the top.

‘A tricky location,’ said Kotsev.

‘It couldn’t be worse.’

As he’d approached the tower, Cooper had called Control to report the situation. Help would be on the way, and it looked as though he might need it. But it would take time.

When Cooper looked up at the parapet again, a fine mist fell on his face and trickled into his collar. Lowther must be getting cold and uncomfortable up there by now. He wasn’t even dressed for the rain.

‘OK, let’s go and talk to him.’

Rain had blown in through the doorway, creating a dark patch in the stairwell. Inside, the view upwards was dizzying. Stone steps curled away into the tower, with bare tree trunks zigzagging overhead from wall to wall. Cooper could see both the outer and inner surfaces of the staircase at once, which seemed entirely wrong. His instincts were telling him that it was impossible to walk on stairs that coiled so tightly and rose so steeply.

Standing close to the wall, Cooper took hold of the handrail and began to ascend. Mounting the spiral staircase was like walking up a twisted ribbon, or climbing a strand of DNA. It was a sort of stone helix, cold to the touch and smelling of earth. You had to be careful on these steps, or you could fall right through the spiral and plummet to the base of the tower.

Just before the last turn, the bulkhead lights on the wall ended, and Cooper stopped when he saw daylight from the platform. He jumped when he became aware of Kotsev’s breathing below and behind him on the steps. His mind had been so distracted that he’d forgotten his companion.

‘Georgi, you’d better stay back out of sight. We don’t want to frighten him too much.’

‘Dobre. I’ll be right here, behind you.’

Cooper’s heart was beating harder after his climb. All the way up the tower, he’d been conscious of the narrowness of the steps, and the drop through the spiral. One slip could be disastrous.

Slowly now, he eased himself the last few feet on to the platform, trying not to make any sudden noises. Leaving the stairwell was like emerging into a different world, with light and air and an awareness of the valley all around him — banks of trees whispering in the breeze, the cables hissing as they pulled another string of swaying cars across the river. Lowther was standing nearby, his hands resting on the parapet.

‘Mr Lowther, do you remember me? Detective Constable Cooper.’

Lowther seemed to become aware of him for the first time. He tried to back away, but he was already pressed hard against the parapet and could only scrape slowly around the platform until he was on the eastern side. He stood with the Heights of Abraham behind him, birds swooping through the woods, water dripping from branch to branch, cable cars descending to the base station.

Cooper took a step backwards, trying to judge a safe distance that wouldn’t make Lowther feel under too much pressure. At the same time, he had to find some way to keep the man’s attention on him. At the moment, his concentration seemed to be wandering, his eyes darting around the landscape, distracted by the whir of cables and the voices of people on the ground below.

‘Just take it easy, sir. There’s nothing to worry about.’

He felt faintly ridiculous as soon as he said it. He could see from the expression on Lowther’s face that the man had plenty to worry about. Real or imagined, it was all there in his eyes and in the twist of his mouth. Fear, verging on panic.

‘You’re quite safe, Mr Lowther. I’m here to help you.’

Trying to inject a calmness into his voice that he didn’t feel himself, Cooper spread his hands in a reassuring gesture. His fingers touched the edge of the parapet, and he saw the stone was yellow with encrusted lichen.

‘Is there a dog here somewhere?’ said Lowther.

Cooper smiled then. Bizarrely, it sounded like progress. ‘You recognize me, don’t you, sir? You remember me? I’m DC Cooper. We talked yesterday. I was with a colleague, and you told us about your neighbour’s Alsatian.’

‘Tyrannosaurus.’

‘And we showed you a wooden dinosaur, that’s right.’

‘You don’t have to believe what they’re saying.’

A gust of wind brought the sound of children’s voices up the valley from Gulliver’s Kingdom. Laughter and screams. Kids hurtling over the switchback, plunging into the log flume, their mouths open, their clothes flying.

Lowther inclined his head. ‘They’re there,’ he said. ‘Not far away now.’

Cooper was concentrating so hard on the other man, tensed for a sudden movement, that he was hardly aware of movements on the edge of his vision, the increasing number of sounds around him. He reminded himself that John Lowther saw the world differently, and was probably already in an entirely abnormal state of mind where he saw things that didn’t exist and heard voices that Cooper couldn’t.

For some reason, Cooper couldn’t stop his thoughts wandering. He remembered thinking about the indoor area at Gulliver’s Kingdom, the place his nieces wanted so much to visit. The Wild West, an ice palace, jungle adventures. It was just there, in the distance, prominent among the trees. He could see it without taking his eyes from Lowther’s. Right now, Cooper could imagine himself in the middle of a Wild West shoot-out, that nerve-jangling moment when two men waited for each other to make the fatal first move. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps he was in the ice palace. Skating on very thin ice indeed.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir,’ he repeated. ‘Let’s just go down to the bottom of the tower, and we can talk. We can talk about whatever you like.’

Lowther shook his head. ‘It’ll soon be Monday,’ he said.

‘Monday?’

Frowning, Cooper found the lines of a song going through his head. An old Boomtown Rats classic.

‘So what don’t you like about Mondays?’

‘Not Mondays,’ said Lowther. ‘Next Monday. The thirty-first of October.’

‘Oh.’

Of course. Halloween. The time when the forces of evil were at their most powerful, the night when the doors to the underworld stood open and it was possible to communicate with the dead. Another belief that died hard, despite the efforts to make it all about pumpkins and apple bobbing.

‘I can’t be alive by then,’ said Lowther. ‘I can’t.’

‘All we need to do,’ said Cooper, ‘is get you down from here and take you to see a doctor. They can stop the voices, John. You know they can. They’ve done it before.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Lowther, shaking with agitation. ‘Mum said you understood, but you don’t. When people talk to me now it’s like a different kind of language. It’s too much to hold in my mind at once. My head is overloaded and I can’t understand what they say. It makes me forget what I’ve just heard because I can’t hear it for long enough. It’s all in different bits, you see, which I have to put together again in my head. Until I do that, it’s all words in the air. I have to try to figure it out from people’s faces. But their faces always say something different from their voices.’

‘Mr Lowther, please calm down and stop talking for a minute.’

‘I have to keep talking, to drown out the voices.’

‘We’ll get you some treatment, to make the voices go away.’

‘They’ll never go away — not completely. They’ll always be there …’ He seemed to be listening to something. Whatever he heard terrified him, and he shouted the next few words. ‘It’s Lindsay’s voice. Lindsay — and the children. I heard them scream. I’ll always hear them scream.’

‘Look — ’

What happened next, Cooper wasn’t quite sure. He’d been trying to concentrate on what John Lowther was saying, so he could respond and reestablish a connection. He’d been trying to maintain eye contact, to hold the man’s attention and keep him talking. But something had spooked him. Lowther jerked backwards against the parapet as if he’d been shoved in the chest or pulled back by an invisible hand.

Then he was going over, and Cooper was diving forward to grab hold of him. He found only clothes to clutch at, smooth material that slipped through his fingers and left him nothing to grip. He felt Lowther’s weight shifting inexorably outwards as gravity seized him and dragged him over the edge.

‘Georgi! Help me, quick!’

Kotsev came thumping up the steps, gasping as he reached the top.

‘Dyavol da go vzeme! Oh hell!’

But Kotsev was too late. Cooper felt his muscles scream against the effort of holding on to Lowther’s coat, fabric stretching and tearing between his fingers. Lowther was doing nothing to help himself. Before Georgi could reach over the parapet to help, Lowther slipped out of Cooper’s hands. His arms and legs flailed in the air, and his body bounced once off the stones of the tower as he fell, his mouth open, his jacket flying.

It was only in the final second that John Lowther’s screams joined those of the children that he could hear. A second of screaming, and then the impact. And all the voices were silenced for ever.