Scared to Live

37

Sunday, 30 October

The following afternoon, Fry was sitting alone in the CID room at West Street. Everyone else who was on duty today had joined the search for Luanne Mullen. Most of them were expecting the divers of the underwater search team to have made a find by the time they’d finished dragging the channels of the mill goyt. Unless the child’s body had been swept out into the river and was miles away from Matlock Bath by now.

Fry was thinking of her conversation with Brian Mullen early that morning. Same hospital, different ward. A Mullen who looked sicker and paler than ever.

‘I always thought the adoption in Bulgaria was the wrong thing,’ Mullen had said to her. ‘I mean, I love Luanne to bits, and I wouldn’t have parted with her, once we’d got her. I couldn’t have taken her away from Lindsay. But I never thought it was right. It felt dodgy to me. I knew there’d be trouble. But Henry kept pushing and pushing, and Lindsay always went along with what he said.’

‘I see.’

‘It was all illegal, wasn’t it? False documents, and everything?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

Mullen had lain back, exhausted. ‘I’ve never been involved in anything illegal before. Never. I knew they’d catch up with us.’

‘Who?’

‘I never knew who they’d be exactly, but I was sure someone would come one day, to take Luanne back. It was like we were living on borrowed time. And once that Rose Shepherd turned up again, that was the last straw. But no one else could see what I was afraid of. They told me I was being stupid.’

‘Is that what you were having arguments with Lindsay about?’

‘No, we never had arguments, I told you. We disagreed about some things. But I was right, wasn’t I? They did come.’

‘Possibly. But you have no idea who these people might be?’

‘Somebody from Bulgaria, that’s all I can guess at. They’ve got Luanne, haven’t they? Have they taken her back there?’

‘I really don’t know, sir. I’m sorry. But we’re doing our best to find her.’

It hadn’t sounded convincing, even to Fry herself. Mullen had just looked even more sick.

‘Can I ask you about something else, Mr Mullen?’ she’d said.

‘What?’

‘Your next-door neighbour, Mr Wade.’

‘Keith Wade? He’s a good neighbour. He’s always kept an eye on our house. I know he can seem a bit rough, and his wife walked out on him, poor bloke. But Lindsay saw a lot of him during the day when he was on late shifts, and he always took an interest in the kids.’

‘Mr Mullen, when you say Mr Wade kept an eye on your house, what exactly do you mean?’

‘We gave him a spare key. So if we were away for the weekend, he could get in to deal with any emergencies.’

‘Wait a minute — he has a key to your house?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Fry shook her head at the memory of her conversation with Mullen. As far as she was concerned, the question of who’d killed Lindsay Mullen and the two boys in the fire remained open. Despite his parents’ protestations, it would be easy to blame John Lowther and leave it at that. But she was feeling guilty that she’d been so wrong about him. Her preconceptions had overruled her judgement. Bad mistake.

She considered Brian Mullen again. He was one of only two people she could definitely place at the scene around the time of the fire. Mullen had a key to the house, so he wouldn’t have needed to break in through the side window. Of course, the damage to the window might simply have been a blind, to make everyone think there had been a break-in.

She wondered whether she ought to have seized Mullen’s clothes for forensic examination at an early stage in the enquiry. But it would have been a pointless exercise, even immediately after the incident. Mullen had legitimate reasons for his clothes being impregnated with smoke, or even singed by the fire. He’d tried to get into the house to rescue his children, hadn’t he? He had plenty of witnesses to that fact, including the two firefighters who’d physically dragged him back to the pavement. It took a bit of clever forward planning to contaminate forensic evidence like that. She couldn’t believe Brian Mullen had it in him.

But no, she shouldn’t rule out it out completely. No more false assumptions.

Gradually, Fry found her thoughts focusing on Keith Wade. The perfect neighbour, the assiduous member of Neighbourhood Watch. The keen amateur photographer. The only other person she knew to have been at the scene when the fire started.

Fry paused and checked her email. Wade had promised to send her some of his photos, but they hadn’t arrived yet. She doubted if they ever would.

Then another thought struck her. Brian Mullen had an alibi for the time of the fire — he’d been at the Broken Wheel with Jed Skinner until the early hours of the morning. In Wade’s case, it was that very same fact that had made it possible for him to get into the Mullens’ house. If Brian hadn’t been out late that night, the front door of number 32 would have been bolted on the inside. But Lindsay had left the bolts off for her husband to come home. Wade could have known that quite easily, couldn’t he?

There was one person who wasn’t out with the search teams. He wasn’t on duty because he was at home, recovering from his unexpected dip in the trapped waters of the Derwent. Fry dialled his number.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘can I bounce something off you?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking, Diane.’

‘Oh. Well, I can tell you’re all right by the way you sound.’

Cooper sighed. ‘What did you want to bounce off me?’

‘Brian Mullen. You know that he denied the arguments with his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Whose word do we have that those arguments ever took place?’

Cooper considered the question for a moment. ‘Well, the lady on one side of the Mullens heard the row about the carpet.’

‘Which is the only one Brian admits to. And the rest?’

‘We only have the other neighbour’s word for those.’

‘Keith Wade.’

‘Yes, Wade. Why, Diane?’

‘I’m thinking of getting Mr Wade in. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good friend of the Mullens, after all.’

‘But he seems to have been the perfect next-door neighbour.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did the prints come back from the can of lighter fluid?’

‘Yes, just today. I’m going to ask Mr Wade to give his prints for comparison.’

‘He’s lived next door to the Mullens for six years,’ said Cooper. ‘And they got on fine, by all accounts. Why would he decide to do them harm? What would have been his motive?’

‘Motive?’

‘Yes, motive. That’s a bit of a problem all round, isn’t it? Juries like a motive. They’re never entirely happy if they don’t get one, you know.’

‘I’ll be sure to let you know when I find out,’ said Fry.

Cooper paused. ‘Do you want me to come in?’

‘No, you’re recuperating.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s any news …?’

‘We’re still working on the Rose Shepherd shooting.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘No, there isn’t any news of Luanne Mullen. Not yet.’

Cooper put the phone down thoughtfully. Neighbours had been a bit outside his experience until he moved to Welbeck Street. At Bridge End Farm, the nearest house had been several fields away. Even here in Edendale, there was only his landlady, Mrs Shelley, on one side, and a retired couple on the other, two former teachers who seemed to spend most of their time in Spain.

‘Who was that, Ben?’

‘It was Diane Fry.’

Liz was in his kitchen. Cooper wasn’t sure what she was doing, and it felt wrong somehow for her to be there. A few months of living on his own, and he was already feeling territorial about his space. He just hoped she wasn’t tidying up. He couldn’t do with that.

Cooper put his head around the door and saw that Liz was talking to the cat, who’d taken to her straightaway. So that was all right.

‘They still haven’t found the child,’ he said. ‘You know — Luanne Mullen.’

Liz looked up, her eyes suddenly full of concern at something she’d detected in his voice. Her dark hair was loose today, curled round her ears in the way that he liked.

‘It wasn’t your fault if the child was snatched, Ben.’

‘I didn’t say it was.’

‘No, but you were thinking it.’

Cooper raised his hands. ‘It’s a fair cop.’

Liz gave the cat another stroke, rubbing him behind the ears, creating a deep buzz of pleasure.

‘Just so long as you weren’t planning on going in to work,’ she said. ‘This is a rest day. We don’t get much chance to spend a whole day together.’

‘No, of course,’ said Cooper. ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘Mmm.’

She stood up and came towards him. When she was close, he could feel her warmth. In another moment, he’d be distracted completely from what had really been on his mind.

‘Diane says they’re still working on the Rose Shepherd shooting,’ he said. ‘There’s a suspect in custody, but it isn’t going too well with him, from what I hear.’

Liz looked up at him, instinctively sharing the desire to see a satisfactory conclusion in a tragic case like the death of Miss Shepherd.

‘Did I tell you about the gun, by the way?’

‘The gun?’ said Cooper.

‘The gun you asked about, Ben. The Romanian PSL. I did tell you about the gun, didn’t I?’

A defendant was always advised by his lawyers to smarten himself up when he appeared in court. It made a better impression on a jury, and even on magistrates, who ought to know better. Have a shave, comb your hair, and borrow a suit, even if it didn’t fit.

But Keith Wade had gone a step further — he’d smartened himself up for his interview at the police station. Not many people cared about looking good in an interview room. But at least he’d ditched the woolly Arbroath smoky, and Fry could risk breathing.

‘Mr Wade, thank you for coming in earlier to give us your fingerprints.’

‘For elimination purposes, you said. Is that right?’

‘Well, that was the idea.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘First of all, I want to take you back to Sunday night again, when you first noticed the fire at your neighbour’s house.’

He looked irritated. ‘I think I’ve told you everything. Twice, probably.’

‘How did you get into the house?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Surely you must do. You saw the smoke, went to make the 999 call, then …?’

‘I opened their front door.’

‘You opened the front door of number 32? Do you mean you broke the door down?’

‘No.’

‘Surely it wasn’t unlocked?’

Wade decided not to answer that one. He began to look sulky. In a moment, she could be into ‘no comment’ territory.

‘You’ve got a key, haven’t you?’ said Fry.

‘Like I said, I knew Brian and Lindsay well. I keep an eye on their house when they’re away.’

‘They leave you a key. That’s how you got in.’

‘Yes.’

‘You knew Brian was out that night, didn’t you?’

‘Well, yes. I always see him come and go.’

‘Mr Wade, how did you get on with boys? Jack and Liam?’

‘Oh, them — ’

‘They were nice lads, you said.’

‘Little bastards, that’s what they were.’

‘One was seven years old, and the other four, Mr Wade.’

He stared at her sullenly. ‘I know that.’

‘You’re a smoker, aren’t you, sir? It was obvious as soon as I walked through your door.’

‘There’s no law against it, is there?’

‘Actually, yes. But not in the privacy of your own home.’

‘So?’

‘Unfortunately, you took your matches and lighter fluid out of your house. You took them to your next-door neighbour’s, in fact.’

‘Brian’s a good bloke,’ said Wade, leaning forward urgently.

‘He says the same about you, funnily enough. But he couldn’t be more wrong, could he?’

‘He’s my mate. I look out for him.’

‘So why did you go into his house that night, pour lighter fluid in the sitting room and set fire to it? Why did you murder his wife and children?’

‘What?’

‘There’s no point in denying it. We have your fingerprints from the can of lighter fluid that you used and left in a bin down the street.’

Wade shook his head. ‘Brian’s better off without them. Look at me — I’m a lot better off without my wife. It was the best thing that ever happened to me when she went. I ought to have kicked her out a lot sooner. Once they start giving you trouble, the best thing is to get rid of them.’

‘You mean you thought you were doing Brian Mullen a favour?’

‘Well, you could put it like that. He was a brave bloke, but not that brave. I think that’s why Brian went out so often, he couldn’t face it. He needed a helping hand, like.’

‘So you stepped in. Watching out for your neighbour, Mr Wade? That’s just great. Thank God we don’t all have neighbours like you.’

‘I don’t want to talk any more.’

‘You’ve said enough.’

Fry began to get up, then stopped. ‘When you said Brian went out so often, what did you mean?’

‘He’d been staying out really late.’

‘Like Sunday night, you mean?’

‘Yes, Sunday. And Saturday.’

‘Saturday? Brian Mullen was out on Saturday night as well?’

‘Oh yes, all night. Past three o’clock, as I recall.’

‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’

‘You never asked.’

She had a sudden memory of her conversation with Jed Skinner, Brian Mullen’s friend, his alibi. Had Skinner just slipped up when he mentioned Saturday instead of Sunday, the night of the fire? But then, why should he have thought that Saturday was the night Brian needed an alibi for? Did he think he was covering for an affair?

‘That’ll do for now, Mr Wade,’ said Fry. ‘You’ll be charged with the murder of Lindsay Mullen and her two children.’

Wade looked at her with something like distaste. Surely it ought to be the other way round. But there was no accounting for what went on in people’s minds, their rationalizations and self-justifications.

‘You know, I thought Lindsay would welcome a bit of company, with Brian being out,’ he said. ‘A bit of male company, like. But she was a bitch, like all the others. Brian is a lot better off without her.’

Hitchens kept his chair still for once, instead of making it squeal on its swivel. Perhaps he was finally reading her thoughts, responding to the force of her unspoken will. Fry made a mental note to ask someone to come in and oil the thing when the DI was off duty.

‘The SOCOs found Wade’s digital camera,’ he said. ‘But all the photographs of the fire had been deleted from the memory card.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Fry. ‘He was worried we might find something incriminating.’

‘Like what?’

‘I think he probably started taking photographs long before he made the 999 call. We’d have been able to see the time of each photograph on the memory card, wouldn’t we?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Or even on a jpeg copy if he’d emailed them.’

‘Well, then it might have occurred to us to compare them to the time of his call. And he’d have some difficult questions to answer. I don’t think our Mr Wade is too technical. He wouldn’t have known how to check the time stamp of each photo, so he deleted the whole lot.’

‘You must have had him worried from the start, Diane.’

‘He was an amateur. Look at how many mistakes he made.’

‘Well, you always said the answer to the Mullen case would be close to home.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Fry. ‘I was thinking about a member of the family. But I suppose your next-door neighbour is pretty close. The Mullens put their trust in him.’

Hitchens stood up from his chair. ‘Let’s go and see the DCI.’

In the DCI’s office, they found that Kessen had just received the results of the latest actions from the incident room — a detailed assessment of Rose Shepherd’s financial circumstances.

‘Miss Shepherd had several savings accounts at different banks,’ he said, ‘but they were practically empty. Unless there are some investments or deposits we haven’t located, the victim’s funds were getting dangerously low.’

‘She doesn’t seem to have had any income, either,’ pointed out Fry.

‘That’s right. Apart from interest on her savings, nothing has been added to any of the accounts as far back as we can go. Since the house purchase, the flow of money has been in one direction — into her current account, where it’s been used to pay bills. We had a quick calculation of her annual expenditure. At her present rate, she couldn’t have survived more than another six months, I reckon.’

Fry took the print-out he offered her. ‘Was she spending heavily?’

‘Not really. Well, her big expenditure was on the house purchase and everything that went with it — solicitor’s fees, and the work she had done, like the gates and the burglar alarms. That must have made a huge hole in her resources. But since then, it’s just been normal living expenses. Council Tax, utilities, telephone bills. Not to mention food and general household expenses. They’ve all been increasing.’

‘And interest rates have been falling.’

‘She must have miscalculated badly, if she thought she could hide herself away in Bain House for the rest of her life.’

‘In any case, she must have been able to see what was going to happen not too far in the future. She was going to run out of money.’

‘Bain House would have had to go, for a start. She could have survived a few years longer if she’d flogged it and bought a terraced property in the city somewhere.’

‘She could have got a job,’ said Fry.

‘Look at the way she lived here,’ said Kessen. ‘Neither of those two options would have seemed possible to Rose Shepherd. She was too frightened of being tracked down.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Kessen coughed. ‘Are we nearly finished here? We need all the manpower we can get at Matlock Bath. Don’t forget we’re still looking for the child. And whoever assaulted DC Cooper, of course.’

‘Thank goodness the Zhivko bombing is C Division’s baby,’ said Hitchens. ‘We couldn’t have coped with that as well. By all accounts, it’s proving a big headache for them.’

‘I’ll send them our sympathy.’

‘What about Brian Mullen?’ asked Fry, turning back to the room. ‘Should we interview him again? It does seem a bit tough on him, so soon after everything else that’s happened.’

‘Leave it for now,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ll have another try at Tony Donnelly first.’

‘No, look,’ said Donnelly a few minutes later. ‘All I did was nick a car and torch it afterwards. That’s nothing. You just get a ticking off for that. Community service, that sort of thing. It’s no big deal.’

‘You’ve done it before, Mr Donnelly, haven’t you?’

‘Well, yeah. Everybody has. When we were kids, we did it all the time round our way.’

‘But you’re not a kid any more.’

‘No. Well, I had given it up. This was just a one-off.’

‘Found something more lucrative, did you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘I think you do,’ said Hitchens.

Donnelly shook his head.

‘So why this one-off?’

‘Look, it was a favour. Someone wanted a car for a bit, that’s all. A decent car, a four-by-four. I found one for him, and I did it as a favour.’

‘This would be the Shogun?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you saying you didn’t know what the vehicle was being used for?’

Donnelly chuckled. ‘No, of course not. You don’t ask questions like that.’

‘We do.’

‘Yeah, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you, can I? No matter how long you keep me here, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.’

‘We don’t need you to tell us that, Mr Donnelly. We already know. The car you stole was used to commit a murder.’

‘Eh?’

‘A shooting in Foxlow.’

‘No. Well, I heard about that, but you can’t- Well, you can’t, that’s all.’

‘Mr Donnelly, unless you tell us who you did this favour for, you’re our number one suspect right now.’

‘For a murder? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘Not at all, sir. I’ve never been more serious. I suggest you start being more co-operative, or you could be here for a lot longer yet.’

Donnelly stared at him for a long moment, his eyes flickering anxiously as he worked out the odds. Either way, they didn’t look good.

‘He was good to me,’ he said. ‘He gave me a job, and he helped me to set up on my own when things started to go pear-shaped. I owed him a favour, that’s all. He’s a good bloke. I did it as a favour, I don’t know anything else.’

‘Who are you talking about, Mr Donnelly?’

Donnelly took a deep breath before finally committing himself. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’

Cooper caught up with Fry in the car park, between the security gate and the custody suite. A light drizzle was falling, and Fry seemed to want to get to her car quickly, but he stopped her.

‘Ben? What the heck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home recuperating.’

‘I don’t need to recuperate. I’m fine.’

He waited for the response he expected, wincing as he remembered what Liz had said to him when he put his jacket on to leave the flat. But, from Fry, it didn’t come.

‘So what do you think you’re going to do here?’ she said.

‘I want to help. Are there any developments?’

Fry brought him up to date on Keith Wade, then told him about Rose Shepherd’s dire financial circumstances.

‘God, she must have been getting desperate,’ said Cooper. ‘There wasn’t even anyone she could turn to for help or advice. She was dealing with that prospect alone.’

Fry leaned against the side of a police van. ‘You know, in those circumstances, I think you’d probably get to a point where you didn’t care any more. You’d be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one — she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.’

Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain.

But Cooper wasn’t at all sure about what she’d just said. He couldn’t feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them.

But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens’ smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night.

‘Diane, there is another possibility that Miss Shepherd might have considered,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s that, Ben?’

‘I wonder if she thought she’d found a lifeline. She might have made contact with someone she thought she could get money out of.’

‘What?’

Cooper saw the sceptical look in her eyes, and started his train of thought all over again. ‘I asked about the rifle. You remember, the Romanian semi-automatic?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, apart from the military sniper rifle, there’s a sporting version of the PSL made for export, the Romak-3. It’s very similar, but has the bayonet lug ground off and some other modifications to comply with US import laws.’

‘A sporting version. Do you mean a hunting rifle?’

‘Yes. A hunting rifle.’

Fry tilted her head slightly to one side as she looked at him. ‘What are you thinking, Ben?’

He smiled at the echo of Liz’s words earlier. Liz had known what he was thinking before he said it. She’d known, even though he denied it. But Fry was different — she wanted it spelled out. She wanted to hear him explain it. They connected on quite a different level.

‘I listened to the tapes of John Lowther’s interviews,’ he said. ‘You remember his sentence referring to hunting? He said some people go “hunting for whores. No, for babies …”’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I wonder if that was an example of what Dr Sinclair called “clang associations”, a confusion of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters. I wonder if he meant some people go hunting boars.’

‘Boars?’

‘Wild pigs. They still hunt them in parts of the world. Bulgaria, for example.’

‘So?’

‘There’s another thing. When Henry Lowther had that business trip to Bulgaria, it wasn’t all vodka and red wine. His business contacts took him wild boar hunting.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘You asked him where he went and he mentioned the name of a place. Dounav. That was a mistake on his part, but I suppose he couldn’t think of anywhere else in Bulgaria on the spur of the moment. There are some lies that you need to plan.’

‘What’s wrong with Dounav?’

‘I looked it up,’ said Cooper. ‘Dounav is a state game preserve in northern Bulgaria. One of its hunting ranges is called the Bulgarian jungle because of its deep forests. Hunters go there to shoot deer, foxes and even the occasional wolf. But mostly wild boar.’

With the back of her hand, Fry wiped a bit of rain from her face and began to walk towards her car again. ‘OK. So …?’

‘Well, how do you go about hunting boar?’ said Cooper. ‘Those are big animals. I doubt if you’d use a bow and arrow.’

Fry stopped in her tracks. ‘You’d use a hunting rifle, right?’

‘I think so, don’t you?’

Her expression had changed. The rain was getting heavier, but she let a trickle run into her eyes and hardly noticed.

‘OK, I’m with you, Ben. Let’s see if we can check out Henry Lowther’s financial status. He seems to have parted with money pretty readily when they were getting Zlatka Shishkov out of Bulgaria. But does he really have such deep pockets? I’m no expert on property prices, but I’d guess that bungalow at Darley Dale is probably worth less than Bain House.’

‘If Rose Shepherd was making an attempt to blackmail Mr Lowther, she might have seriously misjudged his ability to pay.’

‘Yes. But we’ve got to be discreet — I don’t want him to know we’re checking him out.’

‘Right, Diane. And what then?’

‘I’ll talk to the DI. When we’ve got everything together, we’ll go and see the Lowthers again.’

‘They’ve lost both their children in the past week,’ said Cooper.

‘I know. No one said this was going to be easy.’