Scared to Live

6

‘Years ago, I used to work on a delivery round out Leek way,’ said Bernie Wilding when Cooper found him sitting in his red mail van. ‘I saw those wallabies out there about as often as I saw Miss Shepherd in Foxlow.’

‘The wallabies?’

Cooper laughed. Most rumours of exotic animals surviving in unlikely parts of the country were rubbish. But sometimes the creatures turned out to be real, like the scorpions on the London Underground — or the wallabies of the Roaches.

‘Did you really see the wallabies?’ he asked.

‘Only as an odd shape in the distance once or twice. I was never quite sure whether I was looking at a wallaby or a hare, really. But I always told everybody I’d seen the wallabies. Well, you do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I would too.’

It was one of Cooper’s genuine regrets that he’d never seen a wallaby, despite his thirty years in the Peak District. No one who lived or worked on the western fringes of the national park doubted they existed. Plenty of drivers had seen them, and a few had run one over at night on some remote road. The original animals had escaped from a private zoo during the Second World War, and bred on the moors. According to the stories, a yak escaped at the same time. But the last yak sighting was back in the fifties. Pity, really.

‘Too late now, I reckon,’ said Wilding.

‘So they say. Too many people and dogs invading their habitat.’

‘Oh, aye. And too much traffic. People have killed them off, when the bad winters couldn’t.’

Cooper thought he’d probably passed the test. Some of his colleagues would have had no idea what Bernie was talking about. But he’d proved his credentials as a local.

‘What about Miss Shepherd? You saw her often enough and at close enough range to recognize her, didn’t you?’

Wilding screwed his face up thoughtfully. ‘You know, the few times I did catch a glimpse of her, she always seemed to be wearing a headscarf, or something that hid her face. I could never be entirely sure it was her. Not so that I could absolutely swear to it, you understand?’

‘So you don’t think you’d be able to identify her, Mr Wilding?’

‘Not for certain. Sorry.’

‘You spoke to her, though, didn’t you? What did she sound like?’

‘Well, I reckon she had a bit of an accent,’ said Wilding. ‘But I couldn’t really place it. I didn’t speak to her that often, and even then it wasn’t to hold a conversation. Most often, it was through that intercom thing on the gate. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t recognize my own mother speaking through one of those.’

‘Did you ever see anyone else coming or going from Bain House?’

‘No, never.’

‘Any cars parked there?’

‘Just Miss Shepherd’s. It’s a Volvo, I think.’

‘And these gates were always closed, as far as you know?’

‘Always. She kept everyone out, including me.’

‘One last thing,’ said Cooper. ‘What was it you brought for her this morning?’

‘Oh, there was a package. It was a bit too big to get in the letter box. Can I give it to you?’

‘Yes, please. I’ll let you have a receipt.’

Wilding handed him a small parcel about nine inches long. ‘Miss Shepherd never got much mail. I hope it was nothing to do with what happened to her.’

‘Well, it was the reason she was found today, instead of in a week’s time.’

By the time Diane Fry arrived in Foxlow, there was no room for anyone to park anywhere near Bain House. She had to leave her Peugeot on the roadside close to a stone wall and walk to the RV point. Cooper met her near the gates as he was clearing the way for Bernie Wilding to get his van out.

‘Can you bring me up to speed, Ben?’ she asked.

‘Sure. I’ve made notes.’

‘I thought you would have.’

Cooper ran through the details. Fry listened carefully, finding nothing to fault him on. He thought he’d done pretty well, considering he hadn’t been at the scene much longer than she had herself.

‘She sounds like a bit of a recluse,’ said Fry when he’d finished.

He wondered if Fry felt the same slight shiver of recognition that he did at some of the details. There were times in many people’s lives when they went to great lengths to avoid contact with anyone else. It wasn’t so unusual. Just a bit extreme, perhaps, in Rose Shepherd’s case.

‘Actually, I used to know a lady who was a real recluse,’ he said. ‘Old Annie, we called her. When I was a child, she lived in an old cottage near the farm. She must have been there for donkey’s years, because the place was getting very run down. But she didn’t seem to have any relatives — or if she did, they never bothered to visit her. Annie stayed in her house watching TV and listening to the radio, much like Miss Shepherd must have done.’

They began to walk towards the house. The front door stood open, officers still coming and going with bagged items for examination.

‘No one visited Annie at all?’ asked Fry.

‘Well, Mum used to call on her occasionally to see if she was all right. A few times a year, she was invited to our house. Boxing Day, that was a time when we always had to have her round. As kids, we used to dread her coming.’

‘Why?’

‘Annie was one of those lonely people who didn’t speak to anyone for weeks on end, then couldn’t help talking far too much when she finally got into company. It was as if she had to prove to herself that she could still hold a conversation, that somebody would listen to her when she was speaking. I suppose she needed to be sure that she still existed in other people’s eyes.’

‘Were you psychoanalysing people even then?’ said Fry. ‘Yes, I bet you were. I can just see you as an eight-year-old Sigmund Freud.’

But Cooper took no notice. He knew her well enough by now. She made those remarks out of a sort of defensive instinct sometimes. In fact, whenever he talked about vulnerable and lonely people, it seemed.

‘Of course, the result was that everyone tried to steer clear of Old Annie,’ he said. ‘It was probably why her relatives never visited her, and why even the postman kept his van door open and the engine running. Mum always said she had trouble getting away from the cottage once she was inside.’

‘No one likes being trapped by an old bore.’

‘Yes, I suppose Annie was a terrible old bore, but it was more than that. When I was a small child I found her quite frightening. She had that slightly hysterical tone to her voice that always makes people nervous. So people went out of their way to avoid her.’

‘God help me, but I hope I die before I get like that.’

They found Hitchens and Kessen at the edge of the field backing on to the garden of Bain House. The DCI seemed to be sniffing the air, trying to detect the scent of his suspect, like a dog. Wayne Abbott was walking across the field towards them, his boots crunching through the ridges of ploughed soil.

‘I was always taught to go around the edge of a field so as not to damage the crop,’ he said. ‘But I’m making an exception today, because the edge of the field is exactly where your tyre marks are.’

‘The tyre marks of what?’

‘A black car possibly, but a dark colour certainly.’

Kessen looked surprised, and perhaps a bit irritated. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, I’m betting if they drove openly across this field they were hoping that residents living nearby would think they were out lamping.’

‘Lamping?’

‘That’s when people go out into the countryside to shoot animals at night. Lampers use a bright light to dazzle their quarry.’

‘Yes, I know about that — rabbits and such like.’

‘Well, not just rabbits. Badgers, deer, sheep — you name it. Anything that’ll stand up and be shot at.’ Abbott’s eyes flickered around the group. ‘DC Cooper will tell you about it. I’m sure he must have done a bit of lamping himself.’

‘Well …’ began Cooper. But no one was listening to him.

‘But the thing is,’ said Abbott, ‘if local people thought somebody was out lamping that night, they probably wouldn’t have bothered to dial 999, even when they heard shots.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s different in the country — you get used to hearing gunshots. In the city, someone might call the police, but out here you wonder how many brace they’ve potted.’

‘I understand that. But the colour of the vehicle …?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t go lamping in a white car, would you? You want your target to focus on the light, not on the paintwork of your bonnet.’

‘Nothing else, apart from the tyre marks?’

‘Nope. I was hoping for some shell casings. A brass casing could give us some prints, or there might be marks left by the weapon’s extractor or firing pin. But there’s nothing here that we can see.’

‘All right. Thanks.’

‘So it looks as though the suspect didn’t bother going into the house. Clever.’

‘Clever?’

‘Well, it makes it more difficult for us. We always have a better chance of coming up with something from a closed scene. Like the bedroom, for instance. But a ploughed field? And two days after the incident? Better start praying for a miracle.’

Kessen stared at the house. ‘All right, it was clever. But I wonder what the shooter did to get Rose Shepherd’s attention.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Well, if he made the hit from the field, he must have found some way to get his victim to the window. I can’t believe he was prepared to sit out here all night on the off-chance that she’d decide to get out of bed and take a look at the stars.’

‘A phone call, I reckon,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’d be easy enough to phone her on a mobile from the car.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s starting to look like a professional job, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Kessen nodded. ‘Yes, he could easily have phoned Miss Shepherd and woken her up. But what did he say to get her to come to the window? What could he have said that would make her walk straight into his sights?’

While Abbott organized a detailed search of the field, Cooper took the chance to report what the postman Bernie Wilding had told him about never seeing Miss Shepherd’s face clearly.

‘I could understand it if she was physically disfigured,’ said Hitchens. ‘If she was a burns victim, or something. That would explain why she never went out, and didn’t want people to see her.’

‘But she wasn’t disfigured, either in real life or in her passport photo. How old is that passport? When was it issued?’

‘Issued May 2000. Expires 2010.’

‘What about motive?’ asked Fry. ‘Do you think someone in the village might have had a grudge against her?’

‘If she didn’t have contact with anyone in the village, how could someone have a grudge against her?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why she didn’t have contact with anyone. We don’t know anything about her history, so we can’t guess. Where do we start?’

‘There’s one place we can start,’ said Kessen. ‘We need a list of individuals in the locality with firearms certificates. What about this farmer, what’s his name?’

‘Neville Cross?’

‘He’s a neighbour, isn’t he?’

‘He owns the land at the back of Bain House. But I think his farmhouse is way down there, two fields away.’

‘He’ll have a firearms certificate. Most farmers do — for a shotgun, at least. But maybe he has a serious rabbit problem and needs a rifle.’

‘Yes, and maybe he’s a retired SAS sniper,’ said Hitchens sceptically.

Kessen spun sharply on his heel. ‘Well, maybe he is. We don’t know that he isn’t, do we, Paul? This is a man who had the opportunity — the shots were fired from his property. No one would question Mr Cross driving over his own land, even at night. Perhaps no one would question him taking his rifle with him either.’

‘We don’t know that he has a rifle,’ persisted the DI.

‘He’s also the man who reported the open window at the back of the house,’ said Kessen, as if Hitchens hadn’t spoken. ‘Thereby ensuring that he was involved in the investigation as a witness. You know the typical behaviour, Paul.’

‘He was alerted by the postman that something might be wrong. That’s why he took a look.’

‘That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it anyway, sooner or later. We don’t know, do we?’

‘We don’t know anything,’ said Hitchens.

‘That’s why we have to start by eliminating whoever we can get hold of locally. And we’ll see what that leads us to.’

‘What if he doesn’t admit to having a gun? We don’t have any justification for a search.’

‘We could ask him to co-operate with a gunshot residue test. At least we’d know if he’d fired a gun recently.’

Listening to the discussion between the detectives, Wayne Abbott shook his head. ‘Sorry, it’s too long since the shots were fired. A GSR test has to be done within the first few hours to get meaningful results. After forty-eight hours, any suspect will have washed and wiped his hands enough to have removed all detectable traces.’

‘A trace metal test to determine whether he’s held a firearm?’

‘Has to be within twenty-four hours.’

Kessen cursed quietly. ‘Twenty-four hours is useless to us. Useless.’

The DI pointed at his two detectives. ‘We’ve done the initial house-to-house, but the immediate neighbours will have to be interviewed properly. They must know something about Rose Shepherd. Take one of them each, will you? Someone will give you the names.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘A woman with no family and no friends,’ said Hitchens bitterly. ‘How can we reconstruct the life of someone like that?’

‘She must have had at least one enemy,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a start.’

‘It’s some kind of relationship, anyway.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Kessen. ‘It means she had a close enough relationship with someone for that person to hate her. To hate her enough to kill her. That’s not some casual passer-by that she once said hello to in the street. There’s a history between them.’

‘But as far as this house is concerned, the victim seems to be a woman without a history. Without a life almost.’

‘Look, if there’s no evidence of Rose Shepherd’s past in this house, it means only one thing — that she had a past she was trying very hard to hide.’

Fry touched Cooper’s arm.

‘Ben, have you got your car here?’

‘Sure.’

‘Give me a lift down the road, then. I had to leave mine miles away.’

‘No problem.’

Fry brushed some cobwebs off her jacket. ‘This house is dirty, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I noticed that. Have you seen the decor in the sitting room, though?’

‘That charcoal grey? Yes, very minimalist.’

Cooper stopped in the doorway to take a last look at Bain House before he left. Was the house dusty because Miss Shepherd couldn’t be bothered with housework, or because she’d never been used to doing her own cleaning? Or might there be another reason?

On an impulse, he crouched towards the floor and looked into the sunlight flooding the pine boards. A layer of dust showed up clearly, glittering in the light from the windows. It would be possible to tell immediately if anyone had walked across this patch of floor. Their footprints would be visible in the dust. Perhaps that was why it had been left undisturbed.

Abbott’s lamping theory was an interesting one. When a rabbit was caught in the lamper’s beam, it was mesmerized by the light and seemed to forget to run away. Yes, Cooper had seen it happen. He could picture the unnatural stillness of the animal, its eyes reflecting light like two glass beads, stunned by the sudden glare when it thought it was safe in the darkness.

Fry was waiting outside for him, no doubt getting impatient. But for a moment, Cooper thought about Rose Shepherd, shot down at her bedroom window as she stood in her nightdress and slippers. She must have been an easy target in a sniper’s sights, silhouetted against the light. It was impossible not to picture her frozen to the spot, waiting for the bullet to strike.