Scared to Live

8

Moira Lowther gave her son another hug. ‘Take care, John. Give us a call if you need to talk. You know we’re here, don’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s all right.’

She looked suddenly anxious and tried to hold him back. ‘And you’re taking — You’re doing everything you should, dear?’

‘It’s fine. Everything’s under control.’

He walked back down the path, no longer seeming to care whether he stepped on the tortoises, or whether the angel was close enough to speak to. His green Hyundai stood at the kerb, just out of sight below the wall.

Moira watched him until he vanished from view, and listened for his car driving away. Then she turned back to her husband. ‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘Just Tony.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, he used to work for the company. He went off a few months ago to set up on his own account.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember. He was the one I didn’t like.’

Lowther laughed. ‘You and your likes and dislikes. Tony was always loyal to the company. Unlike some of these others, deserting a sinking ship.’

‘Is it that bad, Henry?’

‘Oh, we’ll survive.’

‘I don’t want to have to think about it right now.’

‘None of us do.’

She gazed down the road, though the Hyundai was long since gone.

‘Do you think John will be all right?’ she said.

‘We’d better keep an eye on him. He’s very upset.’ Lowther put an arm round his wife. ‘And how are you coping?’

The question seemed to start her tears all over again, and tears turned to deep, racking sobs. It was a few moments before she could get her breath back.

‘How did it happen?’ she said. ‘How on earth did it happen?’

‘Hell, I don’t know.’

Mrs Lowther pulled out a tissue to dry her eyes. They both stood in their garden in silence for a while, listening to the trickle of water, the chatter of a blackbird. No one watching them could have told what they were thinking, or whether the Lowthers were even thinking the same thoughts.

‘Well, we have to make sure we look after the living now, don’t we?’ said Moira. ‘That’s the most important thing.’

Henry Lowther patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted,’ he said.

‘Between two and four a. m.?’ said Hitchens when Cooper and Fry returned to Bain House. ‘Is that the best they could do?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, it falls bang in the middle of our time scale, anyway. So it helps a bit, I suppose.’

‘We’re no closer to filling in details of Miss Shepherd’s background, though,’ said Fry.

Hitchens shook his head. ‘Not much nearer. Although the owners of the village shop think Rose Shepherd’s accent might have been Irish.’

‘Do they? But her passport says she was British. Born in London.’ Fry laughed. ‘It’s possible, though. Irish is foreign enough for folk round here.’

‘Why don’t we put it to Bernie Wilding?’ suggested Cooper.

But Hitchens shook his head. ‘It would be leading him too much. At the moment, he can’t identify Miss Shepherd’s accent, but if we suggest a particular nationality, he might try to make all his recollections fit in with the suggestion. I bet we could get him to agree that Rose Shepherd was an Iraqi or an Australian — anything we like the sound of.’

‘The name Shepherd sounds more Australian than Iraqi,’ pointed out Cooper.

‘I meant those as examples,’ said Hitchens. ‘Wake up, Ben.’

‘I was joking.’

‘Right. Well, it hasn’t been a laugh a minute round here, I can tell you — not with Mr Kessen in the mood he’s in. We have found a laptop, though. It was in the bottom drawer of the victim’s wardrobe.’

‘Well, that’s good news,’ said Fry. ‘Has it been checked out yet?’

‘We haven’t had time to go through the files, but Miss Shepherd definitely had internet access. It looks as though she used an ordinary modem dial-up connection, so she could have used the laptop right there in the bedroom, plugged into the socket for the bedside phone.’

‘Any interesting email correspondence?’

‘Nothing obvious, apart from some junk mail. God knows why she kept that. But it looks as though she might have joined some online groups, because there were different aliases and screen names. It seems Rose Shepherd did have a social life, of a kind. But it was all online.’

‘By the way, I’ve got the package that the postman was trying to deliver,’ said Cooper. ‘It isn’t all that big, but it’s heavy for its size.’

‘Open it up. But be careful.’

When the cardboard packaging came off, they were looking at three books from an internet bookseller. Maeve Binchy, Danielle Steele, Josephine Cox.

‘Does that give us any clues?’ asked Hitchens.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper. ‘I once saw a Muslim woman in full chador buying a Danielle Steele novel in a supermarket, so I don’t think we can make any assumptions.’

‘The only surprise to me is that she ordered three books at once, since it meant they wouldn’t go into her letter box,’ said Fry.

‘Maybe they were on special offer,’ said the DI, moving away to answer his phone.

Fry waited for a quiet moment, then approached him between calls.

‘Sir, I’m going to need to review the house fire enquiry. You know, the triple death?’

‘Not now, Diane.’

‘But — ’

‘Well, not unless you have firm evidence of malicious intent. Do you?’

‘No, sir. Not yet.’

‘Come back to me when you do, then.’

Fry bit her lip. She obviously wasn’t going to get a look-in on the Rose Shepherd enquiry. She was too junior in this company. But she had an enquiry of her own that she could make a mark with — if she could find the time to work it properly. The Darwin Street fire was low priority until malicious intent was proved. But there were ways around that problem.

She went outside and found Gavin Murfin. Ben Cooper would have been more useful, but his absence was likely to be noticed, so Murfin would have to do.

‘Ah, Gavin, you’re not doing very much,’ she said, taking hold of his arm and steering him towards her car.

‘Well, actually — ’

‘Good. You’re with me.’

Somehow, Murfin had obtained a pork pie, which he was eating out of a paper bag. He’d got into the habit of bringing food with him if he thought he was going to be away from civilization for a few hours.

‘But if you drop bits of that pie in my car, Gavin, you know what’ll happen. And it won’t be pretty.’

Fry had to negotiate the lines of vehicles in Pinfold Lane to find somewhere to turn round. The only space was the entrance to the Birtlands’ driveway.

As she reversed to do her three-point turn, she saw Ben Cooper standing in the gateway of Bain House. He’d stopped to speak to one of the SOCOs, Liz Petty. It wasn’t clear whether she was working the scene, because she was still wearing her navy blue sweater with the Derbyshire Constabulary logo rather than a protective scene suit. Fry watched them for a moment as she changed gear. She saw Petty push back her dark hair and confine it in a clip behind her head. Her cheeks looked slightly pink as she laughed at something Cooper was saying.

‘They make a grand couple, don’t they?’ said Murfin, picking crumbs off the seat. ‘Ben and Liz, I mean,’ he added, as if it needed explaining.

‘Are they sleeping together?’ asked Fry, as casually as she could manage.

Murfin stopped hunting for crumbs. She could feel his eyes on her, wary and suspicious.

‘I dunno,’ he said.

‘You’re his friend, aren’t you, Gavin?’

‘Me and Ben? We go back years.’

‘You must know, then.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘It would only be gossip.’

He lowered his head between his knees, as if searching the floor for more debris.

‘I just wondered,’ said Fry.

In reply, all she got was a mumble from somewhere under the seat.

‘What did you say, Gavin?’

‘I said I can’t hear you.’

Fry let out the clutch suddenly. As the car jerked forward, Murfin’s head shot up from the footwell. His face was beetroot red from the blood rushing into it.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to kill me.’

Cooper went into the back garden of Bain House to look at the field where the SOCOs were still working under a white tent. Liz Petty had confirmed what he’d already guessed — the Foxlow shooting had put a lot of extra pressure on Scientific Support.

One of the complications was obvious. In effect, there were four separate crime scenes to be examined. For a start, there was Rose Shepherd’s bedroom, and the other rooms of her house. Officers conducting the search might hope to learn something about the victim’s life that would lead to her killers, or at least suggest a motive for her murder. But if, as they suspected, the attacker hadn’t entered the victim’s home, or even made direct contact with her, there would be no traces of him in the house. No DNA or fingerprints; no fibres or evidence of any kind.

Then there was the field. That at least had yielded some tyre marks. How clear they were would depend on how soft the ground had been, whether it had rained before the incident, and what the weather had been like since. Cooper looked at his watch, and pictured DCI Kessen doing the same thing, cursing the delay in the body being found. There wouldn’t be much else in the field, of course. If there were no shell casings or footwear impressions, then there wouldn’t be any dropped matches or cigarette ends either. But the suspect’s car had been driven close to the edge of the field. A tiny flake of paintwork left on a branch of the hawthorn hedge, maybe? A bumper scraped on the corner of a stone wall? But in a fifty-acre field? From dark paintwork? Needles and haystacks came to mind.

The most useful scene might be the third one: the suspect’s vehicle. If they ever found it, of course. There should be fibres on the seats, fingerprints on the door handles, sweat stains on the gear stick.

Cooper turned at a sound in the garden. A squirrel ran across the lawn and scuffled among the dead leaves on the flower beds. It was burying nuts before hibernation time came. Across the garden, another squirrel chattered with that strange cry they had, somewhere between the call of a bird and the mew of a cat.

From what Diane Fry had said, Mr and Mrs Ridgeway would hate this, if they saw it. If they were breeding here, there’d be a continuous supply of them to raid her neighbours’ gardens.

Cooper was approaching the end of his shift. His DI seemed to have forgotten him, Fry had already left Foxlow, and no one had mentioned overtime. Tomorrow would be hectic, though. By then some lines of enquiry would have emerged. Suddenly, there would be an insatiable demand for resources, and everyone would be rushed off their feet. He might as well take advantage of the lull.

He walked back into the house. Downstairs, the rooms were full of people. He could hear them opening drawers, taking photographs, rustling papers, talking and laughing among themselves. There were probably more people inside Bain House at this moment than had been over the doorstep in the whole of the last year. If Rose Shepherd walked in now, she wouldn’t recognize the place. She’d be like a shocked parent who’d come home unexpectedly to find the teenage children had moved the furniture, rolled up the carpets, and thrown a party that got out of hand.

The image of her bewildered reaction brought Cooper to a halt as he remembered the fourth crime scene. At this moment it was lying in the mortuary, waiting to be examined for whatever information it could yield. It was Rose Shepherd’s body.

After Fry had dropped Gavin Murfin off at West Street with his instructions, she drove straight back to Darwin Street. Things were happening here, at least. All the appropriate people were gathering, including the fire service’s divisional officer and his investigation team. Their brief was to work with the appointed investigating police officer — which was her, for now.

Her next job would be to decide whether the attendance of a forensic scientist was needed. Of course, she’d be mad to try to manage without an expert when three deaths were involved. It would be too late to change her mind once the scene had been compromised. But there was a procedure to be followed before she could commit resources.

Right now, the fire service had taken possession of the scene. They’d brought in their own dog team from Alfreton, and a chocolate brown Labrador bitch wearing blue protective boots and a reflective harness was being deployed by her handler in the ground-floor rooms of the Mullen house. A firefighter told her the dog was called Fudge, though her official title was ‘post-fire search tool’.

Never mind the fancy names. The important fact was that the dog could search the scene faster than any conventional equipment. It had been trained to locate the presence of flammable liquids that could have been used to start the fire, and then give a passive alert to the handler, so that evidence wasn’t disturbed.

To the dog, it was all a game. There’d be a reward when it found what it was looking for. More than Fry would get, probably. No one would be waiting to pat her on the head and give her a chicken-flavoured Schmacko.

Well, she didn’t like animals much, but she had to admit the Labrador’s expertise was a good example of focus, considering all the other smells that must have bombarded the dog when it entered the house. Lucky animal, not to have to worry about what these humans had been up to inside 32 Darwin Street.

Fry’s mobile rang. It was Murfin, his voice sounding slightly muffled as usual. If he wasn’t actually eating, he was salivating at the thought of his next snack.

‘Hi, Gavin.’

‘I called the hospital, like you told me. They say Brian Mullen is awake. He’ll be fit to be interviewed in the morning.’

‘Great.’

‘I suppose you’ll want to do that after the morning briefing?’

‘Yes, I want to get to him as soon as I can.’

‘Want me to come along?’

‘Er … no thanks, Gavin. There’ll be plenty for you to do on the Shepherd enquiry.’

‘OK. I don’t like hospitals anyway.’

As she ended the call, Fry saw the fire service dog padding across the debris in its blue boots. The animal was wagging its tail, happy to have done its bit. Was it Schmacko time already?

‘So what’s the result? Did the dog find anything?’

‘Yes. She identified accelerant in two locations in the sitting room,’ said the handler. ‘I’ve marked the locations for further investigation by the DO — or the forensic scientists, if you’re calling them in.’

‘Great job. Thanks.’

Fry was already reaching for her phone again. Traces of accelerant were evidence of malicious intent. A chocolate Lab called Fudge had just upped the stakes in this enquiry.