The Corpse Bridge

20

With a heave, Diane Fry dragged her overnight bag off the back seat of her car and slammed the door. The Audi was streaked with mud and its windscreen was filthy. Its black paintwork always showed the dirt at the best of times. But right now the wheel arches seemed to have accumulated half the topsoil of the Peak District. If she had that mud analysed, no doubt she would find a high percentage of sheep muck too.

She sighed and turned towards the lit-up entrance. The A38 Aston Expressway was only a hundred yards away and the buzz of evening traffic was loud and continuous. It was a noise she had grown up with, but which she rarely heard in Derbyshire. Its presence was like the return of the cuckoo in spring. Tuneless, but reassuring.

Fry checked in and found her room. It was like any other budget hotel, anonymous and without character. There were few staff to be seen and her fellow guests took no notice of her as she passed, some of them even turning their heads away as if they didn’t want to be recognised. It suited her down to the ground.

In her room the first thing she did was turn off the TV. She hung her clothes in the tiny wardrobe, though she was only staying overnight. She checked her phone, saw the text she’d been expecting. Just enough time to shower and get changed.

They’d arranged to meet in a pub near Aston University. Fry set off to walk along the canal towpath from the back of the hotel, passing under Dartmouth Middleway, with its set of lock gates beneath a grim concrete bridge. From the edge of the Corporation Street dual carriageway, she turned down Holt Street towards the campus.

It was an old pub with leaded windows and wooden floors, and pictures on the walls depicting the history of Birmingham. Naturally, it was full of students, but they seemed to be drinking rather than eating. Fry crossed the bar to a far corner and found her sister already there.

‘Hi, sis,’ she said.

Angie stood up to give her an uncomfortable hug. ‘Di. How are you doing?’

‘I’m fine.’

Diane sat down and looked at her older sister. Every time she saw her it was like meeting a new person. Angie had run away from their foster home in the Black Country when they were both teenagers. They didn’t see each other until one memorable day in the Peak District, when the two of them had been brought together by Ben Cooper, of all people.

That day Angie had seemed like a complete stranger. But Diane had been setting eyes on her for the first time since she was fourteen. Her teenage illusions were easily shattered.

They’d spent a lot of time together since then and Angie had even stayed with her for a while in her flat in Edendale. Yet it was odd to look at her now and notice that she was starting to look middle-aged. Her eyes were tired and the lines around her temples, formed by years of pain, seemed more deeply etched.

And surely Angie had put on weight too? It was something Diane herself had never been able to do. Food just didn’t hold the same attraction for her that it did for other people. It was necessary fuel, but not a subject for lengthy conversation, let alone something to write stacks of books or produce endless TV shows about. So she eyed Angie’s outline with interest and examined her arms, no longer so thin that they looked as though they would snap. Her sister had always been slim. Since Diane had tried to emulate her in every way when they were teenagers, it seemed wrong that Angie could now so easily abandon her function as a role model.

They ordered straight away, because Angie was keen to eat. Diane chose a pasta pomodoro, a penne pasta with tomato sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and basil.

‘I suppose that’s the lowest calorie dish on the menu,’ said Angie.

‘It might be,’ said Diane, though she knew perfectly well it was.

Angie laughed. She seemed much more relaxed than her sister had ever seen her before. It was odd and she didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Their food came quickly. Diane watched her sister eating skewered chicken breast pieces with peppers and barbecue sauce.

‘Things are going well, then?’ she said.

‘Great.’ Angie looked up from her chicken skewers. ‘I told you I’ve got a new bloke, didn’t I?’

‘I believe you mentioned it in your texts. Several times.’

‘We’ve been an item for a few months now.’

‘I’m happy for you.’

Angie smiled. It was a curiously smug expression, more like a smirk. Diane immediately became suspicious.

‘What’s going on?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it. I know you too well.’

But Angie shrugged. ‘Stop being a copper.’

‘Mmm.’

They ate silently for a moment, allowing the background noise of the students to wash over them.

‘Speaking of which,’ said Angie, ‘how’s the lovely Ben?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know who I mean.’

‘Ben Cooper?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s all right, I suppose.’

Angie nodded. ‘He’s got over all that business with the fire and his fiancée being killed? I mean, it’s a while ago now, isn’t it? People do get over these things and move on with their lives.’

‘Obviously.’

Diane didn’t like the way the conversation was going. Angie had always shown an inexplicable interest in Ben Cooper. But she had her own bloke now. They’d been an item for months and it sounded serious. Why was she still talking about Cooper?

‘So,’ said Angie, ‘he’s, you know … available again.’

‘Well, I guess so. But I thought you were happy with your new bloke.’

Angie gaped at her and dropped her fork on to her plate with a clatter. She threw her head back and laughed. She had a peculiar, hiccuping laugh that always made heads turn in astonishment. Diane cringed with embarrassment and tried to turn away from the gawping faces in the bar.

‘Diane, you idiot,’ said Angie, when she’d taken a drink to stop herself choking.

‘What on earth is the matter with you?’ said Diane.

‘Never mind. How’s the pasta?’

‘Fine.’

When they’d finished their meal, they sat for a long time over their drinks. Finally, Angie put down her glass with a decisive air.

‘So,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I have something to tell you.’

Diane’s heart sank. She’d only ever heard bad news from her sister. Or so it seemed when she looked back over the years.

‘What is it, sis?’

‘You know I was saying about this bloke? His name’s Craig, by the way.’

‘I think I remember.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Well…’

‘It doesn’t matter. Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you is this. We’ve been together for a while and we decided that … well, the fact is, Di — I’m pregnant.’

Ben Cooper had decided not to go straight back to his car after he left the shop, but headed away from the market square. Though it was right in the centre of Edendale, this stretch of the River Eden was a peaceful spot, particularly at night. It was only a few yards from the shopping centre, but it always felt to Cooper as though he’d stepped out of the town into a different world once he turned the corner and stepped down on to the riverbank.

In the darkness he could see only a few flickers of light off the water as it foamed over the weir. But he could hear the sounds. The soothing whisper and murmur of the river was enough to calm him down and let him think quietly to himself.

He was aware of the mallard ducks who lived on the river here. They were floating out there somewhere on the water near the weir, apparently asleep, with their beaks tucked under their wings. But he knew their feet must still be paddling like mad below the surface to keep them in position, or they would be swept downstream by the current.

Cooper sat on a bench for a while, enjoying the quiet and the chance to think. It wasn’t the Sandra Blair inquiry that was bothering him. The solution to that would surely turn out to be something perfectly ordinary and sordid. Almost predictable, in fact.

It wasn’t even Dorothy Shelley he was worried about. He’d phoned the hospital earlier in the evening to check on her condition and had been told she was ‘comfortable’. He knew from experience that it was what they said when there was no hope of recovery. But her family were at her side and it wasn’t his place to intrude. There was nothing more he could do.

No, it was Diane Fry’s behaviour that baffled him. He’d tried to make friends with her when she’d first come to Derbyshire, but he’d failed. He’d tried to understand her, hoping she would relax a little and open up. But in the past she’d hardly noticed his attempts at empathy. She’d simply passed him by, as if he were no more than a piece of furniture. But then, she behaved the same way with everyone else, didn’t she?

Yes, Fry’s lack of empathy was legendary. He’d been reminded of it by one moment during Liz’s funeral. In fact, he’d seen it at almost every funeral he’d ever been to. If you looked behind the church or crematorium, you’d sometimes see the drivers of the hearse and the funeral cars laughing and smoking among themselves during the service.

Well, the undertakers didn’t really care that your fiancée had died. They attended two or three funerals every day and they couldn’t be prostrated by grief every time, especially for people they didn’t know. But for a while Cooper found it hard to understand how people could do the job at all. How did you spend time with a crowd of people who were grief stricken and not share their emotions? How could you go to funeral after funeral, every day of the week, all the year round, and not be affected by it? It needed a particular type of person to spend their life dealing with death, thinking about death, and meeting those who’d just been bereaved, and yet be able to chat and joke with their friends as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

After Liz’s funeral he’d come away with the conviction that people who did the job must be sociopaths. Only a serious personality disorder would enable you to look so solemn while you carried a coffin, then take off your tie, go home and eat dinner, watch the TV, and tell the wife you’d had a good day at work.

In fact, he’d envied those people. For a long time, he wished he could be like them. But he knew he would fail.

That idea, though, had made him look at Diane Fry differently. If it was true about funeral directors, then what about a police officer? Someone who dealt with nothing but murder cases and rapes, and serious violent crimes? Were they also sociopaths who just happened to have found themselves a profession where their personality disorder was an advantage? No one wanted a cop who empathised too much. It made them less professional, not so good at their jobs.

Cooper shivered with cold and knew it was time to go home. He stood up suddenly, startling the ducks and making them rattle their wings in the darkness.

No, he had never been able to achieve that level of detachment himself. No amount of trying got him to a position where he could create that protective façade. He’d become convinced this was what might prevent him from moving up the promotion ladder in the police service. It was the Diane Frys they wanted these days.

But then he recalled the new version of Diane he’d encountered in her flat on Friday night. The softer, more relaxed Fry. The one who actually asked him for a favour. Was this the same person? Could it be the woman he’d always suspected might exist behind the brittle exterior?

If so, this new Diane Fry was like a glimpse of some illusory oasis, glittering in the distance but defying the most determined traveller to reach it. The nearer he got, the further away she would seem. It felt inevitable, the story of his life. It was certainly the story of his relationship with Fry.

The ducks quacked quietly in agreement as he walked away from the peace of the river and headed back towards the town.

While Ben Cooper sat by the riverside in Edendale, Luke Irvine was in the pub. His date hadn’t gone too well the night before. No matter how often he checked his phone, there were no text messages. So he couldn’t imagine she was expecting to hear from him again tonight. But that seemed to be the story of his life at the moment. Opportunities came along, but were allowed to escape.

As he watched the other customers in the bar of the Angler’s Rest, Irvine knew that Ben Cooper would still be out asking questions about the woman whose body had been found at Hollins Bridge. Overtime meant nothing to his DS. Though he admired Cooper in lots of ways, Irvine hoped he never ended up like that himself. Dedication to the job was great, but it was so much better to have a life away from the office.

Irvine lived in the village of Bamford, between the Hope Valley and the Upper Derwent. It was a short drive over the hill to Edendale, but quiet enough to give him the village life he’d grown up with in West Yorkshire.

A man he knew vaguely from a few houses down the road came and sat down on a vacant seat nearby. He nodded and said, ‘Hi’. Irvine acknowledged him cautiously. Conversations in the pub could be difficult, he’d discovered.

‘Good to see the place so busy,’ said the man.

‘Yeah, great.’

‘It just goes to show.’

‘You’re right, it does.’

Irvine took a swig of his beer, holding the bottle to his mouth a bit longer than was strictly necessary. He knew what the man was talking about, without any telling.

People in his community had spent months raising the money to buy their village pub. They formed a cooperative society to take ownership of the building, with hundreds of residents buying shares. They successfully applied to get the pub registered as an ‘asset of community value’ under the government’s new Localism Act. They drew up a business plan, outlining a scheme for a community hub with a café and shop, and accommodation for visitors. Their village post office was due to close too and they negotiated to move counter services into the pub. They appeared in the local media, manned stalls at shows and fêtes, and enough money came in to make the dream possible.

For a while it had all seemed to be going well. With the financial targets hit, solicitors were instructed to begin the conveyancing process. But on the same day the company that owned the pub announced it was exchanging contracts with a third party — a developer who would make the deal pay by building houses on the car park.

Irvine remembered calling into the pub one night for a drink when the news had just broken. The mood was disturbing. Everyone he spoke to was frustrated and angry, convinced they had been betrayed by big business and exploited for a quick profit.

One of his neighbours, who’d had a couple of drinks too many, buttonholed him at the bar while he was ordering a bottle of Thornbridge Sour Brown. Like a doctor, Irvine found he could never escape the fact that he was a police officer, even when he was off duty. In fact, it had been worse since he joined CID and became a detective. Everyone wanted to hear gory details of cases, tell him their theories, or ask him for clandestine forms of assistance that would undoubtedly lose him his job.

That night, though, there was only one topic of conversation. The last-minute betrayal over the sale of the pub had turned people’s minds to committing crime rather than solving it.

‘This could definitely be a motive for murder,’ this same neighbour had said, leaning close to him at the bar. ‘With a hundred and eighty-five potential suspects at the last count. They might all commit the crime together, like the plot of an Agatha Christie story.’

‘By far the least believable Christie plot,’ said Irvine, who had watched Poirot on TV.

The man tapped the side of his nose and almost winked. ‘Where there’s a motive, people will find a means.’

But a week or two later the public outcry against the decision had changed the minds of both the pub’s owners and the potential buyer. The project went ahead and Bamford owned its community hub. When he went into the Angler’s Rest now for a Sour Brown, people again asked for gory details or the kind of assistance that would lose him his job.

‘I suppose you’re involved in that case over near Buxton,’ said the man now, with an inquisitive lift of the eyebrows.

‘Maybe so.’

But as Irvine looked at his neighbour, he recalled that earlier conversation. An Agatha Christie plot? He wondered if he should phone Ben Cooper right now with the interesting idea that had just come into his head.

But of course not. Unlike Cooper, he had a life after all.

‘Do you fancy another drink, mate?’ he said.