Stephen Booth - The Corpse Bridge

‘Is she okay?’

‘Fine.’

There was a small room at the back of the house, adjoining the kitchen. Kilner seemed to have converted it into a workshop. There were air filters and boxes of suspension springs, a crankshaft and even a couple of tyres.

‘I do a bit of work on the stocks now and then,’ said Kilner.

‘On the side, I suppose?’

Kilner shrugged. ‘Everyone does it.’

‘And does Lisa not mind you bringing all this stuff into the house?’

‘As long as I clean up the oil, she doesn’t yell too much.’

Cooper was trying to recall exactly what Brendan Kilner said to him at the raceway on Sunday. It was Kilner who’d said: ‘They’ve all got an axe to grind.’ But there was something else. It’s all about family. Ancient history if you ask me. But that stuff means a lot to some people, doesn’t it? Me, I can never bring myself to visit the place where my mum and dad were buried .

He looked across the hall, glad of the noise coming from the sitting room, the TV turned up a bit too loud. It was such a different home from the expensive Georgian property rented by Marcus Everett and his friends near Pilsbury. Yet there was a similarity, which Cooper had suspected. It had been put into his mind by the sight of that drooping Mexican moustache, the fake Confederate soldier. That same man had offered him a joint outside the Sterndale Moor Social Club on the night he’d been dragged to the country and western evening.

And Gavin Murfin was right to remind him about Brendan Kilner’s background too. Cooper had checked the intelligence.

The items on view in Kilner’s kitchen were different from those he’d seen in the rental property at Pilsbury. There were no silver trays or plastic straws for sniffing lines of cocaine. Instead, he saw small cotton balls, a pile of bottle caps and a narrow leather belt with a series of teeth marks visible on the end, as if it had been chewed by the dog.

At least the Kilners disposed of their hypodermic needles, even if they were only in the pedal bin. That wasn’t the case in some houses Cooper had visited, where the floor might be covered in used needles and you had to be careful where you put your feet when you walked across a room. Some illegal drugs gave the user a sense of invulnerability. Individuals began to believe they would never be found out, that no one would ever notice their paraphernalia or suspect what they were up to when they took a spare belt into the toilet to tie off a vein.

Brendan Kilner probably felt he was safe when he took that moment at the door to reassure himself that his needles and his wraps of heroin were safely out of sight.

But perhaps it wasn’t Kilner himself who was the user. It might be his wife or one of his adult children. It wouldn’t make any difference. It was all about family, after all.

Kilner had stopped and was watching him resignedly. He was an old hand and he knew the score. Cooper didn’t have to explain it to him, the way he had to Everett. Some people grew up confident they would never have to deal with the law. Others expected it. And they were rarely mistaken.

‘So what do you want?’ said Kilner. ‘I dare say there’s something.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact,’ said Cooper. ‘There is.’

Diane Fry got a call-out in the middle of the night. She always hated that. Yet at the same time she experienced an immediate buzz of excitement when her phone rang. This was what she lived for, after all. All the hours of tedium and paperwork were worthwhile, just for this.

The drive through Derbyshire had been dark and wet, the transition from city streets back to muddy rural lanes almost too painful to bear. She needed her satnav just to guide her to the A610 and on to the A6 towards Matlock. After that it was like entering the twilight zone.

At Knowle Abbey she had only to follow the signs of activity. By the time she reached the outer cordon the crime-scene tents had been erected and the scene itself was lit by powerful arc lights.

With the dark outline of Knowle Abbey as a sinister backdrop, the whole effect was of a badly illuminated scene from a melodrama. It looked to Fry as though Earl Manby had decided to stage a modern, open-air version of Hamlet in the grounds of the abbey. A perfect setting for Ben Cooper’s ghosts haunting the mock battlements.

When she’d struggled into a scene suit and joined DCI Mackenzie inside the larger tent, Fry could see the gruesome reality. The earl’s body lay sprawled on the grass, a splatter of blood and shredded flesh in a wide arc round him. His head was unrecognisable from this angle. One bloodied pulp looked much like another.

‘Shotgun?’ she asked. Nothing else did that kind of damage to a human body at close quarters.

Mackenzie nodded. ‘He was shot twice. The second barrel was the one that killed him.’

Fry covered her mouth as she examined the injuries caused by the lead shot. The smell of raw meat rose from the ground under the hot lights.

‘And we’re sure it’s the earl himself?’ she said.

‘He was found by one of the staff, who called the family. There’s no doubt about it. I’m afraid there’s been a lot of trampling of the scene and contamination of the evidence already, before we got here.’

Gradually, Fry moved around to the other side of the tent. She could see now that the left side of the earl’s face was more or less intact. Most of the damage had been done to the back and side of his head. One ear had been shattered and the jawbone gleamed through oozing blood.

At least it looked as though the earl had tried to defend himself. The palms of his hands were also shredded by pellets, as if he’d made a defensive gesture at the last moment, trying to protect his face from the blast. But it had been futile. It was a pity he hadn’t taken one of his own weapons from the gunroom with him when he went out in the grounds. His attacker might have thought twice.

But why had the earl gone out into the grounds of the abbey last night at all? It seemed an odd question to be asking herself, really. Why shouldn’t any individual walk around his own property in perfect safety, whenever he wanted to? It ought not to matter who they were. But Walter Manby had been under threat. He’d been warned there might be an imminent danger to his life. And he’d still felt able to wander alone in the dark through the wooded parklands of Knowle.

In a way Fry had to admire the courage or self-assurance this man must have felt. Perhaps it was a quality that came with the position he’d been born into, like that air of affluence that had turned out to be such a façade. Maybe it was being on his own property that gave him confidence. The earl and Knowle Abbey had certainly seemed inseparable.

‘Do you think he came out here to meet someone he knew?’ she said.

‘We don’t know,’ said Mackenzie. ‘Let’s see what evidence Forensics can turn up.’

‘It’s a bad business.’

Mackenzie smiled grimly. ‘Tell me about it. We’ll need to start interviewing staff.’

‘Where are we going to get the help from?’

‘Why, how many are there?’

‘About three hundred,’ said Fry automatically.

‘Seriously?’

‘Guides, housekeepers, office staff, the maintenance team, shop assistants, kitchen and serving staff in the restaurant, gardeners, gamekeepers, farmers, river bailiffs, car park attendants … where do you want to start?’

Mackenzie frowned at her tone. ‘With those who were on duty here when the shooting occurred. That’s simple enough, Diane.’

Fry took one last look at the body before she left the tent and stripped off her scene suit.

‘When word gets round about this,’ she said, ‘I know someone who’ll say, “I told you so”.’