Stephen Booth: The Corpse Bridge

‘So what are you going to do with yourself, Gavin?’ he asked. ‘I don’t suppose Jean will want you getting under her feet all day long at home.’

‘How right you are. I don’t even have any hobbies that will get me out of the house. There’s no shed for me to hide in. If I took up gardening, she’d think I’d gone mad and get me certified. Besides, I’ve just laid a new patio over the flowerbed.’

‘A few cruises?’

Murfin sighed again. ‘Have you ever been on one of those? You get all the same daft biddies and boring old farts on every boat. It’s like Death on the Nile , but with fewer laughs. When we’re not actually on shore trailing round tacky souvenir shops in ninety-degree heat, I spend my time propping up the bar. And I can do that just as well at home, not to mention that the beer’s better round here.’

‘You have a couple of young grandchildren now, don’t you?’ said Cooper. ‘Surely you’re looking forward to spending more time with them?’

‘There is that,’ said Murfin, without any great enthusiasm.

Cooper felt sure there was something Murfin wasn’t telling him. What did he actually have planned for his years in retirement? Something he was embarrassed about, perhaps. Maybe Jean had it all mapped out for him and Gavin had no say in it at all. That would be possible. She might have decided her husband should go to adult education classes to learn Spanish or salsa dancing, or t’ai chi. Or even all three. That would keep him busy, all right.

But the leap of the imagination to picture Gavin Murfin as a Spanish-speaking salsa dancer and t’ai chi expert left Cooper feeling mentally exhausted. His brain wasn’t ready for such a shock.

Above the trees Cooper could see the upper slopes of the hills now. On the Derbyshire side there had been a series of disturbing incidents recently — increasingly frequent reports of animals being found slaughtered on the moors. Sheep with their eyes gouged out and their genitals mutilated, a cow with its ears slit, a horse with its tail amputated. People were talking about Satanists and ritual sacrifice. But it didn’t take much for Derbyshire people to start talking like that. In Peak District villages they didn’t seem to believe in religion very much these days. But they believed in everything else.

Cooper realised they were going to have to extend the search area considerably. Who knew what had been going on in these woods? He would have to speak to the DI to get that organised.

‘Still, you won’t miss me when you’ve got these bright kids,’ said Murfin. ‘Look at young Luke there. He’s the future. Happy as a pig in clover he is, with this sort of thing.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘He follows you about like a dog, Ben. He knows you’ll find him a nice juicy murder case.’

‘Could you actually get some work done, Gavin?’ said Cooper.

‘Like what?’

‘Get across the border and see if you can assist our colleagues from Staffordshire.’

DC Luke Irvine was breathless by the time he reached the top of the trackway where his car was parked on a grass verge. He was driving a Vauxhall hatchback, and it was his current pride and joy. He hated the idea of scraping its paintwork on a dry stone wall in one of these narrow lanes, or having some uniformed bobby snapping his wing mirror off with a Transit van.

As he climbed into his car, he wondered if there was a reason he’d been tasked with finding out about the victim’s family. It might mean that he’d end up having to inform bereaved relatives of a death. It was the job everyone dreaded the most. Would Ben Cooper delegate that responsibility to him?

Irvine was conscious of certain subjects he mustn’t mention to his DS. It was murmured around the office that Ben Cooper might still be vulnerable to an ill-judged comment. No one knew how he might react to the wrong word. Some said he was on a knife edge, though so far he seemed to be hiding it well. Irvine was even nervous of mentioning the Scenes of Crime department, or crime-scene examiners, or even some forensic detail. It was the department Ben’s fiancée had worked in. Would it bring back intolerable memories?

But Irvine wondered whether he was being over-sensitive about this. Cooper was a professional. He could surely deal with these things; separate his job from whatever happened in his private life outside the office. Even the death of a fiancée.

With the car started, he checked his satnav for Earl Sterndale. Ben Cooper would have used a map, of course. He was an obsessive user of Ordnance Survey maps. No, scratch that. Ben would have known exactly which way to go without having to look at any map. Irvine had to accept that he wasn’t as familiar with these remoter areas as his DS was. He wasn’t a Derbyshire boy like Cooper. He’d grown up in West Yorkshire. Parts of that county were very similar to the Dark Peak, but it didn’t help when it came to navigating these back roads.

As he inched his way to the road and turned towards a hamlet called Glutton, Irvine shook his head in frustration. It seemed so difficult these days to know what was the right thing to do or say. Perhaps it was working so closely with Becky Hurst that had done this to him. She’d made him paranoid about blurting out something that might upset or offend anyone listening.

But Becky was right a lot of the time, of course. You had to be careful; what you said, especially when you were a police officer. It didn’t really matter what your personal opinions were, as long as you didn’t act on them or express them out loud. Not even in an email or a tweet. Someone was bound to report you for inappropriate behaviour. It was almost the worst offence you could commit now. No one allowed police officers to be human, not in the way they once had. No office banter or canteen culture pranks, none of that black humour or contempt for criminals the old school coppers had expressed on a daily basis.

You’d think it was unhealthy to keep all this stuff bottled up, though. All those old guys around the station always seemed so much more relaxed. Take Gavin Murfin. He was so laid back he was practically lying dead on the floor. He said what he thought and didn’t care about the consequences. He’d already put in his thirty years’ service and could pack his belongings at any moment with the certainty of collecting his full pension.

Irvine couldn’t imagine ending up like that. The job was so different now. You had to keep your lip buttoned if you wanted to survive long enough to call it a career. If he managed to make it to his thirty, Irvine suspected he’d be a screwed-up, paranoid mess. Probably a chief superintendent, in fact.

He drove the Vauxhall up out of the valley and through some of those curiously shaped hills that characterised this side of the county. Earl Sterndale was only a little way ahead. He was glad of the satnav’s instructions when it came time to make the turn. The crossroads were almost anonymous and unrecognisable.

The Beresfords’ house was a stone-built semi near the village church. He was able to park directly in front. But he waited for a few minutes, watching children leaving their homes and walking down to the bus stop to wait for the school bus. It made him feel like a lurking paedophile and he began to worry that a suspicious parent might take his registration number and report him.

Finally, he couldn’t waste any more time. He climbed out of the car and checked his pockets to make sure he had his notebook, his warrant card and his phone. It was as he was looking down that he noticed his shoes were caked in mud. So were the bottoms of his trousers. There must be mud on the carpet in his car too, damn it. Just as bad was the fact that he now had to present himself at someone’s front door in this state and expect to be taken seriously. There was no point in trying to brush the mud off until it dried. Anything he did now would only make it worse.