Stephen Booth - Already Dead

DC Luke Irvine paused on his way out of the office, standing by Diane Fry’s desk.

‘Sarge,’ he said hesitantly.

Fry looked up at him curiously, surprised that he hadn’t left yet. Whatever faults Irvine had, being hesitant wasn’t one of them. What was he nervous about asking her?

‘What is it, Luke?’

‘The talk is that the medical reports aren’t good,’ said Irvine. ‘You know-’

She didn’t need to ask what reports he was talking about.

‘And how would anyone get to hear that?’

Irvine shrugged. ‘You know how these things get around. People in this place gossip like a lot of housewives.’

‘Whatever happened to the concept of confidentiality?’

She noticed that Becky Hurst had followed him to her desk, shadowing him like a watchful guard dog. Her hair was tied back in a businesslike way and she was dressed in a black trouser suit like a lawyer or company executive. Very professional looking.

‘Housewife is an outdated term,’ muttered Hurst. ‘And women don’t gossip any more than certain men do.’

Irvine ignored her as usual, and Hurst turned her attention to Fry.

‘Is it true, then? About the medical reports?’

‘How the hell would I know?’ snapped Fry. ‘I’m not his doctor. I’m not his nurse. And I’m certainly not his mother. You’re asking the wrong person.’

‘His mother died,’ said Hurst quietly.

‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘Look — yes, I know.’

She flapped her hands in despair and sat down at her desk, recognising a conversation that she wasn’t going come out of well. But Irvine decided to try again.

‘We just thought-’ he said. ‘Well, we knew you worked together, and you were quite close for a while. So we thought you’d have been able to find something out. That you’d have a bit of information we don’t. You could have asked somebody.’

‘Close?’ said Fry. ‘Were we? Close? ’

‘You’re more senior than us anyway,’ Hurst was saying. ‘The same rank as him. You could ask-’

‘And that means nothing either,’ said Fry. ‘Rank and all that. Nothing. Or else why would I be back here?’

Irvine looked stubborn. ‘I just felt I had to speak up.’

‘Do me a favour,’ said Fry. ‘Next time you feel the need to speak up, do it with your mouth shut.’

Irvine and Hurst exchanged glances and reluctantly went back to work. Fry stared across the CID room thoughtfully, until Gavin Murfin caught her eye. He was chewing, slowly extracting the maximum satisfaction from whatever he was eating.

Murfin paused, and swallowed. Then, very deliberately, he gave Fry a long, slow wink.

Well, thanks a lot, Gavin. Always ready to give her just what she needed — a bit of support from the most experienced member of the team.

Fry left the room and walked up the corridor to the top of the stairs, where a large window looked out over the forecourt of the building towards the east stand of Edendale football ground. She watched Luke Irvine drive out through the barrier in the CID pool car and turn on to West Street. The rain was coming down heavily, and she saw him turn on the sidelights to be safe in poor visibility.

This rain had started suddenly after a long dry spell. For months, Fry remembered the water companies talking about a drought. Dry weather through the previous autumn, winter and spring had reduced the levels of their reservoirs dramatically, and the use of hosepipes had been banned. No amount of rain during the summer would make any difference, they said. It didn’t soak into the ground, but evaporated in the warmer air. The drought would last until next winter at least.

Fry shook her head. In Derbyshire, nature had different ideas. The talk of droughts had lulled everyone into the idea that it would stay dry for ever. Had there been a warning on the weather forecasts? Possibly. But who took any notice of those? No one had since Michael Fish dismissed rumours of a hurricane, just before the Great Storm of 1987 killed eighteen people and ripped up thousands of trees across the south-east of England.

She’d seen it happen, all the predictable consequences. Right across the Peak District, car windscreens had become filmed over with dust and grease during the dry weather, encrusted with the debris of dead insects. When the heavens opened and the sky emptied its deluge on to the landscape, wipers had screeched into action, their rubber blades smearing thousands of windscreens into instant impenetrability. Tides of filth ran down the glass, and rain splattered into thick gobbets. Visibility fell to zero.

The emergency call centres had started to be deluged too, as drivers panicked, swerved, braked, and the roads were blocked by demolished walls, shattered glass, and dozens of rear-end shunts. There had been collisions on all the main cross-county routes — the Woodhead Pass, the Snake, the A623 and A6 — where streams of HGVs ploughed on through flash floods, their headlights blazing. Those were professional drivers, and their windscreens were clean, but their spray blinded motorists in their wake, preventing them from seeing the oceans of surface water before they found themselves aquaplaning straight into a stone wall.

Fry looked up at the sky, seeking a break in the cloud. It wasn’t getting any better. The news this morning had said that records for the amount of rain falling in a twenty-four hour period had been broken several times already. In one day, as much water had fallen on the Peak District as would normally be expected in a month.

Yet it showed no signs of stopping. The rain bucketed down every day. Fields had become mud, and roads turned into rivers. July and August had been washouts so far, the incessant rain keeping tourists away, closing caravan- and campsites, forcing the cancellation of outdoor events. Summer? This was more like a monsoon season.

Irvine had disappeared down West Street, heading into the centre of the rain-soaked town like Captain Oates walking into a snowstorm. He might be some time.

Two uniformed officers came up the stairs and gave Fry curious looks as they passed. A few yards along the corridor, one turned to say something to the other. She thought she heard a laugh as they went round the corner. She felt herself tense with anger again. She had no doubt she must be the object of their joke. She wondered what the station gossip was saying about her these days. Nothing good, she supposed. But at least they didn’t chat about her medical condition.

When she was sent back to Edendale, Fry had known that she’d never be able to escape from the shadow of Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper. Not while she was in E Division, where everyone knew him — even when she walked out on to the streets of the town, members of the public were likely to ask about him. And certainly not while she was running his old team. Those two young DCs had been taken under Cooper’s wing like newborn chicks. She’d never get the loyalty from Irvine and Hurst that she might otherwise have expected. And Carol Villiers? She was an old friend of Cooper’s since childhood. There was no way she could compete with that. As for Gavin Murfin, he was too old a dog to learn any new tricks. He’d always been inclined to make satirical comments from the sidelines, and he wasn’t going to change.

And Fry didn’t know what to do now, or what to think. Seriously? Close? The word had taken her completely by surprise. Had she and Cooper ever been close, really? What did that actually mean? Yes, she’d unwisely shared some personal information about herself with him, and he’d managed to infiltrate himself into her life in various ways. That was true. And there had been moments…

But no. That wasn’t being close. You could do those things, and have those conversations, with a stranger you’d just met in the pub when you were both drunk. It meant nothing, didn’t it?