Stephen Booth - Already Dead

‘So…?’

‘Well, to catch somebody out, you want the brake to appear functional when they get in the car and start moving, but then have all the fluid leak out and the brakes totally non-functional once they get up speed.’ He shook his head. ‘Personally, I just don’t see how that’s possible by simply damaging the line. I think the whole cutting of the brake line as a method of murdering is a Hollywood fantasy. If a line is cut through, a driver would have to be pretty clueless not to notice it on the first application of the brakes.’

One of the mechanics emerged from behind a van where he’d been listening, and grinned at her.

‘Some mice with a taste for brake fluid gnawed through the brake line on my wife’s new RAV4,’ he said. ‘She backed out of the driveway fine, drove to the end of the road, hit the brakes at the lights, and rolled out into the junction. There was no traffic coming, but if there had been she’d have been hit by a vehicle at thirty-five miles an hour.’

‘That was your own fault, Gary,’ said the examiner. ‘You should have made sure you did it when the traffic was busier.’

Gary laughed and wandered off, pulling on a new pair of latex gloves.

‘Anyway,’ said the examiner, ‘if you’re clever, you use a different method. You could add a substance that lowers the boiling point of the fluid. The brakes heat up and the fluid boils. Gas pockets mean no brakes, see. As soon as the brakes get used hard, they’ll fail. You have the added bonus that when everything cools off it all looks normal. Unless you do a chemical analysis of the brake fluid, no one would ever know.’

‘Was that done here?’

‘No. Either way, brake sabotage is a sloppy way to try to harm someone. There are too many ways it could fail. If you’re smart, you look for an alternative. Your man was smart. It’s even cleverer to interfere with the physical linkage from the pedal to the brake master cylinder. Maybe replace part of the linkage with something that will break on application of the brakes. That’s the only sure way to have a one hundred per cent failure that wouldn’t be noticed before it happens.’

‘Is that what happened here?’

‘Yes. The steering linkage has been sabotaged. It can be done pretty easily and there’d be a sudden, unpredictable loss of steering control. Our saboteur went for the double whammy here. Brakes and steering. He wanted to make sure it worked properly.’

‘I don’t think we’re looking too far for this one, do you?’ said Irvine as they left.

‘Why do you say that, Luke?’

‘Well, what does Sheena Sullivan’s husband do for a living?’

‘He’s a garage mechanic.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Jumping to a conclusion?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Me too,’ said Fry, grateful that something appeared straightforward at last.

Even when there were no injuries, cutting the brakes on someone’s vehicle would result in charges of attempted malicious wounding, causing criminal damage with intent, vehicle tampering, destruction of property. In Jay Sullivan’s case, it would be manslaughter at least.

The Sullivans’ house was a fairly modern three-bedroom detached on Yokecliffe Avenue, with a pocket handkerchief garden in front — a few feet of unfenced grass surrounding a patch of soil which contained more ornamental rocks than plants.

In Fry’s view, the house could only just be described as detached — the neighbouring properties couldn’t be any more than four or five feet away. There were no windows in the side walls, because there was nothing to look out at except the brickwork of the house next door. But the property did possess off-street parking — and that seemed to be quite something in Wirksworth.

She entered through a sun room into a large kitchen. There was a wood burning stove in the lounge, but it looked too clean, as if it was only there for show and had never been used for anything so messy as burning wood. The gas central heating was much more convenient.

Fry had noticed this phenomenon often enough around the villages of Derbyshire. House owners seemed to hanker after a rustic look inside their homes, but without the trouble of real country life. Sometimes it wasn’t just the stove that had a purely decorative purpose, but the logs too. She’d seen them stacked up by the fire, all perfectly round and symmetrical, cut cleanly and in identical lengths. The giveaway was their unnatural air of permanence, as if they were dusted and sprayed with air freshener once a week. They were more of an art installation than a stock of winter fuel.

Naturally, Fry had come to regard this as one of the symptoms of middle-class bucolic pretensions, like green wellies and an overfed pony in a paddock. She wasn’t surprised that Sheena Sullivan had developed those pretensions. Sheena had turned away from the car mechanic husband with a garage full of oily engine parts to the smooth estate agent lover with a red BMW. It was upward mobility of a kind, she supposed. But her upward mobility had ended in a tragic downward plunge as that BMW hurtled uncontrollably down Green Hill. She wondered if Jay Sullivan had worked out the symbolism in it. Probably not, she thought.

Sullivan had been arrested and escorted to the station in Edendale for processing. Fry wasn’t sure what she might find in his house. Evidence that he’d been aware of the affair between his wife and Charlie Dean, perhaps.

She could see that Sullivan had been to the local Chinese takeaway for his evening meal last night. Sweet and sour pork with boiled rice, and a special chow mein. The foil containers still lay on the kitchen counter, red streaks of sweet and sour sauce, a blob of uneaten rice, the remains of a side order of prawn crackers in a grease-stained bag. This was a meal for two people, surely. Who had Jay Sullivan been entertaining while his wife was in hospital?

Fry found a fortune cookie, opened but abandoned. The strip of paper inside it read: Now is the time to try something new .

Diane Fry was back at her desk, tapping irritably at her keyboard to input a report when Matt Cooper called. At first, she had no idea who she was talking to, and that made her more irritable.

‘Sorry, who are you?’ she said.

‘Matt Cooper. I’m Ben Cooper’s brother. That is Detective Sergeant Fry, isn’t it? I thought you might remember.’

‘Oh. Of course, I do remember you. There was the incident at the farm…’

‘Yes, the burglars. But I’d rather not think about that too much.’

Fry looked back at her computer screen and tapped a few more keystrokes, mentally dismissing the call as unimportant.

‘It all turned out well for you in the end, though, Mr Cooper,’ she said.

‘Yes, but that isn’t why I’m calling you. You left your card when you were here at the time. And I knew … well, I knew that you worked with my brother. It’s him I’m phoning about.’

She stopped typing. ‘I can’t discuss colleagues with you, sir. It’s not appropriate.’

But Matt seemed not to have heard her. His voice kept on droning in her ear. It was as if he’d wound himself up to say something, and nothing was going to stop him getting it all out now that he’d started.

‘I just can’t get through to him,’ he was saying. ‘Not in the state of mind that Ben’s got himself into now. And the doctors are no use at all. He’s going to them regularly, keeps all his appointments. Physically he’s healing, but they can’t touch what’s going on inside.’

‘Mmm,’ said Fry. She’d spotted an error on screen. It was lucky that she’d seen it. If she let herself get distracted she’d more mistakes. She needed to get off this call as soon as she could, without being too rude to a member of the public.