Stephen Booth - Already Dead

His superstitious ancestors had dreaded fire and flood. But they’d been frightened of a lot of things. Every bump in the night was a devil at the door, every stranger a spy, every bird an ill omen. They lived in terror of the natural and the supernatural until finally they faced their greatest fear of all — death itself.

Gradually he became conscious of a voice. Someone was shouting. As his awareness returned, he began to shiver. This was no tropical sea he was standing in. The rain was freezing.

Diane Fry was wading through water that came almost up to her waist. Finally, Cooper saw her and shouted.

‘Diane, what are you doing?’

‘I came to find you.’

‘For God’s sake, if you lose your footing, that water will sweep you away. You could be killed.’

‘Well, help me out, then.’

When he pulled her up to the bridge, she saw a body on the ground, streaming water.

‘Josh Lane,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘What have you done?’

Fry gripped the edge of the parapet and stared down at the trapped Honda. The flood water was up to its roof now, but she could see the smashed windscreen. She could also make out a sledgehammer wedged through the broken glass.

She turned back and looked at Cooper, noticing now his sodden clothes, the blood trickling from half a dozen cuts on his hands. The body on the ground groaned, coughed out a gush of water, and gasped for breath.

‘You pulled him out of the car,’ said Fry.

Cooper looked down at the ground, as if baffled by what he saw.

‘Of course I did,’ he said.

Tuesday

Ben Cooper had become a hero. No one quite knew how that had happened, least of all Cooper.

When he came into West Street on Tuesday morning he looked almost the old Cooper, clean shaven and upright, though he was several pounds thinner and the shadow in his eyes was still there, the way that Fry had seen it in Wirksworth a few days ago.

She watched Cooper shaking hands with everyone — Gavin Murfin, Luke Irvine, Becky Hurst. And of course Carol Villiers, though that was hardly necessary. Fry felt sure that none of them needed to be quite so enthusiastic about his reappearance.

No matter what had happened, and what anyone else said, she didn’t feel able to treat Cooper like a hero. She was aware of what had been in his heart, if not in his mind. And she knew how close it had come to ending completely differently.

But with the shotgun safely back in its locked cabinet at Bridge End Farm, there seemed to be no reason to mention it to anyone now. It felt strange to be sharing a secret with Matt Cooper, but there were stranger things in life.

Detective Superintendent Branagh came through the office to greet Cooper. Another handshake there. Branagh stopped at Fry’s elbow, and smiled.

‘It was good to have DS Cooper’s input, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘If only unofficially.’

Fry swallowed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

No need to ask where that intelligence came from, then.

By the time Fry finally got Cooper on his own she was fighting conflicting emotions. That always made her say the wrong thing.

‘Ben, I know you’ve been talking to members of my team,’ she said. ‘Trying to get information out of them. Don’t do it again. I don’t need to remind you — while you’re on leave, you’re just another member of the public.’

Cooper gazed back at her, unblinking.

‘If you mean Carol, she’s my friend,’ he said simply.

Fry bit her lip. For some reason, that reply hurt her more than anything else he might have said. She didn’t understand the sudden welling of pain it had caused, a confusing ache in her stomach as her diaphragm spasmed. She was overwhelmed by a desire to lash out in retaliation, as if she’d been physically attacked.

As Cooper walked away, she remembered Carol Villiers saying that it was the name of Turner’s employers Prospectus Assurance that had sparked Cooper’s interest in the first place. At the time, she’d thought it was just familiarity, that he’d heard of the firm before. They had offices in Edendale, after all. But then, Ben Cooper had heard of everybody. He was the fount of all local knowledge. The name of one specific Eden Valley firm shouldn’t have made a particularly deep impression on him. There was more to it than that. There always was.

Fry shook her head. It ought to have dawned on her before. Why hadn’t she figured this out earlier? She’d failed to see that something else might have been going on in Cooper’s mind. Something much more devious and worrying. Perhaps an indication of how close he was to tipping over the edge, how dangerously unbalanced he’d become.

Fry sat down with Luke Irvine. The job wasn’t done yet. She reminded him about the interviews they’d done with Charlie Dean and Sheena Sullivan when Dean’s BMW was first traced. There was that frightening stranger in the red, hooded rain jacket.

‘Luke — in her statement, Sheena Sullivan said something about the stranger breathing heavily.’

‘He was helping to push their BMW out of the mud,’ said Irvine. ‘It’s a heavy vehicle. I think anyone would be a bit out of breath-’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘Before that. When he first got out of his car. And she mentioned his voice. Where are those statements? Can you dig them out?’

‘Here.’

Irvine passed across the files, and Fry flicked through them until she found the page she was looking for. It was a small detail, so apparently unimportant that it might have been left out of Sheena’s written statement altogether by another interviewing officer. But Becky Hurst had recorded it word for word.

‘ And there was something about his voice ,’ she read.

Irvine shrugged. ‘What does that mean? Nothing.’

He was right, of course. Hurst had done the right thing, recording the comment on the statement form, but she should have followed it up. Perhaps she’d thought it was just a bit of imaginative over-dramatisation on Sheena Sullivan’s part, trying to make the stranger sound more menacing in hindsight. But still, Hurst ought to have asked the obvious question. What was it about his voice?

‘Has Ben Cooper left yet?’

‘Yes, I’ve just seen him driving out of the gate.’

Ben Cooper had barely been in his flat for five minutes, when there was a banging on the door. He opened it and was astonished to find Diane Fry standing on his doorstep again.

‘We must stop meeting like this,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘Do you want to come in?’

‘Just for a few minutes.’

‘I was going to ask why you didn’t phone first this time,’ said Cooper. ‘But there doesn’t seem much point. It’s not twenty minutes since I saw you.’

‘No, that’s right.’

‘I suppose you forgot something? Is there…?’

Cooper hesitated. Fry was looking at him oddly, her head cocked slightly to one side as if she was listening hard, waiting for him to speak again. He’d never known her to be so intent on his words, so eager to hear what he had to say. Normally, she treated him like an idiot. She dismissed his ideas instantly and just went her own sweet way no matter what he said.

So what had changed? Was she humouring him because she thought of him as an invalid? He could almost work out her thought processes. Poor old Ben, still on extended sick leave. You’ve got to feel sorry for him.Shut up in here, he’s probably desperate for someone to talk to. I’d better pretend I’m interested in what he has to say.

‘Diane, was there something you wanted to ask me?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s just good to hear your voice.’

Cooper laughed. And, as so often happened, the laugh caught the rawness in his throat and turned into a cough. It was the dry, irksome hack that made him step into the kitchen for a drink of water to ease the irritation.