Stephen Booth: Already Dead

‘He scared you. Yes, you said so. But it turns out he should have been more scared of you, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’

Fry sighed. She could see it was true. The woman really didn’t know what she meant. So often, people couldn’t see how dangerous they were.

‘But you did go back later? Is that what you’re telling us?’

‘Charlie said he went back.’

‘On his own?’

She gave a melodramatic shudder. ‘I couldn’t have faced it.’

‘Oh? You couldn’t face the reality of what you’d done?’

Sheena clamped her lips tightly shut and stared back at Fry mulishly. ‘Charlie went, anyway. Like I said, we didn’t mean him to die. So Charlie went back to the woods when it was safe. But he was too late. He said it was obvious that Turner was, well, already…’

‘Yes.’

‘But he couldn’t have drowned? Not in so little water. We made sure it was shallow.’

‘You didn’t take into account the amount of rain that’s fallen in the last few days,’ said Fry. ‘Haven’t you noticed the flooding? That stream started off shallow, but the water became deeper and deeper while you were sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘That’s horrible,’ she said. ‘Drowning.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Fry.

‘Oh God,’ said Sheena. ‘Did we let him drown?’

Fry shook her head. ‘As matter of fact, you’re right,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t clear, but I got the final post-mortem report only this morning. Glen Turner didn’t drown. It turns out he had an undiagnosed heart condition. Mr Turner’s heart gave out on him before the water killed him.’

‘Oh.’

‘Does that make it better?’ asked Fry.

Sheena didn’t answer. But Fry could see from her face that it did. Somehow the fact that their victim had died from some other cause lifted part of the guilt from her shoulders.

‘But here’s the bad news,’ added Fry. ‘It won’t make any difference to your sentence. In the eyes of the law, you’re still guilty of murder. And that means life.’

‘Prison?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Sheena groaned. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now anyway. I’ve lost everything.’

Fry stood up to leave.

‘One last thing. Where did the blood come from? Who caused that?’

‘I think it was Ryan Gibson who hit him a couple of times,’ said Sheena, as if it was an everyday occurrence. ‘Just a few slaps, that was all. But Turner’s nose was bleeding a bit afterwards.’

‘When noses bleed, they tend to produce quite a lot of blood.’

‘I suppose so.’

It wasn’t important. There hadn’t been much blood evident at the crime scene. Just those few traces she’d glimpsed on the parts of the body above the waterline. The amount lost in a nosebleed would soon have been washed away by the running water. Charlie Dean had taken some of it away on his hands, though. And one of his hands had transferred that blood to the paintwork of his car when he was trying to push it out of the mud. That was what forensics relied on — the transfer of traces from every contact.

‘Charlie did have some blood on his hands,’ said Sheena. ‘I saw it after the man in the red rain jacket got back in his car. I wondered if the stranger noticed it. I imagined him phoning the police as soon as we’d left, to report what he’d seen.’

‘I don’t believe he noticed anything,’ said Fry. ‘And, even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have thought to phone the police.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘Well,’ said Fry. ‘I think he was the police.’

After the interview was finished and the tapes had been sealed and signed, Fry went back to her desk in the CID room and phoned Ben Cooper to arrange another meeting. It would be best to do it now, rather than leave it. He would only hear the details from someone else, anyway.

But Fry wondered how she was going to break it to him. How was she going to tell Cooper the truth? She knew what he was like, and she had to explain a fact to him that he’d never be able to live with.

In his own helpful, Good Samaritan way, Ben Cooper had been responsible for the death of Glen Turner.

Ben Cooper was sitting on a bench by the River Eden, where it flowed shallow and fast through the centre of town. This stretch was wide enough to accommodate the extra volume of water that had come down from the hills. There had been some overflow on to the walkways, and the mallard ducks which nested in the undergrowth on the little island had been flooded out.

The rain had stopped hours ago, and the sun was breaking through in a patch of blue sky. The Eden was almost back to its normal levels, and sunlight glittered on its surface. But the mallards were still complaining. They splashed about frantically among the debris of their nests and a tangle of mud-covered rubbish dragged down from upstream.

Cooper felt as though he’d been like those ducks for a while now, splashing about in the wreckage of his life with no real hope or sense of purpose. He’d been in danger of watching everything get washed away downstream for ever.

Of course, you always brought along a lot of baggage as you went through life. Some of it clung so persistently that it could weigh you down for years. But surely there was even more baggage that you left behind, wasn’t there? Memories and experiences, and failed relationships, that you shrugged off and left at the roadside when you moved on. Cooper pictured a mass of sagging cardboard suitcases, all sealed with grubby parcel tape and bulging at the corners. He could imagine a long row of them, standing at the edge of a pavement, awaiting collection by the binmen. There was no point in going back and poking open the lids to look at what you’d left behind. The accumulated mould was likely to choke you, the dust would get in your eyes.

But he was over that now. He really was feeling different today. Perhaps it was time to leave the debris behind.

Cooper looked up, and saw Diane Fry coming towards him. When she realised he’d spotted her she seemed to slow down, her feet dragging as if she never wanted to reach him. And he saw straight away that she had that look again.

From her expression, he knew without doubt that Fry expected the worst of the world. Even today, she couldn’t see any blue sky.