Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

‘Angie, you can’t just — ’

But she’d already turned away and was walking into the darkness along the river bank.

‘Give it to Diane, if you want,’ she called. ‘Tell her it’s my farewell gift.’

When he eventually reached the corner of the market square where Liz was waiting, Cooper realized she’d been standing close enough to have a view of the river from the Eyre Street bridge.

‘Who was that woman I saw you with?’ she asked straight away.

Cooper flinched at the unfamiliar coolness in her voice. It was the sort of tone that might be used on a suspect in the interview room, when you wanted to make it clear that you thought they were guilty and you were expecting them to lie. He wondered where Liz had learned that tone. Perhaps it just came naturally. Perhaps it came naturally to all women.

‘Were you spying on me?’ he said, trying for a smile.

‘You’re avoiding the question.’

Cooper laughed, but she wasn’t responding.

‘Look, if you really want to know — it was Diane’s sister.’

‘Oh, you mean — ?’

‘Angie, yes.’

‘I’ve never seen her before.’

‘Well, Diane doesn’t exactly bring her into work on Casual Friday,’ said Cooper.

‘OK, OK. I can see you’re defensive about it.’

‘What?’

Liz began to walk away. Stung by her unfairness, Cooper waited a moment, to make his point, before he followed her.

Garda Lenaghan insisted on celebrating that evening. Somehow, they ended up drinking Irish whiskey together in a bar in Coolock that stayed open until the early hours of the morning. Fry didn’t normally drink spirits, and by the end of the night the whiskey was starting to have a peculiar effect on her.

‘Tony, I need to get back to my B amp;B,’ she said finally. ‘I’m due to fly home tomorrow, you know.’

Lenaghan’s face was swimming in front of her, but Fry was sure he was smiling. He wasn’t as bad as she’d thought at first. He was a city man, not like the yokels back in Derbyshire.

‘I’ll call for a taxi,’ he said.

In the early hours of the morning, Cooper found himself watching a film on TV, too tired to go to bed, and with too many thoughts buzzing around in his head.

He’d lost track of the film’s plot in the first few minutes, but he noticed that it seemed to have been shot entirely in the dark. In every scene there were long camera shots, with nothing but a lit doorway or a window in the distance, and a tunnel of darkness for a character to walk through. Sometimes an actor walked towards the camera, sometimes away. But always through that darkness. Why did no one ever put the lights on? he wondered. Did the people in these stories never suspect what might be waiting for them in those shadows, when they moved beyond the rectangles of light?

But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? It was all about the vicarious fear. The thrill was in anticipating the moment when a character stepped out of the safety zone. That was what riveted him to the screen, filled his mind and kept him from sleeping. It was watching a person walk into the dark.

When his phone rang, he thought at first it was part of the film. No one called him this late, unless it was bad news. When he answered, he wasn’t surprised to find it was DI Hitchens.

‘Sorry to bother you, Ben, but I thought you should know. Raymond Sutton has tried to hang himself in his room at The Oaks.’

Wednesday

Fry was already tired when she sat down at her desk next morning. She was supposed to produce a full report for the chiefs on her visit to the Garda Siochana, an analysis of the level of co-operation, and whether she’d made any useful contacts. Fry knew that any report to be read by senior management should use two positives to every negative, if it was going to give the right impression. Three was good, too. But never four — if you used four, it started to sound like sarcasm.

Well, on this occasion, a few bullet points would satisfy them. They wouldn’t want to know too much about Garda Lenaghan, would they? The identification of Orla Doyle should be enough to focus the interest.

Fry had now made two positive IDs on the bodies found at Pity Wood Farm, though not without a bit of good luck. She hoped her efforts would be properly appreciated. It wasn’t her fault that the skull didn’t belong to Orla Doyle. Everyone in the office this morning was talking about Victim C, which was the last thing she needed.

She found a copy of a file on her desk. There were photographs, so far out of proportion that they looked huge and disorientating. The Forensic Science Service laboratory had performed wonders getting fingerprints from Nadezda Halak’s hand, processing the sloughing skin sufficiently to provide a strong possibility of a match if her prints were on record. It couldn’t have been easy, teasing out an identifiable print from a fragment of rotting hand. The entire thumb was gone, and so were half of the index and middle fingers. The skin that remained had been decomposing and so fragile that it had to be soaked in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water.

But under twenty times magnification in the scanning electron microscope, traces of damage to the bones of the hand were just about visible, along with fractures at the surface where the cartilage had been attached to the central arch. Magnified a hundred times, the damage was unmistakable — linear fractures ending in a small region of crushed bone. There were no signs of healing, which indicated that the fracture had occurred perimortem — at, or just before, death.

Instead of finishing her report, Fry phoned the Forensic Science Service and asked to speak to one of the chemists who was dealing with evidence from the abandoned meth lab at Pity Wood.

‘Yes, methamphetamine production in a makeshift laboratory is a very dangerous activity, unless you have training as a chemist,’ she said.

‘I think we can take it that the people involved at Pity Wood didn’t have that training, Doctor.’

‘Well, if an operator without proper training allows the red phosphorus to overheat — due to lack of adequate ventilation, perhaps — then phosphine gas can be produced. If it’s produced in large enough quantities, the gas usually explodes. Technically, the conclusion would be auto-ignition from diphosphine formation, caused by the overheating of phosphorus.’

‘Thank you.’

Fry put the phone down. Training as a chemist? The idea was enough to make anyone laugh. Illegal workers like Nadezda Halak, paid a pittance and hardly daring to go out in daylight for fear of being seen? Their instructions would have been basic, their understanding of what they were involved in even less, perhaps.

In other circumstances, Fry would have said that it was a mistake to assume innocence, just because an individual was dead. It was possible to be guilty and a victim at the same time. But she could never believe it of Nadezda and her fellow workers at Pity Wood.

* * *

Cooper came in, accompanying DI Hitchens after a visit to Edendale District General Hospital, where Raymond Sutton was being treated.

‘Mr Sutton isn’t in good shape,’ said Cooper, chewing his lip nervously. ‘They’re very worried about him on the ward. He wasn’t strong to start with. If one of the care assistants hadn’t been passing his room, he would have been dead a few minutes later.’

‘Nobody’s blaming you, mate,’ said Murfin.

‘We gave him a bit of a hard time, put too much pressure on him. He’s an old man, after all.’

‘Gavin’s right, Ben,’ said Hitchens. ‘No one is blaming you.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

As the DI left, Fry put her phone down and caught up with the news.