Stephen Booth - Scared to Live

‘Before you decided to take a swim, Ben?’

‘Yes. Well, it was a very brief impression I had, but I thought someone else was there by the river that night.’

‘Obviously there was — the person who pushed you in.’

‘No, that wasn’t what I meant. There was someone else, further away. I had the impression — well, I wanted to ask Georgi Kotsev whether he’d seen a woman.’

‘A woman?’

Reluctantly, Cooper tried to describe his half-memory. It was no more than a shadow flickering in the darkness, perhaps the rustle of a long skirt on concrete. He might have been describing a dream. Or he might have confused it with the earlier glimpse of a woman who looked like a fortune teller, her blue scarf flashing briefly in the lights in Derwent Gardens.

Fry shook her head. ‘There was no woman by the river, Ben. Georgi would have mentioned it if he’d seen her.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘I’m sure he would.’

Cooper looked at her closely. Her tone seemed to confirm what he’d been suspecting for a few days now.

‘Did you like him, Diane?’ he said. But Fry looked away. ‘He was a professional.

It was a pleasure to work with him.’

‘A refreshing change, then?’

‘You said it.’

‘Is he married, by the way?’

‘I never asked him,’ said Fry. ‘Why are you interested in Georgi, all of a sudden?’

‘I was reading some of this stuff that the intelligence unit sent us on Bulgaria. They went over the top with the information, for once. There are even some reports from the European Roma Rights Centre. Take a look at this one.’

Fry took the report he held out.

ROMA DIES IN POLICE SHOOTING

A police officer in Pleven shot and killed a 24-year-oldRomani man. The officer apparently tried toapprehend the man, who had broken into a shopin a Mechka neighbourhood and stolen confectioneriesto the value of seven thousand leva. Whenthe suspect managed to escape, the officer shot him.He was taken to Pleven Hospital, but died of hisinjuries. A complaint was made by the dead man’sfamily about the conduct of the officer, identified asa sergeant of the First Regional Police Department.The case was dismissed by the Regional MilitaryProsecutor on the grounds that the incident involvedthe legitimate use of a firearm.

‘So?’

‘There are dozens of these, Diane. The Roma seem to have a lot of problems with the police in Bulgaria.’

‘Georgi Kotsev is different. That’s not his attitude.’

‘If you say so.’

Fry handed the report back. ‘It’s irrelevant anyway. We have incidents like that in this country, too.’

‘Yes, I know. But they don’t all involve gypsies.’

‘Look, this is a report from the Roma Rights Centre. It’s a single-issue campaign group. You’re bound to get a distorted picture, because they’re selective about the cases they publish. They’re not interested in incidents that don’t involve gypsies.’

‘There are still quite a lot of them.’

‘Ben, I must have missed your appointment as EU Commissioner for Human Rights.’

‘What?’

‘Well, that’s what you’re starting to sound like. Or are you still a Derbyshire police officer, by any chance? If so, just file those reports away. They’re of no relevance to us. We’re not here to solve the social problems of Eastern Europe.’

But before he put them away, Cooper read one last extract again:

PROTEST AFTER BURNING OF ROMANI GIRL

The Bulgarian newspaper Trud reported that Roma from the Nadezhda settlement protestedagainst recent cuts in electricity. Supplies had beencut to Romani settlements throughout Bulgaria forseveral hours at a time, every four or five hours.The measure had been taken by the NationalElectrical Company because of payment arrears byRomani inhabitants. The protest was sparked byan incident involving a ten-year-old Romani girl,who was burned when her clothes caught fire froma wood stove being used in the absence of electricity.The girl’s injuries were made worse by thefact that, because there had been no running waterin the settlement for eight months, there was noavailable water to put out the fire.

Finally, Cooper found a website that gave currency exchange rates and looked up how much seven thousand leva were worth. He imagined it wouldn’t be very much in sterling. But the conversion made it to be more than two thousand four hundred pounds. Surely that couldn’t be right. No one could ‘run off’ with over two and a half thousand pounds worth of sweets and chocolate bars.

Then he saw a footnote to the conversion table. In 1999, the Bulgarian lev had been revalued at the rate of one thousand old lev to one new lev. Well, that was a different story. That meant the Romani man had got himself killed for stolen confectionery worth two pounds forty-five pence.

Oh, well. It was none of his business. Cooper looked across to see what Fry was doing, and peered curiously at some stapled sheets of paper on her desk.

‘What’s this?’

‘An application form.’

‘Oh, I see. For Europol.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What happened to SOCA?’

‘It’s just another possibility to think about.’

Cooper picked up the form and flicked through it, wondering why she’d left it where he was certain to see it. He stopped at the qualifications section. Fry was a graduate, so that was OK. And she had the relevant law enforcement experience. But there was a problem here, wasn’t there?

‘How many languages do you speak, Diane?’ he asked.

‘Languages? Are you kidding?’

‘It says here candidates must be fluent in at least two languages of the European Union, including English.’

‘Oh, damnation.’

Cooper looked down, seeing that she was genuinely taken aback.

‘Sergeant Kotsev will qualify when Bulgaria joins the EU. But I think you’re going to have to do some studying if you want to get into Europol. Which language do you fancy, then?’

‘I don’t have time to learn languages.’

‘Didn’t you see that in the conditions of employment?’

‘They didn’t make it clear enough,’ said Fry.

Cooper decided to leave the subject alone. ‘You know, Henry Lowther said that one of the reasons they trusted Rose Shepherd was because she was British, like them.’

‘But she wasn’t British at all. She was half Bulgarian, and half Irish. According to the files from Sofia, her mother was a nurse from County Galway who met a Bulgarian soldier.’

‘I know.’

He couldn’t quite interpret the look that Fry gave him. Maybe she just wanted to change the subject, or maybe she really was concerned for his welfare.

‘Are you all right now, Ben? You’re not still bothered by John Lowther’s death?’

Cooper was about to say no, he wasn’t. But then he realized there were thoughts just below the surface that he hadn’t had a chance to tell anybody about until now.

‘He’d already stopped taking his medication, hadn’t he?’ he said.

‘Yes, some weeks ago. Lindsay became completely absorbed with the baby. She forgot about her brother’s needs, or maybe she thought he was well enough to cope on his own. But he wasn’t — he began to slip.’

‘I bet he knew there was something wrong. But once his thoughts became too disordered, he wouldn’t know why, or what the problem was. Unless the voices gave him an explanation.’

‘You’re empathizing with a psychotic?’ said Fry in amazement. ‘Now I’ve heard everything.’

Cooper took no notice. ‘John Lowther’s problem was that he saw too clearly, wasn’t it?’

‘What? What did he see?’

‘ The ghastly, naked spectre of insanity ,’ said Cooper, hardly knowing whether he was speaking out loud.