Stephen Booth - Scared to Live

‘In any case, she must have been able to see what was going to happen not too far in the future. She was going to run out of money.’

‘Bain House would have had to go, for a start. She could have survived a few years longer if she’d flogged it and bought a terraced property in the city somewhere.’

‘She could have got a job,’ said Fry.

‘Look at the way she lived here,’ said Kessen. ‘Neither of those two options would have seemed possible to Rose Shepherd. She was too frightened of being tracked down.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Kessen coughed. ‘Are we nearly finished here? We need all the manpower we can get at Matlock Bath. Don’t forget we’re still looking for the child. And whoever assaulted DC Cooper, of course.’

‘Thank goodness the Zhivko bombing is C Division’s baby,’ said Hitchens. ‘We couldn’t have coped with that as well. By all accounts, it’s proving a big headache for them.’

‘I’ll send them our sympathy.’

‘What about Brian Mullen?’ asked Fry, turning back to the room. ‘Should we interview him again? It does seem a bit tough on him, so soon after everything else that’s happened.’

‘Leave it for now,’ said Hitchens. ‘I’ll have another try at Tony Donnelly first.’

‘No, look,’ said Donnelly a few minutes later. ‘All I did was nick a car and torch it afterwards. That’s nothing. You just get a ticking off for that. Community service, that sort of thing. It’s no big deal.’

‘You’ve done it before, Mr Donnelly, haven’t you?’

‘Well, yeah. Everybody has. When we were kids, we did it all the time round our way.’

‘But you’re not a kid any more.’

‘No. Well, I had given it up. This was just a one-off.’

‘Found something more lucrative, did you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘I think you do,’ said Hitchens.

Donnelly shook his head.

‘So why this one-off?’

‘Look, it was a favour. Someone wanted a car for a bit, that’s all. A decent car, a four-by-four. I found one for him, and I did it as a favour.’

‘This would be the Shogun?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you saying you didn’t know what the vehicle was being used for?’

Donnelly chuckled. ‘No, of course not. You don’t ask questions like that.’

‘ We do.’

‘Yeah, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you, can I? No matter how long you keep me here, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.’

‘We don’t need you to tell us that, Mr Donnelly. We already know. The car you stole was used to commit a murder.’

‘Eh?’

‘A shooting in Foxlow.’

‘No. Well, I heard about that, but you can’t- Well, you can’t, that’s all.’

‘Mr Donnelly, unless you tell us who you did this favour for, you’re our number one suspect right now.’

‘For a murder? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘Not at all, sir. I’ve never been more serious. I suggest you start being more co-operative, or you could be here for a lot longer yet.’

Donnelly stared at him for a long moment, his eyes flickering anxiously as he worked out the odds. Either way, they didn’t look good.

‘He was good to me,’ he said. ‘He gave me a job, and he helped me to set up on my own when things started to go pear-shaped. I owed him a favour, that’s all. He’s a good bloke. I did it as a favour, I don’t know anything else.’

‘Who are you talking about, Mr Donnelly?’

Donnelly took a deep breath before finally committing himself. ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’

Cooper caught up with Fry in the car park, between the security gate and the custody suite. A light drizzle was falling, and Fry seemed to want to get to her car quickly, but he stopped her.

‘Ben? What the heck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home recuperating.’

‘I don’t need to recuperate. I’m fine.’

He waited for the response he expected, wincing as he remembered what Liz had said to him when he put his jacket on to leave the flat. But, from Fry, it didn’t come.

‘So what do you think you’re going to do here?’ she said.

‘I want to help. Are there any developments?’

Fry brought him up to date on Keith Wade, then told him about Rose Shepherd’s dire financial circumstances.

‘God, she must have been getting desperate,’ said Cooper. ‘There wasn’t even anyone she could turn to for help or advice. She was dealing with that prospect alone.’

Fry leaned against the side of a police van. ‘You know, in those circumstances, I think you’d probably get to a point where you didn’t care any more. You’d be asking yourself what the point of it all was. I mean, how could her life have been worth living? Rose Shepherd was sixty-one — she was facing the prospect of another twenty or thirty years living like this, but with her deliberate isolation becoming more and more difficult to maintain day by day. Personally, I think Rose Shepherd might actually have welcomed her fate, when it came.’

Cooper stared at her, surprised by her sudden burst of empathy. Fry stood beside the van, a slight figure, hardly enough of her to catch the rain.

But Cooper wasn’t at all sure about what she’d just said. He couldn’t feel convinced that Rose Shepherd had welcomed death. In this case, there had been too much of a tendency for people to think they could let the dust settle and return to some kind of normal life, their offences forgiven or forgotten, their past put far behind them.

But dust had a habit of showing tracks if it was left undisturbed too long. And, like the dust gathering in the Mullens’ smoke alarm, it could even mask the approach of danger, when it finally came burning out of the night.

‘Diane, there is another possibility that Miss Shepherd might have considered,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s that, Ben?’

‘I wonder if she thought she’d found a lifeline. She might have made contact with someone she thought she could get money out of.’

‘What?’

Cooper saw the sceptical look in her eyes, and started his train of thought all over again. ‘I asked about the rifle. You remember, the Romanian semi-automatic?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, apart from the military sniper rifle, there’s a sporting version of the PSL made for export, the Romak-3. It’s very similar, but has the bayonet lug ground off and some other modifications to comply with US import laws.’

‘A sporting version. Do you mean a hunting rifle?’

‘Yes. A hunting rifle.’

Fry tilted her head slightly to one side as she looked at him. ‘What are you thinking, Ben?’

He smiled at the echo of Liz’s words earlier. Liz had known what he was thinking before he said it. She’d known, even though he denied it. But Fry was different — she wanted it spelled out. She wanted to hear him explain it. They connected on quite a different level.

‘I listened to the tapes of John Lowther’s interviews,’ he said. ‘You remember his sentence referring to hunting? He said some people go “hunting for whores. No, for babies …”’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I wonder if that was an example of what Dr Sinclair called “clang associations”, a confusion of words with similar sounds or the same initial letters. I wonder if he meant some people go hunting boars .’

‘Boars?’

‘Wild pigs. They still hunt them in parts of the world. Bulgaria, for example.’

‘So?’

‘There’s another thing. When Henry Lowther had that business trip to Bulgaria, it wasn’t all vodka and red wine. His business contacts took him wild boar hunting.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘You asked him where he went and he mentioned the name of a place. Dounav. That was a mistake on his part, but I suppose he couldn’t think of anywhere else in Bulgaria on the spur of the moment. There are some lies that you need to plan.’