Стивен Бут - Fall Down Dead

As she walked up to the rear of the BMW, she thought she heard muffled cursing from inside. But what could they do? They weren’t even supposed to be here.

Fry tapped on the driver’s window. After a moment, the window slid down. She didn’t recognise either of the faces of the two men, but she knew them by their suspicious manner, their wary expressions.

The driver looked at her, saying nothing.

‘I think this is for you,’ she said.

‘I think you’ve—’

But he didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Fry tossed the box through the window onto the floor of the car and watched them scramble to avoid it, as if afraid it might contaminate them. A corner of the box split open and a puff of white dust hit the driver’s trouser leg.

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ she said.

She peeled off the gloves as she walked back across the road and couldn’t resist a satisfied smile at the sound of the cursing and the bouncing of the BMW on its springs. She contemplated making an anonymous call to Nottinghamshire Police reporting suspected drug dealers operating on the Trent River Walk. She pictured the arrival of the Armed Response Unit, the sniffer dogs, the lengthy awkward explanations that would follow.

But no. It was enough to imagine them fearing it. They would be back on the M1 headed south as fast as their BMW could go.

Sometimes a solution was all about knowing where you were, and where everyone else was too. Ben Cooper realised he had never known that in this case.

He went back to study the satellite view of the Kinder Scout plateau on Google Maps. The peat groughs feeding into the River Kinder showed as meandering reddish-brown streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Eroded tracks were visible in a way they wouldn’t have been for walkers on the ground, and the Mermaid’s Pool was no more than a dark blob on the greenish-brown of the western slopes.

But the Downfall stood out as an eruption of broken rock, twisted and spattered on the hillside, the abandoned shell of a reptile skin. It was shadowed by a darker outline, the deeper chasm where water blew over the edge, where Faith Matthew had fallen from Dead Woman’s Drop.

Cooper printed out a new copy of the image and laid it on his desk. Thoughtfully, he took a yellow marker and tried again to locate the position of each of the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club at the time Faith had died.

Several times he had to refer back to the statements made by the group. He marked some of the positions with queries, crossed them out and started again from scratch, trying to get all the conflicting accounts to make coherent sense. After a lot of trial and error, he ended up with eleven markers identifying specific walkers, and one he placed roughly in the area where the search dog Dolly had located Jonathan Matthew. Finally, he took a red pen and drew a cross on the location of Dead Woman’s Drop.

As he stared at his map, Cooper became aware of Carol Villiers looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there watching him at work. He could see from her face that she had something to tell him.

‘I’m just back from Meadow Park Hospital,’ she said.

‘Success?’

‘I knew there was no point in trying the official channels, so I sniffed around and found some staff who’ve worked there for a while and remember her. One or two of them were willing to talk. Hospitals are a hotbed of gossip.’

‘And?’

‘Well, the talk is that Faith had an affair with one of the junior hospital doctors. He was working there as part of his training — they get assigned to different hospitals and various specialties. The trouble was, this junior doctor was married, and when it all came out, it wrecked his marriage. Faith was asked to leave, and that was when she took up agency nursing work.’

‘Did you get the doctor’s name?’

‘Yes. Dr Jake Gooding.’

Cooper wrote the name down and looked at it for a long moment. It meant something, didn’t it? There was a connection, he was sure of it.

‘Is this accurate?’ asked Villiers, looking at the map.

‘As near as I can make it, given the contradictions in the witness statements.’

‘If that’s where everyone was at the time, it only leaves one possibility,’ she said.

‘Yes, when you look at it this way, it seems obvious,’ said Cooper.

Yes, it was obvious. But perhaps too obvious? If you were planning to commit a murder, surely you would take more effort not to be the obvious suspect. Everything else had been planned. So why not this detail? It didn’t make sense. It was like presenting yourself on a plate as a prime suspect.

And yet he had rejected that obvious suspect.

And then he remembered. He heard Darius Roth’s smooth voice in his head, as clear as a bell. He was talking about Sophie Pullen bringing Nick Haslam to the walking group. She used to come with Jake. So who was Jake? Not just a previous boyfriend, as he’d assumed, but—

‘Sophie Pullen was married, wasn’t she?’ said Cooper. ‘It was in your summary, Carol.’

‘Yes, she divorced and reverted to her maiden name.’ Villiers looked at him with her mouth open. ‘So—’

Cooper held up his hand. ‘Let’s not be too hasty. We need to find out her ex-husband’s name first.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Villiers. ‘Just in case it’s a coincidence.’

But this wasn’t a coincidence, and he knew it.

The perfect murder. Cooper recalled Sophie Pullen telling him that story about Darius Roth. The idea had been in Darius’s mind for some time, and the opportunity had arisen on Kinder. He thought the fog would mean no witnesses. Had he really believed he could get away with it? It seemed such a risk for a man like Darius Roth to take.

But what actual evidence had there ever been that Darius killed Faith Matthew? It all came down to one confused witness account. One that Cooper himself had insisted must be mistaken. But one that he’d believed nevertheless.

He remembered what Diane Fry had said to him. That’s often where it all goes off the rails, isn’t it? Trusting the wrong person .

‘Faith,’ he said. ‘It’s an interesting name. Faith. That’s what it’s been about all along.’

Villiers looked up. ‘What do you mean, Ben?’

‘I mean I can’t believe I had faith in the wrong person.’

It was the end of the school day in Buxton. Pupils at St Anselm’s were looking forward to the weekend. The teachers too, no doubt. Though one teacher might have to change their plans.

Ben Cooper and Carol Villiers were sitting in Cooper’s Toyota on the street watching the gates as parents collected their children. For a while, the road was choked with vehicles, with cars on the pavement, parked on double yellow lines, leaving barely enough space for traffic to pass.

‘You never saw Darius Roth as a murderer, did you?’ said Villiers.

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘He was all façade. If his businesses went bankrupt, he might have been capable of killing himself — an overdose, a pipe from his car exhaust — but not someone else. It wasn’t part of the image he worked so hard on.’

‘And I was wrong too,’ said Villiers.

‘Were you?’

‘I said the quiet ones were the worst. But there are some who talk and talk, and say all the right things, so that you believe them even when they’re lying.’

‘You’re right, Carol,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s exactly what I did.’

‘It isn’t like you.’

‘Thanks. But it doesn’t make me feel any better about it. I failed on this one. Well, almost.’

‘What was it that misled you?’ she asked.

‘Sophie Pullen said she followed someone wearing a blue jacket to the Downfall, right to the rock where Faith Matthew fell from. There was no other member of the party wearing a blue jacket apart from Sophie herself. So it seemed to me that it could only have been Darius Roth she saw — he had a long blue scarf. In the fog, Sophie could easily have been mistaken about the item of clothing, while the colour would have been obvious.’ Cooper sighed. ‘But Darius couldn’t have been there — all the members of his group are adamant that he never left them during that time. And I believe them.’