Scared to Live

‘They make a grand couple, don’t they?’ said Murfin, picking crumbs off the seat. ‘Ben and Liz, I mean,’ he added, as if it needed explaining.

‘Are they sleeping together?’ asked Fry, as casually as she could manage.

Murfin stopped hunting for crumbs. She could feel his eyes on her, wary and suspicious.

‘I dunno,’ he said.

‘You’re his friend, aren’t you, Gavin?’

‘Me and Ben? We go back years.’

‘You must know, then.’

Murfin shook his head. ‘It would only be gossip.’

He lowered his head between his knees, as if searching the floor for more debris.

‘I just wondered,’ said Fry.

In reply, all she got was a mumble from somewhere under the seat.

‘What did you say, Gavin?’

‘I said I can’t hear you.’

Fry let out the clutch suddenly. As the car jerked forward, Murfin’s head shot up from the footwell. His face was beetroot red from the blood rushing into it.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You really are trying to kill me.’

Cooper went into the back garden of Bain House to look at the field where the SOCOs were still working under a white tent. Liz Petty had confirmed what he’d already guessed – the Foxlow shooting had put a lot of extra pressure on Scientific Support.

One of the complications was obvious. In effect, there were four separate crime scenes to be examined. For a start, there was Rose Shepherd’s bedroom, and the other rooms of her house. Officers conducting the search might hope to learn something about the victim’s life that would lead to her killers, or at least suggest a motive for her murder. But if, as they suspected, the attacker hadn’t entered the victim’s home, or even made direct contact with her, there would be no traces of him in the house. No DNA or fingerprints; no fibres or evidence of any kind.

Then there was the field. That at least had yielded some tyre marks. How clear they were would depend on how soft the ground had been, whether it had rained before the incident, and what the weather had been like since. Cooper looked at his watch, and pictured DCI Kessen doing the same thing, cursing the delay in the body being found. There wouldn’t be much else in the field, of course. If there were no shell casings or footwear impressions, then there wouldn’t be any dropped matches or cigarette ends either. But the suspect’s car had been driven close to the edge of the field. A tiny flake of paintwork left on a branch of the hawthorn hedge, maybe? A bumper scraped on the corner of a stone wall? But in a fifty-acre field? From dark paintwork? Needles and haystacks came to mind.

The most useful scene might be the third one: the suspect’s vehicle. If they ever found it, of course. There should be fibres on the seats, fingerprints on the door handles, sweat stains on the gear stick.

Cooper turned at a sound in the garden. A squirrel ran across the lawn and scuffled among the dead leaves on the flower beds. It was burying nuts before hibernation time came. Across the garden, another squirrel chattered with that strange cry they had, somewhere between the call of a bird and the mew of a cat.

From what Diane Fry had said, Mr and Mrs Ridgeway would hate this, if they saw it. If they were breeding here, there’d be a continuous supply of them to raid her neighbours’ gardens.

Cooper was approaching the end of his shift. His DI seemed to have forgotten him, Fry had already left Foxlow, and no one had mentioned overtime. Tomorrow would be hectic, though. By then some lines of enquiry would have emerged. Suddenly, there would be an insatiable demand for resources, and everyone would be rushed off their feet. He might as well take advantage of the lull.

He walked back into the house. Downstairs, the rooms were full of people. He could hear them opening drawers, taking photographs, rustling papers, talking and laughing among themselves. There were probably more people inside Bain House at this moment than had been over the doorstep in the whole of the last year. If Rose Shepherd walked in now, she wouldn’t recognize the place. She’d be like a shocked parent who’d come home unexpectedly to find the teenage children had moved the furniture, rolled up the carpets, and thrown a party that got out of hand.

The image of her bewildered reaction brought Cooper to a halt as he remembered the fourth crime scene. At this moment it was lying in the mortuary, waiting to be examined for whatever information it could yield. It was Rose Shepherd’s body.

After Fry had dropped Gavin Murfin off at West Street with his instructions, she drove straight back to Darwin Street. Things were happening here, at least. All the appropriate people were gathering, including the fire service’s divisional officer and his investigation team. Their brief was to work with the appointed investigating police officer – which was her, for now.

Her next job would be to decide whether the attendance of a forensic scientist was needed. Of course, she’d be mad to try to manage without an expert when three deaths were involved. It would be too late to change her mind once the scene had been compromised. But there was a procedure to be followed before she could commit resources.

Right now, the fire service had taken possession of the scene. They’d brought in their own dog team from Alfreton, and a chocolate brown Labrador bitch wearing blue protective boots and a reflective harness was being deployed by her handler in the ground-floor rooms of the Mullen house. A firefighter told her the dog was called Fudge, though her official title was ‘post-fire search tool’.

Never mind the fancy names. The important fact was that the dog could search the scene faster than any conventional equipment. It had been trained to locate the presence of flammable liquids that could have been used to start the fire, and then give a passive alert to the handler, so that evidence wasn’t disturbed.

To the dog, it was all a game. There’d be a reward when it found what it was looking for. More than Fry would get, probably. No one would be waiting to pat her on the head and give her a chicken-flavoured Schmacko.

Well, she didn’t like animals much, but she had to admit the Labrador’s expertise was a good example of focus, considering all the other smells that must have bombarded the dog when it entered the house. Lucky animal, not to have to worry about what these humans had been up to inside 32 Darwin Street.

Fry’s mobile rang. It was Murfin, his voice sounding slightly muffled as usual. If he wasn’t actually eating, he was salivating at the thought of his next snack.

‘Hi, Gavin.’

‘I called the hospital, like you told me. They say Brian Mullen is awake. He’ll be fit to be interviewed in the morning.’

‘Great.’

‘I suppose you’ll want to do that after the morning briefing?’

‘Yes, I want to get to him as soon as I can.’

‘Want me to come along?’

‘Er … no thanks, Gavin. There’ll be plenty for you to do on the Shepherd enquiry.’

‘OK. I don’t like hospitals anyway.’

As she ended the call, Fry saw the fire service dog padding across the debris in its blue boots. The animal was wagging its tail, happy to have done its bit. Was it Schmacko time already?

‘So what’s the result? Did the dog find anything?’

‘Yes. She identified accelerant in two locations in the sitting room,’ said the handler. ‘I’ve marked the locations for further investigation by the DO – or the forensic scientists, if you’re calling them in.’

‘Great job. Thanks.’

Fry was already reaching for her phone again. Traces of accelerant were evidence of malicious intent. A chocolate Lab called Fudge had just upped the stakes in this enquiry.

9 (#u85de6a30-c750-5369-ab1c-8f2eeb654e00)

Below the hill, most of the fields at Bridge End Farm were still good grazing land. But much use that was to anybody now.

According to Matt, he would soon be a glorified park keeper instead of a farmer. Without headage payments, there was no way he could raise sheep, for a start. In future, British lamb would cease to exist, and everything the consumer bought would be flown in from New Zealand. It would happen the same way it did with Brazilian beef and Danish pig meat, he said. Countryside Stewardship schemes were all very well. Maintaining the landscape and conserving biodiversity? Fair enough. But Matt was baffled that the country didn’t see any value in an ability to feed itself.

Ben drew his car into the yard in front of the farmhouse, trying to imagine the place empty and deserted, cleared of its animals. Not just a silent spring, but silent all year round.

Bridge End had been one of those traditional mixed farms that had once characterized British agriculture. Animals were fed with crops grown on the farm, and in turn they fertilized the fields with manure for the next crop. For Ben and Matt, growing up on the farm, it had seemed such a logical and natural cycle that they assumed it would go on for ever. But even by the 1990s mixed farms had already become a quaint eccentricity.

Perhaps his father wouldn’t have cared too much. Joe Cooper had never really been interested in the farm. True, he had occasionally rolled up his sleeves to help. With his shirt open at the neck, he would reveal a rare, vulnerable flash of white skin and a proud smile at working alongside his two sons. It was one of the abiding images that Ben still carried – though, at the time, he hadn’t thought of his father as remotely vulnerable. Like the farm, it had seemed that Sergeant Joe Cooper would go on for ever.