‘Let’s see what we’ve got across the way then,’ she said. ‘With luck, body number two might explain everything.’
* * *
It took Fry so long to find her way to the collection of derelict buildings on the hill above Birchlow, the site had already been searched by uniformed officers, and Wayne Abbott had moved on from the field to supervise the scene.
Most of the site consisted of little more than cracked foundations, weed-grown concrete yards and broken fencing. The surrounding bracken and gorse were gradually encroaching on to the site, and weeds had burst holes through the tarmac road.
She stepped through a door sagging from its hinges and gazed at the scene of dereliction inside. The buildings hadn’t been occupied for many years, of course, and the site had reverted to the landowner. Health and Safety might have something to say about the lack of security, though. No locks, no warning signs, no measures to prevent anyone from suffering injuries through collapsing roofs or broken shards of glass.
‘There’s no body here, Sergeant,’ said an officer who had been searching the building. ‘But we’ve found what look like bloodstains on the concrete in the largest hut.’
Fry turned to gaze back across the fields in the direction from which she’d come. The white body tent was clearly visible from here.
‘Well, unless we’ve got a dead man walking, this call wasn’t to a body at all. Our victim was still alive when he came in here – and then he made it across at least two fields before he gave up the ghost.’
‘Why would someone phone in and give this location for the body, then? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Fry, ‘whoever else was here believed the victim was already dead.’
Murfin came up alongside her, shaking himself like a dog. ‘It seems the 999 call was made from a mobile,’ he said. ‘The caller refused to give a name, but we’ve traced the number, and the phone is registered to a Mr Patrick Rawson, with an address in the West Midlands. Control have tried calling the number back, but it just goes to voicemail. The phone is switched off, probably.’
‘Has anyone checked the barn over there?’
At that moment, the sight of Wayne Abbott making his way towards her again through the rain came as a relief to Fry.
‘No drier up here, is it?’ he said.
‘Who’d live in England?’ said Fry.
‘It rains in other countries, you know. I went to Texas for a conference once, and it rained the whole week.’
‘Somehow, that doesn’t sound too bad.’
Fry was wondering how CSMs managed to get sent to conferences in Texas. Perhaps she’d been in the wrong job all this time. No one had ever suggested sending her to Swindon for a conference, let alone the USA.
‘Have you found something?’ she said.
Abbott pushed back the hood of his scene suit. The last time Fry had seen him at an incident, he’d had a shaved head. Now, his hair had begun to grow back in ragged patches, so that his skull looked like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.
‘Well, we’ve got a series of impressions in the soil within a two hundred-yard radius of the hut,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of impressions, actually.’
‘Shoe marks?’
‘Well, sort of.’
‘I thought the rain would have obliterated them by now.’
‘In the usual way of things, yes – that’s what I would have expected, too. Light prints on soft soil like this would have deteriorated beyond use. But these prints are a bit different.’
‘Different how?’
‘The amount of weight behind the shoe marks has imprinted them deep enough into the ground to preserve them in the drier subsoil, where the rain hasn’t affected them so much.’
‘Weight? That makes such a difference?’
Abbott nodded, a knowing smile on his face. ‘This amount of weight does. That, and the fact the shoes in question were made of steel.’
Fry found herself starting to get irritated. She was too wet and uncomfortable to tolerate people playing games.
‘Steel? What on earth are you talking about, Wayne?’
‘Horses,’ said Abbott. ‘I’m talking about horses.’
There was still a lot of processing to do, of course. With his prisoner safely in the hands of the custody sergeant at E Division headquarters in West Street, Cooper made his way reluctantly from the custody suite, dodging the rain to reach the walkway that led into the main building.
In the CID room, the rest of the team were hard at work over their paperwork. DC Luke Irvine and DC Becky Hurst had been given the desks closest to his. They were the newest members of E Division CID, and they made him feel almost like a veteran now that he was in his thirties. They were eager to impress, too – anxious to get every last detail right in their reports and case files before their supervisor saw them. He had to give credit to Diane Fry for that. She had the new DCs with their noses to the grindstone. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of her.
‘Hi, Ben. How did it go?’ called Irvine.
‘Great. A good result.’
‘Wish I’d been there.’
Irvine was a bit too eager, his face still reflecting his excitement in the job, even when he was buried under paperwork. That wouldn’t last.
As he stripped off his stab vest, Cooper felt the last of the tension fall away. Suddenly, he felt bored again. He stared out of the window at the rooftops of Edendale, dark with continuous rain. His mind drifted back two days to the previous Sunday, and he realized the source of his restlessness.
There was a moment when he had been sitting in his brother Matt’s new Nissan 4x4 on the way back from Staffordshire. He recalled the sound of Phil Collins suddenly filling the car. ‘Another Day in Paradise’. The music had broken a painful silence that had lasted since he and Matt, and their sister Claire, had left the National Memorial Arboretum, near Lichfield.
As always, Matt had been gripping the steering wheel as if he was at the controls of a tractor, pushing the John Deere 6030 across a ploughed slope on a Derbyshire hillside, muscles tensed in his forearms as though power-assisted steering had never been invented. He was getting so big now that he could probably pull the plough himself, like a shire horse.
‘We’re not late,’ said Ben. ‘We don’t have an appointment to meet. Personally, I’d rather get home alive.’
‘Oh, am I driving too fast?’
‘Just a bit.’
‘Sorry. I forgot the KGB were in the car.’
Matt had insisted on driving them down from Edendale that morning, because he desperately wanted to show off the new 4x4. In the visitor centre at the arboretum, the first thing Ben had noticed was a huge, carved police officer standing just inside the entrance. It must have been about twelve feet high, like a giant totem pole. A bobby complete with tunic and helmet, but made out of some sort of copper-coloured wood.
After picking up a guide book, they had taken advantage of a break in the rain to cross Millennium Avenue to the plinth marking the start of The Beat, a long avenue of chestnuts. At the top of it was their destination, the Police Memorial