The corpse bridge, p.5
The Corpse Bridge, page 5
‘Happy now?’ said Cooper when there was no reply.
Diane Fry twisted uncomfortably at her desk in the Major Crime Unit at St Ann’s in Nottingham. She wasn’t happy.
Fry had just come back from a meeting with her DCI, Alistair Mackenzie.
‘We can’t just leave them to get on with it,’ he’d said.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s our job.’
It was frustrating being the new girl all over again and not feeling able to argue too much. But Fry felt there were some things that weren’t her job.
‘We’ve got so much else on,’ she said, though she was pointing out the obvious.
Mackenzie was unmoved. ‘It makes no difference, Diane. Besides—’
‘What?’ She could see him getting round to breaking some kind of bad news. He wasn’t sure how she was going to react. Fry knew herself well enough to realise it probably meant she was going to react badly. ‘Sir? What is it?’
‘We’ve had a request from Derbyshire. Specifically, E Division.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Fry. ‘I spent enough time there. I filled in at Divisional CID in Edendale for months while Ben Cooper was on extended sick leave. It was too much. I couldn’t stand going back and doing the same thing again.’
‘That’s not—’ began Mackenzie.
‘Besides, DS Cooper is back at work now. I know he is. I was there when he returned. There can’t be someone else…?’
Mackenzie was shaking his head patiently. ‘No, you’re getting completely the wrong end of the stick, Diane.’
‘Am I?’
Fry tried to restrain herself. But the sudden prospect that had risen in her mind was too scary. After Ben Cooper’s tragedy in the pub fire, she’d been unable to decline the temporary assignment back to E Division, a secondment to take charge of her old team in Divisional CID. A refusal would have been impossible, especially in those circumstances.
And then there had been the unexpected final task, the more personal one for which she was totally unsuited. Breaking bad news, adding another psychological burden to someone who was already down. She had no personal skills for doing that. Ben Cooper must be used to hearing only bad news from her by now. The thought caused an unexpected stab of pain in her abdomen.
‘Let me explain,’ said Mackenzie.
So Fry reluctantly sat and listened to his explanation of the request from Derbyshire. She fidgeted at the thought of the task she was being presented with. It opened up all kinds of possibilities in her mind, some of which were completely unprofessional. She suppressed the flight of imagination immediately. Totally inappropriate.
‘Why me?’ she said when Mackenzie had finished.
The DCI raised his hands. ‘You’re the obvious person. You’ve got to admit that, Diane.’
‘Perhaps.’
He looked at her more seriously. ‘This is a compliment, you know. It’s a sign of how highly you’re regarded. Don’t just throw that away.’
Fry bit her lip. She knew she was going to have to accept. In fact, her mind was already turning over the ways she might approach the task. Her relationship with Ben Cooper was complicated, but she had to put all that aside. Feelings couldn’t come into it. Definitely not.
She gazed back at Mackenzie for a moment, and finally she nodded. There was only one thing to do. She would just have to take the bull by the horns.
7
The interior of Pilsbury Cottage was cramped and dark. The windows in these old cottages were always too small and the ceilings too low. It reminded Cooper that his ancestors must have been people of short stature who spent their time crouched in candlelight huddled against the cold.
‘We need the lights on,’ he said.
‘Here.’
Irvine found the switches and the sitting room sprang into focus. It was still cramped, but the furniture and wallpaper were decorated in a series of bright chintzy patterns that made the light suddenly painful on his tired eyes.
‘Check upstairs for any signs that anyone else has been here,’ said Cooper. ‘Then see if you can find a diary and an address book.’
‘Anyone else? Oh, you mean like a boyfriend?’ said Irvine. ‘Shaver in the bathroom, slippers under the bed?’
‘Possibly.’
While Irvine disappeared upstairs, Cooper stood in the middle of the sitting room and turned through three hundred and sixty degrees to perform a quick survey. The objects scattered around were a little out of the ordinary. They reminded him of the sort of thing his sister Claire collected. Abstract pottery, ethnic art, bowls full of crystals and stacks of scented candles. A Native American dreamcatcher hung from the ceiling and a pack of Tarot cards stood on a bookshelf. One wall was covered with a rug woven in vibrant colours with tribal African figures.
He noticed a large wicker basket next to one of the armchairs by the fireplace. When he lifted the lid, he found balls of wool, scraps of material, knitting needles, a case full of pins and cotton thread, another of buttons and small glass beads.
Cooper saw a phone on a table by the window. He pressed the answering machine button to play back the messages. But a recorded voice told him there weren’t any. Even the old messages had been deleted. There was a calls list function too, but the only recent numbers it showed were listed as unavailable.
That was odd. It was almost like someone was trying to hide their contact history. It certainly wasn’t a normal thing for the victim of a crime to do. People didn’t expect to meet their death when they left the house.
Cooper walked through into the tiny kitchen and found a laptop computer sitting on the table. He looked out of the back door, where there was only a tiny square of garden tucked under the hillside. He could see over a stone wall into a few acres of sheep pasture.
‘Can you see an address book or anything with phone numbers in?’ he called, when he heard Irvine come back downstairs.
Irvine had begun opening and closing drawers in a pine dresser in the sitting room. ‘Not yet. But come and have a look – I’ve found a diary.’
‘Is it a big one?’
‘No, tiny. A little pocket diary.’
‘She didn’t record every detail of her life, then.’
‘No such luck.’
Irvine passed him the diary. The cover was plastic, but textured to make it look like leather, and it had little brass corners to protect it from getting dog-eared from use by the end of the year. Cooper riffled through and saw the information it provided would be sparse. There were four days to a page and Sandra Blair had used the space mostly to record dates when she was working, the times of WI meetings, dental appointments, an eye test.
He turned to Thursday 31 October. But the section was blank. To Cooper’s eye, it looked suspiciously blank. After the absence of messages on the answering machine, it looked as though Sandra had deliberately failed to mention where she was going last night. Not even to her own diary.
But what about tonight? Well, here was an entry at last. So Sandra hadn’t planned to die last night. For Friday 1 November, she’d written: ‘Meet Grandfather, 1am.’
‘What does it say?’ asked Irvine.
‘“Meet Grandfather, 1am.” What do you think that means?’
‘Well, someone was meeting their grandfather, I guess.’
‘Grandfather?’ said Cooper. ‘How old was Sandra Blair, Luke?’
‘We think she was around thirty-five. But that’s an estimate from Mrs Beresford.’
Cooper did a quick mental calculation. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. But her grandfather would be approaching eighty, at least.’
‘My grandfather wouldn’t be out meeting anyone at one o’clock in the morning,’ said Irvine. ‘He’s in bed with his hot chocolate by ten at the latest.’
‘There are grandfathers and grandfathers, though.’
Cooper was remembering his Granddad Frank, his mother’s father. He’d been a tough old bird, who’d spent most of his life working on the roads as a foreman in the county council’s highways department. That was in the days before health and safety, when Frank and his colleagues worked on all kinds of jobs and in all conditions wearing their overalls and flat caps. As foreman, Granddad Frank had insisted on wearing a tie too. He could have walked twenty miles when he was aged nearly eighty, and he never seemed to get more than three or four hours’ sleep.
‘Whose grandfather, then?’ asked Irvine.
‘I have no idea.’
Irvine frowned. ‘That’s a shame, Ben. She was supposed to be meeting him tonight, whoever he is.’
‘Tonight?’ said Cooper. ‘Or last night?’
‘It’s an entry for today, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but at one in the morning,’
‘Oh, I see what you mean.’
‘If you were going somewhere at one o’clock in the morning, would you enter it in your diary for that day or the day before?’
‘Where would I be going at 1 a.m.?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not familiar with your social life. An all-night party? A rave?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Irvine thought about it for a moment. ‘Probably the day before. Because that’s when I’d need to remember it. The next day would be no good. If I was the sort of person who might forget something like that.’
‘Speaking of which,’ said Cooper. ‘I haven’t seen any car keys yet. You?’
‘No. There’s a handbag here with the usual sort of stuff in. A purse, but no keys.’
Cooper looked round. They’d left the front door open when they entered the house, just in case someone passing by got worried about them being burglars.
‘Close the door for a minute, Luke,’ he said.
Irvine looked surprised, but he pushed the door shut. On the back of it was a row of coat hooks, which held two or three jackets, a waterproof and a scarf.
‘Try the pockets of the top jacket,’ said Cooper.
Irvine patted the pockets, dived in with a hand and pulled out a set of car keys on a fob with a logo.
‘Eureka,’ he said with a happy grin.
‘Let’s take a look in the car, then.’
It was while they were searching the car that a member of the public stopped to ask what they were doing. Irvine showed his warrant card and assured him there was nothing to worry about. Cooper watched the man as he left reluctantly. It would be all round the village in half an hour that something was going on at Pilsbury Cottage. But it couldn’t be helped.
‘Nothing in the boot,’ said Irvine, except some bags of old clothes. ‘It looks as though she was planning to take them to the charity shop.’
Cooper smiled. He opened the glove compartment, pushed aside some old car parking tickets and till receipts, and put his hand on an address book.
‘Excellent.’
They went back inside the house, away from prying eyes again.
‘Luke, did you find a sketch pad in any of the drawers?’ asked Cooper.
‘A what?’
‘A sketch pad. Blank pages that you can draw on.’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Let me know if you see one.’
‘By the way, we’ll need a formal identification, won’t we?’ said Irvine, peering into a broom cupboard.
‘Of course. But it’s more important to use these first few hours trying to pick up as much evidence as we can before the lines of inquiry start to go cold.’
‘Yes.’
‘Besides,’ said Cooper, ‘I think we can be fairly sure of who our victim is.’
He picked up a framed photograph from the dresser. Sandra Blair was pictured with a dark-haired man leaning against a stone wall. They were smiling broadly and had their arms round each other. ‘This must be her husband that she’s with. How long ago did he die?’
‘Around five years. His name was Gary.’
There were other photos on the dresser. One was apparently from the Blairs’ wedding day, with Sandra in an elaborate white dress and Gary looking embarrassed in his suit and tie, with a white buttonhole. Another was of an earlier family group, taken perhaps twenty years ago – mother and father, with two teenage girls. Sandra and her sister, he assumed, though Mrs Blair was unrecognisable as a fifteen-year-old.
‘Do we know the sister’s name?’ asked Cooper.
‘No, the Beresfords couldn’t remember. They think she might live in the Dundee area, and she’s married with three or four children. But that’s all we have at the moment.’
‘We must get on to that. Neighbours—’
‘I know. I’ll go now.’
‘Thanks, Luke. Then we’ll try her colleagues at the place Mrs Blair worked in Hartington. And the Women’s Institute too, if necessary.’
When Irvine had left to call at the houses on either side of Pilsbury Cottage, Cooper looked through the address book. Well, it said ‘Addresses’ on the cover, but it turned out to have very few addresses in it. Names and phone numbers, yes. But many were just first names. Only a few numbers such as the dentist’s and the doctor’s surgery were immediately identifiable. Someone would have to go through the book entry by entry and call all these people. First of all, it would help to identify a Dundee dialling code.
Cooper pulled out his iPhone. The easiest way was to do a quick Google search, provided there was a good signal here. It took a few seconds for him to find the code was 01382. He flicked through the pages of the address book, but found no matches.
It was frustrating that there were no addresses given. Of course, there must be an address list somewhere, even if it was only for sending out Christmas cards. Unless Sandra Blair was the kind of person who sent digital cards by email. He went to the kitchen table and switched on the laptop. As soon as it booted up, he saw that it was password protected, as he suspected. That would be a task for a computer forensics analyst who would be able to crack the password and extract files and emails.
Then Cooper went upstairs. Luke had already been up here, so he didn’t spend much time looking for evidence of a second person being present. The neighbours would know about that, if anyone did. It was impossible to miss much of what was going on in an area like this.
At the bottom of the bedside cabinet, he found what he was looking for. It was folded inside a copy of Woman’s Weekly Craft Special, among several other magazines. At first glance it looked like a pattern book. Sandra had covered it with a swatch of velvety material. Cooper ran his hand over its smoothness. She’d made a nice effort of it too. But it was the right size and feel.
When he opened the book, it fell directly to the last page. The page where Sandra Blair had made her sketch of the Corpse Bridge effigy.
8
Cooper parked the Toyota in Hartington Market Place, close to the duck pond. Legend said that it was actually a ‘ducking pond’, originally used for subjecting suspected witches to water torture to make them confess. But today half a dozen white ducks were on the pond anyway, doing their bit to wipe out the memory of its true purpose. They couldn’t have done a better job if they’d been paid by the tourist authority.
In fact, Hartington was an odd mixture of tourist and traditional, with tea rooms and an antiques shop rubbing shoulders with the village stores and a post office with its Victorian postbox still standing outside the door. Self-catering cottages stood opposite the Royal British Legion club, where a notice advertised grocery bingo on the third Sunday of every month.
‘So that’s all the neighbours knew,’ Luke Irvine was saying. ‘Sandra kept herself to herself pretty much. She was interested in crafts, joined the WI.’
‘We know that,’ said Cooper.
‘And she’d been going out quite a lot in the evenings recently. They didn’t know where.’
‘Or with who?’
‘No. In fact, they were surprised to see that she didn’t go out in her own car last night. There isn’t much in the way of public transport.’
‘Somebody must have picked her up,’ said Cooper. ‘Perhaps just not from in front of her house.’
‘Why would she go to the trouble of sneaking away like that?’
Cooper shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Not yet.’
He locked the car and glanced around the village.
‘Do you know Hartington at all, Luke?’ asked Cooper.
‘Not really. I think there’s a DI from Derby who lives here somewhere, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. He has a house up Hall Bank, near the youth hostel. But we won’t bother him. He’ll be busy.’
Irvine smiled, and Cooper wondered if he’d made a joke. It seemed a long while since that had happened.
‘So what’s the village’s claim to fame?’ asked Irvine, looking round.
‘Cheese,’ said Cooper.
‘Cheese?’
‘Yes, cheese.’
A passer-by turned to stare at them. Cooper laughed now. He suddenly had a picture of himself and Irvine as a couple of tourists having their souvenir photo taken. ‘Say cheese, and let’s have a big grin for the camera.’
But it was true. Until recently Hartington had been a centre for Stilton cheese-making. The cheese factory was built at the Duke of Devonshire’s creamery, where cheese was made from the milk produced by his tenant farmers. There had been other cheese factories in this area – one at Glutton Bridge and one across the river near Sheen. But Hartington had supplied a quarter of the world’s Stilton at one time. The factory closed when it was bought out by a rival company in Leicestershire six years ago. It had been looking increasingly derelict since plans for a residential development on the site were turned down by the planning authority.
Cooper could see the old cheese factory down a side lane off the marketplace. The paint was peeling on the doors and window frames, rubbish was scattered outside, and the sheds and loading bays were gradually losing any sense of function or purpose as they lay abandoned.
In a way the history of the Hartington cheese factory reflected the role of large landowners like Earl Manby. Nearly two hundred people were employed here at the height of its production, many of them living in the village of Hartington itself. They depended on the factory, and its closure took away their livelihoods. Some of them were probably forced to move away to find alternative work.
