Dead And Buried

He stopped, accepting her decision without question, and surprised at himself for it. He looked at her hand on his arm, wondered why he was so struck by her use of his first name. It sounded odd after all these months.

Fry dropped her hand.

‘You’re getting married soon,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Small talk now? Surely not.

‘Good.’

Gavin Murfin appeared, trudging up the track in his green anorak with an armful of files. He wheezed, dropped the files on the ground and threw a mock salute.

‘Messenger boy reporting, ma’am. They said you wanted these.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fry. ‘But I don’t know why they sent you. Any uniform would have done. A PCSO could have managed the job.’

Murfin smiled cheerfully. ‘In view of my vast experience as a detective, they thought I might be of some use to you.’

‘I doubt it.’ Fry picked up the files and began to turn away.

‘So how’s life at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit?’

‘Interesting,’ said Fry sharply.

‘Have you got an acronym for yourselves yet? EMSOU — MC doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?’

Fry turned to him with a sour expression on her face. At one stage in their relationship, a look like that from her would have quelled Murfin without a word being spoken. It didn’t seem to have any effect now.

‘Don’t you have work to do?’ she said. ‘I heard you had an urgent inquiry involving stolen postboxes to deal with. Or has that proved beyond your capabilities?’

Murfin chewed thoughtfully.

‘You know they’re giving me a medal, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘They ought to give you a brain scan,’ said Fry over her shoulder.

‘Why?’

‘Well, someone needs to carry out a proper examination of your pathological behaviour.’

‘Hold on,’ called Murfin as she walked away. ‘Are you calling me a pathologist?’

Fry gritted her teeth, told herself to hang on. Her own DCI would be here in the morning to take charge as senior investigating officer. Until then, it was a question of holding the fort. Grin and bear it. Except she didn’t feel much like grinning.

It would actually be a whole lot better if she could just get rid of some of these people cluttering up the scene. Almost all of them, in fact.

She looked at the firefighting operation still continuing on the moor, the road closure below. There was only one road in, and one road out. That was good. The crime scene was protected, and the evidence collected. Nothing was going anywhere until morning. She knew DCI Mackenzie would back her up.

Alistair Mackenzie was also on a transfer from Derbyshire’s D Division. He was the reason she’d landed the job with EMSOU — MC. She’d worked with him on a case last year — a case she probably shouldn’t mention to Ben Cooper. Well, not unless he started to annoy her, anyway. It had involved Cooper’s brother, and they were all lucky that the outcome hadn’t been much worse.

She looked at the people around her at the scene. Dusk was starting to fall. That was good, too.

‘Okay, I think we can call it a day,’ she said. ‘We’ll pick it up again tomorrow morning. Full daylight, a complete team, a proper scene examination.’

‘All right.’

She could see Cooper was reluctant, but he didn’t argue. In fact he didn’t say anything as the others began to drift slowly away. Perversely, Fry felt the need to provoke some kind of response from him, even if it was a negative one.

‘Can I leave you to organise a scene guard for tonight?’ she said.

Cooper met her eye calmly. ‘Yes, of course. Whatever you want.’

And for some reason, when Fry gazed at him, the thought that came into her head was: And that was your first mistake.

5

An hour or so later, Ben Cooper was standing uncomfortably in the middle of a room. He was used to entering people’s homes, studying their furniture and bookshelves, getting an idea of the way they lived from an observation of small details. But this was different. He was being asked to examine things he wasn’t really interested in, and which seemed to have no significance. The size of the windows, the height of the ceilings, the decorative stonework on the exposed lintels. It was making him feel uneasy — especially when he was aware that he was being closely observed himself.

‘And look at this. We installed this ourselves.’

He found he’d been ushered into a bathroom. There was something very odd about four people crowding into a bathroom all at once, the whole lot of them gazing at a free-standing claw-footed bath with whirlpool effect, as if it was the prime exhibit at a crime scene.

The thought sent Cooper’s imagination spinning out of control. He began to picture a dead body lying in that bath, a head sprawled against the taps, blood pooling around a claw foot on the laminate flooring as it dripped from a slashed wrist. The wrist would be his if he didn’t escape soon. This house was making him feel suicidal.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Oh … yes.’