Dead And Buried

Exasperated, Cooper watched her go, walking down the corridor to greet her DCI from the Major Crime Unit. He shook his head in despair. He seemed to have spent a huge part of his life watching Diane Fry walk away.

‘But hey,’ he called. ‘Diane — what about the victim you found at the Light House?’

Fry paused just for a moment, barely breaking her stride.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about that, DS Cooper. The investigation is in good hands this time.’

Cooper nodded, reluctantly forced to accept her answer, and even the tone it had been delivered in.

But it was true what he’d said. There were very few murder cases that dragged on for months, let alone years. Usually the story was an obvious one. A body turned up, and a suspect presented himself on a plate. Charges were brought and the crime went down in the files as detected.

So there was a powerful temptation to use the logic in reverse. If a case like the Pearson inquiry had gone on for years, with no sign of a body, the chances were high that it wasn’t a murder. Experience alone suggested that conclusion, and statistics backed it up.

So Gavin Murfin was far from alone in the opinion he’d formed. He might just be the only one prepared to voice it so openly right now.

DCI Alistair Mackenzie had arrived to take charge as senior investigating officer. He was a big man, over six feet tall and wide across the shoulders. A bit top-heavy perhaps, carrying too much weight above the belt to be fast on his feet. He had a shrewd stare, and a habit of tilting his head on one side when he looked at you.

Fry had begun to get used to him. She liked to know who she was dealing with, particularly if they could be influential in her career. She’d weighed him up when they’d worked together briefly after he was drafted into E Division for the Bridge End Farm inquiry. She didn’t think he’d be difficult to handle, even though he’d once accused her of being a farm girl. That impression she could dispel pretty quickly.

‘Everything all right, Diane?’ asked Mackenzie.

‘Yes, sir. Fine.’

‘It’s a bit strange to be back among your old colleagues so soon, I suppose?’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘That’s what I like to hear.’

Fry knew he liked to hear that. She’d heard him say it before. The DCI wanted to think his officers could cope with anything. Finding yourself back among your former colleagues, the ones you’d tried so hard to escape from, was definitely nothing to worry about. It was no problem. No problem at all.

In a back street in the north of Edendale, a white Mitsubishi L200 pickup was parked at the kerb outside a semi-detached council house. People on the street passed it without comment — barely noticing it, in fact, seeing just another workmen’s vehicle. Repairs were being carried out on some of the homes on the Devonshire Estate. Vans, pickups and builder’s skips had been a common sight in the street for months.

The paintwork of the Mitsubishi was spattered with tarry black specks, as if it had been parked under a sycamore tree. But that wasn’t unusual either. The clouds of smoke drifting over the moors had been depositing sooty debris far and wide, ever since the first moorland fire had started in the Peak District six weeks ago.

So when two men appeared from one of the houses, no one took any notice of them. After they’d driven away, not a single passer-by in the street could have said what the men looked like. No one could have had a guess at the make or registration number of the pickup. A few wouldn’t even have been sure that it was white.

But that was always the way with memories. There was almost nothing you could rely on as being completely accurate.

7

When Cooper entered the conference room, he found that his immediate boss, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, had been drafted in for the briefing to represent E Division. Hitchens had the unenviable task of summing up the efforts made in the original Pearson inquiry, and the sparseness of the ultimate results.

As he listened with the other officers in the room, Cooper became aware for the first time of the complications of the inquiry. He’d been a DC on the division then, but too lowly in the hierarchy to grasp the overall picture. He recalled taking witness statements that had provided nothing of any value to the investigation, talking for hours to people who had no useful information to give. He’d been sent back to ask more and more questions, until he felt he was scraping the barrel and not producing a thing for his efforts.

So much was known about David and Trisha Pearson after all those months of careful investigation. Yet so little of it had proved to be of any use in finding them.