When he arrived back in Edendale town centre, Cooper thought about Roger Hicklin and his Deluge.
The world needs a good clean-out, don’t you think?
Cooper looked at the water pouring down the main roads and swirling away into the alleys on either side. The water was dirty brown, and its stink was vile. It was filled with mud and debris scoured from the hillsides or forced up out of the drains and dumped on to the streets of the town. For all the world, it looked and smelled as though nature had developed a nasty case of unstoppable diarrhoea. Clean wasn’t the word for it.
By the time Charlie Dean and Sheena Sullivan left the house in Green Hill that Sunday, it was already late afternoon, and it had started to rain again.
They’d stayed much longer than Charlie had intended, and they would both have to work on their excuses before they got home. But the house had been so comfortable compared to other locations they’d used in the past that it was hard for either of them to tear themselves away.
As he waited for Sheena, Charlie looked out of the sitting room window. This property had views to die for over Wirksworth, and beyond the town to the hills on the far side of the Ecclesbourne Valley. It stood at the top of one of the steepest hills in Derbyshire, and on one of the narrowest roads in the county too. He knew exactly what it was like up here – his own house was on the adjacent road, The Dale, which was just as steep and narrow. It curled back and linked into Green Hill at the top, where the sides of the quarries prevented either road from continuing further west.
‘Are you ready?’ he called. ‘We need to be moving.’
‘Nearly.’
Charlie cursed quietly. She could be such a nuisance. She didn’t seem to take things seriously enough. This was all going to fall apart one day, thanks to her. Either Barbara or Jay would become too suspicious, and that would be the end of it. He could foresee unpleasant scenes sooner or later.
When Sheena finally appeared, they went outside. The BMW had been standing under the car port out of the rain, and out of sight of the neighbours. The owners of the house must have kept cans of petrol here, or some motor oil. He could smell it when they left by the back door and he paused for a moment to unlock the car. He wasn’t worried that the car might have developed an oil leak – he was very careful about things like that, and always had the BMW serviced regularly. It paid to look after the possessions you valued. He walked round the car, though, just to make sure.
‘Hurry up, Charlie, I’m getting wet,’ said Sheena. ‘I hate getting wet. You know that.’
‘Well, don’t stand out in the rain, silly cow,’ he said.
‘Don’t call me a silly cow.’
‘For goodness sake—look, the car’s open. Get in. And be careful where you’re stepping. It smells as though there might have been some oil spilled in here.’
As soon as he pulled out on to Green Hill, Charlie Dean knew there was something wrong. The brake pedal felt spongy when he pressed it to hold the car on the steep hill. He pumped it desperately, got only a slight response, then felt the pedal go flat to the floor.
‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’
‘There’s nothing in the brakes,’ he said.
‘We’re going too fast.’
‘I know!’
The car just made the first of the tight corners.
The pedal hit the floor.
‘Shit.’
‘Charlie, do something!’
‘I can’t. The steering’s gone too.’
The car slewed round another corner, scraping the wall of a house and peeling off shards of limestone. Metal screeched in protest all along the side of the car. A flower tub went flying, a recycling bag scattered its contents across the windscreen. Sheena began to scream.
‘Shut up, shut up!’ yelled Charlie, wrestling the steering wheel in futile fury.
His tyres bumped crazily over the stone setts, the nearside wheel hit a step and a tyre burst. The wing of the BMW dipped and sparks flew into the air as the bodywork scoured itself against the stone, leaving a trail of red paint flakes on the road. The rear end began to slew from side to side, swiping a Fiat Uno parked at the kerb and sending its wing mirror spinning off into the distance.
The car continued to veer from side to side, dented a telegraph pole on one side, and took out a plastic grit bin on the other. An overhanging bough of ivy rattled across the roof like gunshots.
Eyes wide, his hands sweaty, Charlie stared at the hill ahead. The narrowest corner was coming up, where there was an ancient stone house with mullioned windows. He knew it was the last bend before the run down into the Market Place past the bookshop and the hairdresser’s. Beyond it, if he couldn’t stop the car, he’d be flying out into the traffic on St John’s Street.
He’d forgotten the junction with The Dale. Ironic, when it was the street he lived on. When he was within a few yards, a white delivery van nosed out of the junction. The driver saw him coming and stopped, gaping at the vehicle swinging from one side of the road to the other.
Charlie only had one option. He yanked on the handbrake. The rear wheels locked, the back end swung round, the nose caught a stone step and the BMW flipped over, turning twice in the air before it hit the van, crushing its bonnet, then bounced off and slid into St John’s Street on its roof. A Sixes bus ploughed into it, pushing it up on to the pavement in front of Ken’s Mini Market, where it lay with its engine still running and fragments of glass showering into the gutter.
For a moment, everything was unnaturally silent. Then people began to shout. And Sheena Sullivan continued to scream.
29
Barbara Dean had always known there were moments when your life changed. When a ring on the doorbell might mark the end of
then
and the beginning of
now
. A before and an after, divided by a turn of the latch and the opening of a door. A moment when you found two police officers standing on your step. And you
knew
. It was more than an interruption of normality. It was a closing down of life, as if someone had turned off the power to your world and plunged it into darkness.
As she stood and stared at the two officers, Barbara realised that one of them was speaking. She could see his mouth moving. But the sentences had gone missing in the air somewhere between them.
It was as if there was a time lag, his words bouncing off a distant satellite and returning slowly to earth, reaching her ears long after they’d been spoken. But no – not reaching her ears, but her brain. She heard the sounds, but her mind wouldn’t process them into anything that made sense. This wasn’t what she’d expected to happen.
They came into the hallway and sat in her lounge. Their presence on her leather sofa was so unnatural that they might as well have been wax dummies that had been stolen from Madame Tussaud’s. They looked almost like real police officers, but there was something creepily wrong with them.
‘They crashed at the bottom of Green Hill,’ the first officer was saying.
Barbara could detect from his tone that he’d said it already, perhaps more than once.
‘Was he badly injured?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Is he dead?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
She sat for a few moments trying to make sense of the answers. The two officers sat forward on the sofa, uncomfortable and anxious to leave.
‘They?’ she said.
‘Your husband had a passenger, Mrs Dean.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There was someone else in the car with him. A woman, we believe. We thought—’
‘What?’
‘We thought it might have been you.’
So that explained the looks of surprise when she answered the door. They’d expected to find no one home, or a teenage child perhaps. That would have been worse for them, she supposed – having to break the news to a child that their parents had been in an accident. It was foolish that she should feel a surge of relief on their behalf. As if it was some consolation that they only had to inform the grieving widow.
‘Could it be a mistake?’ she asked. ‘Are you sure it was Charlie?’
The other officer consulted a notebook. ‘He was driving a red BMW 5 series.’ He read out the registration number. ‘Does your husband own that vehicle?’
‘I can’t remember registration numbers,’ she said.
‘It’s registered in his name.’
‘Well, then. That’s probably right.’
She felt a laugh beginning to rise up in her chest, and stifled it with a cough. They would think she was hysterical. Did they still slap women across the face to cure hysteria? Or was that only in films? She was laughing at herself, though – at her silly inability to make the right responses.
‘What am I supposed to say?’ she asked, looking at the older of the two. The officer must have dealt with situations like this before, would know what words people normally spoke in these circumstances, how a well-balanced woman responded to the news of her husband’s violent and sudden death.
‘Is there anyone we can call to be with you?’ asked the officer instead. ‘A friend or relative? It’s best not to be on your own.’
So that was how she was supposed to behave. She should seek a shoulder to cry on, turn to her best friend for support or run to her mother for comfort. She didn’t feel like doing any of those things. So what was wrong with her?
‘I was cooking supper,’ she said. ‘He should have been home by now.’
Both officers nodded sympathetically. To Barbara, it looked like approval. So perhaps, after all, she was behaving exactly the way they expected.
‘You shouldn’t be alone.’
‘But I want to be alone.’
‘You might want to talk to someone.’ The female officer pulled a leaflet out of her pocket. A list of grief counsellors and their phone numbers. In case she wanted to talk to a stranger.
‘Thank you.’
She made no effort to take the leaflet, so the officer placed it on the table, then added her card. ‘You can reach us here.’
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
She wondered how she was doing, whether she was repeating meaningless phrases too much. How would these police officers be judging her? Too cold, too unemotional? She knew enough about the police to realise they were always judging the way people acted, how they responded to questions, whether they looked guilty or furtive, or ashamed.
‘Will you be all right?’ The younger officer sounded genuinely concerned. But it was probably just an act. They did it all the time. But for Barbara, it was a first.
And Barbara Dean had no idea why she’d reacted in this way to the news. It was the last thing she would have expected of herself. If she’d ever thought about it, she would have imagined feeling a huge sense of relief at the news of Charlie’s death, the knowledge of a burden lifted from her life, the end of ten years of torment.
But now she was thinking that those ten years could have been worse. After all, he’d never shouted at her, and she had never screamed at him. They’d hated each other, but only in whispers.
At least it was an opportunity to stay away from the office. With news spreading that the team from the Major Crimes Unit were arriving at West Street, Diane Fry was keeping clear. In fact, it was a miracle the MCU had been able to find Edendale so quickly. Normally, officers based in St Ann’s were like lost sheep without a sheepdog when they had to venture over the M1 into Derbyshire. The Eden Valley probably wasn’t even on their satnavs.
So here she was in Wirksworth, following up the death of the estate agent, Charlie Dean, and feeling like a version of Ben Cooper, chasing some mystery that she couldn’t explain, but which was challenging all her instincts.
And that was another thing she had to do. She had to corner Ben Cooper … If it took her the whole of the next week, she would have to pin him down and force him to explain how he knew the name of Sean Gibson, the man whose fingerprint was found on the phone lying in the mud of the stream bed at Sparrow Wood, the same man who was now being sought by the MCU from their incident room in Edendale. Cooper couldn’t be allowed to get away with being so enigmatic, even if she had forced him into it herself.
Fry turned up The Dale, passing the exact spot where Charlie Dean’s BMW had been flattened by the number 6.1 bus from Belper. Parking was difficult enough everywhere in Wirksworth, and there was certainly nowhere to park at the Deans’ house – not without completely blocking the road. It was far too narrow to risk her car.
Fry could see the family liaison officer’s Vauxhall on the gravel. There might have been enough room for two vehicles, if it wasn’t for a heap of sand and a pile of breeze blocks and other building materials occupying the space next to the Vauxhall.
She had to carry on all the way up The Dale and turn round at the top, where the road curved back into Green Hill. She came down again slowly, and had gone past Magnolia Cottage again before she reached some residents’ parking spaces under a high retaining wall, where she was able to park the Audi between a flowering cherry tree and a pink Citroën 2CV. It was a fifty-yard walk back up to the house. Much too far, especially in the rain.
‘How do people manage for parking here?’ she asked the FLO.
‘Mrs Dean has a resident’s permit to park in Rydes Yard, the council car park a few hundred yards down.’
Fry examined Barbara Dean critically. She was one of those women worn down by life, so drained of energy and emotion that she looked like a washed-out shadow. Mrs Dean seemed slow to respond to anything, reluctant to express an emotion in case it squeezed out the last drops of her spirit and left her empty and crumpled, like an old plastic bag. Her eyes were withdrawn, her face devoid of expression.
Fry had seen this sort of woman before. When others around them smiled or laughed, their mouths barely twitched. In some women, that might suggest too much Botox, their facial muscles frozen from attempts to resist the process of ageing. But not the likes of Barbara Dean. These women were frozen on the inside, their souls crushed by the intolerable strain of being alive. Now and then, Fry was consumed by the fear that she might end up like that herself in a few years’ time. It might only take one bad decision to trap her into a situation she was unable to escape, and all the life could be drained from her too.