Scared to Live. Stephen Booth

bewildered reaction brought Cooper to a halt as he remembered the fourth crime scene. At this moment it was lying in the mortuary, waiting to be examined for whatever information it could yield. It was Rose Shepherd’s body.

      After Fry had dropped Gavin Murfin off at West Street with his instructions, she drove straight back to Darwin Street. Things were happening here, at least. All the appropriate people were gathering, including the fire service’s divisional officer and his investigation team. Their brief was to work with the appointed investigating police officer – which was her, for now.

      Her next job would be to decide whether the attendance of a forensic scientist was needed. Of course, she’d be mad to try to manage without an expert when three deaths were involved. It would be too late to change her mind once the scene had been compromised. But there was a procedure to be followed before she could commit resources.

      Right now, the fire service had taken possession of the scene. They’d brought in their own dog team from Alfreton, and a chocolate brown Labrador bitch wearing blue protective boots and a reflective harness was being deployed by her handler in the ground-floor rooms of the Mullen house. A firefighter told her the dog was called Fudge, though her official title was ‘post-fire search tool’.

      Never mind the fancy names. The important fact was that the dog could search the scene faster than any conventional equipment. It had been trained to locate the presence of flammable liquids that could have been used to start the fire, and then give a passive alert to the handler, so that evidence wasn’t disturbed.

      To the dog, it was all a game. There’d be a reward when it found what it was looking for. More than Fry would get, probably. No one would be waiting to pat her on the head and give her a chicken-flavoured Schmacko.

      Well, she didn’t like animals much, but she had to admit the Labrador’s expertise was a good example of focus, considering all the other smells that must have bombarded the dog when it entered the house. Lucky animal, not to have to worry about what these humans had been up to inside 32 Darwin Street.

      Fry’s mobile rang. It was Murfin, his voice sounding slightly muffled as usual. If he wasn’t actually eating, he was salivating at the thought of his next snack.

      ‘Hi, Gavin.’

      ‘I called the hospital, like you told me. They say Brian Mullen is awake. He’ll be fit to be interviewed in the morning.’

      ‘Great.’

      ‘I suppose you’ll want to do that after the morning briefing?’

      ‘Yes, I want to get to him as soon as I can.’

      ‘Want me to come along?’

      ‘Er … no thanks, Gavin. There’ll be plenty for you to do on the Shepherd enquiry.’

      ‘OK. I don’t like hospitals anyway.’

      As she ended the call, Fry saw the fire service dog padding across the debris in its blue boots. The animal was wagging its tail, happy to have done its bit. Was it Schmacko time already?

      ‘So what’s the result? Did the dog find anything?’

      ‘Yes. She identified accelerant in two locations in the sitting room,’ said the handler. ‘I’ve marked the locations for further investigation by the DO – or the forensic scientists, if you’re calling them in.’

      ‘Great job. Thanks.’

      Fry was already reaching for her phone again. Traces of accelerant were evidence of malicious intent. A chocolate Lab called Fudge had just upped the stakes in this enquiry.

       9

      Below the hill, most of the fields at Bridge End Farm were still good grazing land. But much use that was to anybody now.

      According to Matt, he would soon be a glorified park keeper instead of a farmer. Without headage payments, there was no way he could raise sheep, for a start. In future, British lamb would cease to exist, and everything the consumer bought would be flown in from New Zealand. It would happen the same way it did with Brazilian beef and Danish pig meat, he said. Countryside Stewardship schemes were all very well. Maintaining the landscape and conserving biodiversity? Fair enough. But Matt was baffled that the country didn’t see any value in an ability to feed itself.

      Ben drew his car into the yard in front of the farmhouse, trying to imagine the place empty and deserted, cleared of its animals. Not just a silent spring, but silent all year round.

      Bridge End had been one of those traditional mixed farms that had once characterized British agriculture. Animals were fed with crops grown on the farm, and in turn they fertilized the fields with manure for the next crop. For Ben and Matt, growing up on the farm, it had seemed such a logical and natural cycle that they assumed it would go on for ever. But even by the 1990s mixed farms had already become a quaint eccentricity.

      Perhaps his father wouldn’t have cared too much. Joe Cooper had never really been interested in the farm. True, he had occasionally rolled up his sleeves to help. With his shirt open at the neck, he would reveal a rare, vulnerable flash of white skin and a proud smile at working alongside his two sons. It was one of the abiding images that Ben still carried – though, at the time, he hadn’t thought of his father as remotely vulnerable. Like the farm, it had seemed that Sergeant Joe Cooper would go on for ever.

      He’d been trying to train himself to remember those happier images, instead of the one that had tormented him for years: the bloodied body on the paving stones that he’d never actually seen. Some of the youths responsible for Joe Cooper’s death were already back out in the world at the end of their sentences. Two years for manslaughter, that was all. First-time offenders, of course. Ben knew he was bound to run into one of them some day soon. It was probably futile to hope that he wouldn’t recognize them.

      ‘Bad do about that family in Edendale,’ said Matt when he greeted his brother in front of the house. ‘The fire, I mean.’

      ‘Yes, really bad.’

      ‘Are you working on that?’

      ‘We don’t know if it was malicious or not yet.’

      ‘It’s not good when kids are involved, whatever it was.’

      Matt removed his boots and stripped off his overalls in the porch. A tabby cat immediately jumped up and inspected the overalls to see if they’d make a decent bed.

      ‘Actually, I was down at Foxlow earlier,’ said Ben. ‘We had a shooting.’

      ‘Oh, I heard,’ said Matt.

      ‘Did you?’

      ‘It was Neville Cross who found the body, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Well, not quite. But he made the call.’

      ‘Neville’s the NFU rep, you know.’

      ‘So the farmers’ grapevine has been busy, has it?’

      ‘Something like that.’

      Matt stroked the cat absent-mindedly. His hand was huge, so it covered the animal’s head completely. Only its ears protruded, trembling with the vibration of a deep purr.

      ‘Come into the office, Ben. There’s something I want to show you.’

      ‘Is there room for two people?’

      ‘As long as you don’t mind sharing your breathing space with a smelly old dog.’

      The farm office was cramped and untidy. It was the aspect of the farm that Matt paid least attention to, because it meant being indoors. Occasionally, Kate came in to help out with the paperwork and sort the mess into some kind of order, so they muddled through year by year, driving their accountants up the wall. ‘I’m a stockman, not a filing clerk,’ Matt would say. But deep down, he probably knew that this failing was the reason he was doomed. These days,