Scared to Live (27 page)

them, to suck them back into his mouth before they reached the air. Then, astonishingly, he smiled at her. It was a charming smile, friendly and guileless. What a nice conversation we're having his expression seemed to say. 'Is there another question?' Fry sighed. 'Yes. Mr Lowther, have you ever seen this before?' She showed him a photograph of the wooden dinosaur. 'Tyrannosaurus.' 'Have you seen it before?' 'No. Is it from abroad?' 'We don't know.' 'Some people go abroad, hunting for whores. No, for babies.' 'What?' 'I'm sorry, I get confused sometimes. I'm not sure what you're asking me. Is it time?' Fry automatically looked at her watch. 'Time?' 'Time to leave.' 'Do you want to leave, sir? You're only here voluntarily, so you can leave whenever you want. We can't keep you against your will. But we only want to ask you some questions, Mr Lowther. We're trying to find out how your sister and her children died.' 'What are they saying?' said Lowther. Again, he seemed to be looking at something behind her. Or perhaps not looking at something, but listening. 'Are you all right, sir?' she asked. 'You don't have to believe what people are saying, you know.' 'I'm sorry, sir, I don't quite follow ' 'The things they say,' he insisted. 'They aren't always right. You don't have to believe them.' 'Which people do you mean particularly?'

Lowther looked anxious. A bead of sweat formed at his temple and trickled slowly towards his jaw. 'Whoever it is that you're listening to. I don't know who they are. I don't know who any of them are.' 'What have people been saying to you, sir? Have you been hearing rumours? Please share any information you have.' Lowther tilted his head. 'I've got exceptional hearing, I'm told. I can hear the people in the next room now.' Fry tried for a while longer, probing for information about his feelings towards Brian Mullen, and about the last time he'd visited the Mullens' house in Darwin Street. But she could feel that she was getting nowhere. The conversation seemed to veer off in directions that she had no control over, and she didn't know how to bring it back under control. She just didn't have anything of substance to use against Lowther and pin him down. When the interview was finally over, they watched John Lowther leave. Then Fry walked back and checked Interview Room Two. 'There wasn't anyone in the next room,' she said. 'So what was he hearing?' asked Cooper. 'I don't know.' 'Something outside? Someone chatting in the corridor?' 'Maybe.' 'Some people do have particularly good hearing. They say blind people develop their other senses to compensate.' 'So what is John Lowther compensating for?' said Fry. 'Let's face it, he's unbalanced.' 'Hang on, Diane. He could be faking it.' 'Faking it?' 'Well, all that stuff was verbal. It was like a smokescreen. He didn't actually answer any of your questions, as I'm sure you noticed.' 'A bit of a teacake,' said Fry thoughtfully. 'What?' 'It was something Gavin said.'

'Well, we shouldn't underestimate Gavin's judgement.' 'I think I'll get John Lowther's background looked into,' said Fry. 'Faking it, or not.' Listening to the interview tapes afterwards, Cooper noticed a pattern to John Lowther's answers. Sometimes he spoke quickly, the words spilling out with no prompting. At other times, he was hesitant, leaving long pauses before he answered. During these periods, he seemed to ramble and go off at tangents, often failing to address the question altogether. At other times, Lowther seemed eager to anticipate what his interviewer was going to say, and tried to complete her sentences for her, often guessing the wrong word from its initial letter or sound. It sounded like a verbal equivalent to the predictive text function on his mobile phone. Both produced gibberish too often to be any real use. Cooper had heard this kind of language before. The sound of it brought back so many unpleasant memories that he knew he was reacting on an emotional level. He tried to suppress the response, to smother assumptions that might prevent him from being objective. These days, his antennae twitched at the first sign of aberrant behaviour in those around him. Right now, he was even more touchy on the subject, thanks to Matt and his obsessions. But not every eccentricity or verbal quirk was a sign of mental illness. He looked around for Fry. 'I wonder if Lowther might have had experience of police interviews before,' he said. But Fry shook her head. 'Not according to the PNC. He doesn't have any previous.' 'No previous convictions, yes. But he might have been questioned and not charged. Should I follow it up?' 'Yes. And don't forget Lowther was on West Yorkshire's patch for three years.' 'OK. Have you done a PNC check on Brian Mullen, by the way?' 'He has no record, not even any driving offences. There's no

local intelligence on him either, so he has no known criminal associates.' 'No one he could call on for a competent arson job, then?' 'I don't think he needed to. This was a personal affair.' 'Right.' Fry watched Cooper put on his jacket and check his mobile phone, ready to leave. 'Are you in Matlock Bath later this afternoon, Ben?' 'Yes. I've got to go back to the shopping village.' 'Do me a favour - keep an eye out for somewhere you might buy a wooden dinosaur.' Cooper stopped. 'What? Oh, the photo that you showed Lowther.' 'I want to find out where this came from. It must be fairly unusual. I've never seen anything like it myself, and Brian Mullen tells me he's never seen it before either. If it was a gift for one of the Mullen children, it might have been from a recent visitor to the house.' Cooper studied the wooden toy closely. 'Hang on - I think I did see something like this in Matlock Bath on Tuesday. Not exactly the same, perhaps - but similar.' He shook his head. 'I'm sorry, Diane, I should have taken more notice.' 'That's OK, Ben. But check it out for me, will you?' Cooper handed the photos back. 'The Rose Shepherd enquiry isn't getting anywhere, is it? It's too unfocused.' 'I agree. What we need is someone to point us in the right direction.' 'Oh, I nearly forgot - there was a message from Sergeant Kotsev,' said Cooper. 'Oh? What does he say?' 'He says his flight from Sofia will land at Manchester Airport at twenty minutes to five.' 'What? He's coming here? For God's sake, why weren't we told about this?'

'I don't know. Maybe there was another message that we missed.' 'And maybe not,' said Fry bitterly. 'Twenty to five? Does he mean today?' 'I suppose so.' 'Damn it, he must have been phoning me from the check in desk. He must have been practically on board the plane already.' 'Do you want to hear the rest of the message?' 'No, but you'd better give it me anyway.' 'Well, he sends his respects to Sergeant Fry. And he wonders if you'd be free to pick him up from the airport.'

22

Cooper decided to drive down through Cromford to reach Matlock Bath. It was a relief to get out into the countryside again. This was his natural environment, not the stuffy meetings to discuss assassinations and organized crime, where he felt uneasy and out of his depth. Let Diane Fry have that side of the job, if she wanted it. Emerging from the canopy of trees on the Via Gellia, he passed a little tufa cottage. This was one of the area's most photographed buildings, and it looked just the way he remembered it - a house made of grey, spongy stone, with wisteria growing up the wall and geraniums in the window boxes, like something out of a fairy tale. A few yards further on, the road swung to the right by the old Pig of Lead pub and the mills nestling in Bonsall Hollow, below Ball Eye Quarry. There was a quirky little bookshop opposite the pond in Cromford - the type of place that had vanished from most high streets, but still lurked in corners of the Peak District. Cooper could see it across the water as he entered the village. On a day like this, he'd have liked to be free to spend an hour or so browsing the shelves, making discoveries, drinking a cup of freshly ground coffee. Maybe there'd be home-made homity pie on the menu.

But he had to drive on, filtering left at the crossroads on to the A6. After the tightly clustered cottages of Cromford, Masson Mill looked enormous in its position between the road and the river. This stretch of the Derwent Valley had been classified as a world heritage site a few years ago. When the centre of the cotton industry moved to Manchester, the mills and millworkers' villages of Derbyshire had been left almost intact in their rural backwater. Some of the old millworkers said that the ghost of Arkwright himself still trod the creaking floorboards at Masson Mill. It was easy to believe that he wasn't long gone when you saw the dusty boxes stacked on the shelves in the spinning room. 'Return to Sir Richard Arkwright. Of course, everyone knew he was buried down the road at Cromford. The mansion he'd built, but never lived in, stood directly across the river from the mill, among trees that he'd planted but never seen grown to maturity. The back wall of the mill overlooked the river. Its five storeys were full of windows - long ranks of them separated into pairs by stone mullions. They were spaced with Victorian precision, but so small and dark that nothing was visible behind the glass. Those windows stared out across the rushing water like blank eyes. There were scores of them, a hundred pairs of eyes - a high, brick wall full of dead faces. Upstream, a fallen tree trunk was caught on the edge of the weir. It jerked from side to side as the flow of water hit it, dead boughs thrashing like a man drowning in the foam. It must have been drawn into the current from the opposite bank, or it would have been carried away into the water channel that fed the mill wheel. Inside the shopping village, Frances Birtland had just arrived and was taking off her coat. 'My neighbour?' she said. 'Rose Shepherd?' 'You don't remember your neighbour coming in on Saturday?'

'No. Did she come in? How embarrassing. But I saw so little of her, that I suppose I didn't recognize her.' 'Your colleague Mrs Hooper recognized her from her photograph in the papers.' Mrs Birtland shook her head. 'I don't read the papers very much. They're always so depressing, aren't they?' 'But you were definitely here all that afternoon?' 'Of course. Did Eva say different?' 'No.' A customer was hovering behind him, and Cooper stood back for a moment. He took the opportunity to check out the stock on the central display units. He prided himself on his observation, but he'd completely missed the wooden toys last time he was here. Cooper picked one up. It wasn't a dinosaur, but the wood looked the same as the toy that Fry had shown him, and the style of carving was identical. He looked at Frances Birtland, who was smiling at him, hoping for a sale. 'Where are these from?' he said. 'Eva has them imported direct from Bulgaria. Traditionally crafted and ecologically friendly. I think they're lovely, don't you?' 'Is there a dinosaur in the range?' 'Yes, but I'm afraid we sold the last one.'

Darren Turnbull pulled his Astra on to the grass verge, waited until a tractor went past, then nipped into the phone box. He never liked using his mobile to ring Magpie Cottage, in case Fiona got hold of the phone and checked his calls. 'You've got to come and meet me outside the village,' he said when Stella answered. 'So you know it's you they're looking for, don't you?' she said. 'You're scared, Darren.'

'I just don't think it's sensible to make a free gift of some gossip to those nosy buggers that live near you.' 'You know what I think - you've got to go to the police.' 'I can't, Stell.' 'They're trying to catch someone who committed a murder.' 'I know, but ' 'So you don't care? You don't care that there's a murderer walking about right in my village, murdering women who live on their own?' 'Oh, Stella, you'll be all right.' 'You ought to be here looking after me and making sure I'm all right.' 'Meet me in Wirksworth or Cromford or somewhere,' he pleaded. 'That's not far to go.' 'And then what, eh?' 'Well ' 'If you think I'm doing it in the back of a car at my age, Darren Turnbull, you've got another think coming. Especially in your bloody Astra, with the police looking for it everywhere. I don't want some copper banging on the window and catching me with my knickers off.' 'We'll go somewhere quiet. There's lots of places we could find.' 'No. Darren, either you go to the police like you should, or I'll phone them myself and tell them who that car belongs to.' 'Stella ' 'Yes, I will. And then they'll come round to your house to pick you up. How would your precious Fiona like that, eh?' Darren went cold at the thought. He glanced guiltily out of the phone box, but no one was around to see him. 'Look, Stell, there's no need for that. I'll come round to the cottage as usual tonight, and we'll have a talk about it, OK?' 'Fine. See you, then. And don't forget the booze.'

Before she left West Street, Fry knocked on the door of the DI's office to report her movements. She found Hitchens staring at a passport that lay on his desk in a clear plastic wallet. Its cover was the familiar burgundy red, with the royal crest embossed in gold. The lion and the unicorn, dieu et mon droit. 'Is that Rose Shepherd's passport?' she asked. 'Yes. Don't you think it's weird to have a French motto on the front of a British passport? I bet most people don't understand what it means.' 'We're in the European Union now,' said Fry. 'We're not supposed to understand what anything means. So why is it here?' 'The HOLMES team checked the passport number. It seems that no such passport was ever issued by the UK authorities. We're going to send it to the FSS for their document examiners to have a look at, but the conclusion seems pretty clear. Rose Shepherd's passport is a forgery. A very good one - but still a forgery.' 'But that means ' Hitchens swivelled his chair to face her. 'Yes, Diane. It means we have absolutely no idea who she really was.'

It was five thirty-eight in the evening when Lazar Zhivko tapped the numbers into the keypad and locked the door of his electrical shop in Stephenson Place, Chesterfield. He rattled the handle to make certain it was secure and looked over his shoulder, as if afraid that a mugger might choose this moment to strike. Lazar's eyes were dark with anxiety as he scanned the pavement and the cars parked in front of the shop. While Lazar hesitated in the shop doorway, his brother Anton was already waiting at the kerb, drumming his fingers impatiently on the arms of his wheelchair, fidgeting with the rug on his knees. He stared straight ahead, taking no notice

of the people passing by, even though they barely had enough room to get past him without stepping into the road. When he glanced in the direction of the Rutland pub, the streetlights seemed to form even deeper shadows among the lines etched like knife marks in his face. The camera recording Lazar Zhivko's movements had captured that expression on his face many times before. It was immortalized in the stills pinned to copies of his file and handed out to officers on surveillance shifts. One observer had described it as the look of a man who'd learned always to expect the worst. 'I wish I knew what the hell the brother was looking at.' The two surveillance officers were starting to feel drowsy. The store room was stuffy, and specks of dust drifted in the air whenever either of them moved from the cardboard box he was sitting on. All afternoon they hadn't dared to open the sash even an inch, in case they drew attention to their position. Even now that it was getting dark, they were being careful. 'It's not us he's looking at, anyway.' 'Are you sure?' 'Don't worry, he hasn't seen us.' 'Maybe he's spotted somebody on the pavement this side of the road. We ought to get someone in the street to check.' 'No, I don't think so.' 'Well, he must be looking at the menswear shop next door, then. I know their window display is pretty weird, but I wouldn't have thought it was bad enough to make him look like that.' Anton Zhivko's expression was much more difficult to interpret than his brother's. Anton looked resigned, yet contemptuous, as if he could see a threat approaching and had resolved not to run, but to face it without fear. The angle of the camera was adjusted as Lazar Zhivko finally left the door of the shop. Stepping on to the pavement,