Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
said Cooper.
‘What?’
‘We can get lucky ourselves.’
‘Yeah, right.’
But Ben Cooper believed in luck. He believed that, if you worked hard enough and long enough at something, then eventually luck would start to operate in your favour.
What Cooper failed to realize was that he had already been given the most important piece of luck he would get that week.
After the enquiry teams had been hastily assembled, Cooper walked back from the incident room with Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin. The only sound between them was Murfin humming to himself. Cooper listened, trying to identify the tune. It sounded like an old Eagles song, ‘New Kid in Town’.
‘Well, a new broom sweeps clean,’ said Murfin as he reached his desk and began to hunt through his drawers. ‘So my old mum used to say, like.’
Cooper saw that Fry couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She was pale and held herself rigidly, as if she were freezing cold. And it was cold in the incident room, too. You could have broken up the air with an ice axe.
‘Always the optimist, aren’t you, Ben?’ she said. ‘You talked about getting lucky. Well, take a look around you. We’re at rock bottom for resources and we have an unidentified body on top of all our other enquiries. We have a new DCI, the Chief Super is cracking up, and Gavin here is our number one asset. Even the weather is against us. Does it look as though we’re likely to get lucky?’
‘Well, you never know.’
‘Do you think we could persuade Mr Tailby to stay on?’ said Murfin.
‘I don’t think it would take much to persuade him,’ said Cooper. ‘He’s not really all that keen on the HQ job.’
‘He’s even less keen on the new DCI.’
‘Mr Kessen will settle down, Gavin.’
‘It could take time, I reckon. I don’t know, Ben – they call some of us old coppers dinosaurs. But it’s like a proper Jurassic Park on the top corridor sometimes.’
‘So why did you bring up Eddie Kemp? Trying to score some points with the new DCI? Kemp has nothing to do with it, has he? What have you got against him?’
‘Maybe he didn’t clean my windows properly,’ said Murfin. ‘Well, I don’t know. Kemp and his mates might have been cruising for victims. Got the taste for it with the other two, then picked some poor bugger up at the roadside out of town.’
‘I talked to Kemp’s wife,’ said Cooper. ‘According to her, he didn’t come home at all that night. He went to the pub at eight o’clock and she knew nothing until she got a call next morning to tell her he was in custody. She also says the Isuzu was gone all night. According to her story, somebody brought it back early next morning and put the keys through the door.’
‘One of Kemp’s associates, presumably, since he was in custody at the time,’ said Fry.
‘Presumably. But we ought to check.’
‘Does Mrs Kemp know her husband’s friends?’
‘Knows them, but doesn’t want to, I’d say.’
‘No names supplied?’
‘No. She’s not happy, but she’s not giving evidence against her husband. The two victims might be more help when we can get full statements from them, but I doubt it. They’re part of the Devonshire Estate gang – they think talking to the police is like committing suicide. So all we have against Eddie Kemp is the identification of the old couple who looked out of the window and say they recognized him as part of the group. You know how reliable witness identifications are in those circumstances. Eddie himself says if he hit anybody, he was acting in self-defence.’
‘I don’t suppose he’s identified the other three?’
‘Are you kidding? Somebody is going to have to enquire into his associates.’
‘God knows who,’ said Fry. ‘And God knows when.’
‘I bet it’ll be me,’ said Cooper. ‘I seem to have got Kemp’s car on my list.’
‘Hey,’ said Murfin, ‘did you realize that the new DCI’s name is Oliver?’ He held up the rubber lobster of the same name.
‘Are you telling us it’s a coincidence, Gavin?’
Diane Fry had been tapping her fingers on her desk. Now she seemed to make a decision, shake her head and was suddenly her proper self.
‘You’d better go and take a look at his car, then, Ben,’ she said. ‘And take Gavin with you.’
‘I’m on missing persons,’ said Murfin.
‘Let the allocator know where you’re up to, then you’ll have to leave it for an hour or two. Ben can’t go to see Kemp on his own. He’s doing enough solos as it is.’
Murfin left, grumbling all the way. With a spasm of concern, Cooper watched Fry as she stared out of the window for a while, the muscles at the side of her mouth tight with tension. She fiddled at a strand of her fair hair in an uncharacteristically uncertain gesture. Her hand was pale and slender, with tendons that he could have traced with his finger.
‘A new broom sweeps clean?’ she said. ‘I’ll stick a broom up his arse.’
Cooper nodded. He didn’t think she was talking about Gavin Murfin.
The Buttercross area of Old Edendale had its own personality, its own picturesque gloss, which had been carefully polished and maintained over the years for the benefit of visitors. It was here that the town’s antique shops clustered, some of them stuffed with gleaming mahogany furniture and brassware, but others dim and dusty, with nothing in their windows but a few coloured bottles and a Queen Victoria diamond jubilee biscuit tin.
There were shops here that Ben Cooper had never seen open, not in all his life spent in and around Edendale. Today, as usual, the ‘closed’ signs hung on their doors, with no indication of when their owners would be available to do business. Maybe they only appeared on special occasions, such as bank holiday weekends, when tourists thronged the Buttercross with money to spend. Maybe the dealers sold enough bottles and biscuit tins on those days to see them through the rest of the year. On the other hand, maybe they all had proper jobs to do.
The Buttercross certainly lived up to the tourist brochure image this afternoon. The lying snow and the weathered stone and mullioned windows of the buildings hit just the right Dickensian note to set off the antique furniture. Sadly, there were no tourists in January to appreciate it.
Between two of the shops, a narrow street lurched suddenly uphill. There were steel handrails set into high limestone walls on either side for pedestrians, but no pavements to separate them from any cars that might scrape their way round the corner. The walls had been the traditional dry stone when they were first built. But now they were held together by mortar, and they had periwinkles growing out of their cracks – forlorn green strands encased in frozen snow.
Gavin Murfin swayed against the side of Cooper’s Toyota as they bumped over the cobbles, took a sharp turn and then made another steep climb to emerge into the Underbank area. The streets here were even narrower, and the doors of the houses had tiny knockers shaped like owls or foxes, with their numbers picked out in coloured tiles set into the stonework. Further up the hill, a set of three-storey Regency houses stood near a youth hostel. Several of the houses had been converted into flats, but one at the far end looked empty and uncared for. A broken window on the first floor had been left unrepaired.
Beeley Street was hardly more than an alley, with an unmade surface just wide enough for one