Already Dead(103)

‘Yes, I can see it is.’

‘There are plenty of cartridges. Number one shot. I use them for foxes.’

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. The ticking of the old grandfather clock against the far wall became very loud. Ben could hear the voices of his nieces somewhere in the house, asking Kate a question. One of the dogs outside began to bark, probably at a passing hiker.

Matt seemed to take his silence to mean something. He slid a drawer out of the mahogany sideboard and placed a box on the table next to the shotgun. A grey box, full of bright blue cartridge cases. Express Super Game, forty-two grams.

‘They lose pattern density if the range is too great,’ said Matt. ‘But otherwise they do the job fine.’

‘You mean…’

‘If you need them,’ said Matt. ‘It’s up to you. Then you can’t say that I never helped you.’

‘Helped me?’

‘Well, you can’t go on like this,’ said Matt. ‘You’ve got yourself into a state that’s no good for you. So you have to make a decision, Ben, one way or the other. For God’s sake, do something about it – or move on.’

Matt got up from the table, heaving himself wearily upright. His increasing bulk was weighing him down more and more, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he was carrying the whole world.

Ben looked up at his brother. ‘Matt…’

‘I’ve got a few things to do,’ said Matt. ‘I’ll say goodbye to Kate and girls for you, if you need to get off.’

Ben nodded, and swallowed, struggling to find anything to say. He only managed one word.

‘Thanks.’

Half an hour later, after Ben’s Toyota had driven out of the yard, Matt Cooper came slowly back into the dining room. The shotgun and the box of cartridges had gone from the table where he’d left them. Matt breathed a long groan of despair.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What have I done?’





33





Fry had been expecting the incident in which Charlie Dean had died to be similar to the spate of botched petrol thefts in the county. Brake lines cut in mistake for the fuel line. Local officers had been despatched to ask questions of the neighbours and check other vehicles on Green Hill and neighbouring properties on The Dale. Given the nature of the roads and their steep inclines, the exercise had been given priority. The results were already in. Nothing. No other reports of brake or fuel lines being tampered with.

‘Deliberate, then?’ asked Fry when she arrived back at the garage, taking Luke Irvine with her from West Street.

‘Certainly,’ said the vehicle examiner. ‘And one other thing I can tell you – this was a professional job.’

‘Professional?’

‘Skilled, anyway. Oh, the lines are steel and you can cut right through them easily enough with a wire cutter. If a line is cut, the fluid takes the path of least resistance, which is the hole. It won’t leak out of a small hole unless you press on the brake, and then you’ll feel it getting mushy. A big hole will leak it all out before the person gets in the car, and the dead brake will be pretty obvious right away.’

‘So…?’

‘Well, to catch somebody out, you want the brake to appear functional when they get in the car and start moving, but then have all the fluid leak out and the brakes totally non-functional once they get up speed.’ He shook his head. ‘Personally, I just don’t see how that’s possible by simply damaging the line. I think the whole cutting of the brake line as a method of murdering is a Hollywood fantasy. If a line is cut through, a driver would have to be pretty clueless not to notice it on the first application of the brakes.’

One of the mechanics emerged from behind a van where he’d been listening, and grinned at her.

‘Some mice with a taste for brake fluid gnawed through the brake line on my wife’s new RAV4,’ he said. ‘She backed out of the driveway fine, drove to the end of the road, hit the brakes at the lights, and rolled out into the junction. There was no traffic coming, but if there had been she’d have been hit by a vehicle at thirty-five miles an hour.’

‘That was your own fault, Gary,’ said the examiner. ‘You should have made sure you did it when the traffic was busier.’

Gary laughed and wandered off, pulling on a new pair of latex gloves.

‘Anyway,’ said the examiner, ‘if you’re clever, you use a different method. You could add a substance that lowers the boiling point of the fluid. The brakes heat up and the fluid boils. Gas pockets mean no brakes, see. As soon as the brakes get used hard, they’ll fail. You have the added bonus that when everything cools off it all looks normal. Unless you do a chemical analysis of the brake fluid, no one would ever know.’