Already Dead(23)

Towards the bottom of the collage was an obituary of Mad Maurice Wharton himself, the landlord of the Light House at the time it had been closed. The disappearance of the two tourists, David and Trisha Pearson, had been rehashed by the newspapers, of course. That was inevitable. In fact, the whole history of the events at the pub was here – the Whartons’ disastrous financial commitments, the debts they couldn’t pay back, Maurice’s drinking. Then the arrival of the Pearsons in that snowstorm and the fatal consequences, the moorland fires intended to draw attention away from the abandoned pub and the evidence in the cellar. Fry remembered Nancy Wharton complaining that it never came to end, the cleaning and covering over. The blood always seemed to be there.

Free space had been left at the bottom of the collage. That would be for the eventual outcome. Verdict and sentence. The ultimate fate of the owners of those two faces, Eliot Wharton and Josh Lane, the men who had burned down the Light House and killed Liz Petty.

‘As you can see, he’s not here,’ said Mrs Shelley.

Hurst turned to her. ‘Just ask him to call, would you?’ she said.

‘Have you got a…?’

Automatically, Fry began to produce her card. But she caught a glance from Hurst. She was probably right. Fry put her card back in its holder and let Becky hand over a card instead. Mrs Shelley tucked it into a pocket of her cashmere cardigan.

‘Is he …?’ said Hurst tentatively.

‘What?’

‘Is he all right, do you think?’

The dog began barking again inside the house next door. Mrs Shelley began to edge towards the door.

‘He told me he’s fine,’ she said. ‘Just fine.’

Fry looked around at the cuttings again before she left the flat. No, you didn’t have to be a psychopath to commit a murder. But it did help.





8





Ben Cooper’s Toyota surged through pools of standing water, spray cascading over his bonnet, headlights probing through the rain at a darkened landscape.

For weeks now, he’d been driving around in the rain, with no idea where he was going, or where he’d been. He’d done this many times. Always driving at night, and always surprised when first light came that he was still so near home. It was as if he couldn’t escape this area. He was drawn like a moth to a flame, a creature seeking warmth from the sun, but finding only lethal fire.

There was a film he saw once … well, there was always a film. In this one, people couldn’t escape from a motel. They kept driving away through a tunnel and finding themselves back in the same place, going through the same actions, the same conversations, living the same day over and over. They had no escape.

Sometimes his life seemed to have been written a long time ago by a team of scriptwriters in the back room of a movie studio off Hollywood Boulevard. They’d recorded in advance all the incidents, triumphs and tragedies that would happen to him over the years and showed them on screen. Now and then, the script slipped into cliché. Tragedy, then disaster and another tragedy, until a character was pushed too close to the edge.

But perhaps he’d just watched too many films. There had been so many DVDs from Blockbuster, or late night B movies on TV, too many surreptitious downloads from his favourite torrent site. There would always be an echo of a parallel celluloid world where the same thing had happened a stranger he didn’t know and hadn’t really cared about. Some odd, uncomfortable parallel, a shadow flickering behind him in a permanent flashback.

Now he could no longer watch films. There were enough horror stories playing out on the screen inside his head, so many screams reverberating in his memories. Too many real terrors were out there, stalking in the dark.

Some nights, he would drive up to Glossop and head towards the Snake Pass. There was something cathartic about driving up and up further over the pass, swinging the car round the narrow bends, getting closer and closer to the steep drop off the southern edge, taking the inclines as fast as he could. He loved to watch the cat’s eyes flicker past in front of his bonnet, the warning signs flash by on the edge of his vision, a narrow pool of light from his dipped headlights showing a few yards of road ahead, then a great ocean of blackness beyond. It was exhilarating not to know exactly what lay ahead of him in the darkness as he raced towards it. Stone walls flying by, glimpses of chevrons on the tightest bends the only indication of which way he should twist the wheel. He was overwhelmed by the sense of the hills out there watching him from the darkness.

At that time of night there was almost no other traffic on the Snake. He could put his foot down time and again as he reached a bend, letting the car slide across the centre line, heading further and further uphill until he was at the highest point of the pass and beginning to descend again, his wheels turning faster and faster as gravity took the weight of the car and the descent took him back down towards the valley. He would hurtle past the Snake Inn and the lights of a distant farm, slipping under the moors and racing down, down, down. Within a few minutes he’d be heading towards Ladybower, into the spreading arms of the great reservoir, seeing water stretching out dark and glittering to his right. And finally he’d coast towards the traffic lights marking the viaduct and the end of the Snake.