Already Dead(28)

The cat stopped eating, and gazed at him in sudden perplexity. Of course, she could sense the tension in the air. She had been restless for weeks, reluctant to stray too far from the back door of the conservatory into the garden, though it was surely a paradise for cats. Maybe it was just the rain she objected to. She’d always made it clear that she didn’t like to get her paws wet.

Cooper looked at the clothes he’d been wearing yesterday. They were damp from the rain and streaked with mud, and he’d failed to put anything in the wash basket or leave it out to dry. What was it Dorothy Shelley had said to him? ‘Don’t catch a chill.’ He almost laughed at the absurdity. Catch a chill? As if a minor physical ailment could compare with the havoc wreaked on the inside.

At times his recollections had a clarity he associated only with the memories of the dying. They said your whole life flashed in front of your eyes in those last few moments. They never said that a few minutes of your life could pass before your eyes over and over, endlessly repeating. Would they never stop until you died?

After Liz’s death in the fire at the Light House, the inquest had to be faced. Violent or unnatural deaths always required an inquest. But the coroner didn’t perform the role that people often expected. The inquest was only meant to establish the identity of the deceased, the place and time of death, and how the person died. Not the cause, but how they came by their death. The legal difference could be too subtle for bereaved relatives to understand.

Cooper had seen it many times, been asked himself by families to explain it. He’d struggled to make sense of it for people already worn down by grief and now baffled by the system they’d been thrown into. Though witnesses were called, it wasn’t a trial. The coroner went to a lot of trouble to make that clear. The verdict would not imply criminal liability. The purpose of an inquest wasn’t to attribute blame. Well, of course not. No one wanted to do that. It wasn’t politically correct. People weren’t responsible for their own actions. It was all due to their upbringing, their genes, the abuse they’d suffered as a child, their disturbed mental state.

He’d heard all that said, and more. A chorus of angry voices, some of them shouting their objections during the hearing itself, but most waiting until afterwards to express their despair. It wasn’t the British way, to make a fuss. But sometimes Cooper had been there, the person they could turn to with their feelings, the target for their anger, the man they hoped could put it all right.

Somehow he’d managed to get through his witness statement. When he looked at his notebook, he thought another person must have written his notes. He couldn’t tell. It seemed like a scrawl by some crazed fiction writer in the throes of producing a horror fantasy. It seemed to have nothing to do with him at all, this slow, careful prodding at the facts. The names, the times, the places, the extent and nature of the injuries. None of this was about Liz.

The outcome he feared most was a narrative verdict. It always seemed such a cop-out, an avoidance of judgment. Yes, it worked sometimes for families who didn’t want to hear the word ‘suicide’, a ruling that their loved one had taken his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed. It helped them to deal with the reality if they could walk away without that fact written down in black and white on an official form. But in terms of justice, it was no more than an evasion.

That hadn’t happened. The jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Why did that feel such a relief?

And then there was the funeral. It had passed in a dark haze. Derbyshire Constabulary didn’t go in for all the ceremony, the way some other forces did. Standing rules said that a serving member of police staff didn’t get even a coffin shrouded in a flag, as a regular officer would, though uniformed pall-bearers were provided on a request from the family. Mr and Mrs Petty had been happy with that, though. Simple, dignified. It was all they’d wanted.

Throughout the service and burial, Cooper had felt as though he wasn’t really there with the other mourners. He’d been floating above the proceedings, looking down at himself in his black suit and tie, standing in the wet grass at the graveside, indistinguishable from all the others in their funeral clothes, just a flock of black crows squawking dismally in the rain.

Liz’s parents lived in Bakewell, and they’d found a corner of the cemetery on Yeld Road for her burial. Relatives from Dundee had arrived, gloomy and Presbyterian, yet first at the bar when the party retreated to a local pub afterwards for the sandwiches and sausage rolls.

Bakewell’s cemetery had hit the headlines in the 1970s with the murder there of a thirty-two-year-old typist, Wendy Sewell – the so-called ‘Bakewell Tart’ case. The place had become notorious all over again in 2002, when the man convicted of the Sewell murder, cemetery worker Stephen Downing, had his conviction overturned after serving twenty-seven years in prison. There was even a TV film, starring Stephen Tompkinson as a local newspaper editor who’d campaigned to get Downing released. Cooper didn’t remember the original case, but he was a serving police officer when the inquiry was reopened after Downing’s release. This cemetery had a different significance for a lot of people.