Already Dead(35)

‘I mean,’ said Matt. ‘That barman. How can he not be locked up? It’s a travesty.’

Yes, there was the barman. Josh Lane. That was a different case entirely. The CPS had concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to make a charge of murder stand. No one involved in the incident at the Light House could be persuaded to testify that the barman had taken part in the fatal assault on two tourists, David and Trisha Pearson, who had died at the Light House more than two years ago.

He had certainly been present at some stage in Room One, the Bakewell Room, where the Pearsons had been staying. But the tiny quantity of his blood recovered from the crime scene was too little to prove that he’d been involved in a fight. Lane had confessed to helping to deal with the aftermath. The DNA profile obtained from the blood trace by forensics put him at the scene, so he had little choice. But the blood was only from a scratch, he said.

After the amount of time that had passed, and as a result of the clean-up carried out by the Whartons in Room One, nothing else could be proved. There were too many evidential weaknesses. No realistic prospect of a conviction. It was in the nature of the criminal justice system that the outcome of a case depended on the way a story was told. The prosecution presented a narrative which depicted the defendant as guilty. But the defence would tell a very different story, an alternative version of the same real-life events. They would dwell on the possibilities, highlight the ambiguities that the prosecution had tried to ignore. A change in emphasis was all that was needed to cast new light on a situation, to suggest a defendant’s innocence, to put that all-important reasonable doubt into a juror’s mind.

So the more serious charges had failed the Full Code Test at the evidential stage, and the CPS had no choice but to refuse to charge. A case which didn’t pass that stage couldn’t proceed, no matter how serious or sensitive it might be.

Instead, Lane had been charged with two counts of perverting the course of justice, once after the death of the Pearsons, and once for the assistance he’d given to Eliot Wharton in the arson case. And now he was out on bail. Cooper had details of the address specified in the bail conditions, and knew that Josh Lane was currently living in a park home near Cromford.

‘Perhaps we should do something about it,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t you think?’

Matt froze. After a moment, his chin sank and his shoulders hunched up towards his ears. Ben hardly dared to look at him. He knew the expression that he’d find on his brother’s face. A pig-headed stubbornness. He’d been like that all his life, but became more and more stubborn when he knew he was in the wrong. If pushed, he’d dig himself in and become impossible to shift. He was like an old tree stump that needed explosives to root it out of a field to make way for the plough.

It was only what he’d expected. People had become so predictable, and there seemed to be no exceptions. He walked a few paces away, letting the wind blow in his face. He could see the clouds moving over the valley from Mam Tor, growing darker and darker as they came. It would rain again soon.





13





Fry had visited Prospectus Assurance before. She recognised the buildings rather than the name. Perhaps the company had changed hands or rebranded itself. That happened all the time, small outfits being swallowed up by bigger and bigger ones, almost always followed by a new name and a different image. All those changes made it difficult to keep track of a company’s history – and perhaps that was the whole point of the exercise.

Nathan Baird was thin and angular, and dressed in a suit that hung all wrong for his shape. He had dark designer stubble and little wings of sideburn which seemed intended to enhance his already sharp cheekbones. Sharp was a good word for him. He was on the young side, too, to be Glen Turner’s line manager and sitting in a separate office of his own, away from the cubicles and rows of computer terminals with operators mouthing their lines into head microphones, like a set of Britney Spears imitators. He clutched at the oak finish desk in front of him as if it was a form of protection or security. A symbol, perhaps, of his position in the hierarchy.

‘Glen, Glen. I can’t get over it,’ Baird was saying. He shook his head, the empty shoulders of his suit jacket flapping like the sides of a tent in a stiff wind.

‘Did anything unusual happen here on Tuesday?’ asked Fry, when she and Irvine had been shown into his office.

‘What? With Glen Turner, you mean? No, nothing unusual. Was that the day he died?’

‘It seems so. He came into work as normal, then?’

‘He came in as normal, left as normal at the end of the afternoon. I’m sure he did a normal day’s work in between. That was Glen, really. Nothing out of the ordinary.’