Already Dead(41)

He supposed it was a failure of empathy. The part of his brain that made connections with other human beings was currently unavailable. He was unable to see the world from any point of view but his own.

Ben frowned, realising he was quoting to himself from a textbook on criminal psychology. That lack of empathy? It sounded like the classic definition of a psychopath.

Finally, he turned and looked down. He could make out his brother, hunched in a blue cagoule and a woollen hat as he stumbled down the slope and kicked angrily at a loose stone that went tumbling towards the road.

As he stood on the edge of Carl Wark, Ben seemed to hear a voice over his shoulder. It was probably just the trickle of water over rocks, the sigh of wind through the ancient ramparts, the muttering of a solitary ewe, damp and lost as it clattered on the scree slope. But for a moment he believed it was a ghostly communication, the echo of some tribal holy man whose spirit had been trapped for ever in these stones. He tilted his head and listened, trying to distinguish the words, or at least some recognisable sound that would reassure him it was just his imagination. But all the voice seemed to talk about was vengeance.

When people spoke about closure and moving on they hadn’t a clue what they were saying. They didn’t know what it was like to have this devil riding on your back, a fiend that you couldn’t throw off. He was possessed by this idea, as much as by any demon.

But his voice was hoarse, and he burst into a spasm of painful coughing. In the bar, smoke travelling across the ceiling hit a wall and rolled down to floor level. His mouth was parched, his throat sore from the smoke penetrating his mask. His eyes streamed with tears so that he could barely see, even if the smoke hadn’t plunged the pub into unfathomable darkness.

He fumbled blindly along the wall, found a steel bar under his fingers, and a door behind it. The fire exit. At first, the bar wouldn’t move. Crying out in frustration, he banged at it with his fists, kicked out at it, thumped it again. Finally, he spun round and grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, swung it hard against the bar and felt it give way.

But he must have inhaled too much smoke. He was getting confused. He didn’t know where right or left was, didn’t know where the doors were, felt as though he couldn’t breathe at all.

Irritants hit his eyes and the back of his throat. He could barely open his eyelids. He retched and took a deep breath, in involuntary reaction. The smoke he inhaled was disorientating, dizzying. He went down on his knees. He knew he was giving way to the carbon monoxide, but he was unable to fight.

Now he saw shadows in the smoke, flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out. Was that a figure outlined against the flames? The smoke was black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning.

Glass shattered, and a blast of air exploded the flames into a great, roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling and engulfed the room.

‘Liz!’

His voice came as a feeble croak, and there was no answer.

Cooper thought he glimpsed a movement near him in the smoke. He reached out for an indistinct shape like a hand, but grasped at empty space and found himself falling forward into darkness, until his face hit the floor and his mind swam into swirling oblivion as he lost that last shred of consciousness.

All around him was shouting and screaming, a muffled roaring noise. The crash of falling stone. And the screaming.

Then silence.





15





At Sparrow Wood, a section of road had been sealed off, all the way from a point just past the nearest farm access to the turning for Brassington. Marked police vehicles had been positioned diagonally across the road at either end, and officers stood miserably in the rain in their yellow waterproofs to turn cars back and point drivers to the diversions set up through nearby villages.

From a traffic point of view, it was lucky this was such a quiet road. But from Fry’s perspective, hoping to track down a few potential witnesses to the crime, it was bad news.

As she approached the scene, officers in boiler suits were conducting a search along the roadside verge, close to the strip of woodland. They were looking for recent tyre marks that would reveal the presence of a vehicle. They might find shoe prints in the mud, a piece of clothing, some item accidentally discarded in the grass. In fact, they were hoping for anything that might indicate why Glen Turner had ended up dead in the woods, and who else had been there at the time.

Most of the B5056 was bordered by dry-stone walls on both sides. Like so many roads in the Peak District, those walls left no room for a vehicle to stop or draw in without blocking the carriageway; there was only a thin strip of grass not even wide enough for someone to walk on. So the search team’s efforts would be concentrated on a stretch of about three hundred yards where the line of trees skirted the road. There was a five-foot-wide boundary of muddy ground here, a few shallow pull-ins, and a stile where a wooden fingerpost pointed to the start of a public footpath through the woods. Some lengths of wall had collapsed on the uneven ground and the remnants were no more than two feet high, making it easy to step over from the road.