Already Dead(44)

The pub was only ten minutes’ drive away. It stood a couple of hundred yards before the main street in Brassington, which seemed to be called Dragon Hill. According to a sign on a wall, the lane opposite was Maddock Lake. Fry realised it was going to be one of those villages where nothing was quite right.

Luke Irvine and a couple of uniformed officers were standing by a blue Renault Megane a couple of years old, parked at the back of a small car park behind the pub. The car’s doors had been opened, presumably without the benefit of Glen Turner’s keys, since they were still in an evidence bag from the crime scene. Probably best not to ask.

‘I’ve already checked at the pub,’ said Irvine. ‘They don’t know Mr Turner, and they don’t remember seeing anyone like him in the bar on Tuesday. But they say customers sometimes leave their cars here overnight if they’ve had a bit over the limit. They try to discourage drinking and driving, so they don’t object.’

‘Very responsible of them,’ said Fry. ‘But the Mégane must have been here since Tuesday if Mr Turner left it himself.’

‘Yes, that’s right. They saw it here on Wednesday morning.’

‘About the time Mrs Turner was reporting her son missing.’

Irvine nodded. ‘I see what you mean, Diane. We might have organised a search for him on Wednesday if we’d known his car was abandoned here.’

‘Yes, we might. But it’s no use wishing for anything different now. Have you gone over the interior?’

‘It didn’t take long. There’s not much to see. Mr Turner wasn’t one for carrying his whole life around with him in his vehicle.’

‘Is there a laptop?’

‘Yes, a Dell Latitude. Looks a tough little bugger.’

Fry could see that the laptop casing was reinforced for hard use, as Nathan Baird had described. Glen Turner must have had some rough claims to deal with, or a few unruly customers.

‘We need to get that into the lab so forensics can check it out. We might get something off it. Anything else?’

‘A bit of equipment in the boot. A pair of wellies, a fluorescent jacket, a folding stepladder. Only what he might have needed for the job. Oh, and there was this on the passenger seat.’

Irvine unwrapped a paper package. Fry looked at the contents, but couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was seeing. It looked like a lump of stone, but embedded in the centre of it was a curled shape like the shell of a sea creature.

‘And that is…?’

‘According to the label, it’s a fossil. An ammonite. There’s a receipt in the bag. It was bought at the National Stone Centre on Monday.’

‘The what?’

‘The National Stone Centre. It’s not far away, just outside Wirksworth.’

‘I said “what”? not “where”?’ said Fry.

‘Oh. Well, it’s a sort of visitor centre where you can go to look at, well, er…’

‘Stones?’

‘In a nutshell.’

‘Why would Glen Turner have been there? Was he interested in geology? Mineralogy?’

‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

‘We need to get Scenes of Crime here to go over the car. Fingerprints, trace evidence – any signs that someone was in the car with him, or anyone was near enough to touch the car. In fact, I want everything.’

Irvine clamped his phone to his ear. ‘I’ll arrange it.’

Fry looked at the fossil again, and sighed. ‘My God, this man lived a boring life. So far, the most fascinating thing about him is the way he died.’

When she received confirmation that a family liaison officer had finally arrived at the cottage in St John’s Street, Diane Fry called and asked Mrs Turner’s permission to examine her son’s room. She didn’t seem to care very much by then.

Fry took Becky Hurst with her, and they got to work after a few words with Mrs Turner and the FLO. It was difficult to make polite small talk in these circumstances, but equally it seemed rude simply to walk through someone’s house and go upstairs, even when they’d given you permission. Members of the public got upset about things like that. And no one wanted complaints.

Upstairs, it was obvious that Glen Turner had used the biggest bedroom in the cottage as his own. It was remarkably tidy for a single man. Fry wondered if his mother did all the tidying and cleaning in here. In which case, he might not have left anything too interesting lying around to be found.

Apart from a king-sized bed and a wardrobe, the room was dominated by a computer work station with two monitors side by side. The screens were blank, and the computer was switched off. No doubt it would require a password to access it anyway. Fry sighed when she realised she was likely to need specialist forensic services if she hoped to get anything off the hard drive. She would have to arrange for the equipment to be removed from the house as soon as possible.