Already Dead(54)

Then Lane began to slither back down the hill to his car, and Cooper turned to make sure he could get to his Toyota in time before he pulled out on to Middleton Road.

Now they were definitely heading into Wirksworth. Down Hutchinson’s Drive, past the Bailey Croft service station and the BP petrol forecourt, and under the arched footbridge that carried a pathway high over the road between Green Hill and Chapel Lane.

A maze of narrow streets and alleyways sprawled on both sides of the main street, some of them leading to an old church set in its own close like a cathedral. On Cooper’s right, the limestone cottages of The Dale and Green Hill clung precariously to the hillside, as if Wirksworth was a Cornish fishing village with only the sea missing. In places it was possible to walk from the garden of one house on to the roof of another. Some residents had even erected greenhouses on their garage roofs in the absence of available space at ground level.

In the centre of town, Lane turned his Honda away from the tea rooms in Coldwell Street and squeezed his car through a narrow archway entrance into the car park of the Red Lion.

Cooper couldn’t risk parking at the pub, but he found a space close by in the Barmote Croft car park, facing the old Temperance Hall. He didn’t want to attract attention by getting a ticket on his windscreen, but the ticket machine wasn’t working. And a passing Wirksworth resident said they never paid it anyway.

He walked a few yards to the Red Lion, wondering who Josh Lane might be meeting inside. And wondering even more what he himself was doing here. Why was he obsessing about Lane’s movements? What could he hope to learn?

Cooper shook his head and tried to take in his surroundings. The old Wirksworth Town Hall stood directly across the street from the Red Lion. Golden stone, ornate pillars, an Italianate facade, even a clock tower. It was a Victorian creation for use by the local Freemasons. But now it housed the library and an Age UK charity shop. A whitewashed cast-iron milestone on the corner of the building told Cooper that London was a hundred and thirty-nine miles from the centre of Wirksworth. It felt an awful lot further away than that.

Charlie Dean cruised the BMW up Harrison Drive on the way out of Wirksworth, automatically glancing up at the footbridge over the road, checking for anyone watching him. There was no one on the bridge, of course. He was just getting paranoid.

And that was Sheena’s fault. He was quite sure that she was wrong about Jay getting suspicious. They’d been much too careful up to now. They never phoned each other at home, only ever sent texts, and then deleted them at once. They had never risked being seen together too close to where they lived or worked. They’d made certain they had plausible reasons for all their absences.

But Dean had a sudden thought as he indicated to pull into the Bailey Croft service station. He knew that he’d always done those things himself. What about Sheena? He only had her word for it. What if she’d just been telling him what he wanted to hear? Had she been forgetting to delete his texts? Had she let drop some incriminating remark? Had she, God forbid, confided in one of her friends at the hairdressing salon? He knew she could lie. She’d been lying to Jay all this time, after all. Couldn’t she just as easily be lying to him?

A worm of unease crawled in his stomach. Just when he’d been convincing himself that everything was fine and no one was going to ask them any questions, suddenly he wasn’t so sure that everything was fine at all.

He turned in past the petrol station forecourt and the Spar shop, his foot on the accelerator pedal, ready to drive away again if something went wrong or he lost courage. They didn’t know him here because he always filled up his car at a service station in Ashbourne, where the company had an account. But you never knew who you might bump into in Wirksworth. It was a small town.

Then he saw Sheena standing in the corner of the car park and the sight of her made him forget his worries. At least for a while. He opened the door and Sheena climbed into the BMW.

Half a mile further on, a Vauxhall Astra had skidded on the wet surface and gone off the road, ending up with its nose in a shallow ditch. Other motorists took no notice of its fate, hurtling on by to wherever they were heading so urgently.

Dean looked at the cars whizzing past, and the rear end of the Vauxhall in the ditch. ‘I bet not one of them has been on a speed awareness course,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

His head still ached a bit from his session in the pub last night. It had been good to be able to relax, though.

Suddenly, Charlie Dean felt reckless. It was a tendency of his that Barbara had complained about often in the past. She said it was incredibly juvenile, this instinct to react to danger by confronting it head-on. Tempting fate, she called it. But he had better descriptions. Facing up to a risk. Showing the world he wasn’t afraid. That was more like it. Charlie Dean wasn’t a man to be cowed by threats.