Around the courtyard there were shops, an ice cream parlour and an RSPB outlet. Cooper bought a filter coffee from the Watermark café and sat under a glass canopy in the courtyard, watched hopefully by a small flock of sparrows who perched on the tables and a magpie that eyed him from the safety of the edge of the roof.
For him, the highlight of this courtyard was the Kugel Stone. Three feet in diameter and weighing over a ton, it was a large black granite ball that floated almost magically on a thin film of water. Two pumps supplied jets of water at different speeds, causing the stone not only to float on the surface, but to rotate slowly. The lightest touch of a finger made the Kugel revolve in a different direction.
He looked up just as Carol Villiers entered the Watermark café. She was looking smart as always, that extra attention to detail making her stand out from the crowd, especially in CID. Her clothes always seemed to fit better, her shoes were less scuffed, she moved with a physical confidence that others lost when they spent so much time at a desk job. She even seemed to have reached the courtyard from the car park without getting wet or dishevelled, as if she’d simply materialised from a teleportation machine.
‘Hello, Carol,’ said Cooper.
‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m okay.’
She gave him that concerned look he’d come to expect. He’d seen it so often over the last few months. Cooper wondered if this was what disabled people sometimes complained about – the way people stared at them with an expression of mixed curiosity and pity. Each time he saw that look, it felt as if everyone was trying to fix him into a role of pitiable victim.
He ordered more coffee, and she sat down across the table. She hardly took her eyes off him, as though she was afraid that he would try to escape if she looked away even for a second.
‘So what’s happening at the moment?’ asked Cooper. ‘Anything exciting?’
Villiers didn’t answer directly. ‘You know we want you back, Ben. We need you at West Street.’
‘Really? I don’t think Diane Fry would want to see me back.’
‘Yes, she would. You’d be surprised. She doesn’t want to be there any more than we want to see her.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘I just can’t come into the office, Carol.’
Villiers sighed. ‘So then,’ she said, ‘does it have to be unofficial?’
‘I can be unofficial,’ said Cooper.
Villiers regarded him steadily. ‘You know, while you’re on extended leave, you’re just another member of the public.’
Cooper nodded. ‘It has its advantages.’
When Villiers had returned to Derbyshire she’d been that much older and leaner than he remembered her, with an extra assurance in the way she held herself. When they were younger, they’d gone to school together, studied for their A levels at High Peak College at the same time. She’d been a good friend, a bit sports obsessed perhaps, really into swimming and running half marathons. She’d been Carol Parry then, the daughter of Stan and Vera Parry, who ran a bed and breakfast in Tideswell High Street.
But there had been another dimension behind her new self-confidence – a shadow in her eyes, a darkness behind the facade. Cooper had noticed it then, and he couldn’t mistake it now. Part of that darkness might be explained by the loss of her husband, killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. But perhaps there were other experiences too, episodes in her life that she would never talk about.
‘Well, you know we have a murder case?’ she said. ‘It happened not very far from here, actually.’
‘Yes, I did hear that.’
‘You’re not completely out of the loop, then.’
‘It’s the front page headline in this week’s Matlock Mercury,’ said Cooper. ‘I noticed it when I was in the petrol station this morning.’
Villiers nodded. ‘That’s good.’
She made it sound like an achievement, as if he was a spinal injury patient attempting to move a finger for the first time, or a baby wobbling upright for a half a second before falling flat on its face again. Was he supposed to feel a warm glow that he’d pleased her with his powers of observation? Immediately he felt an unkind urge to puncture her expectations.
‘But I didn’t read the story,’ he said. ‘So, apart from that, I know nothing.’
‘Oh. Well, I’ve been away in Chesterfield for a few days assisting C Division, so I’m only just catching up myself. But the victim’s name is Glen Turner. There’s nothing of any interest in his background. Not that we’ve found so far, anyway. He worked in insurance. A claims adjuster, employed by Prospectus Assurance. Unmarried, thirty-eight years old, lived with his mother in Wirksworth.’