Already Dead(78)

Stanley Walker still had keys to the place, though. He’d been Police Constable Walker in the old days, and could still tell you his collar number. In fact, he would recite it at any opportunity, like a prisoner of war giving his name and rank. He’d completed thirty years’ service in uniform, including spells in Public Order, Response and Traffic, but had started and ended his career right here in Lowbridge. Then he’d become Old Stan, a part-time civilian employee standing behind the front counter, a friendly face to greet the public.

‘Only, some of the public weren’t so friendly,’ he said, as he made Cooper a cup of tea in his house in Lowbridge. ‘Especially the ones that remembered me from when I was in uniform.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘So I was glad to go in the end. There comes a point when you want to be out of the firing line.’

Now that Stanley Walker was retired, he lived on his memories. Word on the grapevine had it that he was writing it all down, working on a memoir. Cooper wondered if that might be true. There was supposed to be quite a market these days for first-person accounts by police officers, paramedics, doctors, firefighters – in fact, anyone who’d met the public on a day-to-day basis for a few decades and could write about it with humour. If you could look back to a period like the 1970s, you might be on to a winner. The public loved nostalgia, and the Seventies had been a different world. As a young PC, Walker would have been unencumbered by PACE, or the Scarman Report, or political correctness.

Cooper looked around Walker’s house for signs of a manuscript, or at least a laptop or computer. Most police officers weren’t known for their literary talent, but even if you couldn’t get a publisher, you could upload your work to the internet yourself as an eBook and hope for the best. Your family and friends might buy a few copies, at least.

Walker opened a drawer and rattled a large bunch of keys.

‘Want to take a look at the old hellhole, then?’ he said. ‘I can offer you the fifty pence tour of the cells, or the one quid tour. Ask me the difference.’

‘What’s the difference, Stan?’ asked Cooper.

‘For a quid, you get to come out again.’

Walker put his coat on and they walked a couple of streets through Lowbridge to the old police station. Though Lowbridge was called a village, the spread of development along the valley bottom from Edendale meant there were no longer any green fields to separate the two places, only a road sign at the point where one house was in Edendale and the next one in Lowbridge.

A glimpse of the swollen River Eden and the water already lying in surrounding fields reminded Cooper that properties to the east of Edendale were among those most at risk of flooding. He knew that most of Lowbridge sat in the ‘purple area’ on flood maps, where homes and businesses received warnings when flooding was expected.

A housing development had been built here on what local people insisted had always been a floodplain for the River Eden. They’d said it loudly at the time, when planning permission was given, and they’d said it again when the builders moved in and started work on the foundations. Just because the area hadn’t flooded recently, that didn’t mean it would never flood again. But nobody took any notice of them. Not until occupants had moved into the houses and the first floods arrived. Now the access road was closed to traffic by deep water and front doors all along the new crescents were protected by sandbags.

But some home owners at Lowbridge were the lucky ones. At least they had insurance against flooding. All across Derbyshire, there were people whose properties had been affected by flooding in the recent past and who were no longer able to take out insurance policies, being considered too much of a risk.

Cooper thought it must be devastating to lose everything in your house to flood water. Your home should be your refuge, the place you could come back to after everything the world threw at you. It shouldn’t be a disaster zone where all that you valued had been taken from you. And, for some of these people, it had happened more than once.

The old police station was still distinctively identified by the blue lamp over its front door. But they entered through a yard at the back, where police vehicles would once have been parked. It was surrounded by a steel palisaded security fence with triple-pointed heads, and there was a hefty padlock on the gate. Walker had the key for the padlock, a key for the back door and a security code to tap in before they could enter.

‘You wouldn’t think it was empty,’ he said. ‘Well, almost. If you want my opinion, they’d be better off just demolishing the whole thing.’