Already Dead(88)

‘I don’t think there’s such a thing as a wild sheep. Not in Derbyshire, anyway. All the sheep that you see belong to farmers.’

‘Not all of them, surely?

‘Well, yes.’

‘What about the ones wandering loose on the moors? They’re wild, aren’t they?’

‘No, they’re just, er … shafted.’

Cooper sighed. ‘Hefted.’

‘They’re hefted,’ said Fry.

‘I don’t know what you’re on about. They’re not even fenced in, they wander where they like. It looks to me as though they’re there for the taking. Just like the way you might find a pheasant by the side of the road, or the odd rabbit in the woods.’

Fry’s shoulders began to tense, as they did when she was angry. Cooper touched her arm.

‘Diane, he’s winding you up,’ he said.

Just then Fry received a text on her phone. The Crime Scene Manager, Wayne Abbott, had some news for her. She shook Cooper off.

‘Look, if you have anything useful to share, tell it to DC Villiers, will you? Or write it down.’

Cooper pulled a notebook from his pocket and tore off a page.

‘Gibson,’ he said. ‘Ryan and Sean. There, I’ve written it down for you.’

Fry snatched the paper from Cooper’s hand and headed towards the stream bed, covering her nose against the stench of the mud now exposed at her crime scene after the water had been drained away. If she stayed here for too long, she’d have to ask Scenes of Crime for a mask.

‘So. What is it?’ she said.

Wayne Abbott appeared from among the trees and gestured her over to the Scientific Support van, where he had his laptop set up.

‘I’m expecting an SIO to arrive—’ began Abbott.

‘But he’s not here yet.’

‘True.’ He turned over an evidence bag in his hand. ‘Well, we found this in the mud.’

‘A mobile phone,’ said Fry.

‘A Nokia 100, to be exact. In a nice leather case.’

‘It can’t be our victim’s. We found that one, and we’re still waiting for some results.’

Abbott smiled. ‘The leather case is important.’

‘Why?’

‘Well the phone itself is wrecked. It’s been lying in water for four days at least. I doubt even the clever boys at the lab will get anything off the SIM card. But the case protected the casing of the phone well enough for us to lift some prints off it.’

‘That’s excellent news,’ said Fry.

‘Even better, since we now have the new Identification Bureau in Nottinghamshire, we’ve got some real-time forensics at our disposal. We’ve entered the prints and got a hit from the database already. Take a look.’

Fry stared at Abbott, and back at the display on his laptop, where the identity of the fingerprints’ owner was displayed.

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Ben Cooper. Where the heck is he again?’





28





Ben Cooper had walked across the field towards the old cottage he could see standing on its own at the end of a muddy track. It really was old. Random stone walls, slipped and broken tiles on the roof, an overgrown patch of garden, rank with elder and willowherb. It had probably once been associated with a quarry, or provided accommodation for a farm worker. Its position was too uninviting to be considered suitable for anything else. Well, a holiday cottage, perhaps. Holiday cottages could be situated anywhere these days. But this was no tourist destination. It would never get any AA stars.

Cooper saw a splash of bright red and the outline of a piece of agricultural equipment standing on the edge of a field. A thousand-kilo-sized Portequip bull beef feeder with a rain canopy, positioned close against the stone wall. He passed a long line of individual sheep pens running along the edge of the sweeping pasture below Eagle Rocks, each pen with its own gate and corrugated iron roof, like a sort of sheep motel.

A death wish sheep had hurled itself off the rocks above. Its body lay broken on the track, the flesh on its head and legs already picked clean from the bones. Nothing to do with the floods, or with Spikey Clarke. Sheep were genetically suicidal.

Close up, the cottage barely looked habitable. The dirty curtains in the windows might have been there for decades. But when he knocked on the door, it was answered fairly quickly. An old man looked out at him with weak blue eyes, one skeletal hand clutching the door knob, an old grey cardigan sagging from his emaciated chest.

‘Hicklin? Is it Mr Roger Hicklin?’ asked Cooper.

‘The very same. What can I do for you?’

‘I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.’

‘Are you selling something?’