Текст книги "Dead and Buried"

Автор книги: Stephen Booth

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

‘If they were strangers. We don’t know that for sure. Whoever these people were, they might have been part of the plan.’

‘How?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Their role could have been to pick David and Trisha up at a quiet spot where they wouldn’t be seen, and whisk them away.’

But Fry was still shaking her head. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why let themselves be seen talking to the Pearsons at the Light House, then? If the plan was so good that two people were able to just vanish off the face of the earth without leaving a trace, that incident doesn’t fit. It would be a major flaw in the planning.’

‘Something could have gone wrong,’ said Irvine uncertainly.

‘I don’t buy it.’

‘Well that’s a shame.’

Fry looked at him.

‘So you’re not even convinced by the bloodstains on the anorak found buried in the peat on Oxlow Moor?’

‘It could be part of the plan.’

‘Even if the blood is identified as David Pearson’s?’

‘It wouldn’t be too difficult for Pearson to smear some of his own blood on his clothes and leave them for us to find.’

‘But he didn’t do that. They were buried.’

‘Our hopes are resting on forensics, then,’ put in Cooper. ‘As always.’

‘Not quite always. But still …’

‘They ought to get something off the items dug out of the peat,’ he said. ‘I know there will have been some deterioration, but we’d be very unlucky to get nothing at all. Haven’t we had any results back yet?’

‘Still waiting.’

Cooper stared at Fry. He found he just didn’t believe her. Forensic results could be slow, it was true. But he was sure that she was lying to him in this instance. Why would she do that?

Henry Pearson was almost exactly as Cooper had pictured him. He was a tall man, with grey hair and sharp, intelligent eyes that turned to deep pools of sadness when his face was at rest. Most of the time he was far from at rest. Pearson fixed his gaze on each of the officers in the room by turn, studying them as if he was trying to see right into their hearts. When he’d been round the room once, he started all over again, perhaps hoping he might see something different next time.

At the same time he was listening intently to everything that was said. He’d brought a briefcase with him, and opened it to pull out a leather-bound pad. Cooper watched him write a careful note of the date and time, and the place of the meeting. Underneath, he listed the names of the police officers present. He made notes as Superintendent Branagh spoke, but still looked up periodically to examine the reactions of the people round him.

‘Naturally, Mr Pearson, in light of the new evidence, we’re reopening the inquiry into the disappearance of your son and his wife,’ said Branagh, seeming a little unsettled by Pearson’s manner.

‘Reopening?’ said Pearson. ‘I was under the impression that the case was never actually closed. Am I wrong in that?’

‘No, sir. The inquiry is active, and always has been. But the fact is, we exhausted all the avenues. It’s only the new evidence we’ve turned up that has given us fresh leads to follow.’

‘Is there a question of resources?’

‘There’s always a question of resources.’

‘If money would help …’ said Pearson.

As one, the officers in the room bristled, their faces a mixture of indignation and panic. The mere suggestion that someone had offered financial inducements was enough to cause consternation. Cooper imagined the investigations that might follow. A neighbouring force sent in to examine procedures and records, probing questions about bank balances … It was everyone’s worst nightmare.

But that wasn’t what Mr Pearson meant. He scanned the shocked faces, and almost smiled. It was no more than a twitch of the lips, which disappeared as quickly as it had come. But in that one second, Cooper saw that their visitor had a sense of humour, and he began to warm to him a little.

‘I mean, in order to encourage witnesses to come forward, of course,’ said Pearson. ‘That’s normal practice, isn’t it? I’ve seen it done in other cases.’

‘A reward?’ asked Branagh, an audible hint of relief in her voice.

‘If that’s what you call it. If it might help to overcome the reluctance of certain individuals, I would be happy to put some cash up. If someone is still hesitating over what they should do, a reasonable amount of money could tip the balance in our favour, couldn’t it?’

‘It’s true,’ put in Hitchens, with a glance at Branagh. ‘We’ve had results that way in the past.’

‘Perhaps we can make a decision on that in a few days’ time. Let’s see what progress we can make in the meantime, shall we?’

‘All right. I suppose I’ll have to accept that.’

‘Mr Pearson, can I ask you something? Do you remain convinced that your son and his wife have met with a violent end?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He hesitated. ‘Obviously I’m very well aware of the stories that have been going round over the past couple of years. All that nonsense on the internet, all those wild theories. Every one of them is ludicrous. It’s inconceivable that David and Patricia would have somehow managed to disappear and change their identities. If my son had known he was accused of doing something wrong, he would have stayed to face the music. He would have wanted to clear his name. He is not the type to run away.

‘There’s one more thing I want to say,’ added Pearson.

‘Sir?’

‘Unlike most of you, I’ve spent every day and every week of the past two and a half years looking for my son and his wife. I’ve given every minute of my time to trying to locate David and Patricia, wherever they may be.’

Pearson looked around the room again, giving them the benefit of his steady gaze.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘is despite the fact that I’ve never been entirely sure, deep in my own heart, that there was still someone alive to look for.’

18

The sense of isolation struck Cooper every time he got out of his car at the Light House. It wasn’t just the feel of the wind on his face as it swept over the bare acres of moor. It wasn’t the silence either, which was almost unnatural given the attention the old pub was getting. The isolation seemed to be a quality in the character of the building itself.

It wouldn’t always have been like this. The old roads had come this way, the packhorse ways and traders’ routes – all the local foot and cart traffic that had followed the departure of the Romans from Britain. The Light House would have gradually grown up to service the passing trade, becoming a place to rest and change the horses before crossing the moor to markets in Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton.

But the people who’d come along later and built the modern road system had different ideas. They preferred to travel in the valleys, and take a more circuitous route to their destination. So the A625 and the A623 had developed, and taken all the traffic away to the north and south of Oxlow Moor, leaving the Light House isolated despite its prominent location.

From the first-floor windows the Whartons could have looked out and seen cars moving on both main roads in the distance, knowing that very few of those drivers would ever find their way to the pub.

Right now, a crime-scene tent stood incongruously in the middle of a vast expanse of blackened vegetation, like the aftermath of a nuclear blast. Black dust covered everything, and wisps of smoke and steam trailed into the air. The heat from the ground could still be felt, yet the peat squelched wetly underfoot.

There had been more than twenty pumps on site for over a week as the fire continued to burn. United Utilities staff were out in two Argocats with fire fogging units. Fogging had been developed to fight fires with low water volume, producing a high-density fog of water droplets that turned very quickly to steam and absorbed large amounts of heat.

Digging in the peat was going to be a long, laborious job. The smoke rolling across the moor made it look more dangerous than it probably was.

‘If the wind changes and the fire begins to move this way, the fire service will have to abandon the moor and concentrate on protecting these buildings,’ said Wayne Abbott, pulling off his face mask.

‘Any more finds?’ asked Cooper.

‘Not so far.’

‘I’m not sure if that’s good news, or bad.’

Cooper gazed into the trench that was slowly being dug into the peat. He half expected to see a human hand or foot protruding from the ground, stained brown but perfectly preserved. If the Pearsons were buried here, theirs wouldn’t be the first bodies to emerge from the peat bogs.

In the village of Hope, legend had it that the corpses of a grazier and his maidservant who had died from exposure on the moors thirty years previously were once put on public display. The two bodies had been so well preserved by the peaty soil that they were kept on show for twenty years before eventually being given a decent burial.

Inhabitants of the Peak District seemed to have had an interest in preserving bodies. According to one old Peakland custom, the soul of a dead person could be purified by laying a heap of salt on the corpse’s chest. A parson who called at a Calver farmhouse on the death of one of his parishioners was said to have been horrified when he found the whole body pickled in salt.

‘Wear masks if you’re going to be out here,’ said Abbott. ‘Don’t take risks.’

Abbott was responsible for the meticulous art of crime-scene management – deciding where to search and what techniques to use, while taking care not to disturb potential evidence.

Cooper remembered Liz repeating a motto she’d learned in training as a crime-scene examiner.

‘ABC. Nothing, nobody, everything.’

‘Sorry?’ he’d said.

‘Remember your ABC. Assume nothing. Believe nobody. Check everything.’

‘Okay, I get it.’

‘It’s worth remembering.’

During their training, student crime-scene examiners never knew quite what to expect at the end of an assignment. It could be a person hanging from a tree or slumped in a car dead from exhaust fumes. They had to feel that shock factor – they couldn’t be sent off to their forces after training only to freeze when they saw a dead body. Part of the job was detaching yourself from emotion.

Cooper looked around for the presence of police vehicles. A liveried Honda CR-V four-wheel drive had left the pub car park and ventured out on to the edge of the moor. It was now sitting like a UFO on the black expanse of charred heather. He could see it a hundred yards away, with its red stripe and its light bar still flashing blue against a backdrop of smoke.

‘It reminds me of a fire I attended once,’ said Villiers. ‘That was a grass fire, along about a mile of railway embankment.’

‘You don’t have experience of firefighting, surely?’ said Cooper.

‘Not really. But back in 2002 and 2003, our guys took part in Operation Fresco. If you remember, that was the operation to provide fire service cover during the strike by civilian firefighters. It went on for six or seven months.’

‘The old Green Goddesses. Of course.’

Villiers laughed. ‘They were what all the press wanted to take pictures of. But the armed forces have some modern equipment too, you know. In fact, there are professional firefighters in the RAF. They’re needed at airfields. During the strike, they headed up specialist units, like breathing apparatus and rescue equipment support teams. Firefighting isn’t such a mystery.’

Cooper shook his head. He found himself constantly amazed at the breadth of experience Carol Villiers had gathered during her career in the RAF Police. Just the number of countries she’d served in made his time with Derbyshire Constabulary seem incredibly parochial. He wasn’t sure whether he envied her or not.

‘Wayne, have they decided what sort of buildings have been uncovered?’ asked Cooper.

‘Just mine buildings,’ said Abbott.

‘Someone will be interested.’

At High Rake nearby, the Peak District Mines Historical Society had undertaken an eight-year excavation project, which had uncovered two steam-engine houses, a platform for a capstan and wooden gin engine, an ore crusher and an ore-dressing floor. The remains had mostly dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the mine was state-of-the-art. The highlight of the excavation was the discovery of the bottom third of a Cornish pumping-engine house, which had been set underground, a relatively rare and complex type of engine and thought to be the best surviving example in the world. Yes, there would be people interested.

‘A lead miners’ building?’ said Villiers. ‘They didn’t have many structures on the surface.’

‘Not so old as we first thought, then.’

‘No. But see …’

Abbott directed Cooper a few feet away from the line of stones. He noticed a corroded iron plate lying in the burnt grass. He’d seen one of these before, only recently.

‘A capped mine shaft?’

‘Yes. I don’t think this one was generally known about. It’s not on any maps. We’re checking with the Mines Historical Society to see if they have any information on, it, but I suspect it’s one that got lost and forgotten.’

The plate was around three foot square and made of rusted iron on crude hinges. There was no lock or bolt on it of any kind, and it would be easy to raise, even using one hand. Another hole was covered by a larger buckled iron sheet, which hadn’t been fixed down at all but simply rested on stone edgings. Cooper examined the hinges of the plate. They were caked in rust and covered in a layer of peat, with fragments of burnt vegetation fused to them as if stuck with glue.

Unlike the open-cast workings of Moss Rake and Shuttle Rake, these were vertical shafts dug deep into the ground by lead miners. Some of the local rakes were still in use for the quarrying of minerals like fluorspar and calcite. But the lead mines had fallen into disuse decades ago.

The two shafts had been fenced off at some time with a few posts and a bit of barbed wire. But the posts were gone, and the wire that had hung between them lay on the ground.

‘Haven’t you looked inside?’ asked Cooper.

‘No,’ said Abbott.

‘But there might be traces of the Pearsons down there.’

‘No, no. That’s not possible. These shafts haven’t been opened for decades. Possibly for a hundred years or more.’

‘I see.’

Abbott looked at him, as if sensing that he was disappointed.

‘However,’ he said, ‘these old lead mines rarely had just one shaft. If there was a vein of ore running across this area, they would have dug several shafts to get access to it.’

‘We’ll find some more, then?’ asked Cooper.

‘If we look. Yes, I’m sure we will.’

When he lifted the plate, Cooper found he could look straight down into the hole, though without a torch he could see only a few feet into its depths. The shaft was simply hacked out of the rock and was barely wide enough to accommodate a fully grown man. The sides had been worn smooth in places by the shoulders of miners passing up and down. A single iron bolt had been hammered in as a makeshift foothold, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing to prevent a direct plunge into darkness.

Those old lead miners must have been small men. Poor people had been small anyway in those days, thanks to the general lack of nutrition. But perhaps miners had been chosen for their size, like jockeys. It would certainly be much easier to get access through the shafts if you were no more than five foot six and built on the skinny side.

There had been incidents recorded in the past of small children falling into mine shafts and being killed. But as Cooper looked at the width of the shaft in front of him, he found it difficult to imagine any adult being unable to prevent themselves from falling all the way in.

At least, he corrected himself, any conscious, living adult.

During their years at the Light House, the Whartons had tried to fight off the inevitable. Long ago, they’d moved away from the traditional hunting prints and picturesque Peak District scenes. The horse brasses and decorative plates had gone.

For a while, Cooper recalled, they’d opted for a cultural look – shelves of ancient hardback books bought in a job lot, modern abstract artworks, an occasional musical instrument hung near the ceiling. Then one day it had all vanished again, the pub closed for refurbishment, consultants swarming through the rooms, distressing the decor, jamming decrepit furniture into every corner – wooden benches and oak dressers, a reproduction writing desk. An antique look, he supposed. Nostalgic chic. It was an attempt to recapture some past that had never existed. Because the Light House as it appeared now had been a Victorian re-creation. Still a stop-off for travellers, yes. But it had been the height of modernity in its day. The facade hinted of aspirations to grandeur.

Well, the antiques were gone again, sold off to raise a bit of cash against the Whartons’ debts perhaps. The main bar was left with a range of standard pub furniture, glass-topped tables and wooden chairs, scattered haphazardly, as if the clientele had abandoned the pub in a hurry.

‘I want to take a look at the function room upstairs,’ he said.

‘Oh, the party?’ said Villiers. ‘Right, I see. Reliving the memories.’

They climbed the stairs to the first floor, where Cooper opened the door and examined the dusty floor and the little bar in the corner. The YFC party had taken place in this room, he was fairly sure. Even in his inebriated state, he remembered coming up and down those stairs. There seemed to have been a lot of people in the pub that night, though. Had someone else been holding a party here? Or was the function room spilling out revellers into the public bar from time to time?

Given the lack of records, it would require someone with a better memory than his to recall the facts. He could get Hurst or Irvine to trawl through the witness statements again, looking for someone who’d been attending a different party. Two days before Christmas, though? Whose memory wasn’t hazy, especially if you were the kind to get caught up in the social whirl?

‘Why not ask your brother?’ suggested Villiers, as he was about to close the door again.

‘Matt?’

‘That’s the only brother you’ve got, as far as I recall.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘He was there too, wasn’t he? I mean, he was in the Light House that night. You came here with him. That’s what you told us, Ben.’

Cooper said nothing, and found he was gripping the door handle a little too tightly. Villiers nodded, reading his silence as clearly as if he’d spoken everything that was in his mind.

‘But you can’t believe that your brother might be involved in a violent incident,’ she said. And she paused. ‘Oh, wait …’

He turned to look at her then, and watched the realisation dawn on her face, the memory of an incident, all too recent, when Matt Cooper had shot and injured an intruder at Bridge End Farm. Matt had been lucky to escape prosecution, a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service that had reflected the public mood of the time. But despite the relief among the family at the outcome, everyone knew now. Everyone was aware that Matt Cooper had the potential for violence.

That knowledge, and that knowledge alone, changed everything.

Henry Pearson had been brought to the scene as a gesture towards good relations with the family. but who had tipped off the media, no one seemed to know. Photographers from two local newspapers snapped Mr Pearson as he got out of his car and spoke to DCI Mackenzie. A crew from a regional TV station had set up near the outer cordon, and a reporter was doing a piece to camera, with the moor and the crime-scene tent in the background.

Mackenzie didn’t look happy about it, but he had to appear concerned and cooperative in front of the cameras. Possibly Mr Pearson had orchestrated all this himself. During the past two and a half years, he must have learned the best ways of handling the media. This was an opportunity for him to revitalise the interest in his campaign.

‘No one has mentioned what forensic evidence you’ve obtained from the items that were dug out of the peat,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

Pearson looked at Mackenzie directly. ‘For example, was there blood?’

It was impossible to refuse such a straightforward request for information from a member of the family.

‘Yes, sir. There was.’

‘And?’

Mackenzie held out his hands apologetically. ‘I can’t tell you any more at the moment.’

Diane Fry was waiting to speak to the DCI, holding back until he was free from the attention of the cameras.

‘We’ve got some preliminary results back from forensics,’ she told Cooper.

‘Finally,’ he said. ‘And?’

‘Those stains on David’s anorak. Well, they’re confirmed as human blood.’

‘Pretty much as expected.’

‘Yes.’ She looked towards Henry Pearson, to make sure he was out of earshot. ‘The trouble is, Ben – the blood isn’t David Pearson’s, or even Trisha’s.’

Before he could digest the information, Cooper’s phone rang. He looked at the display, but it was a mobile number he didn’t recognise.

‘Who is this?’ he said.

‘It’s Nancy Wharton. I wanted to let you know that Maurice has agreed to talk to you.’

‘When?’

‘Now,’ she said. ‘It has to be this afternoon. Today is one of his good days.’

Maurice Wharton was a shadow of the man Cooper remembered. The meaty elbows that he used to rest on the bar at the Light House were bony now, and hung with pale, shrivelled flesh. There was a curious yellow tinge to his skin and in the whites of his eyes. His hands jerked spasmodically on the cover of his bed in the hospice room, and he lay back on the pillow as if already exhausted before the visit had even begun.

‘Mr Wharton? Detective Sergeant Cooper, Edendale Police. Your wife said you’d agreed to talk to me.’

Cooper wondered if he was speaking too loudly. It was always a tendency when talking to the old and sick.

Wharton seemed to wink at him, one eye closing involuntarily.

‘I know you, don’t I?’

Cooper sighed. ‘Probably.’

‘You’ve been in the pub at some time. I remember faces. Even now, I still have my memory for faces.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

‘I don’t get many visitors here. I don’t want to, really. But Nancy says you’re all right.’

‘I hate to trouble you,’ said Cooper. ‘But we’re conducting a murder investigation. Aidan Merritt. I expect you heard.’

‘Yes, even in here.’ Wharton nodded at the TV screen across the room. ‘I keep up to date. I wouldn’t want to die without knowing how Derby County were getting on.’

Cooper smiled, glad that Maurice Wharton still had his wits about him. Pancreatic cancer might not affect the brain, but he bet the drugs did. The chemotherapy, the increasingly powerful painkillers. What did that combination really do to the memory?

‘I do get confused now and then,’ said Wharton, as if reading his mind. ‘There are bad dreams, and I’m not always sure when I wake up whether they’re real or not.’

‘Mr Merritt’s murder is real. He was clubbed to death at the Light House earlier this week.’

‘The pub is closed up,’ said Wharton.

‘Someone broke in.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘We have no idea,’ said Cooper. ‘We don’t know what Mr Merritt’s reason was for being there. We don’t know why the person who attacked him was there either. We’re looking for any possibilities. So if you can help us at all …’

Wharton was quiet for a moment, breathing very shallowly, as if it used up a lot of his energy just to keep air moving in and out of his lungs.

‘Aidan Merritt. He was one of my regulars. Funny, that.’

‘What is?’

‘That my regulars should die off before me. I didn’t think it would be that way.’

‘But Aidan in particular …?’

‘The last person I would have expected to be getting himself into bother. He wasn’t my type – too quiet, a bit studious. Not a big spender. But trouble? No, he was as quiet as a mouse. What was he doing at the pub?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ said Cooper.

‘Beats me.’

Wharton began to cough, and Cooper waited while he cleared his chest and spat into a tissue. He wondered if he should offer to do anything, fetch a drink of water or whatever. It was always difficult knowing how to behave when visiting the sickbed.

‘You were asking Nancy about an incident with that couple, the Pearsons,’ said Wharton when he’d recovered.

‘Yes. It doesn’t seem to have been followed up by the original inquiry when the Pearsons went missing.’

‘Because it was all settled,’ said Wharton.

‘How was it settled?’

‘I sweet-talked the visitors, made a fuss of them, did a bit of PR. Then I sorted the lads out. All over and done with, see?’

‘The lads? Ian Gullick and Vince Naylor?’

‘Ian and Vince. They’re good lads really, you know. There’s no harm in them.’

Cooper tried not to appear sceptical, but Wharton twisted his head on his pillow to look at him.

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘I’d need more information,’ said Cooper cautiously.

‘Yes, that’s right. Make your own mind up. Take people as you find them. But you don’t know them like I do. I saw the best and worst of people from behind a bar. You’re on the wrong track with Gullick and Naylor. I might not get the chance to tell you anything else, so make a note of that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Wharton wheezed. ‘I knew a lot of people at one time. Thousands. Now there’s just the family. Family is very important, isn’t it? Don’t you agree?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s the kids I worry about most. Eliot and Kirsten. It’s very bad for them. Their lives have been so disrupted, just when they’re at an age when they should have some stability. And it’s all my fault. I lost their home, brought them here into town, which they hate. And now I’m going to leave them in the lurch, thanks to this damn cancer. Even the life insurance won’t pay out much. I’ll be no more use to them dead than I have been while I was alive.’

‘It’s not your fault you got cancer,’ said Cooper.

‘It feels like it. It looks as though I did it to avoid having to put things right for my family, to avoid paying back what I owe them. And I owe them a lot.’

Wharton gazed out of the window again. A pair of gold-finches were fluttering around a bird feeder hung just outside his room.

‘You know – the night they closed up the pub, I couldn’t face being there,’ he said. ‘Not right there, on the premises. I ought to have been present, as the licensee. But I just couldn’t do it.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you? It was more than a pub to me, you know. It was my life, and my home.’

Cooper nodded. He thought he did understand, but if Mr Wharton preferred to think it was a unique feeling, it might be best to let him talk.

‘So I sat in my car,’ said Wharton. ‘I parked up by the side of the road on Oxlow Moor, where I could see the pub in the distance, on the skyline. Do you know the spot I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I sat there for a long time, waiting for something to happen. And in the end, I saw the lights going out. It was dusk by then. I was sitting in my car, and I watched the windows of my pub going dark one by one, until … well, until the Light House ceased to exist.’

‘It must have been very painful,’ said Cooper.

Wharton smiled weakly. ‘I thought so at the time. But the fact is, I didn’t really know anything about pain until now.’

Wharton hardly ever met Cooper’s eye during his visit. Occasionally he would glance quickly around the room, as if checking it was still there. But mostly, all he wanted to do was stare out of the window – not looking at the garden or the fish pond, but at something much further away, beyond the range of ordinary, physical vision.

To Cooper’s mind, it looked like a long stare into the past. Wharton was a man drawn against his will to gaze at a vision of unhappy memories, a distant kaleidoscope of sadness and regrets. He hoped he would never see such a vision himself when he gazed out of the window in his old age.

‘There was no way we could keep going,’ said Wharton. ‘But I didn’t want to give up. I tried everything. In the end, I was so desperate that I trusted people I shouldn’t have done. I signed an agreement. They were supposed to put capital into the business for a share of the pub. But they turned out to be liars and parasites. There was a bit of decorating, some old furniture got chucked out and some new stuff moved in. They called it a redesign.’

Cooper nodded. The nostalgic chic. He shouldn’t have been surprised that it wasn’t Maurice Wharton’s idea of the perfect decor.

‘And then when it didn’t work out the way they’d told me it would, they pulled the plug. Just like that. They wanted their money back. Well, we’d already remortgaged, so the only thing we could do was sell up. I should have known, I should have been able to spot a wrong ‘un a mile off after all these years. But I didn’t.’

‘Perhaps …’ suggested Cooper hesitantly. ‘Perhaps your judgement wasn’t at its best.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve heard that when things went wrong, you began to drink too much.’

‘I was bitter. I was angry. Yes, of course I turned to drink.’

‘Alcohol never took away anger and bitterness.’

‘No. But it numbs them for a while.’ He turned away to the window. ‘For some of us, that’s the best we can hope for.’

He said it with such feeling that Cooper looked at him in surprise, studying him as if he was seeing him for the first time. Yes, there was more than a hint of bitterness in the eyes, a twitch of anger in the set of his jaw. A man who knew about alcohol, too. Not a good combination.

Wharton was silent for a while, lying back on his pillow as if he’d exhausted himself with the burst of emotion. Cooper sat quietly, waiting. He was reminded of the time he’d sat at his mother’s bedside at Edendale General Hospital. He’d eventually fallen asleep in the chair, and had woken to find that she had died.

Now, he began to wonder whether Wharton was aware that his visitor was still there in the room.

‘I was in the Job, you know,’ said Wharton finally, addressing some spot near the ceiling.

‘Were you?’ Cooper had heard the capital J and knew what it meant. ‘You served as a police officer?’

‘You didn’t know that, did you?’ said Wharton. ‘That’s the trouble these days – too much information, all that data and intelligence flooding in. There’s so much of it that it doesn’t get through to the right people. Not the bits of information you need to know, anyway. Someone will have that fact on a computer back in your office. I suppose you’ll ask them about it now.’