Drowned Lives Read online

  Stephen Booth is the internationally bestselling, CWA Dagger-winning author of the acclaimed thrillers featuring Cooper and Fry. The series is in development as a TV programme. Booth lives in Nottingham.

  Also by Stephen Booth

  Black Dog

  Dancing with the Virgins

  Blood on the Tongue

  Blind to the Bones

  One Last Breath

  The Dead Place

  Scared to Live

  Dying to Sin

  The Kill Call

  Lost River

  The Devil’s Edge

  Dead and Buried

  Already Dead

  The Corpse Bridge

  The Murder Road

  Secrets of Death

  Dead in the Dark

  Fall Down Dead

  Copyright

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 978-0-7515-7627-6

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Stephen Booth 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Lyrics from ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on p318 by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, © Abkco Music, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Stephen Booth

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgements

  For Lesley, as always

  And for everyone whose family history has

  surprised them!

  Prologue

  First I see the animal. Its body is a hunched grey shape, outlined by the glow of a lantern and the shadows moving slowly on wet bricks. Billows of warm breath swirl in the fog as it trudges under a bridge to the clatter of its own hooves. Soon I hear the leather harness rustling on its flanks, the line of twisted hemp creaking and sighing as it tightens over the swingletree. I catch the scent of fresh manure, mingled with the tang of earth matted in the animal’s hair and the aroma of oats in its nose tin, moistened by its breath.

  Thirty feet behind, the stem of a boat drifts into sight. It moves in silence, but for a murmur of water caressing the keel. A coating of coal dust clings to the oak boards, and the lantern light catches the roof of a squat cabin, where the arc of a tiller rears over the stern.

  And then I notice the man. He’s a ghostly silhouette, staring ahead, his eyes fixed on the horse as he judges the curve of the bank and braces the tiller against the pressure of water. There’s a stillness in his manner, an air of concentration as he reads the motion of the boat. When his face emerges from the mist, I recognise the pain that deadens his eyes. It’s the look of a man who has faced betrayal, a man who knows all about fear.

  My body aches with tension at the relentless tread of the horse and the slow drift of the boat towards the bridge. Through a gap in the fog, a wooden bollard appears on the wharf for the steerer to tie up his line. Stacks of unmarked boxes lie decaying on the cobbles, slippery with mould.

  The second figure barely stirs. His face is invisible behind the collar of a worsted greatcoat as he stands in the shelter of the bridge, his sweat drying cold on his forehead and a faint wheeze in the back of his throat. A chill strikes into his bones from the freezing water and he moves his feet slowly, one after the other, flexing his toes to stop them from going numb. He turns his head to follow the boat and waits for the horse to pass, praying that the fog will muffle his breathing and the painful pounding of his heart.

  And finally, I see one more thing. It’s a six-foot boat shaft, tipped with an iron spike, gripped in a waiting hand.

  My thoughts are tainted by these images. They’ve grown in my mind like ancient ghosts breathed into a raw, quivering life. They sound and smell too real to be illusions. They’re trying to convince me they’re actual memories.

  Yet all this began in that brief instant when the old man’s eyes first met mine. I realise now that he’d already been able to see these images himself, and perhaps he’d been seeing them for years. He was preparing to transfer them to me, like a dying ancestor handing down the secrets of the tribe. My reluctant hand was the next in line. Refusal had never been an option.

  There was just one moment when I had the chance to walk away, a second of hesitation when I could have drawn back from the edge. I might have gone back to my Victorian semi, to the constant struggle to pay the bills, to the microwaved meals for one in front of the TV, and the tedious tick of the carriage clock that reminded me constantly of my parents. It wasn’t much, but it was my own life, and I was used to it. If I’d been asked, I would have chosen to keep it.

  But I had hesitated, and it was too late. When a voice called my name across the Fosseway restoration site, my shabby, ordinary life sank into that evil-smelling mud where the dumper truck had reversed and churned the earth into a morass. During the weeks that followed, it seemed I would never stop floundering in my efforts to reach firm ground.

  Andrew Hadfield was among the work party that day. He’d straightened up and spotted me before I could walk back to my car. He was pointing me out to a tall, elderly man in a dark overcoat who stood at his side. And then Andrew shouted the words I couldn’t help but hear.

  ‘Hey, Chris! Chris Buckley! There’s someone here who’s dying to meet you!’

  I’d been turning over a paragraph in my mind, something about the first small step in a project to re-create a waterway that had lain buried beneath the Staffordshire countryside for forty years. I should have known that no matter how much you dig, or what ancient facts you unearth, you can never restore the past completely. There always have to be compromises, and a great many lies. But, like those muddy enthusiasts shovelling out the first lock of the canal, the knowledge wouldn’t have stopped me digging.

  ‘Come on, Chris,’ called Andrew. ‘Come over and say hello.’

  A gust of chilly wind blew across the fields, and the afternoon sun had slipped behind a mass of grey clouds building up from the east. I was cold and tired, and I wanted to go home. But politeness made me move towards Andrew and the stranger, the sort of courtesy that becomes an obligation. That, and my other major fault – curiosity. An almost fatal combination, as it turned out.

  It seemed only a short flicker in time from then to the moment I found the police standing at my door, two hard-faced detectives with nothing but questions in their eyes. That movement was all it took to precipitate my headlong plunge through two centuries of bitterness and hatred, decade upon decade of guilty secrets, and an endless thirst for vengeance.

  That step taught me the meaning of betrayal. It took me right to the brink of despair.

  And then it showed me death.

  1

  February 1998

  Lichfield, Staffordshire

  It was all about family in the end. That’s how it began, and that was how it finished, too.

  There are some families that seem to last forever, perpetuating themselves in infinite generations, son after son marching through the centuries, fecund and proud. They branch off and flourish in great clumps like wild flowers seeding themselves on the wind, until their teeming progeny populate vast swathes of the countryside. But other families are destined to die out, to fade and vanish into history. They wither on the branch like blighted fruit, until just one shrivelled apple is left. Such a family are the Buckleys.

  The deaths of my mother and father, coming so close together, should have been a catharsis, a cleansing. When the stonemason added my father’s name to the headstone in the graveyard at St Chad’s, it was a symbolic act that swept the board clean, giving me a chance to start life afresh. Instead, it felt more as though an emptiness had fallen on me, a heavy blanket through which I could barely remember my former life.

  It also left me with no family that carried the Buckley name. I had no brothers or sisters, no broods of nephews and nieces. There weren’t any uncles or aunts on my father’s side, and no cousins. And, of course, I had no wife or children of my own to inherit the house, or the carriage clock.

  So there was just me. Christopher Buckley, thirty-two years old, single and always likely to be. A man who was about to be made redundant from his position as an Information Officer with Staffordshire County Council. I was the last shrivelled apple, waiting for the next stiff breeze to knock me off the branch. And trying my best to avoid the wasps.

  True, there were many friends and acquaintances I’d made over the years in the newspaper, magazine and PR businesses – some former colleagues at the Lichfield Echo, fellow freelancers, councillors, all the contacts I’d cultivated. And recently there were some members of the Waterway Recovery Group I’d come to know through visits to their sites, and asking a lot of questions about a subject that had sparked my interest.

  But how many of these people would waste a day coming to my funeral, as my father’s old work colleagues had? Precious few of them. There would always be something better to do. An urgent meeting, the kids to pick up from school, some unmissable daytime TV game show. But it wouldn’t matter to me by then, would it? A dead man needs no friends.

  There was one person who would certainly come to my funeral. She’d make a point of sobbing into a handkerchief during the service, nodding sorrowfully at the platitudes of a vicar who didn’t even know me. And she’d be weeping buckets as they carried my coffin out to ‘The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Verdi’s Nabucco – a piece of music I’ve chosen specifically because I want to make them all cry. No laughing at my funeral, thanks very much.

  My next-door neighbour, Rachel Morgan, was divorced and lived alone, like me, in a house much too big for her in a neighbourhood she knew little about and cared for less. Even I could work out from her frequent appearances on my doorstep, on one pretext or another, that she wanted friendship, maybe more. Yes, Rachel would come to my funeral. She would come out of the fellow feeling that one lonely person has for another, but she’d believe she was there as something more.

  It was Rachel who happened to be raking dead leaves from her front lawn that cold February morning when I left the house to look for updates on my current stories. I write a few theatre and book reviews for the local papers, but they barely bring in a few pounds. Feature articles for some of the glossy magazines had become my current interest, mainly because they pay well. All I needed was an angle, and a few good photos. Now and then, it was possible to hit lucky.

  ‘Good morning, number six.’

  Rachel had tied her red hair back off her face in a yellow ribbon and was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater.

  ‘Morning, number four,’ I responded automatically.

  ‘Off taking more pictures then, Chris?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, patting the camera bag stupidly, as if she hadn’t already spotted it.

  Our houses are a pair of Victorian brick-built semis, like many others in the Gaia Lane area of Lichfield. Some of the houses have little wooden balustrades on their upper storeys, as if they were trying to hint at the existence of proper balconies like those of their larger neighbours round the corner. Each pair has a plaque built into the brickwork between the bedroom windows, recording a date in the first decade of the twentieth century and a romantically rustic Victorian name – The Hawthorns, Oaklands, Rosemount. Our pair are Maybank, 1910. It must have been Rachel who started the ridiculous habit of addressing me by the number of my house, but it seemed churlish not to respond the same way.

  ‘Where are you off to today then?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, the usual.’

  ‘Hilton, is it? Cyril the Squirrel and his friends in their tree houses?’

  There were only two on-going stories I could rely on, and they were loosely related. One was the efforts of the restoration group to re-create the abandoned Ogley and Huddlesford Canal that had once run through Lichfield – a huge task that seemed about to become impossible in the face of plans for the country’s first toll-paying motorway. The South Staffordshire Link Road would cut right across the line of the canal.

  The other story was a series of protest camps set up near Hilton by environmental campaigners determined to save countryside threatened by the road. Bit by bit, the Under Sheriff of Staffordshire was clearing them from their tunnels and tree houses with the help of armies of bailiffs and police. But every time they had to retreat from a site, the protestors set up camp somewhere else and defied the law to do its worst. The game had gone on throughout January and February.

  Rachel was interested in the link road protest. In a way, she was typical of the readers I aimed my articles at.

  ‘Trees and the environment versus the road builders,’ she said. ‘Whose side are you on, Chris?’

  ‘I don’t have to be on anybody’s side. A journalist makes it his business to see both sides.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  She tossed a rakeful of dead leaves into a wheelbarrow with a dismissive gesture, condemning the limp and useless mass to the compost heap. I took this to mean she didn’t think much of my trite remarks.

  ‘Look, the protestors have a point, obviously,’ I said. ‘We’ve lost enough of our environment already, and somebody has to take a stand. And why on earth do we need yet more roads, when they’ll only create more traffic?’

  Rachel looked up at me then, her eyes expectant, using the prongs of her rake to turn over some decaying beech foliage. The leaves were an attractive chestnut brown on top, but when she turned them over, their rotting black undersides were exposed and tiny slugs and insects fell away, wriggling to escape the light.

  ‘But at the same time,’ I said, ‘if you’ve ever seen the cars and lorries crawling through places like Brownhills and Walsall, you’ll see why a new motorway is needed. It’s a nightmare for people living in those places. There are two opposite viewpoints, both with justification. So there’s bound to be conflict. And that’s what I’m reporting.’

  She smiled at me, nodding encouragingly. I knew I’d done exactly what she wanted, and allowed her to provoke me into conversation, pushing me to express an opinion and show my feelings. I could never figure out how she did it, or why.

  ‘You shouldn’t take your job too seriously,’ she said. ‘People want some entertainment with their news.’

  ‘Even in the Lichfield Echo?’

  ‘We all need a bit of fun.’

  ‘I’ll look for a pile of leaves to kick,’ I said.

  Rachel frowned at me, concern forming little creases around her eyes. She’d been giving me that look a lot since my father’s funeral.

  ‘I know it’s been hard,’ she said. ‘But it’s been three months, Chris. You need something. Your friends—’

  ‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘Work to do.’

  She sighed. ‘All right, then. Have a good day.’

  I walked towards the little car port at the side of my house. The Escort isn’t fond of cold mornings, and it took three or four attempts to start. It was already ten years old and rarely serviced, and I hardly dared to look at how many miles were on the clock. But replacing it wasn’t a possibility right now.

  Rachel waved to me as I pulled onto the road, and I raised a hand in acknowledgement. I suppose I could have had worse neighbours than her. It might have been a house full of screaming children next door, or students smoking weed every night with the stereo turned up full blast. Or it might even have been a couple with a patio barbecue and an urge for midnight DIY, just like the neighbours I’d left behind in Stafford two years ago. But if there’d been anybody like that in the other semi at Stowe Pool Lane, I wouldn’t have stayed in the house when my father died.

  Rachel had been divorced for five years. She’d worked as a librarian until the cuts began, and now she was a part-time receptionist at a vet’s surgery. I gathered she also put some hours in at a charity shop for cancer relief. At weekends, she went with a couple of girlfriends to folk concerts at the Guildhall to hear Bellowhead or The Albion Band. The previous November she’d roped me in to see Pirates of Penzance staged by Erdington Operatic Society at the Civic Hall. How she’d managed to persuade me, I couldn’t remember. But somehow I ended up humming ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ for weeks afterwards. I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical. From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical over and over again. Well, I say ‘singing’, but no one would want to hear me sing.