The Murder Road: A Cooper & Fry Mystery Page 3

  Of course, that might be a blessing for some people. His idealised memories of Christmas were definitely just age.

  Cooper was about to start his week’s work after his rest day. But back in Edendale his boss was already at her desk. Detective Superintendent Branagh must have his number on speed dial. Since his promotion to DI, he had barely been able to escape her attention. Hazel Branagh loved to communicate with her junior staff. Perhaps she’d done a course on it at some time. The longer you worked for Derbyshire Constabulary, the more courses you’d done. By the time you completed your thirty years’ service, you were trained for everything but no longer wanted for anything.

  ‘You’ll have a new team member arriving this week,’ said Branagh. ‘It seems like a good match. I hope you’ll agree.’

  Cooper detected a familiar firmness in her tone on the last few words. She was indicating that it was more than a hope. It was an expectation. In fact, there were currently two vacancies in his CID team at E Division. Since his own promotion to inspector rank, there was an opening for a new detective sergeant. And his old-school DC, Gavin Murfin, had finally retired and was off to pastures new as some kind of private enquiry agent.

  Cooper reminded himself that it was Murfin’s retirement party tonight and he mustn’t miss it. Gavin was long past his sell-by date as a serving police officer. He’d never adjusted to the modern approach to policing and could never hope to pass a fitness test. Worse, he was often guilty of that most heinous of twenty-first-century crimes – being ‘inappropriate’.

  But Cooper had been his supervising officer for some time now, and there was such a thing as loyalty. Besides, he had a sneaking liking for Murfin that was risky to acknowledge too openly.

  There had been a presentation to Murfin in the office on his last day. Superintendent Branagh made the presentation herself and even the Divisional Commander had come along for a few minutes. It was the end of an era, after all. Or ‘the end of an error’, as his youngest DC, Becky Hurst, kept calling it.

  Murfin had provoked exasperation and disapproval from the command structure, because he was the type of detective who no longer fitted in with the modern ethos. His chances of promotion had long since disappeared down the plughole, leaving him cynical and embittered in his last few years, with an ingrained disregard for authority and procedure.

  But Murfin was viewed with great affection by his colleagues, despite all his foibles and failings. Becky Hurst had done her best to change him and shape him into a modern man. She’d tried, but failed – and she was in no doubt it was Murfin’s fault. He was a lost cause, she said. He was an idle, sexist, politically incorrect anachronism who should have been kicked out years ago. But even Hurst wiped away a tear as he walked out of the door for the last time.

  ‘So you’re getting a new DS,’ Branagh was saying.

  ‘Where from, ma’am? Is it an internal promotion?’

  ‘A transfer from D Division.’

  ‘Derby?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Ben. Another city cop, eh?’

  Cooper had pulled up at traffic lights on Middleton Boulevard, indicating to turn right into Wollaton Road, which was already solid with cars backing up into the junction. He had the sudden feeling of a weight sinking to the bottom of his stomach. Superintendent Branagh only called him ‘Ben’ when she was trying to soften him up for something.

  ‘No, I wasn’t going to say that . . .’

  ‘Mmm. You’re a bit too easy to read sometimes.’

  He could hear Branagh smiling. It was a rare enough occasion. In fact, it was really only noticeable on the phone, since her voice changed slightly but her face hardly moved.

  And she was right, of course. He couldn’t deny that sinking feeling. He was already dreading the task of coaching someone in the very different conditions of policing in E Division. Police officers in Derby referred to their rural colleagues in a variety of disparaging terms. The ‘E’ was said to stand for ‘Easy Street’. Cooper knew that was far from the truth. But who had he been sent and why were they being transferred from the city?

  ‘I was rather hoping . . .’ he began.

  Branagh was slow to respond, as if she was doing some other task at the same time, perhaps talking to someone else in her office.

  ‘I know, Ben,’ she said. ‘But sometimes we just have to accept things as they are. We can talk about it when you get in.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Cooper owed a lot to Superintendent Branagh and she knew it. Obligations tended to eat at him until he felt he’d repaid them in full. Sometimes, he thought, it would better not to feel obligated to anyone. It would make life much simpler.

  The lights had changed to green, but the traffic still wasn’t moving. The roads around Nottingham city centre were always choked in the morning. For Cooper, the urban rush hour was one of those horrific experiences that he’d happily avoided most of his life by living in a rural area like the Eden Valley. The town of Edendale could be busy, but only at peak tourist times. You could usually rely on being able to get to and from work without sitting for hours in a queue with hundreds of others, impatiently going nowhere.

  When he finally got moving towards the A610, his phone signal began to break up. He could hear Branagh speaking, but he couldn’t make out the words and wasn’t even sure whether she was talking to him any more.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘who is it we’re getting? Do we have a name?’

  But his superintendent was no longer there. Cooper ended the call and concentrated on driving. There was no point in worrying about it now. Well, was there?

  Sometimes blood was exactly what Detective Sergeant Diane Fry wanted. There were cases that were so difficult to deal with that her personal feelings welled up in outrage.

  Fry had already reached her desk before Ben Cooper made it across the border into Derbyshire. She didn’t have as far to travel. Fry was a city girl and she was back in the city now, though it was one she wasn’t familiar with. Nottingham. Robin Hood and lace making. And a terrible reputation for gun crime. But so far it was looking better than she expected.

  She was working for Major Crime at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, based at EMSOU’s Northern Command at St Ann’s police station in Nottingham. The remit for Northern Command covered the whole of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. But it was events in the neighbouring city of Derby that had caused ripples throughout the region.

  Fry’s head was full of the details from the intensive briefings she’d sat through during the past week. Some of the specifics she would prefer to forget, if she had the choice. The unrelenting descriptions of multiple offences described in victim statements. The sheer number of victims and the one characteristic they all had in common – their vulnerability. And of course there were the photographs. The endless parade of desperate eyes. Those eyes were the hardest thing to look at, the most difficult to forget.

  The first prosecutions for child sexual exploitation in Derby had taken place a few years previously. Operation Retriever involved thirteen defendants who had worked together. Over the course of three separate trials, nine of them had been convicted of systematically grooming and sexually abusing vulnerable teenage girls. They were jailed for up to twenty-two years for a total of seventy offences.

  Almost all those perpetrators were Asian. They were considered devout Muslims and family-orientated men, but away from their homes they would cruise around the streets of Derby in a BMW, wearing designer clothes and targeting young girls.

  After the jailing of two of the sexual predators, a Home Secretary at the time had suggested that some men of Pakistani origin saw white girls as ‘easy meat’. A serious case review found agencies had missed opportunities to help the victims.

  The details were harrowing. The men would pick out girls at train stations, or walking home from school. The gang would first befriend them, inviting them out for a drive in a flash car, plying them with alcohol and drugs. The groomin
g process would then intensify. The girls were invited to parties and met more men. Witness statements had described how victims were sometimes driven to secluded areas, where they were sexually abused and raped. But the abuse also took place in houses and hotels across the Midlands, and even the victims’ own homes. CCTV images had even captured some of the men driving around Derby, stopping girls on the street.

  It was only a chance arrest that halted the Derby gang. Staffordshire police stopped a car in nearby Burton-on-Trent which was carrying three men and two young girls. They were suspected of shoplifting. The girls were taken back to Derby, where they told officers what was going on.

  It was the start of a huge undercover operation involving a team of a hundred detectives. Even now it was believed that not all the girls ensnared by the gang had been found.

  A later inquiry, Operation Kern, secured the successful prosecution of another eight men, who had operated independently of each other. But this time seven of the men were white. The multi-agency task force had been forced to confront two facts. Many of the sexual predators in Derby weren’t Asian, but white middle-aged men. On the other hand, briefings said there was now a specific problem of Muslim men targeting Sikh and Hindu girls.

  Proof, if ever they needed it, that there was no way of creating a typical profile of an offender. No simple causes and no easy answers.

  Fry considered her role in the multi-agency team that had been set up to identify and bring to justice the remaining offenders. There were men still believed to be grooming vulnerable girls in the region, but they were now operating much more covertly after the high-profile court cases. No blatant activities on the street for CCTV cameras to catch.

  She hadn’t for a moment considered trying to refuse the job, but she did wonder why she’d been chosen. A reputation for toughness and a lack of emotion had probably followed her from her previous posting in Derbyshire Constabulary’s E Division. She could imagine what some of her ex-colleagues might have said about her.

  But she wasn’t as cold as everyone thought. Occasionally, someone had the rare ability to find that out about her. But only occasionally.

  St Ann’s was a modern police station, unlike the building she’d worked in at Edendale, with its leaking roof and drafty corners. Fry glanced at the small window, screened by blue louvre blinds, which was all she had in this office. It was hardly worth looking out, of course, since all she would see was a road and a sprawling housing estate, with perhaps a glimpse of the office blocks in the city centre, or the old cinema that was now a cash and carry warehouse.

  Fry wondered how far away Ben Cooper had got from her by now, whether he’d reached Derbyshire yet and was back in the hills he loved so much.

  She wondered, too, whether he would come back again. She questioned that every time. And she wasn’t used to being in doubt.

  There was one other issue on her mind. Her sister Angie was due to have a baby soon. Somehow the idea of a baby threatened to change everything for Fry, even though it wasn’t hers. It meant there was a future, something to look ahead for that she hadn’t planned herself. There were different, unexpected possibilities in the world. Life didn’t have to stay the way it was now. And perhaps things could be put behind her so she could concentrate on what came next.

  But what did come next? Fry was aware of a swirl of mixed emotions when she thought about the subject. Some of those feelings were negative, bitter reactions that she tried to shy away from but was forced to acknowledge.

  Of course, she loved her sister. But Fry was conscious of a small stab of resentment, perhaps even envy, whenever she thought about the baby. Angie hadn’t made many good choices in life, not since the day she ran away from their foster home in the Black Country. Why should Angie’s future be the one they always talked about on the phone? Why wasn’t Diane’s future considered? What was her future?

  Well, one thing was certain. It was up to her to take her life into her own hands and make the best decisions.

  5

  Before he could reach Edendale, Ben Cooper’s route was diverted. Instead of descending into the town he could already see lying below him, he found himself turning and heading west towards the A623 and out of the Eden Valley.

  His duty DC, Carol Villiers, had been called to a scene outside New Mills, a town way over in the north-west of the county. She’d been there since the early hours of the morning, attending an incident that had gradually been escalated and was causing local complications.

  Cooper had known Villiers for years. They’d grown up in the same area and had gone to school together. She’d been through an entire career and marriage since then, spending nine years with the RAF Police, and gaining and losing a husband, before she came back home and was recruited into Derbyshire Constabulary. He’d come to rely on Villiers a lot, valuing her experience and maturity to balance the young DCs in his team. The trouble was, he had something to tell her now that she wouldn’t want to hear.

  ‘Does it look bad, Carol?’ he said.

  ‘There’s an awful lot of blood. A lot more than the woman who called it in noticed. She said she thought the lorry driver must have cut himself. If so, it was one hell of a cut.’

  ‘And no sign of the driver?’

  ‘Not a whisper. Our problem is that the lorry is jammed under this bridge and it’s completely blocking the road. I’m talking about a tractor unit with forty-foot trailer. Nobody’s getting past this thing, in or out. It might just be an accident, but we don’t want to call out a recovery vehicle to shift the lorry if it might turn out to be a crime scene. No one here wants to take that responsibility, so . . .’

  ‘So that’s my job,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You’re the DI.’

  ‘Don’t I know it. I’m on my way.’

  ‘How long will you be?’ asked Villiers.

  ‘Twenty minutes maybe. Why?’

  ‘It’s just that we’re dealing with a bunch of irate residents here.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Like I said, no one is getting past. Well, you’ll have to see it for yourself, Ben. Just don’t take too long getting here, please.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’ Cooper paused. ‘But what does your instinct say, Carol?’

  He could hear Villiers breathing, the distant murmur of voices in the background, the cackle of a rook overhead. He pictured her standing on a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere, members of the public and uniformed officers alike looking to her for a quick judgement. It was a position that came with additional responsibility. Villiers could do that. He’d always had confidence that she could.

  ‘I wouldn’t move this lorry,’ she said at last. ‘And, Ben – I think time might be running out for the driver too.’

  ‘Thanks, Carol.’

  Cooper put his foot on the accelerator and climbed out of the Eden Valley. As always when he crossed Tideswell Moor, the landscape opened up and the sky became bigger than anything he was used to in the valley. Today clouds streamed in from the western horizon, tinted in shades of blue and grey like a vast watercolour painting. He could see all the way ahead, over the limestone quarries in Doveholes Dale to the slopes of Black Edge and Combs Moss.

  He hit the A623 near Peak Forest and swung onto the main A6 at Higher Hallsteads. New Mills was about eight miles north from here, past Chapel-en-le-Frith and Chinley. At Whaley Bridge the road overlooked a stretch of the Peak Forest Canal where it diverged into basins at Bugsworth and Whaley.

  As he crossed over Charley Lane, he could see over Chinley towards the distinctive shapes of Chinley Churn and Mount Famine. One was cut into ridges by the quarrying on Cracken Edge, the other a prominent flat-topped mound at the end of South Head.

  But by the time he reached Furness Vale, the character of the area had changed and was looking much more built-up. Of course, New Mills was close to the borders of Cheshire and Greater Manchester, and that made a big difference. This part of the county was rapidly becoming a commuter belt for work
ers in the urban sprawl beyond the Pennines. People here knew very little about Derby or Chesterfield. They looked to Manchester for their allegiances. They did their shopping at Trafford Park rather than at Westfield or Meadowhall. They followed United, instead of County or Wednesday.

  Only a few fields in this area actually fell within the Peak District national park. When the boundaries were drawn in the 1950s, planners made a dramatic sweep around New Mills and the neighbouring towns of Whaley Bridge, Hayfield and Chapel-en-le-Frith. They were too built-up and too industrial to be subject to the stricter planning regulations. That deliberate gash on the maps ran all the way south past Buxton and the quarries along the A616.

  The resulting outline of the national park resembled a leaping salmon, its head pointing into Yorkshire, its tail sweeping across the Staffordshire moorlands as its surged northwards. New Mills lay just off the tip of the salmon’s tail, a semi-urban fragment that might have broken away from the dark mass of Greater Manchester and drifted into the Peak District to escape.

  Cloughpit Lane led off away from the A6 towards the foothills around the vast, dark plateau of Kinder Scout. Cooper drew his car as far into the side as he could when he saw the collection of vehicles up ahead. And there was the railway bridge Carol Villiers had mentioned. The rear end of an HGV protruded from the arch like an animal that had failed to make it all the way into its burrow and had died there.

  There was barely enough room for a normal-sized person to squeeze through the gap between the lorry and the stone wall of the bridge. Cooper had to get up onto the banking and push his way through the branches of elder saplings and clumps of bracken to reach the cab, supporting himself with one hand against the side of the truck. He noticed that some of the straps holding down the curtain sides were unfastened along one section, creating just enough space for someone to crawl inside. It might just be carelessness by the driver.

  When Cooper reached the cab, he found himself staring at a giant cartoon windmill painted in bright green. It was obviously the company’s logo. Windmill Feed Solutions. He didn’t recognise the name. Back at Bridge End Farm, his brother Matt used a company based in the Eden Valley for his animal feed deliveries.