A Cooper and Fry Mystery Collection: Books 1 -3 by Stephen Booth

Author:Stephen Booth [Booth, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bundle, Fiction, Retail, Thriller
ISBN: 9780062390431
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Ben Cooper managed to get Weenink moving again and they turned left at the top of the path and emerged on to Bargate. There was still some traffic passing across the lights a few yards away, where the pedestrianized area began.

‘Uh-oh, got to have a piss,’ said Weenink.

‘You’ll have to hold on.’

‘Can’t.’

Weenink began to unzip and stumbled into the doorway of Boots the Chemists.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Cooper stood with his back to the doorway, watching the cars cross the end of Bargate, praying that none of them would turn down the street. The sound of a trickle turned into a steady stream, and a pool of urine began to run past his feet on to the pavement.

‘Hurry up.’

Weenink just grunted. Cooper swore under his breath as a patrol car appeared at the lights and stopped on the red signal. The car had the distinctive green and yellow checkerboard pattern on the side that indicated it belonged to Traffic division. Cooper wasn’t even likely to know the crew. Not that knowing them would help in the least.

He recalled travelling on the M1 one day with his father, back at the time of the year-long miners’ strike – 1984, it must have been. Ben had been fourteen years old, and he had gone with his father and Matt to a football match. Derby County had been playing Aston Villa at Birmingham in the FA Cup. He remembered the match well. But he remembered the incident on the motorway, too.

On the way back, they had come up at the rear of a long convoy of coaches, one behind the other, travelling in the inside lane of the motorway. They all carried the name of a coach operator in London and they were packed with men, like some factory outing. When the Coopers’ car was close behind the last vehicle, every man on the coach stood up on the seats and dropped his trousers. There was a sudden blooming of white buttocks like exotic lilies in a pond as the men mooned through the windows at passing motorists.

Ben and Matt had laughed, until their father became angry, then pulled out and began to overtake the coach. Maybe he had intended to pull the driver over, Ben wasn’t sure. But Sergeant Cooper was off duty, and they weren’t even in Derbyshire. This had been Nottinghamshire, somewhere south of Junction 27.

At some point, Ben had sensed his father change his mind. His foot had slipped off the accelerator. He had fallen back momentarily, then accelerated again and passed the convoy as quickly as possible. The boys said nothing. As they passed, they could see the uniforms. They could see the stickers in the front window of every coach. Ten coaches there were – they counted them as they passed. ‘Metropolitan Police’, the stickers said. They realized that the men were reinforcements arriving to help control the mass pickets of Yorkshire miners then threatening Nottinghamshire pits. Law and order was on the road.

The lights changed and the patrol car had moved on by the time Weenink reappeared.

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