Fall Down Dead by Stephen Booth

Author:Stephen Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

22

When Diane Fry finally called Cooper back, it was to ask him for his help. She wanted him to do her a favour.

‘What?’ he said in astonishment.

‘A favour,’ she repeated slowly, as if she was talking to an idiot.

Cooper recalled the last occasion Diane Fry had asked him for a favour. The time she’d gone back to Birmingham to confront an incident from her past. For some reason, she hadn’t felt able to trust her former colleagues from West Midlands Police. Had that all come round again? Had something she’d done in Birmingham rebounded on her? If so, it was hard to see how he could help her.

But he’d agreed to meet her, and she’d volunteered to come to Edendale instead of making him travel to Nottingham. That made him even more suspicious. She was obviously trying to soften him up. She’d be offering to pay for the drinks next.

They arranged to meet at the Wheatsheaf pub off Market Square. Across the road was Stone Bottom, the yard where the Way of the Eagle Martial Arts Centre had once occupied the basement of an old warehouse at the end of Bargate, the other three floors being filled with craft workshops, software developers, a small-scale publisher of countryside books and an employment agency. The steps down to the dojo were always bathed in the smell of freshly baked bread from the ventilators in the back wall of the baker’s in Hollowgate.

It seemed a century ago that he and Diane Fry had gone there together. He’d tried to be friends with her then, when she first came to E Division. Something had gone wrong along the way, and he still wasn’t quite sure what.

Cooper had a flash of recollection, back to the conversation he was having with Fry as they arrived at the dojo that day and parked their cars in the middle of an area of mud-filled potholes, with the sound of dull thumps and hoarse screams filtering through the steel grilles of the warehouse windows and that scent of baking bread.

The buildings were clustered so close together in Stone Bottom that they seemed grotesquely out of proportion from ground level as they leaned towards each other, dark and shadowy against the sky, set with long, blank rows of tiny windows. The slamming of car doors had echoed loudly against the walls and reverberated down the stone setts to the narrow bridge over the River Eden.

He and Fry had been talking about the possible motives for murder in an inquiry they were involved in, the case of a teenage girl found dead in woods outside Edendale.

‘You make people sound really complicated,’ she’d said. ‘In my experience, their motivations are usually very simple and boring.’

‘Motivations like ambition and greed?’ he’d replied. ‘The old favourites? They can certainly make people ruthless and selfish, can’t they?’

‘And sex, of course,’ she said.

‘But sex isn’t so simple either, is it?’

‘For some of us, it’s very simple, I can assure you.’

The craft workshops and software developers were

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