‘No reason,’ said Cooper, ‘if you’re prepared to accept everything you’re told.’
‘I had no cause to doubt Darius,’ she said loyally.
But Cooper could see she was wondering now. What else could her future husband have gone into hospital for? If he left her wondering for long enough, what interpretation might she come up with? How much imagination did Elsa Roth have?
Finally, Cooper took pity on her.
‘Did you know that Meadow Park also has a rehabilitation unit?’ he said.
‘Rehabilitation?’
‘Drugs,’ said Cooper. ‘Alcohol too. But I think your husband was a drug addict. Probably cocaine. It’s not unusual among businessmen, I’m told. It’s the pressure of the work. I remember your husband talking about how hard his father worked.’
‘What you’re saying can’t be true.’
‘We can establish it for definite. But if it helps, I think Mr Roth decided to get clean before your wedding.’
As Cooper watched her face, he saw her put two and two together, then snatch them apart again just as quickly. Sometimes people didn’t want to believe what was right in front of their noses.
Elsa stared at him. ‘I’m going to miss him so much,’ she said.
Cooper was sure that was true, at least.
‘Unfortunately, Mrs Roth,’ he said, ‘it gives your husband a motive for the murder of Faith Matthew. Faith worked at Meadow Park Hospital as a nurse at the time Darius was admitted. I wonder if she threatened to tell what she knew. Did Darius do something to her that made her threaten him? Or that made him threaten her? Would he take the trouble to write a note telling her to “fall down dead”?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Or,’ said Cooper, ‘was that you, Mrs Roth? You were always very defensive of your husband. I think if you believed Faith was a threat, you’d do anything to frighten her off. Sending a note. Perhaps even pushing her off Dead Woman’s Drop.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t understand any of this,’ she said.
‘Jonathan Matthew certainly believes your husband killed his sister on Kinder Scout last Sunday. Somebody told him so.’
‘Darius was with me all the time,’ said Elsa.
‘Or you were with him.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Quite a bit. Are you sure he even noticed you were there?’
She flushed. She knew exactly what he meant. She must have put up with Darius’s lack of attention often enough that she took it for granted. But there was a difference.
Elsa was too loyal, though. She wouldn’t have told him what Darius did even if she’d seen it with her own eyes. She would have rationalised it to herself, figured that he must have had a good reason for it. And she would be willing to protect him even now he was dead. Perhaps especially now.
‘Are you aware of the state of Darius’s businesses?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mrs Roth, there’s no money left. Darius would have been bankrupt within the next six months. He wouldn’t have been able to pay the mortgage on this house much longer.’
‘Mortgage?’
Cooper looked at her pityingly. Had she taken so little interest that she didn’t know there was a huge mortgage to pay on the lodge? Had she taken it for granted that Darius owned the property outright? She was in for a horrible shock.
He let the thought sink in for a moment.
‘You’ll have a lot of things to deal with, Mrs Roth,’ he said. ‘Contact me if you decide there’s anything you want to tell me.’
The French bulldogs were missing from the front lawn when they left the house. Whose job was it to care for them? he wondered. Elsa didn’t look up to it at the moment.
‘Jonathan Matthew was dead set on revenge,’ said Villiers as they got in the car. ‘He didn’t plan it very well, though. He would never have got away with it. He must have been too consumed with hatred.’
Cooper started the ignition and drove out of the gates towards Hayfield.
‘I understand why he would feel like that if Jonathan believed Darius Roth killed his sister,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t think Darius was a killer.’
When Diane Fry passed the service station that morning, she saw the BMW in position again. Had no one told them the disciplinary hearing was over? That would be normal. Lines of communication could be slow, especially through official channels. For a moment, she felt sorry for the two men sitting in the car. But the feeling didn’t last long.
She circled the roundabout and came back to the service station, pulling onto the forecourt. She imagined her watchers sitting up, suddenly alert.
Fry opened her glove compartment and opened a packet of latex gloves. Then she got out of her car and checked her phone for the email giving her a code for her InPost locker. She pulled on the gloves, keyed in the number and a door popped open. A yellow box sat innocently inside. She drew it out, closed the door and walked casually across the road.
As she walked up to the rear of the BMW, she thought she heard muffled cursing from inside. But what could they do? They weren’t even supposed to be here.
Fry tapped on the driver’s window. After a moment, the window slid down. She didn’t recognise either of the faces of the two men, but she knew them by their suspicious manner, their wary expressions.
The driver looked at her, saying nothing.
‘I think this is for you,’ she said.
‘I think you’ve—’
But he didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Fry tossed the box through the window onto the floor of the car and watched them scramble to avoid it, as if afraid it might contaminate them. A corner of the box split open and a puff of white dust hit the driver’s trouser leg.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ she said.
She peeled off the gloves as she walked back across the road and couldn’t resist a satisfied smile at the sound of the cursing and the bouncing of the BMW on its springs. She contemplated making an anonymous call to Nottinghamshire Police reporting suspected drug dealers operating on the Trent River Walk. She pictured the arrival of the Armed Response Unit, the sniffer dogs, the lengthy awkward explanations that would follow.
But no. It was enough to imagine them fearing it. They would be back on the M1 headed south as fast as their BMW could go.
36
Sometimes a solution was all about knowing where you were, and where everyone else was too. Ben Cooper realised he had never known that in this case.
He went back to study the satellite view of the Kinder Scout plateau on Google Maps. The peat groughs feeding into the River Kinder showed as meandering reddish-brown streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Eroded tracks were visible in a way they wouldn’t have been for walkers on the ground, and the Mermaid’s Pool was no more than a dark blob on the greenish-brown of the western slopes.
But the Downfall stood out as an eruption of broken rock, twisted and spattered on the hillside, the abandoned shell of a reptile skin. It was shadowed by a darker outline, the deeper chasm where water blew over the edge, where Faith Matthew had fallen from Dead Woman’s Drop.
Cooper printed out a new copy of the image and laid it on his desk. Thoughtfully, he took a yellow marker and tried again to locate the position of each of the members of the New Trespassers Walking Club at the time Faith had died.
Several times he had to refer back to the statements made by the group. He marked some of the positions with queries, crossed them out and started again from scratch, trying to get all the conflicting accounts to make coherent sense. After a lot of trial and error, he ended up with eleven markers identifying specific walkers, and one he placed roughly in the area where the search dog Dolly had located Jonathan Matthew. Finally, he took a red pen and drew a cross on the location of Dead Woman’s Drop.