Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) (20 page)

‘Diane, would you agree to me speaking to Nancy Wharton?’ he said.

Fry considered it for a moment, and he thought at first that she was going to say no. It certainly wouldn’t have
surprised him. As far as she was concerned, most of his ideas were set up to be rejected out of hand.

‘I suppose it can’t do any harm,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Why do you think all the public attention focused on David Pearson?’ she asked. ‘Trisha is quite attractive, isn’t she? The press normally go for shots of a photogenic young woman. It draws more sympathy, or something.’

Cooper had to agree. Usually that was the case.

‘But look at David again,’ he said. ‘Remember what I said about the film star?’

‘Oh. Robert Redford, was it?’

‘Yes. He has that look about him. Handsome, dashing, a bit of a rogue. He was tailor-made for the story, especially when his skill as a conman started to come out. The media loved the fact that he was on the run. He was Robert Redford in
Butch Cassidy,
or Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape
.’

Seeing Fry’s expression remain blank, he searched desperately for something she could relate to.

‘Oh, I don’t know … Leonardo DiCaprio in
Catch Me if You Can
.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ she said.

‘Good.’

Fry screwed up her eyes. ‘He doesn’t look anything like Leonardo DiCaprio. Wrong hair colouring altogether.’

‘That’s not the point …’ began Cooper, then gave up. ‘Oh, never mind. Some of the locals are pointing their fingers at this other group of visitors. We have descriptions of them, but no names.’

‘Is there a suggestion that they knew the Pearsons?’ asked Fry.

‘We have no indication what their conversation was about. It might just have been a bit of casual chat, if they realised they were from the same part of the country. Or
fellow feeling between outsiders. We can’t say. And there’s no chance of tracing them unless we trawl through the records of every holiday cottage and guest house within twenty miles.’

‘Well, that’s something that wasn’t done at the time,’ said Fry. ‘And now it’s probably too late.’

‘Yes.’

Cooper shut the door a little too hard, just as a gesture, and strode back into the CID room, where his team looked reassuring, and less difficult to deal with.

‘Luke,’ he said, ‘can you dig out everything we have on Ian Gullick, please?’

‘A regular at the Light House?’ said Irvine. ‘I recall the name.’

‘Yes.’ Cooper consulted his notebook. ‘And an associate of his.’

‘Vince Naylor?’

‘Right.’

‘Was that from the old biddy?’ asked Irvine.

‘Surprisingly, yes.’

‘I was wondering,’ said Villiers, ‘why the Pearsons didn’t go to the Light House for an evening meal on that last night. It was closer to their holiday cottage than the George.’

‘The food wasn’t up to much at the Light House,’ said Murfin. ‘It had been rubbish for years. If the Pearsons were bothered about getting a decent meal, they would have gone anywhere else but.’

‘That’s true,’ said Cooper.

‘And in any case, the Light House always closed for a few days over Christmas. They would already have stopped serving food by then, and they never took any bookings for accommodation.’

Cooper knew that its position was what the Light House was most famous for. It vied with the Barrel Inn at Bretton
to be known as the highest pub in Derbyshire. On a clear day you could see across five counties, they said. But its location was also a drawback. To find it the first time you had to programme it into your sat nav. It wasn’t a place you passed by accident.

And Murfin was right – for the last few years the food menu hadn’t competed with anywhere. It hadn’t even tried. No seasonal locally sourced produce here like the pheasant, venison and wild boar you might find at the Barrel. From a culinary point of view, the Light House had been stuck in the 1980s. And there had been nothing available at lunchtime except a packet of pork scratchings.

‘By the way,’ said Murfin. ‘Speaking of food, I’ve got a line on Maclennan, the chef. He’s working at a French restaurant in Chapel-en-le-Frith now.’

On the way to Chapel-en-le-Frith, Cooper drove through Sparrowpit, and turned up a lane by the Wanted Inn that would take him towards the A6, where it bypassed the town. He saw a board by the roadside advertising ‘Livery vacancies’. Now, that was a sign of hard times.

He crossed the national park boundary just before he reached the A6, and followed the road that ran through Chapel. He passed the turning for the high school and the railway station on Long Lane. Since he was early and had time to spare, he decided to call at the local police station.

Chapel police station was a little way out of the old part of town, on Manchester Road. It had originally been a couple of old police houses, and was also the base for a traffic policing unit for the north of the county. There was a dog unit parked in the yard outside, and a mobile police office. It had one of the best views of any police station in
Derbyshire, with an outlook at the back over rolling farmland towards the National Trust site at Eccles Pike.

Half an hour later, Cooper met Niall Maclennan in the little cobbled marketplace in the oldest part of Chapel-en-le-Frith. Maclennan was sitting on a bench between the corner of the NatWest Bank and the old market cross, under a horse chestnut tree, watching the world going by on the high street below.

Although it was tiny, like all the best marketplaces it seemed to be surrounded by pubs. One of them, he noticed, had a sign outside.
Pub for let.
Near the traditional stocks was the Stocks Café, advertising itself as
Great British Breakfast Winner 2010.
Lucky Gavin Murfin wasn’t here.

Niall Maclennan had dark eyes, prominent cheekbones and designer stubble. He was trying very hard to ooze the impression of a TV celebrity chef. At one time his image might have been spoiled by the fact that he was working in Chapel-en-le-Frith, this old market town on the edge of the High Peak. But these days Chapel was claiming to be the gourmet centre of the Peak, thanks to the number of restaurants, cafés and pubs, and a reputation for locally sourced produce.

Less was said about the fifteen hundred Scottish soldiers who had been imprisoned in St Thomas Becket church and starved to death during the Civil War. That ought to be worthy of some kind of commemoration.

‘There are good jobs here,’ said Maclennan. ‘And in Buxton, too. I was just marking time at the Light House, getting a bit of experience.’

‘So you left the Whartons for a better job?’

Maclennan hesitated. ‘Not exactly. It took me a few weeks to find another position.’

‘What made you leave, then?’

Thoughtfully, Maclennan took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘The
atmosphere, I suppose. Things were getting bad. Everyone knew that.’

‘Bad financially?’

‘Yes, business was down. It’s heartbreaking to put all your effort and creativity into producing an exciting menu, and then have no one turn up to get the benefit. Everybody was tetchy, especially Nancy and Maurice. I could see it would only get worse. Once you’re on that slippery slope, it takes new management to turn it round.’

‘Reputation being so important.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But it wasn’t just that, was it?’ asked Cooper.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you mentioned Nancy and Maurice getting tetchy. Running a kitchen can be quite stressful anyway. If the Whartons became difficult to work with, I can see why you might have walked out on them.’

Maclennan laughed. ‘I’m not some kind of prima donna, you know. I don’t storm out in a hissy fit every five minutes. It was a fully thought-out decision, made in the best interests of my own career.’

‘So who took over the kitchen when you left?’

‘Nancy, so far as I know. She had a couple of staff to help her, but they weren’t exactly qualified chefs, if you know what I mean. It’s hardly a surprise that the quality of the menu nosedived. I tried to be a bit adventurous, and produce quality. They went for pub grub. What a phrase. Pub grub.’

He said it with such venom and contempt that Cooper could imagine the conflicts there might have been at the Light House while Maclennan was working there. Maurice Wharton was famously irascible – in fact, he’d made it his trademark. And Nancy was no soft touch, either.

‘Do you remember the time the couple from Surrey went missing?’

‘Sure,’ said
Maclennan. ‘It was on all the news programmes.’

‘You were still working at the Light House then, weren’t you?’

‘Yes – but you appreciate I was in the kitchens all the time? I didn’t see any of the customers. At least, not until we’d finished serving and cleaning down, then I might go out into the bar for a drink to wind down.’

‘Just staff in the bar by then?’

‘Well, unless Maurice had let a few regulars stay for a bit of a lock-in. You know it happens.’

‘Yes, everyone knows it happens,’ said Cooper.

‘But then it was just a few of the same old faces. I never stayed long on those nights. Not my idea of congenial company.’

The hostility in his voice sounded genuine. It was more than just the resentment of an ungrateful public that was common among people working in the hospitality and service industries. Maclennan’s tone suggested that he knew too much about these particular customers personally.

But a moment later he seemed to have second thoughts. He straightened up, took a look round, stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Well, it was a shame when they had to close the pub,’ said Maclennan. ‘I suppose they’d seen it coming for quite a while, though.’

‘The Whartons, you mean?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes. Well, Maurice in particular. You could see him getting more and more depressed. I reckon it was weighing on his mind for years before they eventually had to pull the plug. I mean, a man wants to believe that he can support his family and run a business properly. Maurice was a proud sort of bloke. I’m not surprised it hit him so hard.’

‘You say he was getting depressed?’

‘Oh, aye. Morose, he was. He’d always been such a
character. Cantankerous, you’d say. Crabby and bad-tempered maybe. But a lot of it was show. He liked to live up to his reputation.’

‘His image as Mad Maurice,’ said Cooper.

‘That’s it. He loved all that. It gave him a bit of fame. He played up to it something rotten at times, winding up the tourists and so on. Regulars who knew him thought it was hilarious. “That’s Mad Maurice for you,” they’d say. But, well … when the pub started to get into trouble, you could see it was more than that. Maurice lost heart all of a sudden. One day we all realised that he wasn’t joking any more. He really was moody. He began to drink, too. Well, when a landlord starts to drink his own booze, it’s the beginning of the end, in my view. A very slippery slope. Poor old Maurice.’

‘I dare say you know Mr Wharton’s health is very poor?’ said Cooper.

‘That’s on account of the booze, though, isn’t it? The booze and the stress. I couldn’t say which caused which. Probably a bit of both. Like a vicious cycle.’

‘Circle,’ said Cooper.

‘What?’

‘It’s a vicious circle.’

‘That’s what I said.’

Cooper found himself distracted by the sight of a couple of estate agents he wasn’t familiar with. They didn’t have offices in Edendale, so their properties were probably more on the western borders of the county.

He realised Maclennan was looking at him strangely.

‘Sorry, what were you saying?’’ asked Cooper.

‘I was saying that you might want to talk to Josh Lane, Sergeant. He was their regular barman. The Whartons had quite a few casual staff while I was there, but Josh was full time, right up to the end. He became almost like one of the family.’

‘Thank
you.’

Cooper took a last look round Chapel-en-le-Frith. The men’s hairdresser’s was doing good business. Two women were chatting outside the post office, near a recruitment poster for Hope Valley Rugby Club. At a beauty parlour in the high street they were offering a fish foot spa treatment. Ten pounds for a fifteen-minute session.

‘I can’t tell you anything else,’ said Maclennan. ‘As you can see, I got out before it was too late. You might call me a rat deserting a sinking ship, I suppose. That would be fair. But if you ask me, Maurice Wharton was sinking in a sea of his own alcohol.’

At
the council house on the Devonshire Estate, Nancy Wharton was on her own. She examined Cooper critically for a moment on the doorstep. He knew she would be weighing him up, placing him for what he was, but hopefully remembering him too.

She glanced then at Gavin Murfin. It had been a difficult decision whether to bring Murfin along. In many ways, Carol Villiers would have been a better choice. But Gavin had been well known at the Light House. Mrs Wharton should recognise him, even if she didn’t know Cooper himself.

‘Old faces,’ she said. ‘I suppose you want to come in.’

‘Please, Mrs Wharton.’

Every house had a unique smell. Cooper never got tired of walking into someone else’s home and trying to identify the aromas. Sometimes it was a mix of artificial scents – air fresheners, perfumes, furniture polish. At other times it could only be called a stench. Substances too noxious to mention oozed out of the furniture, and the carpet stuck to his feet as he crossed a room.

Here, the Whartons seemed to have brought subtle hints of the Light House with them on to the Devonshire Estate. He couldn’t quite put a name to the smells, but they were creating those momentary flashes of memory, the way scents
sometimes could, being so much more evocative than the other senses.

It might be the type of furniture polish used, or the mingling of old beer and smoke that you might get used to if you’d lived with it for years. But if he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself sitting in the snug at the Light House. He could practically taste the beer, hear the buzz of conversation around him.

One smell in particular was teasing him. When he caught a fleeting whiff of it, Matt’s face loomed up in his mind, red and sweating, with the suggestion of a snatch of conversation that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was like the elusive memory of a dream that he knew was still there in his mind when he’d woken up, but which slipped away whenever he thought about it.