Deacon had taken them all by surprise. He’d run so far along the parapet and jumped so hard that he’d landed on the grass banking just beyond the hard shoulder. For a moment, Cooper glimpsed him, crumpled against the base of a tree. Incredibly, he still seemed to be alive. Perhaps the undergrowth had softened his landing. Cooper saw him beginning to move, to sit up against the trunk, a hand pushing himself off the ground, his white face staring into a blinding light.
Then something hit the tree with a shocking impact. Cooper could tell from the noise that it was more than just metal hitting solid wood. It was more like the crunch of a boot crushing a snail. Splintered shell and ruptured flesh. The sound turned his stomach.
When they scrambled down the banking, the emergency services found Sean Deacon pinned to the tree by the grille of a Transit van that had swerved off the carriageway. A paramedic went to him, shook her head at Cooper, opened her kit, and injected Deacon with painkiller.
‘Why did you do this, Sean?’ asked Cooper.
‘I just came to the end of the line,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in going on. It’s better this way.’
Cooper didn’t know what to say. Deacon gripped his arm.
‘Can I tell you something?’ he said.
‘Of course. Anything.’
‘I never intended to do any harm.’
And somehow, Cooper knew that he meant it.
He held Deacon’s hand so tightly that it would have been painful, if it hadn’t been for the diamorphine flooding through the man’s collapsing veins.
‘Let it go, Sean,’ he said. ‘Let it go. It’ll be all right.’
Finally, he felt the grip relax. Deacon released a long, rattling breath that came from deep inside his body somewhere. It was more than just carbon dioxide escaping from the lungs, more than just a simple exhalation. It was the dying breath.
‘Let it go. Don’t struggle, just let it go.’
Cooper looked up at the paramedic and stood aside for her. His mind numb, he began to walk away, with no idea where he was heading, just walking away from the scene. Don’t look back, he thought. There’s no need to look back.
Behind him, he heard the fire and rescue service start up their cutters. It was too late for Sean now, but it had to be done. All these things had to be done.
At the top of the banking, he reached a fence, and stopped. The Derbyshire landscape stretched out in front of him — the village of Tibshelf, Woolley Moor, and the higher hills around Matlock in the distance. Roads glittered like strings of jewels as they snaked across the moors. Villages lay sleeping in the darkness all across the Peak District.
Cooper wondered whether Sean Deacon was flying now, or falling. Was his spirit whispering across the sky, somewhere high above those night-time hills? Or was that Deacon’s voice he could hear, screaming faintly in the dark as he plunged into a deeper blackness?
Flying, or falling?
Well, perhaps it was all the same, in the end.
A 1920s red-brick pub stood on the corner of Warstone Lane and Vyse Street in the Jewellery Quarter, near the Chamberlain clock. The Rose Villa Tavern, it was called. A Mitchells amp; Butlers pub, drinkers sitting among decorative tiles.
Fry looked at her watch again. Andy Kewley was late. That was unlike him. But maybe he’d needed a stiff drink before their meeting. She glanced up Vyse Street towards the Rose Villa, considered walking up to see if she could find him propped in the corner of the bar with a whisky, staring morosely at the tiles.
But that picture wasn’t right. It didn’t fit Kewley’s personality. He was much too careful for that. Much too cautious.
Fry entered the Warstone Lane cemetery. Hundreds of Victorian gravestones marching across the slopes, lurking in the hollows, hiding beneath shrouds of ivy. Tiers of catacombs, defaced angels, tombs blackened with soot. And that powerful, sickly sweet smell, still strong on the night air.
An engine revved noisily nearby, and a car raced away on the Middleway. It was very dark away from the streetlights, and Fry pulled a small torch from her pocket. She looked down from the top tier of the catacombs to the grass circle below, the centre of the amphitheatre.
For a moment, Fry thought the vandals had struck again since her last visit to the cemetery, that another memorial angel had been toppled to the ground. In the light of her torch, she saw blank eyes pressed into the grass, a face mottled with damp.
But when she looked again, she knew this was no angel. The face was pale, but it wasn’t stone. The eyes were blank with the stare of death. And the mottled dampness was much too dark. It was dark as clotted blood.
21
Friday
The next morning, Ben Cooper drove through endless red-brick suburbs, streets so identical that it made him wonder how thousands of Birmingham commuters ever found their way home.
On the map, Birmingham looked like a giant spider’s web, a dense network of roads radiating out in a ragged pattern to absorb the surrounding motorways, M42, M5 and M6. Between the roads, the ground was thick with houses.
Cooper took a wrong turning somewhere as he left the Expressway. He thought he’d probably come off too soon, and was driving through some apparently nameless suburb. He stopped to look at the A to Z and turn round, and found himself sitting in front of a bay-windowed semi in an empty, tree-lined street. Cooper looked around him. Acres of brick and leaded glass. Bitumen-stained fencing, and flower beds full of pansies. This place was so suburban it was almost a caricature of itself. It might look comforting if you belonged here. But it was pretty damn weird if you didn’t.
He knew there must be thousands and thousands of homes like this, out there in the spider’s web. Suburb upon suburb, making up a vast brick blanket that covered most of the West Midlands. Warwickshire had been here once, and part of Staffordshire. Now great chunks of them had been absorbed into the urban sprawl.
While he was stopped, he called Fry’s mobile number.
‘Diane, are you at the hotel?’
‘No.’
‘Where, then?’
‘What do you want to know for? What’s going on, Ben?’
‘I’m coming to see you.’
‘What? Where are you?’
‘I’m in Birmingham. I’m not sure exactly which part.’
‘At the risk of sounding dim — why?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘And you couldn’t do it on the phone? You’re not turning into another paranoid, are you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Never mind. Come to Hockley. Warstone Lane, in the Jewellery Quarter. You’ll find it easily enough. Just follow all the police cars.’
A few minutes later, Cooper finally reached the city centre. Its tower blocks, streams of traffic and crowds of pedestrians made him feel he was nothing but a single ant in the middle of a seething ant heap. Well, one insect might be insignificant. But at least that meant it went pretty much unnoticed by the rest of the heap.
It had always seemed to Cooper that city people lived in a permanent sodium twilight. It never really grew dark here, and the stars were invisible. The sky was only a dim void, way up there beyond the tower blocks. And in the daytime, it didn’t seem to get properly light in the shadow of those high-rise buildings. The streets running west
