up top, too.’
‘What was that supposed to do?’
‘The GZI? It recorded the height and direction of a nuclear detonation, so we could report exactly where a bomb had gone off, and whether it was airburst or groundburst, which made a difference to the fallout.’
‘And that’s all you could do?’
‘It was a simple idea. The only trouble was, someone had to go outside to get the readings off it.’
Cooper realized there was some rubber sheeting on the floor, squelching as his weight squeezed out the water.
‘That’s conveyor-belt rubber. It was donated by the National Coal Board some time in the eighties. That’s all the insulation we had, apart from the polystyrene ceiling tiles.’
After only a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get back up into the daylight. He couldn’t imagine staying down there all night, with the hatch closed and nothing more than a dim six-watt bulb to see by. Let alone being trapped down there for the duration. Trapped inside for — what was it? — fourteen days, until it was considered safe to come out? You could go mad down there in fourteen days.
‘Seen enough?’ asked Falconer.
‘Yes, thanks.’
He got clear and watched Falconer re-fix the padlocks and turn the Allen key in its slot.
But even when the hatch was shut and locked again, Cooper still had the feeling that there was something he was missing.
‘Well, you finally meet a decent bloke, and he turns out to be a murderer,’ said Naomi Widdowson.
Fry looked at her. ‘There’s something wrong with the logic of that sentence.’
‘Well, what I mean is… he seemed all right, anyway.’
Naomi was being transferred from the custody suite at West Street to a cell on remand. Magistrates’ court would decide whether to bail her on Monday. She had been issued with her personal belongings at the desk and was waiting for the van to pull up in the yard.
‘He hasn’t been convicted yet,’ pointed out Fry. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even been charged.’
‘Yes, but you must be sure that he did it, right?’
‘We can’t comment on that,’ said Fry.
‘Like I said in my statement, Adrian went back to the huts when I left. I argued, but I couldn’t stop him. So if someone did Rawson in, then it must have been him, mustn’t it?’
‘It will be for a jury to decide.’
Naomi shrugged. ‘I’m cutting my losses, anyway. Time to forget about him and move on, I think. Don’t you?’
‘Aren’t you going to make even the least effort to argue that he’s innocent?’
‘What? You expect me to stand by him? Act the loyal girlfriend for the newspapers? No way. Absolutely no bloody way. He took some money to do this, didn’t he? And he never even told me. Bastard.’
‘Did you want a share?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with me, do you hear? As far as I was concerned, it was all an accident.’
‘An accident?’
‘I had no idea what he meant to do. He let me think he was just going along with the plan. In fact, he seemed to be really into it. Like that thing with the hunting horn. He said it would be a laugh.’ Naomi shook her head. ‘He was pretty useless at it, though. He’d only learned the one call.’
‘The kill call,’ said Fry.
‘If that’s what it was. I wouldn’t know.’
Fry and Murfin watched in amazement as Naomi Widdowson walked away towards the van, accompanied by a prison escort officer.
‘Well, I’ve heard about women who care more for their horses than they do for people,’ said Murfin. ‘And I’ve just seen one.’
‘I’m not a big fan of horses,’ said Fry. ‘But, even so, I know how she feels.’
That evening, in the CID room, Fry stood by the window. It was only a few minutes after six, but darkness was falling rapidly. Heavy clouds gathered in the sky to the west. More rain was on the way.
She had been watching the pedestrians passing by on the pavement. There was nothing unusual about any of them. They were perfectly ordinary members of the public. A young woman in a smart grey business suit, talking on her mobile; a young couple carrying rucksacks, probably early tourists; a man with a dark beard and stained jeans; two girls with magenta hair and nose studs. Ordinary, innocent passers-by.
But were they all so innocent? How many potential murderers were out there, walking the streets of Edendale? Well, wasn’t everyone a potential murderer, in the right circumstances? Or the wrong circumstances. Push any average person into a corner and most of them would cross the line, wouldn’t they?
Fry thought so. The vast majority of these people hurrying by her now probably couldn’t imagine what those circumstances would be. But some of them would. A few might have a specific victim in mind right now. Who knew what fantasies were going on in their heads; violent scenarios playing out, involving a partner, a boss, or a motorist who had just given them the V-sign. Only a tiny minority of them would ever follow through on their fantasies, or act out a violent thought. But there was no way of telling who those individuals were. It might be the man with the beard. But it could just as easily be the young businesswoman, who might be plotting bloody vengeance as she chatted on her phone.
Naomi Widdowson might, or might not, have intended Patrick Rawson to die. But she certainly had no regrets that it had happened. She had badly wanted a person’s death. Deborah Rawson had gone further than that.
Fry knew there were individuals in prison right now, serving life sentences for murder, who were every bit as ordinary as these passers-by on the streets of Edendale. She’d met some of them, and talked with them. They were people who had found themselves in the wrong circumstances, people who had crossed the line.
She thought about what Angie had told her last night. In a smaller way, her sister had crossed a line at some time, too. But was it ever possible to cross back again?
Cooper dropped David Headon and Keith Falconer back at the pub and bought them a drink for their time. He knew they’d enjoyed themselves, because it had been impossible to stop them talking all the way back to Edendale.
When he left them, Cooper drove home in the dark, remembering that there would be no Randy to welcome him, and never would be again. Was that why he had subconsciously been seeking something to distract himself, an excuse to avoid going home? It was the sort of thing that he suspected of Diane Fry. But it was definitely disheartening to think that the flat would be so dark and silent, with Randy lying in his grave.
He’d heard nothing from Fry since he left West Street, but he hoped for her sake that her interviews had led to a successful conclusion. His own interest in the Rawson enquiry had waned, and he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the ROC badge he’d found at Eden View, and with Michael Clay’s local connection. If Clay hadn’t been a member of the Edendale ROC post’s crew, why did he have the badge?
As he crossed the lights and turned into Welbeck Street, Cooper thought about the stories Headon and Falconer had been telling him about the 1960s and the start of the Cold War. It was hard for him to imagine what people had gone through in those strange times. The 1960s weren’t so far in the past, yet they might as well be a chapter in a history book, for all he could understand of the world those young ROC observers had lived in.
Come to think of it, he didn’t think it had even been covered in his Modern History lessons at school. The Cold War did get a mention, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War. But the preparations in Britain for life after a nuclear apocalypse? That had gone unremarked.
Yet for many thousands of ordinary people it had been something right at the forefront of their lives. Any day, any night, they could have heard that rising and falling wail of the siren, following an Attack Warning Red, and know that they had only four minutes. Four minutes — to do what? To find some way to live, and to decide the way they wanted to die.
When he thought about the present enquiry, Cooper felt as though they’d all been drawn off on a false trail, misled by a powerfully laid artificial scent. It seemed as though he and Fry had almost physically been following a
