almost unconscious. He sat in the car outside the hospital entrance for ten minutes before an ambulance crew found him. His hands were glued to the steering wheel with congealed blood. The nurses had to prise him free.’ ‘It isn’t right,’ said Mark. But he didn’t think Owen had heard him. His eyes were on his hands, though they were hidden by his gloves. He rubbed the palms together, as if irritated by some persistent itch. ‘On balance,’ said Owen, ‘I think carbon monoxide is probably the best. It takes only a few minutes. I’ve seen men still sitting in the driving seats of their cars after the exhaust has done its job. They seem just to have fallen asleep. A paramedic once told me that your blood turns cherry-red from the carbon monoxide, when it works properly,’ said Owen. ‘Your brain swells, and so does your liver and kidneys and spleen. Even the tiny blood vessels in your eyes haemorrhage. But that’s internal damage, the things you can’t see. At Suicide Corner, you always think they’re asleep at first. Until you notice the smell of the urine soaked into the cloth of the driving seat.’ Mark shifted his feet uneasily. Now he wanted Owen to stop talking. ‘This paramedic said the carbon monoxide replaces the oxygen in your blood,’ said Owen. ‘You die of oxygen starvation, a sort of internal suffocation. You can’t smell or taste or see the gas; all that happens is that you begin to feel drowsy. You get a slight headache and a shortness of breath. Then your movements slow down, there’s some nausea and chest pain, perhaps a
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few hallucinations. We’ve all had hangovers worse than that. But this is the sort of hangover you don’t wake up from.’ ‘Owen ‘ ‘You wouldn’t believe the mistakes that some of them make, though. They don’t seem to plan their own deaths properly. They come with lengths of hosepipe that are too short to reach through the car window. Or they arrive with nothing to seal the gap where they have to lower the window to get the pipe through. At Suicide Corner, they can sit for a long time with the wind howling through the gap in the window and blowing away the carbon monoxide as fast as it trickles into the car.’ Mark thought for a moment of the woman, Jenny Weston, who had died with her own blood choking her heart. Her death had been sudden; she had been given no time to consider, no time to reflect on what she had done with her life, for good or for evil. ‘None of it is right,’ said Mark. At least Owen lifted his head now and met his eye. Owen’s face looked tired and drawn. The wind up here was making his eyes water. There was rain coming from the east - fat clouds were bouncing over the hills, and all the weight seemed to be in the sky. ‘Owen … ‘Yes, they seem just to have fallen asleep,’ said Owen. ‘But it’s not a sleep that has any comfort in it. Only nightmares.’ Mark peered at his face, seeking to understand more clearly what he was hearing in the Ranger’s words. ‘We’ll not let that happen, Owen; he said.
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Owen just stared at him. And then he said something that made Mark wonder whether he had understood any of it at all.
‘Let me tell you, Mark,’ he said. ‘It’s always your body that lets you down, in the end.’
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26
Diane Fry strapped on the scabbard for her extendable baton. Police officers called the baton an ASP, after the name of the manufacturer, Armament Systems and Procedures of Wisconsin, USA. It extended to sixteen inches when fully racked, and the handbook claimed it offered unparalleled psychological deterrence. Even closed, it consisted of six inches of heavy-duty steel. Most CID officers simply carried the weapon in their pocket, but on Fry’s build the bulge of the closed ASP was still noticeable. So she had bought a back pocket scabbard with a Velcro flap which stopped the baton falling out when she ran. On the other hip was the holder for her kwikcuffs. When she put on her jacket, their outline was barely visible.
She considered her protective vest. But it was heavy and uncomfortable to wear for any length of time, and it gave her pains in the muscles in her back. She put it back in her locker.
Ben Cooper had said that they were supposed to protect people like Calvin Lawrence and Simon Bevington. But it was difficult for Fry to understand why. The two travellers weren’t part of the society that she served;
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they paid no taxes to help meet her wages. They were never likely to become members of the police liaison committee. Still, there was something about them that she didn’t understand, all the same. Against her own judgement, she was curious what it was that Cooper saw in them. His mind was a puzzle and frustration to her - she never understood what perverse instinct it was that made him believe so strongly in things that she couldn’t even see. Yet the need to understand him was like an irritating itch on her skin, a rash that she had to scratch. In this case, he was way off target. Lawrence and Bevington were on the wrong side of the law. Well, they were - weren’t they?
When she arrived at the quarry, Fry found a bored constable sitting in his car with half an ear on the radio, a chocolate bar in his mouth and his eyes on a fishing magazine. The windows of his car were streaked with rain on the outside, and steamed up on the inside.
‘Anything happening?’
‘Nope. Quiet as the grave,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Taylor.’ The rain was getting heavier as Fry banged on the door of the van. The curtain behind the cab was pulled aside and light spilled out on to her face. Then the door slid open, and Cal stood on the step.
‘What do you want?’ ‘Just a few words.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’
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‘There’s something I want to know. I thought you and your friend might be able to help me.’
Cal eyed her suspiciously. ‘Leave us alone. We’ll be out of here by Monday morning. What’s the point of hassling us now?’
‘No hassle. Just a question.’ ‘One question? OK, go ahead.’
Fry turned her jacket collar up against the water trickling on to her neck. ‘It’s wet out here,’ she said. ‘Yeah. It’s the rain that does it.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Is that the question? ‘Cos the answer’s “no”.’
‘I can’t hear you, because of the rain in my ears.’
A voice came from inside the van, lazy and amused. ‘Hey, let her in, Cal. She sounds fun.’
Cal hesitated, but pulled open the door. Inside the van, Fry squeezed into a space next to the chest of drawers, sitting on a cushion that smelled of Indian spices. Stride watched her through the blonde hair that had fallen over his face. He smiled, like an Arab prince welcoming her to his tent.
‘Our last visitor. I hope you bring us luck.’
‘Yes, they’ll have you out of this quarry tomorrow.’ ‘We know.’
‘If it were me, I’d be glad to leave. There’s nothing here. What sort of life can it be?’
‘You want to know what we do all day? Is that the question?’
