getting worried when he realized I was talking to the wrong people.’
Fry glanced at him. ‘When he realized you weren’t going to do what you were told.’
v
But Cooper ignored her. ‘He saw me at the Lukaszes’, then at Walter Rowland’s. And he knew that I’d been to the bookshop itself.’
‘Several times,’ said Fry. ‘Little did he know that you were just buying books.’
‘Books on aircraft wrecks. Lawrence would have told him that.’ Cooper paused. ‘It was Frank Bainc who tried to put me out of action that night, wasn’t it? Not Eddie Kcmp.’
‘Yes, we think so. We’re still waiting for DNA results.’
The patrol car turned into a narrow entrance off Eyre Street, and Fry turned after it. They bumped over cobbles and had to slow to a crawl as they entered the network of passages between Eyre Street and the market square. They pulled up near the bridge over the river, where a police officer was stopping people from walking further up than Larkin’s bakery.
‘I’ll have to explain it all to Alison later today,’ said Cooper.
Frv switched off the engine and sat lor a moment looking at
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the bookshop, listening to the roar of the River Eden under the bridge. She didn’t know what to say to him.
Outside Eden Valley Books, two police motorcyclists were unbuckling the straps of their crash helmets. When they were bare headed, the officers hardly looked any different. They both had bald domes as smooth and white as their helmets.
Ben Cooper pushed open the front door and walked among
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the shelves of books. The shop seemed dead without Lawrence’s presence. Cooper felt as though he was walking through a set for a TV costume drama. In the little kitchen area at the hack, he found a window open. A few lumps of snow had dropped inside and scattered on the draining hoard. A small heap of it lay on the hase of an upturned coffee niug.
While Fry took a call on her radio, Cooper went upstairs and walked slowly through the upper rooms. The shop was so quiet that he was reluctant to open each door that he came to, tor tear of what he might find behind it. On the second floor, the biggest room was the one that he and Fry had seen, where the aviation memorabilia was displayed. A second room had been converted into a kind of study, where a couple of computers sat humming quietly to themselves. No wonder so many books had been piled on the landing and in the corridor they must
I O v
once have occupied these rooms.
Between a couple of stacks of books, Cooper found what he had expected — a door that was a step up from the floor, a door that opened to reveal not a room but another flight of stairs, narrow and uncarpeted. The top floor of the building was Lawrence’s living quarters. There was an untidy sitting room, a bathroom and a large bedroom with a vast iron bedstead. Cooper was looking for signs of Marie Tennent’s presence when he heard a noise over his head. The sound of rats in a house was distinctive. They made so much noise on bare floorboards that they sounded as though they were
^ o
wearing hobnailed boots. And there was that faint, dragging scrape that went with the footsteps a sound that conjured up a clear picture of a scaly tail slithering across the floor in the dust. Dianc Fry stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, not speaking. He saw her shudder when she heard the scurrying in the ceiling.
‘We’ve just had a call from the hospital,’ she said.
‘Lawrence?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Cooper sat down suddenly on the bed, which sagged and gave a protesting squeak.
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‘You did your best, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Nobody could have done any more.’
‘I could have done it sooner. I found Lawrence’s bookmark in one of Marie’s books almost a week ago. J knew she’d been here. Marie read all sorts of books, not only Daniclle Steel. They were there in her house, on her shelves. She spent money that she couldn’t afford, just to buy more books. Lawrence Daley was her type really, not Eddie Kemp. She was following her mother’s advice and doing better for herself. When Marie told her mother that the baby’s father ran his own business, she didn’t mean he was a window cleaner, for God’s sake.’
‘There’s nothing more we could have done, Ben.’
o ‘
‘No, there is,’ said Cooper. ‘We could have found the baby.’
Fry had to stand aside as he brushed past her. He went down the first flight of narrow stairs and into the big room where Lawrence s aviation memorabilia was displayed. The Irving suit and the flying helmets and the personal possessions of long-dead airmen looked particularly ghoulish now that their owner was himself dead. Cooper vas starting to feel stifled by the atmosphere. He pushed open the outside door and stood at the top of the fire escape, allowing the cold air to blow into the room and stir the cobwebs. Uclow him, the yard was still untouched, its unidentifiable shapes covered by vesterday’s fresh snow.
The back alley was full of police vehicles with their engines rumbling. There was a ripping sound and a loud snap as a member of the task force levered the padlock off the yard gates with a crowbar. Hut then the team found they had difficulty pushing the gates open against the weight of the snow. The more they cursed and heaved, the more the snow built up and compacted, so that they might as well have been pushing against a brick wall.
‘Shovels,’ called a sergeant. ‘We’ll have to dig a space clear.’
Cooper went down the fire escape. The steps were treacherously slippery, and his hands left imprints in the snow frozen to the top of the rail. Under the snow was a layer of ice,
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