‘Gavin,’ said Cooper warningly, knowing he was wasting his breath.
‘Go on. I bet you’ve wondered. Do you think Villiers knows those SAS death grips? Can she kill someone with nothing but a ballpoint pen? Only, I’ve got a spare one, if she needs it.’
Cooper couldn’t help following Murfin’s gaze. The sight of the two women drew his attention irresistibly. They seemed to be talking to each other now. He strained to hear what they were saying, but Villiers was sitting with her back to him, and Fry was speaking too quietly to be heard against the background noise of ringing phones. That was unlike her, too. She had never been one to whisper or mumble. And she had certainly never been afraid of letting people hear her opinions.
‘Wishing you could lip-read?’ said Murfin.
‘What? Of course not,’ said Cooper, though it was exactly what he’d been thinking.
‘Mostly swear words, I reckon. A bit of sarcasm. Ritual abuse.’
Cooper looked at Fry’s expression again, saw a raised eyebrow that accompanied a murmured question.
‘No, Gavin,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think so.’
Becky Hurst had been busy working on her PC, but she stopped when an officer brought in a copy of the Sheffield evening paper to show her.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she said.
Cooper caught her outraged tone.
‘Becky?’
‘People are starting to treat the Savages as some kind of heroes.’
‘What is it?’
‘This story in the Sheffield paper. It’s as if they’re Robin Hood and his Merry Men or some rubbish. Unbelievable.’
Murfin chuckled. ‘Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? But they’re only doing the first part, surely?’
‘How do we know?’ said Cooper.
‘Well…’
‘We don’t know, do we? We don’t know anything about them.’
‘Still, whoever they are – they’re not heroes.’
‘It’s the way they’re managing to come and go at will,’ said Murfin. ‘Evading capture, eluding the police. The public love all that. It makes them think they’re watching a Hollywood film. You’ll see, they’ll be built up into legends if we don’t catch them soon. There’ll be stories told about them, all kinds of exaggerations. Songs, jokes – it’ll all happen.’
‘There’s already a Facebook fan page,’ said Irvine.
‘A what?’ asked Cooper.
‘A fan page. On Facebook.’ Irvine looked at him as if that was enough explanation for anyone.
‘Show me,’ said Cooper.
Irvine called up the page. It was headed We all luv the Savages. Cooper read through a few of the messages before he could stand any more.
These guys are legend.
Just brilliant the way they’re giving the f***ing cops the runaround. Ram it to the pigs!
You said it, dude. More power to the Savages.
‘Who are these people?’ he said.
‘All kinds of folk. It’s been building up ever since the first attack. Not the first one in Riddings, I mean the first one attributed to the Savages.’
‘In Hathersage.’
‘Right. That guy they robbed was a banker.’
‘No, he was a financial adviser,’ said Cooper.
‘Still. You know how people feel. That was enough for public support to come down on the side of the Savages. And then, with them sticking it to the police the way they have…’
‘So these are their groupies. Criminals with a fan club. Pity we can’t shut them down.’
‘We could try. Facebook might cooperate.’
‘It’s freedom, though, isn’t it?’ said Irvine. ‘That’s what the internet is supposed to be about, the freedom to express your own views and share information.’
‘Freedom can be used as a weapon, too,’ said Hurst.
Surprised, Cooper looked round at her. He was seeing a side of her he hadn’t noticed before.
Hurst flushed slightly at his look.
‘Well, it’s true,’ she said defiantly. ‘Sometimes you have to protect people from themselves.’
Irvine laughed. ‘Listen to Maggie Thatcher. It’ll be no such thing as society next. Roll on the Fourth Reich.’
‘That’s very offensive,’ said Hurst, going redder.
‘Well, lighten up.’
‘All right,’ said Cooper firmly. ‘That’s enough. You two can continue your political debate in your own time.’
Hurst and Irvine went back to their desks in silence. Hurst ostentatiously picked up her phone and turned her back to her colleague to make a call. Cooper looked round the office, wondering where the suddenly sour atmosphere had come from. But Fry was no longer there. She seemed to have faded into the background, vanishing as unexpectedly as she’d arrived.
Carol Villiers placed copies of her reports on Cooper’s desk for him to check, along with an envelope of crime-scene photographs from Riddings.
‘Not much love lost there, then,’ she said. ‘That was a surprise.’
‘They’re okay,’ said Cooper. ‘I think they like each other really.’
‘Some people have a funny way of showing it.’
‘Yes, they do.’
Cooper opened the envelope and spread the photos out on his desk. Some of them still made him flinch. For some reason, the scene of a violent crime always looked so much more sordid in the photographs than in real life. It might be because the victim was no longer a person, but had been reduced to a tangle of pale, dead limbs, an untidy heap of clothes, a drying bloodstain on the floor. The small details of that person’s life were just so much rubbish scattered in the background, every item marked with a crime-scene number.
Many murder scenes were sordid in reality too, of course. Grubby bedrooms heaped with dirty washing, sitting rooms stacked with leaking plastic bags and cardboard boxes, filthy back alleys jammed with waste bins, stinking of rotten food and infested with rats.
Zoe Barron’s kitchen was nothing like that. Cooper remembered its gleaming newness, its almost clinical cleanliness – a spare, minimalist lack of clutter that seemed unnatural. Definitely not the way he thought of a kitchen, anyway. A long, long way from the kitchen he recalled in his childhood at Bridge End Farm, his mother surrounded by pans and cooking smells, a huge pine table without an inch of clear space.
And yet these photographs had reduced the kitchen at Valley View to the same sordid level as a rat-infested alley. Blood and violent death could do that. Zoe Barron would be appalled. Muddy footprints, the cold light of the camera’s flash, the peculiarly dead quality of a digital image. All the gleam of the steel and marble had been sucked out, drained away the way Zoe’s life had been.
Cooper stared for a long while at the sprawled body. Zoe Barron was no longer a human being with a past, a present and a future, an individual with a life and relationships and all the human hopes and fears. She was no longer even a name, but a series of numbers.
Finally he could look no longer. He felt the anger growing inside him, like a surge of acid through his veins. His hands began to tremble, his ears buzzed with the rush of blood as an overwhelming desire took hold of him. The need to hit out, to lash out at anything that came within range.
He gritted his teeth in his effort to fight back the rage.
‘Some Robin Hood,’ he said. ‘Some bloody Robin Hood.’
