‘It wouldn’t take twenty-four hours for an animal to die in one of these.’
‘That’s true,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve heard stories of dogs getting caught in a snare and dying within forty-five minutes.’
Fry looked at the snares and then at the stink pit with an expression of intense distaste.
‘In some ways,’ she said, ‘the countryside is much more evil and immoral than the city.’
Cooper smiled. ‘You said it.’
The patchwork of farmland and tree-covered slopes to the west looked welcoming and approachable, lit by the sun. But it was full of hidden depths and unseen corners. It was criss-crossed by a pattern of dry-stone walls and it erupted here and there in the ripples and pockmarks of abandoned mine workings. It was, above all, a human landscape, settled and shaped by people and still a place where history might be expected to come to the surface, if you cared to look.
Fry was staring straight ahead at the valley below the slopes of Kinder, the small towns in the corner of Derbyshire and the sprawl of the city in the distance.
‘So where do we go from here?’ she said.
Cooper took her back to his flat in Edendale. It might be the last time she came here to Welbeck Street. Who knew where he might be living soon? He might move to Nottingham to be closer to her. That might work.
‘I think Guy Thomson is showing someone else around the house next door,’ he said, peering through the window into the street. ‘I was supposed to get back to him with a decision this week, but I was too busy. He’s probably written me off as a time waster.’
‘Perhaps it’s a good thing,’ said Fry.
‘Why?’
‘You didn’t want it anyway.’
‘No, you’re right.’
When they were sitting in the warmth with a coffee, he noticed that Fry had gone very silent. He’d done most of the talking in the car on the way back from Kinder and she’d hardly responded. Now she was hardly able to meet his eye. She fidgeted in her seat, clutching nervously at her mug.
‘What’s the matter, Diane?’ he said.
At first she said, ‘Nothing’. But then she told him.
Cooper thought he hadn’t heard her properly.
‘What?’ he said. And again: ‘What?’
‘Well, it was never serious, was it?’ she said. ‘I’ve never been serious with anyone in my life. Not really.’
‘But for me it was.’
‘No.’
‘Diane . . .’
But the words had disintegrated into a dry starch in his mouth with a bitter aftertaste, like a memory of a lemon-flavoured Love Heart. He didn’t know what to say at all.
‘Ben, it was a rebound,’ she said. ‘After Liz died, it was just something that happened.’
Then she’d gone, just slipped out into the cold night air.
Cooper stood on the doorstep of number eight Welbeck Street and watched Diane Fry walk to her car, as he’d watched her walk away many times before. This time she looked back once. Their eyes met and suddenly Cooper understood everything.
He had never been all that close to Diane after all. He had certainly never understood her, or known what she was thinking. He’d felt that way when he first met her in Edendale all those years ago and he still felt that way now. He’d only been fooling himself in between.
Of course, Diane Fry was a woman who could never be close to anybody. She could only pretend, at best. It was clear to him now, as if it had come out of the sky like a revelation. Why had he been so stupid?
Cooper shivered as an icy wind lashed through the streets of Edendale. The pavements were wet with rain as Fry’s black Audi hissed away up the street and vanished round the corner.
Sometimes, just sometimes, this was a terrible place to live.
About the Author
STEPHEN BOOTH was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He is well known as a breeder of Toggenburg goats and includes among his other interests folkore, the Internet—and walking in the hills of the Peak District, in which his crime novels are set.
He lives with his wife Lesley in a former Georgian dower house in Nottinghamshire.
www.stephen-booth.com
www.witnessimpulse.com
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Also by Stephen Booth
BLACK DOG
DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS
BLOOD ON THE TONGUE
BLIND TO THE BONES
ONE LAST BREATH
THE DEAD PLACE
SCARED TO LIVE
THE KILL CALL
LOST RIVER
THE DEVIL’S EDGE
DEAD AND BURIED
ALREADY DEAD
THE CORPSE BRIDGE
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published in Great Britain in 2015 by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.
THE MURDER ROAD. Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Booth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780062439239
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062439246
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