But when you started to look into an individual case, they suddenly turned into people. They sprang out of the screen and became unhappy teenagers or abused wives, confused old women or businessmen who had hit fifty and decided to recover their youth with the girl from the marketing department.
‘What age are we talking?’ he said.
‘Early thirties. Good physical condition. Well dressed.’
‘Mmm. Right profile anyway.’
‘For what?’
‘Well, for going missing.’
‘You need to be a particular type of person?’
‘Apart from youngsters, the people most likely to go missing are men aged between twenty-seven and thirty-four.’
‘That puts you right in the frame, then, Ben.’
‘Are we talking death by misadventure? Or suicide, or what?’
Fry hesitated. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.
‘If it’s murder,’ said Cooper, ‘you don’t need a profile for that. Anybody will do for a victim these days. Have we got any evidence? I thought he was hit by the snowplough?’
‘He was already dead before then.’
The Snowman’s priority rating depended on the pathologist. If he had merely suffered a heart attack by the roadside, then he would be likely to stay on ice for some time before he was claimed. But Fry wasn’t taking that line.
‘An instinct, Diane?’ he said.
But Fry ignored the question. ‘So you and Gavin have got work to do. Let’s have a list of possibles, soon as you can. Neighbouring forces, obviously. Don’t forget he was found on the A57. Greater Manchester must have a whole book full of missing persons.’
‘No doubt.’
‘Get on to the Missing Persons Helpline. And don’t forget the national forces – Transport Police, Ministry of Defence. Oh, and the Northern Ireland Police Service.’
‘Oh, great. Terrorist execution by snowplough.’
‘You never know.’
E Division’s commander, Chief Superintendent Colin Jepson, had agreed to see Alison Morrissey himself. But of course he demanded support from his junior officers. There was strength in numbers, he said – as if the visitor were the advance party for an enemy horde about to invade E Division. But numbers were something they didn’t have at the moment. The duty inspector had said she was too busy, and nobody from the community safety department was available, either. Ben Cooper’s name had been mentioned.
‘Here are the files the Local Intelligence Officer has put together for the Chief,’ said DI Paul Hitchens after telling Cooper the news, just before he went off duty that night.
‘If the LIO produced the files, why can’t he go to the meeting?’ asked Cooper.
‘He’s got flu. So it’ll have to be you, Ben.’
‘Why?’
‘The Chief is afraid he’ll be asked questions that need a bit of local knowledge. You know he’s never quite managed to work out which county he’s in since he transferred from Lancashire. He has you marked down as the local lad who can answer all the difficult questions the rest of us can’t – you know, like how to spell “Derbyshire”.’
‘No, I meant – why?’ said Cooper. ‘It sounds as though this Alison Morrissey is on some kind of holy mission to clear her grandfather’s name. All ancient history, isn’t it?’
‘That’s about right,’ said Hitchens.
‘So why are we doing this at all?’
‘Ah. Political reasons.’
‘Political? What’s political about it?’
‘We owe favours,’ said Hitchens.
‘We do?’
‘When I say “we”, I mean the Chief, of course. Maybe you don’t remember the big fraud case a few years back, Ben. The main suspect got out of the country and ended up in Canada, masquerading as a lumberjack or whatever. The Mounties weren’t too co-operative at first, but the Chief talked to the consul in Sheffield. They’d played golf together once or twice, and the consul pulled some strings. Anyway, the net result was that our Chief Superintendent made some new bosom buddies over there in Ottawa. They discovered they had similar handshakes, if you know what I mean. And one of them turns out to be this Morrissey woman’s uncle. That’s what I mean by politics.’
‘So we’re putting on a show.’
‘Up to a point. We’re not actually going to do anything.’
‘How do you know that, sir, if we haven’t even talked to her yet?’
‘Oh, you’ll see,’ said Hitchens. ‘Even political influence can’t produce resources out of nowhere.’
Finally, Cooper went off duty and made his way directly across town to the Old School Nursing Home. In one of the lounges, he found his mother waiting. She was sitting up in an armchair, tense, staring at the wall, her thoughts far away in some world of her own making.
‘Do you remember what I said, Mum?’ he asked. ‘About moving out of the farm?’ He tried to say it casually, to make it sound as though he were only planning to pop out to the shop to buy some tea bags.
Isabel Cooper didn’t say anything, though her eyes shifted from the wall to his face. Cooper took her hand. It felt limp and lifeless.
‘I’ve decided I’ve got to live in my own place for a bit,’ he said. ‘It’ll only be in Edendale. I’ll still come and see you every day, don’t worry.’
Her eyes remained distant, not focused on him at all. But a momentary shadow seemed to pass across her face, a faint echo of the expression she had always used when she thought she had caught him out in a lie.
‘You’ll never know any difference, Mum,’ he said. ‘You’ll see as much of me as you always have. Too much, as usual. That’s what you always used to say, whenever I got under your feet.’
He wished that she would smile at him, just once. But her face didn’t move. Part of that was the drugs. The drugs were doing their job, controlling the involuntary spasms, suppressing the facial twitches that had so often turned her into someone else, nothing like the mother he had known.
He patted the back of her hand, leaned forward and kissed her. Her cheek was cold, like the face of a statue. He heard her release her breath in a long sigh, and felt her relax a little. It was the only response he was likely to get.
For a moment, Cooper thought of going back on his decision. But it didn’t matter to his mother now, did it? It didn’t make any difference to her where he lived, now that she was in the nursing home and not likely to return to Bridge End Farm. It was his own reluctance that he was having to deal with, his own sense of leaving a
