Read Dead And Buried (Cooper and Fry) for Free Online Page A

this.’
    He was holding a partially decomposed lump in an evidence bag. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a leather wallet, probably also quite an expensive one when it was bought.
    ‘The peat has preserved this pretty well,’ said Abbott. ‘I can even make out a name on one of the credit cards.’
    ‘What? There are still credit cards in there?’
    ‘Yes. And some cash too, by the looks of it.’
    ‘We assumed the stuff must have been thrown away by some thief when they’d emptied out the valuables.’
    Abbott was silent for a moment. He gave Cooper a meaningful glance. ‘No, that’s not the situation we have here. It’s something quite different.’
    Cooper caught his breath. He knew only too well what Abbott meant. This discovery had been coming for the past two years. It had been inevitable ever since an incident one snowy night in December.
    ‘What’s the name on the card?’ he asked finally.
    ‘You could guess, I think. The name is David James Pearson.’
    A light dawned on Villiers’ face too, then. It wasn’t just E Division who remembered the case. Carol had been serving in the RAF Police at the time. She might even have been stationed overseas – it wouldn’t have made any difference. Cooper could see that the name rang a bell. The story had been in the news continuously for months.
    ‘Anddid you say there was blood on the clothing?’ he asked.
    ‘We think so. I’m about to do a presumptive test, but my instincts are bristling like an angry hedgehog.’
    An instinct wasn’t proof of anything, as Cooper had been reminded a few minutes ago. But this was different. In this instance, he trusted Abbott’s instinct. Because his own gut was telling him exactly the same thing.
    ‘You know what this means, Ben?’ asked Abbott.
    ‘Yes,’ said Cooper, with a deep sigh. ‘It means the Major Crime Unit.’

4

    DetectiveSergeant Diane Fry was in the outside lane of the M1 motorway when she got the call. Her black Audi was travelling at just over seventy miles an hour, passing a convoy of French lorries occupying the inside lanes. Her CD player was blasting out one of her favourite albums,
Songs of Mass Destruction.
She loved Annie Lennox’s voice, always full of soul, even when rocking on ‘Ghosts in My Machine’.
    Her fingers tapped on the steering wheel in a rare moment of relaxation. Her car was almost her only personal space, the last refuge where she could escape from the tension that ruled the rest of her life.
    Fry turned the CD off to take the call. While she listened to the message, she looked ahead, saw the overhead gantry signs for Junction 26, the Nottingham exit. She was pretty sure there was a link on to the A610, which would take her back into Derbyshire.
    ‘Yes, give me an hour or so.’
    ‘Understood.’
    She indicated to move into the inside lane and slowed for the exit. At the same time she began to reset the route on her sat nav.
    ‘Can you send me an outline of the original inquiry?’ she asked.
    Therewas a pause. ‘We’ll ask the locals to give you a copy.’
    ‘That’ll do.’
    She hit the roundabout and found herself stuck behind a car transporter as she filtered left towards the A610 for Ripley and Ilkeston.
    ‘Well, maybe a bit more than an hour,’ she muttered.
    Fry had been with the East Midlands Special Operations Unit – Major Crime for six months now, part of the Derbyshire contingent allocated to the new unit when the county’s own Major Crime Unit was wound up.
    The joint initiative was headed up by the former divisional commander from D Division in Derby. He was the man who’d expanded the city’s burglary and robbery squads and introduced Operation Diamond to deal with serious sexual and violent assaults. He was also behind Operation Redshank, set up to target gun and gang crime after a spate of shootings in Derby that had culminated in the death of fifteen-year-old Kadeem Blackwood in 2008.
    Just as importantly from Fry’s point of view,