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Back Dying to Sin Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Dedication
  2. Epigraph
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. About the Author
  42. Also by Stephen Booth
  43. About the Publisher

He tried a chuckle as he looked around at his friends. But the sound died in his throat as he saw that no one else was laughing. Not even the dog.

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

That night, Cooper drove out of Edendale until he’d left the streetlamps behind and there was only the reflection of the Toyota’s headlights from the cat’s eyes in the road and from the rain that drifted across the bonnet. He saw few cars on the road and passed even fewer houses – just the occasional farm wrapped in its own little bowl of light.

According to the weather forecast on the BBC, there was no chance of snow this year. It would be a traditional grey Christmas. Fog was the best that Edendale could hope for in the way of seasonal weather. There’d be a blanket of it filling the valley, smothering the sound of Christmas Day traffic, hiding the flickering lights of the council decorations. And killing a few more visitors on the roads, no doubt.

The old people sometimes described the Peak District climate as ‘six months of bad weather, followed by six months of winter’. But those times were past, the years when snow drifts had made the roads impassable and villages were cut off for weeks. Cooper felt a curious sense of loss.

Fry had taken on the task of interviewing Jack Elder herself, allowing Cooper to keep his date. He had no idea what had made her do that, because he didn’t normally expect favours from her. Still, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as his mother would have said.

Liz Petty lived in Bakewell, the touristy heart of the Peak District. Tonight, she felt like a change, so they opted to eat at the Australian Bar, close to the Bakewell section police station. Here, the Aussie theme had gone beyond the name and the boomerangs in the window, and had spread right through the menu.

While they shared some skinny dips, Liz got a few grumbles off her chest. Cooper had heard most of them before, around the station. Like the other SOCOs, she often complained how frustrating it was to hear police officers say there were ‘no forensics’.

‘Some of them still don’t know what the word means,’ she said.

The division had finally got one of the two long-wheelbase four-by-fours that Scenes of Crime had been saying they needed for years, but not the second. And the policy of automatic attendance at burglary scenes had led to some crazy situations, such as SOCOs dusting for fingerprints when the aluminium powder from their last visit to a victim’s home was still visible on the window frame. There was a story doing the rounds about another burglary, where the officer dealing with the incident had entered in the command and control log: There are no forensic possibilities for SOCO, but I have to ask them to attend.