Dead And Buried Part 22

'But you can't believe that your brother might be involved in a violent incident,' she said. And she paused. 'Oh, wait ...'

He turned to look at her then, and watched the realisation dawn on her face, the memory of an incident, all too recent, when Matt Cooper had shot and injured an intruder at Bridge End Farm. Matt had been lucky to escape prosecution, a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service that had reflected the public mood of the time. But despite the relief among the family at the outcome, everyone knew now. Everyone was aware that Matt Cooper had the potential for violence.

That knowledge, and that knowledge alone, changed everything.

Henry Pearson had been brought to the scene as a gesture towards good relations with the family. but who had tipped off the media, no one seemed to know. Photographers from two local newspapers snapped Mr Pearson as he got out of his car and spoke to DCI Mackenzie. A crew from a regional TV station had set up near the outer cordon, and a reporter was doing a piece to camera, with the moor and the crime-scene tent in the background.

Mackenzie didn't look happy about it, but he had to appear concerned and cooperative in front of the cameras. Possibly Mr Pearson had orchestrated all this himself. During the past two and a half years, he must have learned the best ways of handling the media. This was an opportunity for him to revitalise the interest in his campaign.

'No one has mentioned what forensic evidence you've obtained from the items that were dug out of the peat,' he said.

'Sir?'

Pearson looked at Mackenzie directly. 'For example, was there blood?'

It was impossible to refuse such a straightforward request for information from a member of the family.

'Yes, sir. There was.'

'And?'

Mackenzie held out his hands apologetically. 'I can't tell you any more at the moment.'

Diane Fry was waiting to speak to the DCI, holding back until he was free from the attention of the cameras.

'We've got some preliminary results back from forensics,' she told Cooper.

'Finally,' he said. 'And?'

'Those stains on David's anorak. Well, they're confirmed as human blood.'

'Pretty much as expected.'

'Yes.' She looked towards Henry Pearson, to make sure he was out of earshot. 'The trouble is, Ben a the blood isn't David Pearson's, or even Trisha's.'

Before he could digest the information, Cooper's phone rang. He looked at the display, but it was a mobile number he didn't recognise.

'Who is this?' he said.

'It's Nancy Wharton. I wanted to let you know that Maurice has agreed to talk to you.'

'When?'

'Now,' she said. 'It has to be this afternoon. Today is one of his good days.'

Maurice Wharton was a shadow of the man Cooper remembered. The meaty elbows that he used to rest on the bar at the Light House were bony now, and hung with pale, shrivelled flesh. There was a curious yellow tinge to his skin and in the whites of his eyes. His hands jerked spasmodically on the cover of his bed in the hospice room, and he lay back on the pillow as if already exhausted before the visit had even begun.

'Mr Wharton? Detective Sergeant Cooper, Edendale Police. Your wife said you'd agreed to talk to me.'

Cooper wondered if he was speaking too loudly. It was always a tendency when talking to the old and sick.

Wharton seemed to wink at him, one eye closing involuntarily.

'I know you, don't I?'

Cooper sighed. 'Probably.'

'You've been in the pub at some time. I remember faces. Even now, I still have my memory for faces.'

'Yes, you're right.'

'I don't get many visitors here. I don't want to, really. But Nancy says you're all right.'

'I hate to trouble you,' said Cooper. 'But we're conducting a murder investigation. Aidan Merritt. I expect you heard.'

'Yes, even in here.' Wharton nodded at the TV screen across the room. 'I keep up to date. I wouldn't want to die without knowing how Derby County were getting on.'

Cooper smiled, glad that Maurice Wharton still had his wits about him. Pancreatic cancer might not affect the brain, but he bet the drugs did. The chemotherapy, the increasingly powerful painkillers. What did that combination really do to the memory?

'I do get confused now and then,' said Wharton, as if reading his mind. 'There are bad dreams, and I'm not always sure when I wake up whether they're real or not.'

'Mr Merritt's murder is real. He was clubbed to death at the Light House earlier this week.'

'The pub is closed up,' said Wharton.

'Someone broke in.'

'Why would they do that?'

'We have no idea,' said Cooper. 'We don't know what Mr Merritt's reason was for being there. We don't know why the person who attacked him was there either. We're looking for any possibilities. So if you can help us at all ...'

Wharton was quiet for a moment, breathing very shallowly, as if it used up a lot of his energy just to keep air moving in and out of his lungs.

'Aidan Merritt. He was one of my regulars. Funny, that.'

'What is?'

'That my regulars should die off before me. I didn't think it would be that way.'

'But Aidan in particular ...?'

'The last person I would have expected to be getting himself into bother. He wasn't my type a too quiet, a bit studious. Not a big spender. But trouble? No, he was as quiet as a mouse. What was he doing at the pub?'

'That's what I'm trying to find out,' said Cooper.

'Beats me.'

Wharton began to cough, and Cooper waited while he cleared his chest and spat into a tissue. He wondered if he should offer to do anything, fetch a drink of water or whatever. It was always difficult knowing how to behave when visiting the sickbed.

'You were asking Nancy about an incident with that couple, the Pearsons,' said Wharton when he'd recovered.

'Yes. It doesn't seem to have been followed up by the original inquiry when the Pearsons went missing.'

'Because it was all settled,' said Wharton.

'How was it settled?'

'I sweet-talked the visitors, made a fuss of them, did a bit of PR. Then I sorted the lads out. All over and done with, see?'

'The lads? Ian Gullick and Vince Naylor?'

'Ian and Vince. They're good lads really, you know. There's no harm in them.'

Cooper tried not to appear sceptical, but Wharton twisted his head on his pillow to look at him.

'You don't believe me.'

'I'd need more information,' said Cooper cautiously.

'Yes, that's right. Make your own mind up. Take people as you find them. But you don't know them like I do. I saw the best and worst of people from behind a bar. You're on the wrong track with Gullick and Naylor. I might not get the chance to tell you anything else, so make a note of that.'

'Yes, sir.'

Wharton wheezed. 'I knew a lot of people at one time. Thousands. Now there's just the family. Family is very important, isn't it? Don't you agree?'

'Of course.'

'It's the kids I worry about most. Eliot and Kirsten. It's very bad for them. Their lives have been so disrupted, just when they're at an age when they should have some stability. And it's all my fault. I lost their home, brought them here into town, which they hate. And now I'm going to leave them in the lurch, thanks to this d.a.m.n cancer. Even the life insurance won't pay out much. I'll be no more use to them dead than I have been while I was alive.'

'It's not your fault you got cancer,' said Cooper.

'It feels like it. It looks as though I did it to avoid having to put things right for my family, to avoid paying back what I owe them. And I owe them a lot.'

Wharton gazed out of the window again. A pair of gold-finches were fluttering around a bird feeder hung just outside his room.

'You know a the night they closed up the pub, I couldn't face being there,' he said. 'Not right there, on the premises. I ought to have been present, as the licensee. But I just couldn't do it.'

'I understand.'

'Do you? It was more than a pub to me, you know. It was my life, and my home.'

Cooper nodded. He thought he did understand, but if Mr Wharton preferred to think it was a unique feeling, it might be best to let him talk.

'So I sat in my car,' said Wharton. 'I parked up by the side of the road on Oxlow Moor, where I could see the pub in the distance, on the skyline. Do you know the spot I mean?'

'Yes.'

'I sat there for a long time, waiting for something to happen. And in the end, I saw the lights going out. It was dusk by then. I was sitting in my car, and I watched the windows of my pub going dark one by one, until ... well, until the Light House ceased to exist.'

'It must have been very painful,' said Cooper.

Wharton smiled weakly. 'I thought so at the time. But the fact is, I didn't really know anything about pain until now.'

Wharton hardly ever met Cooper's eye during his visit. Occasionally he would glance quickly around the room, as if checking it was still there. But mostly, all he wanted to do was stare out of the window a not looking at the garden or the fish pond, but at something much further away, beyond the range of ordinary, physical vision.

To Cooper's mind, it looked like a long stare into the past. Wharton was a man drawn against his will to gaze at a vision of unhappy memories, a distant kaleidoscope of sadness and regrets. He hoped he would never see such a vision himself when he gazed out of the window in his old age.

'There was no way we could keep going,' said Wharton. 'But I didn't want to give up. I tried everything. In the end, I was so desperate that I trusted people I shouldn't have done. I signed an agreement. They were supposed to put capital into the business for a share of the pub. But they turned out to be liars and parasites. There was a bit of decorating, some old furniture got chucked out and some new stuff moved in. They called it a redesign.'

Cooper nodded. The nostalgic chic. He shouldn't have been surprised that it wasn't Maurice Wharton's idea of the perfect decor.

'And then when it didn't work out the way they'd told me it would, they pulled the plug. Just like that. They wanted their money back. Well, we'd already remortgaged, so the only thing we could do was sell up. I should have known, I should have been able to spot a wrong 'un a mile off after all these years. But I didn't.'

'Perhaps ...' suggested Cooper hesitantly. 'Perhaps your judgement wasn't at its best.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've heard that when things went wrong, you began to drink too much.'

'I was bitter. I was angry. Yes, of course I turned to drink.'

'Alcohol never took away anger and bitterness.'

'No. But it numbs them for a while.' He turned away to the window. 'For some of us, that's the best we can hope for.'

He said it with such feeling that Cooper looked at him in surprise, studying him as if he was seeing him for the first time. Yes, there was more than a hint of bitterness in the eyes, a twitch of anger in the set of his jaw. A man who knew about alcohol, too. Not a good combination.

Wharton was silent for a while, lying back on his pillow as if he'd exhausted himself with the burst of emotion. Cooper sat quietly, waiting. He was reminded of the time he'd sat at his mother's bedside at Edendale General Hospital. He'd eventually fallen asleep in the chair, and had woken to find that she had died.

Now, he began to wonder whether Wharton was aware that his visitor was still there in the room.

'I was in the Job, you know,' said Wharton finally, addressing some spot near the ceiling.

'Were you?' Cooper had heard the capital J and knew what it meant. 'You served as a police officer?'

'You didn't know that, did you?' said Wharton. 'That's the trouble these days a too much information, all that data and intelligence flooding in. There's so much of it that it doesn't get through to the right people. Not the bits of information you need to know, anyway. Someone will have that fact on a computer back in your office. I suppose you'll ask them about it now.'

'Of course I will.'

'You know what they used to call me, don't you? Mad Maurice.'

Cooper nodded. Some people still called him that. He doubted whether Wharton would want to hear it, though.

'Well, that was me,' said Wharton. 'Mad Maurice. Not this pathetic thing that I am now. I'd like them to remember me as Mad Maurice, the terror of the Light House. Will you tell them that?'

'I'll be happy to, sir.'

'Right then.' He laughed weakly. 'So, if we're done here a why don't you b.u.g.g.e.r off? Haven't you got a home to go to?'