Dead And Buried

As he said it, he could hear Matt’s voice in the back of his mind. You were as pissed as a newt that night. If Matt thought he was drunk, then it was certainly true. Fry’s ‘not entirely sober’ was an understatement, for once.

‘I just thought it would be surprising if no one mentioned it in the statements taken from the Light House.’

‘Due to a communal alcoholic haze perhaps?’

‘Possibly. I’ll get Luke Irvine to double-check, shall I? He’s been going through the files. What do you think?’

Fry had stopped smiling now, which was a relief. He could see her brain working, weighing up the advantages.

‘Yes, good idea.’

‘I’ll get on to it.

Cooper felt a bit more bounce in his step as he went back into the CID room. He had a slightly different view to Fry’s, though that was perfectly normal. He wasn’t thinking of a communal alcoholic haze on the part of the Light House staff and customers — more of a rather curious bit of collective amnesia.

In fact, the original inquiry had done a surprisingly thorough job of examining accounts of the Pearsons’ visit to the Light House. There was an entire file containing statements from staff and customers, and even a sketch plan showing where all the people spoken to had sat or stood in the bar, in relation to the Pearsons. Someone had worked quite hard on that. It must have taken a considerable amount of time to put together. Above and beyond the call of duty, really.

Then Cooper noticed the date on the plan, and realised it had been drawn up some months after the disappearance. He wondered if the date would correspond with some particularly high-profile bit of media coverage, or additional pressure from the Pearson family.

‘If only we could understand why Aidan Merritt had to die.’

‘Well, it’s simple. He must have had incriminating information. Someone needed to shut him up.’

‘But why leave it all this time? If he knew something about the fate of David and Trisha Pearson, the chances are he’d known it for the past couple of years. So why wait until now? Did they think he was about to start talking?’

His last question sounded rhetorical, even to himself. No one bothered answering it. Instead, Villiers moved quickly on to the next question.

‘And what made him agree to meet the person who killed him? Because that’s what must have happened, isn’t it? Merritt went to the Light House voluntarily. There could have been no other reason, except to meet someone. The pub had been closed for months. And in view of the fires spreading across the moors, it was a location you’d want to avoid unless you had a very pressing reason to be there.’

‘You wouldn’t meet a person you were about to incriminate, though, would you?’ said Fry. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Aidan Merritt wasn’t stupid, after all. Do you think he’d agree to a meeting with the one individual who had a reason to get him out of the way? And on his own, in an isolated spot? No.’

‘He could have been lured to the pub by someone else,’ suggested Hurst. ‘Someone he trusted.’

‘Conspiracy now?’

‘Well, what else?’

‘Are we suggesting that Merritt was somehow implicated in the Pearson inquiry himself?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘We’ve found nothing in his circumstances to suggest that.’

‘The fact that you haven’t found anything doesn’t mean he was innocent. You can’t prove a negative. Not like that, anyway.’

‘He was there at the pub on the night before the Pearsons disappeared. We’ve established that much at least.’

‘But we don’t have a single witness to suggest he had any contact with them.’

‘Where does our chart put him?’

‘Down at the far end of the bar, at a table near the games room,’ said Irvine.

‘He was on his own, though?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of? What does that mean?’

‘Well, he was a regular at the Light House. He knew a lot of people. You know what it’s like when you’re in your local.’

Irvine looked at Diane Fry, seemed to decide that she might not know what it was like at all.

‘Look, we interviewed a number of customers who spoke to Merritt during the evening. He chatted for a while to some old biddy called Betty Wheatcroft. She remembered discussing how badly behaved young people were these days.’

‘Old biddy?’

‘Yes. Every pub has one.’

‘All right.’

‘So … he chatted to Mrs Wheatcroft. At one point Merritt was asked to make up a foursome for a game of pool. They might not have called him a friend, and he certainly seems to have gone there by himself. But he had a lot of acquaintances. He was among people he knew. Some of them he’d known since childhood. That’s not the same as being on your own.’

The expression on Fry’s face suggested that it might be possible to be alone among any number of acquaintances, but she let it pass.

‘It still seems odd,’ she said. ‘I mean, no matter how many casual acquaintances he had, it’s a bit odd for a man to go the pub on his own just before Christmas and sit at a table by himself, surrounded by crowds of people celebrating, having parties, getting drunk.’