Free Dying to Sin by Stephen Booth

behaving oddly. Well, even more oddly than usual. She could see him stopping periodically, and sniffing. Sometimes he even crouched and sniffed close to the ground. Quietly, she came up behind him, realizing that he was totally absorbed in whatever he was concentrating on. When he stopped to squat on the ground again, she tapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘Hey, what are you supposed to be? General Custer’s Red Indian guide?’
    Cooper almost overbalanced, and had to push a hand palm down in the mud to stop himself falling.
    ‘Oh, for – Diane, don’t do that.’
    She found him a clean tissue in her pocket, noting that he’d been so taken by surprise that he didn’t even bother to correct her inappropriate use of the term ‘Red Indian’.
    ‘What’s with all the sniffing?’
    ‘There’s a strange smell in this area,’ said Cooper. ‘I thought at first it was just cat urine, but there’s more to it than that.’
    ‘It’s a farm,’ said Fry. ‘Farms have smells like dogs have fleas. Haven’t you noticed that before?’
    ‘Not a livestock kind of smell. It’s a chemical odour. Ammonia, but something else too.’
    ‘This must have been the machinery shed. There’d be diesel, lubricating oil. Damn it, there must have been fertilizer and herbicides, too. Disinfectant – all kinds of chemicals. What’s one whiff among friends?’
    ‘Can you actually smell it?’ asked Cooper.
    ‘No. But, then, I think I’m getting a cold.’ Fry turned her face up to the drizzle that had started while they were speaking. ‘And if I stand out here much longer, it’ll be pneumonia.’
    Fry sent Cooper to see if the DI needed anything doing before he went off duty. She shook her head as she watched him go, despairing at her inability to understand him, even now.
    There were so many things about Cooper that bothered her. She was aggravated by his tendency to look hot and flustered, as if he’d only just got out of bed. These days, he’d probably been in bed with that SOCO, Liz Petty. Or maybe it was just the stress of running from one obsession to another. At least he didn’t look quite so dishevelled as he used to, so maybe he’d learned to wash and iron for himself since he moved out of the family farm into his little flat at Welbeck Street.
    When she first met him, Fry had mostly been struck by that disarray and by his air of innocence, which was lacking in those around him. He looked as though he’d hardly left the sixth form at High Peak College. Now, she wasn’t so sure whether what she saw was innocence any more. For a start, his hair wasn’t quite so untidy. It no longer fell over his forehead, but had been styled. His tie still needed straightening, though, and that scuff mark had been on his leather jacket for months.
    She looked up as Cooper’s car passed, catching his profile as he drove by. In retrospect, it was amazing that he’d ever seemed innocent at all.
    Fry recalled the day he’d told her about his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, and his death on the streets of Edendale at the hands of a gang of thugs. ‘ Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too .’ And then there had been his mother, the psychiatric illness and the complications that had taken her life only a few months ago, with Ben at her bedside in the nursing home.
    Fry wanted to be fair to him, she really did. In the circumstances, she supposed it was surprising that Cooper still retained a positive outlook on life at all, let alone the concern he so often showed for the problems of other people. He ought to be cynical. He ought to have grown as cynical as she was herself. She wondered how he managed to avoid it.
    Before she left Pity Wood, Fry took another look inside the inner cordon to see how work on the remains was progressing. Under the floodlights, the shadows of the diggers against the sides of the PVC tent. The body was