Black Dog
Black Dog
Stephen Booth
Dark, intense and utterly compelling, ‘Black Dog’ was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years.‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated … but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl's killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect.But Cooper's local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…
BLACK DOG
STEPHEN BOOTH
DEDICATION (#ulink_2da23bd1-d39f-5390-b1df-8fb52a476912)
For Lesley
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_f5afe9f7-54dc-5c82-a058-6a83bfc88f48)
black dog: 1. melancholy, depression of spirits; ill humour. In some country places, when a child is sulking, it is said ‘the black dog is on his back’.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
CONTENTS
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1 (#ulink_e1320774-fbf1-5905-8738-d7c84630ccaa)
The sudden glare of colours beat painfully on the young woman’s eyes as she burst from the back door of the cottage and hurled herself into the brightness. She ran with her bare feet slapping on the stone flags and her hair streaming in red knots from her naked shoulders.
A harsh voice was cut off suddenly when the door slammed behind her, isolating her from the house. As she sprinted the length of the garden, she stirred the dust from a flagged path whose moisture had been sucked out and swallowed by the sun. A scarlet shrub rose trailed halfway across the path and a thorn slit the flesh of her arm as she brushed against it, but she hardly felt the pain.
‘Wait!’ she called.
But the old wooden garden gate had banged shut on its spring before she could reach it. She threw herself on to the top of the dry-stone wall, flinging out an arm to clutch at the sleeve of the old man on the other side. He was wearing a woollen jacket, despite the heat, and his arm felt stiff and sinewy under the cloth. The young woman scrabbled for a firmer grip, feeling his muscles slide against the bones under her fingers as if she had plunged her hand deep into his body.
Harry Dickinson paused, held back only by the hand that touched his arm, turning his face away from the appeal in his granddaughter’s eyes. The only change in his expression was a slight tightening in the creases at the sides of his mouth as his gaze slipped past Helen to the row of stone cottages. The stone walls and the white-mullioned back windows were at last starting to cool in the early-evening shade, but the sun still glared low over the slate roofs, bad-tempered and unrelenting. The pupils of Harry’s eyes narrowed to expressionless black points until he tilted his head sideways to turn the peak of his cap into the sun.
Helen could smell the impregnated odours of earth and sweat and animals in the wool, overlaid by the familiar scent of old tobacco smoke. ‘It’s no good walking away, you know. You’ll have to face it in the end. You can’t run away from things for ever.’
A loud juddering sound made Harry flinch as it passed across the valley behind him. For an hour now the noise had been moving backwards and forwards over the dense woodland that covered the slope all the way down to the valley bottom. The sound echoed against the opposite hillside like the beating wings of an angry bird, battering the gorse and heather and alarming the sheep scattered on the upper slopes.
‘We’ll understand,’ said Helen. ‘We’re your family. If only you’d tell us …’
The old man’s right arm was held out at an unnatural angle, creasing the sleeve of his jacket into an ugly concertina of fabric. She knew that Harry felt himself being physically tugged towards the woods along the valley side; his body was tense with the effort of resisting the pull. But emotionally he was being drawn in two directions. The conflicting pressures only seemed to strengthen and toughen him, setting his shoulders rigid and hardening the line of his jaw. His face held no possibility of turning away from whatever he had decided to do.
‘Granddad? Please.’
The sharp edges of the stone wall were digging into her thighs through her shorts, and the skin of the palm on her left hand stung where she had scraped it on the jagged topping stones. There had been a sudden, desperate rush, a moment of overwhelming emotion, and now she didn’t know what to say. She felt the impotence of the conventions that surrounded the communication between one adult and another, even when they were members of the same family. She shared with her grandfather an inborn shortage of the words she needed to be able to express her feelings to those closest to her.
‘Grandma is very upset,’ said Helen. ‘But she’ll calm down in a minute. She’s worried about you.’
Helen had never needed many words before, not with Harry. He had always known exactly what she wanted, had always responded to the message in her eyes, to the shy, adoring smile, to the gleam of sun on a wave of flame-coloured hair, and to a small, trusting hand slipped into his own. She was no longer that child, and hadn’t been for years. A teacher learned a different way of communicating, a calculated performance that was all surface gloss and scored no marks for feeling. Harry still understood, though. He knew what she wanted him to do now. But it was too hard for him, a thing completely against a lifetime’s habit.
Gradually the juddering noise was fading to the edge of audibility, muffled to a dull rattle by the trees and the folds of the land. Its temporary absence released the subtler sounds of the evening – a current of air stirring the beech trees, a cow moaning for the bull across the valley, a skylark spilling its song over the purple heather. Harry cocked an ear, as if listening for a voice that no one else could hear. It was a voice that deepened the sadness in his eyes but stiffened his back and tautened the clench of his fists and his grip on the loop of worn black leather held in one hand.
‘Come back and talk to us. Please?’ she said.
Helen had never heard that voice. She had often tried, staring intently up at her grandfather’s face, watching his expression change, not daring to ask what it was he heard, but straining her own ears, desperate to catch an elusive echo. Like most men who had worked underground, Harry spent as much of his time as he could outside in the open air. As she stood at his side, Helen had learned to hear the sounds of the woods and the sky, the tiny movements in the grass, the shifting of the direction of the wind, the splash of a fish in a stream. But she had never heard what her grandfather heard. She had grown up to believe it was something uniquely to do with being a man.
‘If you don’t want to talk to Grandma, won’t you tell me about it, Granddad?’
And then the noise began to grow steadily louder again, clattering towards them as it followed the invisible line of the road that meandered along the valley bottom. It drew nearer and nearer across the rocky slopes of Raven’s Side, skirting a sudden eruption of black basalt cliff and veering north once more towards the village until it was almost overhead. The din was enough to drown out normal speech. But it was then that Harry chose to speak, raising his voice defiantly against the clattering and roaring that beat down on him from the sky.
‘Noisy bastards,’ he said.
The helicopter banked, its blue sides flickering in the fragmented shadows of its blades. A figure could be seen, leaning forward in the cabin to stare at the ground. The lettering on his door read ‘POLICE’.
‘They’re looking for that girl that’s gone missing,’ said Helen, her voice scattered and blown away by the roar. ‘The Mount girl.’
‘Aye, well. Do they have to make so much row about it?’
Harry cleared his throat noisily, sucking the phlegm on to the top of his tongue. Then he pursed his thin lips and spat into a clump of yellow ragwort growing by the gate.
As if taking offence, the helicopter moved suddenly away from the edge of the village, sliding towards a row of tall conifers that grew in the grounds of a large white house. The pitch of the noise changed and altered shape as it passed the house, tracing the outline of the roofs and chimneys like an echo locator sounding the depths of an ocean trench.
‘At least it’ll wake that lot up as well.’
‘Granddad –’
‘There’s nowt more to be said. Not just now.’
Helen sighed, her brain crowding with thoughts she couldn’t express and feelings she couldn’t communicate. The old man only grimaced as his arm was stretched at an even sharper angle.
‘Have to go, love,’ he said. ‘Jess’ll pull me arm off, else.’
Helen shook her head, but dropped her hand and let him go. A thin trickle of blood ran down her arm from the scratch made by the thorn. It glittered thickly on her pink skin, clotting and drying fast in the warm sun. She watched as her grandfather set off down the hillside towards the woods at the foot of the cliffs. Jess, his black Labrador, led the way along the familiar path, tugging eagerly at the end of her lead, impatient to be allowed to run free when they reached the stream.
No, you couldn’t run away from things for ever, thought Helen. But you could always bugger off and walk the dog for a bit.
Down on the lower slopes of the hill, Ben Cooper was sweating. The perspiration ran in streams through the fine hairs on his chest and formed a sticky sheen on the muscles of his stomach. The sides and back of his T-shirt were already soaked, and his scalp prickled uncomfortably.
No breeze had yet found its way through the trees to cool the lingering heat of the afternoon sun. Each clearing was a little sun trap, funnelling the heat and raising the temperature on the ground into the eighties. Even a few feet into the woods the humidity was enough to make his whole body itch, and tiny black flies swarmed from under the trees in irritating clouds, attracted by the smell of his sweat.
Every man in the line was equipped with a wooden pole to sift through the long grass and push aside the dense swathes of bracken and brambles. The bruised foliage released a damp, green smell and Cooper’s brown fell boots were stained dark to an inch above the soles. His pole came out of the undergrowth thick with burrs, and with small caterpillars and insects clinging to its length. Every few minutes he had to stop to knock them off against the ground or on the bole of a tree. All along the line were the sounds of men doing the same, the thumps and taps punctuating their muttered complaints and sporadic bursts of conversation.
Cooper found that walking with his head down made his neck ache after a while. So when the line stopped for a minute to allow someone in the centre the time to search a patch of dense bramble, he took the chance to raise his head and look up, above the line of the trees. He found himself gazing at the side of Win Low across the valley. Up there, on the bare, rocky outcrops they called the Witches, it would be so much cooler. There would be a fresh wind easing its way from the west, a wind that always seemed to come all the way from the Welsh mountains and across the Cheshire plain.
For the last two hours he had been wishing that he had used his common sense and brought a hat to keep the sun off his head. For once, he was jealous of his uniformed colleagues down the line, with their dark peaked caps pulled over their eyes and their starburst badges glittering in the sunlight. Being in CID had its disadvantages sometimes.
‘Bloody hell, what a waste of effort.’
The PC next to Ben Cooper was from Matlock section, a middle-aged rural beat manager who had once had aspirations to join the Operational Support Task Force in Chesterfield. But the Task Force were deployed further along the hillside, below the Mount itself, while PC Garnett found himself alongside an Edendale detective in a makeshift search group which included a couple of National Park Rangers. Garnett wore his blue overalls with more comfort than style, and he had been swinging his pole with such ferocity as he walked that his colleagues had gradually moved further away to protect their shins.
‘You reckon so?’
‘Aye, certain,’ said Garnett. ‘They say the lass has run off with some boyfriend.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve not heard that. It wasn’t in the briefing. Just that she was missing.’
‘Huh. Missing my arse. Mark my words, she’ll be off shagging some spotty youth somewhere. Fifteen years old, what do you expect these days?’
‘Maybe you’re right. We have to go through the motions all the same.’
‘Mind you, if one of my two did it, I’d murder ’em all right.’
Garnett thrashed at a small elder sapling so hard that the stem snapped in two, the tender young branches collapsing to the ground and leaking a tiny trickle of sticky sap. Then he trod on the broken stem and crushed it into the grass with his police-issue boot. Cooper hoped that, if there were any fragile evidence to be found in the woods, he would see it before Garnett reached it.
Then he looked at the PC and smiled suddenly, recognizing that the man had no harm in him. He might be a middle-aged dad whose ambitions were withering as his waistline expanded, but he had no harm in him at all. Cooper could almost sense the ordinary little niggles that teemed in Garnett’s mind, from his disappearing hairline to the recurring ache at the base of his spine and the size of his telephone bill.
‘Just be thankful for the overtime,’ he said. ‘We could all do with a bit of that.’
‘Ah yes, you’re right there, lad. Too right. It takes something like this to get the fingers of those tight-fisted bastards off the purse strings these days, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s the budget cuts.’
‘Budgets!’ Garnett said the word like a curse, and they both paused for a moment to listen to its sound, shaking their heads as if it symbolized the end of everything they had known.
‘Accountants, you can keep ’em,’ said Garnett. ‘We’re not coppers to them any more, just a load of figures on a sheet of paper. It’s all flashy operations and clear-up rates. There’s no room for old-style coppers these days.’
He threw a bitter glance along the hillside towards where the Task Force squad was beating its way through the scrubland beyond a row of Lombardy poplars like a set of dark spikes dropped into the landscape.
‘Of course, you’ll know all about that, lad. You’re different. A chip off the old block, they reckon. Good for you. Wish you luck, though.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
Cooper had only just returned from a fortnight’s summer leave. On his first day back on duty he had been thrown straight into the search for Laura Vernon, fifteen years old and missing from home since Saturday night. They were looking for a girl with short dark hair dyed red, wearing a silver nose stud, five foot six inches tall, mature for her age. Failing that, they were looking for her clothes – black denims, a red short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, a white sports bra, blue bikini pants, blue ankle socks, a pair of Reeboks, size-five, slim-fit. Nobody thought it necessary to point out that if they found her clothes, they were also looking for a body.
‘This lass, though. She’s miles away, if you ask me,’ said Garnett. ‘Run off with the boyfriend. Some yob on a motorbike from Manchester, maybe. That’s what teenage girls get up to these days. The schools teach them about contraceptives before they’re twelve, so what can you expect? ’Course, the parents never have a clue. Not parents like this lot, anyway. They don’t know the kids exist half the time.’
Cooper’s legs were still aching from the rock climbing he had done on the sheer, terrifying faces of the Cuillin Hills of Skye. His friends Oscar and Rakesh were members of the Edendale Mountain Rescue Team and could never get enough of the mountains. Just now, though, he could really have done with a quiet day behind his desk at Division, making a few phone calls maybe, catching up on what had been happening during the last fortnight, getting up to date with the gossip. Anything but clambering up and down another hillside.
But he knew this area well – he was himself from a village a few miles down the valley. Most of the men recruited for the search parties were from the section stations, or even from out of the division. A few of them were city boys. On the hills around here they would be falling down old mine shafts in their dozens without someone to tell them which way was up and which was down.
And, of course, PC Garnett could well be right. It had happened so often – youngsters bored with life in the villages of the Peak District, attracted by the glamour and excitement of the big cities. And very likely there was a boyfriend, too – no doubt someone the parents found unsuitable. According to the initial reports, the Vernons claimed there had been no trouble at home, no family rows, no reason at all for Laura to walk out. But didn’t parents always say that? So much could remain misunderstood among families, or never even suspected. Especially if they were a family who didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to each other much.
But there were other factors in this case. Laura had taken no clothes with her, very little money, no possessions of any kind. And initial enquiries had brought a sighting of her talking to a young man on Saturday night, at the edge of the expanse of hillside scrub and woodland known as the Baulk.
Once he got out on the hill below the village of Moorhay, Cooper had remembered that he had even been to Laura Vernon’s home once. It was the big white house they called the Mount, which stood somewhere above the search party, hidden behind the trees on its own spur of land. It was a former mine owner’s house, big and pretentious, with formally laid out grounds full of rhododendrons and azaleas, and with a stunning view over the valley from the terrace. Cooper had been invited to the Mount for the eighteenth birthday party of a classmate, a lad everyone at the old Edendale High School knew had well-off parents even before they were given the tour of the big house. That hadn’t been the Vernons, but the people before them – they had been local people, the family of a man who had inherited a string of small petrol stations scattered throughout the Peak. The business had expanded from Edendale and its surrounding villages, beyond the borders of Derbyshire, in fact, into South Yorkshire and the fringes of the cities.
Eventually, of course, he had sold out to one of the larger companies, cashed in and moved away to somewhere better. Abroad, they said. The South of France and Italy were popular guesses.
The Mount had stood empty then for some time, waiting out the recession. Photographs of its elegant facade featured regularly in the adverts of upmarket estate agents in glossy county magazines. The village people would sit in the doctor’s waiting room, pointing out to each other the multiplicity of bathrooms, wondering what a utility was and shaking their heads in astonishment at the number of noughts in the asking price. Then the Vernons had moved into the Mount. No one knew where they had come from, or what Mr Vernon did, except that he was ‘in business’. He drove off every day in his Jaguar XJS in the direction of Sheffield, sometimes staying away from home for days on end. Was he another one just pausing for a while in the Peak while he booked his ticket to Tuscany?
‘You’ll be glad of the extra cash too, though, won’t you? Just been on holiday?’ said Garnett.
‘Scotland,’ said Cooper.
‘Bloody hell. Scotland? It’s just the Peak District, but with a bit more water, isn’t it? Can’t see the point of that, myself. Me, I want a bit of sun and sand when I go on leave. Not to mention the cheap booze, eh? I like Ibiza. There’s loads of English pubs and casinos and stuff. A few bottles of sangria, a paella, and a go on the fruit machines. You can’t beat it, that’s what I say. Besides, the wife’d divorce me if I suggested anything else. She’s on about the Maldives next year. I don’t even know where it is.’
‘Somewhere east of Ibiza, I think,’ said Cooper. ‘But you’d like it.’
The line was moving forward again, and Cooper waved away a cloud of flies from his face. Sun and sand and cheap booze were far from his mind. Even during his fortnight on Skye, his thoughts had kept slipping away from the rock face, back to the promotion interviews that were coming up, now just a few days away. There would soon be a detective sergeant’s job available at E Division. DS Osborne had been on sick leave for weeks now, and it was said that he would go the usual way – early retirement on health grounds, another pension to be paid for from the creaking police authority budget. Ben Cooper thought he was the natural successor to Osborne. Ten years in the force, and five in CID, and he had more local knowledge than most of the rest of his shift put together. The sergeant’s job was what he wanted and needed. More – it was what his family wanted. Cooper thought of his mother, and the desperately hopeful look in her eye when he came home from work, the question as often unspoken as asked out loud. He thought about her many times a day, every time he saw someone ill or old. He thought of her seemingly endless pain and grief, and the one thing she thought might ease it. He ached to give her what she longed for, just this once.
The line of men were deep into the trees again now, the canopy over them muffling the noise of the police helicopter that was still moving along the valley, sweeping the woods with its thermal imaging camera. The sudden transition from glaring sun to deep shade made it difficult to make out the details of the undergrowth below the trees. In places there could have been an entire SAS platoon lying concealed in the chest-high bracken and willowherb, waiting for some bobby in blue overalls to stumble into them armed with nothing but a slug-encrusted pole.
A pheasant clattered in alarm and took off somewhere nearby. From further away, there was another sound. The trees were too thick to tell which direction it came from, or exactly how far away it was. But it was the sound of a dog, and it barked just once.
2 (#ulink_8158a397-6f7f-532f-8d74-fb452674e6a0)
Charlotte Vernon had been in the same position for a quarter of an hour. Whether it was the effects of the tablets or the alcohol, or simply the frantic activity of her imagination, throughout the day she had been alternating between phases of restlessness and immobility. It was as though she managed to blank out her thoughts entirely for short periods before being overwhelmed afresh by surges of terror. The waiting had become an end in itself.
Now Charlotte stood on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, watching the helicopter passing overhead. She followed the movement of the rotor blades as if she hoped to read a message in their flickering blur. On a table near her hand stood a half-drunk glass of Bacardi and an ashtray filled with damp and crushed butts, their filters stained with smears of vermilion.
She had been on the terrace all afternoon, hardly seeming to notice as the heat of the sun gradually moved away from her shoulders and dipped behind the house until she stood in shade and the stone flags around her began to whisper and contract. She had stirred only when the phone rang behind her in the house, her muscles tensing, her fingers gripping tighter on the balustrade for a few seconds each time, as Graham answered it. She would strain to catch his muttered words, then cover her ears as if she didn’t want to hear them at all.
But all the calls were enquiries from friends. Some were even business calls, which Graham dealt with in a lowered voice, glancing towards his wife’s back as he turned guiltily away. He seemed relieved to have an excuse not to look at her as she posed against the view of the Witches, her head raised to the sky like a heroine in an Arthurian romance, waiting for news of a distant battle.
After the latest call, Graham replaced the phone and turned back towards the windows.
‘That was Edward Randle from AET,’ he said. ‘He sends his thoughts. And he wanted to know whether he and Martina should still come tomorrow night.’
Graham waited for Charlotte to speak. But he could only hear the faint buzzing of the fans and the distant bark of a dog somewhere down in the village.
‘I told him of course they should come. We can’t put people off, can we? Life goes on.’
Graham wondered whether she had heard what he said. She was in some world of her own where Allied Electronics and other such trivialities didn’t exist. Graham moved closer to her, wondering whether he should offer to touch her, whether it would be what she wanted just now, or whether it would only make things worse. He couldn’t tell.
When he stepped on to the terrace, he could smell the sun oil on her body. Her bleached hair hung straight on her neck, falling slightly on to the collar of her wrap. The backs of her slim, well-tanned legs were visible to the edge of her bikini, her muscles tense and stretched. Graham felt a surge of physical desire, but tried to suppress it. Maybe tonight his wife would be restored to her usual receptive mood. Maybe tomorrow.
‘Did you hear me, Charlie?’
‘I wish we could take the phone off the hook.’
‘But then we wouldn’t hear … if there was news.’
‘When they find her, you mean.’
Charlotte’s voice was tired now, the strain of the past forty-eight hours taking its toll, though she would be reluctant to admit it.
‘They will find her, won’t they, Graham?’
‘Of course they will.’
Graham repeated the same reassurance he had been giving for two days. He put as much sincerity as he could into his voice, though he doubted his wife really believed him. He certainly didn’t believe it himself.
The helicopter started to turn, its rotors dipping and fading from sight against the hillside behind it. Charlotte looked dejected at its disappearance, as if she had failed to decipher the message because she had not tried hard enough. From the terrace, none of the houses in the village were visible. The only human habitation in view consisted of a couple of farms high on the opposite slope, their weathered stone walls blending into the hillside as if they had grown there. No wonder Charlotte hadn’t wanted the helicopter to go away. It was the only sign of life she could see from the Mount.
‘You hear of girls running off and disappearing for ever,’ she said. ‘To London. Would she go to London, Graham? How would she get there?’
‘She’s only fifteen,’ he said. ‘They would bring her back.’
‘How would she get there?’ she repeated. ‘Where would she get the money? She could have hitched, I suppose. Would she know how to do that? Why didn’t she take any clothes?’
For two days she had asked too many questions that Graham couldn’t answer. He would have liked to tell her that he was sure Laura could have got no further than Bakewell, and that the police would pick her up before the night was over. He had tried to tell her, but the words dried up in his throat.
‘Don’t you want to come in now? It’s time to eat.’
‘Not just yet,’ she said.
‘It’s starting to go dark. You’ll want to change at least.’
‘I want to be out here,’ she said.
‘Charlie –’
‘As long as they’re still looking,’ she said. ‘I want to be out here.’
A book had been turned face down on to the table. Very little of it had been read, but it didn’t need to be. Graham could see from the cover that it was the latest in a best-selling series about an American pathologist who was for ever dissecting dead bodies and catching serial killers. The illustration showed a barely identifiable part of a naked body, set against a dark background.
‘I can’t think of anywhere else that she might have gone,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ve been trying and trying, racking my brains. But we’ve tried everywhere, haven’t we, Graham? Can you think of anywhere else?’
‘We’ve tried them all,’ said Graham.
‘There’s that girl in Marple.’
‘We’ve tried there,’ said Graham. ‘Her parents said she was in France for the summer.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
‘If she’s met up with the wrong sort of people …’
‘How could she?’ said Charlotte quickly. ‘We’ve been so careful. How could she meet the wrong people?’
‘We have to face it, it does happen. Some of her friends … Even if they’re from the best families, they can go astray.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ve heard there are these rave things. Some of them go on all weekend, they say.’
Charlotte shuddered. ‘That means drugs, doesn’t it?’
‘We’ll have to talk to her about it seriously, when she’s back.’
After the helicopter had moved away to hover somewhere along the valley, the faint sound of voices could be heard, carried towards the house on the evening breeze. Graham and Charlotte could see no one because of the heavy tree cover, but both of them knew, without discussing it, that there were many men out there on the hillside, calling to each other, searching for their daughter.
‘Of course, there were probably friends she didn’t tell us about,’ said Graham. ‘We have to face up to that. Places she went that she didn’t want us to know about.’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘Laura didn’t keep secrets from me,’ she said. ‘From you, of course. But not from me.’
‘If you say so, Charlie.’
A small frown flickered across Charlotte’s face at his calm acceptance. ‘Is there something you know, Graham? Something that you’re not telling me?’
‘Of course not.’
He was thinking of his last conversation with Laura. It had been late on Thursday night, when she had slipped into his study and persuaded him to let her have a glass of his whisky. Her face had been flushed with some other excitement, even before the whisky had begun to take effect. She had perched on the edge of his desk and stroked his arm, smiling at him with that mature, seductive smile she had learned had such an effect on their male visitors. She had dyed her hair again, a deeper red than ever, almost violet, and her fingernails were painted a colour so dark it was practically black. Then she had talked to him, with that knowing look in her eyes and that sly wink, and told him what she wanted. The following morning, he had sacked Lee Sherratt. The second gardener they had lost that year.
‘No, of course not, Charlie.’
She accepted his word. ‘And the boy, Lee?’
Graham said nothing. He closed the abandoned novel, slipping a soft leather bookmark between the pages. He collected the book and the half-full glass of Bacardi from the table. The sun had almost gone from their part of the valley now. But the jagged shapes of the Witches were bathed in a dull red light that was streaked with black runnels where the rocky gulleys were in shadow.
‘What about him, Graham? What about the boy?’
He knew Charlotte still thought of Laura as pure and innocent. It was the way she would think of her daughter for ever. But Graham had begun to see her with different eyes. And the boy? The boy had already been punished. Punished for not dancing to the tune that Laura had played. Lee Sherratt had been too stubborn to play the game – but of course, he had been busy playing other games by then. And so Graham had sacked him. It was what Laura had wanted.
‘The police have spoken to him. He told them he hasn’t seen Laura for days.’
‘Do you believe that?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows what to believe just now?’
‘I want to speak to him. I want to ask him myself. Make him tell the truth.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Charlie. Leave it to the police.’
‘They know about him, don’t they?’
‘Of course. They’ve got him on their records anyway. Over that stolen car.’
‘What?’
‘You remember. The car that was taken from the car park at the top of the cliff. It belonged to some German people. Laura told us about it.’
‘Did she?’ said Charlotte vaguely.
At last she allowed him to lead her back into the room, where she began to touch familiar objects – a cushion, the back of a chair cover, the piano stool, a series of gilt-framed photographs in a cabinet. She opened her handbag, touched up her lipstick and lit another cigarette.
‘Who else is supposed to be coming tomorrow night?’ she said.
‘The Wingates. Paddy and Frances. And they’re bringing some friends of theirs from Totley. Apparently, they’re building up a big computer business, installing systems in Doncaster and Rotherham. Paddy says they’ve got a really good future. They’d make an ideal account, but I need to get in quickly and make the contact.’
‘I’d better see to the food then.’
‘Good girl.’
As she turned towards Graham now, her eyes showed no sign of any tears. Graham was glad – she was not a woman given to tears, and he would not have known how to deal with it. Instead, she fiddled with the front of her wrap, letting him glimpse her brown thighs and the gentle slope of her belly above the edge of her bikini briefs.
‘You like Frances, don’t you?’ she said.
Graham grinned, recognizing the opening. ‘Not as much as I like you, Charlie.’
He took a step towards her, but she turned suddenly and picked up one of the photograph frames from the cabinet and began to stroke its edges.
‘Won’t you go and see the Sherratt boy, Graham? To help get Laura back.’
‘Leave it for now, Charlie.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the police will find her.’
‘Will they, Graham?’
The photograph frame she was holding was bare and empty. The picture had been given to the police to enable them to identify Laura when they found her. Graham took the frame from her and replaced it in the cabinet.
‘Of course they will,’ he said.
The old woman’s burst of anger was over, but her thin hands still jerked and spasmed on the floral-patterned arms of her chair. Helen watched her until she was calm, and pulled her cardigan closer round her shoulders from where it had slipped.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, Grandma.’
‘If you like.’
‘Do you want your Special Blend?’
‘The bags’ll do. But make sure you put an extra one in the pot. You know how I like it.’
Helen stood at the narrow window of the kitchen of Dial Cottage while she waited for the kettle to boil. The electrical appliances that her father had bought for his parents-in-law left hardly any room in the kitchen to turn round. There was certainly not enough space for two people between the cooker and the oversized pine table crammed in lengthwise to the sink.
The table was scattered with cooking equipment, place mats with scenes of a North Wales seaside resort, sprigs of mint and thyme tied with bits of string, a jar of marmalade, a jar filled with wooden ladles and spatulas, a potato peeler with a wooden handle, a chopping board and half an onion soaking in a bowl of water. By the back door a pair of wellington boots and a walking stick stood on the blue lino, and a dark-green waxed coat with a corduroy collar hung from the hook where Harry’s cap would normally have been. The coat had been Helen’s present to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.
‘He was never like this before,’ said her grandmother from her chair, not needing to raise her voice over the short distance to the kitchen. ‘Never this bad. Now he can’t speak without biting my head off.’
‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’
‘Asked him? Him? I might as well talk to the wall.’
‘Perhaps he’s ill, Grandma.’
‘He had a cold the other week, I suppose.’
Helen could see that her grandmother thought that Harry was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.
There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your way through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.
‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess. It doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’
‘No, Grandma.’
Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.
While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.
‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’
‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’
‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one, Sam Beeley.’
‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’
‘It’s them that’s done it.’
‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’
‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they’ve led him away, filled his head with thoughts.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.
But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.
‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’
‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’
Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.
Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.
‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’
‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’
‘You’re a good girl. You were always his favourite, Helen. Why don’t you talk to him?’
‘I will try,’ promised Helen.
She stood by the old woman’s armchair, looking down on her white hair, so thin she could clearly see the pink scalp. She wanted to put her arm round her grandmother’s shoulders and hug her, to tell her it would be all right. But she knew that Gwen would be embarrassed, and in any case she wasn’t at all sure that it would be all right. A sudden surge of affection and frustration made her turn away.
Then she saw her grandfather, a small figure way down at the bottom of the hillside path, just emerging from the trees at the foot of Raven’s Side. Whether it was something about the way he moved or the set of his shoulders, she couldn’t say. But she knew immediately that there was something badly wrong.
Gwen cocked her head and peered at Helen, sensing the tension in her silence.
‘What is it, dear?’
‘Nothing, Grandma.’
Helen unlatched the back door and stood on the whitewashed step. Suddenly she felt an irrational flood of memories streaming out of the old cottage behind her like coils of smoke escaping from a burning house. They were childhood memories, mostly of her grandfather – memories of him taking her by the hand as they walked on this same path to look at the fish jumping in the stream, or to pick daisies for a daisy chain; of her grandfather proudly sitting her on his knee as he showed her how he filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it with the long coloured-paper tapers. Fleeting smells flickered by her senses, passing in a second, yet each one with enough emotional power to fill her eyes with instant tears. They were the remembered smells of pipe smoke and Brylcreem and boot polish.
Harry had always seemed to be polishing his shoes. He still did. It was one of those signs that she knew her grandfather by even as he had changed over the years. Without those signs, she thought, old age might have made him unrecognizable to the child who had known the strong, indestructible man in his fifties.
It was in just the same way that, at this moment, she knew her grandfather only by his walk. It was a slow, purposeful walk, upright and solemn, the pace of a soldier at a funeral, bearing the coffin of a dead comrade.
She heard the helicopter turn again and come straight towards her. Two faces stared down at her, expressionless behind their dark glasses. She felt as though the watching policemen could see straight into her heart. Their presence was somehow personal and intimate, and yet for ever too far away.
3 (#ulink_ac9e373d-5651-5aa0-9ff8-418b7240b541)
‘OK, take a break.’
The word came down the line from the uniformed sergeant at the opposite end from Ben Cooper. The men in blue overalls and wellingtons backed away from the line of search and sat on the tussocks of rough grass in a half-circle. Someone produced a flask of tea, someone else a bottle of orange juice.
PC Garnett settled down comfortably, tossing his pole aside, taking off his cap to reveal receding hair cropped short at the sides. They said it was the helmets that made so many policemen start to lose their hair early. Cooper himself was conscious that one day he would start to see a thinning on either side of his forehead. Everybody told him that his fine brown hair was just like his father’s, who had never been anything but halfway bald, as far as he could remember. So far, though, he was still able to let a lock of hair fall across his forehead as he had always done. Fashions had tended to pass him by.
Garnett smiled as he mopped his brow with his sleeve and eased himself into gossip mode. ‘So what about this new recruit in your department, Cooper? The new DC?’
‘I’ve not met him yet. I’ve only just come back from leave.’
‘It’s a “her”, mate, a “her”. Diane Fry, they call her.’
‘Right.’
‘She’s from Birmingham.’
‘I’ve not heard anything about her. I expect she’ll be all right.’
‘According to Dave Rennie, she’s a bit of a hard-faced cow. Could be a looker, he says, but she doesn’t bother. Blonde, but has her hair cut short. Too tall, too skinny, no make-up, always wears trousers. A bit of a stroppy bitch.’
‘You haven’t even met her,’ protested Cooper.
‘Well, you know the type. Probably another lesbian.’
Cooper blew out an exasperated breath. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t go around saying things like that. You don’t know anything about her.’
Garnett had the sense to hear the irritation in Cooper’s voice and didn’t argue. He idly pulled a clump of dandelions and shredded the leaves between his fingers. But Cooper couldn’t let the subject rest.
‘You know what it’s like for the women as well as I do, Garnett – some of them just try too hard. She’ll fit in fine after a week or two, you’ll see. They usually do.’
‘I dunno about that. I’ve a feeling you’ll not have time to be her best mate, though, lad. She’ll be up and away in no time.’
‘Why? Does she go ballooning?’
‘Ha, ha.’ Garnett ignored the sarcasm, in fact was probably impervious to it when he had a good subject of gossip. ‘She comes with a bit of a “rep” actually. A potential high-flier, they reckon. Ambitious.’
‘Oh yeah? She’ll have to prove herself first.’
‘Maybe.’
The clouds of tiny flies were getting thicker as they gathered around the men’s heads, attracted by their sweat and the sweet smell of the orange juice. The PC looked smug.
‘Come on, what do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You don’t just get promotion without showing you’re worth it.’
‘Get real, mate. She’s female. You know – two tits and a fanny, always puts the toilet seat down.’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that. So what?’
‘So what? So what? So the force is short of female officers in supervisory ranks, especially in CID. Don’t you read the reports? You just watch, old son – provided she keeps her nose clean and always smiles nicely at the top brass, Detective Constable Fry will shoot up that promotion ladder like she’s got a rocket up her arse.’
Cooper was about to protest when the shout went up from the contact man. ‘DC Cooper! Is DC Cooper here? Your boss wants you. Urgent.’
The instructions from DI Hitchens were terse, and the address he gave Cooper was in Moorhay, the village visible on the brow of the hill above the woods. Communities in this area tended to gather around the thousand-foot contour, the valley bottoms being too narrow.
‘Check it out, Cooper, and fast. We either get to the girl in the next two hours or we lose the whole night. You know what that could mean.’
‘I’m on my way, sir.’
‘Take somebody with you. Who’ve you got?’
Cooper looked back at the group of men lounging on the grass. His gaze passed across PC Garnett and a couple of other middle-aged bobbies, the overweight sergeant, two female PCs from Matlock and the three rangers.
‘No CID officers, sir. I’ll have to borrow a uniformed PC.’
There was a suggestion of a sigh at the other end of the line.
‘Do it then. But get a move on.’
Cooper explained as quickly as he could to the sergeant and was given a tall, muscular young bobby of about twenty called Wragg, who perked up at the prospect of some action.
‘Follow me as best you can.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m right with you,’ said Wragg, flexing the muscles in his shoulders.
The path up to Moorhay wound back through the trees to where a kissing gate gave access through the dry-stone walls into a field where black and white dairy cattle had recently been turned back in after milking. The field had been cut for hay a few weeks before, and the grass was short and springy underfoot as Ben Cooper ran along the side of the wall, the heat and sweat prickling on his brow and his legs spasming with pain as he forced them on. Wragg kept pace with him easily, but soon dropped his tendency to ask questions when Cooper didn’t respond. He needed all his breath for running.
The cows turned their heads to watch them pass in astonishment, their jaws working slowly, their eyes growing huge between twitching ears. Earlier in the afternoon, the search party had had to wait for the farmer to move the cows to the milking shed before the line could work its way across the field. The air had been filled with crude jokes about cow pats.
Cooper passed a stretch of collapsed wall, where a length of electric fence had been erected to keep the cattle away until someone skilled in dry-stone walling could be found to repair it. Before the cows’ curiosity could lead them to follow him, Cooper had already reached the next gate. He skirted another field and ran up a farm track paved with stones and broken rubble.
The steepness of the slope was increasing steadily now on the last few hundred yards, until Cooper began to feel as though he was back on the Cuillins again. Wragg was dropping further and further behind, slowing to a walk, using his arms against his knees to boost himself up the steeper sections.
He was carrying too much upper body weight, thought Cooper, and hadn’t developed the right muscles in his thighs and calves for hill climbing. Some of the old people who had lived in these hill villages all their lives would have passed the young PC with ease.
Finally, Cooper reached the high, dark wall at the corner of the graveyard at St Edwin’s Church. The church seemed to have been built on a mound, standing well above the village street at the front and presenting an elevation from the bottom of the valley like the rampart of a castle wall. The square Norman tower stood stark against the sky, tall and strangely out of proportion to the shortened nave, giving the church the appearance of a fallen letter ‘L’.
The surface of the churchyard was so high that Cooper thought the bodies buried there must be almost on his eye level, if only he could see through the stones of the wall and the thick, dark soil to where the oak caskets lay rotting.
The church was surrounded by mature trees, horse chestnuts and oaks, and two ancient yews. The damp smell of cut grass was in the air, and as Cooper passed the churchyard, climbing now towards the back of a row of stone cottages, a man in a red check shirt with his sleeves rolled up looked over the wall at him from the side gate. He was leaning on a big petrol lawn mower, pausing between a swathe of smoothly mown grass and a tussocky area he hadn’t yet reached. He gazed at the running man with a grimace of distaste, as if the evening had been disturbed by something particularly unpleasant.
At the first of the cottages, a woman was in her garden with a watering can, tending the flower beds on the side where they were in the shade of the cottage wall. She held the watering can upright in a gloved hand as she watched Cooper trying to catch his breath to ask directions. He found he was gasping in the heady smells of honeysuckle and scented roses freshly dampened with water. Behind him, the lawn mower started up again in the churchyard, and a small flock of jackdaws rose protesting from the chestnuts.
‘Dial Cottage?’
The woman stared at him, then shook her head almost imperceptibly, unwilling to spare him even that effort. She turned her back ostentatiously, her attention on a miniature rose with the palest of yellow flowers. On the wall in front of Cooper was a sign that said: ‘No parking. No turning. No hikers’.
Two cottages up, he found an old woman sitting in a garden chair with a Persian cat on her knee, and he repeated his question. She pointed up the hill.
‘Up to the road, turn left and go past the pub. It’s in the row of cottages on your left. Dial Cottage is one of those with the green doors.’
‘Thank you.’ With a glance at the PC still struggling up the track, Cooper ran on, glad to have tarmac under his feet at last as he approached the road.
Moorhay was off the main tourist routes and had little traffic most of the time, with no more than an occasional car coasting through towards Ladybower Reservoir or the show caverns in Castleton. A small pub called the Drover stood across the road, with two or three cars drawn up on the cobbles in front. According to the signs, it sold Robinson’s beer, one of Ben Cooper’s favourites. Right now, he would have died for a pint, but he couldn’t stop.
He passed a turning called Howe Lane, near a farm entrance with a wooden-roofed barn and a tractor shed. A sign at the bottom of the track said that the farmhouse itself provided bed and breakfast. Trees overhung the road as it wandered away from the village. In the distance, he glimpsed a shoulder of moor with a single tree on its summit.
Two hundred yards from the church was a long row of two-storey cottages built of the local millstone grit, with stone slate roofs and small mullioned windows. They had no front gardens, but some had stone troughs filled with marigolds and petunias against their front walls. One or two of the cottages had plain oak plank doors with no windows. The doors were painted a dark green, with lintels of whitewashed stone tilted at uneven angles.
By the time Cooper found which of them was Dial Cottage, the perspiration was running freely from his forehead and the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt. His face was red and he was breathing heavily when he knocked on the door. He could barely bring himself to speak when it was answered.
‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police.’
The woman who opened the door nodded, not even looking at the warrant card held in his sticky palm.
‘Come in.’
The old oak door thumped shut, shutting out the street, and Cooper blinked his eyes to readjust them to the gloom. The woman was about his own age, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was wearing a halter-necked sun top and shorts, and her pink limbs immediately struck him as totally out of place in the dark interior, like a chorus girl who had wandered into a funeral parlour. Her hair shone as if she had brought a bit of the sun into the cottage with her.
They stood in a narrow hallway, made even narrower by a heavy mahogany sideboard loaded with cut-glass vases and a fruit bowl, all standing on lace mats. In the middle was a colour photograph of a large family group, taken at the seaside somewhere. Recently applied magnolia woodchip wallpaper could not disguise the unevenness of the walls underneath. An estate agent would have called it a charming period look.
Cooper stood still for a moment, fighting to get back his breath, his chest heaving. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to stop the trickles of sweat running into his eyes.
‘We had a report at the station,’ he gasped. ‘A phone call.’
‘It’s Ben Cooper, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’ He looked at the young woman again, recognition dawning only slowly, as he found it did when you saw someone out of their familiar surroundings.
‘Helen? Helen Milner?’
‘That’s it. I guess I’ve changed a bit since the sixth form at Edendale High.’
‘It was a few years ago.’
‘Nine years, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You’ve not changed much, Ben. Anyway, I saw your picture in the paper a while ago. You’d won a trophy of some sort.’
‘The Shooting Trophy, yes. Look, can we –?’
‘I’ll take you through.’
‘Do you live here then?’
‘No, it’s my grandparents’ house.’
They stepped through into a back room, hardly less gloomy than the hallway despite a window looking out on to the back garden. There was a 1950s tiled fireplace in the middle of one wall, scattered with more photographs and incongruous holiday mementoes – a straw donkey, a figure of a Spanish flamenco dancer, a postcard of Morocco with sneering camels and an impossibly blue sea. Above the fireplace, a large mirror in a gilt frame reflected a murky hunting print on the opposite wall, with red-coated figures on horseback galloping into a shadowy copse in pursuit of an unseen quarry. Cooper smelled furniture polish and the musty odour of old clothes or drawers lined with ancient newspapers.
There were two elderly people in the room – a woman wearing a floral-patterned dress and a blue cardigan sitting in one armchair, and an old man in a pair of corduroy trousers and a Harris wool sweater facing her in the other chair. They both sat upright, stiff and alert, their feet drawn under them as if to put as much distance between themselves as they could.
In front of the empty fireplace stood a two-bar electric fire. Despite the warmth of the day outside, it gave the impression of having been recently used. Cooper, though, was glad of the slight chill in the room, which had begun to dry the sweat on his face as the two old people turned towards him.
‘It’s Ben Cooper, Granddad,’ said Helen.
‘Aye, I can see that. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’
Cooper was well used to this greeting, especially from the older residents around Edendale. For some of them, he was merely the shadow of his father, whose fame and popularity seemed eternal.
‘Hello, sir. I believe somebody phoned the station.’
Harry didn’t answer, and Cooper was starting to form the idea that the old boy might be deaf when his granddaughter stepped in.
‘It was me, actually,’ said Helen. ‘Granddad asked me to.’
Harry shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t really be bothered whether she had phoned or not.
‘I thought it’d be something you lot would want to know about, like as not.’
‘And your name, sir?’
‘Dickinson.’
Cooper waited patiently for the explanation. But it came from the granddaughter, not from the old man.
‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she said, leading the way through another door. An almost brand-new washing machine and a fridge-freezer stood among white-painted wooden cupboards, with an aluminium sink unit awkwardly fitted into place among them. Neither of the old people followed them, but watched from their chairs. The rooms were so small that they were well within earshot.
‘Granddad found this.’
The trainer lay on a pine kitchen table, lumpy and grotesque among the bundles of dried mint and the brown-glazed cooking pots. Someone had put a sheet from the Buxton Advertiser underneath it to stop the soil that clung to its rubber sole from getting on to the surface of the table. The trainer lay in the middle of an advertising feature for a new Cantonese restaurant, its laces trailing across a photograph of a smiling Chinese woman serving barbecued spare ribs and bean sprouts. On the opposite page were columns of birth and death notices, wedding announcements and twenty-first birthday greetings.
Cooper wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and took out a pen. He gently prised open the tongue of the trainer to look inside, careful not to disturb the soil that was starting to dry and crumble away from the crevices in the sole.
‘Where did you find this, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Under Raven’s Side.’
Cooper knew Raven’s Side. It was a wilderness of rocks and holes and tangled vegetation. The search parties had been slowly making progress towards the cliff all afternoon, as if reluctant to have to face the task of searching it, with the expectation of twisted ankles and lacerated fingers.
‘Can you be more specific?’
The old man looked offended, as if he had been accused of lying. Cooper began to wonder why he had thought it was cooler inside the cottage. Despite the open windows, there was no breath of air in the kitchen. The atmosphere felt stifling, claustrophobic. The only bit of light seemed to go out of the room when Helen went to answer a knock at the door.
‘There’s a big patch of brambles and bracken down there, above the stream,’ said the old man. ‘It’s where I walk Jess, see.’
Cooper was surprised by a faint scrabbling of claws near his feet. A black Labrador gazed up at him from under the table, responding hopefully to the sound of its name. The dog’s paws were grubby, and it was lying on the Eden Valley Times. The sports section, by the look of it. Edendale FC had lost the opening match of the season.
‘Was there just the trainer? Nothing else?’
‘Not that I saw. It was Jess that found it really. She goes after rabbits and such when she gets down by there.’
‘OK,’ said Cooper. ‘We’ll take a look in a minute. You can show me the exact spot.’
Helen returned, accompanied by an exhausted PC Wragg.
‘Is it … any use?’ she asked.
‘We’ll see.’ Cooper took a polythene bag from his back pocket and carefully slid the trainer into it. ‘Would you wait here for a while, please? A senior officer will probably want to speak to you.’
Helen nodded and looked at her grandfather, but his expression didn’t alter. His face was stony, like a man resigned to a period of necessary suffering.
Cooper went back into the road and pulled out his personal radio to contact Edendale Divisional HQ, where he knew DI Hitchens would be waiting for a report. He held the polythene bag up to the light, staring at its contents while he waited for the message to be relayed.
The trainer was a Reebok, size-five, slim-fit. And the brown stains on the toe looked very much like blood.
4 (#ulink_2e870ee3-8d36-53f9-b1d5-a0917adebf8c)
The E Division Police Headquarters in Edendale had been new once, in the 1950s, and had even earned their architect a civic award. But in the CID room, fifty years of mouldering paperwork and half-smoked cigarettes and bad food had left their mark on the walls and their smell in the carpets. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget had recently stretched sufficiently to decorate the walls, replace the window frames, and install air conditioning in some of the offices. They had also replaced the old wooden desks with modern equivalents more in keeping with the computer equipment they carried.
DC Diane Fry was reading the bulletins. She had started off by catching up with the fresh ones for the day, then had continued casting back over recent weeks. Her intention was to make herself familiar with all the current enquiries in the division. Although she had been in Edendale nearly two weeks, she still felt as new as the white glosswork that for some reason was refusing to dry properly on the outside wall near the window. All the windows on this side of the building looked down on Gate C and the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club, a team struggling in the lower reaches of one of the pyramid leagues.
The priority problem of the moment was car crime at local tourist spots. From the weary tone of some of the memos Fry came across, it sounded as though it always was the priority problem in E Division at this time of year. Many thousands of visitors were drawn into the Peak District National Park during the summer, bringing with them what appeared to be their own crime wave, like the wake trailing behind a huge cruise liner. These visitors left their cars at remote spots, in makeshift car parks on rough ground, in abandoned quarries and on roadside verges. The cars were invariably full of cameras and binoculars and purses stuffed with cash and credit cards, and God knows what else. At the same time, travelling criminals from the big conurbations around Sheffield in the east and Manchester in the west were touring the Peak District looking for just such victims. A few minutes with an unattended vehicle and they were away back to their cities, leaving a trail of distraught visitors and ruined holidays.
It presented an apparently insoluble problem. It was impossible to get the message across to the car owners, since they were a constantly changing flood – here one day, then moving on the next, to be replaced by another group of visitors. It was impossible for the police to keep surveillance on vulnerable sites with the resources available; it was feasible only to identify possible perpetrators and ask neighbouring forces to keep them under observation. It was called living in hope.
Diane Fry looked across the room at DS Rennie. He was on the phone, and had been for some time. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she was fairly sure he hadn’t yet taken a single note with the ballpoint pen he was chewing. He was thick-shouldered and thick-necked, a veteran prop forward in the divisional rugby team, as she had learned from his conversation with one of the other DCs. She also knew that Rennie’s first name was David, and that he was married with two children in their early teens.
She had soon become aware of his sly sideways appraisal, a slithering of the eyes towards her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She had observed this in the past to be a common tentative first manoeuvre towards a junior female colleague, designed to culminate in an office affair. Many men, of course, never got past this first sign – it was more an indication of hope than intention. But there were others who were more of a nuisance, and Fry couldn’t tell just yet which Rennie was. It was helpful, though, to have the early warning, so that she could decide on her own terms when the time was right to put him down. Affairs with colleagues were not on her agenda. Not at all.
She could see Rennie was not making the effort to appear busy, even though there was a DCI somewhere in the building and liable to appear in the CID room at any moment.
‘Sarge?’ said Fry, when at last he put the phone down.
Rennie looked round, as if surprised that she was still there. Then he smiled, contorting his face until it was almost a wink. His tie was something dark green, with a small gold crest, and his suit was a good cut for his heavy shoulders, but not recently cleaned. He pulled out a bar of his habitual chewing gum, which Fry had guessed might mean he was a reformed smoker.
‘What can I do for you, Diane?’
‘This project group looking at the auto crime figures.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I wondered if a check had been done on the computer. Matching up locations and timings. An analysis of MOs. We could set up a computer model.’
‘Ben Cooper usually does that,’ said Rennie. ‘You’d better not mess with the computer until you’ve asked him about it.’
‘A computer model could come up with a set of predictions, suggest target locations. It’s worth a try, Sarge.’
‘I told you, speak to Ben. They’ve got him out at Moorhay, but he should be back in the office later, thank God.’
Fry had already heard Ben Cooper’s name several times during her first week in Edendale. Apparently he was some paragon of all the virtues who knew everything. DC Cooper knew the area like the back of his hand, they said. He knew all the local villains and even their families, they said. He knew how all the systems in the CID office worked, too. He knew exactly how to fill in the vast quantities of paperwork that baffled other detectives. Now, apparently, he was the only one who knew how to use the computers. But Diane Fry had an information technology qualification to her name, and she had done a course on intelligence data analysis at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. At the first opportunity, she would show them who knew how to use the computers around here.
For now, though, she decided to try another tack.
‘Someone from the NCIS did a paper on this problem a few months ago. It was mentioned when I was at Bramshill.’
‘Really?’
Rennie sounded uninterested.
‘The National Criminal Intelligence Service.’
‘I know what the NCIS is, thanks.’
‘I wondered if someone had researched it. I can’t see any mention in the paperwork. Maybe the project group have followed it through?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I’ll look it up, if you like, Sarge.’
Rennie looked sour, pulled at his tie, scrabbled about on his desk for a bit of paper and picked up the phone to dial another number.
‘Shall I, Sarge?’
‘Oh, if you like.’
Fry made a note for herself in her notebook and asterisked it. Then she put the car crime reports aside and picked up that morning’s bulletin on the missing girl, Laura Vernon. She had already read it once and had memorized its admittedly sketchy details.
Her memory was excellent for jobs like this. She knew exactly what the girl had been wearing when last seen, down to the blue pants and the size-five slim-fit Reeboks. If she was the first officer to come across any of these items, she knew she would recognize them straightaway. But she would have to be allocated to the search first, of course.
All available hands had already been called to the task of finding Laura Vernon. All hands, that was, except Detective Constable Diane Fry and Detective Sergeant David Rennie. Fry was new to the division, of course, but what had Rennie done wrong? He was currently in charge of day-to-day crime in E Division, and Fry constituted his staff. It wasn’t a combination that looked likely to crush any crime waves. At this moment, they weren’t even trying.
Fry got up from her desk and walked over to check the action file on the Laura Vernon enquiry. Although the enquiry was less than forty-eight hours old, the file was already getting thick. The apparatus of a major enquiry was beginning to swing into operation, even though it hadn’t yet been designated a murder enquiry – not until a body was found. Teenage girls ran away from home all the time, of course, and generally turned up a few days later, hungry and shamefaced. Laura had money – her parents estimated there could have been as much as thirty pounds in her purse; obviously she was not a girl who was kept short of cash. But she had taken no clothes and no possessions with her. That was a significant factor.
And reactions had been quicker in this instance for two other reasons. One was the fact that a witness report had placed Laura Vernon talking to an unidentified young man behind her house shortly before her disappearance. It had been the last sighting of her for nearly two days now.
The other pressing reason, understated in the action file but discernible as a thread running through the reports, was the so far unsolved murder of sixteen-year-old Susan Edson in neighbouring B Division a few weeks earlier.
Everyone knew that the first two or three days of an enquiry were vital, if it did turn out to be a case of murder, or other serious crime. Within the first seventy-two hours the memories of witnesses were fresh, and the perpetrator had little time to dispose of evidence or construct an alibi. At the same time, speedy action also meant they had a better chance of finding Laura Vernon alive.
Fry was interested to see that a name had been offered up to police as a ‘possible’ right from the start. A youth called Lee Sherratt had been named by the parents and had been interviewed by officers in the initial sweep. He had denied being the young man seen talking to Laura, but his alibi was unsupported. Sherratt’s record had been pulled from the Police National Computer – a few petty crimes, some as a juvenile. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to leave his name at the top of the file until he could be eliminated.
According to the reports, a uniformed inspector from Operational Support was now in charge of the search on the ground. DI Paul Hitchens was CID investigating officer, reporting to Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby. Officers had already called at every house in the village of Moorhay, since there weren’t all that many. Enquiries had been made with all known friends and relatives in the area. No sign of Laura Vernon, no leads to her possible whereabouts.
By now the painstaking inch-by-inch search of the surrounding countryside was well under way – off-duty officers had been called in, the search dog teams were out and the helicopter was in the air. Peak Park Rangers and Countryside Rangers were helping the search, and the Mountain Rescue Team was somewhere up on the tops of the moors above the village. And, of course, Detective Constable ‘Mr Perfect’ was also out at Moorhay in person. Case solved, then.
Fry had met DI Hitchens on her first day. He was her CID boss – after DS Rennie, anyway, and she had already decided Rennie didn’t really count. Hitchens was younger than the sergeant, and better educated. So an early promotion; maybe he was a fast-track graduate, like herself. He would certainly be destined for higher things, and his voice would be listened to by more senior officers. Fry ached to be out there, on a major enquiry, at the right hand of DI Hitchens, getting the chance to impress. She wasn’t intending to hang around looking at car crime statistics for long. A murder enquiry was just the thing. But it had come too soon, while she was still too new. Hence her presence in the office with Rennie.
In an hour or two they would have to call off the search for Laura Vernon anyway. Even in August dusk fell eventually over the hills, and the lines of men and women would disperse and wander dispiritedly home. Tomorrow there would be appeals in the papers and on TV, and civilian volunteers would be queueing up to swell the numbers of the search parties.
Fry knew she had two choices. She either coasted along and filled in time until Rennie thought fit to allocate her some tasks; or she could speak up, take the initiative, start to show what she was made of. But she held her tongue. Now was not the time – she needed to be in a stronger position. Meanwhile, DS Rennie was not worth the effort of trying to impress.
Then the door opened and DI Hitchens put his head round. ‘Who’s here? Oh yes.’
He looked disappointed, like a captain left with the choice of the players no one wants when the teams are being chosen. Hitchens was in his shirt sleeves, with his cuffs rolled up a few inches over strong wrists covered in dark, wiry hair. He was in his thirties, and seemed to be permanently about to break into a smile. Fry caught his eye, looked from him to Rennie, who had barely moved except to shift his foot from his desk.
Hitchens nodded. ‘All right to hold the fort for a while, Dave?’
‘Sir.’
Fry jumped up eagerly. ‘Where are we going, sir? Is it the missing girl, Laura Vernon?’
‘What else? Yes, we’ve had a find called in. We’ve got a good man out in the field now checking it out, but it sounds positive. Can you be ready in two minutes?’
‘I’ll be ready.’
When the DI had left, Diane Fry went back to her desk to clear away the car crime reports. She was careful to turn her back to Dave Rennie, so that he wouldn’t see her smiling.
Edendale sat astride a wide valley in the gap between the two distinct halves of the Peak District. On one side the gentle limestone hills and wooded dales of the White Peak rolled away past Bakewell and Wyedale into B Division and the borders of Staffordshire. On the other side were the grim, bare gritstone moors of the sparsely populated Dark Peak, where the high slopes of Mam Tor and Kinder Scout guarded the remote, silent reservoirs below Snake Pass.
It was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park – the other being Bakewell, a few miles to the south, where one of the E Division section stations was based. Other towns, like Buxton, headquarters of B Division, had been deliberately excluded from the National Park when the boundaries were drawn.
At Buxton, as at Matlock and Ashbourne, the boundary took wide sweeps around the towns and back again. But Edendale was too deep within the hills to be excluded. It meant that the restrictive Peak Park planning regulations applied to the town as much as they did to the face of Mam Tor or to the Blue John caves of Castleton.
Diane Fry was still learning the geography of the town and the dale. So far she was familiar only with the immediate area around the Victorian house on the outskirts of Edendale where she had rented a first-floor flat, and the streets near the station – including the view of the Edendale FC stand. But she was aware that, no matter which route you chose out of Edendale, the only way was up – over the hills, to the moorland hamlets or the villages in the next valley.
Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But DI Hitchens chose to drive himself as they headed out of the town towards the great hump of moorland separating Edendale from the next valley.
‘It’s just the one shoe,’ said Hitchens.
‘A trainer?’ said Fry. ‘Reebok, size-five?’
The DI looked at her, surprised, raising his eyebrow.
‘You’ve been reading up on the Vernon enquiry.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It was always a possibility from the start that something had happened to her, though you can’t tell the parents that. She had cash with her, but had taken nothing else. We’d already traced all her friends and contacts. Negative all round. It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, that her body will turn up somewhere.’
‘What sort of girl is she?’
‘Oh, comes from a well-off family, comfortable background. Never wanted for anything, I’d say. She attends a private school called High Carrs, due to take her GCSEs next year. She gets piano lessons, has a horse that her parents bought that’s kept at some stables just outside Moorhay. She takes part in riding events sometimes.’
‘Show jumping?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And is she good at any of those things?’
Hitchens looked at her and nodded approvingly. ‘If you believe the parents, she’s perfect at everything. Bound to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and do her degree, but might decide to pursue a career as a concert musician later on. Unless she wins an Olympic gold medal in the meantime, of course. Her friends say different.’
‘Boys?’
‘Of course. What else? Mum and Dad deny it, though. They say she’s too busy with her studies and her horse riding, all that. But we’re tracing the boyfriends, gradually.’
‘Rows at home? Anything like that?’
‘Nothing. At least …’
‘Not according to the parents, right.’
‘Got it.’
Hitchens was smiling again. Fry liked her senior officers to smile at her, within reason. She watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were strong hands, with clean and carefully trimmed fingernails. His nose was a little too large in profile. It was what they called a Roman nose. But a man could get away with that – it gave him character. She looked again at his left hand. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But now she noticed a white scar that crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.
‘The parents say that Laura had been shopping with her mother that afternoon,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’d been to the De Bradelei Centre at Belper.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Oh – clothes,’ he said vaguely.
‘Not Dad?’
‘I don’t suppose it was his sort of thing. Anyway, the females were buying him a birthday present, so he wouldn’t have been wanted, would he? He stayed at home to catch up on some work. Graham Vernon runs a financial consultancy business and says it’s going well. They do seem to be pretty well-off.’
‘And after they got home?’
‘It was about half past five by then. It was still hot, so Laura changed and went out into the garden for a while. She didn’t come back for her evening meal at half past seven. That’s when the Vernons began to panic.’
Fry admired the way he had all the details in his mind and could produce them without effort. Hitchens obviously had the sort of brain that was much valued in the police service these days. Many coppers could not have repeated the information without reading it from their notes.
‘Parents alibi each other?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she was seen talking to a young man before she disappeared, wasn’t she?’
‘Very good, Diane. Yes, we found a lady who was out collecting wild flowers on the edge of the scrubland at the top of the Baulk. She’s a WI member and is helping to create the decoration for a well dressing at Great Hucklow. She was embarrassed about admitting it, can you believe it? She thought we might arrest her for stealing wild flowers. Her children had told her it’s a crime against the environment. But the well dressing was obviously important enough to turn her to evil ways. Anyway, she came forward and identified Laura Vernon from her photograph as the girl she saw. She couldn’t describe the boy, though. Too far away.’
‘And now a trainer.’
‘Yes, that’s all we’ve got so far, but it looks hopeful. We’ve got Ben Cooper on the spot there – he was with one of the search parties. Ben’s got good judgement.’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘Oh, you’ve met Cooper, have you? He’s only back from leave today.’
‘No, but I’ve heard the others talk about him.’
‘Right.’ Hitchens said nothing for a few minutes, negotiating a crossroads where heavy lorries thundered by at regular intervals, dusting the roadside verges with a coating of lime. Fry tried to read his thoughts, wondering if she had said something wrong. But she was sure of her ability to keep any emotion out of her voice. She had practised long and hard, and now, she felt, she only ever sounded positive.
‘How’s it going then, Diane? Settling into the CID room OK?’
‘Fine, sir. Some things are done a bit differently from what I’ve been used to, but nothing I haven’t been able to pick up on pretty quickly.’
‘That’s good. Dave Rennie treating you all right?’
‘No problem,’ said Fry. She noted that she had become ‘Diane’ since getting into the car alone with the DI. She liked to keep a track of these things, in case they had any deeper meaning. Maybe she could manage without the ‘sir’ in return, and see if it struck the right note – a closeness of colleagues rather than a senior officer with a junior. But no further.
‘Not finding Derbyshire too quiet for you after the West Midlands?’
‘It’s a nice change,’ said Fry. ‘But I’m sure E Division has its own challenges.’
Hitchens laughed. ‘The other divisions call it “E for Easy Street”.’
Fry had already been informed by her new colleagues that Edendale had been chosen over Bakewell or Matlock as E Division Headquarters for purely alphabetical reasons. It was one of the oddities of the Derbyshire Constabulary structure that the territorial divisions were all based in towns that began with the right letter – A Division in Alfreton, B Division in Buxton, C Division in Chesterfield and D Division in Derby.
So it was inconceivable that E Division should have been based in Bakewell or Matlock. It would have been an outrage against corporate neatness. In fact, if there hadn’t already been a town called Edendale, some PR person in an office at County HQ would have had to invent one.
‘But I was thinking of the social life,’ said Hitchens. ‘Edendale isn’t exactly the night spot capital of Europe. A bit tame after Birmingham, I expect.’
‘It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose.’
He turned to look towards her, his hands resting casually on the wheel. ‘And what is Diane Fry looking for exactly?’
What indeed? There was only one thing that Fry wanted to acknowledge to herself. Maybe it wasn’t what Hitchens was expecting to hear. But it was something he ought to know, now rather than later.
‘I want to advance my career,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ He raised his eyebrows, a smile lighting up his face. He was quite good-looking, and he wore no wedding ring.
‘I’m good at my job,’ she said. ‘I’ll be looking for promotion. That’s what’s important to me. At the moment.’
‘Fair enough. I like your honesty.’
The main road towards Buxton climbed and climbed until it reached a plateau where the limestone quarries competed with the moors as background scenery. There was a well-placed pub here called the Light House, with tremendous views over two neighbouring valleys and the hills beyond. Hitchens turned off the road before they reached the quarries, and they began a gentle rollercoaster ride over smaller valleys and hills, dipping gradually towards Wyedale. Farm gates flickered past occasionally, with black and white signs advertising the names of dairy herds and stacks of huge round bales of straw or black plastic-wrapped silage lying in the fields behind stone walls.
‘I’ve seen your record, of course,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s not bad.’
Fry nodded. She knew it wasn’t bad. It was damn good. Her exam results had been in the top few per cent all along the line. Her clear-up rate since her transfer to CID had been outstanding. She had had a good career lined up in the West Midlands, and they had been grooming her for big things; anybody could see that.
‘It was a pity you had to leave your old force,’ said Hitchens.
She said nothing, waiting for the comment that she knew would have to come.
‘But it was understandable. In the circumstances.’
‘Yes, sir.’
In the circumstances. That was exactly how Fry herself tried to think of it now. ‘The circumstances’. It was a wonderfully cool and objective phrase. Circumstances were what other people had, not something that turned your life upside down, destroyed your self-esteem and threatened to ruin everything you had ever held as worthwhile. You couldn’t get upset about circumstances. You could just get on with life and concentrate on more important things. In the circumstances.
They were driving along a ridge now, with a steep drop on one side down rock-strewn slopes to a little river. Gradually the view became more and more obscured by trees. Here and there was a house set back from the road, not all of them working farms.
‘No ill effects though?’ said Hitchens.
Fry couldn’t really blame him for fishing. She had expected it sooner or later. The subject had been raised at her interview, of course, and she had answered all the carefully worded questions with the proper responses, very reasonable and unemotional. But it was bound to be in the minds of those, like DI Hitchens, that she had to rely on for her prospects of advancement. It was just another hurdle she had to get over.
‘None at all,’ she said. ‘It’s all behind me now. I don’t think about it. I just want to get on with the business in hand.’
‘One of the hazards of the job, eh? Goes with the territory?’
‘I suppose you might say that, sir.’
He nodded, satisfied. For a brief moment, Fry wondered how he would react if she did what a tight little angry knot deep inside her really wanted to do – screamed, shouted, lashed out with her fists to wipe the smug smile off his face. She was proud that she no longer did that; she had learned to keep the knot of anger tied up tight and secure.
The houses suddenly grew thicker on either side of the road, though there had been no sign to indicate they were reaching a village. There was a small school off to the right, some farm buildings converted into craft workshops and a tiny village post office and store in an end terrace cottage. The square tower of a church appeared over the rooftops, surrounded by tall, mature chestnut trees and sycamores.
They found a cluster of cars and vans parked in a gravel layby. As soon as Hitchens pulled up, a sweating PC Wragg appeared at the window of the car. He was clutching a polythene bag containing a Reebok trainer.
‘Wragg? Where’s DC Cooper?’
‘The old bloke’s showing him where he found it, sir.’
‘What’s he playing at? He should have waited,’ said Hitchens.
‘The old bloke wouldn’t wait. He said it was dominoes night, and it was now or never.’
‘Dominoes night?’
Wragg looked embarrassed. ‘He really seemed to mean it,’ he said.
The section of footpath looked much the same as any other. It had a dry bed of dusty soil, embedded with twisted tree roots that broke through the surface to form steps in the steeper places. There were oaks and birches clinging to the slopes on either side, with swathes of dense bracken clustering round their trunks. A tumble of huge rocks lay half hidden among the bracken, like the overgrown ruins of a Stone Age temple. Birds skittered away among the undergrowth, chattering their alarm calls, and there was the constant background hiss of a fast-running stream.
‘Aye, about here,’ said Harry.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I reckon.’
Ben Cooper didn’t quite know what to make of Harry Dickinson. Usually he could read some emotion in people he came into contact with in this sort of job. They were often upset, frightened, angry or even completely knocked for six by shock and distress. These were the ones for whom violent crime was something new and horrific that had never touched their lives before. Sometimes there were those who were nervous, or became unreasonably aggressive. Those were interesting reactions, too, often the first signs of guilt. He had learned to pick up those signs in the people he dealt with. He thought of it as a good detective’s instinct.
Harry Dickinson, though, had showed no emotion of any kind, not when he had been in the cottage with his wife and granddaughter, and not now when he stood with Cooper at the spot where he and his dog had found the bloodstained trainer.
During the walk down the path to the foot of Raven’s Side, Harry had marched ahead, silent and stiff, his back pulled straight, his arms swinging in a steady rhythm. He had not spoken a word since they had left the cottage, communicating only with a slight tilt of the head when they reached a turning in the path. It was as if the old man was shut up tight in a body that had turned to wood. Cooper would have liked to have got in front of him, to try to read something in the old man’s eyes.
‘You do realize that Laura Vernon might be lying nearby badly injured, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or even dead?’
Harry met Cooper’s eyes. What was the expression that passed across them so fleetingly? Amusement? No, mockery. An impatience with such a waste of words.
‘I’m not daft. I know what’s what.’
‘It’s vital that we know the exact spot you found the trainer, Mr Dickinson.’
Harry spat into the grass, narrowed his eyes against the low sun, like an Indian picking up a trail. He pointed the peak of his cap to the right.
‘Down there? Near the stream?’
‘Jess runs down there, by the water,’ said Harry.
‘What’s past those rocks?’
‘A wild bit, all overgrown. There’s rabbits and such in there.’
‘Is that where the trainer came from?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Take a look for yourself, lad.’
Cooper walked over to the outcrop of rocks. Only their tops protruded from the grass, and their jagged shapes looked slippery and treacherous. It was not a place he would choose to walk over, given the choice of easier walking that lay in other directions. He could see that sheep must graze here, by the shortness of the coarse grass. Between the rocks, narrow tracks had been worn, and there were ancient black pellets drying on the ground.
Trying to stick to the rocks to avoid confusing any traces of footprints, Cooper clambered over into the thick undergrowth. The stream rushed over the rocks a few feet to his right, running low just here below a stretch of smooth, grassy bank. It looked like an ideal spot for two people to spend an afternoon, secluded and undisturbed.
He looked back over his shoulder. Harry Dickinson had not followed him. He stood on a flat section of rock, poised as if guarding the path, apparently oblivious to what was going on around him. His fist clenched occasionally, as if he felt that he ought to have his dog lead in his hand. He looked completely calm.
Cooper moved further into the undergrowth, his clothes brushing against the bracken and catching on the straggling tendrils of brambles. Two or three wasps, disturbed by his passage, hovered round his head, making irritating darts at his face and evading his futile slaps at the air. The trees began to close over him again, creating a dark cave filled with summer flies.
Ahead and about thirty feet below, just across the stream, he could make out a wide footpath marked with small stones and with wooden ledges built into the ground as steps. It was almost a motorway of a footpath, cleared of vegetation, well-used and worn by many feet. Cooper realized that he had almost reached the Eden Valley Trail, the path that connected to the long-distance Pennine Way a little to the north. It was a favourite with ramblers, who passed this way in their thousands in the summer.
But the spot where he stood was as remote and isolated from life on the path down there as if it had been on top of Mam Tor itself. A passing walker would not have been able to see Cooper up there among the bracken, even if he had bothered to look up.
He turned round, wafting his hand across his face against the flies. He was looking back through the trees and thick brambles as if towards the end of a dark tunnel, where the figure of Harry Dickinson stood framed in a network of grasping branches. Cooper had to squint against the contrast of a patch of dazzling light that soaked the hillside in strong colours. The old man stood in the glare of the low sun, with the hot rocks shimmering around him like a furnace. The haze of heat rising from the ground made his dark outline blur and writhe, as if he were dancing a slow shimmy. His vast shadow, flung across the rocks, seemed to wriggle and jerk as its jagged shape fragmented among the bracken and brambles.
The expression in Harry’s eyes was unreadable, his face lying partly in the shade from the peak of his cap. Cooper couldn’t even tell which way he was looking, whether he had turned away or was staring directly towards him into the trees.
He wanted to grab the old man by the shoulders and shake him. He wanted to tell him that somebody had disturbed the spot, and recently. The evidence was right there for anyone to see and to smell. There had been two people, and at least one of them had been looking for more than just rabbits. The smell that lingered under the trees was of stale blood, overripe meat and urine. And the flies had found something even more attractive than Cooper’s sweat to feed on.
5 (#ulink_4dbd6bc1-9086-593d-aa01-16a8f945ab2e)
‘OK. Secured?’
‘Officers at all points,’ said Hitchens promptly.
‘Scenes?’
‘On their way.’
Diane Fry stood behind DI Hitchens and Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, twenty feet from where the body of the girl lay. The scene had already been well-organized. Hitchens had made a big performance of it, posting officers along the track, calling for information so that he could pass it on to the DCI. But it had seemed to Fry that everything necessary had already been done even before Hitchens had arrived.
‘Scientific support?’
‘Ditto.’
‘Incident room?’
‘DI Baxter is i/c.’
Tailby was head and shoulders taller than the inspector, slim and slightly stooped around the shoulders, as very tall men often were. His hair was greying at the front but still dark at the back, and it was left to grow thicker than the cropped heads favoured by most of his junior colleagues. He was wearing green wellingtons, which were not ideal footwear for stumbling over half a mile of rough ground scattered with rabbit holes and hidden stones. He was lucky to have reached the scene without a broken ankle. Fry congratulated herself on her habit of wearing strong, flat-soled shoes and trousers.
‘Photographer?’ said Tailby.
‘Here, ready.’
‘Let him get on with it.’
Fry waited for the DCI to ask about the doctor, but she looked up and realized that he could already see Dr Inglefield making his way down the path.
‘Finder?’ said Tailby.
‘Back at the cottage, sir. With DC Cooper.’
‘Let’s see what the doc says then.’
The doctor was giving his name to a PC standing halfway up the path. Tailby waited impatiently while they compared watches to agree the time, and the PC wrote it down in his notebook. Most of the other officers who had inevitably begun to gather round the scene had been sent away to continue their search, grumbling all the more at the futility of it.
Blue and white tape hung in strands for several yards around the body, wound round the trunks of trees and a jutting stump of black rock. From where the detectives stood, all that could be seen of Laura Vernon was a lower leg. The black fabric of her jeans contrasted with the glare of a white, naked foot, its toenails painted blood-red. The rest of the body was hidden in a dense clump of bracken, and around it there were numerous signs of trampling. Fry knew that the broken stems and crushed grass raised the odds in favour of the crime scene examiners producing the sort of evidence that would lead to a quick arrest. She longed to get nearer, to get a close look at the body, to see the girl’s face. How had she died? Had she been strangled or battered, or what? Nobody was saying. At this stage, nobody wanted to commit themselves. They simply stood and watched the doctor do his official business as he nodded at the policemen without a word and made his way gingerly along a marked-out strip of ground to the crushed bracken.
They were, of course, assuming the body was that of Laura Vernon. There seemed little doubt, but it was not considered a fact until one of her parents had been dragged through the process of identification.
‘No hope of getting the caravan down here,’ said Tailby.
‘Nowhere near, sir,’ agreed Hitchens.
‘Is there a farm track nearby? What’s over that side of the trees?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
Hitchens and Tailby both turned to look at Fry. Hitchens frowned when he saw who she was, as if he had been expecting someone else.
‘See if you can find out, Fry,’ he said. ‘Closest access we can get for the caravan.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Fry wondered how she was expected to do this, when there was no habitation in sight. The village itself was invisible beyond the huge outcrop of rock. There was a cliff face at her back and dense woodland stretching in front of her down to the road.
She was aware of the tall DCI studying her. He had a thin, bony face and keen grey eyes with a vigilant air. She had not encountered him face to face until now – he had simply been a figure passing in the distance once, pointed out to her and noted as one of the people who mattered. The last thing she wanted to do was to look useless now, on their first meeting. First impressions lasted a long time.
‘Perhaps you could find somebody who has a bit of local knowledge,’ suggested Tailby.
Hitchens said: ‘Maybe we’d better ask –’
Then Diane Fry registered the noise that she had been aware of in the background all the time they had been on the hillside. It was a juddering and clattering noise, stationary now somewhere over the trees to the east. The helicopter was holding position until its crew were given instructions to return to base.
Fry pulled out her radio, and smiled. ‘I think I’ve got a better idea, sir.’
The DCI understood straightaway. ‘Excellent. Get them to let Scenes and Scientific Support have a location as well for their vans.’
Dr Inglefield had taken only a few minutes before he was walking back up the path towards Tailby.
‘Well, dead all right,’ he said. ‘Skull bashed in, I’d say, not to put too fine a point on it. You’ll get the technical details from the PM, of course, but that’s about it. Rigor is almost completely resolved and decomposition has started. Also we have quite a few maggots hatching in the usual places. Eyes, mouth, nostrils. You know … The pathologist should be able to give you a pretty good idea of the time of death. Normally I’d say at least twenty-four hours, but in this weather …’ He shrugged expressively.
‘Sexually assaulted?’ asked Tailby.
‘Mmm. Some disturbance of the clothing, certainly. More than that I couldn’t say.’
‘I’ll take a quick look while we wait for the pathologist,’ said Tailby to Hitchens.
He pulled on plastic gloves and approached to within a few feet of the body. He would not touch it or anything around it, would not risk disturbing any of the possible forensic evidence waiting for the SOCOs. Inglefield looked at Fry curiously as she pocketed her radio. She had been listening keenly to their conversation even while she made the call.
‘New, are you?’ asked Inglefield. ‘Sorry about the maggots.’
‘New to the area,’ said Fry. ‘I’ve seen maggots on a dead body before. People don’t realize how quickly flies will get into the bodily orifices and lay their eggs, do they, Doctor?’
‘In weather like this the little beggars will be there within minutes of death. The eggs can hatch in another eight hours or so. How long has the girl been missing?’
‘Nearly two days,’ said Fry.
‘There you are then. Plenty of time. But don’t take my word …’
‘It’s a question for the pathologist, yes.’
‘Mrs Van Doon will no doubt give your chaps the chapter and verse. A forensic entomologist will be able to tell you what larval stage they’re going through and all that. That can fix the time of death pretty well.’
There was the sound of engines beyond the trees, and the helicopter appeared again, flying low, guiding a small convoy along the forest track that had been found.
‘I’d better go and direct them,’ said Fry.
‘Somebody was luckier than me,’ said the doctor. ‘My car’s back up the hill there somewhere. Ah well, no doubt the exercise will do me good. It’s what I tell my patients, anyway.’
Fry shepherded the Home Office pathologist and the Scenes of Crime team down the hillside. The SOCOs, a man and a woman, were sweating in their white suits and overshoes as they lugged their cases with them to the taped-off area and pulled their hoods over their heads until they looked like aliens. Tailby was backing away, leaving the way clear for the photographer to set up his lights against the lengthening shadows that were now falling across the scene. The exact position of the body had to be recorded with stills camera and video before the pathologist could get close enough to examine her maggots. Fry turned away. She knew that the next stage would involve the pathologist taking the girl’s rectal temperature.
She was in time to catch DI Hitchens taking a call on his cellphone.
‘Hitchens here. Yes?’
He listened for a minute, his face slipping from a frown into anger and frustration.
‘Get everyone on to it that you can. Yes, yes, I know. But this is a priority. We’re going to look complete idiots. Pull people in from wherever you need to.’
Hitchens looked round to see where Tailby was, and saw him walking back up the slope towards them.
‘Bastard!’ said Hitchens as he pushed the phone into his pocket.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Fry.
‘A team went to pick up Lee Sherratt, and he’s done a runner.’
Fry winced. It was bad luck to lose your prime suspect just when you were hoping that everything would click together easily, that the initial witness statements would tie your man into the scene and the results of forensic tests would sew the case up tight. It was bad luck she didn’t want to be drawn into, she thought, as they watched the DCI approach, peeling off his plastic gloves.
‘We need to get that time of death ascertained as close as we can,’ said Tailby. ‘Then we need the enquiry teams allocated to doing the house-to-house again, Paul.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We need to locate a weapon. Organize the search teams to get started as soon as Scenes are happy.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What was the call? Have they picked up the youth yet? Sherratt?’
Hitchens hesitated for the first time.
‘No, sir.’
‘And why not?’
‘They can’t find him. He hasn’t been at home since yesterday afternoon.’
‘I do hope you’re joking.’
Hitchens shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
Tailby scowled, his bushy eyebrows jutting down over cold grey eyes. ‘I don’t believe this. We interview the lad on Sunday when it’s a missing person enquiry, and as soon as a body turns up we’ve lost him.’
‘We had no reason –’
‘Well, we’ve got reason enough now. Reason enough down there, don’t you think?’ said Tailby angrily, gesturing at the spot where Laura Vernon lay.
‘We’ve got patrols trying all possible locations now. But so many men were taken up by the search down here –’
‘They’d damn well better turn the lad up soon. I want to wrap this one up quickly, Paul. Otherwise, people will be connecting it to the Edson case and we’ll have all the hysteria about a serial killer on the loose. We don’t want that – do we, Paul?’
Hitchens turned and looked appealingly at Fry. She kept her face impassive. If people chose to have bad luck, she wasn’t about to offer to share it with them.
‘Right,’ said Tailby. ‘What’s next? Let’s see – what’s his name? The finder?’
‘Dickinson,’ said Hitchens. ‘Harry Dickinson.’
Harry was in the kitchen. He had finally taken off his jacket, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to show white, sinewy arms. At his wrists there was a clear line like a tidemark between the pale skin untouched by sun and his brown, weathered hands, sprinkled with liver spots and something dark and more ingrained. Harry was at the sink using a small blue plastic-handled mop to scrub out the teacups and polish the spoons. His face was as serious as if he were performing brain surgery.
‘He always does the washing-up,’ said Gwen when the detectives came to the door. ‘He says I don’t do it properly.’
‘We’d just like a few words, Mrs Dickinson,’ said Tailby. ‘Further to our enquiries.’
Harry seemed to become aware of them slowly. He put down the mop and dried his hands carefully on a towel, rolled his sleeves down over his arms and reached behind the door to put his jacket back on. Then he walked unhurriedly past them, without a word, into the dim front room of the cottage, where there was a glimpse of the road through a gap in white net curtains.
Hitchens and Tailby followed him and found him sitting upright on a hard-backed chair. He was facing them like a judge examining the suspects entering the dock. The detectives found two more chairs pushed close to a mahogany dining table and set them opposite the old man. Diane Fry slipped quietly into the room and leaned against the wall near the door with her notebook, while Hitchens and Tailby introduced themselves, showing their warrant cards.
‘Harry Dickinson?’ said Hitchens. The old man nodded. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, Harry. I’m Detective Inspector Hitchens. From Edendale.’
‘Where’s the lad?’ asked Harry.
‘Who?’
‘The one who was here before. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’
Tailby looked at Hitchens, raising an eyebrow.
‘Ben Cooper is only a detective constable, Harry. This is a murder enquiry now. You understand that? Detective Chief Inspector Tailby here is the senior investigating officer who will be in charge of the enquiry.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Harry. ‘The man in charge.’
‘You are aware that we have found a body, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby. He spoke loudly and clearly, as if he had decided that they were dealing with an idiot.
Harry’s eyes travelled slowly from Hitchens to Tailby. At first he had looked unimpressed, now he looked stubborn.
‘The Mount girl, is it?’
‘The Vernon family live at the Mount,’ explained Hitchens for Tailby’s sake. ‘That’s the name of the house.’
‘The remains haven’t yet been formally identified, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby. ‘Until they have, we can’t commit ourselves to a positive statement in that regard. However, it is generally known that we have been conducting an extensive search for a fifteen-year-old female by that name for some hours. In the circumstances there would seem to be a strong degree of possibility that the remains discovered in the vicinity may be those of Laura Vernon.’
An old carriage clock in an oak case ticked quietly to itself on the mantelpiece, providing the only sound in the room as it counted off the seconds. Fry thought that time seemed to be passing particularly slowly within the room, as if it was sealed off from the rest of the world in a time zone of its own, where normal rules didn’t apply.
‘You talk like a proper pillock, don’t you?’ said Harry.
Tailby’s jaw muscles tightened, but he restrained himself.
‘We’d like to hear from you how you came to find the trainer, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I’ve told it –’
‘Yes, I know you’ve told it before. Just tell us again, please.’
‘I’ve got other things to do, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Tailby coolly. ‘It’s dominoes night.’
Harry took his pipe from the pocket of his jacket and poked at the contents of the ceramic bowl. His movements were slow and relaxed, and his expression was studiously placid. Hitchens began to stir, but Tailby quelled him with a movement of his hand.
‘You’ll no doubt understand one day,’ said Harry. ‘That at my age you can’t go rushing up and down hill twice in one afternoon and be in any fit state to go out of the house later on, without having a bit of a kip in between. I don’t have the energy for it any more. There’s no fighting it.’ He ran a hand across his neatly groomed hair, smoothing down the grey, Brylcreemed strands. ‘No matter how many dead bodies you’ve found.’
‘The sooner we get it over with, the sooner we’ll be able to leave you in peace.’
‘I can’t do anything more than that, not even for some top-brass copper and all his big words. All this coming and going and folk clattering about the house – it wears me out.’
Tailby sighed. ‘We’d really like to hear your story in your own words, Mr Dickinson. Just tell us the story, will you?’
Harry stared at him defiantly. ‘The story. Aye, well. Do you want it with hand gestures or without, this story?’
To Diane Fry there seemed to be something wrong with the scene, a sort of subtle reversal. It was as though the two detectives were waiting to be interviewed by the old man, not the other way round. Hitchens and Tailby were unsettled, shifting uncomfortably in their hard chairs, not sure what to say to break the moment. Harry, though, was totally at ease, calm and still, his feet planted in front of him on a worn patch of carpet. He had placed himself with his back to the window, so that he was outlined against the view of the street, a faint aura forming around his head and shoulders. Hitchens and Tailby were looking into the light, waiting for the old man to speak again.
‘Without, then, is it?’
‘Without, if you like, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I was out with Jess.’
‘Jess?’
‘My dog.’
‘Of course. You were walking your dog.’
Harry lit a taper, puffed on his pipe. He seemed to be waiting, to see if Tailby were going to take up the story himself.
‘I were walking my dog, like you say. We always go down that way. I told the lad. Sergeant Cooper’s –’
‘Sergeant Cooper’s lad, yes.’
‘Interrupt a lot, don’t you?’ said Harry. ‘Is that a, what you call it, interview technique?’
Fry thought she detected the ghost of a smile on Tailby’s face. Hitchens, though, so genial at the office, did not look like smiling.
‘Do go on, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby.
‘We always go down to the foot of Raven’s Side. Jess likes to run by the stream. After the rabbits. Not that she ever catches any. It’s a game, do you follow?’
Harry puffed smoke into the room. It drifted in a small cloud towards the ceiling, gathering round the glass bowl that hung on tiny chains below a sixty-watt light bulb. A wide patch of ceiling paper in the centre of the room was stained yellow with smoke.
Fry watched the moving cloud, and realized that the old man must sit every day in this same chair, in this room, to smoke his pipe. What was his wife doing meanwhile? Watching Coronation Street or Casualty on the colour television in the next room? And what did Harry do while he was smoking? There were a few books on a shelf set into the alcove formed by the chimney breast. The titles she could make out were The Miners in Crisis and War and Trade Unions in Britain, Choose Freedom and The Ripper and the Royals. There seemed to be only one novel – Robert Harris’s Fatherland. It was lined up with the other books, all regimented into a neat row between two carved oak bookends. Three or four issues of the Guardian were pushed into a magazine rack by the hearth. But there was no television here, no radio, no stereo. Once the newspaper had been read, it would leave nothing for the old man to do. Nothing but to listen to the ticking of the clock, and to think.
Fry became aware of Harry’s eyes on her. She felt suddenly as though he could read her thoughts. But she could not read his in return. His expression was impassive. He had the air of an aristocrat, forced to suffer an indignity but enduring it with composure.
‘A game, Harry …’ prompted Hitchens. He had less patience than the DCI. And every time he called the old man ‘Harry’ it seemed to stiffen his shoulders a little bit more. Tailby was politer, more tolerant. Fry liked to observe these things in her senior officers. If she made enough observations, perhaps she would be able to analyse them, put them through the computer, produce the ideal set of character traits for a budding DCI to aim for.
‘Sometimes she fetches things,’ said Harry. ‘I sit on a rock, smoke my pipe, watch the stream and the birds. Sometimes there’s otters, after the fish. If you sit still, they don’t notice you.’
Tailby was nodding. Maybe he was a keen naturalist. Fry didn’t have much knowledge of wildlife. There hadn’t been a lot of it in Birmingham, apart from the pigeons and the stray dogs.
‘And while I sit, Jess brings me things. Sticks, like. Or a stone, in her mouth. Sometimes she finds something dead.’
Harry paused. It was the first time Fry had seen him hesitate unintentionally. He was thinking back over his last words, as if surprised by what he had said. Then he shrugged.
‘I mean a stoat or a blackbird. A squirrel once. If they’re fresh dead and not been marked too bad, there’s a bloke over at Hathersage will have ‘em for his freezer.’
‘What?’
‘He stuffs ’em,’ said Harry. ‘All legal. He’s got a licence and everything.’
‘A taxidermist,’ said Hitchens.
Fry could see Tailby frown. Harry puffed on his pipe with extra vigour, as if he had just won a minor victory.
‘But today, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby.
‘Ah, today. Today, Jess brought me something else. She went off, rooting about in the bracken and that. I wasn’t paying much attention, just sitting. Then she came up to me, with something in her mouth. I couldn’t make out what it was at first. But it was that shoe.’
‘Did you see where the dog got it from?’
‘No, I told you. She was out of sight. I took the shoe off her. I remembered this lass you lot were looking for, the Mount girl. It looked the sort of object she would wear, that lass. So I brought it back. And my granddaughter phoned.’
‘You knew Laura Vernon?’
‘I reckon I know everybody in the village,’ said Harry. ‘It isn’t exactly Buxton here, you know. I’ve seen her all right.’
‘When did you last see her, Mr Dickinson?’ asked Tailby.
‘Ah. Couldn’t say that.’
‘It might be very important.’
‘Mmm?’
‘If she was in the habit of going on to the Baulk, where you walk your dog regularly, Mr Dickinson, you may have seen her earlier.’
‘You may also have seen her killer,’ said Hitchens.
‘Doubt it,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘Surely –’
‘I don’t see anyone.’
Harry glared at Hitchens, suddenly aggressive. The DI saw it and bridled immediately.
‘This is a murder enquiry, Harry. Don’t forget that. We expect full cooperation.’
The old man pursed his lips. The skin around his mouth puckered and wrinkled, but his eyes remained hard and cool. ‘I reckon I’ve done my bit. I’m getting a bit fed up of you lot now.’
‘Tough. We’re not messing about here, Harry. We’re not playing games, like you throwing sticks for your dog to fetch. This is a serious business, and we need all the answers you can give us.’
‘Have you seen anybody else on the Baulk, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby gently.
‘If I had,’ said Harry, ‘I’d remember, wouldn’t I?’
Hitchens snorted and stirred angrily in his chair. ‘Crap.’
‘Hold on, Paul,’ said Tailby automatically.
‘Right. I’ll not have that in my house,’ said Harry. ‘It’s high time you were off somewhere else, the lot of you, doing some good.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe towards Fry and her notebook. ‘And make sure you take the secretary lass with you. She’s making a mucky mark on my wall.’
‘Detective Constable Fry will have to stay to take your statement.’
‘She’ll have to wake me up first.’
Tailby and Hitchens stood up, straightening their backs from the hard chairs. The DCI looked too tall for the room. The house had been built at a time when very few people stood more than six foot. He must have had to stoop to get through the door, though Fry hadn’t noticed it.
‘We may want to speak to you again, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby.
‘You’d be better off sending that lad next time.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with DI Hitchens and myself. Sorry and all that, but we expect you to cooperate fully with our enquiries, however long they may take. Are you sure there isn’t anything else you’d like to say to me just now, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Harry.
‘What’s that?’
‘Bugger off.’
6 (#ulink_a236ce53-6745-5a9b-b8d8-bf08d9294bd7)
No sooner had the police left than the little cottage was again full of people. Helen watched from the kitchen as her mother and father fussed into the back room, flapping round her grandparents as if they were naughty children who needed scolding and reassuring at the same time.
‘My goodness, you two, what’s been going on? All these police up here? What have you been doing, Harry?’
Andrew Milner was in a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a frivolous blue and green pattern, but he still had on the trousers of the dark-grey suit he wore for the office. He smelled faintly of soap and a suggestion of whisky fumes. Helen didn’t need to be told that her father had showered after arriving home from work and had already drunk his first Glenmorangie of the evening by the time she had phoned. He wore clip-on sun shades over his glasses, which he had to flip up as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the cottage. Now they stood out horizontally from his forehead like extravagant eyebrows.
Harry looked up at Andrew from his chair, no gesture of welcome breaking the rigidity of his expression.
‘I dare say young Helen’s told you what you need to know.’
Margaret Milner was fanning herself with a straw hat. She was a large woman and felt the heat badly. Her floral dress swirled and rustled around her knees and wafted powerful gusts of body spray throughout the room.
‘A dead body. How awful. You poor things.’
‘It was a shoe your dad found,’ said Gwen, who had not yet tired of the excitement. ‘One of those trainer things. They said there was a dead girl with it, but your dad didn’t see her. Did you, Harry?’
‘It was Jess,’ said Harry. ‘Jess that found it.’
‘But there was … Was there blood?’
‘So they reckon.’
‘The young policeman took it away,’ said Gwen. ‘The first one, the young one.’
‘The Cooper lad,’ said Harry.
‘Who?’
‘Sergeant Cooper’s son. The old copper. You remember all the fuss, surely?’
‘Oh, I know.’ Margaret turned to her daughter. ‘Didn’t you used to know him very well at school, Helen? Is that the one? I remember now. You liked him, didn’t you?’
Helen fidgeted, ready to escape back to the kitchen to make more tea. She loved her parents and her grandparents, but she was uncomfortable when they were all together. She could communicate with them one at a time, but when they were gathered in a family group there was a kind of blanket of incomprehension that descended between them.
‘Yes, Mum, Ben Cooper.’
‘You always seemed to get on well. But he never asked you out, did he? I always thought it was a shame.’
‘Mum –’
‘I know, I know – it’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Forget it, Mum. This isn’t the time.’
‘We’ve had a body,’ said Gwen plaintively, appealing to the room, as if someone, somewhere could give her consolation, even tell her it hadn’t happened.
‘And it was the Vernons’ girl?’ said Andrew impatiently. Helen noticed her father’s faint Scottish accent creeping through in the ‘r’s, as it did when he was under stress. ‘Did they say it was definitely Laura Vernon?’
‘She had to be identified, they said.’ Gwen looked challengingly towards Harry, letting it be known that she had been listening at the door when the police had been interviewing him. Harry took no notice. He was feeling at his pocket, as if all he wanted to do was pull out his pipe and retire to the front room, to escape to his sanctuary.
‘They reckon it was her all right,’ said Harry.
‘Poor little thing,’ said Margaret. ‘She was only a kiddie. Who would do a thing like that, Helen?’
‘She was fifteen. Would you like some tea?’
‘Fifteen. Just a child. They gave her everything, her mother and father did. A private school, her own horse. All that money, just think of it. And look what it comes to.’
‘I wonder what Graham Vernon will think,’ said Andrew.
‘What do you mean, Dad?’
‘Well, it’s awkward. You know – just imagine what state he’s in over the girl. And then it has to be my own father-in-law who finds her.’
‘What does that matter to him, for heaven’s sake? Their daughter’s dead – it won’t make any difference to them who found her.’
‘Well, it’s just awkward, that’s all.’
‘Andrew thinks his role is to be Graham Vernon’s loyal lackey,’ said Margaret. ‘Being involved in the murder of his daughter rather ruins the image, doesn’t it?’
‘Involved? Well, hardly,’ protested Andrew.
‘However distantly, of course,’ said Margaret, with a smile of satisfaction. ‘I suppose it’s bound to make you feel tainted by association.’
‘Stop it, Margaret.’
‘Perhaps it would have been better if Dad had just walked on and ignored it, and said nothing. Better for you, anyway. I’m surprised he didn’t think of your reputation at the time. It was very remiss of you, Dad.’
Harry took his empty pipe out and sucked on its stem, looking from one to the other. Helen thought he was the only one of them who was enjoying the conversation.
‘Anyway, they haven’t much of a reputation up there to be worried about, have they?’ said Margaret.
‘That’s not fair. The Vernons are very well-respected.’
Margaret snorted contemptuously. ‘Respected. Not in this house. What do you say, Dad?’
‘Rich buggers. Ignorant rubbish.’
Helen smiled. ‘That needed saying too. They’ve done enough to this family. Why should we let something like this affect us? I’m sorry for their trouble, but it’s their trouble, not ours. It’s nothing to do with Granddad. Blow the Vernons. We have to see that Grandma and Granddad are all right.’
‘Of course we do. Andrew?’
‘Well, all right.’
‘We’re lucky we’re a proper family and can stand together,’ said Margaret. ‘Not like them up there. That’s been their problem, of course. That’s been the cause of all the trouble in the past. They don’t know what a family should be. And that’s the cause of this bit of trouble, too, you’ll see.’
‘We should talk about it,’ said Helen. ‘We should have talked about it before.’
‘He won’t,’ said Gwen. ‘He won’t talk about it to anybody.’
‘There’s no need for it,’ said Harry. ‘Let it rest.’
Helen stood by his chair and put her hand on his arm. ‘Granddad?’
He patted her hand and smiled up at her. ‘Believe me, lass, there’s no need.’
She sighed. ‘No, we’ve never talked about anything important, have we? Not ever, in this family. Except when we were angry or upset. And that’s not the time to talk. It’s not the time to do anything.’
‘Well, I don’t know what you mean by that, I’m sure,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m as capable as anyone of talking things over without getting upset about it.’
Margaret’s voice was becoming high-pitched. She tossed her head and fiddled with an earring, glaring at her husband as if challenging him not to support her. But Andrew turned away with sagging shoulders and found himself staring into the mournful eyes of Jess, who had crept into the corner of the room to listen. The dog’s ears twitched from side to side as she assessed the sound of their voices, trying to judge the mood and looking dejected at what she heard.
‘There was no need for you to come here, you know,’ said Harry. ‘No need at all. We were managing perfectly well, us and Helen.’
‘We could hardly stay away at a time like this,’ said Margaret. ‘We’re your family, after all.’
Harry stood and walked slowly to the stairs. ‘I’ll be going out for a while,’ he said.
And before anybody could ask him where to, he had disappeared. They could hear water running and the sound of a wardrobe door creaking above them through the ancient floorboards.
‘Where is he going?’ asked Andrew.
‘Not to the pub, surely?’ said Margaret. ‘Not at a time like this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Gwen. ‘He’ll be going to meet them.’
Half an hour later, Harry had escaped from the cottage and was settled into an entirely different atmosphere, where he didn’t need to be prompted to tell his story. When he had finished, it required a moment of quiet contemplation, a few swallows of beer, a companionable silence to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.
‘Well, Harry. Police and all.’
‘Oh aye, them, all right, Sam. A bucketload of ’em.’
‘Making a nuisance of themselves, I suppose?’
‘They try, some of them. But they don’t bother me.’
The corner of the Drover between the fire and the window smelled strongly of old men and muddy dogs. The seats of the wooden settles the men sat on were worn smooth to the shape of their buttocks, and their boots seemed to ease themselves into familiar depressions in the dark carpet tiles.
Sam Beeley had rested his stick against the table. Its ivory handle, shaped like the head of an Alsatian dog, stared at the beaten brass surface with contempt. Occasionally, Sam stroked the ivory with a bony hand, fondling the Alsatian’s worn ears in his yellow fingers, or tapping it with a twisted thumbnail on the corner of the brass. His knees cracked when he moved, and he shuffled his toes uncomfortably in soft suede shoes as if he was unable to find a position that did not give him pain. He was the thinnest of the three men, but his thinness was almost masked by the multiple layers of clothes that he wore, despite the warmth of the evening. The emaciation showed most in his hands and in his face, where the flesh had sunk into his cheeks and his eye sockets were dark pools where weak blue eyes flickered.
‘Bloody coppers,’ he said, his voice rough with cigarette smoke. ‘What do you reckon, Wilford?’
‘We can do without ’em, Sam.’
‘True enough.’
‘Oh aye.’
Wilford Cutts had removed his cap to reveal a tangle of white hair around a pale scalp that contrasted sharply with the ruddy colour of his face. He had an untidy white moustache and a suggestion of sideburns that might once have been bushy around his ears. His neck was thick and sinewy and ran into heavy shoulders that could no longer be called well-muscled, but sagged forward into his sweater, soft and fleshy. His palms were stained with grime, and his fingernails were dark against the side of his beer glass. Dark fibres clung to his corduroy trousers, which were worn at the knees and stiff at the calves, where they were tucked into grey woollen socks. He kept his feet pushed out of sight under the bench, in case the landlord should notice the caked soil drying on the soles of his boots.
‘So it’s what they call a murder enquiry then, is it, Harry? They’ve worked out what happened to the lass?’
‘They didn’t say, Wilford.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Bloody coppers.’
Harry was keeping his cap firmly in place. He was the centre of attention, the man of the moment, but it didn’t do to get too excited. He had put on a clean shirt to walk to the pub, and a tie with a discreet paisley pattern fastened neatly round his throat. His feet were thrust out in front of him into the room, where the wall lights were reflected in his polished toecaps.
Now and then one of the pub’s customers would call to him across the room, and he acknowledged their greetings with a brief nod, not uncivil, but deliberately reserved. He stared, tight-lipped, at a group of youths and girls he didn’t recognize, who were laughing noisily at the far end of the bar, trying to talk above each other and now and then breaking into bursts of song.
By unspoken consent, Sam sat closest to the fire, although it was summer and the grate was empty. Wilford sat furthest away, with his back to the door, hidden in the shadow of the alcove. There were two pints of Marston’s Bitter and a half of stout on the table, next to a heap of well-worn dominoes which had been emptied from their box and left untouched. With the round of drinks had come a packet of smoky bacon crisps, which Wilford slid into his pocket.
‘And how are the family bearing up?’ said Sam. ‘Bit of a shock for the womenfolk, no doubt.’
Harry shrugged. ‘That son-in-law of mine is the worst by a long chalk,’ he said. ‘He can’t stand it at all. Worried about his precious job with Vernon.’
‘He’d crack like a nut, that one. Sorry to say it, Harry. But if he had anything to hide, if he ever found himself under suspicion. He’d cough, all right.’
The slang expression brought a small smile to Harry’s face. Like Sam, he had heard it used last night in the latest television police series, set in some drug-ridden area of inner London, where the detectives were more like criminals than the criminals themselves.
‘Has he?’ asked Wilford suddenly.
‘Has who what?’
‘Has Andrew Milner got anything to hide?’
‘You must be joking,’ said Harry. ‘Our Margaret knows every hole in his socks. The poor bugger couldn’t hide a pimple on his arse.’
‘The police are useless, anyway,’ said Sam. ‘They never know who to talk to, what questions to ask. If they solve anything, it’s by luck round here.’
Wilford laughed. ‘Not like on the telly, Sam.’
‘Well, on the telly they always sort it out. That stands to reason. They’re just stories. There wouldn’t be much point putting them on the telly otherwise, would there?’
‘I suppose it’s a sort of warning to people, like,’ said Wilford. ‘It’s telling them not to commit murders and crimes, because they’ll get caught, like they always do on the telly.’
‘But they don’t really get caught,’ said Sam. ‘Not in real life they don’t. Half of ’em never get found out. And those that do get caught are let off by the judges. They get probation or one of them other things.’
‘Community service,’ said Harry. He pronounced the words carefully, as if he had never actually heard them spoken but had only seen them as an unfamiliar combination of syllables printed in the court reports of the Buxton Advertiser.
Sam curled his lip. ‘Aye. Community service. When was that ever a punishment for a crime? Making ’em do a bit of honest work. It’s just like letting them off. It’s true, you can get away with owt these days. Murder, even.’
‘But the people who watch the telly don’t know that,’ said Wilford. ‘Mostly they have no idea. They think it is real life on the box. The kids today. And the women, of course. They don’t know the difference. They think when there’s a crime Inspector Morse comes out and works it all out in the pub with a pencil and a bit of paper and the murderer gets banged up.’
‘Banged up, aye. For life.’
They lapsed into silence again, staring at each other’s drinks, trying to imagine the reality of spending the rest of their lives in prison. A life sentence might mean ten, twenty or thirty years – it was all the same for a man in his late seventies or eighties. He would never be likely to see the outside again.
‘You’d miss the open air something terrible in prison,’ said Sam.
The other two nodded, their heads turning automatically to the window, where, even in the dusk, the outline of the Witches could be made out against the southern sky, jagged and black on the horizon of Win Low. A ripple of unease ran round the table. Sam shivered and clutched at his stick, rubbing the ivory as if seeking comfort from its smooth shape. Wilford ran his hands nervously through his untidy hair and reached for his glass. Even Harry seemed to become more tight-lipped, a shade more cautious.
‘No. You couldn’t be doing with that,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’
The three old men looked sideways at each other, unspoken messages passing between them in the tentative movements of their hands and the tilting of their heads. It was a level of communication they had learned in their working lives, when they had been isolated from the rest of the world in their own enclosed space, where conversation was unnecessary and at times impossible. At such moments, they could still cut themselves off from the world around them, pushing the noise and bustle of the pub into the distance as effectively as if they had been sitting in one of those dark tunnels a mile underground, far from the surface light.
Sam fumbled a packet of ten Embassy and a box of matches from somewhere among his clothing and lit a cigarette, squinting his pale eyes against the cloud of smoke that hung in the still air, obscuring his face. Wilford ran his dirt-stained fingers through his hair, momentarily revealing an unnaturally white patch of naked scalp at the side of his head, where the skin was stretched thin and tight like paper. Harry fiddled with his unlit pipe, poking a few dominoes about the table with the stem, separating the tiles that were face down. He stared at them fixedly, as though hoping to read their numbers through their patterned backs.
‘There are some that would have a troubled conscience, though,’ suggested Wilford. ‘They say that can be as bad as anything anybody else can do to you.’
‘It can drive folks mad,’ agreed Sam.
‘Like being in your own hell, I reckon. That would be punishment, all right.’
‘Worse than community service, any road.’
‘Worse than prison?’ asked Harry.
They looked unsure about that. They were picturing a narrow, confined cell and bars, the knowledge of hundreds of other men crowded together like ants, allowed out into a yard for an hour each day. Shut away from the light and the air for ever.
‘You’d have to have a conscience to start with, of course,’ said Wilford.
‘There aren’t many that have one these days,’ agreed Sam.
They both looked at Harry, waiting for his response. But Harry didn’t seem to want to think about it. He got up stiffly, collected their glasses and walked across the room to the bar. He looked to neither right nor left as he moved through the crowd of youngsters, his back upright, like a man entirely apart from those around him. Drinkers parted automatically to let him through, and the landlord served him without having to be told the order.
Harry’s jacket and tie looked incongruously formal and sober among the T-shirts and shorts of the other customers. He could have been an elderly undertaker who had wandered into a wedding reception. When he turned his head, the peak of his cap swung like a knife across a background of pink limbs and sunburnt faces.
‘So the bloke who killed this lass,’ said Harry when he returned to the corner table. ‘Do you reckon he’ll get away with it?’
‘Depends,’ said Wilford. ‘Depends whether the coppers have a bit of luck. Perhaps somebody saw something and decides to tell them about it. Or some bobby asks the right question by accident. That’s the only way it happens.’
‘They have their suspicions, no doubt.’
‘It doesn’t matter what they suspect. They can’t do anything without evidence,’ said Wilford confidently.
‘Evidence. Aye, that’s what they’ll want.’
‘They’ll be desperate for it. Desperate for a bit of evidence.’
‘They reckon that Sherratt lad has gone missing,’ said Sam.
‘Daft bugger.’
‘It’ll keep the coppers busy, I suppose, looking for him. He’ll be the number one suspect.’
‘Unless they fancy blaming it on one of the family,’ said Wilford. ‘That’s where they always look first.’
‘Aye,’ said Sam, brightening suddenly. ‘Or the boyfriend.’
‘Ah! Which boyfriend?’ asked Harry.
‘That’s the question. With that one, that’s the first question you’d have to ask.’
‘And only fifteen,’ said Sam.
They shook their heads in despair.
‘Well, that’s the best bit, eh, Harry?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Harry. ‘That’s the best bit. When they do all their enquiring, they’ll turn up all sorts. They’re bound to find out about those buggers at the Mount. The Vernons.’
‘Maybe when they do …’
‘… they won’t be so bothered about finding out who put the cat among their pigeons.’
‘Maybe,’ said Harry, ‘they’d even give him a medal.’
The youths at the other end of the pub turned in astonishment to stare at the three old men in the corner. For once, the laughter of the old men was even louder and more unnatural than their own.
Helen stood with her grandmother on the doorstep of the cottage, watching the lights of the Renault disappear past the bend by the church. The night was clear and still quite warm, and the stars glowed in a dark-blue blanket of sky. Only the streetlamps here and there and the security lights outside the Coach House and the Old Vicarage created areas that seemed truly dark.
‘It was nice to see Sergeant Cooper’s son, wasn’t it? He’s made a nice-looking young man.’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
‘Ben, is it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘He’s the one you used to bring round to the house after school sometimes, isn’t he, Helen?’
‘Only once or twice, Grandma. And that was years ago.’
‘I remember, though. I remember how you looked at him. And then you told me one day that you were going to marry him when you grew up. I remember that.’
‘All little girls get crushes like that. I don’t even know him now.’
‘I suppose so. But he has nice eyes. Dark brown.’
They turned back into the house. Helen noticed that Gwen was reluctant even to look into the kitchen, let alone go near the door, although the police had long since taken away the bloodstained trainer and the pages of the Buxton Advertiser with it.
‘They’ll be up at the Mount now,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t envy them the job. They have to tell Mr and Mrs Vernon what they’ve found.’
Her grandmother looked at the clock, fiddled with her cardigan, folded and unfolded a small piece of pink tissue from her sleeve.
‘One of them will have to go and identify the body, you know. I suppose he’ll be the one who does it. But it will hit her hard, Charlotte Vernon. Don’t you think so, Grandma?’
Gwen shook her head, and Helen saw a small tear gather at the corner of one eye, brightening for a moment the dry skin of her cheek.
‘I know I should do,’ said Gwen. ‘I know I should feel sorry for them, but I don’t. I can’t help it, Helen.’
Helen sat on the side of her grandmother’s chair and put her arm around her thin shoulders.
‘It’s all right, Grandma. It’s understandable. There’s no need to upset yourself. What if I make some hot chocolate, then there might be something you can watch on TV until Granddad comes back.’
Gwen nodded and sniffed, and found another piece of tissue that was still intact to wipe her nose. Helen patted her shoulder and began to move towards the kitchen until her grandmother’s voice stopped her. It sounded harsh and full of fear, and trembling on the edge of despair.
‘What’s going to happen to Harry?’ she said. ‘Oh dear God, what will they do to Harry?’
7 (#ulink_57529e24-52c5-5000-b926-15f8466a69c8)
The mortuary assistant drew back the plastic sheet from the face with care. The relatives should never be allowed to see the injuries on the body, unless it was absolutely necessary. In this case, the face was bad enough, although it had been cleaned up as far as possible in the time they had been given. The maggots had been scooped away and bottled, the eyes cleaned and closed, the dried blood scraped off for testing. With the hair pushed back, the injuries to the side of the head were not readily visible.
‘Yes,’ said Graham Vernon, without hesitation.
‘You are identifying the remains as those of your daughter, Laura Vernon, sir?’ asked DCI Tailby.
‘Yes. That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’s a necessary formality which allows the other procedures to get under way.’
The assistant was already drawing the sheet back over Laura’s face, returning her to the anonymity of the recently dead, until the postmortem examination could be completed.
‘Does one of your procedures involve catching my daughter’s murderer, by any chance, Chief Inspector?’ said Vernon, without taking his eyes from the body.
There was no need for Tailby to have been present in person when Graham Vernon identified his daughter’s body, but he saw it as a valuable chance to observe the reactions of relatives. He watched Vernon now as the man stepped away from the sheeted mound that had been his daughter. He saw his eyes linger with that familiar horrid fascination on the loose ridges and hollows of green plastic that concealed the dead girl’s face. Vernon’s hands moved constantly, touching his face and his mouth, smoothing his jacket, rubbing their soft fingers together in a series of involuntary gestures that could mean nervousness or barely concealed distress. His face told its own story.
Many parents and bereaved spouses had told Tailby that at this point their minds still refused to accept the reality of death. They would imagine their loved one sitting up suddenly and laughing at the joke, the sheet falling away from features restored to life and health. Was Graham Vernon thinking this now? Did he still see and hear a living Laura? And, if so, what was she telling him that made him look so afraid?
There was a fine line to tread in these cases. The family of a victim had to be treated with care and consideration. Yet ninety per cent of murders were ‘domestics’, in which a family member or close friend was responsible. Tailby was no longer moved by the various symptoms of distress displayed by relatives. It was a necessary ability in the job he did, this hardening of the emotions. Sometimes, though, he was forced to acknowledge that it had weakened him as a person; it was a long time since he had been able to form a close relationship.
‘You appreciate that we will need to talk to you and your wife again, sir,’ he said, when Vernon finally turned away.
‘There isn’t anything else I can tell you that I haven’t already.’
‘We need to know as much about Laura’s background as we can. We need to interview all her friends and associates again. We need to identify any links that we haven’t yet discovered. We need to trace her movements on the day she was killed. There’s a lot to be done.’
‘Just find Lee Sherratt!’ snapped Vernon. ‘That’s all you need to do, Chief Inspector.’
‘Enquiries are being made in that respect, sir.’
‘And what does that mean, for God’s sake?’
The two men walked out through the double doors into the corridor, attempting to leave behind the stink of antiseptic. Their footsteps echoed on a tiled floor as Tailby lengthened his stride to keep up with Vernon, who seemed to want to get away as quickly as possible.
‘We’ll find the boy, of course, sir. In time. I remain hopeful.’
Vernon stopped suddenly, so that Tailby couldn’t avoid bumping into him. They ended up almost eye to eye, though the detective was several inches taller. Vernon stared upwards with a ferocious scowl, his handsome face swollen into a grimace. His eyes were tired and shot with tiny red veins, and he had shaved unevenly on one side of his face.
‘I seem to remember you saying something like that before, Chief Inspector. Nearly two days ago. But that time you were assuring me that you would find my daughter.’
Tailby waited, not blinking in the face of Graham Vernon’s stare. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘But somebody else found her first. Didn’t they?’
Tailby recalled the painful scene earlier in the evening, when he had visited the Mount to break the news to the Vernons. He remembered the way that neither parent had shown any surprise on seeing him, only despair and resignation.
He also remembered Charlotte Vernon’s slow deterioration into sobbing hysteria, the retreat to a bedroom somewhere, and Graham Vernon’s phone call to their doctor. They had been both shocked and upset, of course. But they had reacted entirely separately – there had not been the smallest gesture of mutual support in the first moments after the bad news had been broken.
The two men were through the outside door and at the top of the mortuary steps when Tailby spoke again. To their right, through a screen of dark conifers, they could see the lighted windows of the medical wards of Edendale General Hospital, a series of modern two-storey brick buildings added to the rambling Victorian original. The lights looked cheerful and bright in contrast with the plain facade of the mortuary and its discreet car park.
‘Apart from the fact that he seems to have temporarily disappeared, there is no firm evidence at this stage to link Lee Sherratt with the death of your daughter,’ said the DCI reasonably.
‘That’s your job, surely, Chief Inspector. It’s up to you to find the evidence. I just hope you’re going to get on with it now.’
His voice had grown louder once they were free of the atmosphere of the mortuary. He had reverted to the brusque and impatient businessman. It had been interesting to observe the change in him in the presence of his daughter’s body. But the change had been short-lived.
‘All we know of Lee Sherratt, sir, is that he was employed by you as a gardener for the last four months. You gave him employment after he answered an advertisement in the window of Moorhay post office. Until then, he seems not to have known your family at all. His skills appear to have been of a labouring nature – digging and weeding, using a lawn mower and pushing a wheelbarrow rather than anything requiring horticultural expertise, since he has absolutely no training and no experience in that field. Am I right?’
‘That’s all we wanted – a labourer. My wife has all the expertise we needed.’
‘Indeed. And though he is twenty years old, this was the first job Sherratt had ever obtained, apart from a short spell as a warehouse assistant at the Tesco supermarket here in Edendale. He likes drinking, he admits he has had several casual girlfriends, and he is known to follow the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday FC. It hardly seems much to reach a conclusion from, sir.’
‘Look, his father’s in prison for receiving stolen goods,’ said Vernon. ‘And the boy himself was involved in stealing a tourist’s car. What do you make of that?’
‘A criminal background, eh? Then why did you employ him, Mr Vernon?’
Vernon turned away, staring at the police car waiting in the car park. ‘I wanted to give him a chance. I don’t believe young men like that should be hanging around idle with nothing to do but get into trouble. Is that so wrong? Also, he looked like a strong youth who could cope with the heavy work. All right, I admit I made a mistake, but how could I have known what he would turn out to be?’
‘His mother says he’s just an ordinary young man who likes girls and beer and football.’
‘Crap!’ said Vernon. ‘Look a bit deeper, Chief Inspector. You’ll find Sherratt is a violent yob who was obsessed with my daughter. I warned him off, I sacked him. And a few days later she’s found attacked and murdered. Who else are you going to suspect?’
Vernon stalked off and got into the car that was waiting to take him home to Moorhay. But Stewart Tailby stood thoughtfully for a moment on the mortuary steps, considering the last question. On reflection, he was glad that Vernon hadn’t waited to be given the answer.
Diane Fry had got a lift back into Edendale with two traffic officers. She had been sent off duty for the night, while DCI Tailby himself had made the journey up to the Mount to ask the Vernons to identify the body.
As she sat behind the traffic men rustling in their yellow fluorescent jackets, she began to feel the familiar sensation of growing despondency as the tension left her and the adrenaline subsided. Very shortly she would have to walk away from the job and face up to the bleak reality of her personal life for another depressing evening.
‘Thanks, fellers!’ she called as the car dropped her in the station yard.
The driver waved a hand nonchalantly in her direction, but his partner turned to look at her as the Rover pulled away. He eyed her curiously and said something to the driver which Fry couldn’t make out. She dismissed it from her mind as not worth bothering about. She had seen female colleagues rushing like lemmings to destroy their own careers in the force because they had let totally petty incidents get out of proportion and fester in their minds.
First she walked up to the CID room. All the lights were on, and one or two of the computer screens were flickering with screen savers that looked like all the stars of the galaxy rushing past the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. But the place was devoid of human life, not even a DC on night duty. Fry sat at her desk and wrote up her notes of the interview with Harry Dickinson. She knew that Tailby would be demanding them first thing, before the morning briefing, and she wanted them to be there for him before he had to ask. It would mean another small credit to her name – and it would also mean she would be available immediately for allocation to an enquiry team.
The report didn’t take her long. She was a competent typist, and her note-taking was accurate and legible. She hesitated for only a moment when she reached the end of the interview, but decided to include the final comment from Harry Dickinson for the sake of completeness. As she wrote that Dickinson had told DCI Tailby to ‘bugger off’, she was surprised to find herself smiling. She quickly changed the expression to a grimace, then a frown, looking round the empty office to be sure that no one was watching her. It wasn’t her style to laugh at senior officers – she had never joined in the irreverent banter and rude jokes of the canteen, either here or at West Midlands. She couldn’t understand what there was about Harry Dickinson’s comment that could have made her smile.
She printed out two copies of her notes and dropped one into the tray on DI Hitchens’s desk. Then she walked up to the incident room, where a DS and a computer operator were huddled together over a telephone and a screen full of data. They both ignored her as she cast around for the action file to insert the second copy of her report. She knew that, in the morning, when the regular day shift came on, the room would be buzzing with activity. From what she had seen of Tailby, she was sure he would be fully up to date and reminded of the details of the day by the time everyone arrived for briefing.
Then, finally, there was nothing left for her to do. She shut the incident room door quietly and walked back down through the almost empty building to the car park.
After she had deactivated the alarm on her black Peugeot, she stood for a moment, looking at the back wall of the police station. There was nothing at all to see, but for a few lighted windows, where shadowy outlines could be made out occasionally as officers went about their business. Probably some of them were resentful about being on duty when they would rather be at home with their families or out at the pub or whatever else police officers did in their free time. Fry guessed that very few of them would resent having to leave the station and go home. She started the Peugeot and drove too quickly out of the yard.
In Edendale, as in any other small town, the evening often meant almost deserted streets for long periods, interrupted by straggling groups of young people heading for the pubs between eight and nine o’clock, and the same groups, stumbling now, returning home at half past eleven or looking for buses and taxis to take them on to night clubs or parties.
Many of the youngsters who littered the streets at night were not only the worse for drink, but were also plainly underage. Diane Fry knew enough to turn a blind eye when she passed them. Every police officer would do so, unless some other offence was being committed – an assault, a breach of the peace, abusive language or indecent exposure. Underage drinking could only be tackled in the pubs themselves, and there were always more urgent things to do, always other priorities.
Today was Monday, and even the young people were thin on the ground as Fry drove down Greaves Road towards the town centre. She circled the roundabout at the end of the pedestrianized shopping area and automatically looked to her right down Clappergate. There were lights on in the windows of Boots the Chemists and McDonald’s, where three youths slouched against the black cast-iron street furniture, eating Chicken McNuggets and large fries prior to adding their cartons to the debris already littering the paving stones.
Most of the shops were shrouded in darkness, abandoning the town to the pubs and restaurants. Fry had not yet got used to the mixture of shops in Edendale. By day, there was a small baker’s shop in Clappergate with wicker baskets and an ancient delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions and a painted milk churn, all standing outside on the pavement. A few doors down was a New Age shop rich with the smell of aromatherapy oils and scented candles and the glint of crystals. In between them lay SpecSavers and the dry cleaners and a branch of the Derbyshire Building Society.
Further along, on Hulley Road, a couple in their thirties stood looking into the darkened window of one of the estate agents near the market square. They were probably weighing up the prices of properties in Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, the more picturesque and desirable parts of old Edendale, where the stonewalled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lobelias and lichen-covered millstones. Diane Fry wondered why the couple had chosen to visit the estate agent’s at night. Where were they going, where had they come from? What intimate plans were they making for themselves, the two of them together?
She had to stop at the lights at the far end of the square. On her right, running down the hill, were steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick i’th Tor. Narrow pubs and tea rooms and craft shops filled the corners of these alleys like latecomers crowding round the edges of the main shopping area. Of course, they really were latecomers – attracted by the twentieth-century influx of tourists rather than by the traditional trade of a market town.
Fry had researched her new area, and knew that a fair share of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale each year, in one form or another. By day, the market square was frequently impassable because of the volume of traffic passing through or seeking parking spaces on the cobbles near the public toilets and the recycling skips.
A huge Somerfield’s lorry rolled slowly across the junction, heading for the back of the supermarket that had recently opened on Fargate, replacing a derelict cotton mill. Beyond the junction, the Castleton Road began to climb past rows of pebble-dashed semis. On either side, close-packed residential areas spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow, winding roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying contours. The roads were made even narrower up there by the cars parked nose to tail at the kerb, except on the worst of the bends. The bigger houses had made room for short drives and garages, but the humbler cottages had not been built for people with cars.
Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same white stone. On the edge of town were small council estates where the streets were called ‘Closes’ and had grass verges. Finally, there was an area where the housing petered out in a scattering of smallholdings and small-scale dairy farms. In some places, it was difficult to see where town became country, with farm buildings converted into homes and mews-style developments, lying shoulder to shoulder with muddy crewyards, fields full of black and white cows and pervasive rural smells.
Eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of the farmland, and the town would continue its spread. But for now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of hills.
Turning from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number twelve. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the tiny bedsitters on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases.
Her own flat, on the first floor, consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle and a tiny kitchen area. The wallpaper was striped in a faded shade of brown, and the pattern on the carpet was a complicated swirl of washed-out blues and pinks and yellows, as if designed to hide any substance spilt on it. Judging by the background smell, there must have been many things spilt in the flat over the years that she would not have liked to name. Most of the other occupants of the house were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.
Fry made herself cheese on toast and a cup of tea and took a Müller low-fat yoghurt from a fridge that smelled suspiciously of rotting fish and onions. No amount of cleaning had removed the smell, but in any case she intended to keep only a minimum amount of food in the fridge, preferring to visit the shops as often as required, glad to take any excuse to be out of the flat. There was an Asian corner shop a quarter of a mile away where the young couple behind the counter had seemed pleasant enough. A friendly greeting over the sliced bread and gold top could be welcome at times.
After her meal, she spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day as she would after a practice session at the dojo, flexing her muscles and stretching her joints and limbs. Then she showered and put on her old black silk kimono with the Chinese dragon on the back and the Yin and Yang symbols on the breast.
Tomorrow, she decided, she would make a point of getting hold of the Yellow Pages and looking up names and addresses of local martial arts centres. She would not find an instructor quite like her old shotokan master in Warley, and she would have to adapt to new techniques. But she could not let her skills go rusty. The ability to defend herself had become too important to her now. Besides, she relished the renewed feeling of confidence and power that karate had brought her. And it required total concentration. With shotokan and her job, she might never have to think about anything else.
Fry didn’t spend too much time considering the Laura Vernon killing. At present, her mind was a blank, awaiting data on which to base deductions, to make connections. She was looking forward to the morning, when she expected to be able to take in a barrage of facts that would be presented at the briefing, to see lines of enquiry open up like so many doors of opportunity.
For one brief moment, a small niggle entered her mind, a passing irritation that might have to be dealt with at some stage. It concerned DC Ben Cooper. The detective everyone loved; the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently. She considered him fleetingly, then pushed him off the stage with an imaginary hand in the face. There were no obstacles that couldn’t be overcome. There were no problems, only challenges.
Finally, she switched on the television in the corner to watch a late-night film before bedtime. It was some sort of old horror film, in black and white. From her place in the old armchair, she was able to feel under the bed with one hand, her eyes on the TV. She pulled out a two-pound box of Thornton’s Continental and fed a Viennese truffle into her mouth. On the screen, a woman walking alone at night turned at the sound of following footsteps. As a dark shadow fell across her face, she began to scream and scream.
Five miles away from Grosvenor Avenue, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. In places, the track had been repaired with compacted earth and the odd half-brick. The first heavy rain of the winter would wash it all away again when the water came rushing down from the hillside and turned the narrow track into a river.
In passing, he noticed a stretch of wall where the topping stones had fallen away and the wall was beginning to bulge outwards towards the field. He made a mental note to mention it as a job he could do for Matt on his next day off.
Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.
Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local small-time villain. He was currently serving two years in Derby for receiving, but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.
Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eye socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.
It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go away at all.
Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.
The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.
When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded on the wall, and an ice cream had melted into a raspberry-coloured puddle on the ground.
‘Hello, girls,’ he said.
‘Hi, Uncle Ben.’
Amy looked at him sadly, with big eyes that showed hurt but no real comprehension of what was hurting. She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the farmhouse. The front door stood open, but there was silence from within. A black and white cat emerged from the garden, walked to the doorstep and paused, sniffing the air of the hallway. Then it seemed to change its mind and trotted quickly away towards the Dutch barn.
‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ said Amy, anticipating the question.
‘And where’s your dad?’
‘He had to go up to Burnt Wood straight after milking. To mend some gates.’
‘I see.’
Cooper smiled at the girls, but got no response. They were totally unlike the two children who would normally have come running to greet him. But he didn’t have to ask them any more questions to guess why they were so subdued.
In the big kitchen he found his sister-in-law, Kate. She was moving about from table to stove stiffly, like a woman with arthritis, or one whose limbs were badly bruised. Her short fair hair was dishevelled and the sheen of sweat on her forehead looked as though it was caused by something more than the heat of the day or the steam from a pan which was simmering on the hotplate with nothing in it. She, too, had been crying.
When she saw him, she let go of the carving knife she was carrying as if it was a relief to part with it. The kitchen normally smelled of herbs and freshly baked bread, and sometimes of garlic and olive oil. Tonight, though, it smelled of none of those. The smell was of disinfectant and several less pleasant odours that made Cooper’s stomach muscles tighten with apprehension.
‘What’s wrong, Kate?’
His sister-in-law shook her head, sagging against the pine table, weary with the effort of trying to keep up an appearance of normality for the girls. Cooper could have told her, even from his brief glimpse of them outside, that it had not worked.
‘See for yourself,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it any more, Ben.’
He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘You look after the girls.’
He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.
Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.
The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.
Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.
Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.
8 (#ulink_01a58ee6-431d-5d87-b087-b1022a4072c0)
‘Found by a man walking a dog.’
There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.
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Stephen Booth
Dark, intense and utterly compelling, ‘Black Dog’ was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years.‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated … but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl's killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect.But Cooper's local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…
BLACK DOG
STEPHEN BOOTH
DEDICATION (#ulink_2da23bd1-d39f-5390-b1df-8fb52a476912)
For Lesley
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_f5afe9f7-54dc-5c82-a058-6a83bfc88f48)
black dog: 1. melancholy, depression of spirits; ill humour. In some country places, when a child is sulking, it is said ‘the black dog is on his back’.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
CONTENTS
Cover (#u519def27-6fbd-5231-928a-4c55c1a342bb)
Title Page (#u365098c9-d6ea-5a44-acac-de8125357c45)
Dedication (#uc834b32e-5593-5638-9398-b62197a22078)
Epigraph (#u8e99149a-536a-568e-8db8-bde18f0160cd)
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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
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About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_e1320774-fbf1-5905-8738-d7c84630ccaa)
The sudden glare of colours beat painfully on the young woman’s eyes as she burst from the back door of the cottage and hurled herself into the brightness. She ran with her bare feet slapping on the stone flags and her hair streaming in red knots from her naked shoulders.
A harsh voice was cut off suddenly when the door slammed behind her, isolating her from the house. As she sprinted the length of the garden, she stirred the dust from a flagged path whose moisture had been sucked out and swallowed by the sun. A scarlet shrub rose trailed halfway across the path and a thorn slit the flesh of her arm as she brushed against it, but she hardly felt the pain.
‘Wait!’ she called.
But the old wooden garden gate had banged shut on its spring before she could reach it. She threw herself on to the top of the dry-stone wall, flinging out an arm to clutch at the sleeve of the old man on the other side. He was wearing a woollen jacket, despite the heat, and his arm felt stiff and sinewy under the cloth. The young woman scrabbled for a firmer grip, feeling his muscles slide against the bones under her fingers as if she had plunged her hand deep into his body.
Harry Dickinson paused, held back only by the hand that touched his arm, turning his face away from the appeal in his granddaughter’s eyes. The only change in his expression was a slight tightening in the creases at the sides of his mouth as his gaze slipped past Helen to the row of stone cottages. The stone walls and the white-mullioned back windows were at last starting to cool in the early-evening shade, but the sun still glared low over the slate roofs, bad-tempered and unrelenting. The pupils of Harry’s eyes narrowed to expressionless black points until he tilted his head sideways to turn the peak of his cap into the sun.
Helen could smell the impregnated odours of earth and sweat and animals in the wool, overlaid by the familiar scent of old tobacco smoke. ‘It’s no good walking away, you know. You’ll have to face it in the end. You can’t run away from things for ever.’
A loud juddering sound made Harry flinch as it passed across the valley behind him. For an hour now the noise had been moving backwards and forwards over the dense woodland that covered the slope all the way down to the valley bottom. The sound echoed against the opposite hillside like the beating wings of an angry bird, battering the gorse and heather and alarming the sheep scattered on the upper slopes.
‘We’ll understand,’ said Helen. ‘We’re your family. If only you’d tell us …’
The old man’s right arm was held out at an unnatural angle, creasing the sleeve of his jacket into an ugly concertina of fabric. She knew that Harry felt himself being physically tugged towards the woods along the valley side; his body was tense with the effort of resisting the pull. But emotionally he was being drawn in two directions. The conflicting pressures only seemed to strengthen and toughen him, setting his shoulders rigid and hardening the line of his jaw. His face held no possibility of turning away from whatever he had decided to do.
‘Granddad? Please.’
The sharp edges of the stone wall were digging into her thighs through her shorts, and the skin of the palm on her left hand stung where she had scraped it on the jagged topping stones. There had been a sudden, desperate rush, a moment of overwhelming emotion, and now she didn’t know what to say. She felt the impotence of the conventions that surrounded the communication between one adult and another, even when they were members of the same family. She shared with her grandfather an inborn shortage of the words she needed to be able to express her feelings to those closest to her.
‘Grandma is very upset,’ said Helen. ‘But she’ll calm down in a minute. She’s worried about you.’
Helen had never needed many words before, not with Harry. He had always known exactly what she wanted, had always responded to the message in her eyes, to the shy, adoring smile, to the gleam of sun on a wave of flame-coloured hair, and to a small, trusting hand slipped into his own. She was no longer that child, and hadn’t been for years. A teacher learned a different way of communicating, a calculated performance that was all surface gloss and scored no marks for feeling. Harry still understood, though. He knew what she wanted him to do now. But it was too hard for him, a thing completely against a lifetime’s habit.
Gradually the juddering noise was fading to the edge of audibility, muffled to a dull rattle by the trees and the folds of the land. Its temporary absence released the subtler sounds of the evening – a current of air stirring the beech trees, a cow moaning for the bull across the valley, a skylark spilling its song over the purple heather. Harry cocked an ear, as if listening for a voice that no one else could hear. It was a voice that deepened the sadness in his eyes but stiffened his back and tautened the clench of his fists and his grip on the loop of worn black leather held in one hand.
‘Come back and talk to us. Please?’ she said.
Helen had never heard that voice. She had often tried, staring intently up at her grandfather’s face, watching his expression change, not daring to ask what it was he heard, but straining her own ears, desperate to catch an elusive echo. Like most men who had worked underground, Harry spent as much of his time as he could outside in the open air. As she stood at his side, Helen had learned to hear the sounds of the woods and the sky, the tiny movements in the grass, the shifting of the direction of the wind, the splash of a fish in a stream. But she had never heard what her grandfather heard. She had grown up to believe it was something uniquely to do with being a man.
‘If you don’t want to talk to Grandma, won’t you tell me about it, Granddad?’
And then the noise began to grow steadily louder again, clattering towards them as it followed the invisible line of the road that meandered along the valley bottom. It drew nearer and nearer across the rocky slopes of Raven’s Side, skirting a sudden eruption of black basalt cliff and veering north once more towards the village until it was almost overhead. The din was enough to drown out normal speech. But it was then that Harry chose to speak, raising his voice defiantly against the clattering and roaring that beat down on him from the sky.
‘Noisy bastards,’ he said.
The helicopter banked, its blue sides flickering in the fragmented shadows of its blades. A figure could be seen, leaning forward in the cabin to stare at the ground. The lettering on his door read ‘POLICE’.
‘They’re looking for that girl that’s gone missing,’ said Helen, her voice scattered and blown away by the roar. ‘The Mount girl.’
‘Aye, well. Do they have to make so much row about it?’
Harry cleared his throat noisily, sucking the phlegm on to the top of his tongue. Then he pursed his thin lips and spat into a clump of yellow ragwort growing by the gate.
As if taking offence, the helicopter moved suddenly away from the edge of the village, sliding towards a row of tall conifers that grew in the grounds of a large white house. The pitch of the noise changed and altered shape as it passed the house, tracing the outline of the roofs and chimneys like an echo locator sounding the depths of an ocean trench.
‘At least it’ll wake that lot up as well.’
‘Granddad –’
‘There’s nowt more to be said. Not just now.’
Helen sighed, her brain crowding with thoughts she couldn’t express and feelings she couldn’t communicate. The old man only grimaced as his arm was stretched at an even sharper angle.
‘Have to go, love,’ he said. ‘Jess’ll pull me arm off, else.’
Helen shook her head, but dropped her hand and let him go. A thin trickle of blood ran down her arm from the scratch made by the thorn. It glittered thickly on her pink skin, clotting and drying fast in the warm sun. She watched as her grandfather set off down the hillside towards the woods at the foot of the cliffs. Jess, his black Labrador, led the way along the familiar path, tugging eagerly at the end of her lead, impatient to be allowed to run free when they reached the stream.
No, you couldn’t run away from things for ever, thought Helen. But you could always bugger off and walk the dog for a bit.
Down on the lower slopes of the hill, Ben Cooper was sweating. The perspiration ran in streams through the fine hairs on his chest and formed a sticky sheen on the muscles of his stomach. The sides and back of his T-shirt were already soaked, and his scalp prickled uncomfortably.
No breeze had yet found its way through the trees to cool the lingering heat of the afternoon sun. Each clearing was a little sun trap, funnelling the heat and raising the temperature on the ground into the eighties. Even a few feet into the woods the humidity was enough to make his whole body itch, and tiny black flies swarmed from under the trees in irritating clouds, attracted by the smell of his sweat.
Every man in the line was equipped with a wooden pole to sift through the long grass and push aside the dense swathes of bracken and brambles. The bruised foliage released a damp, green smell and Cooper’s brown fell boots were stained dark to an inch above the soles. His pole came out of the undergrowth thick with burrs, and with small caterpillars and insects clinging to its length. Every few minutes he had to stop to knock them off against the ground or on the bole of a tree. All along the line were the sounds of men doing the same, the thumps and taps punctuating their muttered complaints and sporadic bursts of conversation.
Cooper found that walking with his head down made his neck ache after a while. So when the line stopped for a minute to allow someone in the centre the time to search a patch of dense bramble, he took the chance to raise his head and look up, above the line of the trees. He found himself gazing at the side of Win Low across the valley. Up there, on the bare, rocky outcrops they called the Witches, it would be so much cooler. There would be a fresh wind easing its way from the west, a wind that always seemed to come all the way from the Welsh mountains and across the Cheshire plain.
For the last two hours he had been wishing that he had used his common sense and brought a hat to keep the sun off his head. For once, he was jealous of his uniformed colleagues down the line, with their dark peaked caps pulled over their eyes and their starburst badges glittering in the sunlight. Being in CID had its disadvantages sometimes.
‘Bloody hell, what a waste of effort.’
The PC next to Ben Cooper was from Matlock section, a middle-aged rural beat manager who had once had aspirations to join the Operational Support Task Force in Chesterfield. But the Task Force were deployed further along the hillside, below the Mount itself, while PC Garnett found himself alongside an Edendale detective in a makeshift search group which included a couple of National Park Rangers. Garnett wore his blue overalls with more comfort than style, and he had been swinging his pole with such ferocity as he walked that his colleagues had gradually moved further away to protect their shins.
‘You reckon so?’
‘Aye, certain,’ said Garnett. ‘They say the lass has run off with some boyfriend.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ve not heard that. It wasn’t in the briefing. Just that she was missing.’
‘Huh. Missing my arse. Mark my words, she’ll be off shagging some spotty youth somewhere. Fifteen years old, what do you expect these days?’
‘Maybe you’re right. We have to go through the motions all the same.’
‘Mind you, if one of my two did it, I’d murder ’em all right.’
Garnett thrashed at a small elder sapling so hard that the stem snapped in two, the tender young branches collapsing to the ground and leaking a tiny trickle of sticky sap. Then he trod on the broken stem and crushed it into the grass with his police-issue boot. Cooper hoped that, if there were any fragile evidence to be found in the woods, he would see it before Garnett reached it.
Then he looked at the PC and smiled suddenly, recognizing that the man had no harm in him. He might be a middle-aged dad whose ambitions were withering as his waistline expanded, but he had no harm in him at all. Cooper could almost sense the ordinary little niggles that teemed in Garnett’s mind, from his disappearing hairline to the recurring ache at the base of his spine and the size of his telephone bill.
‘Just be thankful for the overtime,’ he said. ‘We could all do with a bit of that.’
‘Ah yes, you’re right there, lad. Too right. It takes something like this to get the fingers of those tight-fisted bastards off the purse strings these days, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s the budget cuts.’
‘Budgets!’ Garnett said the word like a curse, and they both paused for a moment to listen to its sound, shaking their heads as if it symbolized the end of everything they had known.
‘Accountants, you can keep ’em,’ said Garnett. ‘We’re not coppers to them any more, just a load of figures on a sheet of paper. It’s all flashy operations and clear-up rates. There’s no room for old-style coppers these days.’
He threw a bitter glance along the hillside towards where the Task Force squad was beating its way through the scrubland beyond a row of Lombardy poplars like a set of dark spikes dropped into the landscape.
‘Of course, you’ll know all about that, lad. You’re different. A chip off the old block, they reckon. Good for you. Wish you luck, though.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
Cooper had only just returned from a fortnight’s summer leave. On his first day back on duty he had been thrown straight into the search for Laura Vernon, fifteen years old and missing from home since Saturday night. They were looking for a girl with short dark hair dyed red, wearing a silver nose stud, five foot six inches tall, mature for her age. Failing that, they were looking for her clothes – black denims, a red short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, a white sports bra, blue bikini pants, blue ankle socks, a pair of Reeboks, size-five, slim-fit. Nobody thought it necessary to point out that if they found her clothes, they were also looking for a body.
‘This lass, though. She’s miles away, if you ask me,’ said Garnett. ‘Run off with the boyfriend. Some yob on a motorbike from Manchester, maybe. That’s what teenage girls get up to these days. The schools teach them about contraceptives before they’re twelve, so what can you expect? ’Course, the parents never have a clue. Not parents like this lot, anyway. They don’t know the kids exist half the time.’
Cooper’s legs were still aching from the rock climbing he had done on the sheer, terrifying faces of the Cuillin Hills of Skye. His friends Oscar and Rakesh were members of the Edendale Mountain Rescue Team and could never get enough of the mountains. Just now, though, he could really have done with a quiet day behind his desk at Division, making a few phone calls maybe, catching up on what had been happening during the last fortnight, getting up to date with the gossip. Anything but clambering up and down another hillside.
But he knew this area well – he was himself from a village a few miles down the valley. Most of the men recruited for the search parties were from the section stations, or even from out of the division. A few of them were city boys. On the hills around here they would be falling down old mine shafts in their dozens without someone to tell them which way was up and which was down.
And, of course, PC Garnett could well be right. It had happened so often – youngsters bored with life in the villages of the Peak District, attracted by the glamour and excitement of the big cities. And very likely there was a boyfriend, too – no doubt someone the parents found unsuitable. According to the initial reports, the Vernons claimed there had been no trouble at home, no family rows, no reason at all for Laura to walk out. But didn’t parents always say that? So much could remain misunderstood among families, or never even suspected. Especially if they were a family who didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to each other much.
But there were other factors in this case. Laura had taken no clothes with her, very little money, no possessions of any kind. And initial enquiries had brought a sighting of her talking to a young man on Saturday night, at the edge of the expanse of hillside scrub and woodland known as the Baulk.
Once he got out on the hill below the village of Moorhay, Cooper had remembered that he had even been to Laura Vernon’s home once. It was the big white house they called the Mount, which stood somewhere above the search party, hidden behind the trees on its own spur of land. It was a former mine owner’s house, big and pretentious, with formally laid out grounds full of rhododendrons and azaleas, and with a stunning view over the valley from the terrace. Cooper had been invited to the Mount for the eighteenth birthday party of a classmate, a lad everyone at the old Edendale High School knew had well-off parents even before they were given the tour of the big house. That hadn’t been the Vernons, but the people before them – they had been local people, the family of a man who had inherited a string of small petrol stations scattered throughout the Peak. The business had expanded from Edendale and its surrounding villages, beyond the borders of Derbyshire, in fact, into South Yorkshire and the fringes of the cities.
Eventually, of course, he had sold out to one of the larger companies, cashed in and moved away to somewhere better. Abroad, they said. The South of France and Italy were popular guesses.
The Mount had stood empty then for some time, waiting out the recession. Photographs of its elegant facade featured regularly in the adverts of upmarket estate agents in glossy county magazines. The village people would sit in the doctor’s waiting room, pointing out to each other the multiplicity of bathrooms, wondering what a utility was and shaking their heads in astonishment at the number of noughts in the asking price. Then the Vernons had moved into the Mount. No one knew where they had come from, or what Mr Vernon did, except that he was ‘in business’. He drove off every day in his Jaguar XJS in the direction of Sheffield, sometimes staying away from home for days on end. Was he another one just pausing for a while in the Peak while he booked his ticket to Tuscany?
‘You’ll be glad of the extra cash too, though, won’t you? Just been on holiday?’ said Garnett.
‘Scotland,’ said Cooper.
‘Bloody hell. Scotland? It’s just the Peak District, but with a bit more water, isn’t it? Can’t see the point of that, myself. Me, I want a bit of sun and sand when I go on leave. Not to mention the cheap booze, eh? I like Ibiza. There’s loads of English pubs and casinos and stuff. A few bottles of sangria, a paella, and a go on the fruit machines. You can’t beat it, that’s what I say. Besides, the wife’d divorce me if I suggested anything else. She’s on about the Maldives next year. I don’t even know where it is.’
‘Somewhere east of Ibiza, I think,’ said Cooper. ‘But you’d like it.’
The line was moving forward again, and Cooper waved away a cloud of flies from his face. Sun and sand and cheap booze were far from his mind. Even during his fortnight on Skye, his thoughts had kept slipping away from the rock face, back to the promotion interviews that were coming up, now just a few days away. There would soon be a detective sergeant’s job available at E Division. DS Osborne had been on sick leave for weeks now, and it was said that he would go the usual way – early retirement on health grounds, another pension to be paid for from the creaking police authority budget. Ben Cooper thought he was the natural successor to Osborne. Ten years in the force, and five in CID, and he had more local knowledge than most of the rest of his shift put together. The sergeant’s job was what he wanted and needed. More – it was what his family wanted. Cooper thought of his mother, and the desperately hopeful look in her eye when he came home from work, the question as often unspoken as asked out loud. He thought about her many times a day, every time he saw someone ill or old. He thought of her seemingly endless pain and grief, and the one thing she thought might ease it. He ached to give her what she longed for, just this once.
The line of men were deep into the trees again now, the canopy over them muffling the noise of the police helicopter that was still moving along the valley, sweeping the woods with its thermal imaging camera. The sudden transition from glaring sun to deep shade made it difficult to make out the details of the undergrowth below the trees. In places there could have been an entire SAS platoon lying concealed in the chest-high bracken and willowherb, waiting for some bobby in blue overalls to stumble into them armed with nothing but a slug-encrusted pole.
A pheasant clattered in alarm and took off somewhere nearby. From further away, there was another sound. The trees were too thick to tell which direction it came from, or exactly how far away it was. But it was the sound of a dog, and it barked just once.
2 (#ulink_8158a397-6f7f-532f-8d74-fb452674e6a0)
Charlotte Vernon had been in the same position for a quarter of an hour. Whether it was the effects of the tablets or the alcohol, or simply the frantic activity of her imagination, throughout the day she had been alternating between phases of restlessness and immobility. It was as though she managed to blank out her thoughts entirely for short periods before being overwhelmed afresh by surges of terror. The waiting had become an end in itself.
Now Charlotte stood on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, watching the helicopter passing overhead. She followed the movement of the rotor blades as if she hoped to read a message in their flickering blur. On a table near her hand stood a half-drunk glass of Bacardi and an ashtray filled with damp and crushed butts, their filters stained with smears of vermilion.
She had been on the terrace all afternoon, hardly seeming to notice as the heat of the sun gradually moved away from her shoulders and dipped behind the house until she stood in shade and the stone flags around her began to whisper and contract. She had stirred only when the phone rang behind her in the house, her muscles tensing, her fingers gripping tighter on the balustrade for a few seconds each time, as Graham answered it. She would strain to catch his muttered words, then cover her ears as if she didn’t want to hear them at all.
But all the calls were enquiries from friends. Some were even business calls, which Graham dealt with in a lowered voice, glancing towards his wife’s back as he turned guiltily away. He seemed relieved to have an excuse not to look at her as she posed against the view of the Witches, her head raised to the sky like a heroine in an Arthurian romance, waiting for news of a distant battle.
After the latest call, Graham replaced the phone and turned back towards the windows.
‘That was Edward Randle from AET,’ he said. ‘He sends his thoughts. And he wanted to know whether he and Martina should still come tomorrow night.’
Graham waited for Charlotte to speak. But he could only hear the faint buzzing of the fans and the distant bark of a dog somewhere down in the village.
‘I told him of course they should come. We can’t put people off, can we? Life goes on.’
Graham wondered whether she had heard what he said. She was in some world of her own where Allied Electronics and other such trivialities didn’t exist. Graham moved closer to her, wondering whether he should offer to touch her, whether it would be what she wanted just now, or whether it would only make things worse. He couldn’t tell.
When he stepped on to the terrace, he could smell the sun oil on her body. Her bleached hair hung straight on her neck, falling slightly on to the collar of her wrap. The backs of her slim, well-tanned legs were visible to the edge of her bikini, her muscles tense and stretched. Graham felt a surge of physical desire, but tried to suppress it. Maybe tonight his wife would be restored to her usual receptive mood. Maybe tomorrow.
‘Did you hear me, Charlie?’
‘I wish we could take the phone off the hook.’
‘But then we wouldn’t hear … if there was news.’
‘When they find her, you mean.’
Charlotte’s voice was tired now, the strain of the past forty-eight hours taking its toll, though she would be reluctant to admit it.
‘They will find her, won’t they, Graham?’
‘Of course they will.’
Graham repeated the same reassurance he had been giving for two days. He put as much sincerity as he could into his voice, though he doubted his wife really believed him. He certainly didn’t believe it himself.
The helicopter started to turn, its rotors dipping and fading from sight against the hillside behind it. Charlotte looked dejected at its disappearance, as if she had failed to decipher the message because she had not tried hard enough. From the terrace, none of the houses in the village were visible. The only human habitation in view consisted of a couple of farms high on the opposite slope, their weathered stone walls blending into the hillside as if they had grown there. No wonder Charlotte hadn’t wanted the helicopter to go away. It was the only sign of life she could see from the Mount.
‘You hear of girls running off and disappearing for ever,’ she said. ‘To London. Would she go to London, Graham? How would she get there?’
‘She’s only fifteen,’ he said. ‘They would bring her back.’
‘How would she get there?’ she repeated. ‘Where would she get the money? She could have hitched, I suppose. Would she know how to do that? Why didn’t she take any clothes?’
For two days she had asked too many questions that Graham couldn’t answer. He would have liked to tell her that he was sure Laura could have got no further than Bakewell, and that the police would pick her up before the night was over. He had tried to tell her, but the words dried up in his throat.
‘Don’t you want to come in now? It’s time to eat.’
‘Not just yet,’ she said.
‘It’s starting to go dark. You’ll want to change at least.’
‘I want to be out here,’ she said.
‘Charlie –’
‘As long as they’re still looking,’ she said. ‘I want to be out here.’
A book had been turned face down on to the table. Very little of it had been read, but it didn’t need to be. Graham could see from the cover that it was the latest in a best-selling series about an American pathologist who was for ever dissecting dead bodies and catching serial killers. The illustration showed a barely identifiable part of a naked body, set against a dark background.
‘I can’t think of anywhere else that she might have gone,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ve been trying and trying, racking my brains. But we’ve tried everywhere, haven’t we, Graham? Can you think of anywhere else?’
‘We’ve tried them all,’ said Graham.
‘There’s that girl in Marple.’
‘We’ve tried there,’ said Graham. ‘Her parents said she was in France for the summer.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
‘If she’s met up with the wrong sort of people …’
‘How could she?’ said Charlotte quickly. ‘We’ve been so careful. How could she meet the wrong people?’
‘We have to face it, it does happen. Some of her friends … Even if they’re from the best families, they can go astray.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ve heard there are these rave things. Some of them go on all weekend, they say.’
Charlotte shuddered. ‘That means drugs, doesn’t it?’
‘We’ll have to talk to her about it seriously, when she’s back.’
After the helicopter had moved away to hover somewhere along the valley, the faint sound of voices could be heard, carried towards the house on the evening breeze. Graham and Charlotte could see no one because of the heavy tree cover, but both of them knew, without discussing it, that there were many men out there on the hillside, calling to each other, searching for their daughter.
‘Of course, there were probably friends she didn’t tell us about,’ said Graham. ‘We have to face up to that. Places she went that she didn’t want us to know about.’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘Laura didn’t keep secrets from me,’ she said. ‘From you, of course. But not from me.’
‘If you say so, Charlie.’
A small frown flickered across Charlotte’s face at his calm acceptance. ‘Is there something you know, Graham? Something that you’re not telling me?’
‘Of course not.’
He was thinking of his last conversation with Laura. It had been late on Thursday night, when she had slipped into his study and persuaded him to let her have a glass of his whisky. Her face had been flushed with some other excitement, even before the whisky had begun to take effect. She had perched on the edge of his desk and stroked his arm, smiling at him with that mature, seductive smile she had learned had such an effect on their male visitors. She had dyed her hair again, a deeper red than ever, almost violet, and her fingernails were painted a colour so dark it was practically black. Then she had talked to him, with that knowing look in her eyes and that sly wink, and told him what she wanted. The following morning, he had sacked Lee Sherratt. The second gardener they had lost that year.
‘No, of course not, Charlie.’
She accepted his word. ‘And the boy, Lee?’
Graham said nothing. He closed the abandoned novel, slipping a soft leather bookmark between the pages. He collected the book and the half-full glass of Bacardi from the table. The sun had almost gone from their part of the valley now. But the jagged shapes of the Witches were bathed in a dull red light that was streaked with black runnels where the rocky gulleys were in shadow.
‘What about him, Graham? What about the boy?’
He knew Charlotte still thought of Laura as pure and innocent. It was the way she would think of her daughter for ever. But Graham had begun to see her with different eyes. And the boy? The boy had already been punished. Punished for not dancing to the tune that Laura had played. Lee Sherratt had been too stubborn to play the game – but of course, he had been busy playing other games by then. And so Graham had sacked him. It was what Laura had wanted.
‘The police have spoken to him. He told them he hasn’t seen Laura for days.’
‘Do you believe that?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows what to believe just now?’
‘I want to speak to him. I want to ask him myself. Make him tell the truth.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Charlie. Leave it to the police.’
‘They know about him, don’t they?’
‘Of course. They’ve got him on their records anyway. Over that stolen car.’
‘What?’
‘You remember. The car that was taken from the car park at the top of the cliff. It belonged to some German people. Laura told us about it.’
‘Did she?’ said Charlotte vaguely.
At last she allowed him to lead her back into the room, where she began to touch familiar objects – a cushion, the back of a chair cover, the piano stool, a series of gilt-framed photographs in a cabinet. She opened her handbag, touched up her lipstick and lit another cigarette.
‘Who else is supposed to be coming tomorrow night?’ she said.
‘The Wingates. Paddy and Frances. And they’re bringing some friends of theirs from Totley. Apparently, they’re building up a big computer business, installing systems in Doncaster and Rotherham. Paddy says they’ve got a really good future. They’d make an ideal account, but I need to get in quickly and make the contact.’
‘I’d better see to the food then.’
‘Good girl.’
As she turned towards Graham now, her eyes showed no sign of any tears. Graham was glad – she was not a woman given to tears, and he would not have known how to deal with it. Instead, she fiddled with the front of her wrap, letting him glimpse her brown thighs and the gentle slope of her belly above the edge of her bikini briefs.
‘You like Frances, don’t you?’ she said.
Graham grinned, recognizing the opening. ‘Not as much as I like you, Charlie.’
He took a step towards her, but she turned suddenly and picked up one of the photograph frames from the cabinet and began to stroke its edges.
‘Won’t you go and see the Sherratt boy, Graham? To help get Laura back.’
‘Leave it for now, Charlie.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the police will find her.’
‘Will they, Graham?’
The photograph frame she was holding was bare and empty. The picture had been given to the police to enable them to identify Laura when they found her. Graham took the frame from her and replaced it in the cabinet.
‘Of course they will,’ he said.
The old woman’s burst of anger was over, but her thin hands still jerked and spasmed on the floral-patterned arms of her chair. Helen watched her until she was calm, and pulled her cardigan closer round her shoulders from where it had slipped.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, Grandma.’
‘If you like.’
‘Do you want your Special Blend?’
‘The bags’ll do. But make sure you put an extra one in the pot. You know how I like it.’
Helen stood at the narrow window of the kitchen of Dial Cottage while she waited for the kettle to boil. The electrical appliances that her father had bought for his parents-in-law left hardly any room in the kitchen to turn round. There was certainly not enough space for two people between the cooker and the oversized pine table crammed in lengthwise to the sink.
The table was scattered with cooking equipment, place mats with scenes of a North Wales seaside resort, sprigs of mint and thyme tied with bits of string, a jar of marmalade, a jar filled with wooden ladles and spatulas, a potato peeler with a wooden handle, a chopping board and half an onion soaking in a bowl of water. By the back door a pair of wellington boots and a walking stick stood on the blue lino, and a dark-green waxed coat with a corduroy collar hung from the hook where Harry’s cap would normally have been. The coat had been Helen’s present to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.
‘He was never like this before,’ said her grandmother from her chair, not needing to raise her voice over the short distance to the kitchen. ‘Never this bad. Now he can’t speak without biting my head off.’
‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’
‘Asked him? Him? I might as well talk to the wall.’
‘Perhaps he’s ill, Grandma.’
‘He had a cold the other week, I suppose.’
Helen could see that her grandmother thought that Harry was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.
There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your way through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.
‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess. It doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’
‘No, Grandma.’
Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.
While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.
‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’
‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’
‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one, Sam Beeley.’
‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’
‘It’s them that’s done it.’
‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’
‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they’ve led him away, filled his head with thoughts.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.
But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.
‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’
‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’
Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.
Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.
‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’
‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’
‘You’re a good girl. You were always his favourite, Helen. Why don’t you talk to him?’
‘I will try,’ promised Helen.
She stood by the old woman’s armchair, looking down on her white hair, so thin she could clearly see the pink scalp. She wanted to put her arm round her grandmother’s shoulders and hug her, to tell her it would be all right. But she knew that Gwen would be embarrassed, and in any case she wasn’t at all sure that it would be all right. A sudden surge of affection and frustration made her turn away.
Then she saw her grandfather, a small figure way down at the bottom of the hillside path, just emerging from the trees at the foot of Raven’s Side. Whether it was something about the way he moved or the set of his shoulders, she couldn’t say. But she knew immediately that there was something badly wrong.
Gwen cocked her head and peered at Helen, sensing the tension in her silence.
‘What is it, dear?’
‘Nothing, Grandma.’
Helen unlatched the back door and stood on the whitewashed step. Suddenly she felt an irrational flood of memories streaming out of the old cottage behind her like coils of smoke escaping from a burning house. They were childhood memories, mostly of her grandfather – memories of him taking her by the hand as they walked on this same path to look at the fish jumping in the stream, or to pick daisies for a daisy chain; of her grandfather proudly sitting her on his knee as he showed her how he filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it with the long coloured-paper tapers. Fleeting smells flickered by her senses, passing in a second, yet each one with enough emotional power to fill her eyes with instant tears. They were the remembered smells of pipe smoke and Brylcreem and boot polish.
Harry had always seemed to be polishing his shoes. He still did. It was one of those signs that she knew her grandfather by even as he had changed over the years. Without those signs, she thought, old age might have made him unrecognizable to the child who had known the strong, indestructible man in his fifties.
It was in just the same way that, at this moment, she knew her grandfather only by his walk. It was a slow, purposeful walk, upright and solemn, the pace of a soldier at a funeral, bearing the coffin of a dead comrade.
She heard the helicopter turn again and come straight towards her. Two faces stared down at her, expressionless behind their dark glasses. She felt as though the watching policemen could see straight into her heart. Their presence was somehow personal and intimate, and yet for ever too far away.
3 (#ulink_ac9e373d-5651-5aa0-9ff8-418b7240b541)
‘OK, take a break.’
The word came down the line from the uniformed sergeant at the opposite end from Ben Cooper. The men in blue overalls and wellingtons backed away from the line of search and sat on the tussocks of rough grass in a half-circle. Someone produced a flask of tea, someone else a bottle of orange juice.
PC Garnett settled down comfortably, tossing his pole aside, taking off his cap to reveal receding hair cropped short at the sides. They said it was the helmets that made so many policemen start to lose their hair early. Cooper himself was conscious that one day he would start to see a thinning on either side of his forehead. Everybody told him that his fine brown hair was just like his father’s, who had never been anything but halfway bald, as far as he could remember. So far, though, he was still able to let a lock of hair fall across his forehead as he had always done. Fashions had tended to pass him by.
Garnett smiled as he mopped his brow with his sleeve and eased himself into gossip mode. ‘So what about this new recruit in your department, Cooper? The new DC?’
‘I’ve not met him yet. I’ve only just come back from leave.’
‘It’s a “her”, mate, a “her”. Diane Fry, they call her.’
‘Right.’
‘She’s from Birmingham.’
‘I’ve not heard anything about her. I expect she’ll be all right.’
‘According to Dave Rennie, she’s a bit of a hard-faced cow. Could be a looker, he says, but she doesn’t bother. Blonde, but has her hair cut short. Too tall, too skinny, no make-up, always wears trousers. A bit of a stroppy bitch.’
‘You haven’t even met her,’ protested Cooper.
‘Well, you know the type. Probably another lesbian.’
Cooper blew out an exasperated breath. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t go around saying things like that. You don’t know anything about her.’
Garnett had the sense to hear the irritation in Cooper’s voice and didn’t argue. He idly pulled a clump of dandelions and shredded the leaves between his fingers. But Cooper couldn’t let the subject rest.
‘You know what it’s like for the women as well as I do, Garnett – some of them just try too hard. She’ll fit in fine after a week or two, you’ll see. They usually do.’
‘I dunno about that. I’ve a feeling you’ll not have time to be her best mate, though, lad. She’ll be up and away in no time.’
‘Why? Does she go ballooning?’
‘Ha, ha.’ Garnett ignored the sarcasm, in fact was probably impervious to it when he had a good subject of gossip. ‘She comes with a bit of a “rep” actually. A potential high-flier, they reckon. Ambitious.’
‘Oh yeah? She’ll have to prove herself first.’
‘Maybe.’
The clouds of tiny flies were getting thicker as they gathered around the men’s heads, attracted by their sweat and the sweet smell of the orange juice. The PC looked smug.
‘Come on, what do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You don’t just get promotion without showing you’re worth it.’
‘Get real, mate. She’s female. You know – two tits and a fanny, always puts the toilet seat down.’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that. So what?’
‘So what? So what? So the force is short of female officers in supervisory ranks, especially in CID. Don’t you read the reports? You just watch, old son – provided she keeps her nose clean and always smiles nicely at the top brass, Detective Constable Fry will shoot up that promotion ladder like she’s got a rocket up her arse.’
Cooper was about to protest when the shout went up from the contact man. ‘DC Cooper! Is DC Cooper here? Your boss wants you. Urgent.’
The instructions from DI Hitchens were terse, and the address he gave Cooper was in Moorhay, the village visible on the brow of the hill above the woods. Communities in this area tended to gather around the thousand-foot contour, the valley bottoms being too narrow.
‘Check it out, Cooper, and fast. We either get to the girl in the next two hours or we lose the whole night. You know what that could mean.’
‘I’m on my way, sir.’
‘Take somebody with you. Who’ve you got?’
Cooper looked back at the group of men lounging on the grass. His gaze passed across PC Garnett and a couple of other middle-aged bobbies, the overweight sergeant, two female PCs from Matlock and the three rangers.
‘No CID officers, sir. I’ll have to borrow a uniformed PC.’
There was a suggestion of a sigh at the other end of the line.
‘Do it then. But get a move on.’
Cooper explained as quickly as he could to the sergeant and was given a tall, muscular young bobby of about twenty called Wragg, who perked up at the prospect of some action.
‘Follow me as best you can.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m right with you,’ said Wragg, flexing the muscles in his shoulders.
The path up to Moorhay wound back through the trees to where a kissing gate gave access through the dry-stone walls into a field where black and white dairy cattle had recently been turned back in after milking. The field had been cut for hay a few weeks before, and the grass was short and springy underfoot as Ben Cooper ran along the side of the wall, the heat and sweat prickling on his brow and his legs spasming with pain as he forced them on. Wragg kept pace with him easily, but soon dropped his tendency to ask questions when Cooper didn’t respond. He needed all his breath for running.
The cows turned their heads to watch them pass in astonishment, their jaws working slowly, their eyes growing huge between twitching ears. Earlier in the afternoon, the search party had had to wait for the farmer to move the cows to the milking shed before the line could work its way across the field. The air had been filled with crude jokes about cow pats.
Cooper passed a stretch of collapsed wall, where a length of electric fence had been erected to keep the cattle away until someone skilled in dry-stone walling could be found to repair it. Before the cows’ curiosity could lead them to follow him, Cooper had already reached the next gate. He skirted another field and ran up a farm track paved with stones and broken rubble.
The steepness of the slope was increasing steadily now on the last few hundred yards, until Cooper began to feel as though he was back on the Cuillins again. Wragg was dropping further and further behind, slowing to a walk, using his arms against his knees to boost himself up the steeper sections.
He was carrying too much upper body weight, thought Cooper, and hadn’t developed the right muscles in his thighs and calves for hill climbing. Some of the old people who had lived in these hill villages all their lives would have passed the young PC with ease.
Finally, Cooper reached the high, dark wall at the corner of the graveyard at St Edwin’s Church. The church seemed to have been built on a mound, standing well above the village street at the front and presenting an elevation from the bottom of the valley like the rampart of a castle wall. The square Norman tower stood stark against the sky, tall and strangely out of proportion to the shortened nave, giving the church the appearance of a fallen letter ‘L’.
The surface of the churchyard was so high that Cooper thought the bodies buried there must be almost on his eye level, if only he could see through the stones of the wall and the thick, dark soil to where the oak caskets lay rotting.
The church was surrounded by mature trees, horse chestnuts and oaks, and two ancient yews. The damp smell of cut grass was in the air, and as Cooper passed the churchyard, climbing now towards the back of a row of stone cottages, a man in a red check shirt with his sleeves rolled up looked over the wall at him from the side gate. He was leaning on a big petrol lawn mower, pausing between a swathe of smoothly mown grass and a tussocky area he hadn’t yet reached. He gazed at the running man with a grimace of distaste, as if the evening had been disturbed by something particularly unpleasant.
At the first of the cottages, a woman was in her garden with a watering can, tending the flower beds on the side where they were in the shade of the cottage wall. She held the watering can upright in a gloved hand as she watched Cooper trying to catch his breath to ask directions. He found he was gasping in the heady smells of honeysuckle and scented roses freshly dampened with water. Behind him, the lawn mower started up again in the churchyard, and a small flock of jackdaws rose protesting from the chestnuts.
‘Dial Cottage?’
The woman stared at him, then shook her head almost imperceptibly, unwilling to spare him even that effort. She turned her back ostentatiously, her attention on a miniature rose with the palest of yellow flowers. On the wall in front of Cooper was a sign that said: ‘No parking. No turning. No hikers’.
Two cottages up, he found an old woman sitting in a garden chair with a Persian cat on her knee, and he repeated his question. She pointed up the hill.
‘Up to the road, turn left and go past the pub. It’s in the row of cottages on your left. Dial Cottage is one of those with the green doors.’
‘Thank you.’ With a glance at the PC still struggling up the track, Cooper ran on, glad to have tarmac under his feet at last as he approached the road.
Moorhay was off the main tourist routes and had little traffic most of the time, with no more than an occasional car coasting through towards Ladybower Reservoir or the show caverns in Castleton. A small pub called the Drover stood across the road, with two or three cars drawn up on the cobbles in front. According to the signs, it sold Robinson’s beer, one of Ben Cooper’s favourites. Right now, he would have died for a pint, but he couldn’t stop.
He passed a turning called Howe Lane, near a farm entrance with a wooden-roofed barn and a tractor shed. A sign at the bottom of the track said that the farmhouse itself provided bed and breakfast. Trees overhung the road as it wandered away from the village. In the distance, he glimpsed a shoulder of moor with a single tree on its summit.
Two hundred yards from the church was a long row of two-storey cottages built of the local millstone grit, with stone slate roofs and small mullioned windows. They had no front gardens, but some had stone troughs filled with marigolds and petunias against their front walls. One or two of the cottages had plain oak plank doors with no windows. The doors were painted a dark green, with lintels of whitewashed stone tilted at uneven angles.
By the time Cooper found which of them was Dial Cottage, the perspiration was running freely from his forehead and the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt. His face was red and he was breathing heavily when he knocked on the door. He could barely bring himself to speak when it was answered.
‘Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police.’
The woman who opened the door nodded, not even looking at the warrant card held in his sticky palm.
‘Come in.’
The old oak door thumped shut, shutting out the street, and Cooper blinked his eyes to readjust them to the gloom. The woman was about his own age, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was wearing a halter-necked sun top and shorts, and her pink limbs immediately struck him as totally out of place in the dark interior, like a chorus girl who had wandered into a funeral parlour. Her hair shone as if she had brought a bit of the sun into the cottage with her.
They stood in a narrow hallway, made even narrower by a heavy mahogany sideboard loaded with cut-glass vases and a fruit bowl, all standing on lace mats. In the middle was a colour photograph of a large family group, taken at the seaside somewhere. Recently applied magnolia woodchip wallpaper could not disguise the unevenness of the walls underneath. An estate agent would have called it a charming period look.
Cooper stood still for a moment, fighting to get back his breath, his chest heaving. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow to stop the trickles of sweat running into his eyes.
‘We had a report at the station,’ he gasped. ‘A phone call.’
‘It’s Ben Cooper, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’ He looked at the young woman again, recognition dawning only slowly, as he found it did when you saw someone out of their familiar surroundings.
‘Helen? Helen Milner?’
‘That’s it. I guess I’ve changed a bit since the sixth form at Edendale High.’
‘It was a few years ago.’
‘Nine years, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You’ve not changed much, Ben. Anyway, I saw your picture in the paper a while ago. You’d won a trophy of some sort.’
‘The Shooting Trophy, yes. Look, can we –?’
‘I’ll take you through.’
‘Do you live here then?’
‘No, it’s my grandparents’ house.’
They stepped through into a back room, hardly less gloomy than the hallway despite a window looking out on to the back garden. There was a 1950s tiled fireplace in the middle of one wall, scattered with more photographs and incongruous holiday mementoes – a straw donkey, a figure of a Spanish flamenco dancer, a postcard of Morocco with sneering camels and an impossibly blue sea. Above the fireplace, a large mirror in a gilt frame reflected a murky hunting print on the opposite wall, with red-coated figures on horseback galloping into a shadowy copse in pursuit of an unseen quarry. Cooper smelled furniture polish and the musty odour of old clothes or drawers lined with ancient newspapers.
There were two elderly people in the room – a woman wearing a floral-patterned dress and a blue cardigan sitting in one armchair, and an old man in a pair of corduroy trousers and a Harris wool sweater facing her in the other chair. They both sat upright, stiff and alert, their feet drawn under them as if to put as much distance between themselves as they could.
In front of the empty fireplace stood a two-bar electric fire. Despite the warmth of the day outside, it gave the impression of having been recently used. Cooper, though, was glad of the slight chill in the room, which had begun to dry the sweat on his face as the two old people turned towards him.
‘It’s Ben Cooper, Granddad,’ said Helen.
‘Aye, I can see that. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’
Cooper was well used to this greeting, especially from the older residents around Edendale. For some of them, he was merely the shadow of his father, whose fame and popularity seemed eternal.
‘Hello, sir. I believe somebody phoned the station.’
Harry didn’t answer, and Cooper was starting to form the idea that the old boy might be deaf when his granddaughter stepped in.
‘It was me, actually,’ said Helen. ‘Granddad asked me to.’
Harry shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t really be bothered whether she had phoned or not.
‘I thought it’d be something you lot would want to know about, like as not.’
‘And your name, sir?’
‘Dickinson.’
Cooper waited patiently for the explanation. But it came from the granddaughter, not from the old man.
‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she said, leading the way through another door. An almost brand-new washing machine and a fridge-freezer stood among white-painted wooden cupboards, with an aluminium sink unit awkwardly fitted into place among them. Neither of the old people followed them, but watched from their chairs. The rooms were so small that they were well within earshot.
‘Granddad found this.’
The trainer lay on a pine kitchen table, lumpy and grotesque among the bundles of dried mint and the brown-glazed cooking pots. Someone had put a sheet from the Buxton Advertiser underneath it to stop the soil that clung to its rubber sole from getting on to the surface of the table. The trainer lay in the middle of an advertising feature for a new Cantonese restaurant, its laces trailing across a photograph of a smiling Chinese woman serving barbecued spare ribs and bean sprouts. On the opposite page were columns of birth and death notices, wedding announcements and twenty-first birthday greetings.
Cooper wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and took out a pen. He gently prised open the tongue of the trainer to look inside, careful not to disturb the soil that was starting to dry and crumble away from the crevices in the sole.
‘Where did you find this, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Under Raven’s Side.’
Cooper knew Raven’s Side. It was a wilderness of rocks and holes and tangled vegetation. The search parties had been slowly making progress towards the cliff all afternoon, as if reluctant to have to face the task of searching it, with the expectation of twisted ankles and lacerated fingers.
‘Can you be more specific?’
The old man looked offended, as if he had been accused of lying. Cooper began to wonder why he had thought it was cooler inside the cottage. Despite the open windows, there was no breath of air in the kitchen. The atmosphere felt stifling, claustrophobic. The only bit of light seemed to go out of the room when Helen went to answer a knock at the door.
‘There’s a big patch of brambles and bracken down there, above the stream,’ said the old man. ‘It’s where I walk Jess, see.’
Cooper was surprised by a faint scrabbling of claws near his feet. A black Labrador gazed up at him from under the table, responding hopefully to the sound of its name. The dog’s paws were grubby, and it was lying on the Eden Valley Times. The sports section, by the look of it. Edendale FC had lost the opening match of the season.
‘Was there just the trainer? Nothing else?’
‘Not that I saw. It was Jess that found it really. She goes after rabbits and such when she gets down by there.’
‘OK,’ said Cooper. ‘We’ll take a look in a minute. You can show me the exact spot.’
Helen returned, accompanied by an exhausted PC Wragg.
‘Is it … any use?’ she asked.
‘We’ll see.’ Cooper took a polythene bag from his back pocket and carefully slid the trainer into it. ‘Would you wait here for a while, please? A senior officer will probably want to speak to you.’
Helen nodded and looked at her grandfather, but his expression didn’t alter. His face was stony, like a man resigned to a period of necessary suffering.
Cooper went back into the road and pulled out his personal radio to contact Edendale Divisional HQ, where he knew DI Hitchens would be waiting for a report. He held the polythene bag up to the light, staring at its contents while he waited for the message to be relayed.
The trainer was a Reebok, size-five, slim-fit. And the brown stains on the toe looked very much like blood.
4 (#ulink_2e870ee3-8d36-53f9-b1d5-a0917adebf8c)
The E Division Police Headquarters in Edendale had been new once, in the 1950s, and had even earned their architect a civic award. But in the CID room, fifty years of mouldering paperwork and half-smoked cigarettes and bad food had left their mark on the walls and their smell in the carpets. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget had recently stretched sufficiently to decorate the walls, replace the window frames, and install air conditioning in some of the offices. They had also replaced the old wooden desks with modern equivalents more in keeping with the computer equipment they carried.
DC Diane Fry was reading the bulletins. She had started off by catching up with the fresh ones for the day, then had continued casting back over recent weeks. Her intention was to make herself familiar with all the current enquiries in the division. Although she had been in Edendale nearly two weeks, she still felt as new as the white glosswork that for some reason was refusing to dry properly on the outside wall near the window. All the windows on this side of the building looked down on Gate C and the back of the East Stand at Edendale Football Club, a team struggling in the lower reaches of one of the pyramid leagues.
The priority problem of the moment was car crime at local tourist spots. From the weary tone of some of the memos Fry came across, it sounded as though it always was the priority problem in E Division at this time of year. Many thousands of visitors were drawn into the Peak District National Park during the summer, bringing with them what appeared to be their own crime wave, like the wake trailing behind a huge cruise liner. These visitors left their cars at remote spots, in makeshift car parks on rough ground, in abandoned quarries and on roadside verges. The cars were invariably full of cameras and binoculars and purses stuffed with cash and credit cards, and God knows what else. At the same time, travelling criminals from the big conurbations around Sheffield in the east and Manchester in the west were touring the Peak District looking for just such victims. A few minutes with an unattended vehicle and they were away back to their cities, leaving a trail of distraught visitors and ruined holidays.
It presented an apparently insoluble problem. It was impossible to get the message across to the car owners, since they were a constantly changing flood – here one day, then moving on the next, to be replaced by another group of visitors. It was impossible for the police to keep surveillance on vulnerable sites with the resources available; it was feasible only to identify possible perpetrators and ask neighbouring forces to keep them under observation. It was called living in hope.
Diane Fry looked across the room at DS Rennie. He was on the phone, and had been for some time. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she was fairly sure he hadn’t yet taken a single note with the ballpoint pen he was chewing. He was thick-shouldered and thick-necked, a veteran prop forward in the divisional rugby team, as she had learned from his conversation with one of the other DCs. She also knew that Rennie’s first name was David, and that he was married with two children in their early teens.
She had soon become aware of his sly sideways appraisal, a slithering of the eyes towards her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She had observed this in the past to be a common tentative first manoeuvre towards a junior female colleague, designed to culminate in an office affair. Many men, of course, never got past this first sign – it was more an indication of hope than intention. But there were others who were more of a nuisance, and Fry couldn’t tell just yet which Rennie was. It was helpful, though, to have the early warning, so that she could decide on her own terms when the time was right to put him down. Affairs with colleagues were not on her agenda. Not at all.
She could see Rennie was not making the effort to appear busy, even though there was a DCI somewhere in the building and liable to appear in the CID room at any moment.
‘Sarge?’ said Fry, when at last he put the phone down.
Rennie looked round, as if surprised that she was still there. Then he smiled, contorting his face until it was almost a wink. His tie was something dark green, with a small gold crest, and his suit was a good cut for his heavy shoulders, but not recently cleaned. He pulled out a bar of his habitual chewing gum, which Fry had guessed might mean he was a reformed smoker.
‘What can I do for you, Diane?’
‘This project group looking at the auto crime figures.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I wondered if a check had been done on the computer. Matching up locations and timings. An analysis of MOs. We could set up a computer model.’
‘Ben Cooper usually does that,’ said Rennie. ‘You’d better not mess with the computer until you’ve asked him about it.’
‘A computer model could come up with a set of predictions, suggest target locations. It’s worth a try, Sarge.’
‘I told you, speak to Ben. They’ve got him out at Moorhay, but he should be back in the office later, thank God.’
Fry had already heard Ben Cooper’s name several times during her first week in Edendale. Apparently he was some paragon of all the virtues who knew everything. DC Cooper knew the area like the back of his hand, they said. He knew all the local villains and even their families, they said. He knew how all the systems in the CID office worked, too. He knew exactly how to fill in the vast quantities of paperwork that baffled other detectives. Now, apparently, he was the only one who knew how to use the computers. But Diane Fry had an information technology qualification to her name, and she had done a course on intelligence data analysis at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. At the first opportunity, she would show them who knew how to use the computers around here.
For now, though, she decided to try another tack.
‘Someone from the NCIS did a paper on this problem a few months ago. It was mentioned when I was at Bramshill.’
‘Really?’
Rennie sounded uninterested.
‘The National Criminal Intelligence Service.’
‘I know what the NCIS is, thanks.’
‘I wondered if someone had researched it. I can’t see any mention in the paperwork. Maybe the project group have followed it through?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I’ll look it up, if you like, Sarge.’
Rennie looked sour, pulled at his tie, scrabbled about on his desk for a bit of paper and picked up the phone to dial another number.
‘Shall I, Sarge?’
‘Oh, if you like.’
Fry made a note for herself in her notebook and asterisked it. Then she put the car crime reports aside and picked up that morning’s bulletin on the missing girl, Laura Vernon. She had already read it once and had memorized its admittedly sketchy details.
Her memory was excellent for jobs like this. She knew exactly what the girl had been wearing when last seen, down to the blue pants and the size-five slim-fit Reeboks. If she was the first officer to come across any of these items, she knew she would recognize them straightaway. But she would have to be allocated to the search first, of course.
All available hands had already been called to the task of finding Laura Vernon. All hands, that was, except Detective Constable Diane Fry and Detective Sergeant David Rennie. Fry was new to the division, of course, but what had Rennie done wrong? He was currently in charge of day-to-day crime in E Division, and Fry constituted his staff. It wasn’t a combination that looked likely to crush any crime waves. At this moment, they weren’t even trying.
Fry got up from her desk and walked over to check the action file on the Laura Vernon enquiry. Although the enquiry was less than forty-eight hours old, the file was already getting thick. The apparatus of a major enquiry was beginning to swing into operation, even though it hadn’t yet been designated a murder enquiry – not until a body was found. Teenage girls ran away from home all the time, of course, and generally turned up a few days later, hungry and shamefaced. Laura had money – her parents estimated there could have been as much as thirty pounds in her purse; obviously she was not a girl who was kept short of cash. But she had taken no clothes and no possessions with her. That was a significant factor.
And reactions had been quicker in this instance for two other reasons. One was the fact that a witness report had placed Laura Vernon talking to an unidentified young man behind her house shortly before her disappearance. It had been the last sighting of her for nearly two days now.
The other pressing reason, understated in the action file but discernible as a thread running through the reports, was the so far unsolved murder of sixteen-year-old Susan Edson in neighbouring B Division a few weeks earlier.
Everyone knew that the first two or three days of an enquiry were vital, if it did turn out to be a case of murder, or other serious crime. Within the first seventy-two hours the memories of witnesses were fresh, and the perpetrator had little time to dispose of evidence or construct an alibi. At the same time, speedy action also meant they had a better chance of finding Laura Vernon alive.
Fry was interested to see that a name had been offered up to police as a ‘possible’ right from the start. A youth called Lee Sherratt had been named by the parents and had been interviewed by officers in the initial sweep. He had denied being the young man seen talking to Laura, but his alibi was unsupported. Sherratt’s record had been pulled from the Police National Computer – a few petty crimes, some as a juvenile. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to leave his name at the top of the file until he could be eliminated.
According to the reports, a uniformed inspector from Operational Support was now in charge of the search on the ground. DI Paul Hitchens was CID investigating officer, reporting to Detective Chief Inspector Stewart Tailby. Officers had already called at every house in the village of Moorhay, since there weren’t all that many. Enquiries had been made with all known friends and relatives in the area. No sign of Laura Vernon, no leads to her possible whereabouts.
By now the painstaking inch-by-inch search of the surrounding countryside was well under way – off-duty officers had been called in, the search dog teams were out and the helicopter was in the air. Peak Park Rangers and Countryside Rangers were helping the search, and the Mountain Rescue Team was somewhere up on the tops of the moors above the village. And, of course, Detective Constable ‘Mr Perfect’ was also out at Moorhay in person. Case solved, then.
Fry had met DI Hitchens on her first day. He was her CID boss – after DS Rennie, anyway, and she had already decided Rennie didn’t really count. Hitchens was younger than the sergeant, and better educated. So an early promotion; maybe he was a fast-track graduate, like herself. He would certainly be destined for higher things, and his voice would be listened to by more senior officers. Fry ached to be out there, on a major enquiry, at the right hand of DI Hitchens, getting the chance to impress. She wasn’t intending to hang around looking at car crime statistics for long. A murder enquiry was just the thing. But it had come too soon, while she was still too new. Hence her presence in the office with Rennie.
In an hour or two they would have to call off the search for Laura Vernon anyway. Even in August dusk fell eventually over the hills, and the lines of men and women would disperse and wander dispiritedly home. Tomorrow there would be appeals in the papers and on TV, and civilian volunteers would be queueing up to swell the numbers of the search parties.
Fry knew she had two choices. She either coasted along and filled in time until Rennie thought fit to allocate her some tasks; or she could speak up, take the initiative, start to show what she was made of. But she held her tongue. Now was not the time – she needed to be in a stronger position. Meanwhile, DS Rennie was not worth the effort of trying to impress.
Then the door opened and DI Hitchens put his head round. ‘Who’s here? Oh yes.’
He looked disappointed, like a captain left with the choice of the players no one wants when the teams are being chosen. Hitchens was in his shirt sleeves, with his cuffs rolled up a few inches over strong wrists covered in dark, wiry hair. He was in his thirties, and seemed to be permanently about to break into a smile. Fry caught his eye, looked from him to Rennie, who had barely moved except to shift his foot from his desk.
Hitchens nodded. ‘All right to hold the fort for a while, Dave?’
‘Sir.’
Fry jumped up eagerly. ‘Where are we going, sir? Is it the missing girl, Laura Vernon?’
‘What else? Yes, we’ve had a find called in. We’ve got a good man out in the field now checking it out, but it sounds positive. Can you be ready in two minutes?’
‘I’ll be ready.’
When the DI had left, Diane Fry went back to her desk to clear away the car crime reports. She was careful to turn her back to Dave Rennie, so that he wouldn’t see her smiling.
Edendale sat astride a wide valley in the gap between the two distinct halves of the Peak District. On one side the gentle limestone hills and wooded dales of the White Peak rolled away past Bakewell and Wyedale into B Division and the borders of Staffordshire. On the other side were the grim, bare gritstone moors of the sparsely populated Dark Peak, where the high slopes of Mam Tor and Kinder Scout guarded the remote, silent reservoirs below Snake Pass.
It was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park – the other being Bakewell, a few miles to the south, where one of the E Division section stations was based. Other towns, like Buxton, headquarters of B Division, had been deliberately excluded from the National Park when the boundaries were drawn.
At Buxton, as at Matlock and Ashbourne, the boundary took wide sweeps around the towns and back again. But Edendale was too deep within the hills to be excluded. It meant that the restrictive Peak Park planning regulations applied to the town as much as they did to the face of Mam Tor or to the Blue John caves of Castleton.
Diane Fry was still learning the geography of the town and the dale. So far she was familiar only with the immediate area around the Victorian house on the outskirts of Edendale where she had rented a first-floor flat, and the streets near the station – including the view of the Edendale FC stand. But she was aware that, no matter which route you chose out of Edendale, the only way was up – over the hills, to the moorland hamlets or the villages in the next valley.
Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But DI Hitchens chose to drive himself as they headed out of the town towards the great hump of moorland separating Edendale from the next valley.
‘It’s just the one shoe,’ said Hitchens.
‘A trainer?’ said Fry. ‘Reebok, size-five?’
The DI looked at her, surprised, raising his eyebrow.
‘You’ve been reading up on the Vernon enquiry.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It was always a possibility from the start that something had happened to her, though you can’t tell the parents that. She had cash with her, but had taken nothing else. We’d already traced all her friends and contacts. Negative all round. It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, that her body will turn up somewhere.’
‘What sort of girl is she?’
‘Oh, comes from a well-off family, comfortable background. Never wanted for anything, I’d say. She attends a private school called High Carrs, due to take her GCSEs next year. She gets piano lessons, has a horse that her parents bought that’s kept at some stables just outside Moorhay. She takes part in riding events sometimes.’
‘Show jumping?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And is she good at any of those things?’
Hitchens looked at her and nodded approvingly. ‘If you believe the parents, she’s perfect at everything. Bound to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and do her degree, but might decide to pursue a career as a concert musician later on. Unless she wins an Olympic gold medal in the meantime, of course. Her friends say different.’
‘Boys?’
‘Of course. What else? Mum and Dad deny it, though. They say she’s too busy with her studies and her horse riding, all that. But we’re tracing the boyfriends, gradually.’
‘Rows at home? Anything like that?’
‘Nothing. At least …’
‘Not according to the parents, right.’
‘Got it.’
Hitchens was smiling again. Fry liked her senior officers to smile at her, within reason. She watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were strong hands, with clean and carefully trimmed fingernails. His nose was a little too large in profile. It was what they called a Roman nose. But a man could get away with that – it gave him character. She looked again at his left hand. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But now she noticed a white scar that crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.
‘The parents say that Laura had been shopping with her mother that afternoon,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’d been to the De Bradelei Centre at Belper.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Oh – clothes,’ he said vaguely.
‘Not Dad?’
‘I don’t suppose it was his sort of thing. Anyway, the females were buying him a birthday present, so he wouldn’t have been wanted, would he? He stayed at home to catch up on some work. Graham Vernon runs a financial consultancy business and says it’s going well. They do seem to be pretty well-off.’
‘And after they got home?’
‘It was about half past five by then. It was still hot, so Laura changed and went out into the garden for a while. She didn’t come back for her evening meal at half past seven. That’s when the Vernons began to panic.’
Fry admired the way he had all the details in his mind and could produce them without effort. Hitchens obviously had the sort of brain that was much valued in the police service these days. Many coppers could not have repeated the information without reading it from their notes.
‘Parents alibi each other?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she was seen talking to a young man before she disappeared, wasn’t she?’
‘Very good, Diane. Yes, we found a lady who was out collecting wild flowers on the edge of the scrubland at the top of the Baulk. She’s a WI member and is helping to create the decoration for a well dressing at Great Hucklow. She was embarrassed about admitting it, can you believe it? She thought we might arrest her for stealing wild flowers. Her children had told her it’s a crime against the environment. But the well dressing was obviously important enough to turn her to evil ways. Anyway, she came forward and identified Laura Vernon from her photograph as the girl she saw. She couldn’t describe the boy, though. Too far away.’
‘And now a trainer.’
‘Yes, that’s all we’ve got so far, but it looks hopeful. We’ve got Ben Cooper on the spot there – he was with one of the search parties. Ben’s got good judgement.’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘Oh, you’ve met Cooper, have you? He’s only back from leave today.’
‘No, but I’ve heard the others talk about him.’
‘Right.’ Hitchens said nothing for a few minutes, negotiating a crossroads where heavy lorries thundered by at regular intervals, dusting the roadside verges with a coating of lime. Fry tried to read his thoughts, wondering if she had said something wrong. But she was sure of her ability to keep any emotion out of her voice. She had practised long and hard, and now, she felt, she only ever sounded positive.
‘How’s it going then, Diane? Settling into the CID room OK?’
‘Fine, sir. Some things are done a bit differently from what I’ve been used to, but nothing I haven’t been able to pick up on pretty quickly.’
‘That’s good. Dave Rennie treating you all right?’
‘No problem,’ said Fry. She noted that she had become ‘Diane’ since getting into the car alone with the DI. She liked to keep a track of these things, in case they had any deeper meaning. Maybe she could manage without the ‘sir’ in return, and see if it struck the right note – a closeness of colleagues rather than a senior officer with a junior. But no further.
‘Not finding Derbyshire too quiet for you after the West Midlands?’
‘It’s a nice change,’ said Fry. ‘But I’m sure E Division has its own challenges.’
Hitchens laughed. ‘The other divisions call it “E for Easy Street”.’
Fry had already been informed by her new colleagues that Edendale had been chosen over Bakewell or Matlock as E Division Headquarters for purely alphabetical reasons. It was one of the oddities of the Derbyshire Constabulary structure that the territorial divisions were all based in towns that began with the right letter – A Division in Alfreton, B Division in Buxton, C Division in Chesterfield and D Division in Derby.
So it was inconceivable that E Division should have been based in Bakewell or Matlock. It would have been an outrage against corporate neatness. In fact, if there hadn’t already been a town called Edendale, some PR person in an office at County HQ would have had to invent one.
‘But I was thinking of the social life,’ said Hitchens. ‘Edendale isn’t exactly the night spot capital of Europe. A bit tame after Birmingham, I expect.’
‘It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose.’
He turned to look towards her, his hands resting casually on the wheel. ‘And what is Diane Fry looking for exactly?’
What indeed? There was only one thing that Fry wanted to acknowledge to herself. Maybe it wasn’t what Hitchens was expecting to hear. But it was something he ought to know, now rather than later.
‘I want to advance my career,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ He raised his eyebrows, a smile lighting up his face. He was quite good-looking, and he wore no wedding ring.
‘I’m good at my job,’ she said. ‘I’ll be looking for promotion. That’s what’s important to me. At the moment.’
‘Fair enough. I like your honesty.’
The main road towards Buxton climbed and climbed until it reached a plateau where the limestone quarries competed with the moors as background scenery. There was a well-placed pub here called the Light House, with tremendous views over two neighbouring valleys and the hills beyond. Hitchens turned off the road before they reached the quarries, and they began a gentle rollercoaster ride over smaller valleys and hills, dipping gradually towards Wyedale. Farm gates flickered past occasionally, with black and white signs advertising the names of dairy herds and stacks of huge round bales of straw or black plastic-wrapped silage lying in the fields behind stone walls.
‘I’ve seen your record, of course,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s not bad.’
Fry nodded. She knew it wasn’t bad. It was damn good. Her exam results had been in the top few per cent all along the line. Her clear-up rate since her transfer to CID had been outstanding. She had had a good career lined up in the West Midlands, and they had been grooming her for big things; anybody could see that.
‘It was a pity you had to leave your old force,’ said Hitchens.
She said nothing, waiting for the comment that she knew would have to come.
‘But it was understandable. In the circumstances.’
‘Yes, sir.’
In the circumstances. That was exactly how Fry herself tried to think of it now. ‘The circumstances’. It was a wonderfully cool and objective phrase. Circumstances were what other people had, not something that turned your life upside down, destroyed your self-esteem and threatened to ruin everything you had ever held as worthwhile. You couldn’t get upset about circumstances. You could just get on with life and concentrate on more important things. In the circumstances.
They were driving along a ridge now, with a steep drop on one side down rock-strewn slopes to a little river. Gradually the view became more and more obscured by trees. Here and there was a house set back from the road, not all of them working farms.
‘No ill effects though?’ said Hitchens.
Fry couldn’t really blame him for fishing. She had expected it sooner or later. The subject had been raised at her interview, of course, and she had answered all the carefully worded questions with the proper responses, very reasonable and unemotional. But it was bound to be in the minds of those, like DI Hitchens, that she had to rely on for her prospects of advancement. It was just another hurdle she had to get over.
‘None at all,’ she said. ‘It’s all behind me now. I don’t think about it. I just want to get on with the business in hand.’
‘One of the hazards of the job, eh? Goes with the territory?’
‘I suppose you might say that, sir.’
He nodded, satisfied. For a brief moment, Fry wondered how he would react if she did what a tight little angry knot deep inside her really wanted to do – screamed, shouted, lashed out with her fists to wipe the smug smile off his face. She was proud that she no longer did that; she had learned to keep the knot of anger tied up tight and secure.
The houses suddenly grew thicker on either side of the road, though there had been no sign to indicate they were reaching a village. There was a small school off to the right, some farm buildings converted into craft workshops and a tiny village post office and store in an end terrace cottage. The square tower of a church appeared over the rooftops, surrounded by tall, mature chestnut trees and sycamores.
They found a cluster of cars and vans parked in a gravel layby. As soon as Hitchens pulled up, a sweating PC Wragg appeared at the window of the car. He was clutching a polythene bag containing a Reebok trainer.
‘Wragg? Where’s DC Cooper?’
‘The old bloke’s showing him where he found it, sir.’
‘What’s he playing at? He should have waited,’ said Hitchens.
‘The old bloke wouldn’t wait. He said it was dominoes night, and it was now or never.’
‘Dominoes night?’
Wragg looked embarrassed. ‘He really seemed to mean it,’ he said.
The section of footpath looked much the same as any other. It had a dry bed of dusty soil, embedded with twisted tree roots that broke through the surface to form steps in the steeper places. There were oaks and birches clinging to the slopes on either side, with swathes of dense bracken clustering round their trunks. A tumble of huge rocks lay half hidden among the bracken, like the overgrown ruins of a Stone Age temple. Birds skittered away among the undergrowth, chattering their alarm calls, and there was the constant background hiss of a fast-running stream.
‘Aye, about here,’ said Harry.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I reckon.’
Ben Cooper didn’t quite know what to make of Harry Dickinson. Usually he could read some emotion in people he came into contact with in this sort of job. They were often upset, frightened, angry or even completely knocked for six by shock and distress. These were the ones for whom violent crime was something new and horrific that had never touched their lives before. Sometimes there were those who were nervous, or became unreasonably aggressive. Those were interesting reactions, too, often the first signs of guilt. He had learned to pick up those signs in the people he dealt with. He thought of it as a good detective’s instinct.
Harry Dickinson, though, had showed no emotion of any kind, not when he had been in the cottage with his wife and granddaughter, and not now when he stood with Cooper at the spot where he and his dog had found the bloodstained trainer.
During the walk down the path to the foot of Raven’s Side, Harry had marched ahead, silent and stiff, his back pulled straight, his arms swinging in a steady rhythm. He had not spoken a word since they had left the cottage, communicating only with a slight tilt of the head when they reached a turning in the path. It was as if the old man was shut up tight in a body that had turned to wood. Cooper would have liked to have got in front of him, to try to read something in the old man’s eyes.
‘You do realize that Laura Vernon might be lying nearby badly injured, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or even dead?’
Harry met Cooper’s eyes. What was the expression that passed across them so fleetingly? Amusement? No, mockery. An impatience with such a waste of words.
‘I’m not daft. I know what’s what.’
‘It’s vital that we know the exact spot you found the trainer, Mr Dickinson.’
Harry spat into the grass, narrowed his eyes against the low sun, like an Indian picking up a trail. He pointed the peak of his cap to the right.
‘Down there? Near the stream?’
‘Jess runs down there, by the water,’ said Harry.
‘What’s past those rocks?’
‘A wild bit, all overgrown. There’s rabbits and such in there.’
‘Is that where the trainer came from?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Take a look for yourself, lad.’
Cooper walked over to the outcrop of rocks. Only their tops protruded from the grass, and their jagged shapes looked slippery and treacherous. It was not a place he would choose to walk over, given the choice of easier walking that lay in other directions. He could see that sheep must graze here, by the shortness of the coarse grass. Between the rocks, narrow tracks had been worn, and there were ancient black pellets drying on the ground.
Trying to stick to the rocks to avoid confusing any traces of footprints, Cooper clambered over into the thick undergrowth. The stream rushed over the rocks a few feet to his right, running low just here below a stretch of smooth, grassy bank. It looked like an ideal spot for two people to spend an afternoon, secluded and undisturbed.
He looked back over his shoulder. Harry Dickinson had not followed him. He stood on a flat section of rock, poised as if guarding the path, apparently oblivious to what was going on around him. His fist clenched occasionally, as if he felt that he ought to have his dog lead in his hand. He looked completely calm.
Cooper moved further into the undergrowth, his clothes brushing against the bracken and catching on the straggling tendrils of brambles. Two or three wasps, disturbed by his passage, hovered round his head, making irritating darts at his face and evading his futile slaps at the air. The trees began to close over him again, creating a dark cave filled with summer flies.
Ahead and about thirty feet below, just across the stream, he could make out a wide footpath marked with small stones and with wooden ledges built into the ground as steps. It was almost a motorway of a footpath, cleared of vegetation, well-used and worn by many feet. Cooper realized that he had almost reached the Eden Valley Trail, the path that connected to the long-distance Pennine Way a little to the north. It was a favourite with ramblers, who passed this way in their thousands in the summer.
But the spot where he stood was as remote and isolated from life on the path down there as if it had been on top of Mam Tor itself. A passing walker would not have been able to see Cooper up there among the bracken, even if he had bothered to look up.
He turned round, wafting his hand across his face against the flies. He was looking back through the trees and thick brambles as if towards the end of a dark tunnel, where the figure of Harry Dickinson stood framed in a network of grasping branches. Cooper had to squint against the contrast of a patch of dazzling light that soaked the hillside in strong colours. The old man stood in the glare of the low sun, with the hot rocks shimmering around him like a furnace. The haze of heat rising from the ground made his dark outline blur and writhe, as if he were dancing a slow shimmy. His vast shadow, flung across the rocks, seemed to wriggle and jerk as its jagged shape fragmented among the bracken and brambles.
The expression in Harry’s eyes was unreadable, his face lying partly in the shade from the peak of his cap. Cooper couldn’t even tell which way he was looking, whether he had turned away or was staring directly towards him into the trees.
He wanted to grab the old man by the shoulders and shake him. He wanted to tell him that somebody had disturbed the spot, and recently. The evidence was right there for anyone to see and to smell. There had been two people, and at least one of them had been looking for more than just rabbits. The smell that lingered under the trees was of stale blood, overripe meat and urine. And the flies had found something even more attractive than Cooper’s sweat to feed on.
5 (#ulink_4dbd6bc1-9086-593d-aa01-16a8f945ab2e)
‘OK. Secured?’
‘Officers at all points,’ said Hitchens promptly.
‘Scenes?’
‘On their way.’
Diane Fry stood behind DI Hitchens and Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, twenty feet from where the body of the girl lay. The scene had already been well-organized. Hitchens had made a big performance of it, posting officers along the track, calling for information so that he could pass it on to the DCI. But it had seemed to Fry that everything necessary had already been done even before Hitchens had arrived.
‘Scientific support?’
‘Ditto.’
‘Incident room?’
‘DI Baxter is i/c.’
Tailby was head and shoulders taller than the inspector, slim and slightly stooped around the shoulders, as very tall men often were. His hair was greying at the front but still dark at the back, and it was left to grow thicker than the cropped heads favoured by most of his junior colleagues. He was wearing green wellingtons, which were not ideal footwear for stumbling over half a mile of rough ground scattered with rabbit holes and hidden stones. He was lucky to have reached the scene without a broken ankle. Fry congratulated herself on her habit of wearing strong, flat-soled shoes and trousers.
‘Photographer?’ said Tailby.
‘Here, ready.’
‘Let him get on with it.’
Fry waited for the DCI to ask about the doctor, but she looked up and realized that he could already see Dr Inglefield making his way down the path.
‘Finder?’ said Tailby.
‘Back at the cottage, sir. With DC Cooper.’
‘Let’s see what the doc says then.’
The doctor was giving his name to a PC standing halfway up the path. Tailby waited impatiently while they compared watches to agree the time, and the PC wrote it down in his notebook. Most of the other officers who had inevitably begun to gather round the scene had been sent away to continue their search, grumbling all the more at the futility of it.
Blue and white tape hung in strands for several yards around the body, wound round the trunks of trees and a jutting stump of black rock. From where the detectives stood, all that could be seen of Laura Vernon was a lower leg. The black fabric of her jeans contrasted with the glare of a white, naked foot, its toenails painted blood-red. The rest of the body was hidden in a dense clump of bracken, and around it there were numerous signs of trampling. Fry knew that the broken stems and crushed grass raised the odds in favour of the crime scene examiners producing the sort of evidence that would lead to a quick arrest. She longed to get nearer, to get a close look at the body, to see the girl’s face. How had she died? Had she been strangled or battered, or what? Nobody was saying. At this stage, nobody wanted to commit themselves. They simply stood and watched the doctor do his official business as he nodded at the policemen without a word and made his way gingerly along a marked-out strip of ground to the crushed bracken.
They were, of course, assuming the body was that of Laura Vernon. There seemed little doubt, but it was not considered a fact until one of her parents had been dragged through the process of identification.
‘No hope of getting the caravan down here,’ said Tailby.
‘Nowhere near, sir,’ agreed Hitchens.
‘Is there a farm track nearby? What’s over that side of the trees?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
Hitchens and Tailby both turned to look at Fry. Hitchens frowned when he saw who she was, as if he had been expecting someone else.
‘See if you can find out, Fry,’ he said. ‘Closest access we can get for the caravan.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Fry wondered how she was expected to do this, when there was no habitation in sight. The village itself was invisible beyond the huge outcrop of rock. There was a cliff face at her back and dense woodland stretching in front of her down to the road.
She was aware of the tall DCI studying her. He had a thin, bony face and keen grey eyes with a vigilant air. She had not encountered him face to face until now – he had simply been a figure passing in the distance once, pointed out to her and noted as one of the people who mattered. The last thing she wanted to do was to look useless now, on their first meeting. First impressions lasted a long time.
‘Perhaps you could find somebody who has a bit of local knowledge,’ suggested Tailby.
Hitchens said: ‘Maybe we’d better ask –’
Then Diane Fry registered the noise that she had been aware of in the background all the time they had been on the hillside. It was a juddering and clattering noise, stationary now somewhere over the trees to the east. The helicopter was holding position until its crew were given instructions to return to base.
Fry pulled out her radio, and smiled. ‘I think I’ve got a better idea, sir.’
The DCI understood straightaway. ‘Excellent. Get them to let Scenes and Scientific Support have a location as well for their vans.’
Dr Inglefield had taken only a few minutes before he was walking back up the path towards Tailby.
‘Well, dead all right,’ he said. ‘Skull bashed in, I’d say, not to put too fine a point on it. You’ll get the technical details from the PM, of course, but that’s about it. Rigor is almost completely resolved and decomposition has started. Also we have quite a few maggots hatching in the usual places. Eyes, mouth, nostrils. You know … The pathologist should be able to give you a pretty good idea of the time of death. Normally I’d say at least twenty-four hours, but in this weather …’ He shrugged expressively.
‘Sexually assaulted?’ asked Tailby.
‘Mmm. Some disturbance of the clothing, certainly. More than that I couldn’t say.’
‘I’ll take a quick look while we wait for the pathologist,’ said Tailby to Hitchens.
He pulled on plastic gloves and approached to within a few feet of the body. He would not touch it or anything around it, would not risk disturbing any of the possible forensic evidence waiting for the SOCOs. Inglefield looked at Fry curiously as she pocketed her radio. She had been listening keenly to their conversation even while she made the call.
‘New, are you?’ asked Inglefield. ‘Sorry about the maggots.’
‘New to the area,’ said Fry. ‘I’ve seen maggots on a dead body before. People don’t realize how quickly flies will get into the bodily orifices and lay their eggs, do they, Doctor?’
‘In weather like this the little beggars will be there within minutes of death. The eggs can hatch in another eight hours or so. How long has the girl been missing?’
‘Nearly two days,’ said Fry.
‘There you are then. Plenty of time. But don’t take my word …’
‘It’s a question for the pathologist, yes.’
‘Mrs Van Doon will no doubt give your chaps the chapter and verse. A forensic entomologist will be able to tell you what larval stage they’re going through and all that. That can fix the time of death pretty well.’
There was the sound of engines beyond the trees, and the helicopter appeared again, flying low, guiding a small convoy along the forest track that had been found.
‘I’d better go and direct them,’ said Fry.
‘Somebody was luckier than me,’ said the doctor. ‘My car’s back up the hill there somewhere. Ah well, no doubt the exercise will do me good. It’s what I tell my patients, anyway.’
Fry shepherded the Home Office pathologist and the Scenes of Crime team down the hillside. The SOCOs, a man and a woman, were sweating in their white suits and overshoes as they lugged their cases with them to the taped-off area and pulled their hoods over their heads until they looked like aliens. Tailby was backing away, leaving the way clear for the photographer to set up his lights against the lengthening shadows that were now falling across the scene. The exact position of the body had to be recorded with stills camera and video before the pathologist could get close enough to examine her maggots. Fry turned away. She knew that the next stage would involve the pathologist taking the girl’s rectal temperature.
She was in time to catch DI Hitchens taking a call on his cellphone.
‘Hitchens here. Yes?’
He listened for a minute, his face slipping from a frown into anger and frustration.
‘Get everyone on to it that you can. Yes, yes, I know. But this is a priority. We’re going to look complete idiots. Pull people in from wherever you need to.’
Hitchens looked round to see where Tailby was, and saw him walking back up the slope towards them.
‘Bastard!’ said Hitchens as he pushed the phone into his pocket.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Fry.
‘A team went to pick up Lee Sherratt, and he’s done a runner.’
Fry winced. It was bad luck to lose your prime suspect just when you were hoping that everything would click together easily, that the initial witness statements would tie your man into the scene and the results of forensic tests would sew the case up tight. It was bad luck she didn’t want to be drawn into, she thought, as they watched the DCI approach, peeling off his plastic gloves.
‘We need to get that time of death ascertained as close as we can,’ said Tailby. ‘Then we need the enquiry teams allocated to doing the house-to-house again, Paul.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We need to locate a weapon. Organize the search teams to get started as soon as Scenes are happy.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What was the call? Have they picked up the youth yet? Sherratt?’
Hitchens hesitated for the first time.
‘No, sir.’
‘And why not?’
‘They can’t find him. He hasn’t been at home since yesterday afternoon.’
‘I do hope you’re joking.’
Hitchens shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
Tailby scowled, his bushy eyebrows jutting down over cold grey eyes. ‘I don’t believe this. We interview the lad on Sunday when it’s a missing person enquiry, and as soon as a body turns up we’ve lost him.’
‘We had no reason –’
‘Well, we’ve got reason enough now. Reason enough down there, don’t you think?’ said Tailby angrily, gesturing at the spot where Laura Vernon lay.
‘We’ve got patrols trying all possible locations now. But so many men were taken up by the search down here –’
‘They’d damn well better turn the lad up soon. I want to wrap this one up quickly, Paul. Otherwise, people will be connecting it to the Edson case and we’ll have all the hysteria about a serial killer on the loose. We don’t want that – do we, Paul?’
Hitchens turned and looked appealingly at Fry. She kept her face impassive. If people chose to have bad luck, she wasn’t about to offer to share it with them.
‘Right,’ said Tailby. ‘What’s next? Let’s see – what’s his name? The finder?’
‘Dickinson,’ said Hitchens. ‘Harry Dickinson.’
Harry was in the kitchen. He had finally taken off his jacket, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to show white, sinewy arms. At his wrists there was a clear line like a tidemark between the pale skin untouched by sun and his brown, weathered hands, sprinkled with liver spots and something dark and more ingrained. Harry was at the sink using a small blue plastic-handled mop to scrub out the teacups and polish the spoons. His face was as serious as if he were performing brain surgery.
‘He always does the washing-up,’ said Gwen when the detectives came to the door. ‘He says I don’t do it properly.’
‘We’d just like a few words, Mrs Dickinson,’ said Tailby. ‘Further to our enquiries.’
Harry seemed to become aware of them slowly. He put down the mop and dried his hands carefully on a towel, rolled his sleeves down over his arms and reached behind the door to put his jacket back on. Then he walked unhurriedly past them, without a word, into the dim front room of the cottage, where there was a glimpse of the road through a gap in white net curtains.
Hitchens and Tailby followed him and found him sitting upright on a hard-backed chair. He was facing them like a judge examining the suspects entering the dock. The detectives found two more chairs pushed close to a mahogany dining table and set them opposite the old man. Diane Fry slipped quietly into the room and leaned against the wall near the door with her notebook, while Hitchens and Tailby introduced themselves, showing their warrant cards.
‘Harry Dickinson?’ said Hitchens. The old man nodded. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, Harry. I’m Detective Inspector Hitchens. From Edendale.’
‘Where’s the lad?’ asked Harry.
‘Who?’
‘The one who was here before. Sergeant Cooper’s lad.’
Tailby looked at Hitchens, raising an eyebrow.
‘Ben Cooper is only a detective constable, Harry. This is a murder enquiry now. You understand that? Detective Chief Inspector Tailby here is the senior investigating officer who will be in charge of the enquiry.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Harry. ‘The man in charge.’
‘You are aware that we have found a body, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby. He spoke loudly and clearly, as if he had decided that they were dealing with an idiot.
Harry’s eyes travelled slowly from Hitchens to Tailby. At first he had looked unimpressed, now he looked stubborn.
‘The Mount girl, is it?’
‘The Vernon family live at the Mount,’ explained Hitchens for Tailby’s sake. ‘That’s the name of the house.’
‘The remains haven’t yet been formally identified, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby. ‘Until they have, we can’t commit ourselves to a positive statement in that regard. However, it is generally known that we have been conducting an extensive search for a fifteen-year-old female by that name for some hours. In the circumstances there would seem to be a strong degree of possibility that the remains discovered in the vicinity may be those of Laura Vernon.’
An old carriage clock in an oak case ticked quietly to itself on the mantelpiece, providing the only sound in the room as it counted off the seconds. Fry thought that time seemed to be passing particularly slowly within the room, as if it was sealed off from the rest of the world in a time zone of its own, where normal rules didn’t apply.
‘You talk like a proper pillock, don’t you?’ said Harry.
Tailby’s jaw muscles tightened, but he restrained himself.
‘We’d like to hear from you how you came to find the trainer, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I’ve told it –’
‘Yes, I know you’ve told it before. Just tell us again, please.’
‘I’ve got other things to do, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Tailby coolly. ‘It’s dominoes night.’
Harry took his pipe from the pocket of his jacket and poked at the contents of the ceramic bowl. His movements were slow and relaxed, and his expression was studiously placid. Hitchens began to stir, but Tailby quelled him with a movement of his hand.
‘You’ll no doubt understand one day,’ said Harry. ‘That at my age you can’t go rushing up and down hill twice in one afternoon and be in any fit state to go out of the house later on, without having a bit of a kip in between. I don’t have the energy for it any more. There’s no fighting it.’ He ran a hand across his neatly groomed hair, smoothing down the grey, Brylcreemed strands. ‘No matter how many dead bodies you’ve found.’
‘The sooner we get it over with, the sooner we’ll be able to leave you in peace.’
‘I can’t do anything more than that, not even for some top-brass copper and all his big words. All this coming and going and folk clattering about the house – it wears me out.’
Tailby sighed. ‘We’d really like to hear your story in your own words, Mr Dickinson. Just tell us the story, will you?’
Harry stared at him defiantly. ‘The story. Aye, well. Do you want it with hand gestures or without, this story?’
To Diane Fry there seemed to be something wrong with the scene, a sort of subtle reversal. It was as though the two detectives were waiting to be interviewed by the old man, not the other way round. Hitchens and Tailby were unsettled, shifting uncomfortably in their hard chairs, not sure what to say to break the moment. Harry, though, was totally at ease, calm and still, his feet planted in front of him on a worn patch of carpet. He had placed himself with his back to the window, so that he was outlined against the view of the street, a faint aura forming around his head and shoulders. Hitchens and Tailby were looking into the light, waiting for the old man to speak again.
‘Without, then, is it?’
‘Without, if you like, Mr Dickinson.’
‘I was out with Jess.’
‘Jess?’
‘My dog.’
‘Of course. You were walking your dog.’
Harry lit a taper, puffed on his pipe. He seemed to be waiting, to see if Tailby were going to take up the story himself.
‘I were walking my dog, like you say. We always go down that way. I told the lad. Sergeant Cooper’s –’
‘Sergeant Cooper’s lad, yes.’
‘Interrupt a lot, don’t you?’ said Harry. ‘Is that a, what you call it, interview technique?’
Fry thought she detected the ghost of a smile on Tailby’s face. Hitchens, though, so genial at the office, did not look like smiling.
‘Do go on, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby.
‘We always go down to the foot of Raven’s Side. Jess likes to run by the stream. After the rabbits. Not that she ever catches any. It’s a game, do you follow?’
Harry puffed smoke into the room. It drifted in a small cloud towards the ceiling, gathering round the glass bowl that hung on tiny chains below a sixty-watt light bulb. A wide patch of ceiling paper in the centre of the room was stained yellow with smoke.
Fry watched the moving cloud, and realized that the old man must sit every day in this same chair, in this room, to smoke his pipe. What was his wife doing meanwhile? Watching Coronation Street or Casualty on the colour television in the next room? And what did Harry do while he was smoking? There were a few books on a shelf set into the alcove formed by the chimney breast. The titles she could make out were The Miners in Crisis and War and Trade Unions in Britain, Choose Freedom and The Ripper and the Royals. There seemed to be only one novel – Robert Harris’s Fatherland. It was lined up with the other books, all regimented into a neat row between two carved oak bookends. Three or four issues of the Guardian were pushed into a magazine rack by the hearth. But there was no television here, no radio, no stereo. Once the newspaper had been read, it would leave nothing for the old man to do. Nothing but to listen to the ticking of the clock, and to think.
Fry became aware of Harry’s eyes on her. She felt suddenly as though he could read her thoughts. But she could not read his in return. His expression was impassive. He had the air of an aristocrat, forced to suffer an indignity but enduring it with composure.
‘A game, Harry …’ prompted Hitchens. He had less patience than the DCI. And every time he called the old man ‘Harry’ it seemed to stiffen his shoulders a little bit more. Tailby was politer, more tolerant. Fry liked to observe these things in her senior officers. If she made enough observations, perhaps she would be able to analyse them, put them through the computer, produce the ideal set of character traits for a budding DCI to aim for.
‘Sometimes she fetches things,’ said Harry. ‘I sit on a rock, smoke my pipe, watch the stream and the birds. Sometimes there’s otters, after the fish. If you sit still, they don’t notice you.’
Tailby was nodding. Maybe he was a keen naturalist. Fry didn’t have much knowledge of wildlife. There hadn’t been a lot of it in Birmingham, apart from the pigeons and the stray dogs.
‘And while I sit, Jess brings me things. Sticks, like. Or a stone, in her mouth. Sometimes she finds something dead.’
Harry paused. It was the first time Fry had seen him hesitate unintentionally. He was thinking back over his last words, as if surprised by what he had said. Then he shrugged.
‘I mean a stoat or a blackbird. A squirrel once. If they’re fresh dead and not been marked too bad, there’s a bloke over at Hathersage will have ‘em for his freezer.’
‘What?’
‘He stuffs ’em,’ said Harry. ‘All legal. He’s got a licence and everything.’
‘A taxidermist,’ said Hitchens.
Fry could see Tailby frown. Harry puffed on his pipe with extra vigour, as if he had just won a minor victory.
‘But today, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby.
‘Ah, today. Today, Jess brought me something else. She went off, rooting about in the bracken and that. I wasn’t paying much attention, just sitting. Then she came up to me, with something in her mouth. I couldn’t make out what it was at first. But it was that shoe.’
‘Did you see where the dog got it from?’
‘No, I told you. She was out of sight. I took the shoe off her. I remembered this lass you lot were looking for, the Mount girl. It looked the sort of object she would wear, that lass. So I brought it back. And my granddaughter phoned.’
‘You knew Laura Vernon?’
‘I reckon I know everybody in the village,’ said Harry. ‘It isn’t exactly Buxton here, you know. I’ve seen her all right.’
‘When did you last see her, Mr Dickinson?’ asked Tailby.
‘Ah. Couldn’t say that.’
‘It might be very important.’
‘Mmm?’
‘If she was in the habit of going on to the Baulk, where you walk your dog regularly, Mr Dickinson, you may have seen her earlier.’
‘You may also have seen her killer,’ said Hitchens.
‘Doubt it,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘Surely –’
‘I don’t see anyone.’
Harry glared at Hitchens, suddenly aggressive. The DI saw it and bridled immediately.
‘This is a murder enquiry, Harry. Don’t forget that. We expect full cooperation.’
The old man pursed his lips. The skin around his mouth puckered and wrinkled, but his eyes remained hard and cool. ‘I reckon I’ve done my bit. I’m getting a bit fed up of you lot now.’
‘Tough. We’re not messing about here, Harry. We’re not playing games, like you throwing sticks for your dog to fetch. This is a serious business, and we need all the answers you can give us.’
‘Have you seen anybody else on the Baulk, Mr Dickinson?’ said Tailby gently.
‘If I had,’ said Harry, ‘I’d remember, wouldn’t I?’
Hitchens snorted and stirred angrily in his chair. ‘Crap.’
‘Hold on, Paul,’ said Tailby automatically.
‘Right. I’ll not have that in my house,’ said Harry. ‘It’s high time you were off somewhere else, the lot of you, doing some good.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe towards Fry and her notebook. ‘And make sure you take the secretary lass with you. She’s making a mucky mark on my wall.’
‘Detective Constable Fry will have to stay to take your statement.’
‘She’ll have to wake me up first.’
Tailby and Hitchens stood up, straightening their backs from the hard chairs. The DCI looked too tall for the room. The house had been built at a time when very few people stood more than six foot. He must have had to stoop to get through the door, though Fry hadn’t noticed it.
‘We may want to speak to you again, Mr Dickinson,’ said Tailby.
‘You’d be better off sending that lad next time.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with DI Hitchens and myself. Sorry and all that, but we expect you to cooperate fully with our enquiries, however long they may take. Are you sure there isn’t anything else you’d like to say to me just now, Mr Dickinson?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Harry.
‘What’s that?’
‘Bugger off.’
6 (#ulink_a236ce53-6745-5a9b-b8d8-bf08d9294bd7)
No sooner had the police left than the little cottage was again full of people. Helen watched from the kitchen as her mother and father fussed into the back room, flapping round her grandparents as if they were naughty children who needed scolding and reassuring at the same time.
‘My goodness, you two, what’s been going on? All these police up here? What have you been doing, Harry?’
Andrew Milner was in a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a frivolous blue and green pattern, but he still had on the trousers of the dark-grey suit he wore for the office. He smelled faintly of soap and a suggestion of whisky fumes. Helen didn’t need to be told that her father had showered after arriving home from work and had already drunk his first Glenmorangie of the evening by the time she had phoned. He wore clip-on sun shades over his glasses, which he had to flip up as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the cottage. Now they stood out horizontally from his forehead like extravagant eyebrows.
Harry looked up at Andrew from his chair, no gesture of welcome breaking the rigidity of his expression.
‘I dare say young Helen’s told you what you need to know.’
Margaret Milner was fanning herself with a straw hat. She was a large woman and felt the heat badly. Her floral dress swirled and rustled around her knees and wafted powerful gusts of body spray throughout the room.
‘A dead body. How awful. You poor things.’
‘It was a shoe your dad found,’ said Gwen, who had not yet tired of the excitement. ‘One of those trainer things. They said there was a dead girl with it, but your dad didn’t see her. Did you, Harry?’
‘It was Jess,’ said Harry. ‘Jess that found it.’
‘But there was … Was there blood?’
‘So they reckon.’
‘The young policeman took it away,’ said Gwen. ‘The first one, the young one.’
‘The Cooper lad,’ said Harry.
‘Who?’
‘Sergeant Cooper’s son. The old copper. You remember all the fuss, surely?’
‘Oh, I know.’ Margaret turned to her daughter. ‘Didn’t you used to know him very well at school, Helen? Is that the one? I remember now. You liked him, didn’t you?’
Helen fidgeted, ready to escape back to the kitchen to make more tea. She loved her parents and her grandparents, but she was uncomfortable when they were all together. She could communicate with them one at a time, but when they were gathered in a family group there was a kind of blanket of incomprehension that descended between them.
‘Yes, Mum, Ben Cooper.’
‘You always seemed to get on well. But he never asked you out, did he? I always thought it was a shame.’
‘Mum –’
‘I know, I know – it’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Forget it, Mum. This isn’t the time.’
‘We’ve had a body,’ said Gwen plaintively, appealing to the room, as if someone, somewhere could give her consolation, even tell her it hadn’t happened.
‘And it was the Vernons’ girl?’ said Andrew impatiently. Helen noticed her father’s faint Scottish accent creeping through in the ‘r’s, as it did when he was under stress. ‘Did they say it was definitely Laura Vernon?’
‘She had to be identified, they said.’ Gwen looked challengingly towards Harry, letting it be known that she had been listening at the door when the police had been interviewing him. Harry took no notice. He was feeling at his pocket, as if all he wanted to do was pull out his pipe and retire to the front room, to escape to his sanctuary.
‘They reckon it was her all right,’ said Harry.
‘Poor little thing,’ said Margaret. ‘She was only a kiddie. Who would do a thing like that, Helen?’
‘She was fifteen. Would you like some tea?’
‘Fifteen. Just a child. They gave her everything, her mother and father did. A private school, her own horse. All that money, just think of it. And look what it comes to.’
‘I wonder what Graham Vernon will think,’ said Andrew.
‘What do you mean, Dad?’
‘Well, it’s awkward. You know – just imagine what state he’s in over the girl. And then it has to be my own father-in-law who finds her.’
‘What does that matter to him, for heaven’s sake? Their daughter’s dead – it won’t make any difference to them who found her.’
‘Well, it’s just awkward, that’s all.’
‘Andrew thinks his role is to be Graham Vernon’s loyal lackey,’ said Margaret. ‘Being involved in the murder of his daughter rather ruins the image, doesn’t it?’
‘Involved? Well, hardly,’ protested Andrew.
‘However distantly, of course,’ said Margaret, with a smile of satisfaction. ‘I suppose it’s bound to make you feel tainted by association.’
‘Stop it, Margaret.’
‘Perhaps it would have been better if Dad had just walked on and ignored it, and said nothing. Better for you, anyway. I’m surprised he didn’t think of your reputation at the time. It was very remiss of you, Dad.’
Harry took his empty pipe out and sucked on its stem, looking from one to the other. Helen thought he was the only one of them who was enjoying the conversation.
‘Anyway, they haven’t much of a reputation up there to be worried about, have they?’ said Margaret.
‘That’s not fair. The Vernons are very well-respected.’
Margaret snorted contemptuously. ‘Respected. Not in this house. What do you say, Dad?’
‘Rich buggers. Ignorant rubbish.’
Helen smiled. ‘That needed saying too. They’ve done enough to this family. Why should we let something like this affect us? I’m sorry for their trouble, but it’s their trouble, not ours. It’s nothing to do with Granddad. Blow the Vernons. We have to see that Grandma and Granddad are all right.’
‘Of course we do. Andrew?’
‘Well, all right.’
‘We’re lucky we’re a proper family and can stand together,’ said Margaret. ‘Not like them up there. That’s been their problem, of course. That’s been the cause of all the trouble in the past. They don’t know what a family should be. And that’s the cause of this bit of trouble, too, you’ll see.’
‘We should talk about it,’ said Helen. ‘We should have talked about it before.’
‘He won’t,’ said Gwen. ‘He won’t talk about it to anybody.’
‘There’s no need for it,’ said Harry. ‘Let it rest.’
Helen stood by his chair and put her hand on his arm. ‘Granddad?’
He patted her hand and smiled up at her. ‘Believe me, lass, there’s no need.’
She sighed. ‘No, we’ve never talked about anything important, have we? Not ever, in this family. Except when we were angry or upset. And that’s not the time to talk. It’s not the time to do anything.’
‘Well, I don’t know what you mean by that, I’m sure,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m as capable as anyone of talking things over without getting upset about it.’
Margaret’s voice was becoming high-pitched. She tossed her head and fiddled with an earring, glaring at her husband as if challenging him not to support her. But Andrew turned away with sagging shoulders and found himself staring into the mournful eyes of Jess, who had crept into the corner of the room to listen. The dog’s ears twitched from side to side as she assessed the sound of their voices, trying to judge the mood and looking dejected at what she heard.
‘There was no need for you to come here, you know,’ said Harry. ‘No need at all. We were managing perfectly well, us and Helen.’
‘We could hardly stay away at a time like this,’ said Margaret. ‘We’re your family, after all.’
Harry stood and walked slowly to the stairs. ‘I’ll be going out for a while,’ he said.
And before anybody could ask him where to, he had disappeared. They could hear water running and the sound of a wardrobe door creaking above them through the ancient floorboards.
‘Where is he going?’ asked Andrew.
‘Not to the pub, surely?’ said Margaret. ‘Not at a time like this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Gwen. ‘He’ll be going to meet them.’
Half an hour later, Harry had escaped from the cottage and was settled into an entirely different atmosphere, where he didn’t need to be prompted to tell his story. When he had finished, it required a moment of quiet contemplation, a few swallows of beer, a companionable silence to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion.
‘Well, Harry. Police and all.’
‘Oh aye, them, all right, Sam. A bucketload of ’em.’
‘Making a nuisance of themselves, I suppose?’
‘They try, some of them. But they don’t bother me.’
The corner of the Drover between the fire and the window smelled strongly of old men and muddy dogs. The seats of the wooden settles the men sat on were worn smooth to the shape of their buttocks, and their boots seemed to ease themselves into familiar depressions in the dark carpet tiles.
Sam Beeley had rested his stick against the table. Its ivory handle, shaped like the head of an Alsatian dog, stared at the beaten brass surface with contempt. Occasionally, Sam stroked the ivory with a bony hand, fondling the Alsatian’s worn ears in his yellow fingers, or tapping it with a twisted thumbnail on the corner of the brass. His knees cracked when he moved, and he shuffled his toes uncomfortably in soft suede shoes as if he was unable to find a position that did not give him pain. He was the thinnest of the three men, but his thinness was almost masked by the multiple layers of clothes that he wore, despite the warmth of the evening. The emaciation showed most in his hands and in his face, where the flesh had sunk into his cheeks and his eye sockets were dark pools where weak blue eyes flickered.
‘Bloody coppers,’ he said, his voice rough with cigarette smoke. ‘What do you reckon, Wilford?’
‘We can do without ’em, Sam.’
‘True enough.’
‘Oh aye.’
Wilford Cutts had removed his cap to reveal a tangle of white hair around a pale scalp that contrasted sharply with the ruddy colour of his face. He had an untidy white moustache and a suggestion of sideburns that might once have been bushy around his ears. His neck was thick and sinewy and ran into heavy shoulders that could no longer be called well-muscled, but sagged forward into his sweater, soft and fleshy. His palms were stained with grime, and his fingernails were dark against the side of his beer glass. Dark fibres clung to his corduroy trousers, which were worn at the knees and stiff at the calves, where they were tucked into grey woollen socks. He kept his feet pushed out of sight under the bench, in case the landlord should notice the caked soil drying on the soles of his boots.
‘So it’s what they call a murder enquiry then, is it, Harry? They’ve worked out what happened to the lass?’
‘They didn’t say, Wilford.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Bloody coppers.’
Harry was keeping his cap firmly in place. He was the centre of attention, the man of the moment, but it didn’t do to get too excited. He had put on a clean shirt to walk to the pub, and a tie with a discreet paisley pattern fastened neatly round his throat. His feet were thrust out in front of him into the room, where the wall lights were reflected in his polished toecaps.
Now and then one of the pub’s customers would call to him across the room, and he acknowledged their greetings with a brief nod, not uncivil, but deliberately reserved. He stared, tight-lipped, at a group of youths and girls he didn’t recognize, who were laughing noisily at the far end of the bar, trying to talk above each other and now and then breaking into bursts of song.
By unspoken consent, Sam sat closest to the fire, although it was summer and the grate was empty. Wilford sat furthest away, with his back to the door, hidden in the shadow of the alcove. There were two pints of Marston’s Bitter and a half of stout on the table, next to a heap of well-worn dominoes which had been emptied from their box and left untouched. With the round of drinks had come a packet of smoky bacon crisps, which Wilford slid into his pocket.
‘And how are the family bearing up?’ said Sam. ‘Bit of a shock for the womenfolk, no doubt.’
Harry shrugged. ‘That son-in-law of mine is the worst by a long chalk,’ he said. ‘He can’t stand it at all. Worried about his precious job with Vernon.’
‘He’d crack like a nut, that one. Sorry to say it, Harry. But if he had anything to hide, if he ever found himself under suspicion. He’d cough, all right.’
The slang expression brought a small smile to Harry’s face. Like Sam, he had heard it used last night in the latest television police series, set in some drug-ridden area of inner London, where the detectives were more like criminals than the criminals themselves.
‘Has he?’ asked Wilford suddenly.
‘Has who what?’
‘Has Andrew Milner got anything to hide?’
‘You must be joking,’ said Harry. ‘Our Margaret knows every hole in his socks. The poor bugger couldn’t hide a pimple on his arse.’
‘The police are useless, anyway,’ said Sam. ‘They never know who to talk to, what questions to ask. If they solve anything, it’s by luck round here.’
Wilford laughed. ‘Not like on the telly, Sam.’
‘Well, on the telly they always sort it out. That stands to reason. They’re just stories. There wouldn’t be much point putting them on the telly otherwise, would there?’
‘I suppose it’s a sort of warning to people, like,’ said Wilford. ‘It’s telling them not to commit murders and crimes, because they’ll get caught, like they always do on the telly.’
‘But they don’t really get caught,’ said Sam. ‘Not in real life they don’t. Half of ’em never get found out. And those that do get caught are let off by the judges. They get probation or one of them other things.’
‘Community service,’ said Harry. He pronounced the words carefully, as if he had never actually heard them spoken but had only seen them as an unfamiliar combination of syllables printed in the court reports of the Buxton Advertiser.
Sam curled his lip. ‘Aye. Community service. When was that ever a punishment for a crime? Making ’em do a bit of honest work. It’s just like letting them off. It’s true, you can get away with owt these days. Murder, even.’
‘But the people who watch the telly don’t know that,’ said Wilford. ‘Mostly they have no idea. They think it is real life on the box. The kids today. And the women, of course. They don’t know the difference. They think when there’s a crime Inspector Morse comes out and works it all out in the pub with a pencil and a bit of paper and the murderer gets banged up.’
‘Banged up, aye. For life.’
They lapsed into silence again, staring at each other’s drinks, trying to imagine the reality of spending the rest of their lives in prison. A life sentence might mean ten, twenty or thirty years – it was all the same for a man in his late seventies or eighties. He would never be likely to see the outside again.
‘You’d miss the open air something terrible in prison,’ said Sam.
The other two nodded, their heads turning automatically to the window, where, even in the dusk, the outline of the Witches could be made out against the southern sky, jagged and black on the horizon of Win Low. A ripple of unease ran round the table. Sam shivered and clutched at his stick, rubbing the ivory as if seeking comfort from its smooth shape. Wilford ran his hands nervously through his untidy hair and reached for his glass. Even Harry seemed to become more tight-lipped, a shade more cautious.
‘No. You couldn’t be doing with that,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’
The three old men looked sideways at each other, unspoken messages passing between them in the tentative movements of their hands and the tilting of their heads. It was a level of communication they had learned in their working lives, when they had been isolated from the rest of the world in their own enclosed space, where conversation was unnecessary and at times impossible. At such moments, they could still cut themselves off from the world around them, pushing the noise and bustle of the pub into the distance as effectively as if they had been sitting in one of those dark tunnels a mile underground, far from the surface light.
Sam fumbled a packet of ten Embassy and a box of matches from somewhere among his clothing and lit a cigarette, squinting his pale eyes against the cloud of smoke that hung in the still air, obscuring his face. Wilford ran his dirt-stained fingers through his hair, momentarily revealing an unnaturally white patch of naked scalp at the side of his head, where the skin was stretched thin and tight like paper. Harry fiddled with his unlit pipe, poking a few dominoes about the table with the stem, separating the tiles that were face down. He stared at them fixedly, as though hoping to read their numbers through their patterned backs.
‘There are some that would have a troubled conscience, though,’ suggested Wilford. ‘They say that can be as bad as anything anybody else can do to you.’
‘It can drive folks mad,’ agreed Sam.
‘Like being in your own hell, I reckon. That would be punishment, all right.’
‘Worse than community service, any road.’
‘Worse than prison?’ asked Harry.
They looked unsure about that. They were picturing a narrow, confined cell and bars, the knowledge of hundreds of other men crowded together like ants, allowed out into a yard for an hour each day. Shut away from the light and the air for ever.
‘You’d have to have a conscience to start with, of course,’ said Wilford.
‘There aren’t many that have one these days,’ agreed Sam.
They both looked at Harry, waiting for his response. But Harry didn’t seem to want to think about it. He got up stiffly, collected their glasses and walked across the room to the bar. He looked to neither right nor left as he moved through the crowd of youngsters, his back upright, like a man entirely apart from those around him. Drinkers parted automatically to let him through, and the landlord served him without having to be told the order.
Harry’s jacket and tie looked incongruously formal and sober among the T-shirts and shorts of the other customers. He could have been an elderly undertaker who had wandered into a wedding reception. When he turned his head, the peak of his cap swung like a knife across a background of pink limbs and sunburnt faces.
‘So the bloke who killed this lass,’ said Harry when he returned to the corner table. ‘Do you reckon he’ll get away with it?’
‘Depends,’ said Wilford. ‘Depends whether the coppers have a bit of luck. Perhaps somebody saw something and decides to tell them about it. Or some bobby asks the right question by accident. That’s the only way it happens.’
‘They have their suspicions, no doubt.’
‘It doesn’t matter what they suspect. They can’t do anything without evidence,’ said Wilford confidently.
‘Evidence. Aye, that’s what they’ll want.’
‘They’ll be desperate for it. Desperate for a bit of evidence.’
‘They reckon that Sherratt lad has gone missing,’ said Sam.
‘Daft bugger.’
‘It’ll keep the coppers busy, I suppose, looking for him. He’ll be the number one suspect.’
‘Unless they fancy blaming it on one of the family,’ said Wilford. ‘That’s where they always look first.’
‘Aye,’ said Sam, brightening suddenly. ‘Or the boyfriend.’
‘Ah! Which boyfriend?’ asked Harry.
‘That’s the question. With that one, that’s the first question you’d have to ask.’
‘And only fifteen,’ said Sam.
They shook their heads in despair.
‘Well, that’s the best bit, eh, Harry?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Harry. ‘That’s the best bit. When they do all their enquiring, they’ll turn up all sorts. They’re bound to find out about those buggers at the Mount. The Vernons.’
‘Maybe when they do …’
‘… they won’t be so bothered about finding out who put the cat among their pigeons.’
‘Maybe,’ said Harry, ‘they’d even give him a medal.’
The youths at the other end of the pub turned in astonishment to stare at the three old men in the corner. For once, the laughter of the old men was even louder and more unnatural than their own.
Helen stood with her grandmother on the doorstep of the cottage, watching the lights of the Renault disappear past the bend by the church. The night was clear and still quite warm, and the stars glowed in a dark-blue blanket of sky. Only the streetlamps here and there and the security lights outside the Coach House and the Old Vicarage created areas that seemed truly dark.
‘It was nice to see Sergeant Cooper’s son, wasn’t it? He’s made a nice-looking young man.’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
‘Ben, is it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘He’s the one you used to bring round to the house after school sometimes, isn’t he, Helen?’
‘Only once or twice, Grandma. And that was years ago.’
‘I remember, though. I remember how you looked at him. And then you told me one day that you were going to marry him when you grew up. I remember that.’
‘All little girls get crushes like that. I don’t even know him now.’
‘I suppose so. But he has nice eyes. Dark brown.’
They turned back into the house. Helen noticed that Gwen was reluctant even to look into the kitchen, let alone go near the door, although the police had long since taken away the bloodstained trainer and the pages of the Buxton Advertiser with it.
‘They’ll be up at the Mount now,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t envy them the job. They have to tell Mr and Mrs Vernon what they’ve found.’
Her grandmother looked at the clock, fiddled with her cardigan, folded and unfolded a small piece of pink tissue from her sleeve.
‘One of them will have to go and identify the body, you know. I suppose he’ll be the one who does it. But it will hit her hard, Charlotte Vernon. Don’t you think so, Grandma?’
Gwen shook her head, and Helen saw a small tear gather at the corner of one eye, brightening for a moment the dry skin of her cheek.
‘I know I should do,’ said Gwen. ‘I know I should feel sorry for them, but I don’t. I can’t help it, Helen.’
Helen sat on the side of her grandmother’s chair and put her arm around her thin shoulders.
‘It’s all right, Grandma. It’s understandable. There’s no need to upset yourself. What if I make some hot chocolate, then there might be something you can watch on TV until Granddad comes back.’
Gwen nodded and sniffed, and found another piece of tissue that was still intact to wipe her nose. Helen patted her shoulder and began to move towards the kitchen until her grandmother’s voice stopped her. It sounded harsh and full of fear, and trembling on the edge of despair.
‘What’s going to happen to Harry?’ she said. ‘Oh dear God, what will they do to Harry?’
7 (#ulink_57529e24-52c5-5000-b926-15f8466a69c8)
The mortuary assistant drew back the plastic sheet from the face with care. The relatives should never be allowed to see the injuries on the body, unless it was absolutely necessary. In this case, the face was bad enough, although it had been cleaned up as far as possible in the time they had been given. The maggots had been scooped away and bottled, the eyes cleaned and closed, the dried blood scraped off for testing. With the hair pushed back, the injuries to the side of the head were not readily visible.
‘Yes,’ said Graham Vernon, without hesitation.
‘You are identifying the remains as those of your daughter, Laura Vernon, sir?’ asked DCI Tailby.
‘Yes. That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’s a necessary formality which allows the other procedures to get under way.’
The assistant was already drawing the sheet back over Laura’s face, returning her to the anonymity of the recently dead, until the postmortem examination could be completed.
‘Does one of your procedures involve catching my daughter’s murderer, by any chance, Chief Inspector?’ said Vernon, without taking his eyes from the body.
There was no need for Tailby to have been present in person when Graham Vernon identified his daughter’s body, but he saw it as a valuable chance to observe the reactions of relatives. He watched Vernon now as the man stepped away from the sheeted mound that had been his daughter. He saw his eyes linger with that familiar horrid fascination on the loose ridges and hollows of green plastic that concealed the dead girl’s face. Vernon’s hands moved constantly, touching his face and his mouth, smoothing his jacket, rubbing their soft fingers together in a series of involuntary gestures that could mean nervousness or barely concealed distress. His face told its own story.
Many parents and bereaved spouses had told Tailby that at this point their minds still refused to accept the reality of death. They would imagine their loved one sitting up suddenly and laughing at the joke, the sheet falling away from features restored to life and health. Was Graham Vernon thinking this now? Did he still see and hear a living Laura? And, if so, what was she telling him that made him look so afraid?
There was a fine line to tread in these cases. The family of a victim had to be treated with care and consideration. Yet ninety per cent of murders were ‘domestics’, in which a family member or close friend was responsible. Tailby was no longer moved by the various symptoms of distress displayed by relatives. It was a necessary ability in the job he did, this hardening of the emotions. Sometimes, though, he was forced to acknowledge that it had weakened him as a person; it was a long time since he had been able to form a close relationship.
‘You appreciate that we will need to talk to you and your wife again, sir,’ he said, when Vernon finally turned away.
‘There isn’t anything else I can tell you that I haven’t already.’
‘We need to know as much about Laura’s background as we can. We need to interview all her friends and associates again. We need to identify any links that we haven’t yet discovered. We need to trace her movements on the day she was killed. There’s a lot to be done.’
‘Just find Lee Sherratt!’ snapped Vernon. ‘That’s all you need to do, Chief Inspector.’
‘Enquiries are being made in that respect, sir.’
‘And what does that mean, for God’s sake?’
The two men walked out through the double doors into the corridor, attempting to leave behind the stink of antiseptic. Their footsteps echoed on a tiled floor as Tailby lengthened his stride to keep up with Vernon, who seemed to want to get away as quickly as possible.
‘We’ll find the boy, of course, sir. In time. I remain hopeful.’
Vernon stopped suddenly, so that Tailby couldn’t avoid bumping into him. They ended up almost eye to eye, though the detective was several inches taller. Vernon stared upwards with a ferocious scowl, his handsome face swollen into a grimace. His eyes were tired and shot with tiny red veins, and he had shaved unevenly on one side of his face.
‘I seem to remember you saying something like that before, Chief Inspector. Nearly two days ago. But that time you were assuring me that you would find my daughter.’
Tailby waited, not blinking in the face of Graham Vernon’s stare. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘But somebody else found her first. Didn’t they?’
Tailby recalled the painful scene earlier in the evening, when he had visited the Mount to break the news to the Vernons. He remembered the way that neither parent had shown any surprise on seeing him, only despair and resignation.
He also remembered Charlotte Vernon’s slow deterioration into sobbing hysteria, the retreat to a bedroom somewhere, and Graham Vernon’s phone call to their doctor. They had been both shocked and upset, of course. But they had reacted entirely separately – there had not been the smallest gesture of mutual support in the first moments after the bad news had been broken.
The two men were through the outside door and at the top of the mortuary steps when Tailby spoke again. To their right, through a screen of dark conifers, they could see the lighted windows of the medical wards of Edendale General Hospital, a series of modern two-storey brick buildings added to the rambling Victorian original. The lights looked cheerful and bright in contrast with the plain facade of the mortuary and its discreet car park.
‘Apart from the fact that he seems to have temporarily disappeared, there is no firm evidence at this stage to link Lee Sherratt with the death of your daughter,’ said the DCI reasonably.
‘That’s your job, surely, Chief Inspector. It’s up to you to find the evidence. I just hope you’re going to get on with it now.’
His voice had grown louder once they were free of the atmosphere of the mortuary. He had reverted to the brusque and impatient businessman. It had been interesting to observe the change in him in the presence of his daughter’s body. But the change had been short-lived.
‘All we know of Lee Sherratt, sir, is that he was employed by you as a gardener for the last four months. You gave him employment after he answered an advertisement in the window of Moorhay post office. Until then, he seems not to have known your family at all. His skills appear to have been of a labouring nature – digging and weeding, using a lawn mower and pushing a wheelbarrow rather than anything requiring horticultural expertise, since he has absolutely no training and no experience in that field. Am I right?’
‘That’s all we wanted – a labourer. My wife has all the expertise we needed.’
‘Indeed. And though he is twenty years old, this was the first job Sherratt had ever obtained, apart from a short spell as a warehouse assistant at the Tesco supermarket here in Edendale. He likes drinking, he admits he has had several casual girlfriends, and he is known to follow the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday FC. It hardly seems much to reach a conclusion from, sir.’
‘Look, his father’s in prison for receiving stolen goods,’ said Vernon. ‘And the boy himself was involved in stealing a tourist’s car. What do you make of that?’
‘A criminal background, eh? Then why did you employ him, Mr Vernon?’
Vernon turned away, staring at the police car waiting in the car park. ‘I wanted to give him a chance. I don’t believe young men like that should be hanging around idle with nothing to do but get into trouble. Is that so wrong? Also, he looked like a strong youth who could cope with the heavy work. All right, I admit I made a mistake, but how could I have known what he would turn out to be?’
‘His mother says he’s just an ordinary young man who likes girls and beer and football.’
‘Crap!’ said Vernon. ‘Look a bit deeper, Chief Inspector. You’ll find Sherratt is a violent yob who was obsessed with my daughter. I warned him off, I sacked him. And a few days later she’s found attacked and murdered. Who else are you going to suspect?’
Vernon stalked off and got into the car that was waiting to take him home to Moorhay. But Stewart Tailby stood thoughtfully for a moment on the mortuary steps, considering the last question. On reflection, he was glad that Vernon hadn’t waited to be given the answer.
Diane Fry had got a lift back into Edendale with two traffic officers. She had been sent off duty for the night, while DCI Tailby himself had made the journey up to the Mount to ask the Vernons to identify the body.
As she sat behind the traffic men rustling in their yellow fluorescent jackets, she began to feel the familiar sensation of growing despondency as the tension left her and the adrenaline subsided. Very shortly she would have to walk away from the job and face up to the bleak reality of her personal life for another depressing evening.
‘Thanks, fellers!’ she called as the car dropped her in the station yard.
The driver waved a hand nonchalantly in her direction, but his partner turned to look at her as the Rover pulled away. He eyed her curiously and said something to the driver which Fry couldn’t make out. She dismissed it from her mind as not worth bothering about. She had seen female colleagues rushing like lemmings to destroy their own careers in the force because they had let totally petty incidents get out of proportion and fester in their minds.
First she walked up to the CID room. All the lights were on, and one or two of the computer screens were flickering with screen savers that looked like all the stars of the galaxy rushing past the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. But the place was devoid of human life, not even a DC on night duty. Fry sat at her desk and wrote up her notes of the interview with Harry Dickinson. She knew that Tailby would be demanding them first thing, before the morning briefing, and she wanted them to be there for him before he had to ask. It would mean another small credit to her name – and it would also mean she would be available immediately for allocation to an enquiry team.
The report didn’t take her long. She was a competent typist, and her note-taking was accurate and legible. She hesitated for only a moment when she reached the end of the interview, but decided to include the final comment from Harry Dickinson for the sake of completeness. As she wrote that Dickinson had told DCI Tailby to ‘bugger off’, she was surprised to find herself smiling. She quickly changed the expression to a grimace, then a frown, looking round the empty office to be sure that no one was watching her. It wasn’t her style to laugh at senior officers – she had never joined in the irreverent banter and rude jokes of the canteen, either here or at West Midlands. She couldn’t understand what there was about Harry Dickinson’s comment that could have made her smile.
She printed out two copies of her notes and dropped one into the tray on DI Hitchens’s desk. Then she walked up to the incident room, where a DS and a computer operator were huddled together over a telephone and a screen full of data. They both ignored her as she cast around for the action file to insert the second copy of her report. She knew that, in the morning, when the regular day shift came on, the room would be buzzing with activity. From what she had seen of Tailby, she was sure he would be fully up to date and reminded of the details of the day by the time everyone arrived for briefing.
Then, finally, there was nothing left for her to do. She shut the incident room door quietly and walked back down through the almost empty building to the car park.
After she had deactivated the alarm on her black Peugeot, she stood for a moment, looking at the back wall of the police station. There was nothing at all to see, but for a few lighted windows, where shadowy outlines could be made out occasionally as officers went about their business. Probably some of them were resentful about being on duty when they would rather be at home with their families or out at the pub or whatever else police officers did in their free time. Fry guessed that very few of them would resent having to leave the station and go home. She started the Peugeot and drove too quickly out of the yard.
In Edendale, as in any other small town, the evening often meant almost deserted streets for long periods, interrupted by straggling groups of young people heading for the pubs between eight and nine o’clock, and the same groups, stumbling now, returning home at half past eleven or looking for buses and taxis to take them on to night clubs or parties.
Many of the youngsters who littered the streets at night were not only the worse for drink, but were also plainly underage. Diane Fry knew enough to turn a blind eye when she passed them. Every police officer would do so, unless some other offence was being committed – an assault, a breach of the peace, abusive language or indecent exposure. Underage drinking could only be tackled in the pubs themselves, and there were always more urgent things to do, always other priorities.
Today was Monday, and even the young people were thin on the ground as Fry drove down Greaves Road towards the town centre. She circled the roundabout at the end of the pedestrianized shopping area and automatically looked to her right down Clappergate. There were lights on in the windows of Boots the Chemists and McDonald’s, where three youths slouched against the black cast-iron street furniture, eating Chicken McNuggets and large fries prior to adding their cartons to the debris already littering the paving stones.
Most of the shops were shrouded in darkness, abandoning the town to the pubs and restaurants. Fry had not yet got used to the mixture of shops in Edendale. By day, there was a small baker’s shop in Clappergate with wicker baskets and an ancient delivery boy’s bicycle strung with onions and a painted milk churn, all standing outside on the pavement. A few doors down was a New Age shop rich with the smell of aromatherapy oils and scented candles and the glint of crystals. In between them lay SpecSavers and the dry cleaners and a branch of the Derbyshire Building Society.
Further along, on Hulley Road, a couple in their thirties stood looking into the darkened window of one of the estate agents near the market square. They were probably weighing up the prices of properties in Catch Wind and Pysenny Banks, the more picturesque and desirable parts of old Edendale, where the stonewalled streets were barely wide enough for a car and the river ran past front gardens filled with lobelias and lichen-covered millstones. Diane Fry wondered why the couple had chosen to visit the estate agent’s at night. Where were they going, where had they come from? What intimate plans were they making for themselves, the two of them together?
She had to stop at the lights at the far end of the square. On her right, running down the hill, were steep cobbled alleys with names like Nimble John’s Gate and Nick i’th Tor. Narrow pubs and tea rooms and craft shops filled the corners of these alleys like latecomers crowding round the edges of the main shopping area. Of course, they really were latecomers – attracted by the twentieth-century influx of tourists rather than by the traditional trade of a market town.
Fry had researched her new area, and knew that a fair share of the Peak District’s twenty-two million visitors found their way to Edendale each year, in one form or another. By day, the market square was frequently impassable because of the volume of traffic passing through or seeking parking spaces on the cobbles near the public toilets and the recycling skips.
A huge Somerfield’s lorry rolled slowly across the junction, heading for the back of the supermarket that had recently opened on Fargate, replacing a derelict cotton mill. Beyond the junction, the Castleton Road began to climb past rows of pebble-dashed semis. On either side, close-packed residential areas spiralled up the hillsides, houses lining narrow, winding roads that took sudden twists and turns to follow the humps and hollows of the underlying contours. The roads were made even narrower up there by the cars parked nose to tail at the kerb, except on the worst of the bends. The bigger houses had made room for short drives and garages, but the humbler cottages had not been built for people with cars.
Further out, the houses became newer as they got higher, though they were built of the same white stone. On the edge of town were small council estates where the streets were called ‘Closes’ and had grass verges. Finally, there was an area where the housing petered out in a scattering of smallholdings and small-scale dairy farms. In some places, it was difficult to see where town became country, with farm buildings converted into homes and mews-style developments, lying shoulder to shoulder with muddy crewyards, fields full of black and white cows and pervasive rural smells.
Eventually, the pressure for more housing would force up the price of the farmland, and the town would continue its spread. But for now, Edendale was constrained in its hollow by the barrier of hills.
Turning from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number twelve. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the tiny bedsitters on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases.
Her own flat, on the first floor, consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle and a tiny kitchen area. The wallpaper was striped in a faded shade of brown, and the pattern on the carpet was a complicated swirl of washed-out blues and pinks and yellows, as if designed to hide any substance spilt on it. Judging by the background smell, there must have been many things spilt in the flat over the years that she would not have liked to name. Most of the other occupants of the house were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.
Fry made herself cheese on toast and a cup of tea and took a Müller low-fat yoghurt from a fridge that smelled suspiciously of rotting fish and onions. No amount of cleaning had removed the smell, but in any case she intended to keep only a minimum amount of food in the fridge, preferring to visit the shops as often as required, glad to take any excuse to be out of the flat. There was an Asian corner shop a quarter of a mile away where the young couple behind the counter had seemed pleasant enough. A friendly greeting over the sliced bread and gold top could be welcome at times.
After her meal, she spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day as she would after a practice session at the dojo, flexing her muscles and stretching her joints and limbs. Then she showered and put on her old black silk kimono with the Chinese dragon on the back and the Yin and Yang symbols on the breast.
Tomorrow, she decided, she would make a point of getting hold of the Yellow Pages and looking up names and addresses of local martial arts centres. She would not find an instructor quite like her old shotokan master in Warley, and she would have to adapt to new techniques. But she could not let her skills go rusty. The ability to defend herself had become too important to her now. Besides, she relished the renewed feeling of confidence and power that karate had brought her. And it required total concentration. With shotokan and her job, she might never have to think about anything else.
Fry didn’t spend too much time considering the Laura Vernon killing. At present, her mind was a blank, awaiting data on which to base deductions, to make connections. She was looking forward to the morning, when she expected to be able to take in a barrage of facts that would be presented at the briefing, to see lines of enquiry open up like so many doors of opportunity.
For one brief moment, a small niggle entered her mind, a passing irritation that might have to be dealt with at some stage. It concerned DC Ben Cooper. The detective everyone loved; the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently. She considered him fleetingly, then pushed him off the stage with an imaginary hand in the face. There were no obstacles that couldn’t be overcome. There were no problems, only challenges.
Finally, she switched on the television in the corner to watch a late-night film before bedtime. It was some sort of old horror film, in black and white. From her place in the old armchair, she was able to feel under the bed with one hand, her eyes on the TV. She pulled out a two-pound box of Thornton’s Continental and fed a Viennese truffle into her mouth. On the screen, a woman walking alone at night turned at the sound of following footsteps. As a dark shadow fell across her face, she began to scream and scream.
Five miles away from Grosvenor Avenue, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. In places, the track had been repaired with compacted earth and the odd half-brick. The first heavy rain of the winter would wash it all away again when the water came rushing down from the hillside and turned the narrow track into a river.
In passing, he noticed a stretch of wall where the topping stones had fallen away and the wall was beginning to bulge outwards towards the field. He made a mental note to mention it as a job he could do for Matt on his next day off.
Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.
Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local small-time villain. He was currently serving two years in Derby for receiving, but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.
Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eye socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.
It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go away at all.
Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.
The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.
When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded on the wall, and an ice cream had melted into a raspberry-coloured puddle on the ground.
‘Hello, girls,’ he said.
‘Hi, Uncle Ben.’
Amy looked at him sadly, with big eyes that showed hurt but no real comprehension of what was hurting. She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the farmhouse. The front door stood open, but there was silence from within. A black and white cat emerged from the garden, walked to the doorstep and paused, sniffing the air of the hallway. Then it seemed to change its mind and trotted quickly away towards the Dutch barn.
‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ said Amy, anticipating the question.
‘And where’s your dad?’
‘He had to go up to Burnt Wood straight after milking. To mend some gates.’
‘I see.’
Cooper smiled at the girls, but got no response. They were totally unlike the two children who would normally have come running to greet him. But he didn’t have to ask them any more questions to guess why they were so subdued.
In the big kitchen he found his sister-in-law, Kate. She was moving about from table to stove stiffly, like a woman with arthritis, or one whose limbs were badly bruised. Her short fair hair was dishevelled and the sheen of sweat on her forehead looked as though it was caused by something more than the heat of the day or the steam from a pan which was simmering on the hotplate with nothing in it. She, too, had been crying.
When she saw him, she let go of the carving knife she was carrying as if it was a relief to part with it. The kitchen normally smelled of herbs and freshly baked bread, and sometimes of garlic and olive oil. Tonight, though, it smelled of none of those. The smell was of disinfectant and several less pleasant odours that made Cooper’s stomach muscles tighten with apprehension.
‘What’s wrong, Kate?’
His sister-in-law shook her head, sagging against the pine table, weary with the effort of trying to keep up an appearance of normality for the girls. Cooper could have told her, even from his brief glimpse of them outside, that it had not worked.
‘See for yourself,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it any more, Ben.’
He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘You look after the girls.’
He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.
Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.
The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.
Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.
Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.
8 (#ulink_01a58ee6-431d-5d87-b087-b1022a4072c0)
‘Found by a man walking a dog.’
There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.
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Stephen Booth
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Dark, intense and utterly compelling, ‘Black Dog’ was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years.‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated … but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon′s body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl′s killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect.But Cooper′s local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…