Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 11

‘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.