Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 16

‘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.

‘Found by a man walking a dog,’ repeated the superintendent dangerously.

Some of the officers in the room looked at the ceiling; others tilted their plastic coffee cups to their faces, hoping to hide their expressions from the superintendent’s eye. Fry wondered why bluebottles always chose to ignore open windows in favour of the determined futility of bashing themselves incessantly against the closed ones.

‘It was some old bloke called Dickinson, sir,’ said DS Rennie. ‘Apparently he has his own regular route across the Baulk every night.’

Rennie had not been involved in the search operation. But, like everyone else in the room, he recognized the time for covering your back, for limiting the damage, for claiming any shreds of credit where it could be found. Those responsible for the search were keeping sensibly silent. So it followed that if you spoke up, the super would register you as blameless. Rennie watched for the brief flicker of the blue eyes towards him that said he had been heard and acknowledged.

‘So. A man walking a dog. Some old bloke called Dickinson, in fact. Thank you for that, Rennie.’ The superintendent nodded and smiled like a sewage worker gifted with an exceptionally keen sense of smell. ‘And here we are, Her Majesty’s finest. We had a helicopter up in the air at God knows how much a minute, and forty officers on the ground searching those woods for five hours, without turning up so much as a decent used condom. The police, like the papers used to say, are baffled. And then – and then what happens?’

Nobody answered him this time, not even Rennie. Fry found she had drawn an entire swarm of small blue flies flitting across her page, their flimsy wings beating fast, but going nowhere.

‘The body,’ said Jepson, ‘is found by a man walking a dog.’

‘Given another day or two –’ began DI Hitchens. But it was unwise – as duty inspector, Hitchens had been technically responsible for the search, though he had not been present. The superintendent cut straight across him.

‘Just tell me why,’ he said. ‘Why is there always a man walking a dog? You might start to suspect they were put there specifically to expose the shortcomings of the police force, eh? Lost a body somewhere in the woods? Don’t worry, chief, some old bloke walking his dog will find it for us. Got no description of the getaway car used in that armed robbery last night? No problem – some insomniac dragging poor old Rover round the streets is bound to have made a note of the registration number. Got no positive ID of your suspect to place him at the scene of the offence? Albert and Fido are sure to have clocked him stashing the loot while they were wetting a lamppost somewhere. Yes. Men walking dogs. If only they advertised their services in the Eden Valley Times, we’d save a fortune.’

‘Chief, I don’t think –’ said Hitchens.

‘And then,’ said Jepson, ‘we could disband the entire Derbyshire Constabulary and replace it with a few dozen blokes walking their dogs. They’d have the detection rate up in no time.’

Diane Fry relegated Hitchens a few rungs in her mental hierarchy. She had to make the best impression she could among all these new faces and stay alert, try to pick up the names and ranks and figure out who was the most likely to be influential. Hitchens had started off near the top of the scale as her DI, but was gradually fading on the rails.

A detective Fry didn’t recognize had put his hand up, like the bright boy in class wanting to get himself noticed. He had already drawn unwelcome attention to himself by arriving very late for the briefing, which had always been considered a disciplinary offence in stations Fry had worked at. He had looked hot and flustered and dishevelled when he came in, as if he had only just got out of bed, and he had suffered a prolonged glower from Jepson. Now all eyes turned to him, welcoming a sacrificial victim, amazed that he was going to throw himself into the pit voluntarily. He looked to be in his late twenties, but carried an air of innocence lacking in those around him. He was tall and slim, and he had messy, light-brown hair that fell untidily across his forehead.

‘Excuse me, sir, but I don’t understand.’

‘Oh aye? What don’t you understand, lad?’

‘Well, we got the dog section out from Ripley to go over the ground, didn’t we? So why didn’t the Ripley lot find what the old bloke’s dog found?’

Jepson looked at him sharply, a scathing put-down hovering on his lips. But he saw the expression on the detective’s face, noticed his cheeks already starting to go a shade of pink. The superintendent sighed, his irritation suddenly spent.

‘I think you’ll find the key to that, Cooper,’ he said, ‘is not the dog. It’s the old bloke.’

Finally, Jepson handed over to DCI Tailby as senior investigating officer. Amid muffled sighs of relief and a flood of comforting conference room jargon, the discussion moved on into safer areas – the prioritization of lines of enquiry, the division of staff into enquiry teams, the allocation of action sheets. But several days later, Diane Fry was amazed to find that, in among the detailed anatomical drawings of common winged insects, she had recorded the superintendent’s last words exactly.

‘Preliminary report from the pathologist suggests death was caused by two or three heavy blows to the side of the head with a hard, smooth object. Task Force will commence a search for the weapon this morning.’

All eyes in the room were fixed on the photograph of the crime scene which had been projected on to the screen behind Tailby. The full-length shot of the body lying in the undergrowth changed to a closer view of the head. The colour of Laura Vernon’s hair looked garish and unnatural in the photograph, and the dark, matted bloodstains were not easy to make out. Her red T-shirt made the accuracy of the colour balance even more doubtful.

‘First indications, based on temperature of the body and the stage of development of fly larvae found in the eyes, mouth and vulva, suggest Laura Vernon was killed within a couple of hours either side of the first report that she was missing – i.e. eight o’clock Saturday evening. As you know, we already have one early report that Laura was seen talking to a young man at about six-fifteen on a footpath in the scrubland just a few yards from her own back garden. This is some distance from where she was found, which was in the wooded area called the Baulk. Therefore we need to re-trace that final journey. House-to-house teams will concentrate on recording movements of anyone in and around the Baulk at about the time. Including, of course, any sightings of Laura Vernon herself.’

The picture changed to the lower half of Laura’s body. Black denims were pulled down to her knees, showing the top edge of a pair of blue pants, and several inches of deathly white flesh above and below the dark bush of hair.

‘As you see, Laura’s clothing was disturbed. However, subject to the full postmortem, which will be carried out later this morning, the pathologist’s initial view is that there is no evidence that any sexual assault took place, either before or after the victim’s death. There is one possible exception to that.’

Tailby nodded, and the picture changed again, the camera zooming in to a small area near the top of the dead girl’s right thigh. The assembled officers frowned and peered closer. A discolouration of the skin could be seen, some sort of bruising, but bearing an oddly regular shape.

‘Mrs Van Doon,’ said Tailby, ‘believes this injury probably occurred around the time of death.’

The room stirred uneasily. Some of the officers were sweating, and the atmosphere was becoming humid.

‘I know you’re all anxious to get started,’ said Tailby, sensing the restlessness. ‘DI Hitchens will give you your action forms very shortly. Bear with me for a few more minutes.’

The picture disappeared from the wall behind the DCI, and some in the room breathed a sigh of relief.

‘First of all, we are urgently enquiring into the whereabouts of one Lee Sherratt, aged twenty, recently employed as a gardener at the Mount. Details are in your files. But we also want to know about any other boyfriends Laura Vernon may have had a relationship with. Particularly those her parents might not have been aware of.’

‘Are we assuming the family are in the clear, sir?’ asked DS Rennie.

‘We never assume, Rennie,’ said the DCI with a little smile. ‘It makes an “ASS” out of “U” and “ME”.’

Rennie paused for a moment, puzzled. Then someone sniggered, and he realized he had been put down.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

‘Both Graham and Charlotte Vernon will, of course, be interviewed again. There is also a brother, I believe, away at university. Otherwise, we are told that Laura Vernon did not mix much with people in the village of Moorhay. This is what the parents tell us, at least. If that isn’t the case, it will be your job to find out. Meanwhile, the usual checks on all our known sex offenders are being carried out. We have DI Armstrong here from B Division, who will be coordinating that aspect of the enquiry.’

The chief inspector indicated a female officer to one side of the room. She was rather overweight and the grey suit she was wearing didn’t fit too well around her shoulders. Her dark hair was collar-length and cut very straight.

‘Some of you may know that DI Armstrong has been working on the team investigating the death of Susan Edson near Buxton five weeks ago. Some of this ground has already been covered in B Division in the last few weeks, so we are avoiding duplication of effort.’

Some of the officers shifted uneasily and looked sideways at each other. Tailby seemed to sense it, and responded. ‘For public consumption, there must be no suggestion of a link between these two cases. I do not want to hear the words “serial killer” mentioned by any member of this team or see them appearing in the press.’

He looked to one side, glaring at a civilian wearing a suit, a colourful tie and a pair of large, blue-framed spectacles. Fry pegged him as one of the force’s press officers, whose job it was to deflect press attention and distribute as little information about the case as possible.

‘All these lines of enquiry will take time, of course,’ said Tailby. ‘And I don’t need to remind you that the first hours are important.’

Diane Fry was busy studying DI Armstrong when Ben Cooper tentatively put his hand up again. Tailby regarded him with something like pity.

‘Yes, Cooper?’

‘Harry Dickinson, sir. The gentleman who found the trainer.’

‘Ah, the old bloke,’ said someone, breaking the tension.

‘With the dog,’ said someone else.

‘Will he be interviewed again, sir?’

Fry wondered for a moment whether Cooper had seen her transcript of the first interview with Harry Dickinson and was taking the mickey out of the DCI. But Tailby obviously decided that it wasn’t Cooper’s style or intention.

‘Harry Dickinson is seventy-eight years old,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Cooper. ‘But we’re not assuming that his age rules him out. Are we, sir?’

‘Of course not,’ said Tailby. ‘We assume nothing.’

There was a general shuffling of feet and scraping of chair legs. Fry watched a female detective turn round to ask Ben Cooper if he was all right. She looked concerned, but he only nodded, keeping his eyes on the chief inspector. Fry noticed that there was a scuff mark on Cooper’s leather jacket and his tie needed straightening. He was really untidy, and it made him look disorganized. No way was he as perfect as everyone said he was.

‘One more thing I want to emphasize before you go,’ said Tailby, raising his voice over the noise. ‘Again, this is in your files, but keep it to the forefront of your minds, all of you. DC Cooper has mentioned the trainer found by Mr Dickinson and his dog, the find which led us to the body a short distance away. But there is one fact which could be vital to the enquiry. One thing which could lead to an early conclusion, if we are thorough with our routines – and if we get a little bit of luck. I want you to remember, all of you, that Laura Vernon’s second trainer is missing.’

‘All right. DC Fry, here, please.’

Fry stepped briskly towards Hitchens, where he leaned casually against the wall, dangling a leg over the edge of a desk. He had a stack of action forms in his hand, and Fry knew she was about to be allocated to an enquiry team.

‘You’re the new girl around here, Diane. So we’re going to team you up with Ben Cooper for a while. He knows the area like the back of his hand.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Well, we don’t want you going and getting lost on the moors, do we, Fry? We’d have to send the dogs out again.’

Fry tried a smile and hoped it was convincing. ‘I’m sure we’ll work well together.’

Hitchens studied her. ‘You’ll get on all right,’ he said.

‘It’s OK.’

‘Right. DC Cooper! Where’s Ben Cooper gone?’

‘He had to take an urgent phone call, sir,’ said another detective. ‘In the CID room.’

‘OK. Well, you two are in charge of house-to-house in Moorhay,’ said Hitchens. ‘There will be uniformed teams out there to assist you. These are the allocated areas. Make sure you don’t miss anybody.’

He held out a photocopied street map divided into three sections with blue, red and yellow highlighter pens.

‘I’ll go and introduce myself to DC Cooper,’ said Fry. ‘If I can find the CID room.’

Ben Cooper was hunched over a desk, staring at a sea of papers that seemed to have accumulated during his holiday. He wasn’t reading the papers; in fact, he didn’t appear to see them at all. His face was completely blank as he listened to the voice at the other end of the phone.

‘I suppose so, if that’s what they think,’ he said. ‘But how long for? Yes, I know Kate needs a break, but Matt –’

He saw the new DC coming from the far end of the CID room. She moved with a cool deliberateness, not meeting his eye, but glancing from side to side as she walked past the desks and filing cabinets, as if searching for evidence of misdemeanours among her absent colleagues. Cooper half expected to see her stoop to check for footprints in the carpets, or turn over an envelope to examine the address. She had a lean face and short fair hair, and she was very slim – slimmer than he had grown up to expect women to be. His mother would have said she was sickening for something. But she had a certain wiry look that suggested she was no weakling. No wilting violet, this one.

He had worked out who she was, of course. She was the one PC Garnett had told him about, the new DC who had come from the West Midlands with a reputation. Garnett had been almost right in his description. The only surprise was that she was actually quite attractive – though a smile, he thought, would help to relax her face and do something about the dark shadows in her eyes.

‘Yes, Matt. Yes, you’re right, I know. Two days, then. And we can talk about it properly on Thursday, OK? It just seems a long time to wait.’

The new DC had reached Cooper’s desk. She stood looking at the mess of papers, idly tapping the Moorhay file against her thigh. He turned away, shielding the phone. He knew it was obvious that the call was nothing to do with work. She would recognize a personal call when she heard one. She probably thought he was discussing a girlfriend.

He watched in amazement as she calmly took a seat and booted up his computer terminal, still without looking at him.

‘Hold on a minute, Matt.’

He saw her start to smile as the computer came to life and she logged into the database. It allowed her into the first two screens, but then threw up a dialogue box when she tried to extract some data.

‘You need a password,’ said Cooper.

‘What’s that?’ said Matt in his ear.

‘Nothing.’

‘What is it then?’ she asked.

‘I can’t just give it out. You need authority.’

‘Yeah? I’ll find a way past it then.’

She started tapping keys to get into the terminal settings, looking for the security program and the password function. A silver stud glinted in her ear where it was exposed by a recent trim.

‘You’ll never get anywhere without knowing the proper password.’

‘Ben, if you’re busy –’

‘Yes, look, Matt, I’ll have to go,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll speak to you tonight.’

He replaced the phone, and didn’t look up for a moment, as if he was adjusting himself to something, preparing to face a whole new challenge.

‘Damn!’

A ‘fatal error’ message was frozen on the computer screen. The terminal had objected to the unauthorized tinkering and had crashed.

‘I did tell you you’d get nowhere without the password,’ he snapped.

‘You’re my new partner,’ said Fry. ‘When you’re available, that is.’

Cooper took a deep breath. ‘OK. Hi, I’m Ben Cooper. You must be DC Fry.’

He waited for her to say something else. He didn’t know her first name yet.

‘My friends call me Diane.’

He nodded cautiously, noting the ambiguity of the message. ‘What are we up for?’

‘House-to-house with some woodentops.’

‘Don’t let them hear you call them that.’

Fry shrugged. ‘We could get going, if you’re ready. I’m only the new girl, but I understand murder enquiries are usually considered quite important.’

‘All right, I’m ready.’

In the corridor, DI Hitchens called them back.

‘I’ll be out for another briefing and to take your reports myself at the end of the morning,’ he said. ‘There’s a pub in Moorhay, isn’t there, Cooper?’

‘The Drover, sir.’

‘Marston’s, I seemed to notice when we went through the village yesterday.’

‘That’s right.’

‘We’ll rendezvous there then – let’s say twelve-thirty. And Ben …’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Don’t be late, will you?’

‘Sorry about that, sir. Family problems.’

‘It’s not like you. Don’t make a habit of it.’

‘No, sir.’

‘One more thing everybody needs to know. Mr Tailby pointed out how important these first few hours of an enquiry are. We all know that. But don’t get too carried away when your shift is finished. There’s no more overtime.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no cash in the budget. The top floor think we can get a result without it.’

‘It’s crazy,’ said Cooper.

Hitchens shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is. OK, you know what your tasks are. Off you go.’

Cooper and Fry had reached the car park at the back of the police station before they hesitated. Fry thought she could read his thoughts.

‘My car’s over there,’ she said. ‘The black Peugeot. And I’m a good driver.’

‘My Toyota’s got four-wheel drive,’ said Ben. ‘It might be handy for some of those lanes round Moorhay. And I know the way.’

Fry shrugged, allowing a small victory. ‘OK.’

They found little to say to each other on the drive out of Edendale. Cooper took a route that Fry didn’t know, dodging down narrow back streets that wound their way across town past the parish church and Edendale Community School. When they emerged on the Buxton Road, she realized that he had managed to bypass all the traffic snarled up on Clappergate and the other approaches to the town centre. Already, she thought, he was making a point of showing off his famous local knowledge.

Cooper could barely keep his eyes off the landscape as he drove. It was a constant pleasure to him to escape from Edendale into the surrounding hills, where the changing moods of the scenery always surprised and delighted him.

Nowhere was the contrast between the White Peak and the Dark Peak more striking than on the climb southwards out of Edendale, past the last of the housing developments, past the sports field and the religious retreat run by the Sisters of Our Lady. Right at the top of the hill was a pub, the Light House, with its stunning views across both limestone and millstone grit.

The patchwork of farmland and tree-covered slopes to the south looked welcoming and approachable lit by the sun, but was full of hidden depths and unseen corners. It was criss-crossed by a pattern of white dry-stone walls and it erupted here and there in steep limestone cliffs or the ripples and pockmarks of abandoned mine workings. It was, above all, a human landscape, settled and shaped by people, and still a place where thousands of years of history might be expected to come to the surface, if you cared to look.

Behind the car, to the north, the moors of the Dark Peak looked remote and forbidding, an uncompromising landscape that was anything but human. The bare faces of hardened gritstone seemed to absorb the sun instead of reflecting it as the limestone did. They seemed to stand aloof and brooding, untouched by humanity and therefore offering a challenge that many took up, to conquer their peaks. Some succeeded, but many failed, defeated by the implacability of the dark slopes and the bad weather that seemed to hover around them.

But appearances could be deceptive. Even the White Peak bore its scars – the great crude gashes where the limestone quarries and opencast workings had been blasted and ripped from its hills.

‘What do you think of Edendale, then?’ he asked at last, as they joined a convoy of cars crawling behind a caravan round the bends that climbed towards the summit of the hill. It promised to be another hot day, and their visors were down against the sun already scorching the windscreen and glaring off the tarmac. To their right, the outskirts of the town were gradually falling away, the stone slates of the roofs settling among the trees and petering out along the faint silver ribbon of the River Eden. There was a camping site in a meadow by the river just outside town, with rows of blue and green tents like exotic plants blooming in the morning sun. ‘That’s what everybody asks me,’ said Fry. ‘What do I think of Edendale. Does it matter?’

‘I would have thought so,’ said Cooper, surprised.

‘It’s a place to work. It has crime, like any other place, I suppose. I expect it has a few villains, a lot of sad cases and a whole mass of boring respectable types in between. It’s the same everywhere.’

‘It’s a better place to live than Birmingham, surely?’

‘Why?’

‘Well –’ He gestured with one hand off the steering wheel, indicating the hills and the valley and the river and the patchwork of fields and dry-stone walls, the tumbling roofs and spires of the town behind them, and the deep green mass of the Eden Forest marching up towards the vast reservoirs on the heights of the gritstone moors. He hardly knew how to express what he meant, if she couldn’t see it for herself.

‘In any case, I didn’t live in Birmingham,’ said Fry. ‘I lived at Warley.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the Black Country. Have you heard of it?’

‘I once travelled into Birmingham by train. That went through Wolverhampton. Is that close?’

‘Yeah, well, you’d know all about it then.’

They had reached a level stretch of road at the top of the hill, and Cooper accelerated to follow the stream of cars overtaking the caravan.

‘So if you liked the Black Country, what brought you here, then?’

Fry grimaced and turned her face away to look at the view across the plateau towards the Wye Valley, where Moorhay waited. But Cooper didn’t miss the gesture.

‘I suppose everybody asks you that as well.’

‘I suppose they do.’

‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Nice to have you on board, anyway, Diane.’

Fry had charge of the file Hitchens had given them. She pulled out the map to avoid having to look at Cooper.

‘There’s only Main Street running through the village, and a few lanes off it. Some without names that only seem to lead to farms. And there’s a group of houses that seem to be called Quith Holes. Do you know it?’

‘Those cottages at Quith Holes back on to the Baulk,’ he said. ‘Not far from where Laura Vernon was found. There’s the Old Mill there too. It does teas and bed and breakfast now.’

‘Who doesn’t round here?’ said Fry as they passed another farmhouse advertising holiday accommodation.

She had to admit that Ben Cooper was a competent driver. She felt able to concentrate on absorbing the details from the file before they arrived at Moorhay. There was a photograph of Laura Vernon as she had been in life, though her hair was a different colour from that of the dead girl Fry had seen – not quite so virulent a shade of red. The photo had been blown up from one supplied by the Vernons on the day their daughter had gone missing. Fry had seen the original picture in the action file, before the case had become a murder enquiry and had been removed from the CID room. The full shot had shown young Laura in a garden, with a clump of rhododendrons in full bloom behind her, a glimpse of a stone balustrade and the top of a flight of steps to one side, and a black and white Border collie asleep on the grass at her feet. But the enlargement showed only her head and the top half of her body. The background had been cut out, removing Laura from her environment as effectively as someone had removed her from life.

There was a list of the names and addresses of all Laura Vernon’s known contacts in Moorhay and the surrounding area. It was a pitifully short list for a fifteen-year-old girl. Top of it was Lee Sherratt, aged twenty, of 12, Wye Close, Moorhay. He had worked as a gardener at the Mount until dismissed from his job last Thursday by Laura’s father, Graham Vernon. Sherratt had been interviewed when Laura was first reported missing, but had not been seen since Sunday. Unlike the Vernons, the Sherratts had not reported their son missing. His name was marked in red, which meant tracing him was a priority.

Further down the list were Andrew and Margaret Milner and their daughter Helen. Andrew was also noted as an employee of Graham Vernon’s. As for Helen, Fry remembered her from her visit to Dial Cottage with Tailby and Hitchens. She had stayed close to the old man when the police had arrived – closer than his own wife, it had seemed. Close relationships within families always seemed a bit suspect to Diane Fry; she felt she didn’t quite understand them.

She looked up at Cooper, watching his profile as he drove. She had a sudden urge to tell him to tidy himself up before they met the public. She wanted to straighten his tie, to push his hair back from his forehead. That boyish look did absolutely nothing for her.

But she could see that he was completely absorbed with his own thoughts, his face closed to the outside world. It struck her that they were not happy thoughts, but she dismissed it as none of her business and returned to her file.

Ben Cooper was remembering the smell. There had been a stink in the room worse than anything he had ever smelt on a farm. No cesspit, no slurry tank, no innards from a freshly gutted rabbit or pheasant had ever smelt as bad as the entirely human stench that filled that room. There was excrement daubed across the wallpaper and on the bedclothes piled on the floor. A pool of urine was drying into a sticky mass on the carpet near where other similar puddles had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant, leaving paler patches like the remnants of some virulent skin disease. A chair lay on the rug with one leg missing. A curtain had been torn off its rail, and the pages of books and magazines were scattered like dead leaves on every surface. A second pink slipper sat ludicrously in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran down across the top drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle. The drawers and the wardrobe had been emptied of their contents, which were heaped at random on the bed.

It was from beneath the heap of clothes that the noise came, monotonous and inhuman, a low, desperate wailing. When he had moved towards the bed, the mound stirred and the keening turned to a fearful whimper. Cooper knew that the crisis was over, for now. But this had been the worst so far, no doubt about it. The evidence was all around him.

He leaned closer to a coat with an imitation fur collar, but was careful not to touch the bed, for fear of sparking off a violent reaction. The coat was drenched in a familiar scent that brought a painful lump to his throat.

‘It’s Ben,’ he said quietly.

A white hand was visible briefly as it clutched for a sleeve and the edge of a skirt to pull them closer for concealment. The fingers withdrew again into the darkness like a crab retreating into its shell. The whimpering stopped.

‘It was the devil,’ said a small voice from deep in the pile of clothes. ‘The devil made me do it.’

The mingled odours of stale scent, sweat and excrement and urine made Cooper feel he was about to be sick. He swallowed and forced himself to keep his voice steady.

‘The devil’s gone away.’

The hand slowly reappeared, and Cooper clasped it in his fingers, shocked by its icy coldness.

‘You can come out now, Mum,’ he said. ‘The devil’s gone away.’

‘Ben?’ said Fry.

‘Yes?’ He jerked back to attention. He looked to Fry as if he had been asleep and dreaming. Or maybe going through a familiar nightmare.

‘Why did you ask about Harry Dickinson during the briefing this morning?’

She was curious why he had drawn attention to himself at the wrong time, when self-interest had clearly indicated that it was a time to keep quiet and keep his head down for a while. But she couldn’t ask him that outright.

‘The person who finds the body is always a possible suspect,’ he said.

‘Oh really? But I thought Dickinson only found the trainer. It was you who actually found the body.’

‘Yes, but you know what I mean.’

‘Anyway, Dickinson is seventy-eight years old. An awkward old sod, I’ll give you that. But a definite pipe-and-slippers man. He hardly looked strong enough to unzip his own fly, let alone commit a violent assault on a healthy fifteen-year-old girl.’

‘I’m not sure you’re right there, Diane.’

‘Oh? What are you basing your suspicion on?’

‘Nothing really. Just a feeling I had when I was there, in the cottage. A feeling about that family.’

‘A feeling? Oh yeah, right, Ben.’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘You do? Is that another feeling? Tell you what, do me a favour – while we’re together as a team, don’t involve me in any of your feelings. I prefer the facts.’

They lapsed into silence again for the rest of the drive. Fry mentally dismissed Ben Cooper’s talk of feelings. She didn’t believe he could know the facts about relationships in families. He was what she thought of as the social worker type of police officer – the sort who thought there were no villains in the world, only victims, that people who did anything wrong must necessarily be sick and in need of help. Not only that, but he was obviously well-settled, popular, uncomplicated, with dozens of friends and relatives around him, smothering him with comfort and support until his view of the real world was distorted by affection.

She didn’t think he could possibly know what it was like to have evil in the family.