Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 18

‘OK, what have we got, anything?’

‘Cars, lots of cars. Most of them unknown. You have to expect it in an area like this.’

‘Tourists,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘They always complicate the issue.’

They were in the tiny beer garden at the back of the Drover, squashed round a table under a parasol that kept the sun off their plates of ham and cheese sandwiches and their slimline tonics. The only other customers outdoors were two workmen eating scampi and chips and drinking beer at a far table. Everyone else had chosen to sit inside the pub, in the cool rooms, or at the front, where there was a view of the road.

Cooper and Fry had met up with four sweating PCs who had been working their way down the village, and they were all now clinking ice cubes desperately as they exchanged the pitifully thin information from their clipboards. DI Hitchens had arrived late, brazenly downing a whisky and stealing their sandwiches. He looked like the squire visiting his workers, trying to appear interested in what they had to say but ready to move on to more important calls on his time at any moment. He pulled up a chair next to Fry, cool as only a man could be who had just got out of an air-conditioned Ford.

‘I’ve got plenty of hikers,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘Mostly ones and twos. But there was a bigger group through round about the right time. They were seen on the Eden Valley Trail early Saturday evening.’

‘God, how will we trace them?’ asked Hitchens.

‘They were young people. They may have been heading for the sleeping barn at Hathersage or one of the youth hostels.’

‘OK, we’ll check them out. There’s going to be an appeal in the papers and on the telly in the morning. We’ll try and get the hikers mentioned specifically. And the – what was it – Eden Valley Trail?’

‘It’s a popular footpath. It runs just under the slope where Laura Vernon was found. You can see the path quite clearly from there.’

‘OK, thanks, Ben. At least we’re in with a chance of finding a witness or two. Anything else?’

‘Only a lot of talk,’ said Cooper.

‘You’re lucky,’ said one of the PCs, an aggressive-looking bald-headed man whose name was Parkin. ‘Most of them just wanted me off the doorstep.’

‘Well, I can understand that,’ said PC Wragg. ‘They’ve probably heard your jokes.’

Wragg was the officer who had accompanied Cooper to Dial Cottage when Helen Milner had first rung in to report her grandfather’s find. He didn’t look any fitter now than he had the day before, and he was drinking orange juice as if he had a lot of fluid to replace. Like the other uniformed officers, he had loosened his clothing as much as he could, but was handicapped by the entire ironmonger’s shop of equipment he wore round his belt – kwik-cuffs, side-handle baton, CS spray, and God knew what else was considered necessary for the job of calling on members of the public in a quiet Peak District village.

‘I’ve got a new one,’ said Parkin. ‘There’s this prostitute –’

There were general groans. They had all heard Parkin’s awful jokes before.

‘Not now, Parkin,’ said Hitchens.

Fry was leafing through her notebook. ‘I got one woman. Mrs Davis, Chestnut Lodge. She says she’s met Laura Vernon several times. Apparently Mrs Davis’s daughter goes to the same stables as Laura did, and they got quite friendly. She describes Laura as a very nice girl.’

‘What does that mean exactly? Nice.’

‘The way she spoke about some of the other children she came across, I think it means that she approved of Laura’s background, sir.’

‘Mmm. Did you get her to expand on that?’

‘As far as I could. She said Laura was polite and knew how to behave. She said she was very good with the younger children, helping to show them what to do when they were learning to ride. Mrs Davis told me a story about Laura looking after a boy who had fallen off his horse. Apparently, she was the only one he would let comfort him when he had hurt himself. Mrs Davis said Laura’s mother was a nice woman too.’

Somebody snorted. DI Hitchens didn’t look impressed. ‘It doesn’t mean much.’

‘But they all seem to know of the Vernons, these people,’ said Fry. ‘Every one of them.’

‘Yes, and not too charmed by them either, on the whole,’ said Wragg.

‘It’s that sort of village, though.’

‘What do you mean, Diane?’ asked Hitchens.

‘They’re close, this lot. They don’t like newcomers, people who don’t fit in. I mean, they’re not exactly welcoming, are they?’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Cooper.

‘Well, you wouldn’t.’

‘It depends on how you approach them, that’s all. If you come to a village like this willing to fit in, they’ll accept you. But if you stay aloof, make it look as though you think you’re better than they are, then they’re bound to react against you.’

‘And the Vernons are like that, aloof, you reckon, Ben?’

‘Sure of it, sir.’

‘Hey, what about some sort of conspiracy against the Vernons? Local vigilantes, like, who get together and knock off Laura Vernon as a warning? Clear off out of our village, we don’t want you. That sort of thing.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Parkin.’

‘That sounds like something out of the Dark Ages,’ said Fry.

‘Or The X-Files,’ suggested Wragg.

‘All right, all right.’

‘Any positive reactions to the trainer?’ asked Hitchens.

‘Nothing.’

‘Some of the old biddies don’t even know what a trainer is.’

‘That trainer has to be somewhere.’

‘Sir, if it’s chummy from Buxton, the one B Division are after, then he’ll probably have taken it home with him as a memento, like they reckon he did with the tights off the other one.’

‘Yes, that’s possible, Wragg. But Mr Tailby doesn’t believe we can assume the two cases are linked at this stage.’

‘But that means we have to do everything from scratch, when they might turn out to be the same bloke after all.’

‘Have we turned up anything on the known offenders, sir?’ asked Cooper.

‘Not yet. It’s early days. DI Armstrong is on to it.’

‘Well, she’s wasting her time anyway.’

‘Thanks for the benefit of your views, Parkin.’

Cooper saw that PC Parkin was watching Diane Fry carefully for her reactions. Fry only needed to make one ill-considered comment, let slip one unguarded reaction, and a report on her behaviour would be circulating round the division very quickly. A reputation among your colleagues could be made or broken on first impressions.

Sometimes, he knew, the worst thing of all was to inadvertently earn yourself some childish nickname, which you could then never live down, no matter how hard you tried.

‘We were lucky that the body was found so quickly really,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s given us a head start. Sometimes we’re not so lucky. The old bloke with the dog did us a big favour.’

‘Have you been involved in any other enquiries like this, sir?’ asked Fry.

Hitchens told them about a murder enquiry in the late 1980s, when a teenage boy had gone missing from his foster home in Eyam. They had set up an incident room right in the centre of the village, linked to Divisional HQ. Over a period of months they had gradually spread the search over an area within a fivemile radius of Eyam. They had used the Mountain Rescue Team, Search Dog Teams, Cave Rescue Teams, the Peak Park Ranger Service, Derbyshire Countryside Rangers, even members of ramblers’ clubs and scores of other volunteers. They had put up Search and Rescue helicopters over the hills. But they had never found the boy.

‘A man walking his dog in just the right place would have been a godsend then,’ he said.

‘And there was that one in 1966, do you remember?’ said Parkin, turning to Diane Fry.

‘I wasn’t even around in 1966,’ said Fry. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘Eh? Well, it’s only, what …’

‘Thirty-three years ago.’

‘So it was. Well, it’s in the history books anyway.’

‘1966? Let me guess – you’re talking about football. The World Cup? That’d be the only thing you know about, I suppose.’

‘Yeah. They had the trophy nicked, did you know that? The World Cup itself, the Jules Rimet Trophy. Before the finals.’

‘Did somebody leave it in their car or what?’

‘And you won’t believe this – but it was found by a dog. Chucked in a hedge bottom, it was. Wrapped in fish-and-chip paper.’

‘The dog?’

‘The trophy. It was wrapped in fish-and-chip paper.’

‘Pickles,’ said Cooper.

‘No, it was definitely fish and chips.’

‘The dog was called Pickles. It got introduced to all the players before the final.’

‘Surely you don’t remember it?’ said Fry.

‘No, but like Parkin says …’

‘It’s in the history books, right. Well, I must be reading the wrong history books. All that stuff passed me by. I suppose I must have overlooked it somewhere between the assassination of President Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War.’

‘Well, probably,’ said Parkin, and sneered.

Cooper winced. ‘I think I’ll just pop to the gents before we leave.’

It was a relief to get inside the Drover and out of the heat. The landlord, Kenny Lee, nodded to Cooper from the bar as he slipped into the toilets. The sudden solitude and the smell of urine did nothing to help Cooper keep his mind off the previous night. It had been a very long night, as the farmhouse had filled with members of the family – his brother first, then his sister and her husband arriving from Buxton, and then his uncle and his cousins, all pitching in to help clear up the mess, to support Kate and look after the children, Amy and Josie. Meanwhile, the doctor had called to sedate his mother, and later the ambulance had arrived to take her to Edendale General, where it would not be her first visit to the psychiatric unit. And then the endless discussion had begun – a discussion that had gone on until the early hours of the morning, by which time they were all exhausted and no nearer to an answer to an insoluble problem.

There was a payphone in the passage near the bar, and Cooper fished in his pocket for a few coins. He was put through to the psychiatric unit at the hospital, where the staff were professionally cautious. All his call established was what he already knew – that his mother was still under sedation and not fit to have visitors. Try again tomorrow, they said.

In the meantime, tonight there might finally be a family decision. And he knew that there was a chance his mother would have to be taken away permanently from the home she had known all her life. It would be the final humiliation in her descent into schizophrenia.

When he came out of the pub and walked back out into the beer garden, something made Cooper stop and stand still in the shade of the side wall. He was standing several yards behind Diane Fry, and he saw what he might not have seen from his seat across the table. He saw DI Hitchens’s arm on the back of Fry’s chair as he leaned close towards her to speak directly into her ear. He saw the DI’s hand move upwards from the chair to rest for a moment on her shoulder. Behaving like a courting couple, as his mother would have said.

And then he saw Fry nod briefly before Hitchens took his hand away. And Parkin told another poor joke that nobody laughed at.

The phone was ringing again. It had hardly stopped ringing for days. Though the answerphone had been left on and she had been told to take no notice of it, the continual noise was driving Sheila Kelk mad.

Sheila came to the Mount three days a week to clean, and Tuesday was one of her days. The fuss about the girl being found murdered had not put her off coming – far from it, in fact. Mr and Mrs Vernon would need her, she had told her husband. A house still needed cleaning. She might be able to provide some other service to poor Mrs Vernon, to be of some comfort to her. Mrs Vernon might, just might, want to confide in her, to tell her all about what had been going on.

But here she was, going over the sitting room carpet for the second time, wishing the sound of the Dyson would drown out the constant ringing. She had been here longer than her four hours already, and no one had so much as spoken to her.

In a temporary silence from the phone, Sheila switched off the vacuum cleaner, flicking a cloth over a piece of pine furniture that she had never quite been able to put a name to. She thought of it as a cross between a sideboard and a writing desk.

While she polished, she listened for the noises from upstairs. From Mrs Vernon’s bedroom, of course, there was still no sound. But the heavy footsteps were still moving directly overhead, where Sheila knew Laura’s room lay. Mr Vernon was still up there with the policemen. He had not been in a good mood; he had been angry, in fact. Understandable, of course. But being rude and refusing even to speak to her was going too far, Sheila thought.

The phone began to ring again. Four rings before the answering machine cut in. She couldn’t understand why the Vernons were getting so many phone calls. Back home at Wye Close, the phone often didn’t ring from one week to the next, and then it would only be some girl she didn’t know, who would try to sell her double glazing.

Sheila Kelk was so absorbed in listening to the movements above, that she didn’t notice someone had come into the room behind her until she heard the voice.

‘Working overtime, Mrs Kelk?’

She jumped, her hand going to her mouth as she turned, then she relaxed as quickly.

‘Oh – it’s you.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said the young man. His jeans were grubby, and when he walked across the carpet towards the far door, his shoes left imprints on the pile. Sheila wanted to complain, but knew it would make no impression on Daniel Vernon. He was dark and fleshy, like his father, but sullen and quick-tempered where Graham Vernon was polite and sometimes charming, on the outside at least. Daniel was wearing a white T-shirt with the name of some rock group on it that Sheila Kelk had never heard of. The armpits and a patch on his back were soaked with sweat. She guessed that Daniel had probably walked from the main road after hitching his way from Devon.

‘Where’s my mother?’ he asked.

‘Taken to her bed and won’t get up,’ said Sheila.

‘And I suppose these apes tramping about the house are policemen.’

‘They’re looking at Laura’s room.’

‘What for, for God’s sake? What do they think they’ll find there?’

‘They don’t tell me, I’m sure,’ said Sheila.

When the phone went again, Daniel automatically walked over and picked it up on the second ring.

‘No, this is Daniel Vernon. Who am I speaking to?’ He listened impatiently for a moment. ‘Your name means nothing to me, but I take it you’re some sort of associate of my father’s? Yes? Then, in that case, you can fuck off.’

Daniel slammed the phone back down and glared at Sheila.

‘Oh, I don’t think your father would like you to do that,’ she said, shocked.

He walked towards her angrily, and she backed away from him, dragging the vacuum cleaner with her so that it remained in between them, like a lion tamer’s chair.

‘My father, Mrs Kelk,’ said Daniel, his face contorted into a snarl. ‘My father can fuck off as well.’

Tailby was watching Graham Vernon carefully, not asking too many questions, content to let the silence prompt the other man to talk.

‘We’re a very close family,’ said Vernon. ‘We’ve stayed very close to our children. In other families, they start to drift away when they reach their teens, don’t they?’

Tailby nodded, as one father to another, understanding the way it was with teenagers. In his own case, though, they had done more than drift – they had positively stampeded.

‘Charlotte and I, we have … we had a good relationship with Laura. We took an interest in what she was doing at school, in who her friends were, in how she was progressing with her music and her riding. And she took an interest in what we were doing. Not many families can say they have that sort of relationship, can they? Laura used to ask me how business was. She would ask me about some of the people she had met. Business contacts, you know. She was so intelligent. She knew who was important without me telling her. Amazing.’

‘She met your business contacts here?’ asked Tailby. ‘They visit you at home?’

‘Oh yes. I think entertaining is important. We both do, Charlotte and I. You have to treat your clients right. It’s a question of mixing business with pleasure, if you like. A nice house, a good meal, a decent bottle of wine or two. A normal, happy family around. It makes a good impression on clients, I can tell you. It’s the key to long-term success.’

‘Of course.’ Tailby wondered where a happy family came in the list of requirements. Somewhere between the Bordeaux and the beef Wellington?

‘And your son, Mr Vernon?’

‘Daniel? What about him?’

‘Is he part of this … I mean, does he meet your clients when they visit?’

‘Well, he has done, on occasion.’ Vernon got up from the chair and poured himself another whisky. He didn’t offer the policeman one, having already been refused once.

Tailby had noted that there was a drinks cabinet in Vernon’s study as well as in the sitting room, and no doubt another in the dining room. Not that Vernon himself called this room his study. It was an office, and it looked like one – with a personal computer and laser printer, a fax machine, a phone and a bookcase full of presentation folders in tasteful dark blue with gold block lettering. From the high sash windows there was an excellent view of the garden, right down to the avenue of conifers and the rocky summit of Win Low in the distance.

‘He’s at university, Chief Inspector. Exeter. Studying politics. Not my idea of a subject, but there we are. He’s a bright boy, and he’ll make a success of something one day, I suppose.’

‘He was close to Laura?’

‘Oh, very close. They doted on each other.’

‘He’ll be extremely upset then, by what’s happened.’

‘He was dreadfully cut up when we told him. He’ll take it very hard indeed.’

Tailby considered this. He wondered if the son would put on a better show of being cut up than the father was doing. Shock and grief took people so many different ways, of course. And Graham Vernon had already had three days in which to go through the range of emotions expected of a man whose fifteen-year-old daughter had gone missing and had then been found again, battered to death. There had been emotions, certainly. Anger most of all – but directed almost obsessively in one direction, towards the boy called Lee Sherratt, who had, it was claimed, lusted after young Laura. The intelligent, innocent, extremely attractive Laura. But if there had been genuine grief in Graham Vernon’s heart, then Tailby had missed it.

‘It’s a little early to be back at university, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Surely August is still the summer holidays for these students, isn’t it?’

‘Of course.’ Suddenly, Vernon looked as though he might be losing patience. ‘But there are always things to do before the term starts proper. Summer schools, revision, settling into new digs.’

Tailby nodded. ‘Tell me again about Lee Sherratt.’

‘Again? Surely you know enough about him already? I don’t think there’s any more I can tell you that will help you to find him, if you haven’t managed it already.’

‘We’re looking as hard as we can, sir. I’m hopeful we’ll locate the boy soon. But I’d just like to get the alleged circumstances clear in my mind.’

‘The alleged circumstances?’ Vernon looked a little red in the face.

‘His relationship with Laura.’

Vernon sighed. ‘He’s a young man, isn’t he? Twenty years old. You know what young men are like. Laura was a very attractive girl. Very attractive. You could see by the way he looked at her what he was thinking. I had to get rid of him in the end. It never occurred to me when I took him on – I blame myself for that.’

‘So he looked at Laura,’ said Tailby. ‘Anything else?’

‘Well … he took any excuse to strip off his shirt when he worked in the garden. Whenever he knew she was watching him. I thought of telling him not to, but it would only have drawn attention to the fact.’

‘It’s not what I’d call a relationship,’ said Tailby.

‘It was obvious that he wanted to go further. I don’t need telling about young men like Sherratt, Chief Inspector. I had to nip it in the bud. I couldn’t have him pestering my daughter.’

‘Did she say he was pestering her? Did she complain?’

‘Well, in a way.’

‘Mmm. Yet from what you say, it sounds as though Laura was equally interested in the young man.’

‘For God’s sake, she was only fifteen. That age is … difficult. They’re easily influenced, in the full flush of adolescent hormones. Surely you understand that.’

It was obvious to them both that Vernon was floundering.

‘So you sacked him.’

‘Yes. Last week. I told him we didn’t need him any more. He wasn’t very pleased, I can tell you.’

‘You tend to deal with these things yourself, do you, sir? Rather than your wife.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re away all day on business. Sometimes you work long hours, no doubt. You arrive home late in the evenings. But your wife is at home most of the time, I gather. She would have had more contact with a gardener. Yet you would do something like that yourself, rather than letting your wife do it.’

‘Yes.’

‘I just thought, it might have been difficult to find the opportunity to speak to Sherratt, if you weren’t at home during the day.’

‘I made a point of it on this occasion, Chief Inspector.’

‘I would also have thought it might be difficult for you to get the chance to observe the boy.’

‘Observe him? You’re losing me.’

‘I’m going on your description just now. You described him looking at your daughter and showing off to her while she watched. That suggests to me, sir, that you must have spent some time observing him. Perhaps I should say, observing them both.’

Vernon was pacing towards the windows with his whisky. His hands were moving again now, touching his lips as if he feared his mouth might react of its own accord. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at. It’s quite natural. Are those men of yours finished up there yet?’

‘Shall we see, sir?’ suggested Tailby.

Sheila Kelk’s gaze passed over Daniel’s shoulder to the doorway from the main hall. The tall policeman stood there, smiling politely, raising a slightly quizzical eyebrow. She wasn’t sure how long he had been standing there.

Daniel turned and stared at him. ‘And who exactly are you?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Tailby, Edendale CID. Here with Mr Vernon’s permission, of course.’

‘Oh, sure.’

There were more footsteps in the hall behind Tailby.

‘Daniel?’ Graham Vernon looked tired rather than impatient now, the conflicting pressures starting to wear him down. He looked from Tailby to his son. ‘We didn’t expect you quite so soon.’

‘Mr Daniel Vernon, is it? I’d like to have a chat with you sometime, sir, when it’s convenient.’

Sheila looked at Daniel and received a glare so venomous that her mouth shut suddenly, and she began to drag the Dyson towards the dining room, away from the scene of confrontation.

‘Of course, Chief Inspector.’ The young man walked towards the policeman, staring up at him with an expression of undisguised fury. ‘I’m absolutely dying to tell you a few things you may not know about my parents.’