Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 22

Ben Cooper and Diane Fry emerged from their showers damp and tingling, and drank a fruit juice in the rugby club bar before heading back to Edendale. Cooper had seen a glimpse of Fry’s flat in Grosvenor Road, and he thought he knew why she had been so easy to persuade with an excuse not to go home. But she could not know his own reason, and so far she had shown no curiosity. She did, however, want to talk about work, to go over the day’s results.

‘God, that Moorhay place,’ she said. ‘Is everyone round here as stroppy and awkward as that? The Dickinson man was the worst. Unhelpful or what?’

‘He’s an old man,’ said Cooper. ‘An old man who’d had a shock. How do you expect him to be? Most people around here are friendly and helpful, anyway.’

‘That I remain to be convinced of.’

Her view of Harry Dickinson struck Cooper as superficial. His own feelings had been quite different. He thought of the moment when he had found the body of Laura Vernon, of Harry standing like a black mark against the sun-drenched hillside. Stroppy and unhelpful? Maybe. Deeply disturbed and afraid, definitely.

‘Anyway,’ said Fry, ‘hold on a minute. That wasn’t what you said at the briefing this afternoon. You wanted Dickinson to be pressed harder.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Yeah? An old man who’d had a shock. So what do you want to press him harder for? That sounds suspiciously like gratuitous harassment to me, pal. Where’s the caring, sharing Ben Cooper here? Come off it, you think he was unhelpful too, don’t you?’

‘I think he knows something he’s not saying,’ admitted Cooper.

‘And that’s not the same thing?’

‘Maybe Mr Tailby and Mr Hitchens didn’t ask the right questions,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s not to do with Laura Vernon at all. I don’t know.’

‘Well, you could always ask your girlfriend, I suppose,’ said Fry.

‘Who?’

‘You know – the granddaughter, Helen Milner. Got the hots for you, hasn’t she? She was following you around Moorhay like a lost dog.’

‘Rubbish.’

Fry shrugged. ‘I stand by the evidence, your honour.’

Cooper refused to rise to the bait.

‘What did you make of the other two, then – Harry Dickinson’s friends?’

‘My God, don’t remind me. That place was like something medieval. When I left West Midlands, they kept telling me that the countryside was primitive. Now I know it’s true. That dead hen … How Wilford Cutts’s wife can put up with that, I don’t know. No doubt she would have had to cook it in a stew tonight.’

‘And chop off its head and legs and pluck it, and take out its innards,’ said Cooper. ‘That’s women’s work. So they say.’

‘Not this woman. I’d make him stuff his dead hen where it hurts most.’

Cooper sniffed his orange juice suspiciously, worried by the distinctly metallic tang.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t think this enquiry will get any further until Lee Sherratt is traced.’

‘He’s a fair bet.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. We’re just accepting Graham Vernon’s word as gospel and hoping the evidence will turn up somehow. It’s lazy thinking.’

‘OK then, Sherlock. You obviously know better than Mr Tailby and Mr Hitchens put together. What’s your theory, then?’

‘You don’t want to hear about my gut feelings, I suppose.’

‘You’re right, I don’t. I asked for a theory. Something that relies on a few facts.’

‘I suppose you play it by the book always. Do you never follow a hunch, use your instincts?’

‘By the book,’ said Fry.

‘So you get yourself into a difficult situation. The first thing you do is call in, then sit back and wait for the back-up to arrive?’

‘Well, usually,’ said Fry. ‘That is the sensible course.’

‘The safest for you, certainly. Would you never break the rule?’

She thought about it. ‘OK, there are times when you might have to take the initiative.’

‘Eureka.’

‘I’ll let you know when that happens. All right?’

‘Sure. Send me a fax.’

A couple of rugby players walked past on their way out from the bar, smelling strongly of beer. They slapped Ben Cooper on the shoulder and ruffled his hair as they made jokes about making sure his balls were warmed up. They smirked across the table at Fry without speaking to her.

Fry was rapidly losing interest in Ben Cooper. Other police officers’ private lives were a serious turn-off, she found. Just occasionally, there was someone she felt she needed to know more about. But there was no way Ben Cooper could be one of them.

‘What do you know about DI Armstrong?’ she asked him, when the rugby players had gone.

‘Not much. I worked with her briefly when she was a DS, but B Division poached her from us. She seemed to get promoted pretty quickly. I can’t say she’s dazzled anybody with her results since she was moved up to DI.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she got the job because she’s a woman.’

‘No, but … Well.’

‘And maybe she did. So what? Makes a change, doesn’t it?’

‘Not to me, it doesn’t.’

Fry drained her glass and slapped it on the table. ‘I think it’s about time we left. There’s just no atmosphere in here.’

By the time they left the club, it was dark. Cooper pressed his key fob and the Toyota flashed its lights for him in the car park. The skeletal shapes of the white rugby posts were visible standing guard over the black, deserted pitches.

‘Do you actually play rugby, then?’ asked Fry as they got into the car.

‘No, I could never see the attraction in it,’ he said.

‘Oh? I thought team sports were a boys’ thing.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Especially in the force. They like team bonding and all that, don’t they?’

Cooper shrugged. ‘I’ve managed to keep out of it so far. I prefer the individual sports. But I am in the Derbyshire Police Male Voice Choir.’

‘You are kidding.’

‘No, it’s good fun. We do a few concerts – for the old folks mostly, that kind of thing, especially around Christmas time. The old dears love it. It’s good PR.’

‘Do you sing soprano?’

‘Tenor.’

A couple of miles down the road towards Edendale, Cooper turned the Toyota off on to a side road and headed back out of the valley.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Fry.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ he said. ‘Something that came to me when we were talking about DI Armstrong.’

‘What exactly do you mean?’ said Fry, with a warning note in her voice.

‘You remember I said she was “poached” by B Division?’

‘Are you still harping on that?’

‘No, no, you don’t understand. I was thinking about poaching.’

‘Come again?’

‘Just up here there’s a big estate, the Colishaw Estate. That’s an “estate” as in a large area of privately owned land. Not a housing estate.’

‘I think I’ve got that, thanks.’

‘The Colishaw Estate runs shoots. That means they breed a lot of pheasants. There are deer on the estate too. Not to mention rabbits and hare and partridge.’

‘Is this a nature lesson? If so, could we possibly do it tomorrow?’

‘Obviously, it’s a big target for poachers,’ said Cooper patiently.

‘Right.’

‘The professional gangs used to be a big problem, but they don’t bother so much any more. There’s no money in it now. But the local men still get down there.’

‘Chasing the pheasants and rabbits.’

‘You don’t exactly chase them.’

Cooper pulled the Toyota on to the verge near a patch of woodland, where signs warned ‘Private Property’. There was little traffic on the road, and the night was totally black but for the stars in a clear sky. The Toyota’s sidelights illuminated a wall and a length of barbed wire.

‘There’s an old hut down there,’ he said, pointing into the wood. ‘It’s always been a favourite for poachers to lie up in. It’s well away from where the keepers patrol, even when they bother. Jackie Sherratt was a notorious poacher. He used to use it all the time. He must often have taken his son Lee there. As part of his training.’

‘Sherratt? Hold on. You think –?’

‘It’s possible. I think Lee could have chosen the hut to lie up in. No one will have thought of checking this out. It’s too distant from Moorhay. But a lad like Lee wouldn’t think anything of moving this far.’

‘Don’t tell me – you want to check it out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right here and now?’

‘Why not?’

‘Are you crazy? It’s the middle of the night!’

‘I’m going down anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘You can wait here if you like.’

He got out of the car, pulling a sturdy torch from the glove compartment.

‘We can’t do this.’

‘I can,’ said Cooper. ‘You’ll obviously have to go by the book, won’t you?’

He climbed over the wall and began to walk into the wood, finding the start of a narrow path that had been invisible from the road.

‘Hold on, for God’s sake,’ said Fry, slamming her door.

He smiled and keyed the electronic locks.

‘Can’t be too careful.’

They set off close together, sharing the light of the torch. Cooper had always felt a part of the world he worked in, especially when he was out working in the open. But Diane Fry, he thought, would be for ever a stranger to it. He was alert for any sounds in the wood, but she seemed completely absorbed in herself, as if the darkness meant not only that she couldn’t see, but also that she could neither hear nor smell what was around her, nor even feel the nature of the ground underfoot. Cooper was listening hard. Any countryman knew that the sounds that animals made could tell you whether there was a human presence in the area.

At that moment, he could hear the echo of a faint screech deep in the wood, a fleeting sound like the scratching of a nail on glass, or chalk across a blackboard, but with a plaintive falling note at the end.

‘Little owl.’

‘Eh?’ said Fry.

‘Little owl.’

‘What are you talking about? Is it Cowboys and Indians? You Big Chief Little Owl, me squaw?’

‘I’m talking about the bird. Can’t you hear it?’

‘No.’

They both listened for a moment.

‘It’s gone now,’ said Cooper.

Fry seemed genuinely reluctant to go into the woods in the dark. He was surprised by her behaviour. Afraid of the dark? Surely not Diane Fry; not Macho Woman.

‘Are you nervous?’ he asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘We could leave it until tomorrow, if you like. I could suggest it at the morning briefing, and see if anyone can be bothered to put out an action for it. We’re not getting overtime for this, after all. It doesn’t make good business sense, does it? If you want to look at it like that.’

‘Since we’re here, let’s just do it, then we can go home.’

‘On the other hand, if he is down there, he’ll probably have moved on somewhere else by tomorrow.’

‘Can you just shut up and get on with it?’

Diane Fry found the darkness disturbing. The deeper they moved into the wood, the more she wished that she had brought a torch of her own, that she had refused to go along with the idea, that she had stayed in the car after all. Or better still, that she had never stupidly agreed to play squash with a jerk like Ben Cooper. She had known it had been a mistake from the start. She should never have let herself get involved, not even for one evening. And now it had ended up like this. With a stupid escapade that she could see no way of getting herself out of.

In front of her, Cooper was walking with an exaggerated carefulness, lifting his feet high in front of him before placing them cautiously back on the ground. He pointed the torch downwards, shielding its light with his hand so that it would not be visible in the distance. At one point he stopped to rest against a tree. When he straightened up again, Fry felt him stagger as if he was drunk. She grabbed his arm to support him, but felt no resistance in his muscles. Peering into his face by the dim light, she saw that his cheeks were drawn, and his eyelids were heavy.

‘You’re exhausted,’ she said. ‘You can’t go on with this. We’ll have to turn back.’

‘Not now,’ said Cooper. ‘I’ll be all right.’

He shook himself vigorously and they set off again. Soon, a darker area of blackness began to form up ahead. Cooper switched off the torch and signalled her closer so that he could whisper into her ear. His breath felt warm on her cheek, which was starting to feel a faint chill in the night air.

‘That’s the hut. You stay here while I take a look through the window at the side there. Don’t make a sound.’

Fry began to protest, but he hushed her. Then he was gone, creeping through the trees towards the side of the hut. Soon his shape had vanished into the gloom, and she found herself on her own. Immediately, she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She cursed silently, knowing what was about to come.

As soon as she was alone, the darkness began to close in around her. It moved suddenly on her from every side, dropping like a heavy blanket, pressing against her body and smothering her with its warm, sticky embrace. Its weight drove the breath from her lungs and pinioned her limbs, draining the strength from her muscles. Her eyes stretched wide, and her ears strained for noises in the woods as she felt her heart stumble and flutter, gripped with the old, familiar fear.

Around her, the night murmured and fluttered with unseen things, hundreds of tiny shiftings and stirrings that seemed to edge continually nearer, inch by inch, clear but unidentifiable. Next, her skin began to crawl with imagined sensations. It was as if she had stood in a seething nest of tiny ants that ran all over her body in their thousands, scurrying backwards and forwards, scuttling in and out of her intimate crevices, tickling her flesh with their tiny feet and antennae. Her flesh squirmed and writhed as an icy chill seeped into her bones.

She had always known the old memories were still powerful and raw, ready to rise up and grab at her hands and face from the darkness, throwing her thoughts into turmoil and her body into immobility. Desperately, she tried to count the number of dark forms that loomed around her, mere smudges of silhouettes that crept ever nearer, reaching out to nuzzle her neck with their teeth and squeeze the air from her throat.

And then she seemed to hear a voice in the darkness. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring in a Birmingham accent. ‘It’s a copper,’ it said. Taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, stained pillars of menace all around, whichever way she turned. ‘A copper. She’s a copper.’

The light fell on her face, blinding her. She knew there was a person behind the light, but she couldn’t make out his eyes. She tensed automatically, her hands closing into fists, the first two knuckles protruding, with her thumbs locked over her fingers, and her legs moving to take her balance. Concentrate. Pour the adrenaline into the muscles. Get ready to strike.

‘Are you OK?’

A concerned voice, northern vowels. Whispering. Unthreatening. Fry let the muscles relax slowly, coming back to an awareness of the woods, to the fact she was in Derbyshire, many miles from Birmingham. The reality of the horror was months behind her, and only the wounds in her mind were still raw and terrible where they were exposed to the cold wind of memory. She took a breath, felt her lungs trembling and ragged.

Cooper leaned towards her face, so they were only a few inches apart. ‘Are you OK, Diane?’

Instinctively, she reached out a hand to touch him, like a child seeking affection, a protective embrace. She felt his solidity and his reassuring warmth, and closed her eyes to grasp at the elusive sensations of tenderness and affection. The feeling of another human body so close was unfamiliar. It was a long time since she had wanted someone to hold her and comfort her, a lifetime since there had been someone to wipe away the tears that she now felt gathering in the corners of her eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’

Fry pulled back her hand, blinked her eyes, drew herself upright. Control and concentration, that’s what she needed. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs, forcing her heartbeat to slow down. Control and concentration.

‘I’m fine, Ben. What did you see?’

‘He’s in there, all right. He’s got a candle lit, and I could see his face in a sort of half-profile.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘It’s definitely him.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘Are you joking? We nick him.’

Fry sighed. ‘All right. Let’s nick him then.’

Cooper put his hand on her arm, and gave it a squeeze. She bit her lip at the friendly gesture, and firmly shook him off.

‘There’s just the one door, and there’s no lock on it,’ he said. ‘We’ll go in fast, one either side of him, take him by surprise. I’ll do the words. OK?’

‘Fine by me.’

They approached the door, paused to look at each other. Cooper nodded, flicked the catch and kicked the door backwards on its hinges. He was in the hut fast, moving to his right, allowing Fry space to get alongside him.

A young man was bending over a wooden table against the far side of the hut. A candle threw a fitful light on his face and cast his shadow on the opposite wall. There was an old chair and a small cupboard in the room, and even a worn carpet on the floor. But the hut smelled of earth and mouldy bread.

Cooper began to reach for his warrant card, which was deep inside the inner pocket of his jacket.

‘Lee Sherratt? I’m a police officer.’

Sherratt turned round, slowly and deliberately, and only then did Cooper see the gun. It came up in his hands as they lifted from the table, the barrel swinging outwards and upwards, with Sherratt’s fingers turning white where they gripped the stock, one index finger creeping towards the trigger guard, a blackened fingernail touching the steel of the trigger, applying the first pressure …

Cooper stood numbed with surprise, his right hand pushed into his pocket, immobile. His mind had come to a halt, no instincts sprang up to tell him what to do. The last thing he had been expecting was that he would die here, in the poacher’s hut, on a threadbare carpet gritty with soil and fragments of stale food.

Then Diane Fry came into view. She was moving at twice the speed of Sherratt. Her left foot lashed out in a straight-legged sideways kick that impacted with Sherratt’s wrist and knocked the rifle out of his hands towards the wall of the hut. Even before the gun had landed, she regained her footing, shifted her balance and was striking a closed-fist rising blow to his solar plexus. Sherratt folded backwards into the table, then collapsed face down on to the floor and vomited on the carpet. Fry stepped back to avoid the mess.

‘You don’t have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but what you say may be given in evidence,’ she said.

‘Shit,’ said Cooper.

Fry dug into her pockets and pulled out her kwik-cuffs and her mobile phone.

‘I suppose I could have called in first and waited for the back-up,’ she said. ‘But, like I said, there are times.’