Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 27

Fry switched channels on the TV in her room until she landed on a news programme. She watched an item about a sex scandal involving a government minister, heard about a breakdown in talks in Northern Ireland, and listened to news of a long-running war in some African country where thousands of people had already died in an inexplicable tribal conflict. It was all very predictable.

She lay sprawled on her hard bed, nibbling one of the complimentary biscuits from a cellophane-wrapped packet on the bedside table. She had kicked off her shoes and taken off her sweaty clothes, and was wearing her black kimono over her underwear. She was wishing she had been able to find the time to call in at a shop in Skipton for some chocolate.

Then a shot of the woods at Moorhay came on the screen. It looked as though the camera had been positioned on Raven’s Side, where the bird-watcher, Gary Edwards, had stood. It focused in on the site where Laura Vernon had been found, but all that could be seen was the police tape. Then a reporter with a microphone appeared with a brief summary of the enquiry, and the scene switched to a shot of Edendale Police HQ, followed by a crowded room full of lights and microphones. At a table sat DCI Tailby, a police press officer and Graham and Charlotte Vernon. The familiar photo of Laura appeared in a corner of the screen. They were about to broadcast the appeal recorded that morning.

Several minutes were given over to coverage of the Vernon enquiry. To be of real interest to the media, Fry knew that these days murders had to involve children or teenage girls, or possibly young mothers. But it also seemed to make a difference what part of the country they happened in. Somehow it seemed to strike at the heart of English middle-class conceptions for a murder to take place on their own rural doorstep. If Laura Vernon had died on wasteland in a run-down area of London or Birmingham, it would not have been seized on so eagerly. But this was a murder in scenic, sleepy Moorhay, and the tabloid newspapers had been full of it all week. Where Diane Fry had come from, there were murders for the papers to report every day. Some weren’t given a high profile, even locally. And there were other crimes that hardly seemed worth mentioning. Like rape, for example.

After a few words of introduction from Tailby, it was Graham Vernon who was doing the talking. Fry knew that the film clip would be recorded and played back over and over again at Edendale, where they would be looking for little giveaways in the Vernons’ performance, for discrepancies between the account they gave on screen and the statements they had given the police.

It was accepted practice to encourage the relatives in such cases to tell their story under the glare of the lights and cameras, knowing their words were being heard by millions of viewers. It put a pressure on them in a way that could no longer be legally done in the privacy of an interview room.

But Vernon looked well in control. He appealed in a steady voice for anyone who had seen Laura on the night in question, or who knew anything about her death, to come forward and assist police. He encouraged people to consider whether they had noticed anything strange about the behaviour of their husbands, sons or boyfriends. Any bit of information, however trivial it might seem, could prove useful to the police. He sounded as though he had been coached in the phrases by Tailby himself.

Then Vernon changed to a slower, more intimate tone as he talked about Laura. He called her ‘our little girl’ and described her as a bright, clever teenager who had had her whole life to look forward to, but had been brutally struck down. He talked of how well she had been doing at school, and described her love of music and her passion for horses. He told the watching millions that Laura had been due to take part in a horse show today. But her horse, Paddy, was still in his stable, wondering where she was. As an actor, he was only second rate. But that was how some people coped with these things.

Finally, the microphone was presented to Charlotte Vernon. Her eyes were dry and staring, and Fry wondered if she was still on some form of medication. She didn’t say much, but at least she sounded sincere.

‘We’re pleading with everybody: just help the police to catch whoever did this to Laura.’ And she stared directly into the cameras, gaunt and grief-stricken, while her husband put an arm round her shoulders to support her. It was the image that would appear in all the newspapers tomorrow.

The news programme drifted off into a weather forecast – more sun tomorrow and no cloud until the evening. Fry reflected on the past few hours, the frustrating, time-consuming interviews with the student hikers. One after another they had been dragged reluctantly from their tents to the little office at the camp site near Malham. None of them had seen a thing – a fact which Fry thought could have been established quite easily by a couple of North Yorkshire bobbies.

She wondered whose idea it had been for the two of them to travel all this way from Derbyshire, with the necessity of staying overnight in the little hotel in Skipton. Someone had felt sure the hikers would have seen something useful – or they had said they did. And why a detective inspector, who should have been heading one of the enquiry teams? A sergeant would have been quite adequate, or even two DCs.

Of course, it must have been Paul Hitchens’s idea. She had left him in the bar, fuelling up on beer and whisky, enjoying the freedom of being away from the office. He had looked sour when she had taken only one glass of white wine and had refused further drinks, pleading tiredness. Late-night boozing in a Yorkshire pub was not her style.

Meanwhile, no doubt, the main part of the enquiry was getting along fine without her back at Edendale. She wondered what Ben Cooper was doing right now. Bubbling with brilliant insights and unerring flashes of instinct, probably. Like last night. It had been the most stupid thing she had ever seen, to go trailing through the woods in the dark and bursting in on a suspect without proper back-up, or even calling in to tell control where they were. If that’s where instinct and intuition led you, then you could keep it as far as she was concerned. She could not forget the moment that she had seen the gun in Lee Sherratt’s hands. Then her instinct had taken over. But that was a different kind of instinct – a physical reaction, an essential defence mechanism honed by months of training.

In this case, though, she knew she had reacted not in self-defence, but out of a gut-wrenching fear of seeing Ben Cooper injured. She knew it was terror that had made her strike the second, unnecessary, blow. Once she had disarmed Sherratt, he could have been arrested easily. But she had struck again out of fear and anger. Her old instructor would have been furious with her. It showed lack of discipline.

Fry wondered whether she had apologized to Cooper properly for the comments she had made about his father. He had seemed withdrawn and moody afterwards. The escapade in the wood could well have been his way of proving something – in which case, had it been partly her fault that it had happened? Sighing in exasperation, she put it out of her mind. People were too complicated when they started having feelings. Why couldn’t they all just get on with the job in hand?

Another old film was starting. Some romantic comedy from the 1950s with James Stewart. She switched off the TV and lay back on the bed. For a while she lay listening to the footsteps and other small sounds in the hotel corridor. She was wondering whether Paul Hitchens would come to her room.

‘Sound asleep.’

Ben Cooper had just come from saying good night to his nieces. Matt and Kate were watching television, curled up on the sofa together, a picture of domestic contentment. Life had to go on, after all.

But the sight gave Cooper no comfort; it only made him feel worse. Since Monday he had been finding it difficult just to walk up and down the stairs at the farmhouse, remembering the things he had seen.

He and Matt had spent an hour at the hospital, though their mother was still asleep. They had been warned she would be under heavy sedation for at least two days. She would not be awake and able to communicate with them until tomorrow. Yet the two brothers had still wanted to sit by her bed, looking at her face, watching her movements, and discussing, in quiet voices, their hopes and fears for the future. Matt said that the house and the phone had been busy for two days with members of the family calling to ask how Isabel was and offer their help. The Coopers were a large, close family, and nothing brought them together more effectively than a crisis. The same had happened two years ago, when the brothers and their sister, Claire, had never been alone after their father had been killed.

The death of their father had been a sudden, shattering blow. The illness of their mother had been a slow, lingering torture. Cooper’s mind drifted away again, seeking memories of the times when they had all been together. It had only been two years ago, but it seemed like a century. It was called changing circumstances.

This time, though, he could not understand why he was finding little solace from the constant presence of his family. Their closeness seemed to create a weight of expectation which he no longer felt capable of fulfilling. They all thought he was a clever, popular policeman and never doubted for a moment that he was destined for great things. It was a burden that he could no longer live up to.

Suddenly it seemed to him as though everything in his life was going wrong, one thing after another. The solid planks he depended on were being kicked away; his hopes were being trampled on remorselessly, one by one. Why had the crisis with his mother coincided with the arrival at Edendale of Diane Fry? He couldn’t get out of his mind the idea that the two things were connected. They were a joint assault on his private and professional life, and he didn’t know how to cope with the effects they were having on his feelings, his moods and his judgement.

He had to admit that he had made a mistake in ignoring procedures to go after Lee Sherratt, and it had nearly ended in disaster – though he told himself that if Fry had not been with him, he would have done things differently. And then, out of the blue, he had found himself thinking about Helen Milner; he had been thinking about her ever since they had met for the first time in years during his visit to Dial Cottage on Monday.

In quiet moments since then he had speculated about the possibility that he had found someone he had enough in common with to think they could share a life together, someone outside the family. He had pictured himself introducing Helen to his mother, and knowing that she would approve. It was one of the two things that she wanted most – for Ben to find someone to marry; the other was her confident belief that he would make sergeant, like his father. Only that morning, he had been presented with an opportunity to renew the relationship they had once developed. But he had let the opportunity pass, and he had done it because of the job.

On top of that had come the humiliating fiasco with the compost heap at Thorpe Farm. He could imagine what was being said about him at the station. Within a few hours it would be the subject of gossip for every police officer in E Division, probably the whole county. The mountain he had to climb to be worthy of his father’s memory was getting higher and higher. At this moment, it looked like Mount Everest.

‘You’ve just missed the appeal by the Vernons,’ said Matt.

‘Yeah? What was it like?’

‘Stagey,’ said Kate.

Cooper nodded. He slumped into an armchair and stared at the TV screen without seeing it. His mind was a whirl of anxieties. He wondered how he was going to face going back into work tomorrow. And how he was going to face the visit to the hospital in the afternoon, which he had arranged to take time off for – the visit when his mother would be out of sedation. He didn’t realize that Kate was speaking to him for several seconds.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘Are you all right, Ben?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I was asking if you were in for the night now. I’ll make some supper for later, if you are.’

He couldn’t admit that he found the idea of staying in the farmhouse for any length of time unbearable. There was a constant urge to go up the stairs and open the door of his mother’s room, knowing she wouldn’t be there. An urge to relive the worst moments of her illness as if it was some penance he had to go through.

‘Er, no. I thought I might go out for a drink. Do you fancy coming, Matt?’

He didn’t fail to see the quick squeeze that Kate gave to his brother’s arm, which communicated her feelings sufficiently.

‘No, thanks, Ben. I’ll stay in tonight. I’m getting up early in the morning to shoot some of those rabbits in the south field. Maybe tomorrow, eh?’

‘Fine.’

Cooper got in the car and drove automatically towards Edendale. There were a handful of pubs in town which he went to regularly. But on the outskirts of town, when he saw the familiar landscape of stone gables and slate roofs spread out before him in the dusk, he changed his mind. He turned the Toyota into a side road and went over the hill into Moorhay.

The village looked peaceful once more. There were no tourists to be seen on the street, and no noticeable police activity, only a line of green wheelie bins along the roadside. The residents had retreated again behind their doors, some of them clutching their individual secrets, he was sure.

He drew up a few yards short of Dial Cottage and sat in the car for a while watching the doorway. It might have been the confusing light of the growing dusk, or the stress of his experiences during the day, or just his secret hopes acting on his senses. But he felt as though he could see Helen Milner emerging from the door of the cottage, just as she had done that morning – a warm, living glow against the inner darkness. He remembered that fleeting expression of disappointment when she realized she was not the one he had come to see. He remembered Gwen Dickinson’s words – ‘She’s been talking about you, you know.’ Could that be true? Had Helen been thinking of him, as he had thought about her?

Cooper repeated to himself the last few sentences that had been spoken between them. ‘So aren’t you a policeman all the time?’ she had asked. ‘What are you like when you’re just being Ben Cooper?’ ‘You’ll have to find out one day, won’t you?’ And then finally she had said: ‘Maybe I will.’

He turned the words over in his mind, assessing the tone of voice she had used, trying to recall the exact expression on her face, the precise movement of her head as she turned away, seeking the subtle meanings. There would be a day, he promised himself. Definitely there would be a day, one when he wasn’t being a policeman. But not just now.

He started the Toyota and drove a hundred yards further along the road to pull up on the cobbles outside the Drover. Inside, the pub was busy for a Wednesday night. But in their usual corner were the three old men – Harry Dickinson, Wilford Cutts and Sam Beeley. Their heads turned as he came in and their eyes followed him to the bar. As he was ordering, he heard a comment from one of them produce a cackle of laughter. He felt his jaw clench, and the blood start to flow into his cheeks, but controlled himself with an effort. He was not going to let the old men wind him up.

The landlord, Kenny Lee, tried to make conversation, but sniffed and turned away when he was ignored. Having paid for his pint of Robinson’s, Cooper walked over towards the table in the corner. The three old men watched him come, their eyes expectant, but their mouths tight shut. Harry stood up from his chair.

‘Looking for me?’

‘Not particularly. I just called in for a drink.’

Harry looked disappointed, and sat down again. Cooper looked round for a seat and found a worn wooden stool. He could feel them following his movements as he pulled the stool up to the table, sat down and took a long draught of his beer.

‘That’s good stuff,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be. But I couldn’t try it while I was on duty.’

The old men nodded cautiously. Sam coughed and offered him a cigarette, which Cooper refused politely.

‘Not many tourists in tonight, then?’

‘It’s Wednesday,’ said Sam.

He sensed the unspoken messages passing between the three men in the flicking of their eyes and the tapping of their bony fingers on the table. They were like a group of poker players about to take the shirt off the back of a stranger in town. But Cooper wasn’t interested in what they weren’t telling him. Not just now.

He let a silence develop, waiting for the old men to break it. Normally they would probably sit together for hours without saying a word, if there was nothing much to say. But he was a guest at their table, and they were the hosts. He was banking on their courtesy.

‘How’s it going, then?’ asked Wilford at last.

‘What’s that?’

‘You know what, lad. The murder case.’

‘It’s not,’ said Cooper, and lifted his glass to his face again.

‘Eh?’

‘You’ve got suspects,’ said Sam. ‘You’ll be questioning them. There’ll be bright lights, the good copper and the bad copper. Wearing ’em down.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘We can’t do much of that these days. It’s all the new regulations. They’ve got rights.’

‘Rights?’

‘Unless we’ve got enough evidence to charge them, we have to let them go.’

‘And haven’t you? Got evidence?’ asked Wilford.

‘Not enough. Not by a long way.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘It’s very discouraging. Sometimes you feel like giving up.’

Harry had said nothing so far. His eyes were fixed on Cooper as he spoke, watching his lips, studying his face as if trying to see behind his words.

‘It wasn’t our fault about the pigs, lad.’

‘No, I know it wasn’t.’

‘Did you get in trouble?’ asked Wilford.

Cooper shrugged. ‘I’ll be very unpopular for a bit.’

‘It wasn’t our fault,’ echoed Sam.

‘We told you about the blood and bone.’

‘The heap rots ’em down, as long as they’re not too big. Otherwise the knackerman charges you for taking ’em away.’

‘And you don’t want to be paying the knackerman when you can dispose of ’em natural, like,’ said Sam.

‘They weren’t big enough for porkers yet, I suppose,’ said Cooper.

‘No, no. Nowhere near. You couldn’t have sold ’em.’

‘Funny thing about pigs, though,’ said Wilford. ‘Their skin is a lot like ours.’

‘It certainly gave those police mates of yours a fair turn,’ said Sam, starting to smile again.

‘They thought they’d found a dead body or two,’ said Cooper. ‘For a while.’

‘Bloody hell, that doctor woman wasn’t very pleased when she got there.’

‘The pathologist. That was a mistake.’

‘I’ve never heard language like it,’ said Wilford.

‘Not from a doctor.’

‘And a woman too.’

‘Do you know they get sunburnt, just like us?’ asked Wilford. ‘Pigs, I mean. You can’t leave ’em out in hot sun. Those two had been inside, you see, out of the sun. That’s why their skin was so clean.’

‘And white.’

‘Aye. Middle Whites, they were. Some folk like the old breeds, but the Whites grow better.’

Cooper closed his eyes, feeling the conversation running away from him already. Bizarrely, a memory popped into his mind of the slippery fish he used to try to catch by hand as a boy in the streams around Edendale. He knew they were there, lurking in the shady corners, and he could almost get his hands on them in the water. But it needed only a couple of wriggles and they were out of his grasp, every time. He suddenly felt utterly depressed, and wondered what on earth he had hoped to achieve by coming here tonight. He was totally in the wrong place. But he had no idea what the right place for him was just now.

He drained his glass and stood up wearily.

‘Off already?’ asked Sam. ‘Company not suit you?’

‘I’m wasting my time,’ said Cooper, as he walked away towards the door.

Outside, the sky was still light and the evening was warm. He stood for a moment, breathing in the motionless air and looking up at the shape of Raven’s Side, looming above the village. He remembered then that there was one place where he always felt he belonged.

The door to the pub had been propped open to let out the heat, and he didn’t hear anybody come up behind him. But he recognized the slow voice that spoke in his ear.

‘If you ask the right questions, you’ll find out what you want to know.’

‘Oh yes? I’m not sure about that, Mr Dickinson. At the moment, it all seems pretty futile.’

Harry looked at him with sudden understanding. ‘Fed up?’

‘You might say that.’

‘Ah. I reckon you’ve got the black dog, lad.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what we used to say to the young ‘uns when they were sulking or had a fit of temper. “The black dog’s on your back,” we’d say. That’s what’s up with you, I reckon.’

Sulking? It was a long time since he had been accused of sulking. As if he was some temperamental adolescent.

‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it, lad.’

Now the old man had explained the expression, Cooper remembered that he had heard it before. He could hear a faint echo of his own mother’s voice chiding him for having the black dog. It was one of those mysterious expressions from childhood that you only half understood at the time. The black dog. Words with a frisson of meaning that had always worked on his imagination. Looking back, he had a feeling that the young Ben Cooper had pictured some huge, terrifying beast coming down from the moors, with red eyes and slavering jaws. The memory was confused now with the stories his Grandma Cooper had told, of the legendary Black Shuck and the Barguest – giant hounds with glowing eyes that waylaid unfortunate travellers on certain roads at night and took them straight to hell.

‘The black dog’s on your back’, they said. It wasn’t a very nice image. Once the picture had been planted in his mind, it had been difficult to get rid of. It had cropped up in his nightmares, waking him with snapping jaws and ferocious eyes. As a child, he would have done anything to get rid of that black dog from his back. Usually, his mother could help him do it. She could always cheer him up, and chivvy him out of a depressed mood.

Now, though, when the tables were turned, he was helpless to remove an immense black dog from his mother’s back.

Harry looked at him sharply, suspicious at the silence. Cooper shook himself and stared back at the old man.

‘Well, I’ve got to go now, Mr Dickinson. Maybe I’ll see you again.’

‘I don’t doubt, lad.’

A few minutes later, Cooper was sitting on Raven’s Side, looking across the dusk-filled valley towards Win Low.

He liked the names of the hills in this part of the Peak, with their resonances of the Danish invaders who had occupied Derbyshire for several decades. He had been taught at school that the Raven had been the symbol of Odin, the chief of the Viking gods. And the Danes had not been alone in investing the hills with supernatural powers.

On the far side of the valley, the last rays of the setting sun lit the western flanks of the Witches in blood-red streaks, highlighting them in melodramatic three-dimensional relief. At any moment, they might launch themselves into the air on their broomsticks. No wonder the ancient inhabitants of the valley had been in awe of them. The rocky gritstone outcrops were a brooding and malevolent presence at the best of times, their shapes black and ominous on the sunniest day. It would be easy for superstitious villagers to blame them for all sorts of evils and misfortunes.

Cooper was sitting close to where Gary Edwards must have stood with his binoculars on the night that Laura Vernon had been killed. The view extended from the back gardens of the cottages in Moorhay in one direction to the roof of the Old Mill at Quith Holes in the other, and down over the sweeping woodland to the meandering road far below in the valley bottom. The stream was invisible from here, and the trees were thick in the area where Laura’s body had been found.

The last shreds of the evening light were playing tricks in the deeper patches of woodland, distorting the shadows and deadening the colours until the greens and browns merged into each other in a mesh of dark patches tinged with violet. The light was slanting almost vertically down from the hill, flattening out the perspective and reducing the woods to a two-dimensional landscape where colour meant nothing.

Cooper looked again at the summit of Win Low and the Witches. There was an ancient pack horse road crossing the tor, below the shadow of the twisted rocks. But it would be a brave traveller who went that way at night. It was all too easy to imagine the black hounds of the legends prowling up there on the dark ridge, waiting to pounce.

And once the black dogs of hell were on your back, you could never shake them off.