Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  The old woman’s burst of anger was over, but her thin hands still jerked and spasmed on the floral-patterned arms of her chair. Helen watched her until she was calm, and pulled her cardigan closer round her shoulders from where it had slipped.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on, Grandma.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Do you want your Special Blend?’

  ‘The bags‘11 do. But make sure you put an extra one in the pot. You know how I like it.’

  Helen stood at the narrow window of the kitchen of Dial Cottage while she waited for the kettle to boil. The electrical

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  appliances that her father had bought for his parents-in-law left hardly any room in the kitchen to turn round. There was certainly not enough space for two people between the cooker and the oversized pine table crammed in lengthwise to the sink.

  The table was scattered with cooking equipment, place mats with scenes of a North Wales seaside resort, sprigs of mint and thyme tied with bits of string, a jar of marmalade, a jar filled with wooden ladles and spatulas, a potato peeler with a wooden handle, a chopping board and half an onion soaking in a bowl of water. By the back door a pair of Wellington boots and a walking stick stood on the blue lino, and a dark-green waxed coat with a corduroy collar hung from the hook where Harry’s cap would normally have been. The coat had been Helen’s present to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.

  ‘He was never like this before,’ said her grandmother from her chair, not needing to raise her voice over the short distance to the kitchen. ‘Never this bad. Now he can’t speak without biting my head off.’

  ‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’

  ‘Asked him? Him? I might as well talk to the wall.’

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  ‘Perhaps he’s ill, Grandma.’

  ‘He had a cold the other week, I suppose.’

  Helen could see that her grandmother thought that Harry

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  was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.

  There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your vav through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.

  ‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess, it doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’

  ‘No, Grandma.’

  Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.

  While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the

  window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden

  ‘to^o

  itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.

  ‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’

  ‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’

  ‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one,

  Jo

  Sam Beeley.’

  ‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’

  ‘It’s them that’s done it.’

  ‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’

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  ‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they we led him away, tilled his head with thoughts.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.

  But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.

  ‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’

  Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.

  Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.

  ‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’

  ‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’

  ‘You’re a good girl. You were always his favourite, Helen.

  o&J>

  Why don’t you talk to him?’

  ‘I will try,’ promised Helen.

  She stood by the old woman’s armchair, looking down on her white hair, so thin she could clearly see the pink scalp. She wanted to put her arm round her grandmother’s shoulders and hug her, to tell her it would be all right. But she knew that

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  Gwen would be embarrassed, and in any case she wasn’t at all sure that it would be all right. A sudden surge of affection and frustration made her turn away.

  Then she saw her grandfather, a small figure way down at the bottom of the hillside path, just emerging from the trees at the foot of Raven’s Side. Whether it was something about the way he moved or the set of his shoulders, she couldn’t say. But she knew immediately that there was something badlv wrong.

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  Gwen cocked her head and peered at Helen, sensing the tension in her silence. ‘What is it, dear?’ ‘Nothing, Grandma.’

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  Helen unlatched the back door and stood on the whitewashed step. Suddenly she felt an irrational flood of memories streaming out of the old cottage behind her like coils of smoke escaping from a burning house. They were childhood memories,

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  mostly of her grandfather — memories of him taking her by the hand as they walked on this same path to look at the fish jumping in the stream, or to pick daisies for a daisy chain; of her grandfather proudly sitting her on his knee as he showed her how he filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it with the long coloured-paper tapers. Fleeting smells flickered by her senses, passing in a second, yet each one with enough emotional power to fill her eyes with instant tears. They were the remembered smells of pipe smoke and Brylcreem and boot polish.

  Harry had always seemed to be polishing his shoes. He still did. It was one of those signs that she knew her grandfather by even as he had changed over the years. Without those signs, she thought, old age might have made him unrecognizable to the child who had known the strong, indestructible man in his fifties.

  It was in just the same way that, at this moment, she knew her grandfather only by his walk. It was a slow, purposeful walk, upright and solemn, the pace of a soldier at a funeral, bearing the coffin of a dead comrade.

&nb
sp; She heard the helicopter turn again and come straight towards

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  her. Two faces stared down at her, expressionless behind their dark glasses. She felt as though the watching policemen could see straight into her heart. Their presence was somehow personal and intimate, and yet for ever too far away.

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  OK, Lake a break.’ The word came down the line from the uniformed sergeant

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  at the opposite end from Ben Cooper. The men in blue overalls and Wellingtons backed away from the line of search and sat on the tussocks of rough grass in a half-circle. Someone produced a flask of tea, someone else a bottle of orange juice.

  PC Garnett settled down comfortably, tossing his pole aside, taking off his cap to reveal receding hair cropped short at the sides. They said it was the helmets that made so many policemen start to lose their hair early. Cooper himself was conscious that one day he would start to see a thinning on either side of his forehead. Everybody told him that his fine brown hair was just like his father’s, who had never been anything but halfway bald, as far as he could remember. So far, though, he was still able to let a lock of hair fall across his forehead as he had always done. Fashions had tended to pass him by.

  Garnett smiled as he mopped his brow with his sleeve and eased himself into gossip mode. ‘ So what about this new recruit in your department, Cooper? The new DC?’

  ‘I’ve not met him yet. I’ve only just come back from leave.’

  ‘It’s a “her”, mate, a “her”. Diane Fry, they call her.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She’s from Birmingham.’

  ‘I’ve not heard anything about her. I expect she’ll be all right.’

  ‘According to Dave Rennie, she’s a bit of a hard-faced cow. Could be a looker, he says, but she doesn’t bother. Blonde, but has her hair cut short. Too tall, too skinny, no make-up, always wears trousers. A bit of a stroppy bitch.’

  ‘You haven’t even met her,” protested Cooper.

  ‘Well, you know the type. Probably another lesbian.’

  Cooper blew out an exasperated breath. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t go around saying things like that. You don’t know anything about her.’

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  Gannett had the sense to hear the irritation in Cooper’s voice and didn’t argue. He idly pulled a clump of dandelions and shredded the leaves between his fingers. But Cooper couldn’t let the subject rest.

  ‘You know what it’s like for the women as well as I do, Garnett — sonic of them just try too hard. She’ll fit in fine after a week or two, you’ll see. They usually do.’

  ‘I dunno about that. I’ve a feeling you’ll not have time to be her best mate, though, lad. She’ll be up and away in no time.’

  ‘Why? Does she ?o ballooning?’

  Joo

  ‘Ha, ha.’ Garnett ignored the sarcasm, in fact was probably impervious to it when he had a good subject of gossip. ‘She comes with a bit of a “rep” actually. A potential high-flier, they reckon. Ambitious.’

  ‘Oh yeah? She’ll have to prove herself first.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The clouds of tiny flies were getting thicker as they gathered around the men’s heads, attracted by their sweat and the sweet smell of the orange juice. The PC looked smug.

  ‘Come on, what do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You don’t just get promotion without showing you’re worth it.’

  ‘Get real, mate. She’s female. You know — two tits and a fanny, always puts the toilet seat down.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that. So what?’

  ‘So what? So what? So the force is short of female officers in supervisory ranks, especially in CID. Don’t you read the reports? You just watch, old son — provided she keeps her nose clean and always smiles nicely at the top brass, Detective Constable Fry will shoot up that promotion ladder like she’s got a rocket up her arse.’

  Cooper was about to protest when the shout went up from the contact man. ‘DC Cooper! Is DC Cooper here? Your boss wants you. Urgent.’

  The instructions from DI Hitchens were terse, and the address he gave Cooper was in Moorhay, the village visible on the brow of the hill above the woods. Communities in this area tended

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  to gather around the thousand-foot contour, the vallev bottoms

  being too narrow.S

  ‘Check it out. Cooper, and fast. We either (jet to the girl in?

  the next two hours or we lose the whole night. You know whatJ

  that could mean.’

  ‘I’m on my way, sir.’a

  ‘Take somebody with you. Who’ve you got?’f>

  Cooper looked back at the group of men lounging on the

  grass. His gaze passed across PC Garnett and a couple of other

  middle-aged bobbies, the overweight sergeant, two female PCs

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  from Matlock and the three rangers.

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  ‘No CID officers, sir. I’ll have to borrow a uniformed PC.’ There was a suggestion of a sigh at the other end of the

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  line.

  ‘Do it then. But get a move on.’

  Cooper explained as quickly as he could to the sergeant and was given a tall, muscular young bobby of about twenty called Wragg, who perked up at the prospect of some action.

  ‘Follow me as best you can.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m right with you,’ said Wragg, flexing the muscles in his shoulders.

  The path up to Moorhay wound back through the trees to where a kissing gate gave access through the dry-stone walls into a field where black and white dairy cattle had recently been turned back in after milking. The field had been cut for hay a few weeks before, and the grass was short and springy underfoot as Ben Cooper ran along the side of the wall, the heat and sweat prickling on his brow and his legs spasming with pain as he forced them on. Wragg kept pace with him easily, but soon dropped his tendency to ask questions when Cooper didn’t respond. He needed all his breath for running.

  The cows turned their heads to watch them pass in astonishment, their jaws working slowly, their eyes growing huge between twitching ears. Earlier in the afternoon, the search party had had to wait for the farmer to move the cows to the milking shed before the line could work its way across the field. The air had been filled with crude jokes about cow pats.

  Cooper passed a stretch of collapsed wall, where a length of

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  electric fence had been erected to keep the cattle awav until someone skilled in dry-stone walling could be found to repair it. Before the cows’ curiosity could lead them to follow him, Cooper had already reached the next gate. He skirted another field and ran up a farm track paved with stones and broken rubble.

  The steepness of the slope was increasing steadily now on the last few hundred yards, until Cooper began to feel as though !u- as back on the Cuillins again. Wragg was dropping further and further behind, slowing to a walk, using his arms against his knees to boost himself up the steeper sections.

  He was carrying too much upper body weight, thought Cooper, and hadn’t developed the right muscles in his thighs and calves for hill climbing. Some of the old people who had lived in these hill villages all their lives would have passed the voung PC with ease.

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  Finally, Cooper reached the high, dark wall at the corner of the graveyard at St Edwin’s Church. The church seemed to have been built on a mound, standing well above the village street at

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  the front and presenting an elevation from the bottom of the valley like the rampart of a castle wall. The square Norman tower stood stark against the sky, tall and strangely out of proportion to the shortened nave, giving the church the appearance of a fallen letter ‘L’.

  The surface of the churchyard was so high that Cooper thought the bodies buried there must be almost on his eye level, if only he could see through the stones of the wall and the thick, dark
soil to where the oak caskets lay rotting.

  The church was surrounded by mature trees, horse chestnuts and oaks, and two ancient yews. The damp smell of cut grass was in the air, and as Cooper passed the churchyard, climbing now towards the back of a row of stone cottages, a man in a red check shirt with his sleeves rolled up looked over the wall

  at him from the side gate. He was leaning on a big petrol lawn

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  mower, pausing between a swathe of smoothly mown grass and a tussocky area he hadn’t yet reached. He gazed at the running man with a grimace of distaste, as if the evening had been disturbed by something particularly unpleasant.

  At the first of the cottages, a woman was in her garden with

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  a watering can, tending the flower beds on the side where they

  were in the shade of the cottage wall. She held the watering canZ

  upright in a gloved hand as she watched Cooper trying to catch

  his breath to ask directions. He found he was gasping in theI

  headv smells of honeysuckle and scented roses freshly dampened

  with water. Behind him. the lawn mower started up again in the

  ft churchyard, and a small flock of jackdaws rose protesting from ť

  the chestnuts.

  ‘Dial Cottage?’

  The woman stared at him, then shook her head almost imperceptibly, unwilling to spare him even that effort. She turned her back ostentatiously, her attention on a miniature rose with the palest of yellow flowers. On the wall in front of Cooper was a sign that said: ‘No parking. No turning. No hikers’.

  Two cottages up, he found an old woman sitting in a garden chair with a Persian cat on her knee, and he repeated his question. She pointed up the hill.

  ‘Up to the road, turn left and go past the pub. It’s in the row of cottages on your left. Dial Cottage is one of those with the green doors.”

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  ‘Thank you.’ With a glance at the PC still struggling up the track, Cooper ran on, glad to have tarmac under his feet at last as he approached the road.