Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

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

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  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.

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

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  ‘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

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  thought, he was making a point of showing off his famous local

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  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,

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  with its stunning views across both limestone and millstone

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  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 crisscrossed 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

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  bends that climbed towards the summit of the hill. It promised to Lit another hot day, and their isort, verc 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

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  across the plateau towards the Wye Valley, where Moorhay wailed. But Cuoper 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

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  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?7 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

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  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

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  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.r />
  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.

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  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 ludicrouslv in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of

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  drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran down across the top

  drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle, ihc ‘ ro

  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 “.vailing. 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.

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

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  She was curious why he had drawn attention to himself at the wrong time, when self-interest had clearly indicated that it was

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  a time to keep quiet and keep his head down for a while. But ohu cuuldn’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.’

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  ‘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.’

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  ‘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

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  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

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  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.

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  Vye Close was in the centre of the little council estate at the northern end of Moorhay. The houses were built of the same grey-white stone as the rest of the village, with slate roofs and unfenced grassed areas that were more roadside verge than garden. At one side stood a row of old people’s bungalows, separated from the family houses by a low fence that didn’t deter the children from playing on the grass under the windows of the old people.

  There were no more than thirty houses on the estate, and in many other places, even in Edendale, it wouldn’t have been considered a street, let alone an estate. It had been built on the top field of one of Moorhay’s dairy farms. When the area had been allocated for housing on the council’s local plan, the increased value of the land had proved too much of a temptation for the farmer at a time when agriculture was in increasing financial difficulties. The result was that every house backed on to pastureland or had a view across rolling slopes to the farm itself. Some of the residents of the estate worked in the small factory units on the outskirts of Edendale, or in the dairy ten miles away. Many didn’t work at all. Rural housing might have been provided, but not rural employment.

  Outside number 12, Wye Close stood an unmarked police Vauxhall. The car, or one like it, had been there since Monday evening, waiting for the return home of Lee Sherratt. The local children, at a loose end during the day because the schools were still on holiday, had invented a new game this morning. They were acting out the part of burglars, robbers and murderers, lurking suspiciously in the street, then pretending to see the police car suddenly and running away round the corner, screaming. The detective constable on surveillance duty was getting rapidly fed up of it. The baking heat inside the car was already enough to make him tired and irritable. The cheeky kids could be the last straw.

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  A green Ford entered the estate and pulled up at number t elve. When UCi 1 ailby got out and glowered across the road, the children seemed genuinely frightened for once, perhaps intimidated by his size and the grey suit he wore. They retreated behind the fence of the old people’s homes and watched to see what he would do. First he crossed to speak to the detective in the Vauxhall. who sat up straight and shook his head. Then he strode

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  to the door of number twelve and banged on the knocker.

  ‘Oh, it’s you lot again,’ said the big woman who came to the door. She was wearing sandals and frayed blue jeans and a billowing pink garment that could only have come from a maternity-wear shop. Her hair had been pinned up but was falling back down across a chubby neck, and she smelled of cigarette smoke. Tailby put her age in the late thirties, fortv

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  at most.

  ‘Just a few questions, Mrs Sherratt,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not back.’

  ‘I know. Has he been in touch?’

  ‘No.’


  ‘There are some things I need to ask you.’

  Molly Sherratt looked down the road at the children gawping and nudging each other.

  ‘For God’s sake, come in then,’ she said.

  Tailby ducked to go through the door and picked his way through a hallway cluttered with bicycles and shoes and piles of clothes. Mrs Sherratt led him into a tiny kitchen with fitted teak effect units and a brand-new automatic washer. The remains of somebody’s breakfast still stood on the counter — an open packet of cornflakes, half a carton of milk, a knife sticky with butter, and a toaster sitting amid a sea of blackened breadcrumbs.

  ‘I was just washing up,’ said Mrs Sherratt defensively, watching the detective’s instinctive survey of the room.

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  ‘Carry on. Don’t let me interrupt.’

  ‘I don’t see that you could be doing anything else.’

  ‘I’ll try not to be long,’ said Tailby politely.

  She turned on a tap and began to squirt washing-up liquid into a blue plastic bowrl until the suds concealed anything that might have been in there. Tailby saw that the door of the washing

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  machine stood slightly open, and the interior was packed tight with dirty clothes. Presumably Mrs Sherratt had been just about to do the weekly wash as well.

  ‘I’ve told your lot all I’ve got to say already,’ she said.

  ‘We need to know as much as we can about Lee so that we can find him. That’s the reason for all the questions, I’m afraid. It is important that we find him.’

  ‘To eliminate him from enquiries. That’s what the other ones said.’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Sherratt.’

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  She clutched the washing-up liquid bottle to her bosom without closing the cap, so that a small squirt of sticky green liquid spurted on to her pink smock. She seemed not to notice.