Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I’ve got mine in the car, but I’ll follow you home and we can go together. OK?’

  ‘All right, yes. Thanks.’

  ‘It seems strange to be going off duty with the enquiry at this stage, though. No money for overtime. Can you believe it?’

  ‘They think they’ve got it sewn up, once Lee Sherratt’s in custody.’

  ‘That’s what I think, too. They’re relying totally on forensic evidence. It seems to be some sort of holy grail these days.’

  ‘Forensics don’t lie, Ben. Only people lie.’

  ‘And it costs too much to keep a manpower-intensive enquiry going for days and weeks on end. I know, I’ve heard all that.’

  ‘It’s true. We have to live in the real world.’

  ‘It worries me that the only suggestion of any motivation for

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  Lee Sherratt is what the girl’s father savs about him. That’s not

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  enough, surely.’

  ‘Enough for Mr Tailby to build a case on, providing the torensics back him up.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘Feel right? That again.’

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  ‘OK, point taken.’

  ‘Feelings don’t come into it.’

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  ‘At one time,’ said Cooper, ‘it was money that didn’t come into it.

  ‘That sounds to me like your famous father speaking.’ She saw Cooper flush, and knew she was right. ‘A proper Dixon of Dock Green, isn’t he, your dad? Why don’t you explain to him

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  one day that it’s not the 1950s any more? Things have moved on in the last fifty years. If he walked down the street in his uniform in a lot of places in this country today, he’d get his head kicked in before he could say, “Evening all”.’

  Cooper went completely rigid, and his face suffused with blood. He breathed deeply two or three times before he managed to get himself under control. His hands were shaking as he pushed the papers he was holding into a file.

  ‘I’ll see you down in the car park,’ he said, in a voice thick with emotion.

  As he walked away, Fry immediately began to regret agreeing to play squash with him. It had only been some sudden burst of comradeship, all too easy to give in to in the police service. There was always a feeling that it was ‘us against them’ in the closed environment of a police station. But then she shrugged, knowing that it would only be for one evening. She would have no problem keeping Ben Cooper at arm’s-length.

  ‘All right, Diane?’ asked DI Hitchens, approaching her from behind and standing close to her shoulder.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘What are you doing when you go off duty?’

  ‘I’m playing squash with Ben Cooper. Apparently.’

  ‘Really? Good luck then.’

  ‘And I’m going to thrash him too.’

  ‘Are you? So you’re a squash expert as well, then?’

  ‘Not really, just averagely good. But I’m fit, and I’ll have him begging for mercy on that court. Old Ben looks like a real softy to me.’

  ‘Ben? I don’t think so. He’s a bit of a chip off the old block really. Soft on the surface, but tough as old boots underneath, like his dad.’

  ‘So you’re a fan of Sergeant Cooper’s too, are you, sir?’

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  ‘We all are in this station. How could we be anything else?’ ‘And what exactly has he done to earn this adulation?’ ‘If you want to know about Sergeant Joe Cooper,’ said Hitchens, ‘I suggest you stop off downstairs in reception for a few minutes. You’ll find his memorial on the wall near the (rout counter. It’s about tvvo years since he was killed.’

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  (Cooper screwed up his face, bared his teeth and let the power surge through his muscles. He glared at the ball, swung back his

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  arm and released a ferocious serve that flew off the front wall like a rocket and hit the back corner so fast that Fry hardly had time to move.

  ‘Thirteen-three.’

  They changed sides of the court, passing each other near the ‘The. Cooper refused to meet Fry’s eye. He was completely absorbed in his game, as he had been since the start. His concentration was total, and Fry felt she might as well have been a robot set up for him to aim at. As they passed, she smelled the sweat on his body like the sweet resin of a damaged pine tree.

  ‘Your serve’s incredible.’

  Cooper nodded briefly, lining up the ball with his left side turned to the front wall. He waited a few seconds for Fry to get in position, then, with a grunt, unleashed a cannonball that bounced straight at his opponent’s face, making her instinctively want to get out of the way, rather than try to hit it back. Returning Cooper’s serve was proving a futile exercise anyway.

  ‘Fourteen-three. Game point.’

  Fry had given up trying to make conversation during the game. Her comments brought no response, other than another crushing serve. Those that she managed to return resulted in an exhausting rally, during which she ran herself ragged backwards

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  and forwards across the court, while Ben Cooper kept control of the ‘The’. He would thrash the ball time and again against the

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  front wall, now just above the tin, now curving high into the air over her racquet. She could see that her arms and legs had turned lobster-red with the exertion, and the perspiration was trickling past her sweat band to run down the sides of her face and soaking into the elastic of her sports bra between her breasts.

  Cooper served again, and she managed to get her racquet under the ball, lobbing it towards the near corner. He darted

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  across court and collected the shot with ease, ready to bounce his return to the far side. Fry stretched to reach it, ducking low and hitting the ball straight and hard back along the side wall. Glad to have made a return, she spun round, almost off balance, in an effort to get back to the ‘The’, and collided with Cooper on his way to return the shot. Their racquets clashed and their hot limbs tangled sweatily for a moment before they could separate themselves. shee breathed hard and rubbed her knee where she had knocked it against some part of Cooper’s body that felt like rock.

  ‘Obstruction,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘OK. Game, then.’

  ‘And match. Unless you want to play three out of five.’

  ‘Oh no. I think I’d be safer conceding.’

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  ‘Whatever.’

  Cooper collected the ball. For the first time, a small smile touched his lips. ‘I win, then. Thanks for the game.’

  ‘I’d say it was a pleasure, Ben, except that you play like a machine.’

  ‘I take that as a compliment from you.’

  ‘I’m absolutely wrecked.’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘You tried hard.’

  At another time, Fry might have found his tone a bit patronizing and reacted quite differently. But just now she was in placatory mood. She tucked her racquet under her arm and held out a hand.

  ‘Shake, then.’

  Cooper looked at her, surprised, but shook automatically. His hand felt as hot as her own, and their perspiration mingled in their palms as their swollen fingers fumbled clumsily at each other. Fry held on to his hand when he tried to pull it away again.

  ‘Ben — I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What for? Playing so badly?’

  ‘For the things I said about your father today. I didn’t know.’

  The know you didn’t,’ he said. She felt the muscles in his forearm tense. The beginnings of a smile had vanished again, and his face

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  was set, revealing no emotion. She saw a trickle of sweat run through his fair eyebrows and into his eyes. He blinked away the moisture, breaking her stare, and she let his hand go.

  ‘DI H
itchens told me tonight. He sent me to look at the plaque in reception at the station. Your father was killed arresting a mugger, wasn’t he? He was a hero.’

  Cooper seemed to study the squash ball, turning it over in his hand to find the coloured spot and squeezing against the warm air trapped inside.

  ‘It wasn’t the mugger who killed him. A gang of youths were standing around outside a pub, and they joined in to try to get the mugger free. It was them who killed him. There were too

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  many of them. They got him on the ground and kicked him to death.’

  ‘And what happened to them?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ he said. He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his shorts to wipe his eyes and his forehead. ‘Oh, they found out who they were, all right. There was a big enough outcry about it in Edendale. But there were seven or eight of them, all telling different stories when it came to court, with die usual set of defence solicitors looking for the get-outs. It could never be proved which ones actually kicked my father in the head. I mostly remember that it came down to a debate about the bloodstains on their boots. Their argument was that they just got splashed because they were standing too close.’ He paused, his eyes distant and full of remembered anger and pain. ‘Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too. But that’s a mitigating circumstance, isn’t it, as far as the courts are concerned? An excuse.’

  ‘I really didn’t know, Ben.’

  ‘Do you think I would have asked you to play squash tonight if I thought you knew? I’m not that desperate for company.’ He ran the handkerchief round the back of his neck. ‘I’m not sure it was a good idea to play in this weather anyway.’

  ‘You should have said something about your father. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Cooper looked down at his feet.

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  ‘If you really want to know, I get fed up of hearing about it. It’s been constantly rammed down my throat for two years now. I have to look at that bloody plaque every time I walk through reception. Do you know there’s even a little brass plate screwed on to one of the benches in Clappergate? That’s so that the Edendale public don’t forget either. I’ve got so that I avoid walking down that part of Clappergate. I go round by another street to avoid seeing it. And then all those people who remember him. Thousands of them. Even those who’d never heard of him before he died, they knew all about him by the time the papers had finished with the story.’

  ‘Like in Moorhay —’

  ‘Yeah. Like in Moorhay. “It’s Sergeant Cooper’s lad.” “Aren’t you Sergeant Cooper’s son?” It hurts every time. Every time I hear somebody say it, it’s like they’re twisting a knife in an old wound to keep it fresh. My father’s death devastated my life. And people are never going to let me forget it. Sometimes I think that if one more person calls me Sergeant Cooper’s lad, it’s going to be too much. I’m going to go berserk.’

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  He squeezed the squash ball in his fist, bounced it off the floor and smacked it almost casually against the back wall with his racquet, so that it flew high into the air and dropped back into his hand.

  ‘Were you working in E Division when it happened?’ ‘I was already in CID. In fact, at that very moment I’d just arrested a burglar, a typical bit of Edendale lowlife. I heard the shout on the radio while I was sitting in the car with him. It’s

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  not a moment I’m likely to forget.’

  ‘And it didn’t put you off the police service?’

  He looked surprised.

  ‘Of course not. Quite the opposite. It made me more determined.’

  ‘Determined? You’ve got ambitions?’

  ‘I have. In fact, there’s a sergeant’s job coming vacant soon,’ he said. ‘I’m up for it.’

  ‘Good luck, then,’ said Fry. ‘You must have a good chance.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know any more,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I thought I had, but …’

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  ‘Of course you have.’ She glared at him, irritated by the sudden slump in his shoulders. He had talked about his lather with anger and passion, but he had changed in a few seconds, and now he had the air of defeat.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘You seem to be very highly regarded. Everybody knows you round the division. Not to mention the general public.’

  ‘Oh veah, the public,’ he said dismissivelv.

  ‘If they had a vote on it, you’d be mayor by now.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, we all know how much we can trust them.’

  But Fry had done her apologies now and was getting fed up with his reluctance to shake off whatever was making him so moody and morose. She watched him bounce the ball again

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  and swing his racquet at it, hitting a slow lob that curled back towards them.

  ‘You know, it must be really nice to have so many friends,’ she said, ‘and such a close family too.’

  ^

  He took his eye off the ball, puzzled by the change in her voice.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever move away from here, will you, Ben? You’ll marry somebody, maybe some old sdhoolfriend, and you’ll settle down here, buy a bungalow, have kids, get a dog,

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  the whole bit.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It sounds great.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ she said, and smashed the

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  ball into the ceiling lights.

  Charlotte Vernon had found Daniel in Laura’s room. On the dresser was a pile of letters that had been tied neatly in a pink ribbon. Charlotte had seen the letters before, but had not touched them. She had not touched anything of Laura’s yet. It seemed too much of an acknowledgement that she had gone for ever.

  ‘I wrote to tell her that I would be home last weekend,’ said Daniel. ‘She wanted to talk to me, she said.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounded serious. I told her I would be home for the weekend. But I wasn’t. I didn’t come home.’

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  ‘You always wrote to her far more than you wrote to us, Danny.’ ‘To you? You never needed letters — you always had your own concerns. But Laura needed contact with the outside world. She felt she was a prisoner here.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Daniel turned over another letter and ran his eves briefly over his own scrawl. His mother walked to the window and fiddled with the curtains as she peered down into the garden, squinting against the sunlight reflecting from the summerhouse. She moved a porcelain teddy bear back into its proper place on the window ledge, from where it had been left by the police. It was a Royal Crown Derby paperweight with elaborate Imari designs on its waistcoat and paws, a gift to Laura from Graham after a business trip. Charlotte averted her eyes from the room and turned to stare at her son, studying his absorption until she became impatient.

  ‘What exactly are you looking for, Danny? Evidence of your own guilt?’

  Daniel went red. ‘I certainly don’t need to look for yours. Yours or Dad’s. It’s been pushed in my face for long enough.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  Charlotte had been upset herself by the fact that her son had failed to return to his home, even for a day or two, between the doubtful attractions of a holiday spent in Cornwall with his friends and the peculiar sense of obligation that drew him back to university so long before the start of term. She didn’t know the reason he stayed away. Now she pulled a face at the streaks of dirt on Daniel’s jeans, the scuffs on his shoes and the powerful smell of stale sweat. He looked tired, his fleshy face shadowed with dark lines and a day’s growth of stubble. He reminded her so strongly of his father as he had once been, nineteen years ago,

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  before success and money had superimposed a veneer of courtes
y and sophistication. Graham, too, had been a man whose passions were barely kept in check.

  ‘There’s one missing,’ said Daniel suddenly.

  ‘What?’

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  ‘A letter. I wrote to Laura from Newquay last month. But it’s not there; there’s a gap. Where is it.’ She always kept thema

  together.’

  ‘The police have been through them,’ said Charlotte uncerf|

  tainly. ‘I suppose they might have taken one.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘I don’t know. It depends what was in it, doesn’t it?’^

  ‘Are they allowed to do that?’ ‘I suppose your father will have given them permission. You’ll have to ask him. I don’t know what they were looking for.’

  Daniel put the letters down. He tied them together again with the ribbon, securing it carefully and neatly despite the trembling in his hands.

  ‘It’s bloody obvious what they were looking for.’

  As he headed for the door, Charlotte caught his arm. She could tell he hadn’t washed today, perhaps for more than one day. The back of his neck was grubby and the collar of his T-shirt was stained. She longed to propel him physically to the bathroom and demand his filthy clothes for the wash, as she would once have done when he was a year or two younger.

  But Charlotte knew her son had passed well beyond her control. What he did in Exeter was a mvstery to her. He no longer told her about his course, about his friends or where he lived. She could no longer understand the angry, disapproving young man he had become.

  ‘Danny,’ she said. ‘Don’t condemn us so much. There’s no need to stir up old arguments that aren’t relevant to all this.

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  Let the police find out what happened to Laura. The rest of us have to go on living together without her.’ She watched his

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  sullen expression and saw his face was closed against her. She felt his muscles tense to pull away from her, to shake off the last physical link between them. ‘Your father —’