Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  Fry’s nose twitched. There was a curious smell in the interview room which had been getting stronger during the past few minutes. It was warm and stuffy in the small room, but the smell was something more than just the sour odour of stale male sweat.

  ‘You didn’t know Laura before that?’ she asked.

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  ‘Never set eyes on her belore.’ ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I would’ve remembered, luv, believe me. I don’t forget a good-looking tart.’

  toto

  Holmes grinned at Diane Fry, who remained impassive, much as she would have liked to have ‘decked’ him. She had never much liked being called ‘luv’ by youths like Simeon Holmes.

  ‘She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Yeah. She was.’

  Was that a slight flinching? Fry had seen before the people who seemed almost unperturbed by the death of someone they knew well, until they were referred to in that awful past tense. The fact of their death seemed to come home in one tiny word.

  ‘So why was she on your motorbike?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘She was just looking, she said. A lot of birds like bikes, you know. They find ‘em dead sexy. They can’t wait to get their legs astride one.’

  o

  ‘Is that why you ride one?”

  Holmes grinned again. ‘Not really. But it helps, you know?’

  ‘So are you saying she was interested in the bike, not in you?’ asked Fry.

  Holmes looked at her, ignoring her frown as the grin stayed on his face. ‘Give over. Well, you might have thought so at first — she was pretending to play it a bit cool, like. But all I had to do was give a bit of chat, you know, and we got talking straight

  o‘ j‘ooto

  off. She came in the arcade to watch me play. Yeah, and later on one of the other lads in there, who knew her — he told me she’d been asking about me a couple of days before. She wanted to know who I was, what my name was, you know. So she’d obviously fancied me. The bike thing was just a bit of a ploy.’ He turned towards Hitchens again. ‘Birds do that sort of stuff,

  o‘

  you know?’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Hitchens. For a moment. Fry thought the

  ‘‘‘ Jto

  DI was going to give Holmes a matey wink. If he did, she was going to have to walk out.

  to o

  ‘Birds like her especially,’ said Holmes.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, she was from the posh school, you know. High Carrs.

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  The lads there aren’t supposed 10 be douii 111 tov.a during school hours, not even the sixth formers. But she’d sneaked out. She was like that, Laura. Didn’t give a toss about school really.’

  ‘oJ

  ‘She was a bright girl, though, from what we hear.’

  ‘Sure. Dead bright. She could have sailed through her GCSEs, I reckon, but she couldn’t be bothered with all the studying. She was more into music. I reckon her parents put her right off school. It happens, you know. Some parents push their kids too hard and they go totally the other way. It’s a shame really.’

  ‘Teenage rebellion, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, right. Did it yourself, eh, mate? Well, maybe Laura would have come out of it, if she’d pot the chance.’

  ‘o

  ‘Yes, Simeon. But you didn’t exactly encourage her to go back to school, did you?’

  ‘Well, no. We hit it off pretty well, you see, from the beginning. She started coming down to the arcades regular. I was a bit surprised, to be honest — she was a bit too upmarket for me, if you know what I mean. Not my usual type. But she was dead keen. Yeah, dead keen. And I didn’t say no. Well, you don’t, do you?’

  The curious smell was definitelv coming from Holmes. Fry

  JOJ

  discounted the sweet smell of alcohol, the rank bite of cigarette

  ‘O

  smoke. No drugs she had ever come across smelled quite like that. Perhaps it was something to do with the motorbike leathers. Some kind of oil used to soften up the leather maybe, which was now being evaporated by the heat and humidity in the interview room. But to produce that sort of stink it would have to have been something like rancid pig fat.

  ‘Didn’t Laura get into trouble at school for breaking the rules?’ she asked.

  ‘Dunno. She never said. She wouldn’t have given a toss anyway.’

  ‘But her parents might have.’

  Holmes shrugged. ‘She didn’t talk about them much.’

  ‘Basically, you would say that Laura instigated the relationship?’ asked Hitchens.

  ‘What? Oh, yeah. She started it, all right. Dead keen, like 1 said.’

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  ‘Had she had other boyfriends?’

  ‘Sure. She was no Liltle misj. Innocent. Don I go getting that idea.’

  Fry leaned forward to put her next question.

  ‘When did you start having sex with her, Simeon?’

  Holmes looked from Hitrhcns to shee, the worry that had been behind the grin coming to the surface now.

  oo

  ‘Look, this is about who killed her, right? That’s what you lot are bothered about. I mean, you’re not going to come on heavy about the age thing, are you?’

  ‘What do you mean, Simeon?’

  ‘Well, she told me she was sixteen, you know, but …’

  ‘You knew she was younger, didn’t you?’

  Holmes looked at Hitchens appealingly. ‘You’re not interested in that, are you? It isn’t important now, is it? Now she’s dead.’

  ‘That’s what I think too,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Right. Well, I didn’t want you thinking I was making excuses, like. But, to be honest, she was gasping for it, big time. Couldn’t wait to get my trousers off. Being frank, like.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Well, it’s right. She wanted to do it all the time. We used to go into the park, or we’d get on the bike and drive out somewhere into the country. Up on the hills. She liked that.’

  ‘So you had sex often?’

  ‘All the time — well, every time we met, if we had long enough.

  ‘J‘OO

  And sometimes when we didn’t have long enough, too, if you know what I mean. Yeah.’

  Fry thought if Holmes grinned again she would have to slap the cuffs on him and read him his rights on a charge of offensive

  oo

  behaviour.

  ‘Was she a virgin before she met you?’ she asked.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, look, for one thing you can tell when you do it the first time, you know. By how they react and other things.’ He hesitated, looking sideways at Fry. ‘Anyway, she knew what it was all about, all right. In any case, the lad that she’d asked

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  about me, he’d already had her himself. He told me about her. Reckoned there had been others too.

  ‘Plenty of boyfriends, then.’

  ‘Yeah. She was dead keen on the blokes.’

  ‘Were there other boyfriends while you were seeing her, perhaps?’

  ‘Dunno really. Could have been, I suppose. She never mentioned to me if she had.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be unusual, for the sort of girl you seem to be describing. She might even do it deliberately, to make you jealous.’

  ‘I’m not the jealous type,’ said Holmes. Then his smile shrank and faded, and he looked at Fry again. ‘Oh yeah, I see what you’re getting at. You’ve got an idea that I got jealous of some other bloke and bashed her, right? Well, you can forget that right off. She was OK, Laura, good fun. But things like that don’t last, you know? We all move on. It’s what I would have expected, for either her or me to find someone else and it’d be over. A good few weeks together, and that’s it. It wasn’t a problem. I didn’t see her as much in the holidays anyway — she couldn’t get away from the parents, you know.’

  �
��We have a witness who saw Laura talking to a young man on the path behind the Mount shortly before she was killed on Saturday night,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘It wasn’t me, mate. I’ve already told the other bloke where I was. I was at Matlock Bath with about fifty other bikers.’

  ‘Yes, so you said.’ Officers were already busy checking out the names and places Holmes had given to DS Morgan. Depending on what they came back with, the youth might have to be sent home for now.

  Fry would be pleased to get out of the interview room soon to get some fresh air, because the smell was becoming overpowering. She noticed Hitchens pull out a handkerchief as if to wipe his nose, but keeping it there a long time.

  ‘Besides,’ said Holmes, ‘I’ve never been near her place. Did someone say it was me they saw?’

  ‘Not specifically,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘There you are then.’

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  Holmos was relaxincr now shee ha tor] tn soe him rolaxincr. Mo

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  might start to grin again. ‘When you had sex with Laura,’ she said, ‘did you like to bite her?’

  He stared at her with distaste. ‘Get lost,’ he said.

  ‘You refuse to answer?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Would you be willing to let us take a mould of your teeth?’ asked Hitchcns.

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘To help eliminate you from our enquiries, Simeon. If you didn’t harm Laura Vernon, then you have absolutely nothing to

  worry about.’

  j

  Simeon Holmes wasn’t quite so stupid as he pretended. Fry could see him figuring it out. A question about his sexual techniques, and a request for a mould from his teeth. They hadn’t exactly been subtle with their questions. Because of his casual manner, Holmes might be easy to underestimate. But he had a choice now. He could work out that a mould might prove

  o i

  his guilt, if he was guilty. But if he was innocent, it might also clear him and get the police off his back. Fry and Hitchens both waited patiently to see which way he would jump.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  Hitchens’s face fell in disappointment. But before he could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and DS Rennie stuck his head into the room. He did a quick double take at the fetid atmosphere and his face screwed up in disgust. Hitchens announced a break in the interview, switched off the tapes, and went out into the corridor to speak to Rennie.

  Left alone with Simeon Holmes, Fry was able to study him afresh. The young man met her eyes directly. But a layer of affectation seemed to have dropped away from him in the last few minutes, the final shreds of some assumed role dissipating as DI Hitchens left the room. Fry couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She didn’t think he had been lying during the interview. And yet … How old was Holmes? Seventeen?

  ‘You must be in the sixth form at the Community School now, Simeon,’ she said.

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  Holmes raised his eyebrows, saying nothing, but looking meaningfully at the motionless tape machines.

  ‘Just asking,’ she said.

  He grinned slowly — that annoying, self-satisfied grin he had. But still nothing.

  ‘Only I was thinking,’ said Fry. ‘that I bet vou’ve got a bit

  ^O’- ‘,’O

  more brain than most of your mates.’

  ‘Dead right.’

  ‘And I bet you do quite well at school when you turn your mind to it. What are your best subjects? Let me guess

  —mechanical engineering? Car maintenance, perhaps?’

  Holmes sneered. ‘Chemistry and biology, actually. I take my

  joy’i^

  A levels next year.’

  Intrigued, Fry found herself looking at a new Simeon Holmes, one who even sounded quite different.

  ‘Not much use for stripping a bike, surely?’ she said.

  The guarded look began to fall back across the youth’s face. Fry could almost see the transformation taking place in his features as he reverted to his role with a dismissive snort.

  ‘Perhaps you were thinking of going on to university,’ she said. Then she held herself quite still, tingling with satisfaction, as she saw the beginnings of a blush seep into Simeon’s neck and across his cheeks. She had found something that embarrassed

  O

  him. Something that he wouldn’t want to talk about with his

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  biker mates.

  ‘With good grades in chemistry and biology you could study

  —what? Medicine?’

  His mouth opened, moving compulsively. Deep in his eyes there was a small spurt of pain and distress, as if Fry had struck close to the most vulnerable part of his anatomy. She hurried to press home her advantage.

  ‘Is that it? Would you like to be a doctor one day, Simeon?’

  But the spell was broken as DI Hitchens opened the door just

  in time to hear the last two sentences. His face contorted at the

  thought that he might go along to his local surgery and find this

  OOOOO J

  youth was his new GP. Then he nodded Diane Fry out of the room, leaving Simeon Holmes starting to grin again in the midst of his peculiar smell.

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  ‘We can hand this one back to Morgan,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘They’ve found those liikers. We’re oft to West Yorkshire, Diane.’

  Ben Cooper had not seen Daniel Vernon before. He wasn’t impressed at first sijjht, but had learned not to judge people younger than himself too quickly. It was a mistake to dismiss someone because they did not dress as you did or behave in quite the same way. Daniel Vernon was a student. That probably meant he went to all-night raves and took cannabis and Ecstasy. He probably took a different girl home every night and lay in bed all day. He probably thought nothing of stealing traffic signs from the roadside, beer glasses and ashtrays from pubs. But in a few years he would be a respectable, well-off member of the community demanding better protection from the police.

  Daniel looked as though he had drunk too much cheap beer in the Students’ Union. He was dressed in a grubby white T-shirt with the name of an American university written across the front. The T-shirt smelled of sweat.

  Cooper took Daniel up to an interview room, where Tailby was waiting. They hardly needed to ask any questions before Daniel had begun to talk. He was eager to get something off his chest, and it quickly became clear what it was.

  The find it astonishing,’ said Tailby a few minutes later, ‘that you should be so eager to come in here and tell me such things about your parents.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘I couldn’t give a toss what they do among themselves or with their tacky friends. But they were blind to what it was doing to Laura. She thought it was OK, all that. She wanted to try things out for herself. She got a taste for sex when she was about thirteen. She told me all about it, though she would never listen to my advice. Mum, she never suspected, even now. Dad —’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘You tried to talk some sense into her, didn’t you, Daniel?’

  ‘I tried. But it was a waste of time.’

  ‘We found your letters, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know you did. You took the one I wrote to her after she’d told me about Simeon Holmes.’

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  ‘Yes, Holmes,’ said Tailby. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No. But it was the way Laura talked about him that made me write to her like that. It sounded more serious this time. She wasn’t just playing any more. My big worry was that she would let someone like him get her pregnant. I wanted to be sure she was still taking the pills she got from the doctor. She told me she was.’

  Daniel looked up at Tailby with a question

  ‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ said the DCI, though he refrained from explaining how they knew. Or rather, how the pathologist knew. There was such a thing as too much information. ‘
But why have you decided to tell us all this now, Daniel?’

  ‘I don’t doubt that my father has been telling you things about Lee Sherratt and Laura. I won’t have you believing them. Laura wasn’t interested in Sherratt, or him in her.’

  ‘But your mother …”

  ‘My mother had the hots for him. She likes them young. And he was quite willing. My father knew, of course. He knew what was going on. He always knows.’

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  ‘You’re saying that your mother was actually having an affair with her gardener?’

  o

  ‘Sounds very D. H. Lawrence put like that, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘But Lee Sherratt is just a youth from the village who saw the chance of getting his end away with an older woman. He isn’t exactly a Mellors.’

  Tailby wasn’t sure what he was talking about. ‘Your father believes Sherratt may have killed your sister.’

  ‘If he did,’ said Daniel. ‘If he did kill her — it was my father’s fault.’

  ‘Ah. How do you make that out?’

  ‘He let it go on,’ he said. ‘Until it had gone too far. He enjoyed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Daniel pulled at his T-shirt, which was sticking to his sides where the sweat was beginning to dry. He fidgeted in his chair,

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  his jeans squeaking on the leather. He looked from Tailby to

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  Cooper, the expression in his eyes shifting and changing. When ho spuke again, his uice had altered. It as quiet, less aggressive, with an adolescent edge to it that spoke of an inner pain he could no longer conceal.

  ‘One day,’ he said. ‘I came across my father in his room. I wanted to speak to him about something I needed for university, just before I went away. I knocked on the door, but he must not have heard me. It turned out he was otherwise engaged.’

  Daniel gave him a small, ironic smile. Tailby didn’t react. His face was expressionless, but for one eyebrow lifted slightly — indicating a mild interest only. It spurred Daniel on more than a probing question would have done.