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
‘O
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
O‘O
individual secrets, he was sure.
He drew up a few yards short of Dial Cottage and sat
rjo
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
oo
Milner emerging from the door of the cottage, just as she
O OO J
had done that morning — a warm, living glow against the
o‘o OO
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
o‘o
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
245
^ssjtit 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
O‘o
couldn’t try it while 1 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
246
fnen in the flicking of their eyes and the tapping of their bony fingers on the table. They were like a group of poker plavers 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 saving a word, if there was nothing much to say. But he was a uuest at their table, and they were the hosts. He was nankins
&‘irť
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.’
o
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
ooo‘
to let them go.’
o
‘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.’
247
‘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 lor porkers yet, I suppose,’ said Cooper.
‘No, no. Nowhere near. You couldn’t have sold ‘em.’
‘Funny thing about pigs, though,’ said VVilford. ‘Their skin
jc>r oo ‘
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.
o o‘
‘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
o ‘
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 corning 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.
248
Outside, the sky was still light and the evening was warm. He stood ioi a moment
, breathing in the motionless air and looking
‘oo
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 lo 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
249
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
j ‘JO
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
250
trees were thick in the area where Laura’s hodv 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.
251
20
Oh God,’ Ťaid Superintendent Jcpson. ‘We’ll never hear the
end of it. This is the sort of thing the division will never live
&
down. It’ll be in the local press, the national tabloids, we’ll make the joke item on the TV news. And for certain it’ll be in the Police Review. We’ll be the laughing stock of every force
o oJ
in the country. I can hear the jokes about us now. It’ll go on
J-1O
for years. Years!’
The superintendent had DCI Tailby and DI Hitchens in his office before the morning briefing. They had faced the difficult task of explaining to the divisional commander why a dozen officers had been employed to dig up a giant compost heap, and why the pathologist had then been called to examine two dead pigs.
‘We could probably find something we could charge Cutts with,’ said Hitchens. ‘To justify the exercise, so to speak.’
‘No, no, no. That would only make it worse. Let’s just play it down and hope it passes over after a day or two. Has the press office been briefed?’
The did it last night,’ said Tailby. ‘They’ve got bare details, but after that they have to refer enquiries to me. I’ll stonewall them.’
‘All right, Stewart, but I can’t understand how it happened.’
‘Ben Cooper had one of his inspirations,’ said Hitchens.
‘Ah, young Cooper. We had that business with the Sherratt arrest too.’
‘It could have been a disaster if DC Fry hadn’t been there.’
‘If Cooper had got himself shot …’ Jepson shuddered. ‘It would be a total public relations catastrophe. Nobody’s forgotten what happened to his father.’
‘We can’t afford that sort of incident, no matter how you look at it,’ agreed Tailby.
Jcpson turned to Hitchens. ‘You keep your ear to the ground regarding the staff in your department, don’t you, Paul?’
252
‘I try to, sir.’
‘You know we ii have to be making the decision on DS Osborne’s replacement very soon. He signs off tor good at the beginning of next month. DC Cooper was one we had in mind for the job, wasn’t he?’
‘He was top of the shortlist,’ said Hitchens.
‘What’s your view on that now?’
‘Franklv, he appears to be a touch emotionally unstable. He was very moody yesterday. All over something and nothing, as far as I can gather.’
o
‘This new DC, though. Fry …’
‘She’s got better qualifications than Cooper. And she seems very stable, despite her past history.’
Jepson nodded seriously. ‘Ah, the business in the West Midlands. Of course.’
‘A very nasty business,’ said Tailby. ‘But she’s fine now, isn’t she? Paul?’
‘A bit of a cold fish, but solid as a rock, sir. Totally in control, I’d say. Very professional. No ill effects, she says.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good man. That’s excellent management. Good relations with the staff.’
‘According to her record, she had the standard counselling.
o‘o
There’s a note that she packed the sessions in, though, after she split up with a boyfriend. Seems he couldn’t handle it, but she could.’
The suppose that sort of experience can actually make someone a stronger person,’ suggested Tailby.
‘Ah, that’s right. Baptism of fire and all that. Add Diane Fry’s name to the shortlist. Let’s see how she shapes up in the interviews.’
‘Ben Cooper, though … He’d be a popular choice, sir.’
‘Mmm. Emotionally unstable, Paul says. I don’t like the sound of that. Cooper’s a bit too immature yet for a supervisory post, I think. It’s a pity, though. A local lad, wonderful local knowledge. Dedicated, hard-working, bright.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said Hitchens.
o ‘
253
Jcpson sighed. ‘You’re probably right. Do I take it we’re agreed DC Cooper is not an option to replace Osborne?’ He waited while the others nodded. ‘In that case, it’d better be done quickly. I’ll see him this morning during the briefing and break the news. I’ll jolly him along a bit, try to soften the blow. Suggest a bit of lateral development.’
The three men sat for a moment, calmly assessing a job well done. Jepson stirred and sat upright, signalling a change of subject.
‘What’s the progress on the Vernon enquiry, then? Stewart?’
‘We don’t need to expend extra resources at this stage, sir. I expect forensic results today. They could wrap the enquiry up, I think.’
‘You’ve got two possibles, haven’t you?’
‘I’m confident forensics will tie in either Lee Sherratt or the bovfriend, Simeon Holmes,’ said Tailby. ‘That will be the breakthrough we need. We could be making an arrest soon.’
‘That sounds like a good press release,’ said Jepson hopefully. ‘If we can get that out to the media today, they might forget about the pigs.’
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