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by Stephen Booth

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  Looking at Cooper’s face now, she knew that this was what it was really all about for her. This was why she had let him persuade her into this mad expedition, this spell of unauthorized surveillance. It was the sheer strength of his conviction, the intensity of his belief in himself. All he had done was put a few facts together with a whole load of half-baked ideas, instincts

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  and feelings that were entirely his own, and as a result he was filled with a pure, heartfelt certainty that he was right. She could see that Ben Cooper was a man who believed strongly in things; he had faith, he had genuine passion. It was ridiculously attractive.

  ‘Ben — you’ve made this mistake once already. You’re not even on the case any more. You should back off now, or you’ll regret it.’

  ‘And what exactly have I got left to lose?’ he snapped.

  ‘Shh. You’ll let everybody down there know we’re here.’

  ‘I promise you I’m right.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  Immediately below their position was a patch of woodland clinging to the side of the hill. It was full of the quiet noises of creatures settling down for the night or stirring, ready for their evening’s hunting. The woods petered out fifty yards away, where the millstone grit erupted from the hillside and the ground became bare and rocky. At their backs were the ‘tors’ themselves — gritstone outcrops sculpted by geological forces and the weather into strange, twisted shapes. Their names owed a lot to the dark imagination of the rural Peak dwellers — the Horse Stone, the Poached Egg Stone, the Mad Woman.

  But I’m the mad woman, thought Fry. I’m mad for even being here.

  Cooper knew he had to handle her carefully. She was like a coiled spring — one wrong word and she would walk off and leave him. But it was difficult to avoid the wrong word with Diane Fry. Besides, there were so many things he wanted to ask her, away from the office. Number one on his list was what had happened between her and DI Hitchens on their trip to Yorkshire. But it might be wise to save that one for later.

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  ‘Is Mr Tailby still hopeful of Andrew Milner?’ he asked, steering the way into a saier subject.

  ‘Your diagram encouraged him. That and the lack of evidence

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  against Simeon Holmes. If Harry Dickinson was protecting somebody, it has to be Milner.’

  ‘Yeah. Harry doesn’t think much of Milncr, but he’d protect him for the sake of his daughter. For the sake of the family.’

  ‘Family loyalty. As you say, a powerful motivation.’

  ‘Yes, it fits,’ said Cooper sadly.

  ‘Milner had been pushed to the limit by Graham Vernon. Maybe he finally cracked and took revenge.’

  ‘Not only was he pushed to the limit by Vernon, but he was also reminded of his failure by his own family. Harry in particular taunted him with his weakness. If Harrv found out what had

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  happened, he would have felt guilty — partly responsible, in fact. He would try to make amends. I can see that.’

  Cooper cast his mind back to his first visit to Dial Cottage. He remembered the bloodstained trainer standing on the kitchen table on a copy of the Buxton Advertiser, the atmosphere of tension lying on the cramped rooms like a thick blanket. He remembered the old lady, distressed by something beyond the innocent discovery of a missing girl’s trainer.

  ‘I wonder if that was what the row was about,’ he said. ‘And, if so, who was on which side?’

  Fry frowned, but let it pass. ‘Anyway, Milner’s account of his whereabouts was crap from the start.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There was no possibility of tracing anyone who could remember him. He could have been anywhere at that time.’

  ‘But he can’t be placed at the scene either.’

  ‘The DCI thinks he’s worth pursuing. And that one is no Harry Dickinson, either. Mr Tailby will have been running rings round him back at Division.’

  Cooper was silent for a moment, lying quite still to ease the pain in his chest.

  ‘Andrew Milner isn’t in the frame,’ he said.

  ‘But you just said it fits!’

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  ‘Of course it does. It fits the facts, anvwav. But he can’t have killed Laura Vernon.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘He just can’t, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re nuts, do you know that? You’re a sandwich short of a picnic.’

  They didn’t speak to each other for a few minutes. They lay listening to the noises in the woods. A small flock of jackdaws

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  appeared and circled the face of a neighbouring crag. Their harsh, metallic cries drowned out all other noises coming up from the valley until the birds gradually settled on to their roost.

  The minutes passed without incident. The three old men were still gathered around the white pick-up in front of the house. In another half-hour the light would have gone completely. Fry passed the binoculars back to Cooper. Then she eased over on to her side and dug a hand into the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out a bag of coloured sweets.

  The read somewhere you should have something with you when you’re on the hills. For the energy.’

  Cooper took a sweet and sucked it thoughtfully. He looked at her with a faintly puzzled expression. She seemed to feel his eyes on her and turned away, pretending to study something in the woods. Beyond the valley, a jet airliner was leaving a faint trace across the sky towards Manchester.

  ‘Diane —’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What happened to your family?’

  Fry remained staring straight ahead. A tendon twitched in her neck as her jaw tightened. She showed no other sign that she had heard him.

  He studied her profile, trying to tune in to what she was thinking, to get a glimpse of how she was feeling. But her face was stony and expressionless, her eyes fixed on something that might have been deep in the wood, or even beyond it.

  A blackbird scratching in the old leaves beneath the trees whistled and chattered to itself. A partridge wound up its rusty spring somewhere down the hillside. They followed the sound of a car travelling up out of Moorhay towards Edendale.

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  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ he said gently.

  She turned her head then. Her lips had narrowed to a hard line, but her eyes had returned from their invisible horizon to seek out his own.

  ‘I just can’t believe you sometimes, Ben.’

  ‘I’m that amazing, eh?’

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  ‘What sort of time is this to decide you want to discuss my private life?’

  ‘I thought you might like to talk while we wait.’

  ‘Would it surprise you to learn that all I’d like to do at this particular moment is
punch you on the nose?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do that. My screaming would give our position away.’

  ‘Right.’

  They stayed unmoving for five minutes more. The blackbird

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  chattered amongst the old leaves on the woodland floor. A

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  squirrel rustled the branches as it leaped from one tree to the next. A large, pale moth appeared, fluttering in front of Fry’s nose until she waved it away. A tawny owl hooted from the slopes of the Baulk. Finally, she gave a deep sigh.

  ‘I was taken into care by Social Services when I was nine. They said my parents had been abusing my sister, who was eleven. They said it was both my parents. We were fostered after that, but we kept moving on to different places. So many different places that I can’t remember them. It was years before I realized that we didn’t stay anywhere long because of my sister. She was big trouble wherever we went. Nobody could keep her under control. But I worshipped her, and I refused to be split up from her.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me? Do you mean was I abused too? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Was it ?’

  7 can’t remember.’

  The blackbird flapped away through the undergrowth, cackling its alarm call. The squirrel froze on an oak branch, its body upright, its head alert for danger. Cooper and Fry automatically

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  ducked their heads and hugged the ground more closely. Gradually, the normal sounds oi the lullbide returned. J he squirrel relaxed and moved on.

  ‘So what happened to your parents?’

  ‘For God’s sake. I’ve no idea. And I don’t want to know. All right?’

  ‘And your sister?’

  Fry hesitated. When she spoke, her voice had lost its hard edge. Her eyes had drifted away, back to the images floating somewhere in a darkness that only she could see. ‘I haven’t seen her since she was sixteen. She disappeared from our foster home and never came back.’

  Her voice died, and Cooper thought she had told him all she was ever going to say. But then came a whisper, full of anger and unresolved pain.

  ‘Of course, she was already using heroin by then.’

  A skein of geese passed slowly overhead in a straggly V shape. They honked hoarsely to each other, communicating their presence, binding themselves together as a living unit that moved as a single creature. A combine harvester was working late lower down the valley. Its headlights were on, and the clatter of its blades was clear and sharp on the air as it flattened a field of barley. A cloud of dust marked the combine’s position, golden specks glittering in the fading light.

  Fry tried to persuade her memories to fly away with the geese, to fall into shreds beneath the combine’s blade, to disappear in a cloud of dust. But in the dark valley of her mind, the nightmares roosted permanently; the harvest never came.

  ‘Diane ‘

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I guess you must have taken me home last night.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Well … thanks.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. But don’t expect the same favour too often. It wasn’t exactly the most fun I’ve ever had in one night.’

  ‘Right.’

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  He surked the last of Vii^
  binoculars on his sleeve.“I

  ‘There’s just one other thing, Diane. Most of last night is a(it

  complete blur. But there is something I can sort of remember.ir

  Something 1 wanted to ask you about. I can’t get it out of”

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  my mind.L

  Fry went completely rigid, her arm and leg muscles locked’”

  tight as if she had multiple cramp. Her stomach tied itself into a painful knot, and she turned her face away, praying that he couldn’t see her blush. How could she have hoped that he wouldn’t remember that excruciatingly embarrassing moment?

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  She had no idea what she was going to say to him. Her mind

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  was a total blank. ‘Diane — ?’

  She barely managed a grunt of acknowledgement, but it was

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  enough to encourage him to continue.“a

  ‘I remember some music you were playing in the car on the‘&

  way back to your flat. I guess it sort of stuck in my mind whilepj

  I was drunk, and I can’t get rid of it again. I just wondered what||

  it was, that’s all.’];”

  Fry laughed out loud with relief. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Some woman singer. I’m more into the Waterboys and the Levellers. But that tape sounded all right.’

  ‘It was Tanita Tikaram. It’s called “Ancient Heart.”’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Till lend you the cassette, if you like. You can make a copy of it.’

  ‘That’s great —’

  A bleeping sound came from Fry’s jacket pocket. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘What have you brought that thing for?’

  Fry pulled out her pager and switched off the sound as she read the phone number. ‘It’s somebody I’ve been trying to get hold of all day,’ she said. ‘He’s just tried to ring me back at last.’

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  ‘Important?’

  ‘The bird-watcher — Gary Edwards.’ ‘Ah. You remembered.’

  ‘Do you still think it’s important? Should I go back to the car and phone him, then?’

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  Cooper hesitated for a moment. ‘Yes, you should.’ She straightened herself up and scrambled over the rocks towards the car park that lay a few hundred yards below them at the Old Mill. ‘See you in a few minutes, then.’ ‘Yeah/

  Damn, thought Cooper. And just as he was getting round to asking her about Hitchens.

  He swung up the binoculars again. He had to peer hard now to make out the figures by the white pick-up. They seemed to have been gathered over a piece of paper, consulting together, nodding their heads, as if they were doing a crossword or something.

  A few minutes after Diane Fry had left, he saw two of the dim

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  shapes begin to move away from the house. He realized they were heading back down the track leading from the smallholding. The tiiird stayed behind, leaning against the pickup.

  Cooper followed the two figures as they passed dirough the first gate on foot and continued along the track towards the road. When they turned and crossed the road towards the squeeze stile that led to the path on to the Baulk, he knew he would have to follow them.

  He looked at his watch. Nearly eight o’clock. Who else had mentioned eight o’clock? He flicked through his mental notes,

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  and remembered Fry’s account of her interview with Charlotte Vernon. It was this time, every night, that Charlotte visited the spot on the Baulk where her daughter’s body was found.

  ‘So let’s just go back over it again, Mr Edwards, shall we?’ said Fry. ‘You were standing near the cairn on Raven’s Side when you saw an old man with a black dog walk past the end of the footpath below.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean “no”? That’s what you said in your statement.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Where’ve you got that from?’

  Fry stared through the windscreen at the car park and the lighted windows on the front of the Old Mill. She was still

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  unsure what it was she hoped to establish by speaking to the

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  bird-watcher. Gary Edwards had already insisted that he would stick by his estimate of the time he had seen the old man. His watch was accurate, and he was sure of the time. He always recorded the exact time of a sighting, he said.

  oo’

  Now, though, she did seem to have touched on something. She consulted her notes, taken from his earlier statement.

  ‘I’ve got it right here, Mr Edwards
— the statement that you signed. Let me read part of it to you. Your statement reads: “I saw the head of a dog through my binoculars. It appeared through some undergrowth. It was close to the ground, sniffing at a fallen branch. It was black.”’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You go on: “Then I saw there was a man with the dog. He

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  was an old man, wearing a cap. He passed out of my vision to the left, walking, not running. I took the binoculars away from my eyes and I saw the man and the dog move away into the trees. This was near the stream that runs by the footpath called the Eden Valley Trail.”’

  ‘Well ‘

  ‘So the dog was a black dog.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I said.’

  ‘It’s here. You’ve signed it. “It was black”, you said.’

  ‘You’re not listening. Like the other bloke — he didn’t listen either.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Rennie?’

  ‘Yes, him. He just wrote what he wanted to, didn’t he? But listen. I only saw the dog’s head through the binoculars. The head was black.’ ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe the rest of the dog wasn’t. Get it? I couldn’t tell when I took the binoculars away, see? I could only make out the rest of the thing then, when it came out into the open. But the light was funny by that time. It was late on, and the sun was so low. You lose the definition of the colours.’

  ‘OK, I know what you mean. But as far as you could tell, the dog was black, yes?’

  ‘No. Well … I reckon it was probably black and white.’

  ‘Why? You’ve just said —’

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  ‘Well, they usually are, that type of dog. When you see them on the telly — they’re mostly black, with some white. They reckon it’s good camouflage, so the sheep can’t see them on the hillside.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘One Man and His r>fg. It was a sheepdog type of thing, with a shaggy coat. A Border collie, they call it.’

  ‘A Labrador, surelv. A black Labrador you saw.’