Black dog bcadf-1

by Stephen Booth

  While she waited, biting her lip, she found her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness in the doorway behind Sam. And now she could see, all too clearly, what was in the shed.

  For a while, Ben Cooper was able to keep the two figures in sight from a safe vantage point among the rocks on Raven’s Side. Gradually, he worked his way down the steep hillside, using the cover of the rocky outcrops and the first of the trees on the lower

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  slopes. The two old men weren’t moving quickly. They looked as though they were out for a Sunday stroll, ambling along the path close together, almost shoulder to shoulder, apparently deep in conversation.

  Cooper was glad of their absorption in each other as he scrambled down a stretch of open ground, stumbling on invisible rabbit holes and stubbing his toe on half-buried stones. Before he had reached ground level, Harry and Wilford had vanished around a bend in the path. He remembered a second path which ran at a diagonal across the face of the cliff and emerged on to

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  the main path heading towards the Baulk. He found it quickly and broke into a run, lifting his feet high off the ground and letting them fall as softly as he could, afraid of unseen hazards that might trip him, but desperate to gain distance on the two old men. The surrounding trees grew tall and dense, and a thick, muffled silence gradually descended around him, cutting him off from the world that had existed higher up on the tors.

  As he ran, Cooper thought of Diane Fry’s interview with Charlotte Vernon. If she really did visit the Baulk every night to contemplate the place of her daughter’s death, then Harry Dickinson would surely know it. There seemed to be very little that went on in this area that Harry wasn’t aware of. No doubt he had seen Charlotte picking her way along the path with her bunches of flowers, just as he had spotted her husband out on the Baulk. Cooper wondered what Harry’s real intention had been when he set off to try to meet Graham Vernon the night that Laura had died. And he wondered whether Harry now meant to follow up that intention with Vernon’s wife instead. There was no doubt in Cooper’s mind that danger lurked in the woods tonight.

  For once, Harry was without his dog, Jess. But he was accompanied by Wilford Cutts instead. Probably there was|i

  little to choose between them for loyalty.i.|

  Cooper reached the main path, breathing hard, and turnedI

  westwards towards the Baulk. Down below him now, on his|

  right, was the stream and the Eden Valley Trail that ran along|’|

  side it. Faintly, through the covering of trees, he could hearif

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  the whispering of the water. A barn owl called — an eerie,|

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  long-drawn-out hunting cry that echoed across the valley and was enough to make him sliivcr, even though he knew what it was.

  He wondered what luck Diane Fry might have had with the bird-watcher, and wished that he had her alongside him now. A fox barked somewhere ahead. Perhaps even the same fox that had sunk its teeth into the cooling flesh of Laura Vernon’s thigh.

  A couple of minutes passed as Cooper walked as fast as he dared, squinting ahead into the gloom, hoping he hadn’t lost the two men. But eventually, as he rounded a bend by the disintegrated remains of a stone building, he came to a sudden halt at a glimpse of movement up ahead. He stood into the side of the path under an overhanging elder bough, and watched the

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  old men. They were standing at a point where the path diverged. Again they were very close together, merging into one dark, indistinct figure, as if they were holding each other, embracing like lovers. Then they turned, striding down the right-hand path without looking back. The path dipped in a gentle slope into a patch of denser trees and then towards ground that grew rocky and steep and was broken into deep ravines.

  Cooper had to go more slowly as he found himself walking over the rocks. By the time he reached the first ravine, the old men had vanished into the night as if they had been erased out of existence.

  He stood back off the path in the trees and waited. There was nothing else he could do. He wondered what Diane Fry would have done when she found him gone. Surely she would have the sense this time to call in and get some support. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No way. She wouldn’t make the

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  mistake of following him into trouble.

  As soon as she entered the woods, Fry knew that it would happen again. Though she had brought a torch this time, the narrow pool of light it cast at her feet seemed only to emphasize the blackness outside its reach, to make her isolation total and threatening. From among the trees, the eager darkness had begun to sidle in towards her, oozing round her body in swift, oily movements, and pressing in close with its nauseous and suffocating familiarity.

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  The night was full of tinv, whispering movements. They were

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  like the soft seething on the surface of a bowl of maggots. They made her want to scratch her skin, where the small hairs were tense and moving. Then the invisible ants began to swarm across her body, nipping and biting as they went, their thousands of tiny insect feet scuttling over her arms and legs, itching her skin and

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  burrowing under her breasts and into the moist warmth between

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  her thighs, until she wanted to scream with revulsion.

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  She needed desperately to reach out and touch something solid for reassurance, yet could not move her hand for fear of what her fingers might encounter. Somehow she managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, automatically, like a robot programmed for a single action. Every step she took made her afraid. Every movement wras like a leap into a void, a step into the midst of unseen horrors.

  She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows bringing back the memories that she had pushed deep into

  the recesses of her mind. They were memories that were too

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  powerful and greedy to be buried completely, too vivid to be erased, too deeply etched into her soul to be forgotten. They merely wallowed and writhed in the depths, waiting for the chance to reemerge.

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  As she walked, she turned her head from side to side, watching the dimly seen trees for movement. They were like rows of solid bodies standing threateningly around, surrounding her and

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  closing in. She was alone among a dozen of them, two dozen,

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  maybe more. Other bodies could be sensed, further back in the darkness, watching, laughing, waiting eagerly for what they knew would happen next. Voices murmured and coughed. ‘It’s a copper,’ the voices said. ‘She’s a copper.’

  The memories churned and bubbled. There were movements that crept and rustled closer; there were brief, fragmented glimpses of figures carved into severed segments by the streetlights; the sickly reek of booze and violence. And then she seemed

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  to hear that one particular voice — that rough, slurring Brummie voice that slithered out of the darkness. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ The same taunting laughter moving in the shadows. The same dark, menacing shapes all around, whichever way

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  she turned. A hand in the small of her back, and a leg outstretched to trip. Then she was falling, flailing forward into the darkness. Hands grabbing her, pinching and pulling and slapping. Her arms trapped by unseen fingers that gripped her tightly, painful and shocking in their violence. Her own voice, unnaturally high-pitched and stained with terror, was trying to cry out, but failing.

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  Nothing could stop the flood of remembered sensations now. The smell of a sweat-soaked palm over her mouth, her head banging on the ground as she thrashed helplessly from side to side. Her clothes pulled and torn, the shock of feeling parts of her body exposed to the cruel air. ‘How do you like this, copper?’ And then came the groping and the prodding and
the squeezing, and the hot, intruding fingers. And, perfectly clear on the night air, the sound of a zip. Another laugh, a mumble, an excited gasp. And finally the penetration. The ripping agony, and the scream that was smothered by the hand over her face, and the desperate fighting to force breath into her lungs. ‘How do you like this, copper? How do you like this, copper?’ Animal noises and more laughter, and a warm wetness spurting and trickling inside her before the final withdrawal. The relief of the lifting of a weight from her body, as one dark shape moved away and she thought it was over.

  But then it happened again.

  And again.

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  Blindly, she continued walking, insensible to her surroundings, all her efforts directed towards controlling the reactions of her body. She tried to focus her thoughts on Ben Cooper, somewhere ahead in the woods, unaware of the danger he was in. ‘Are you going to let me down?’ he’d said.

  Finally, she found herself stepping out into a clearing, immediately feeling the difference in the ground underfoot. She became aware of a sound — a real sound, belonging to here and now, a sound that needed explanation.

  Her memory was still forcing unwanted pictures in front of her eyes as she turned to identify the noise, seeking its source among the menacing shadows. She found that a large tree stood

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  near her shoulder, tall and thirklv shrouded in foliage, its cruv-.ii dimly visible against the pale sky. Its leaves whispered and rustled like a vast colony of small creatures roosting directly above her head. She thought of thousands of tiny bats, scraping their thin, papery wings against their bodies as they prepared to drop in fluttering swarms on to her shoulders. There was nothing worse than something you could only hear, but not see.

  There was a sudden loud creaking as the wind caught the weight of a branch, and a louder crackling among the leaves. She

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  caught the unmistakable smell of urine and faeces, drifting closer. And then there was a heavier movement among the branches as something swung towards her, lumbering out of die dark.

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  Three hundred yards away, Ben Cooper had picked up the trail again as one of the old men reappeared on the path. He heard the man coming before he saw him, could sense his breathing

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  and hear a barely audible muttering.

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  After switching to the left-hand fork, the figure walked on for several hundred yards before suddenly striking off the path into the depths of the trees. Cooper found it difficult even to locate the exact spot where he had disappeared. Once in among the trees, he was lost. There was no hope of seeing anyone who might be lurking among the straggling clumps of brambles and the trunks of the old oaks and beeches that grew thickly here. Faintly, on the air, he caught a familiar tang of pipe smoke. But he finally had to admit that he had lost the old man he had been following.

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  Then Cooper lifted his head in despair as a high-pitched scream shattered the silence of the woods.

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  Uial Cottage was almost in darkness. The only light behind the curtains of the sitting room was a flickering pattern of shifting colours, a light that died against the window before it reached the garden or the blackness beyond.

  Two torches shone on to the flagged path, throwing the shadows of shrub roses across the flower beds like skeletal fingers reaching towards the house. In the background was the sound of another siren approaching Moorhay from the Edendale road. The flashing blue lights of an ambulance were reflected off the night sky.

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  Ben Cooper and Diane Fry knew the ambulance would not be needed. Fry still had a clear picture in her mind of the old man hanging from a branch ten feet above the ground, the toes of his black work boots pointing to the earth, his head lolling to one side in a last mocking gesture. When she had moved reluctantly closer to the swinging body, she had seen that his right hand was clenched tight around an old leather dog lead.

  She was aware that she had screamed when the wind had swung

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  the dark, rustling shape towards her head and the dangling feet had bumped in her face. Then Ben Cooper had been there, cannoning into her at full tilt in answer to her cry. And somehow

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  she had recognized him instantly, an instinctive response to his scent or the sound of his breath, so that she reacted not by attacking him as she would a stranger rushing at her from the darkness, but by clinging to him desperately, finding at last the reassuring solidity that her body craved.

  Then finally, together, they had cut the body down. Cooper had climbed up to the branch and sawed through the nylon rope with his penknife. The old man had clearly been dead long before they got him to the ground. It had been a neat, clean job, with the knot of the noose tied properly and positioned below the angle of the jaw, with plenty of height to the drop. His neck had been snapped cleanly.

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  Ben Cooper hesitated ,is they reached the old oodcn gate at the bottom of the garden, wondering if the same thought was in both their minds. But he didn’t want to be die iirst to say it.

  ‘So Sam Beeley had the dog,’ he said instead.

  ‘The Border collie, yes. Kept well out of sight in a shed at Thorpe Farm.’

  They had waited only while the machinery of an official

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  response to a sudden death had swung into action. The first area patrol car had already arrived with two uniformed officers following Fry’s call to the incident room. An ambulance had been summoned, closely followed by the police surgeon to officially certify death. They had all been obliged to step carefully round the small heap of roses and carnations tied up with ribbons, slowly fading and shrivelling on the ground, marking the spot where Laura Vernon died.

  Then Cooper and Fry had walked together up the path towards Moorhay. Cooper was following the route for the third time that week. But this time he was conscious of Diane Fry close at his side, her hand unsteady now as she pointed her torch towards the row of cottages.

  Cooper knew that she had taken control at some point. It had been immediately after they had discovered the body, immediately after that spontaneous embrace, when her fear had seemed to empty itself into his arms like a dam bursting, relieving some unimaginable pressure. She had naturally taken command of the scene then, issuing instructions clearly and professionally, like someone born to the role.

  And then he had discovered that she had already been to Thorpe Farm and spoken to Sam Beeley, and had already found the dog. She had already phoned in to the incident room, and she had organized the back-up. Everything done just right. The credit would be all hers.

  But it was almost too perfect. Almost as if the reason she had agreed to come with him tonight was not to support him, but just to seek that moment when she typed her own name on the report that cleared up the Vernon enquiry.

  ‘Who’s going to do it?’ she asked.

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  Cooper nodded, relieved that she had said it first.

  ‘I will, if you like ‘

  They walked up the path. From inside the cottage came the dull, distorted sounds of artificial laughter. Cooper knocked. It was late, and the noise sounded too loud. When Gwen Dickinson answered the door, the sound from inside the cottage increased and it became clear that she had been watchinp television.

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  ‘Mrs Dickinson, when did you last see Harry?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

  She took them through the sitting room, where a talk show was on the TV, into the front room of the cottage. Here, in the semi-darkness, the same smell of pipe smoke lingered that Cooper had noticed in the woods.

  The knew there was something going on.’ said Gwen.

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  ‘We’ve found a body,’ said Cooper. ‘Hanging from a tree on the Baulk.’

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ Gwen clutched at her b
osom as if her heart would stop with the shock. She fumbled her way to an armchair behind her and sat down heavily. She stared across the room at the opposite chair.

  ‘You know who it is, of course,’ said Cooper. But he wasn’t speaking to Gwen.

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Harry. His pipe was in his mouth and his head was resting upright on the antimacassar of his chair. But in the half-light of a single lamp in the corner, his stare was derisive. ‘He always knew to do the right thing, did Wilford.’

  Jess lay at Harry’s feet, her black coat gleaming, one eye turned apprehensively towards the visitors, sensing the atmosphere.

  ‘Are you saying he committed suicide?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Harry.

  ‘And why would he do that, Mr Dickinson?’

  ‘Because he killed that girl. The Mount lass. It was the only way out. He couldn’t have faced prison, you see. Not being kept in a cell, out of the daylight. He couldn’t have stood that.’

  ‘He killed Laura Vernon. And you, Mr Dickinson — you helped him all along?’

  ‘It’s what you do, for a friend.’

  Cooper perched on the edge of a hard chair. The Labrador

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  stirred and lifted her head to studv shee as she moved rest! ess! v across the room. A low growl began in the dog’s throat, but Harry silenced her with a sound that was barely a hiss of breath.

  ‘Do you want to tell us about it?’ asked Cooper.

  Harrv was silent for a moment, looking from one to the other.

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  He seemed not to be considering his words, but weighing up what effect they would have.

  ‘I saw Wilford on the Baulk that night, that Saturday,’ he said. ‘He was upset, and he told me what had happened. I said 1 would help him, of course.’