Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Of course,’ said Howard. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Sarah turned and looked at him. But she could only see the back of his head, and his growing bald patch. Beyond him, the television screen was flickering into the opening credits of a wildlife programme. In the branches of a tree, a hook-beaked predator swivelled its head and stared with unblinking yellow eyes at the camera, ignoring the struggles of a small lizard that writhed in its talons.

  Ben Cooper remembered the first time Diane Fry had mentioned her sister to him. It had made him feel guilty, as if he had dragged something painful out of her that she would rather have kept to herself. And he knew that Fry had been searching for that missing sister ever since she’d transferred to Derbyshire from the West Midlands. In fact, she had told him herself that it was the only reason she’d come to Edendale, desperately following a rumour that Angie was somewhere in one of the big cities to the north.

  Cooper felt sure that it was desperation and hope that had driven Fry this far. Desperation to find the one remaining link to her own past, and therefore perhaps the confirmation she needed of her own identity. And hope that she might find her sister before it was too late.

  Now he thought about it, Cooper knew he had never really believed that Diane’s hope would ever be justified. Too many possibilities awaited someone who had been a heroin addict by the age of sixteen – as Angie had been, according to her sister. Yet that desperate faith had actually been strong enough to produce Angie herself, right here in the flesh, in the sitting room of his flat at 8 Welbeck Street.

  Cooper was so surprised by the fact that for a few minutes he could only stare at his visitor stupidly. He sat down on the arm of the sofa, suddenly feeling so disorientated that he was afraid his knees might otherwise crumple and leave him sprawled on the floor in an undignified heap. Then he stood up again immediately and opened his mouth to speak. But the only questions that came into his mind were ‘Why here?’ and ‘Why me?’, which sounded too discourteous to be uttered to a visitor.

  ‘How did you find out where I live?’ he said at last.

  Angie Fry brushed a strand of hair from her forehead in a familiar gesture that he saw almost every day. ‘Oh, they told me at the police station.’

  ‘I see. They gave you my address?’

  ‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind. It’s important, or I wouldn’t have come here bothering you.’

  Cooper realized his mouth was hanging open. He could neither believe what he was seeing, nor what he was being told. But the person standing in the middle of his rug was too like Diane Fry to be anybody except who she said she was. And his upbringing prevented him from blurting out what was in his mind.

  Angie looked at him and smiled briefly. Cooper thought for a moment that it was a mocking smile, but it disappeared from her face too quickly for him to be sure.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to offer me a coffee or something?’ she said. ‘You might even ask me to sit down, rather than leaving me standing here.’

  ‘Of course. Would you like coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’

  ‘Coffee would be great,’ she said. ‘White, no sugar.’

  ‘Just the way Diane has it. No sugar.’

  ‘Like they say, we’re both sweet enough already.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The kitchen of the flat was near enough for Cooper to continue holding a conversation with Angie while he made the coffee and lifted down a pair of Simpsons mugs from the dresser.

  ‘Did you call in at the station, or did you phone?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I phoned.’

  ‘Who did you speak to?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Just wondering. Did you get put through to CID, or did you talk to someone on the enquiries desk? Male or female?’

  He got no answer. Eventually, he went back into the room with two mugs of coffee and found Angie Fry sitting on the floor with her back against his sofa, staring at the ceiling. She’d taken off her rucksack and jacket, and he could see she was wearing an old sweatshirt with lettering that might have been the name of a university or a rock band, but was too worn to read.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Questions and more questions,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d treat me like this. You are a copper, after all. Suspicious lot, aren’t you?’

  ‘We’re trained to be. But, whether as a copper or just as another human being, I prefer to be told the truth.’

  ‘I am telling you the truth,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She said nothing, but sat and looked at him for a moment. He was relieved that she didn’t try to bluff it out, to bluster and lie barefaced, as he had heard so many people do in the interview rooms at West Street. So he didn’t hesitate in explaining what he meant.

  ‘They would never give out a police officer’s home address at the station,’ he said. ‘It’s the number one rule. You really ought to have known that.’

  For a second, he thought she might laugh. But that mocking half-smile flitted across her lips again, then vanished. She nodded, lowering her eyes. Her shoulders slumped a little inside the sweatshirt.

  ‘I’m not a very good liar,’ she said. ‘I should have known not to try to lie.’

  ‘We get plenty of experience of hearing good liars,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, I expect you do.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me the truth?’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better,’ she said. But Cooper, listening carefully to the intonation of her voice, thought she might as well have shaken her head and said ‘no’. Unlike some of the regular customers they had to interview at West Street, Angie Fry had learned to lie only through her words. She hadn’t mastered the techniques of controlling her voice and the expression on her face, of disguising the tension in her body and the look in her eyes. He had listened to scores of much better liars than Angie Fry. Much better.

  ‘I heard you were a farm boy, Ben. So I looked in the local Yellow Pages for farmers called Cooper. Though I can’t imagine Di ever having any interest in farming.’

  ‘Di?’

  The mocking smile was there this time, definitely. Cooper felt himself go a little pink in the neck. ‘Of course. Diane.’

  ‘We were always Di and Angie to each other, when we were little.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I was lucky for once. The first number I tried was the wrong Cooper, but the second was right. Bridge End Farm, was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And was that your dad I spoke to?’

  Taken by surprise, Cooper tensed painfully, his fingernails stabbing into his palms as his hands clenched. The physical reaction to any unexpected mention of his father never failed to embarrass him.

  ‘I think it would have been my brother,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, right.’ She raised an eyebrow slightly. ‘An older brother, is he? Interesting.’

  That smile was starting to become annoying. Each time it appeared, it seemed to linger a bit longer, and looked a little more openly mocking.

  ‘Yes, an older brother. What’s interesting about that?’

  ‘I don’t know really. Just the older brother/older sister thing. It can be complicated, can’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Cooper, who had decided he wasn’t going to give away even the slightest detail of his private life that she didn’t know already.

  ‘Anyway, I made out I was an old college friend of yours who’d lost touch with you. I asked if you still lived there, at the farm. And your brother told me you’d moved out, and he gave me your new address. He’s not like you, is he? He wasn’t suspicious of me at all. I take it he’s not a copper.’

  ‘Of course not. He’s a farmer.’

  That part of the story, at least, would be easy enough to check out with Matt. Bridge End Farm was certainly in the Yellow Pages, but Angie could have thought that through. As for where she had heard
that he was a farm boy in the first place, it seemed to Cooper that there was only one person who might have told Angie Fry that. And it made no sense at all.

  ‘What else did you hear about me?’ he said.

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. What else is there to know about you?’

  ‘Not very much. But I’m curious where you heard anything about me at all.’

  She hid her face in her coffee mug, lowering her eyes. ‘I asked around. Everyone knows you.’

  That last bit was true, at least – Cooper could hardly deny that. There were far too many people in Edendale who knew all about him. Diane had told him he was mad to move into this flat in the centre of town, where he would be so close to so many people who knew exactly who he was and might have reason to bear a grudge. But it had caused no problems for him. Not until tonight, anyway.

  ‘You’re looking happier,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re smiling a lot. You weren’t smiling like that when you arrived.’

  ‘It must be because I feel at ease with you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, you’re a good listener. But then, I suppose you’d say you’re trained to be.’

  Cooper put down his mug. ‘You’d better get to the point and tell me what it is you want from me.’

  ‘Oh …’

  He could feel himself starting to lose patience then. Angie was intruding into his private life uninvited and without a proper explanation, and he really didn’t have to be polite to her all evening, if he didn’t feel like it.

  ‘There’s no point in pretending you don’t want something,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have gone through all that business with the Yellow Pages and phoning up farmers called Cooper if you didn’t want something from me, Angie. So I don’t want to hear any more of this rubbish. Just cut to the chase, and tell me what you want. Then I can say “no” and go back to my own life.’

  Angie looked down at her coffee mug. She was still clutching it, though he had watched her tip back the last drops of coffee several minutes ago. Her fingers were tight and white at the joints. They moved restlessly against the smooth porcelain, tracing the slightly raised shapes of Homer and Marge. Backwards and forwards her fingers went, following the shapes, keeping themselves moving. Reluctantly, Cooper found he couldn’t hold on to his burst of irritation.

  ‘Have you spoken to Diane recently?’ he said.

  Angie shook her head.

  ‘When? Not since you left Warley?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But that was years and years ago.’

  ‘It’s fifteen years.’

  Cooper restrained an exclamation. It was beyond his comprehension how sisters could be apart for fifteen years without getting in touch with each other. But stranger things happened in families.

  ‘I know Diane has been looking for you,’ he said. ‘In fact, she’s been looking for you very hard recently. She once told me it was the reason she’d come to Derbyshire, because she’d managed to track you down as far as Sheffield and this was as near as she could get.’

  ‘Yes, I know she’s been looking for me.’

  Cooper began to get impatient again. ‘Well, if you know that, what’s the problem? You’ve found me, so I’m sure you could have found Diane a whole lot easier. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to talk to Diane for you? Maybe arrange a meeting? You want to do it gradually, is that what you’re worried about? I know it’s going to be a shock for both of you, after so long.’

  Angie listened him out with a defiant stare. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ she said. ‘Completely wrong.’

  ‘What then?’

  She leaned forward suddenly, thrusting her narrow face towards him, so that he couldn’t avoid the stare of her pale eyes or miss the tiny lines clustered around her temples, lines etched by years of pain.

  ‘I want you to explain to her that I never want to see her again,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell her to leave me alone.’

  Cooper sat back, shocked by the vehemence that was suddenly in her voice. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Mean it?’ Now she put the mug down on the table, with a crack like the noise of an air rifle. ‘Believe me, I don’t want my little sister back in my life. And I’m damn sure she doesn’t really need me back in hers. But there’s no way I can try to tell her that myself. She’s so damn stupid and pig-headed that she wouldn’t believe me. I know from past experience that she only believes what she wants to hear, and I could never do any wrong as far as she was concerned. She never saw the real me, no matter how much I shoved it in her face.’

  ‘People change a lot in fifteen years,’ said Cooper quietly.

  ‘Do you think she’s changed? Or would you say she was still like that?’

  He sat back. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But you could convince her, couldn’t you? Diane would believe you. They say you’re the man who believes in things like telling the truth. Is that right? Or are you going to be another one who just pisses me about?’

  ‘If Diane wants to make contact with you again, who am I to make a different decision for her?’

  ‘It’s not your decision, it’s mine. And I’m her big sister, so I know best.’ Angie sighed. ‘OK, what can I do? Will you listen if I tell you the whole story?’

  Cooper hesitated. From the little Diane had said, he wasn’t sure it was anything he really wanted to hear. But what else was he going to be doing this evening?

  ‘Like you said, I’m a good listener.’

  So Angie told him. It took fifteen to twenty minutes, with frequent pauses. But Cooper got the sense of the girl who had rebelled against her family situation, who had been desperate to escape from the nightmare she had got herself trapped in. Any escape route must have looked attractive to her then. But she had only been leaving one trap to enter another.

  ‘We were both taken into care by Social Services. I was eleven, and Diane was nine. They said my parents had been abusing me. Well, of course they had. My dad anyway, and my mum knew. No point trying to pretend it didn’t happen.’

  ‘And Diane, too?’ said Cooper.

  Angie hesitated. ‘Has she said so?’

  ‘She says she can’t remember.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ But then her tone changed. ‘Well, she was only a kid. Maybe she can’t. But you see why I know she won’t have changed now. The fear goes way back when.’

  ‘You were fostered together, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. They kept moving us on to different places, though. So many different places that I can’t remember them. It was because of me that we didn’t stay anywhere long. I was big trouble wherever we went. But Di thought the sun shone, and she screamed the roof down at the idea of being split up from me. In the end, I couldn’t stick it any longer. I left our last foster home when I was sixteen, and never went back. I haven’t seen Diane since. And it’s much better that way, believe me.’

  ‘I know you were already using heroin,’ said Cooper.

  ‘So she told you all about that, too? She must really think a lot of you, Ben.’

  ‘I think it just slipped out.’

  Angie raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, yeah? My little sister doesn’t let things slip out, unless it’s for a reason.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Well, you’re right. The thing is, I was stealing stuff from the house to pay for it. Stealing from our foster parents. That’s why there was so much trouble. They just couldn’t deal with it, with the idea that this was the way I showed my gratitude. So I had all this shit flying around my head all the time until I thought I was going to be sick on their Axminster carpet, and all I could think about was the next hit. You know, as long as you get your daily fix, you don’t care about anyone. You’ll use anybody, steal or rob, just for a hit. They always say it’s the needle that some people get addicted to, not the drug. They call it needle fever. So it was better for me
to leave – better for Di, too. I couldn’t stand the thought that she would follow the same route.’

  Angie was staring at the ceiling again, rather than look at Cooper. As he had expected, tears began to form in the corners of her eyes as she spoke. She made no attempt to wipe them away, and they streaked her face as they trickled across her cheekbones.

  ‘So it’s not quite true that you didn’t care about anyone,’ said Cooper.

  Angie flushed. ‘Don’t try to trap me. I’m telling it like it was. You need to know that, no matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger. I’ve done cold turkey many times, and they’ve had me on a detox programme. Do you know how long you have to wait for help from the Drugs Service? Up to twenty-eight weeks for an appointment. Six months. Do you know what can happen to you in that time? Do you know how easy it is to die? It doesn’t take six months. I went through hell doing all that, but I always went back to the drugs. No matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger in the end. It’s always there in your brain, and it just calls you and calls you. I know Diane would try to make me stop, but I couldn’t deal with that. Neither of us could deal with that.’

  Cooper was silent. Despite the deception and the performance he was watching now, the feeling was creeping over him that Angie Fry was essentially telling him the truth. He wasn’t entirely convinced, but there was sufficient doubt in his mind.

  ‘I’m still not sure that I shouldn’t phone Diane right now and tell her you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘They told me you were Di’s friend. If you care anything about her, you won’t let this happen to her. You won’t let me happen to her.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘The trouble is, I really don’t think there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘She has false hopes, don’t you realize that?’ said Angie, with a brief flash of anger that Cooper found familiar. ‘Diane has expectations that I can never live up to. Quite the opposite. When she found out the truth about my life, she would be so ashamed of her sis that it would knock the bottom out of her world. She always had a kind of fragile sense of security. She always needed something to hang onto to make her feel safe in the world.’ She paused, and gave him that challenging smile, even through the tears. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me that people change in fifteen years?’