Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dearden triumphantly. ‘I knew whose side you’d be on.’

  ‘Mr Dearden –’

  But Michael Dearden was no longer listening. He got back into his pick-up, revved the engine and spun his wheels as he headed out of Withens. Cooper watched him as he climbed up Dead Edge and crashed his gears as he drove back over the border.

  Cooper frowned. Derek Alton had said that Dearden avoided driving through Withens because he dreaded seeing the Oxleys in the road in front of Waterloo Terrace, as he had the day he’d knocked down and injured Jake. That might be so. But Cooper could detect no guilt in Michael Dearden. At least, not about what had happened to Jake Oxley.

  Further up the village, over the bridge, Cooper could see the supports being set up for the well-dressing boards opposite Waterloo Terrace. The well consisted of a stone trough full of clear water that Cooper knew would be ice cold, though there was no obvious source for it.

  But he noticed there was another well near the church. It had water bubbling into it from the wall behind, but it looked abandoned, and it wasn’t being prepared for dressing like the one further up the village.

  There was a familiar face among the little crowd. Eric Oxley. He was the only adult member of the Oxley family here, though Cooper thought he had seen some of the children darting around, excited by what they had found waiting for them when they got home from school. Soon, the Yorkshire Traction bus driver would be doing extra business running tours to the scene. There were screens around the grave now, but a tent hadn’t been erected yet to protect the scene from the weather.

  As Cooper approached, Eric Oxley seemed suddenly to remember their first meeting, when Cooper had been trying to find Shepley Head Lodge.

  ‘Shop!’ snorted Eric. ‘We’re bloody lucky we’ve got a pub.’

  ‘You’ve got a church too,’ pointed out Cooper.

  ‘Aye, there’s a church.’

  ‘The Reverend Alton says the congregations at St Asaph’s are very small, even when there are services here. I’d have thought the church would have been closed by now, to be honest.’

  Oxley looked down the village at the church. ‘Everybody here thought they would have closed it, too,’ he said. ‘But that chap arrived, when we didn’t expect it.’

  ‘Mr Alton?’

  ‘Aye, Alton. Have you seen him, messing about in the graveyard?’

  ‘He’s trying to tidy it up, to improve the look of the place. He says nobody else will do it.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘He’s fighting a losing battle, Mr Oxley. He could do with some help.’

  But Oxley just looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language.

  ‘Have you done?’

  ‘I see your daughter-in-law has been working on the well dressing,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Aye. She does it every year. The younger ones help, too.’

  ‘Right.’ Cooper remembered the girls in the bath full of clay. ‘Puddling’, they called it – making the clay ready for spreading on the boards.

  ‘It’ll be up at the weekend,’ said Oxley.

  ‘But what about the other well? The one below the church. Why isn’t that one dressed as well?’

  ‘That well isn’t used. It hasn’t been used for a long time.’

  ‘But there’s water in it.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So why isn’t it used?’

  ‘It’s on the wrong side of the church,’ said Oxley.

  ‘What do you mean, the wrong side?’

  Eric Oxley shrugged. ‘People won’t use the water down that end. They say it’s polluted.’

  ‘But there are no farming activities at the end of the village. The farms are at the other end. Down there, there’s just the church and the graveyard, and the village hall.’

  ‘Like I said – people reckon it’s polluted.’

  ‘But what by?’

  But Oxley either didn’t know the answer, or couldn’t be bothered to explain it. With a twitch of his shoulder, he began to walk off.

  ‘Mr Oxley,’ called Cooper.

  ‘Aye?’ said the old man, without looking round.

  ‘Those graves at the back of the church. Were those men some of the navvies working on the railway tunnels?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I noticed that they all seem to have died around the same time. What did they die of?’

  Oxley had stopped, but he still didn’t answer.

  ‘Was it an accident in the tunnels?’ said Cooper. ‘I thought perhaps it was a roof collapse, or an explosion, or something like that. But they died over a period of about a week. Was it an accident, Mr Oxley?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Oxley turned back towards him at last. Cooper couldn’t see any expression in his eyes but for the usual suspicion. Oxley’s gaze slid past Cooper towards the graveyard itself, and to the neglected well, full of water that the villagers ignored. When he spoke, his voice was tinged not with suspicion, but with anger.

  ‘No, it wasn’t an accident that killed them.’

  ‘Not an accident? What, then?’

  Oxley took a deep breath and met Cooper’s eyes at last when he spoke.

  ‘It was cholera.’

  Suddenly, there was a scuffling and a shout from the churchyard gate, and two people burst through before anyone could stop them. They ran towards the tape, the man in the lead not bothering to stop as he charged into it and dragged it with him towards the makeshift grave. The Renshaws.

  ‘Stop them!’

  The nearest scenes of crime officer was taken completely by surprise. He tried to turn, tripped on a clump of weeds and dropped his video camera. He began to swear as Howard Renshaw shouldered him aside and trampled into the middle of the sacrosanct crime scene, destroying evidence with every step.

  Before anyone could get near him, Howard had dropped to his knees, plunged his hands into the tangled roots and peaty soil, and picked up the skull.

  ‘He had her here all the time,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Renshaw, please!’

  Sarah was hanging back behind the cordon, not looking at the remains in the shallow grave, but staring at her husband as he ran his hands over the plates of the skull like a man caressing the head of a lover.

  ‘Emma,’ he said. ‘She liked me to dry her hair when she’d washed it. I can remember being able to feel her scalp move over her skull when I ran the towel through her hair. I know the feel of her skull.’

  As a SOCO took hold of the skull and tried to gently prise it from his grip, Howard looked up and caught Fry’s eye. ‘And this is her skull. It’s my daughter.’

  He resisted only a moment more, before allowing two police officers to pull him away.

  29

  Derek Alton sat awkwardly on his chair in the interview room at West Street. He was sweating, but then the room was always stuffy, and few interviewees found it comfortable. The interviewing officers tended to sweat, too. It didn’t make them guilty.

  Alton was a fidgeter. Some people went very still, as if in shock; others insisted on getting up and pacing the room. There were some who appeared quite relaxed – but they were usually the regulars, who had been here and done it all before.

  But Alton was a fidgeter. He sat, but not comfortably, shifting from one buttock to the other, edging his chair a little nearer to the table, then away again. His hands were constantly moving. He squeezed one with the fingers of the other, then turned both hands upside down and looked at his palms, as if surprised to see them. Or perhaps just surprised to see something that he could read there. Then Alton put his hands back flat on the table, hiding the palms. But his fingers were still moving. When he lifted his hands again, his fingertips left faint perspiration stains on the polished surface of the table.

  Cooper watched him with fascination. These moments before the interview started were often the most important. The interviewee didn’t know what questions were going to be asked, and that allowed him to imagine
the worst. If he had enough imagination, Alton might already have mentally painted himself into a corner, in a way that his interviewers were forbidden from doing. Just as they were obliged under the PACE rules to explain to him what his rights were, they also couldn’t tell him any untruths about what evidence they might have, or what other witnesses had said, or mislead him about what could happen to him. But Derek Alton could do all of that for himself, given time.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Mr Alton,’ said Fry. ‘You’re here by your own free will to make a statement. You’re free to leave at any time. Do you understand?’

  Alton nodded, but stared at her as if she had threatened him with impending doom and destruction.

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  Fry seemed to hear the same shake in his voice that Cooper did. ‘Are you quite comfortable, sir?’ she said. ‘Would you like a drink of water before we start? A cup of tea perhaps? Coffee?’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Thank you.’

  ‘If you feel the need for a break at any time, just say so, and we’ll stop the interview.’

  ‘You’re very considerate.’

  Fry looked a bit surprised to be regarded as considerate. She was only doing what the PACE rules told her to. She was doing it by the book.

  ‘You’ve kindly given us a statement about the circumstances surrounding your discovery of human remains in the churchyard of St Asaph’s, Withens,’ she said. ‘This is the church where you are the incumbent.’

  She had to read the word ‘incumbent’ from Derek Alton’s statement. It wasn’t a job title that she was familiar with.

  ‘I’m priest in charge of Hey Bridge and Withens,’ said Alton.

  ‘So you’re the incumbent at Withens?’ said Fry, unsure whether he was contradicting himself.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’ve said in your statement that there wasn’t anything particular that made you choose that part of the churchyard to clear.’

  ‘Well, only because of the graves there. They’re very small memorial stones. They were disappearing completely.’

  ‘When was it last cleared?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Alton. ‘It was already deteriorating when I came to Withens.’

  ‘Have you noticed any disturbance in that particular area?’

  ‘Well, not really.’

  ‘Not really? Was there something?’

  ‘There’s litter left. Beer cans, that sort of thing. Sometimes you can tell people have been in that part of the churchyard at night – branches broken off the trees, ground trampled. Once or twice, somebody has tried to start a fire.’

  ‘It’s out of sight from the road, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. That’s the problem.’

  ‘Mr Alton, do you know who comes into the churchyard at night?’

  Alton looked a little more nervous.

  ‘Children? Teenagers?’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Usually. But I can’t imagine they would do anything like this …’

  ‘Any particular youngsters you might be able to identify?’

  Alton grimaced. ‘Of course. The Oxleys.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. DC Cooper will make sure you get back home to Withens.’

  Ben Cooper had noticed Tracy Udall’s Astra in the car park at West Street, and guessed she must have been summoned to a divisional meeting that had been taking place upstairs. When he found her, she was in the locker room, cleaning her rigid handcuffs, oiling the boss and ratchet bar with WD40.

  ‘Cholera?’ said Cooper.

  His dictionary defined cholera as an acute communicable bacterial infection of the small intestine by vibrio cholerae, derived from the ingestion of food or water contaminated by human sewage containing the micro-organism. It said the symptoms included the rapid onset of a profuse, white, watery diarrhoea, with muscle cramps, vomiting and progressive fluid loss, resulting in death within a few hours.

  Cooper had very soon started feeling unwell.

  ‘I mean, cholera?’

  ‘It was a result of the conditions the navvies lived in,’ said Udall. ‘You know, the shanty town?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They not only had poor food and no health-and-safety regulations, they also weren’t provided with any clean water or any toilet facilities. Their food and water got contaminated by human sewage, and men started dying of cholera by the dozen. Some are buried at Woodhead Chapel, above the A628.’

  ‘But others are buried in the churchyard at Withens.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s ironic, when you think about it. Well dressing is supposed to have started after the Black Death. The villages that escaped being affected by the plague credited the purity of their local water supply for protecting them. So they revived the tradition of blessing the wells as a way of saying thank you. I think Tissington was one of the first.’

  ‘Some of them probably still believed they were propitiating the water goddess in those days,’ said Cooper.

  But Udall was right. Those Derbyshire villagers did have good reason to be thankful. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Black Death had killed a third of the population of England. Villages like Tissington were very lucky not to have been touched. Five hundred years later, though, it had been cholera that had taken the lives of the navvies building the Woodhead tunnels and living in their pitiful shanty towns.

  ‘So the other well in Withens is avoided because it’s on the wrong side of the churchyard – below it, where the cholera from the bodies buried there could get into the water supply?’

  ‘It’s nonsense, of course.’

  ‘But you understand how that fear might have arisen. Those men died from drinking contaminated water in the first place.’

  Udall dried the handcuff grip and reset the handcuffs to preload.

  ‘You know, a lot of people use the tip of a ballpoint pen to double-lock their cuffs,’ she said. ‘I always think that looks a bit unprofessional – it gives the impression you’ve lost the key and you’re trying to pick the lock with a pen.’

  ‘Some people do lose the key,’ said Cooper. ‘Or forget to take one with them.’

  Udall sniffed. ‘Some people seem to want trouble. They go in as if they want a suspect to turn violent. Not me. These handcuffs are the most important bit of equipment I have, and learning touch ’n’cuff has been a godsend. It’s saved me a lot of trouble from arrests over the last few years. I’ll be happy if I never have to draw a baton. A lot of my arrests don’t know what’s happening. The first time I touch them, they’re under my control. Then I tell them they’re under arrest. And they come like lambs, by and large.’

  She eased the handcuffs back into their pouch and patted it, almost with affection.

  ‘Do you think it helps being female?’ said Cooper. He had seen plenty of male officers who had exactly the attitude that Udall had described. When they went in to a situation, it was as if they wanted trouble, either because it made them feel macho, or because they liked the adrenalin rush from the risk of injury, he wasn’t sure.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Udall. ‘They take one look at me, and they’re lulled into a false sense of security. They don’t realize how dangerous I am.’

  ‘Want to come and give the Reverend Derek Alton a lift back to Withens?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Derek Alton didn’t seem to want to talk on the way home. He sat in the car staring out of the window at the passing scenery as they descended into Longdendale.

  ‘Will you be blessing the well dressing this weekend?’ said Ben Cooper.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I always thought well dressings were pagan. Water worship. But the church has taken them over these days, hasn’t it?’

  ‘The Church of England is nothing if not pragmatic,’ said Alton. ‘The early missionaries were told not to destroy the pagan holy places and beliefs but to incorporate them into the new religion. The spring festival of the fertility goddess Oestre became the date
of the resurrection. They still name it Easter, which I always think is a bit of a giveaway, myself. And death and resurrection have symbolized the beginning of spring for thousands of years. Winter and spring, death and life, the dark and the light. The natural cycle.’

  ‘Like the mummers’ play tradition. The Fool is killed, then brought back to life again.’

  ‘Of course. It’s a resurrection play.’

  ‘Except they didn’t save a part for Jesus.’

  Alton decided not to take the bait. He went back to the scenery as they approached the road over the reservoirs.

  ‘And you’re interested in the Border Rats,’ said Cooper.

  ‘They’re based on Border morris, which was the real workingmen’s tradition. It was a way of getting a bit of money during the winter, when their families might have starved otherwise. Since begging was illegal, they blacked their faces up as a disguise. But in Withens, the tradition has developed in its own way. That’s the nature of genuine traditions. They’re not preserved in aspic, they develop naturally and mean whatever people want them to mean.’

  ‘Some of them told me the dance symbolized killing the rats in the old railway tunnels where the navvies worked.’

  ‘That could be so,’ said Alton. ‘Nobody can know for sure now. It’s passed down from one generation to the next, and it gets changed along the way, because nothing is ever written down. Each year it changes a bit more, depending on the people involved.’

  ‘How is it you know so much about these traditions, sir?’

  ‘I’m a morris man myself, I have to admit,’ said Alton. ‘I danced Cotswold morris in a previous parish.’

  ‘With the bells and hankies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pagan origins again?’

  ‘Pagan or not, every dance has its own meaning. A spiritual dimension. The rituals are important, of course. Dressing up, setting aside a special day, learning the words and the movements. All part of the ritual. There’s even a sacred space for the dancers to perform in. In religion, it’s called the “temenos”. But ritual isn’t quite enough. If the moments of spiritual connection are going to happen, you have to commit, you have to invest belief in it.’

  Cooper noted that the Border Rats seemed to have sparked a bit more interest than a mention of Jesus.