Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘But this is very limited. It seems to be entirely members of the Oxley family.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Alton. ‘These days, some of the Border Rats live in Hey Bridge. The two groups hardly speak to each other outside rehearsals, but when they’re performing, they hardly seem to know who’s who. There’s never any shortage of volunteers to join. Lucas Oxley’s rule is to give places to those who live nearest to Withens, but as long as they’re willing to give everything when they’re Border Rats, Lucas doesn’t care. If they treat the Rats as a joke, they’re out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cooper. ‘That was very interesting.’

  ‘And no earthly use to you at all, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘The thing to remember is that morris isn’t really terribly, terribly old. And there’s no inherent mystical meaning, only what the individual puts into it. But it has grown out of our own culture and history, and it belonged to generations of our own ancestors. That’s why it’s important.’

  Ben Cooper looked at his watch as he and Tracy Udall turned back on to the A628 towards Longdendale. There were several active lines of enquiry that he could be helping out with now. But as she drove along the reservoirs, Udall was still thinking about cholera.

  ‘Do you know, there was a notorious murder here around the time of that cholera outbreak,’ she said. ‘It was a case that would have defeated even Derbyshire Constabulary, if it had existed in those days.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The Woodhead Tunnel Murder. Not heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was in 1849.’

  ‘Oh, well. The Constabulary wasn’t formed until 1857. Besides, Longdendale was in Cheshire until 1974. There might have been a petty constable or something, but a magistrate would have taken charge in a murder case. Where did it happen?’

  ‘In the shanty town where the navvies lived. The place had already became notorious, but this was just after the cholera outbreak. One of the big problems the navvies faced was the contract system. In fact, it was a complicated process of sub-contracting, called “truck”. At every level, there was someone who creamed off some of the money for themselves by reducing supplies, buying the cheapest food, cutting corners. You can imagine.’

  ‘Yes. That hasn’t changed much.’

  ‘Well, one of the worst sub-contractors was a man called Nathan Pidcock. He was a local man, who ran a haulier’s business from Tintwistle. He jumped at the chance of getting involved in the tunnel project, because there were big profits to be made. By all accounts, he made a lucrative business for himself by supplying rotting food, dirty water, and substandard materials at inflated prices. The navvies hated him, of course, but they were living in their shanty town in the middle of nowhere, and they relied on people like Pidcock for supplies. Anyway, finally he must have gone too far. The outbreak of cholera was blamed on water polluted by human waste. Dozens of men died over a period of days. And one morning, Nathan Pidcock was found dead in a ditch on the edge of the camp. He had been beaten to death.’

  ‘And were there no suspects?’

  ‘Suspects?’ Udall laughed. ‘That’s the question of a twenty-first century policeman. Yes, there were fifteen hundred of them. The theory was that a group of workmen decided to exact their own brand of justice on Pidcock for the deaths of their mates. The rest of the men in the camp must have known what happened, but nobody said a word. So the authorities were helpless.’

  ‘A conspiracy of silence?’

  ‘I expect these days we could have done a mass DNA test or something.’

  ‘Only if there was some blood, or traces of other bodily fluids from the perpetrators at the scene, or Pidcock’s blood on their clothing. But basically, you’re right – there would certainly have been some forensic evidence to follow up.’

  ‘There was one witness, though,’ said Udall. ‘Nathan Pidcock had a young assistant, a lad called John Cobb. He helped with deliveries to the camp. But he was only about fourteen, and the attackers left him alone.’

  ‘Wasn’t Cobb able to identify anyone?’

  ‘No. He saw the whole thing, but couldn’t point out any one of his employer’s attackers. His story was that they had disguised themselves. He said they all had their faces blacked up.’

  Cooper wasn’t surprised. The continuity seemed to be there even now, a tradition passed down through the generations. Maybe the Oxleys were direct descendants of those railway navvies who had died building the tunnels. Maybe their ancestors had lived in the shanty town, which seemed to be treated as the village’s dirty little secret.

  He recalled the superstition that Sandy Norton had mentioned about the tunnels. Those workmen were right that an evil had been brought down on them by the tunnelling project. But it hadn’t been caused by some primeval force that had slept for eons under the hill and had been disturbed by their blasting. It had been a much more human evil. Its cause was greed.

  30

  The second time Ben Cooper met his new neighbour, it was on neutral territory again. He had arrived home and was fiddling around in his pockets for his door key. It had been a hard day, and his mind was full of fragments of conversation, and pictures of young Oxleys he couldn’t put the right name to.

  As he managed to get the key into his hand, the door to the other flat opened. Briefly, he wondered whether Peggy Check had been listening for him coming in. If Dorothy Shelley was the only person she knew in Edendale, she might be getting desperate for a bit of normal human contact. Cooper immediately felt guilty that he hadn’t made an effort to be more sociable.

  ‘Hello, how’s it going?’ he said.

  ‘Great, thanks. And you?’

  Cooper knew he was probably a bit dishevelled at the end of his shift, rather unshaven and maybe a bit grubby.

  ‘Fine. I’m sorry, I’m just home from work.’

  He opened his door, still feeling a little embarrassed. He thought perhaps he didn’t smell too good either.

  ‘You must come in for a coffee some time.’

  ‘Sure. That would be great.’

  ‘Good.’

  He nodded and smiled, thinking there was probably a next step, but not quite able to bring it to mind.

  ‘When?’ said Check.

  ‘Oh, er … tonight, if you like. Eight? Eight-thirty?’

  ‘Fine. See you later then, Ben.’

  Cooper fed the cats, showered, changed and thought about having something to eat. His stomach told him he was starving. But he couldn’t face rummaging through the freezer compartment. Not another frozen Chinese meal for one. But he had time to nip down to the Hanging Gate for a bar meal before Peggy Check called.

  During the first week or so after he had moved into his new flat in Welbeck Street he had checked out all the pubs within walking distance. There were several of them, some of which he had visited before, but one or two were new to him. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, not like some of his colleagues, who took to it to help them deal with the pressure and some of the depressing realities of the job. A drink or two did help him relax. But most of all, a decent pub provided company.

  That was why he needed the right sort of place – not one that attracted only tourists, so that the same faces were never in the bar two nights running. And definitely not an Irish bar with singing waiters and ceilidh nights.

  At night, some town-centre streets became drinking strips. An area around the front door of each pub became a bubble of noise and smells, loud music and scores of young people yelling to make themselves heard above it. Inside, it was like walking into a tropical micro-climate. Hot, sweating faces above yards of bare flesh moved around in the heat and humidity of an Amazon rainforest, exhuding a miasma of antiperspirant and alcohol fumes.

  Occasionally there were fights at closing time. And of course, there were the drugs. On Friday and Saturday nights, there was a permanent police presence – a personnel carrier with caged accommodation in the back and a riot visor over i
ts windscreen, multiple foot patrols of officers who had drawn the short straw and been rostered for the late shift.

  Tourists learned to avoid those areas at night, when they saw the change that had come over a town that had looked so quaint during the day, with its cobbled alleys and tall stone buildings, its antiques shops and tea rooms. Even the pleasantest of England’s market towns could have a Jekyll and Hyde nature.

  But to Cooper, Edendale still had character, a proper sense of place. It had its own smells and sounds and sights – that accumulation of sensations that gave it a unique identity, so that you always knew where you were. The same couldn’t be said of many towns, whose high streets looked indistinguishable.

  On his way to the Hanging Gate, he passed through streets that had rows of terraced houses with names like Riversleigh and Rockside. In the window of a cottage, someone had let a yucca plant flourish, and it had filled the little bay window completely. A small tabby cat had squeezed into the tiny amount of space left on the window ledge, and it peered out at him through the plant’s spiky leaves. Antique bottles were lined up in another window next door. They were carefully arranged by size – the largest at either end and the smallest in the middle.

  Cooper shook his head. The windows of these houses were so small that they allowed in little enough light already, without being cluttered up with dusty bottles and overgrown yucca plants. Windows like these always made him wonder what the people inside the houses had to hide. Or were they symbolically protecting themselves against the world outside by lining up their peculiar talismans on the edge of their property? Were glass bottles a kind of charm to ward off the evils of the outside world? Maybe there was some psychological reassurance from viewing the world through brown glass or the leaves of a yucca.

  He was always curious about people’s minds, the bizarre mental processes that made them do the things they did. A part of him would love to be able to knock on a few of these doors to see who was behind them, and then to ask the questions. Why the bottles? What’s the yucca all about? Wouldn’t you prefer a bit of sunlight in your life?

  Like many pubs in the area, the Hanging Gate had scenic Peak District views in framed prints on the walls. The same old CD of 60s and 70s pop classics seemed to be playing, too. But it also had Bank’s Bitter and Mansfield Cask Ale and Pedigree, not to mention a choice of lagers like Stella Artois and white wine on draft. On uneven stone flags, the cigarette machine, jukebox and slot machines had been pushed back against the wall, out of the way.

  Cooper ordered a steak pie and chips and nodded to a few casual acquaintances as he found a table. He had a paperback novel in his pocket that he’d brought to read if there was no one to talk to.

  Stained-glass panels were set into the ceiling and red roses in the pattern of the carpet. None of the colour schemes in the décor seemed to fit together when you took the pub as a whole. One corner might seem to make sense on its own, but when Cooper sat in the middle of the room, as he did now, he got quite a different perspective. Now, there were too many painful clashes, too many choices that made no sense, too many failures of taste and logic. It was chaos – a jumble of pieces that would never fit together as a whole.

  A few minutes later, there was a slight change in the background noise in the bar. Ben Cooper looked up from his pie. He saw the men sitting by the bar turn their heads towards the door. Probably some tourists had wandered into the pub to get out of the rain and were rustling their cagoules in the porch as they shook themselves off like wet dogs. Maybe they had an actual wet dog with them, too.

  If they were lucky, someone might make a bit of room for them near the log fire, which the landlord always kept ready and had lit because of the change in the weather. He didn’t like anyone being hostile to tourists in his pub, because they tended to buy shorts rather than beer, which made a difference to his profit margin. They might even be tempted to a Hanging Gate All-Day Breakfast.

  But no one moved away from the fire. No rustling cagoules passed Cooper on their way to the bar, no flashes of orange and yellow clashed with the purple patterns of the wallpaper as they appeared from behind the glass partition. Instead, Cooper became aware of water dripping on to the end of the polished oak-effect table, and a pair of grubby trainers that stopped on the industrial-thickness carpet just inside his line of sight.

  ‘Hello, Ben.’

  ‘What are you doing in here, Angie?’

  ‘I came in for a drink. You’re going to buy me one, aren’t you?’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘You’re a man of habit. It’s not so hard.’

  She sat down in an empty chair, smiling as if sure of her welcome. Cooper leaned across the table to speak to her, anxious not to draw the attention of the other customers too much.

  ‘Look, I can’t put up with this. I want to know how you got my name and address in the first place.’

  ‘Maybe I hired a detective. There are some good ones around these days.’

  ‘Angie –’

  ‘If you’re not going to buy me a drink, I could ask one of those people over there. I don’t mind. I’m quite good at asking for money.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Cooper. ‘Just try not to drip on my book. What is it you want?’

  ‘For a start, a tonic water would be nice.’

  ‘You drink tonic water?’

  ‘Yes. But I drink it straight from the bottle, to be trendy.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Oh, and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps.’

  Cooper went to the bar to get her drink. While he waited, he looked back at Angie Fry. She wasn’t paying any attention to him at all, but had picked up his book and was slowly turning the pages. Her pale fingers lying against the cover reminded him of the hands of the skeleton protruding from the shallow grave in St Asaph’s churchyard.

  He kept his back to the men sitting against the wall. They were silent now, wondering quite what to make of Angie. Normally, they might have ribbed him or given him a friendly wink about having a girlfriend. But even they sensed that there was something not quite right about Angie.

  ‘Do you read books a lot?’ she said, when he took her the tonic water and crisps.

  ‘Quite a bit. They’re relaxation. Especially since I’ve lived on my own. I don’t want to end up watching telly every night, like a vegetable.’

  ‘It helps to keep the brain active, right? The imagination.’

  ‘Yes, I think so.

  She put the book back on the table. Cooper noticed that she had lost his page.

  ‘It seems a funny thing to be doing in a pub, though,’ she said. ‘Anti-social.’

  ‘I don’t do it all the time. Only when I want to be left alone for a while.’

  She laughed. ‘And now I’ve come along and interrupted your relaxation. That’s not very fair, is it?’

  She gazed at him, as if expecting him to take some deeper meaning from her words. Cooper sighed. He was going to have to take a course in communication skills. Everything was going straight over his head these days.

  ‘The world isn’t fair,’ he said. ‘We just have to hope it’s unfair in our favour occasionally.’

  ‘Is that the best we can hope for?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘It hardly seems worth bothering.’

  ‘But there are other things in life, apart from fairness. So think about the things that you can get hold of.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘You what?’ said Angie.

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘You’re crazy, do you know that? Love!’

  ‘It was only a suggestion. Think about it.’

  ‘I can’t believe you, Ben Cooper. Are you for real? I’ve never met anybody so naïve.’

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ said Cooper. ‘But you sound just like somebody else I know.’

  Angie laughed again. ‘Right. And what have you decided, Ben?’

  Cooper thought about Diane
Fry. She’d been the bane of his life for months. Yet she’d tried to help him, even when he could see she was having difficulties dealing with the Renshaws. Could he lay the extra stress on her about her sister? In a way, this was keeping her together and focused; while she had hope, she could cope. Angie wanted him to take her hope away.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t? Of course you can.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t take Diane’s hope away.’

  ‘I heard you were her friend.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  Angie looked disappointed in him. If that was the way she felt, she should join the queue.

  ‘Well, what sort of friend are you? You know it would be the best thing for her, to forget all about me.’

  Cooper felt himself weakening. ‘Diane wouldn’t listen to me, anyway. Not without any proof.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Angie. ‘I thought you would say that. And that’s why I came.’

  She reached inside her coat and pulled out an envelope, which she handed to Cooper.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Open it and see.’

  There was nothing written on the outside of the envelope. Cooper glanced around uncomfortably. A police officer being handed a plain brown envelope in a pub wouldn’t look too good. But the customers of the Hanging Gate had lost interest in him and Angie. Some football highlights were being shown on the TV screen.

  He opened the flap of the envelope and slid out the contents.

  ‘How did you get these?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does matter,’ said Cooper angrily. ‘How did you get them?’

  ‘Let’s just say I have the right sort of contacts.’

  ‘Criminal contacts, obviously.’

  ‘You stick to your friends, and I’ll stick to mine.’

  He was holding a death certificate. It recorded the death in Chapeltown, Sheffield, of Angela Jane Fry, aged thirty. It was dated just over a year ago.

  ‘And presumably this isn’t your real address,’ said Cooper.

  Angie laughed. ‘That isn’t even my name now. I changed it some time ago.’