Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  Through a doorway, Cooper watched Marion Oxley fussing around in the kitchen, slamming cupboards, peeping under the lids of saucepans as if some secret lurked inside that she could never share with anyone, and glaring suspiciously at the windows. Her disapproval filled the moments of silence like a bad smell.

  The glimpses of her reminded him of his own mother, as she had been in her best days at Bridge End Farm. Though she seemed to be busy, she was watching. Always watching.

  The picture of family life he was gathering from the Oxleys was completely unlike what he had been used to, yet they were as close as the Cooper family, in their own way. The comparisons he saw all around him made Cooper uneasy. He was trying to concentrate on the job in hand, but his memory kept unpacking old recollections of his childhood at Bridge End Farm. Time and again, he had pushed the remembered images back into their boxes. But as soon as his mind was distracted by a phrase or a gesture, the memories came tumbling out again, unfolding their carefully packed shapes, falling open like the petals of pale flowers, too long untouched by the sun.

  ‘Did they tell you at the water company that somebody wants to buy this land?’ said Lucas.

  ‘Yes, I know there’s a developer interested.’

  ‘But I don’t suppose they told you who’s working for that developer locally.’

  ‘No. Who?’

  ‘Dearden.’

  ‘Michael Dearden?’

  ‘Aye, at Shepley Head Lodge. The people with the money are in London, but they pay him to do the negotiating locally. He’s a surveyor of some kind.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ said Cooper.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve had the odd set-to with Dearden.’

  ‘You had an argument with Mr Dearden?’

  ‘Aye. You might say so. A disagreement.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The road. That road up there. It runs all the way down to their place, Shepley Head. We never could agree on who ought to keep it in order. He’s always chunterin’ about it, silly bugger. He goes on about how the potholes are damaging that car of his. I wasn’t standing for that. So I gave him what for.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘I thought he was going to burst into tears. What a mard-arse. I’ve never come across anyone so mardy in my life. But I knew what he was on about really. He blamed the road for the time he hit our Jake and smashed his leg. He blamed everything and everybody but himself.’

  Cooper recalled the glimpse of Michael Dearden sitting in his car, terrified at the sight of Jake and the other boys in the road outside Waterloo Terrace.

  ‘Are you sure, Mr Oxley?’ he said quietly.

  Oxley gazed at him for a moment, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘You might not realize this,’ said Cooper, ‘but Michael Dearden has been obsessed with the idea that members of your family are persecuting him, ever since the incident with Jake. He imagines Oxleys in the darkness around his house every night. He even avoids driving through Withens because he has to pass the spot where he ran over Jake. I think Mr Dearden is consumed with guilt, but he won’t ever admit it to you.’

  ‘Happen you’re right, then,’ said Oxley.

  Then Cooper smiled. It had occurred to him that, after the incident in the Oxleys’ yard on Wednesday, he might be imagining Oxleys in the darkness at night for a little while himself.

  ‘Take a look at these –’ said Lucas, gesturing at a couple of black box files on a table. ‘They go back years. Years and years of getting nowhere. Years of people not listening to us. We don’t fit into their computer systems, so they don’t know what to do about us, apart from getting rid of us. Read some of them – they keep repeating a lot of jargon that doesn’t mean anything. Whatever we say, it comes up against a blank wall. The bureaucracy machine just rolls on. One day, it’s going to roll over us.’

  Cooper picked up some of the letters.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that one of these is an eviction notice?’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘It’s not the first.’

  ‘You do realize that if nobody does anything about it, your family is in danger of being evicted from Waterloo Terrace?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Have you talked to anyone. Got proper advice?’

  ‘There’s no one we can trust.’

  ‘There must be someone.’

  ‘Everyone we’ve ever dealt with has let us down, or outright lied. It’s too late now. But we can dig in; we’re ready for a fight.’

  ‘That won’t do any good at all, Mr Oxley.’

  ‘It’ll keep our pride.’

  Exasperated, Cooper looked at the old man, Eric Oxley. In a strange way, he was the one member of the Oxley family who made most sense to him. Eric made him think of a Border collie that had lived with the Coopers at Bridge End Farm when he and Matt were children. The collie had been called Sam, and he had first arrived as a puppy, bounding with energy. But he’d lived to be a grey-muzzled old dog who spent his life panting painfully in the heat of the sun, endlessly circling and circling until he could find a comfortable place to sleep. Eric was like that old collie, grey and tired, seeking only a place to settle down and rest. Yet a glimpse of the strong young man that he had once been was still visible now and again, as if it lingered in his shadow.

  In another way, Eric reminded him of his great-uncle, whom he had known as a child, and had been fascinated by. He still clearly remembered the smell of his great-uncle’s clothes and the feel of his trousers as he clutched the fabric tightly between his fingers and pushed his face shyly into his leg. He had loved his great-uncle when he was a small boy. But he had died when Ben was seven or eight years old.

  And then there was Lucas. Surely Lucas Oxley was nothing like his own father. Nothing like him at all.

  ‘We don’t reckon much to you as a policeman,’ Lucas was saying. ‘But you’re a sight better than most of the buggers we’re expected to deal with. If that’s what we have to put up with, you’ll have to do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Cooper.

  Eric stirred in his chair. ‘Though happen you ought to be looking elsewhere, instead of bothering the likes of us.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Look for the foreigners.’

  ‘Foreigners?’

  ‘You’ve been around here asking about last Friday night, before Neil got himself killed?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, look for the foreigners. There were foreigners in the pub that night.’

  ‘What foreigners?’

  ‘That’s up to you to find out.’

  Ryan had come into the room, and Cooper could see straight away that he was nervous. But the boy looked from his father to his grandfather, and he seemed to take reassurance from their presence.

  Cooper remembered from the files that Ryan’s date of birth was 26 June, so he had entered the world just after the 1987 General Election, when Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory and became Prime Minister for the third time. In fact, anyone between thirteen and twenty-three had been born in the 1980s, that decade of marginalization and social exclusion, when some parts of society were making more money than they had ever dreamed of. All of the Oxley boys had been born into that time, except Jake.

  And the reason Cooper could remember Ryan’s birthday was that it was almost the same date as his own, though a different year. They were fellow Cancerians. They were known for clinging to their shells.

  Emma Renshaw had been born in the 1980s, too – some time in the spring of 1982, around the time of the Falklands War. Cooper was willing to bet that Howard Renshaw had done well in the 1980s – the companies he carried out work for had no doubt benefited from the boom in the construction business. So was Howard worth a lot of money? Did he have a nice nest egg of capital stashed away that he had managed to protect from the decline in the stock market?

  Money was such an obvious motive for every kind of crime. Cooper made a mental n
ote to ask Fry if she knew where Howard stood financially.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me, Ryan?’ he said.

  Ryan swallowed before he spoke. Cooper was expecting something about minor offences – the damage to the church vestry, perhaps. But what Ryan wanted to say was nothing like that.

  ‘It’s about Barry,’ he said.

  Cooper had to re-focus his thoughts quickly. There was only one person he’d heard of by that name recently.

  ‘Barry? Barry Cully?’

  He noticed Lucas and Eric had suddenly gone very still. Maybe this hadn’t been what they expected, either. There was a silence in the room that allowed the croaking of the rooks to penetrate from outside.

  ‘Fran’s bloke,’ said Ryan.

  ‘I know who you mean. But I’ve never seen him. He’s away, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucas Oxley cleared his throat. It was one of those signals that ought to mean something to his family. A warning perhaps. But Ryan refused to look at his dad now. He was staring fixedly at Cooper as if clinging to something he had finally managed to grasp.

  ‘He knocked Fran about a lot,’ said Ryan. ‘She never said anything, but some of us knew about it. We could tell when we went round there. The door is never locked, and sometimes we’d go in when she wasn’t expecting us. We worked it out all right.’

  ‘Did Fran ever make a complaint?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to have to talk to her. When is Cully due back?’

  Then Lucas interrupted. ‘We don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Can you give me a phone number where I can contact him? Or tell me what company he’s working for?’

  ‘To be honest, he’s left,’ said Lucas.

  ‘For good?’

  ‘We hope so. We don’t know how to get in touch with him.’

  Cooper looked at Ryan. The boy’s stare was so fixed that his eyes were becoming glassy, and he was pale with some painful internal effort.

  ‘It was Craig who used to get most upset about it,’ said Ryan. ‘He used to get really, really angry.’

  Lucas took a couple of steps forward and stood over his son. There were veins standing out on his neck, and his fists were clenched.

  ‘We don’t –’ he began. But whatever he was going to say seemed to stick in his throat when he saw the boy’s expression. It was fear. But not a fear of his father.

  Ryan looked past Lucas at Cooper, like a trapped animal seeking the smallest escape route.

  ‘Craig got really angry,’ he repeated desperately.

  ‘But Craig is dead,’ said Cooper. ‘I can’t ask him about it.’

  There was a message here that Cooper knew he wasn’t picking up. His brain felt really slow, as if his thoughts had been blunted by the days of frustration and lack of communication.

  The Oxleys were watching him almost pityingly, in the way they might watch a dumb animal trying to figure out what was happening as it blundered blindly from its pen to be slaughtered. The old man had a particularly disturbing stare. It had begun to feel like something physical, a sensation on Cooper’s skin, as if a spider had landed on him and was crawling across his neck. Cooper wondered what was going on in the old man’s mind that made his thoughts so uncomfortable.

  Then Cooper realized there was an important question he should be asking. But nobody here had been cautioned, and he couldn’t invite them to incriminate themselves.

  ‘Tell me something about Barry Cully,’ he said, looking now at Lucas.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘For a start,’ said Cooper, ‘does he have a finger missing on his left hand?’

  ‘Hold on, what’s happening now?’ said the South Yorkshire inspector, pacing the yard at Shepley Head Lodge.

  ‘He’s coming out, sir.’

  ‘Everybody move back.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be armed.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  Michael Dearden walked across the yard with his hands in the air and tears running down his face. His wife appeared in the doorway behind him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the lights.

  Four officers moved quickly in on Dearden from different directions, shouting instructions at him. Within a few seconds, he was handcuffed and had been searched for weapons. One of the officers gave a thumbs-up sign.

  ‘It’s all over,’ said the inspector with undisguised relief.

  But it didn’t feel over to Fry. There was a smell in the air that was too strong to be the lingering reek of a discharged shotgun. It was a smell that carried a meaning and presence as powerfully as the scent of Rive Gauche from Emma Renshaw’s car. She turned away from the house and swung her binoculars upwards.

  ‘Smoke,’ she said.

  ‘What? Not another damn moorland fire!’ said the inspector. ‘If you ask me, those kids from Manchester should be shot and roasted over the flames.’

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘This smoke isn’t coming from the moors. It’s coming from Withens.’

  40

  Ben Cooper had asked to use the loo, when he heard Marion Oxley begin to shout. He’d really wanted to take a look upstairs, where he found a door had been knocked through the wall from number 1 into number 2, providing access to the bedrooms in both houses without having to go outside and back in again. He thought this was probably one of the unauthorized structural alterations that J. P. Venables had complained about.

  He had also been looking for a chance to use his mobile phone without the Oxleys overhearing. Under cover of the noise of the toilet flushing and water running into the hand basin, he called Diane Fry.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘I was just going to call you. I’m on my way down to Waterloo Terrace. You might want to get there as soon as you can.’

  ‘Er, Diane, that’s where I am already.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m at number 1, Lucas Oxley’s house.’

  ‘Ben –’

  ‘Listen, that skeleton in the churchyard – it looks as though it might turn out to be Barry Cully, Fran Oxley’s bloke.’

  ‘Ben, haven’t you noticed the fire?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Fire. Smoke, flames. You must be right in the middle of it. Get everybody out, for God’s sake.’

  Cooper turned off the running tap and pulled back the lace curtain to peer out of the tiny bathroom window. It looked out on to the back yard, with its mountains of scaffolding poles and wooden pallets, and towards the front doors of the derelict houses of Trafalgar Terrace.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘That’s more than just smouldering tyres.’

  Now he could hear what Marion Oxley was shouting in the kitchen downstairs. It came to him clearly above the increasing noise of crackling flames and the barking of the normally silent Alsatian dog.

  ‘Where’s Jake?’ she was shouting. ‘Has anybody seen Jake?’

  By the time Diane Fry reached Withens, the derelict houses of Trafalgar Terrace were well ablaze. Coming over the hill from Shepley Head Lodge, she could see the smoke billowing out of the upstairs windows, thick and black. There was an acrid stench in the air, as if the houses themselves had been full of old tyres that were now burning. The upper floor must already be smoke-logged. The windows had been shattered by the heat, and the smoke was pouring out of them in waves. The smoke was so thick that only the occasional tongue of flame could be seen in the midst of them.

  Fry found PC Tracy Udall and a colleague parking their Vauxhall across the road to stop any traffic going further than the car park.

  ‘Where the hell’s the fire service?’ said Fry.

  ‘According to Control, some of the local crews are still up on Withens Moor damping down. The nearest appliance is coming from New Mills.’

  ‘Is there anyone inside?’

  ‘We don’t know. We’ve looked in the ground-floor rooms at this end of the row, as far as we could. But the fire seems to have started at the other end, and the smoke is too bad to get ne
ar. The fire crew might find anybody who’s in there, if they get here soon. But if there was anyone upstairs, then I reckon they’ve had it by now. No one could breathe in that smoke.’

  ‘And what about the people in the other terrace?’

  ‘Mrs Wallwin is over there, from number 7. She’s perfectly OK.’

  ‘And her neighbours? The Oxleys?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. She’s a bit stressed and confused.’

  ‘They all have to come out. There are hundreds of railway sleepers and wooden pallets stacked in the yard at the back. A couple of vehicles, too. If all that stuff catches fire, their homes will go up like a bomb.’

  ‘There are some demolition contractors down there in the field with a JCB and a bulldozer,’ said Udall. ‘They say they’ve been sent in by the landlords. They were due to start work on knocking down those empty houses, but someone has got to them first.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘The contractors have created an access through the fence at the bottom of the field. The trouble is, we can’t get to Waterloo Terrace.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’ve dropped a couple of trees across the entrance, using chainsaws.’

  They jogged through the farmyard and down the field to where the contractors’ machinery stood uselessly by.

  Now Fry could see the pigeons circling Trafalgar Terrace. Their pale grey shapes were passing in and out of the smoke like tiny ghosts. At the far end of the terrace, the roof slates were glowing red from the heat of the burning rafters beneath them. But the pigeons kept trying to land on the ridge of the roofs, despite the heat and the flames, which were now licking through the slates. After making repeated attempts to land on the roof, one of the birds was finally caught by a burst of flame that erupted from a gap in the tiles. Its pinion feathers flared and blackened immediately, and its feet curled and shrivelled as the tendons burned. The pigeon tumbled on to the roof, where it writhed and flopped desperately as it roasted in the intense heat from the slates. But finally it gave up the struggle, slid down the roof and disappeared into the smoke. Oblivious to its fate, the other birds continued to attempt to land.