Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If there’s one group in the prison system who could actually be helped, surely it’s young people. If anybody really cared about them, their lives could be turned round at that age. They could be given education, at least. I mean proper education – not training for a future as a car thief or a mobile-phone bandit.’

  ‘There aren’t all that many cases like his, Ben.’

  ‘No. The system probably considers Craig Oxley to be one of its successes. He won’t be clogging up the courts again, will he? He won’t be taking up valuable police time any more.’

  ‘There’s no point in talking to you when you’re in this mood, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Go home and get some sleep, see if you can get a dose of reality. Or a sense of proportion at least. You’ll have got over it in the morning. And don’t forget, we’ve got a meeting to re-schedule. We still need to have that talk about your future.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Give me a break, Diane.’

  ‘We can’t keep putting it off.’

  ‘But you’ll be busy.’

  ‘Not too busy for you, Ben.’

  There was a pause while Cooper tried to picture the expression on her face. Sometimes phones just weren’t good enough for communication.

  ‘You said you’d be in Withens later on?’ said Fry. ‘You want to see this Border Rats thing through to the end, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. You’re still coming, aren’t you?’

  ‘Unfortunately. I have to see the Renshaws one last time. I promised them I’d keep them informed personally about progress on the enquiry. I wish I didn’t have to come to Withens ever again. It isn’t going to be easy this afternoon.’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘Not easy at all.’

  The picture in the Withens well dressing depicted the sainthood of St Asaph. The legend, picked out in blue hydrangea petals and buttercups, explained that 1 May was his patronal day. The makers of the well dressing had used chrysanthemums and maize, sweetcorn and rice, some of it coloured with icing-sugar dyes. Everything had to be natural.

  Ben Cooper saw Eric Oxley holding a plastic watering can. He was spraying the picture with water to make sure it didn’t dry out. Already, the background of the picture was starting to crumble away a little, the fluorspar trickling to the bottom of the frame, like fine gravel.

  ‘A pity Derek Alton won’t be here to bless the well dressing,’ said Cooper, standing behind Eric’s shoulder. ‘But at least you can use the church. We’ve finished with the graveyard now.’

  Eric turned round, sending a spray of water on to Cooper’s trousers. But he was already damp from the steady drizzle, so it didn’t matter.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear Mr Alton will recover fully, after he’s had all the shotgun pellets removed from his side. He’ll be in a state of shock for a while though, I think. In fact, he had two bad shocks. I don’t know which was worse.’

  ‘Everyone knows you don’t disturb that end of the graveyard,’ said Eric. ‘It’s where the railwaymen are buried.’

  ‘The ones who died of cholera?’

  ‘That’s right. Who would go digging up the ground there?’

  ‘The Reverend Alton would, obviously.’

  ‘Daft bugger.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else. A stranger. Even a foreigner.’

  But Eric just stared at him. Cooper supposed this superstitious fear of ‘disturbing’ the cholera had somehow been inherited from the ancestors who had lived in the shanty town and had good reason to fear the disease. Where better to hide a dead body than among so many others? But the Oxleys’ decision had been based on the belief that the tradition of leaving that part of the graveyard undisturbed would continue indefinitely. They hadn’t seen that things were changing. They hadn’t understood that change was inevitable. And that was always a mistake. Always.

  ‘At least you’ve still got your traditions,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What, the Border Rats? It won’t last much longer,’ said Eric.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, these grandsons of mine won’t keep it up without me and their dad to make them do it. The tradition will pass on to the folk from Hey Bridge, and other places. And they’ll make of it whatever they want. It won’t ever be the same again.’

  Eric Oxley picked up his hat and his stick, and shook his head.

  ‘Times change,’ he said. ‘And our time is nearly over.’

  In the car park, a crowd had gathered in the rain to watch the morning performance by the Border Rats. Though the musicians from Hey Bridge were doing their best, the dancers lacked the energy and enthusiasm of their earlier display in Edendale.

  Cooper could see that they were approaching the final dance, the ritual killing of the rat. Did the aggressive banging of the sticks on the ground really represent the tunnel workers killing rats? Was it a celebration of the murder of Nathan Pidcock? Was there any difference?

  The men who began the ritual might have known its meaning, but by the third, fourth and fifth generation, the story had changed. It meant whatever it had to mean for those performing it.

  His neighbour, Peggy Check, had made a good point. Somebody was being symbolically killed in this ritual. It might be Nathan Pidcock, the carrier who had caused the cholera outbreak through his greed. But the target of the sticks might also be more recent, the victim of a murder committed by a close-knit group who would never talk. And no witnesses except, perhaps, for one frightened boy. The postmortem on the skeletalized remains found in the churchyard had revealed several broken bones. Barry Cully had been beaten to death and his body concealed in a shallow grave among the other dead of Withens. The scene of his murder had burned to ashes.

  The Border Rats’ performance might be an old tradition. But the story they told could be much more recent. Could it be the story of Barry Cully’s murder?

  He waited, listening to the chant and the screaming, watching the dancers approach the climax of their performance. The rat fell and was symbolically beaten with the sticks. Then he got up, and the Border Rats took the sporadic applause from the damp crowd.

  Was he any the wiser? No. But it had been a nice theory.

  Cooper began to walk back across the road, passing in front of the church. He didn’t give a second glance to Ruby Wallwin, who had been asked by Marion Oxley to put the finishing touches to the Withens well dressing. She was clutching a handful of the most delicate petals of all, which she had collected only that morning. She had shuffled down to the bank of the stream in her bedroom slippers, her joints still stiff because she had only just got out of bed, but knowing that the petals had to be perfectly fresh. They were white dog roses, pure and gleaming, still damp from the rainfall overnight.

  Mrs Wallwin had never got a chance to talk to the vicar, and it was too late now. But she thought it was probably for the best anyway that she hadn’t said anything. The Oxleys were starting to accept her now, and it wouldn’t do for them to think she was passing on the things she overheard them shouting at each other when they forgot she was there.

  Ruby Wallwin bent to the bottom corner of the picture, where a group of black figures had been created from tiny alder cones and roasted coffee beans. She wasn’t sure of the meaning of the picture. But she knew that the white rose petals she lay at the feet of the black figures looked very much like bones.

  Diane Fry was sitting in an interview room at West Street with DI Paul Hitchens. She stared at the man across the table, hoping they weren’t going to have a repeat of the silence she had endured during the last interview she’d conducted here.

  ‘The stick that was found in the railway tunnel has Neil Granger’s blood on it,’ she said. ‘Not to mention traces of his cerebrospinal fluid, and fragments of bone embedded in the wood.’

  She looked up, but got no reaction.

  ‘At the other end of the stick,
we have some fingerprints. As it happens, these are prints that we already had on record.’

  ‘That was lucky, wasn’t it?’ said Hitchens, with a smile. ‘Sometimes, we do get a bit of luck.’

  Fry nodded. ‘Detective Inspector Hitchens is right. We collected these particular fingerprints very recently.’

  There was no response, but she hadn’t asked a question yet. Fry stared at the man opposite her, and he met her gaze calmly. She was a little unnerved by his appearance – his paleness, the blackness of his hair and the dark stubble on his cheeks.

  ‘We took these prints for elimination purposes,’ she said. ‘The same prints were on the bronze bust we found, and on a small brass box.’

  He actually nodded then, as if encouraging her to continue.

  ‘They were also elsewhere in your brother’s house,’ she said.

  And Philip Granger smiled at the mention of his brother.

  42

  Driving on the A628 towards the Flouch crossroads, Ben Cooper found the treacly expanses of Black Hill and Withens Moor opening up all around him. When he looked down into the valley, he could see the rain drifting across the face of the hills in sheets, like mist.

  He had already passed the sites of two of the villages that had been on this road, the communities that Tracy Udall had said were removed by the water companies. Woodhead and Crowden at least had a few isolated houses left to show where they had been. But now the map said that he was approaching Saltersbrook.

  Cooper looked down the hill from the road. There was a stony track leading down into a small valley, where a brook fed into the River Etherow and on down to the reservoirs. At the bottom of the track, he could see a tiny stone bridge over the stream. It looked like a packhorse bridge – presumably for the traders who had once brought salt on their packhorses from Cheshire to the cities in Yorkshire. This must have been the original salters’ way, which the village of Saltersbrook had been named after. But now, there was nothing here.

  Deep banks of bracken grew on the slopes at the sides of the brook, masking some of the ground where Saltersbrook had once stood. All that remained of the village were the foundations of a few houses and the ruins of the village inn. Fireplaces were still visible in collapsed rooms where the inn had stood on rising ground beyond the bridge. The climb to it from the bridge was very steep, and the track had been cobbled to provide a secure grip for the hoofs of the packhorses. The fallen stones of the inn were overgrown now with nettles and rough grass. At the moment, they were being grazed by a few sheep.

  Apart from the traffic on the A628, there was nothing else human in the landscape, except for the turbines of the wind farm to the north-east. He noticed that two of the turbines were motionless. And when he turned a bend, he suddenly had a clear view across the expanse of moor to the wind farm. There were several vehicles parked there.

  Cooper pulled into the side of the road, careful not to drive too far on to the soft verge, where his wheels would surely sink into the peat. Clustered at the base of the turbines, he could see a couple of Land Rovers, a minibus, even a small mobile crane. There were people working at the wind farm, presumably a maintenance crew. How long had they been working there, without him being aware of them? Who might they have seen going to and from Withens from their unique vantage point?

  Cooper looked at his watch. He was early yet. He had plenty of time to pay them a visit.

  Philip Granger had decided to ignore the advice of the duty solicitor and explain himself. He did it with the same smile, as if he were helping his interviewers to get their ideas straight.

  ‘You have this all wrong,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend to kill Neil. Why would I do that? He was my brother.’

  ‘We know that Neil was going to help the Reverend Alton dig up the graveyard. You knew he would find the remains of Barry Cully. All of your family knew that. And somebody had to stop him. We think the obvious person to do that was you, Mr Granger.’

  Philip Granger looked paler than ever. He didn’t seem to have shaved for several days, and his clothes didn’t smell too clean either. He had deteriorated noticeably during the last week, and someone ought to have noticed.

  ‘Yes, yes. But I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said. ‘I meant to break Neil’s arm, that was all – not to kill him.’

  ‘But you did kill him, Mr Granger.’

  He shook his head. ‘It was an accident. He moved at the wrong moment. He hit his head on the stones at the bottom of the air shaft. You know that’s what happened. It was an accident.’

  ‘A broken arm wouldn’t have kept him out of action for ever,’ said Hitchens. ‘Besides, you should have known Mr Alton would carry on clearing the graveyard on his own, which is what he did. Did you really hope that the remains of Barry Cully would never be found?’

  ‘We hoped Alton would leave. We hoped the church would be closed.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The family were behind me,’ said Granger.

  ‘But the vicar put a spanner in the works.’

  ‘He was a bit obsessed about that graveyard. I don’t know why it was so important to him.’

  ‘The damage to the vestry?’ said Hitchens. ‘The theft? The vandalism to his car?’

  ‘We didn’t have anything against him, really. But nothing seemed to take his attention away from that bloody graveyard. He should have left things well alone.’

  Fry consulted the notes she had made before starting the interview. One of the first things she’d noted was the record of Neil Granger’s calls from his mobile phone the night he was killed. They were calls to a number in Glossop – his brother’s number.

  ‘Well, there you go, then,’ said Philip, when she asked him about the calls. He glanced at his solicitor with a little triumphant smile, but the solicitor didn’t respond. ‘Would Neil have phoned me to arrange to meet, if he thought I would do anything to him?’

  ‘The fact that Neil didn’t expect you to attack him doesn’t cast any light on your intentions,’ said Fry.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, why would I?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Look, he pestered me to go up there. He had an idea about some ceremony at dawn on May Day, and he wanted to rehearse it. I think he’d had a row about it with Uncle Lucas and the others. So he had a point to prove. He was a bit like that, Neil – pig-headed. But it was no good to him doing it on his own, because he needed somebody to prove his point to. That’s why he thought of me. I had my uses, even for my little brother. Hell, do you think I wanted to go up the hill to that air shaft in the middle of the night? He pestered me until I said “yes”. I don’t know why I agreed to it.’

  ‘Perhaps you suddenly realized what a convenient opportunity you’d been presented with.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Philip, shaking his head.

  Hitchens folded his hands together on the table as he took a turn to let Fry prepare her next question.

  ‘How did you actually get up to the air shaft to meet Neil?’ he said. ‘We’ve interviewed lorry drivers on the A628, and no one saw any cars parked in the lay-by, except your brother’s.’

  ‘I don’t have a car. I ride a motorbike. I parked it behind Neil’s car, where no one would see it from the road.’

  ‘And you walked up to the air shaft from the lay-by?’

  ‘It isn’t that far. If Neil could walk it, why shouldn’t I?’ Philip grimaced. ‘I was a bit shattered by the time I got there, to be honest. I’m not quite so clean living as good old Neil. That was another way he always made me feel second best.’

  ‘You could have ridden up on the bike,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘I’m not totally stupid. There would be tracks.’

  ‘You were worried about leaving tracks, yet you say you didn’t intend to kill your brother?’

  Philip opened his mouth, then stopped and looked at his solicitor, who shook his head sadly.

  ‘That’s a “no comment”.’

  Fry
looked at Hitchens, who sat back, content. Time for a change of tack. If Granger thought he could get off lightly, he was going to be mistaken.

  ‘Mr Granger,’ said Fry, ‘according to the postmortem report on your brother, some of the cerebrospinal fluid from his head injury was transferred to his hand while he was dying. That could only have been done by you. Do you agree?’

  Granger looked a little sick. If he could have gone any paler, he would have done. His voice was a little quieter when he spoke.

  ‘It was still quite dark, but I remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was a sort of thud and crunch, like somebody had dropped a packet of biscuits in the street. I could see that Neil wasn’t dead. He was still moving a bit, and making noises like an animal. But I couldn’t hit him again. I couldn’t hit someone who was injured, it’s not the same.’ He looked up at Fry for some understanding. She found she couldn’t look away.

  ‘I was always like that,’ he said. ‘I could never understand how uncle Lucas and some of my cousins could kill injured animals. Lucas always said it was putting them out of their misery, that it was a kindness. But I could never bring myself to do it like he could, not killing an injured thing in cold blood, no matter how badly hurt it was.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I held Neil’s hand and waited with him, until he died.’

  ‘Do you expect us to believe that?’ said Hitchens.

  Granger dropped his head. ‘He took a long time to die. But time always passes, doesn’t it?’

  Fry looked at Hitchens. They both knew that Philip Granger’s account didn’t quite tally with the postmortem report on his brother’s injuries.

  They allowed Granger a moment to recover. But Fry had a lot of important questions she still wanted to ask him.

  ‘And now, Mr Granger, we come to the subject of Emma Renshaw.’

  The maintenance crew at the wind farm turned out to be Danish. They said they were employed by the turbine manufacturers, a specialist wind-power company in Denmark. The wind farm looked quite different at close quarters. The towers were elegantly tapered, but the massive blades of the turbines looked like propellers from an aircraft of unimaginable size. When six of the turbines were lined up, they reminded Cooper of that Hindu goddess with too many arms. Their eighteen blades rotated hypnotically, like white scimitars carving the Pennine air.