Blind to the bones bcadf-4

by Stephen Booth

  ‘It’s been standing here overnight at least/ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, I noticed the spider’s web. It’s been spun from the hawthorn shrub to the wing mirror.’

  ‘The doctor says the body’s been lying up there over twenty four hours/

  ‘Don’t come any closer/ said Petty, reminding Cooper of Lucas Oxley and his dog.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Be really careful of where you tread. There look to be some interesting traces on the ground here. Anyone getting into or out of this vehicle will most likely have got something on the soles of

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  their shoes. Or anyone using another vehicle, for that matter.’

  Cooper studied the surface of the lay-by. ‘All I can see are chocolate wrappers, sweet papers and the remains of a burger and fries.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Why don’t people use the litter bins?’ said Cooper.

  ‘In this case/ said Petty, ‘we might be grateful that they didn’t.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The interior of the car could be what matters most, though. By the way, there’s a box of some kind in the footwell at the back,’ she said, peering through the car window.

  ‘You realize the perpetrator probably didn’t arrive in this car, Liz?’

  ‘We can hope, can’t we, Ben?’

  ‘He might not even have come this way. Apparently, there’s a track to the air shaft from the other side of the hill, from a place called Withens.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Petty.

  ‘You will.’

  Tourist hot spot, is it?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Cooper couldn’t recall seeing anything picturesque about the village where the Oxleys lived. No wonder there were never any tourists passing through, as there were in other Peak District villages.

  But at least there was one good thing about Withens. It was a long way from Diane Fry.

  With a slam of the door, DC Gavin Murfin started the car and turned out of the West Street car park towards Edendale.

  ‘So how the hell do we get to this Withens place?’ said Fry. ‘Have you any idea, Gavin?’

  ‘Why don’t you find it on the map?’ said DC Murfin. ‘I put a couple in the glove compartment.’

  Fry found two thick, badly folded Ordnance Survey maps from the Outdoor Leisure series, covering the whole of the Peak District at two and a half inches to the mile.

  ‘We want Dark Peak, right?’ she said.

  ‘Hey, you’re learning the lingo.’

  ‘I just try to remember that it gets dark if you go north and lighter if you go south. Can’t go wrong then.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

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  Before she had unfolded the map even hallway, Fry realized that it was huge. It was so big that it was almost the size of the Peak District itself. There was no way she could open it fully inside the car, not without covering the windscreen and blocking Murfin’s vision. Then she discovered that the map was printed on both sides, too.

  ‘All right - Dark Peak West or Dark Peak East?’ she said.

  ‘West, I think,’ said Murfin.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘You don’t sound certain enough for me. You do know this place we’re heading? It is in Derbyshire, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just about. But it isn’t the kind of area you really know unless you live there, like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Fry suspiciously.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Oh, I can hardly wait.’

  ‘Dark Peak West/x said Murfin. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Stop the car for a minute, then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s on the other side of the map, that’s why. I need some space.’

  Murfin pulled into a gateway. Fry got out and began to unfold the map on the car roof so that she could turn it over. When it was opened up, the map almost covered the roof of the Peugeot completely. She cursed steadily as the wind blowing down the valley snatched at the corners of the map and pulled sections of it from her hands, slapping them against the roof and tearing the folded edges.

  ‘Right, I’ve got Dark Peak West,’ she called to Murfin. I’m looking at the top right-hand corner, and I can see a place called Holmfirth. Anywhere near there?’

  ‘Not far off. Holmfirth is a few miles over the border into West Yorkshire. Come south a bit, and you’ll be about right. It’s just this side of the national park boundary, in an area called Longdendale.’

  ‘South a bit? But there’s nothing there.’

  ‘Well, not quite nothing.’

  ‘Gavin, I can see the national park boundary, and I’m telling you that there’s nothing anywhere near it on this side.’

  ‘We’ll find it,’ said Murfin.

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  Fry ducked her head and got in the car. She pulled down the visor to look at herself in the little mirror. Her hair had been pushed up on end by the wind in old-fashioned spiky punk style. Murfin was also going to have to apply a bit of Sellotape to his map to hold it together, or buy a new one.

  ‘Drive then/ she said. ‘But as far as I can see, we’re heading towards - what do they call it around here? - the moon’s backside.’

  The Back of the Moon,’ said Murfin.

  ‘All right. But I think I prefer my version.’

  A few minutes later, they were out of Edendale and heading north into the Hope Valley, approaching the village of Bamford.

  ‘Are you planning to go over the Snake Pass?’ said Fry, trying to follow their route on the map.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that the best way, Gavin?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  Fry looked for the area called Longdendale. This was where a body had been found early that morning, but it was a long valley, which ran right across the map. She studied the adjacent terrain in growing disbelief. Apart from the thin red ribbon of the A628 trunk road snaking its way from east to west through the valley, and the blue of the reservoirs in the valley bottom, the map had no features at all. No, that wasn’t quite true. There were masses of thin brown lines that swirled everywhere, clustering tightly together here and there. They were contour lines. The closer together the lines were, the steeper the slope of the land - she knew that from some distant geography lesson. But crossing these brown lines were almost as many pale blue ones - little snaky things that ran down from all the summits, branching and trickling away in every direction. They looked like the worst case of varicose veins she had ever seen.

  Many of these pale blue lines were labelled ‘doughs’, ‘slacks’ or ‘groughs’. They were streams and rivulets feeding down into the valleys. She could imagine how boggy the ground between them would be, because this was certainly peat moor.

  Sure enough, there were lots of little clusters of black dots on the map, too. Fry checked the key for the meaning of the symbol. Rough grassland. In some places, those flecks turned blue. That meant marsh - a polite name for boggy ground that was like wet

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  Christmas pudding to walk through, the sort of ground that the Dark Peak seemed to specialize in. She sighed. If anyone tried to persuade her to walk across one yard of those barren acres of peat moor, she would refuse. There had to be a tarmacked street somewhere in this place.

  Fry looked closer, searching the map for features she could recognize. Some of the moors had their own names - she saw Dead Edge Flat, Bleakmires and Withens Moss. She could make out the line of a disused railway tunnel running under the hills. But the moors themselves were empty.

  Then she laughed. Not quite empty. There were actually some features to be found marked among the brown contour lines and the tangled systems of doughs and slacks. The features were labelled on the map as ‘mound’ and ‘pile of stones’.

  ‘Unbelievable/ she said.

  But Murfin just smiled.

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  12

  The Renshaws’ sitting roo
m was almost colourless. There were no reds or blues in the decor or in the furniture, only shades of brown, cream and off-white, as if the life had been bleached from the house. Diane Fry wondered if it had always been like this, or whether the Renshaws had changed the look of the house since Emma had disappeared, consciously or unconsciously reflecting the draining of the colour from their own lives.

  Sarah Renshaw showed Fry and Murfin into the room and made them sit together on the leather settee. Murfin sat down gingerly, trying not to touch the teddy bear that sat at the end of the sofa, against the arm. It was about eighteen inches tall, and it had a red ribbon tied round its throat. Its eyes stared glassily at the Japanese screen in front of the fireplace, and one of its arms was raised as if to take an invisible cup of tea.

  Despite the washed-out look of the room, Sarah Renshaw seemed to gain vitality from the moment she was given a chance to talk about Emma. It was the one aspect of her life that seemed to mean anything at all to her now. That, and the endless analysis of her own guilty feelings.

  ‘We can still sense Emma in the house/ said Sarah. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. But I never knew her.’

  ‘The house is full of all the things that mean a lot to Emma. Her books, her drawings, and her poems. Her violin and her paints. And, of course, her teddy bears.’

  Teddy bears?’

  ‘Yes. Emma was starting a collection. We gave her a big eighteenth birthday party here, you know. It was a wonderful party,

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  with all her friends, and a disco and everything. Emma said it was the best day of her life.’

  Sarah Renshaw’s voice died, and her thoughts seemed to drift away for a moment. Fry could almost see the little black fist of reality that was trying to break through her bubble in those few seconds. It hammered, but failed to get in. Fry felt her throat constrict, and experienced a brief pain in the exact spot where the surgeon had left a small, fleshy vestige of her tonsils when he removed them years ago.

  But then Sarah recovered herself and was just as composed as before, smiling at Fry as if she had made some small social gaffe.

  ‘Anyway, Emma was starting a collection of teddy bears,’ she said, ‘and lots of people brought her teddies for her collection on her birthday. Most of them are in her room upstairs, but we keep her favourite ones down here. Edgar there was her very first one, and he’s rather special. We gave him to Emma ourselves. He’s sitting there waiting for her to come home.’

  Murfin looked at the teddy bear on the settee, and tried to edge further away from it. But he found himself nudging up against Fry. She gave him a look, and he edged back again, his trousers, squeaking on the soft leather.

  ‘You know,’ said Sarah, ‘every morning when I wake up, there’s a moment when I feel like my old self again. It’s a wonderful moment, when Emma is about to arrive home, just as she was that day two years ago. And for a brief time it feels as though nothing was ever wrong at all. I always try to cling on to that moment and bring it into the world with me as I come awake. If only I could manage to hang on to it for long enough, I could make it real. But I’ve never been able to do it. Every time, the moment slips away from me.’

  Sarah sighed, and looked up at something above Fry’s head.

  ‘Then I open my eyes, and everything falls back into perspective. And suddenly two years have gone by, and here I am. Here, today. My new self takes over again.’

  Howard had pulled up another armchair to be near her. He leaned over and touched her shoulder.

  ‘She’ll be back soon,’ he said.

  But Sarah didn’t seem to notice him or feel his touch. ‘I always keep Emma’s clock going in her bedroom,’ she said. 1 make sure I replace the batteries regularly. It’s important that the clock shouldn’t stop. As long as it’s ticking, it’s counting down the

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  minutes until Emma comes home. It mustn’t stop, until then.’

  ‘Mrs Renshaw, when Emma went missing -‘ said Fry.

  ‘When she didn’t come home/ Sarah corrected her gently. But she had a resigned note in her voice that suggested she had said it often before, had said it too many times to too many people.

  ‘When she didn’t come home,’ said Fry, ‘you said you spoke to all her friends.’

  ‘Yes, of course we did.’

  ‘By that, do you mean the young people she shared the house with?’

  ‘Yes, and a few others, such as some of the girls she knew on the same course.’

  ‘Was that before or after the local police had spoken to them?’

  ‘Before,’ said Howard. ‘If they bothered to speak to them at all, that is.’

  ‘The West Midlands officers went through the correct procedures at the time, Mr Renshaw.’

  ‘I suppose you have to say that. You have to stick together.’

  ‘They’ve sent us copies of all their reports. I read through them yesterday.’

  ‘A journalist on one of the local newspapers told us nine months ago that the police had arrested a man for attacks on two other female students in the area around the same time,’ said Howard.

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that.’

  ‘He told us that the police had tried to make out a case that this man had done something to Emma, too. He said they had no evidence, but they were connecting it. “Tying it in,” he said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think they’ve given up. They decided to use that as an excuse.’

  The man convicted of attacking the students was in the files, too. One of his victims had died some days later, and it had become a murder charge. Those incidents had been in Birmingham, a few miles from Bearwood, but within easy reach. The defendant had refused to accept responsibility for the disappearance of a third student, and the police had been unable to prove a connection. They said this was probably because the body had never turned up. Fry hoped they hadn’t said that to the Renshaws.

  ‘We looked through her diary for clues,’ said Howard. ‘We’d heard it was the sort of thing the police do. We were looking for indications of her state of mind, mentions of people she might have been meeting up with. The names of any boyfriends.’

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  ‘And?’

  ‘She was planning on coming home for Easter. That was all.’

  ‘When was the last entry in the diary?’

  ‘On the Wednesday, the day she rang us.’

  ‘No appointments for the following couple of days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Emma wrote in her diary a lot/ said Sarah. ‘She is a very thoughtful, sensitive sort of girl. Very artistic, you know. She wrote about her feelings all the time. She wrote poems, too, sometimes.’

  ‘In her diary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This diary of Emma’s - did you find it at Bearwood?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And where is it now?’

  ‘In her room here, with the rest of her things.’

  ‘I wonder if I might see it?’

  ‘You’d be welcome to.’

  ‘She won’t need it when she comes back,’ said Sarah. ‘We’ve bought her a new one for this year.’

  And now Fry thought she could guess the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway.

  ‘Have you kept Emma’s room as it was?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah.

  ‘May I see that, too?’

  Till show you/ said Howard, and jumped up, as if relieved to have an excuse for moving around again. Perhaps the atmosphere had become that little bit too cloying for him. Fry was certainly glad of the cooler air in the hallway and the light from the big picture window at the top of the stairs. In the kitchen, she glimpsed a despondent-looking black poodle - presumably the source of the dog hairs on Sarah Renshaw’s skirt.

  ‘How long have you lived here, Mr Renshaw?’ asked Fry.

  ‘More than twenty years. Before that we lived in Marple, over in Cheshire.’

  ‘Nic
e place?’

  ‘It’s a very nice place, yes. We had a lovely house, too, and lots of friends there.’

  ‘But Emma always lived here, until she went to the Black Country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

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  ‘Certainly. The only problem we’ve ever had was a burglary a few months ago. But everybody has had them around here. We didn’t lose very much. The sad thing is, we wouldn’t even have been out of the house at the time, but we’d had some guidance on where we should look for Emma. Sarah was a bit upset about that.’

  ‘Of course.’

  As Fry had expected, Emma’s bedroom was a shrine, complete in itself. There were pictures on the wall and stacked on a desk, and there were framed photographs of Emma as a girl, from a toddler of about two through to a teenager with long hair. A small dressing table contained bottles of scent and pots of make-up, and a bathrobe hung over the chair, as if it had just been draped there a few minutes ago. No doubt the wardrobe was packed full of Emma’s clothes. The bed was neatly made and ready for use, apart from the fact that the duvet and pillows were partly occupied by teddy bears of various colours and sizes.

  ‘By the way, I’m sorry about Edgar,’ said Howard.

  ‘Oh, the bear?’

  ‘At first, Sarah used to hide him when people came to the house. She was embarrassed to be asked questions about it. But it was more embarrassing for visitors, when she saw the look on their faces and could see they didn’t know the right words to say. After a while, though, we decided to leave the bear where it is. Now, it would seem like an insult to Emma to hide it away. It’s just our way of coping. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘I thought your colleague looked a little uncomfortable.’

  Fry was going to explain that Gavin Murfin didn’t do sensitive, but she held her tongue and asked instead about the items the Renshaws had brought back from the house in Bearwood.