Black Dog

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Turning from Castleton Road into Grosvenor Avenue, Fry finally pulled up at the kerb outside number twelve. The house had once been solid and prosperous, just one detached Victorian villa in a tree-lined street. Its front door nestled in mock porticos, and the tiny bedsitters on the top floor were reached only by hidden servants’ staircases.

Her own flat, on the first floor, consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with shower cubicle and a tiny kitchen area. The wallpaper was striped in a faded shade of brown, and the pattern on the carpet was a complicated swirl of washed-out blues and pinks and yellows, as if designed to hide any substance spilt on it. Judging by the background smell, there must have been many things spilt in the flat over the years that she would not have liked to name. Most of the other occupants of the house were students at the High Peak College campus on the west side of town.

Fry made herself cheese on toast and a cup of tea and took a Müller low-fat yoghurt from a fridge that smelled suspiciously of rotting fish and onions. No amount of cleaning had removed the smell, but in any case she intended to keep only a minimum amount of food in the fridge, preferring to visit the shops as often as required, glad to take any excuse to be out of the flat. There was an Asian corner shop a quarter of a mile away where the young couple behind the counter had seemed pleasant enough. A friendly greeting over the sliced bread and gold top could be welcome at times.

After her meal, she spent ten minutes going through some gentle exercises, winding down from the day as she would after a practice session at the dojo, flexing her muscles and stretching her joints and limbs. Then she showered and put on her old black silk kimono with the Chinese dragon on the back and the Yin and Yang symbols on the breast.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would make a point of getting hold of the Yellow Pages and looking up names and addresses of local martial arts centres. She would not find an instructor quite like her old shotokan master in Warley, and she would have to adapt to new techniques. But she could not let her skills go rusty. The ability to defend herself had become too important to her now. Besides, she relished the renewed feeling of confidence and power that karate had brought her. And it required total concentration. With shotokan and her job, she might never have to think about anything else.

Fry didn’t spend too much time considering the Laura Vernon killing. At present, her mind was a blank, awaiting data on which to base deductions, to make connections. She was looking forward to the morning, when she expected to be able to take in a barrage of facts that would be presented at the briefing, to see lines of enquiry open up like so many doors of opportunity.

For one brief moment, a small niggle entered her mind, a passing irritation that might have to be dealt with at some stage. It concerned DC Ben Cooper. The detective everyone loved; the man most likely to stand in her way. The picture that entered her mind was of a six-foot male with broad shoulders and perfect teeth, smiling complacently. She considered him fleetingly, then pushed him off the stage with an imaginary hand in the face. There were no obstacles that couldn’t be overcome. There were no problems, only challenges.

Finally, she switched on the television in the corner to watch a late-night film before bedtime. It was some sort of old horror film, in black and white. From her place in the old armchair, she was able to feel under the bed with one hand, her eyes on the TV. She pulled out a two-pound box of Thornton’s Continental and fed a Viennese truffle into her mouth. On the screen, a woman walking alone at night turned at the sound of following footsteps. As a dark shadow fell across her face, she began to scream and scream.

Five miles away from Grosvenor Avenue, Ben Cooper bumped his Toyota down the rough track to Bridge End Farm, twisting the wheel at the familiar points along the way to avoid the worst of the potholes. In places, the track had been repaired with compacted earth and the odd half-brick. The first heavy rain of the winter would wash it all away again when the water came rushing down from the hillside and turned the narrow track into a river.

In passing, he noticed a stretch of wall where the topping stones had fallen away and the wall was beginning to bulge outwards towards the field. He made a mental note to mention it as a job he could do for Matt on his next day off.

Cooper was consciously trying to readjust his mind to such mundane things. But his thoughts were lingering on the Laura Vernon case. It was going to be an enquiry that he would not find easy to forget. He was baffled by the old man, Harry Dickinson. He had seen many reactions among people who became accidentally involved in incidents of major crime, but he could not recall such a puzzling mixture of indifference and secret enjoyment.

Unable to find a ready explanation for the old man’s attitude, he considered the leading suspect, the missing Lee Sherratt. He did not know Lee, and had never had any dealings with him. But he did recall his father, Jackie Sherratt, a local small-time villain. He was currently serving two years in Derby for receiving, but was better known in the Edendale area as an experienced poacher.

Most of all, though, Cooper’s thoughts kept straying back to the moment he had found the body of the girl. The physical impressions had stamped themselves on his senses and would not go away. Even the evening air blowing through the open windows of the Toyota could not take away the smell of stale blood and urine that seemed to linger in the car. Even a Levellers tape on the stereo could not drown out the buzzing of the flies that had laid their eggs in Laura Vernon’s mouth, or silence the derisive cry of the ragged-winged crow that had flapped away from her face. Directly in his field of vision, as if imprinted on the inside of the windscreen, hung the images of a ravaged eye socket and the startling contrast between a strip of bleached white thigh and a thick coil of black pubic hair. Even at the moment that he had first seen the body, Cooper had registered the fact that Laura Vernon had dyed the hair on her head a rich, vermilion red.

It was not his first body by any means. But they didn’t get any better with experience. Certainly not when they were like this one. He knew that the sight would stay with him for weeks or months, until something worse came along. Maybe it would never go away at all.

Cooper also knew that he had sensed something wrong in the cottage at Moorhay where Harry and Gwen Dickinson lived. Something that the granddaughter, Helen Milner, was aware of too. It was not anything he could put his finger on; not a cold fact that he could have included in an interview report; not a logical conclusion that he could have justified in any way. There wasn’t even any firm impression in his mind that the atmosphere had anything to do with the finding of Laura Vernon’s body. But something wrong at Dial Cottage there had certainly been. He was sure he was not mistaken.

The Toyota rattled over a cattle grid and into the yard of Bridge End Farm. Its tyres splashed through trails of freshly dropped cow manure left by the herd coming down to the milking shed from their pasture and back again after afternoon milking. A group of calves destined for Bakewell Market bellowed at him from a pen in one of the buildings at the side of the yard. But he ignored them, slowing instead as he passed the tractor shed to look in at the big green John Deere and the old grey Fergie, and the row of implements lined up against the walls. There was no sign of his brother, although Matt would normally be found tinkering with a bit of machinery at this time of the evening.

When he reached the front of the house, Cooper’s heart began to sink. His two nieces, Amy and Josie, were sitting on the wall between the track and the tiny front garden. They were not playing and not talking to each other, but sat kicking their heels against the stones and stirring the dust with the toes of their trainers. They looked up as he parked the Toyota, and neither smiled a greeting. He could see that Josie, who was only six, had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose had been running, leaving grimy tracks on her brown cheeks. A comic lay discarded on the wall, and an ice cream had melted into a raspberry-coloured puddle on the ground.

‘Hello, girls,’ he said.

‘Hi, Uncle Ben.’

Amy looked at him sadly, with big eyes that showed hurt but no real comprehension of what was hurting. She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder at the farmhouse. The front door stood open, but there was silence from within. A black and white cat emerged from the garden, walked to the doorstep and paused, sniffing the air of the hallway. Then it seemed to change its mind and trotted quickly away towards the Dutch barn.

‘Mum’s in the kitchen,’ said Amy, anticipating the question.

‘And where’s your dad?’

‘He had to go up to Burnt Wood straight after milking. To mend some gates.’

‘I see.’

Cooper smiled at the girls, but got no response. They were totally unlike the two children who would normally have come running to greet him. But he didn’t have to ask them any more questions to guess why they were so subdued.

In the big kitchen he found his sister-in-law, Kate. She was moving about from table to stove stiffly, like a woman with arthritis, or one whose limbs were badly bruised. Her short fair hair was dishevelled and the sheen of sweat on her forehead looked as though it was caused by something more than the heat of the day or the steam from a pan which was simmering on the hotplate with nothing in it. She, too, had been crying.

When she saw him, she let go of the carving knife she was carrying as if it was a relief to part with it. The kitchen normally smelled of herbs and freshly baked bread, and sometimes of garlic and olive oil. Tonight, though, it smelled of none of those. The smell was of disinfectant and several less pleasant odours that made Cooper’s stomach muscles tighten with apprehension.

‘What’s wrong, Kate?’

His sister-in-law shook her head, sagging against the pine table, weary with the effort of trying to keep up an appearance of normality for the girls. Cooper could have told her, even from his brief glimpse of them outside, that it had not worked.

‘See for yourself,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it any more, Ben.’

He put his hand on her shoulder and saw the tears begin to squeeze from her eyes once more.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘You look after the girls.’

He went out into the passage that ran through the centre of the house and looked up the stairs. When he was a child, the passage and the stairs had been gloomy places. The walls and most of the woodwork had been covered in some sort of dark-brown varnish, and the floorboards had been painted black on either side of narrow strips of carpet. The carpet itself had long since lost its colour under a layer of dirt which no amount of cleaning could prevent from being tramped into the house by his father, his uncle, their children, three dogs, a number of cats of varying habits and even, at times, other animals that had been brought in from the fields for special attention. Now, though, things were different. There were deep-pile fitted carpets on the floor and the walls were painted white. The wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.

Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.

The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.

Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.

Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.

8 (#ulink_01a58ee6-431d-5d87-b087-b1022a4072c0)

‘Found by a man walking a dog.’

There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.