Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
and the borders of Staffordshire. On the other side were the grim, bare gritstone moors of the sparsely populated Dark Peak, where the high slopes of Mam Tor and Kinder Scout guarded the remote, silent reservoirs below Snake Pass.
It was one of only two towns that sat within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park – the other being Bakewell, a few miles to the south, where one of the E Division section stations was based. Other towns, like Buxton, headquarters of B Division, had been deliberately excluded from the National Park when the boundaries were drawn.
At Buxton, as at Matlock and Ashbourne, the boundary took wide sweeps around the towns and back again. But Edendale was too deep within the hills to be excluded. It meant that the restrictive Peak Park planning regulations applied to the town as much as they did to the face of Mam Tor or to the Blue John caves of Castleton.
Diane Fry was still learning the geography of the town and the dale. So far she was familiar only with the immediate area around the Victorian house on the outskirts of Edendale where she had rented a first-floor flat, and the streets near the station – including the view of the Edendale FC stand. But she was aware that, no matter which route you chose out of Edendale, the only way was up – over the hills, to the moorland hamlets or the villages in the next valley.
Fry was a good driver, trained in the West Midlands force driving school to handle pursuit cars. But DI Hitchens chose to drive himself as they headed out of the town towards the great hump of moorland separating Edendale from the next valley.
‘It’s just the one shoe,’ said Hitchens.
‘A trainer?’ said Fry. ‘Reebok, size-five?’
The DI looked at her, surprised, raising his eyebrow.
‘You’ve been reading up on the Vernon enquiry.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It was always a possibility from the start that something had happened to her, though you can’t tell the parents that. She had cash with her, but had taken nothing else. We’d already traced all her friends and contacts. Negative all round. It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, that her body will turn up somewhere.’
‘What sort of girl is she?’
‘Oh, comes from a well-off family, comfortable background. Never wanted for anything, I’d say. She attends a private school called High Carrs, due to take her GCSEs next year. She gets piano lessons, has a horse that her parents bought that’s kept at some stables just outside Moorhay. She takes part in riding events sometimes.’
‘Show jumping?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And is she good at any of those things?’
Hitchens looked at her and nodded approvingly. ‘If you believe the parents, she’s perfect at everything. Bound to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and do her degree, but might decide to pursue a career as a concert musician later on. Unless she wins an Olympic gold medal in the meantime, of course. Her friends say different.’
‘Boys?’
‘Of course. What else? Mum and Dad deny it, though. They say she’s too busy with her studies and her horse riding, all that. But we’re tracing the boyfriends, gradually.’
‘Rows at home? Anything like that?’
‘Nothing. At least …’
‘Not according to the parents, right.’
‘Got it.’
Hitchens was smiling again. Fry liked her senior officers to smile at her, within reason. She watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were strong hands, with clean and carefully trimmed fingernails. His nose was a little too large in profile. It was what they called a Roman nose. But a man could get away with that – it gave him character. She looked again at his left hand. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But now she noticed a white scar that crawled all the way across the middle knuckles of three of his fingers.
‘The parents say that Laura had been shopping with her mother that afternoon,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’d been to the De Bradelei Centre at Belper.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Oh – clothes,’ he said vaguely.
‘Not Dad?’
‘I don’t suppose it was his sort of thing. Anyway, the females were buying him a birthday present, so he wouldn’t have been wanted, would he? He stayed at home to catch up on some work. Graham Vernon runs a financial consultancy business and says it’s going well. They do seem to be pretty well-off.’
‘And after they got home?’
‘It was about half past five by then. It was still hot, so Laura changed and went out into the garden for a while. She didn’t come back for her evening meal at half past seven. That’s when the Vernons began to panic.’
Fry admired the way he had all the details in his mind and could produce them without effort. Hitchens obviously had the sort of brain that was much valued in the police service these days. Many coppers could not have repeated the information without reading it from their notes.
‘Parents alibi each other?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she was seen talking to a young man before she disappeared, wasn’t she?’
‘Very good, Diane. Yes, we found a lady who was out collecting wild flowers on the edge of the scrubland at the top of the Baulk. She’s a WI member and is helping to create the decoration for a well dressing at Great Hucklow. She was embarrassed about admitting it, can you believe it? She thought we might arrest her for stealing wild flowers. Her children had told her it’s a crime against the environment. But the well dressing was obviously important enough to turn her to evil ways. Anyway, she came forward and identified Laura Vernon from her photograph as the girl she saw. She couldn’t describe the boy, though. Too far away.’
‘And now a trainer.’
‘Yes, that’s all we’ve got so far, but it looks hopeful. We’ve got Ben Cooper on the spot there – he was with one of the search parties. Ben’s got good judgement.’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘Oh, you’ve met Cooper, have you? He’s only back from leave today.’
‘No, but I’ve heard the others talk about him.’
‘Right.’ Hitchens said nothing for a few minutes, negotiating a crossroads where heavy lorries thundered by at regular intervals, dusting the roadside verges with a coating of lime. Fry tried to read his thoughts, wondering if she had said something wrong. But she was sure of her ability to keep any emotion out of her voice. She had practised long and hard, and now, she felt, she only ever sounded positive.
‘How’s it going then, Diane? Settling into the CID room OK?’
‘Fine, sir. Some things are done a bit differently from what I’ve been used to, but nothing I haven’t been able to pick up on pretty quickly.’
‘That’s good. Dave Rennie treating you all right?’
‘No problem,’ said Fry. She noted that she had become ‘Diane’ since getting into the car alone with the DI. She liked to keep a track of these things, in case they had any deeper meaning. Maybe she could manage without the ‘sir’ in return, and see if it struck the right note – a closeness of colleagues rather than a senior officer with a junior. But no further.
‘Not finding Derbyshire too quiet for you after the West Midlands?’
‘It’s a nice change,’ said Fry. ‘But I’m sure E Division has its own challenges.’
Hitchens laughed. ‘The other divisions call it “E for Easy Street”.’
Fry had already been informed by her new colleagues that Edendale had been chosen over Bakewell