Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
untouched by humanity and therefore offering a challenge that many took up, to conquer their peaks. Some succeeded, but many failed, defeated by the implacability of the dark slopes and the bad weather that seemed to hover around them.
But appearances could be deceptive. Even the White Peak bore its scars – the great crude gashes where the limestone quarries and opencast workings had been blasted and ripped from its hills.
‘What do you think of Edendale, then?’ he asked at last, as they joined a convoy of cars crawling behind a caravan round the bends that climbed towards the summit of the hill. It promised to be another hot day, and their visors were down against the sun already scorching the windscreen and glaring off the tarmac. To their right, the outskirts of the town were gradually falling away, the stone slates of the roofs settling among the trees and petering out along the faint silver ribbon of the River Eden. There was a camping site in a meadow by the river just outside town, with rows of blue and green tents like exotic plants blooming in the morning sun. ‘That’s what everybody asks me,’ said Fry. ‘What do I think of Edendale. Does it matter?’
‘I would have thought so,’ said Cooper, surprised.
‘It’s a place to work. It has crime, like any other place, I suppose. I expect it has a few villains, a lot of sad cases and a whole mass of boring respectable types in between. It’s the same everywhere.’
‘It’s a better place to live than Birmingham, surely?’
‘Why?’
‘Well –’ He gestured with one hand off the steering wheel, indicating the hills and the valley and the river and the patchwork of fields and dry-stone walls, the tumbling roofs and spires of the town behind them, and the deep green mass of the Eden Forest marching up towards the vast reservoirs on the heights of the gritstone moors. He hardly knew how to express what he meant, if she couldn’t see it for herself.
‘In any case, I didn’t live in Birmingham,’ said Fry. ‘I lived at Warley.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘In the Black Country. Have you heard of it?’
‘I once travelled into Birmingham by train. That went through Wolverhampton. Is that close?’
‘Yeah, well, you’d know all about it then.’
They had reached a level stretch of road at the top of the hill, and Cooper accelerated to follow the stream of cars overtaking the caravan.
‘So if you liked the Black Country, what brought you here, then?’
Fry grimaced and turned her face away to look at the view across the plateau towards the Wye Valley, where Moorhay waited. But Cooper didn’t miss the gesture.
‘I suppose everybody asks you that as well.’
‘I suppose they do.’
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Nice to have you on board, anyway, Diane.’
Fry had charge of the file Hitchens had given them. She pulled out the map to avoid having to look at Cooper.
‘There’s only Main Street running through the village, and a few lanes off it. Some without names that only seem to lead to farms. And there’s a group of houses that seem to be called Quith Holes. Do you know it?’
‘Those cottages at Quith Holes back on to the Baulk,’ he said. ‘Not far from where Laura Vernon was found. There’s the Old Mill there too. It does teas and bed and breakfast now.’
‘Who doesn’t round here?’ said Fry as they passed another farmhouse advertising holiday accommodation.
She had to admit that Ben Cooper was a competent driver. She felt able to concentrate on absorbing the details from the file before they arrived at Moorhay. There was a photograph of Laura Vernon as she had been in life, though her hair was a different colour from that of the dead girl Fry had seen – not quite so virulent a shade of red. The photo had been blown up from one supplied by the Vernons on the day their daughter had gone missing. Fry had seen the original picture in the action file, before the case had become a murder enquiry and had been removed from the CID room. The full shot had shown young Laura in a garden, with a clump of rhododendrons in full bloom behind her, a glimpse of a stone balustrade and the top of a flight of steps to one side, and a black and white Border collie asleep on the grass at her feet. But the enlargement showed only her head and the top half of her body. The background had been cut out, removing Laura from her environment as effectively as someone had removed her from life.
There was a list of the names and addresses of all Laura Vernon’s known contacts in Moorhay and the surrounding area. It was a pitifully short list for a fifteen-year-old girl. Top of it was Lee Sherratt, aged twenty, of 12, Wye Close, Moorhay. He had worked as a gardener at the Mount until dismissed from his job last Thursday by Laura’s father, Graham Vernon. Sherratt had been interviewed when Laura was first reported missing, but had not been seen since Sunday. Unlike the Vernons, the Sherratts had not reported their son missing. His name was marked in red, which meant tracing him was a priority.
Further down the list were Andrew and Margaret Milner and their daughter Helen. Andrew was also noted as an employee of Graham Vernon’s. As for Helen, Fry remembered her from her visit to Dial Cottage with Tailby and Hitchens. She had stayed close to the old man when the police had arrived – closer than his own wife, it had seemed. Close relationships within families always seemed a bit suspect to Diane Fry; she felt she didn’t quite understand them.
She looked up at Cooper, watching his profile as he drove. She had a sudden urge to tell him to tidy himself up before they met the public. She wanted to straighten his tie, to push his hair back from his forehead. That boyish look did absolutely nothing for her.
But she could see that he was completely absorbed with his own thoughts, his face closed to the outside world. It struck her that they were not happy thoughts, but she dismissed it as none of her business and returned to her file.
Ben Cooper was remembering the smell. There had been a stink in the room worse than anything he had ever smelt on a farm. No cesspit, no slurry tank, no innards from a freshly gutted rabbit or pheasant had ever smelt as bad as the entirely human stench that filled that room. There was excrement daubed across the wallpaper and on the bedclothes piled on the floor. A pool of urine was drying into a sticky mass on the carpet near where other similar puddles had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant, leaving paler patches like the remnants of some virulent skin disease. A chair lay on the rug with one leg missing. A curtain had been torn off its rail, and the pages of books and magazines were scattered like dead leaves on every surface. A second pink slipper sat ludicrously in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran down across the top drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle. The drawers and the wardrobe had been emptied of their contents, which were heaped at random on the bed.
It was from beneath the heap of clothes that the noise came, monotonous and inhuman, a low, desperate wailing. When he had moved towards the bed, the mound stirred and the keening turned to a fearful whimper. Cooper knew that the crisis was over, for now. But this had been the worst so far, no doubt about it. The evidence was all around him.
He leaned closer to a coat with an imitation fur collar, but was careful not to touch the bed, for fear of sparking off a violent reaction. The coat was drenched in a familiar scent that brought a painful lump to his throat.
‘It’s Ben,’ he said quietly.
A white hand was visible briefly as it clutched for a sleeve and the edge of a skirt to pull them closer for concealment. The fingers withdrew again into the darkness like a crab retreating into its shell. The whimpering stopped.
‘It was the devil,’ said a small voice from deep in the pile of clothes. ‘The devil made me do it.’
The mingled odours of stale scent, sweat and excrement and urine made Cooper feel he was about to be sick. He swallowed and forced himself to keep his voice steady.