Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
we don’t want you. That sort of thing.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish, Parkin.’
‘That sounds like something out of the Dark Ages,’ said Fry.
‘Or The X-Files,’ suggested Wragg.
‘All right, all right.’
‘Any positive reactions to the trainer?’ asked Hitchens.
‘Nothing.’
‘Some of the old biddies don’t even know what a trainer is.’
‘That trainer has to be somewhere.’
‘Sir, if it’s chummy from Buxton, the one B Division are after, then he’ll probably have taken it home with him as a memento, like they reckon he did with the tights off the other one.’
‘Yes, that’s possible, Wragg. But Mr Tailby doesn’t believe we can assume the two cases are linked at this stage.’
‘But that means we have to do everything from scratch, when they might turn out to be the same bloke after all.’
‘Have we turned up anything on the known offenders, sir?’ asked Cooper.
‘Not yet. It’s early days. DI Armstrong is on to it.’
‘Well, she’s wasting her time anyway.’
‘Thanks for the benefit of your views, Parkin.’
Cooper saw that PC Parkin was watching Diane Fry carefully for her reactions. Fry only needed to make one ill-considered comment, let slip one unguarded reaction, and a report on her behaviour would be circulating round the division very quickly. A reputation among your colleagues could be made or broken on first impressions.
Sometimes, he knew, the worst thing of all was to inadvertently earn yourself some childish nickname, which you could then never live down, no matter how hard you tried.
‘We were lucky that the body was found so quickly really,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s given us a head start. Sometimes we’re not so lucky. The old bloke with the dog did us a big favour.’
‘Have you been involved in any other enquiries like this, sir?’ asked Fry.
Hitchens told them about a murder enquiry in the late 1980s, when a teenage boy had gone missing from his foster home in Eyam. They had set up an incident room right in the centre of the village, linked to Divisional HQ. Over a period of months they had gradually spread the search over an area within a fivemile radius of Eyam. They had used the Mountain Rescue Team, Search Dog Teams, Cave Rescue Teams, the Peak Park Ranger Service, Derbyshire Countryside Rangers, even members of ramblers’ clubs and scores of other volunteers. They had put up Search and Rescue helicopters over the hills. But they had never found the boy.
‘A man walking his dog in just the right place would have been a godsend then,’ he said.
‘And there was that one in 1966, do you remember?’ said Parkin, turning to Diane Fry.
‘I wasn’t even around in 1966,’ said Fry. ‘Thanks very much.’
‘Eh? Well, it’s only, what …’
‘Thirty-three years ago.’
‘So it was. Well, it’s in the history books anyway.’
‘1966? Let me guess – you’re talking about football. The World Cup? That’d be the only thing you know about, I suppose.’
‘Yeah. They had the trophy nicked, did you know that? The World Cup itself, the Jules Rimet Trophy. Before the finals.’
‘Did somebody leave it in their car or what?’
‘And you won’t believe this – but it was found by a dog. Chucked in a hedge bottom, it was. Wrapped in fish-and-chip paper.’
‘The dog?’
‘The trophy. It was wrapped in fish-and-chip paper.’
‘Pickles,’ said Cooper.
‘No, it was definitely fish and chips.’
‘The dog was called Pickles. It got introduced to all the players before the final.’
‘Surely you don’t remember it?’ said Fry.
‘No, but like Parkin says …’
‘It’s in the history books, right. Well, I must be reading the wrong history books. All that stuff passed me by. I suppose I must have overlooked it somewhere between the assassination of President Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War.’
‘Well, probably,’ said Parkin, and sneered.
Cooper winced. ‘I think I’ll just pop to the gents before we leave.’
It was a relief to get inside the Drover and out of the heat. The landlord, Kenny Lee, nodded to Cooper from the bar as he slipped into the toilets. The sudden solitude and the smell of urine did nothing to help Cooper keep his mind off the previous night. It had been a very long night, as the farmhouse had filled with members of the family – his brother first, then his sister and her husband arriving from Buxton, and then his uncle and his cousins, all pitching in to help clear up the mess, to support Kate and look after the children, Amy and Josie. Meanwhile, the doctor had called to sedate his mother, and later the ambulance had arrived to take her to Edendale General, where it would not be her first visit to the psychiatric unit. And then the endless discussion had begun – a discussion that had gone on until the early hours of the morning, by which time they were all exhausted and no nearer to an answer to an insoluble problem.
There was a payphone in the passage near the bar, and Cooper fished in his pocket for a few coins. He was put through to the psychiatric unit at the hospital, where the staff were professionally cautious. All his call established was what he already knew – that his mother was still under sedation and not fit to have visitors. Try again tomorrow, they said.
In the meantime, tonight there might finally be a family decision. And he knew that there was a chance his mother would have to be taken away permanently from the home she had known all her life. It would be the final humiliation in her descent into schizophrenia.
When he came out of the pub and walked back out into the beer garden, something made Cooper stop and stand still in the shade of the side wall. He was standing several yards behind Diane Fry, and he saw what he might not have seen from his seat across the table. He saw DI Hitchens’s arm on the back of Fry’s chair as he leaned close towards her to speak directly into her ear. He saw the DI’s hand move upwards from the chair to rest for a moment on her shoulder. Behaving like a courting couple, as his mother would have said.
And then he saw Fry nod briefly before Hitchens took his hand away. And Parkin told another poor joke that nobody laughed at.
The phone was ringing again. It had hardly stopped ringing for days. Though the answerphone had been left on and she had been told to take no notice of it, the continual noise was driving Sheila Kelk mad.
Sheila came to the Mount three days a week to clean, and Tuesday was one of her days. The fuss about the girl being found murdered had not put her off coming – far from it, in fact. Mr and Mrs Vernon would need her, she had told her husband. A house still needed cleaning. She might be able to provide some other service to poor Mrs Vernon, to be of some comfort to her. Mrs Vernon might, just might, want to confide in her, to tell her all about what had been going on.
But here she was, going over the sitting room carpet for the second time, wishing the sound of the Dyson would drown out the constant ringing. She had been here longer than her four hours already, and no one had so much as spoken to her.
In a temporary silence from the phone, Sheila switched off the vacuum cleaner, flicking a cloth over a piece of pine furniture that she had never quite been able to put a name to. She thought of it as a cross between a sideboard and a writing desk.
While