Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
‘OK, take a break.’
The word came down the line from the uniformed sergeant at the opposite end from Ben Cooper. The men in blue overalls and wellingtons backed away from the line of search and sat on the tussocks of rough grass in a half-circle. Someone produced a flask of tea, someone else a bottle of orange juice.
PC Garnett settled down comfortably, tossing his pole aside, taking off his cap to reveal receding hair cropped short at the sides. They said it was the helmets that made so many policemen start to lose their hair early. Cooper himself was conscious that one day he would start to see a thinning on either side of his forehead. Everybody told him that his fine brown hair was just like his father’s, who had never been anything but halfway bald, as far as he could remember. So far, though, he was still able to let a lock of hair fall across his forehead as he had always done. Fashions had tended to pass him by.
Garnett smiled as he mopped his brow with his sleeve and eased himself into gossip mode. ‘So what about this new recruit in your department, Cooper? The new DC?’
‘I’ve not met him yet. I’ve only just come back from leave.’
‘It’s a “her”, mate, a “her”. Diane Fry, they call her.’
‘Right.’
‘She’s from Birmingham.’
‘I’ve not heard anything about her. I expect she’ll be all right.’
‘According to Dave Rennie, she’s a bit of a hard-faced cow. Could be a looker, he says, but she doesn’t bother. Blonde, but has her hair cut short. Too tall, too skinny, no make-up, always wears trousers. A bit of a stroppy bitch.’
‘You haven’t even met her,’ protested Cooper.
‘Well, you know the type. Probably another lesbian.’
Cooper blew out an exasperated breath. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t go around saying things like that. You don’t know anything about her.’
Garnett had the sense to hear the irritation in Cooper’s voice and didn’t argue. He idly pulled a clump of dandelions and shredded the leaves between his fingers. But Cooper couldn’t let the subject rest.
‘You know what it’s like for the women as well as I do, Garnett – some of them just try too hard. She’ll fit in fine after a week or two, you’ll see. They usually do.’
‘I dunno about that. I’ve a feeling you’ll not have time to be her best mate, though, lad. She’ll be up and away in no time.’
‘Why? Does she go ballooning?’
‘Ha, ha.’ Garnett ignored the sarcasm, in fact was probably impervious to it when he had a good subject of gossip. ‘She comes with a bit of a “rep” actually. A potential high-flier, they reckon. Ambitious.’
‘Oh yeah? She’ll have to prove herself first.’
‘Maybe.’
The clouds of tiny flies were getting thicker as they gathered around the men’s heads, attracted by their sweat and the sweet smell of the orange juice. The PC looked smug.
‘Come on, what do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You don’t just get promotion without showing you’re worth it.’
‘Get real, mate. She’s female. You know – two tits and a fanny, always puts the toilet seat down.’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that. So what?’
‘So what? So what? So the force is short of female officers in supervisory ranks, especially in CID. Don’t you read the reports? You just watch, old son – provided she keeps her nose clean and always smiles nicely at the top brass, Detective Constable Fry will shoot up that promotion ladder like she’s got a rocket up her arse.’
Cooper was about to protest when the shout went up from the contact man. ‘DC Cooper! Is DC Cooper here? Your boss wants you. Urgent.’
The instructions from DI Hitchens were terse, and the address he gave Cooper was in Moorhay, the village visible on the brow of the hill above the woods. Communities in this area tended to gather around the thousand-foot contour, the valley bottoms being too narrow.
‘Check it out, Cooper, and fast. We either get to the girl in the next two hours or we lose the whole night. You know what that could mean.’
‘I’m on my way, sir.’
‘Take somebody with you. Who’ve you got?’
Cooper looked back at the group of men lounging on the grass. His gaze passed across PC Garnett and a couple of other middle-aged bobbies, the overweight sergeant, two female PCs from Matlock and the three rangers.
‘No CID officers, sir. I’ll have to borrow a uniformed PC.’
There was a suggestion of a sigh at the other end of the line.
‘Do it then. But get a move on.’
Cooper explained as quickly as he could to the sergeant and was given a tall, muscular young bobby of about twenty called Wragg, who perked up at the prospect of some action.
‘Follow me as best you can.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m right with you,’ said Wragg, flexing the muscles in his shoulders.
The path up to Moorhay wound back through the trees to where a kissing gate gave access through the dry-stone walls into a field where black and white dairy cattle had recently been turned back in after milking. The field had been cut for hay a few weeks before, and the grass was short and springy underfoot as Ben Cooper ran along the side of the wall, the heat and sweat prickling on his brow and his legs spasming with pain as he forced them on. Wragg kept pace with him easily, but soon dropped his tendency to ask questions when Cooper didn’t respond. He needed all his breath for running.
The cows turned their heads to watch them pass in astonishment, their jaws working slowly, their eyes growing huge between twitching ears. Earlier in the afternoon, the search party had had to wait for the farmer to move the cows to the milking shed before the line could work its way across the field. The air had been filled with crude jokes about cow pats.
Cooper passed a stretch of collapsed wall, where a length of electric fence had been erected to keep the cattle away until someone skilled in dry-stone walling could be found to repair it. Before the cows’ curiosity could lead them to follow him, Cooper had already reached the next gate. He skirted another field and ran up a farm track paved with stones and broken rubble.
The steepness of the slope was increasing steadily now on the last few hundred yards, until Cooper began to feel as though he was back on the Cuillins again. Wragg was dropping further and further behind, slowing to a walk, using his arms against his knees to boost himself up the steeper sections.
He was carrying too much upper body weight, thought Cooper, and hadn’t developed the right muscles in his thighs and calves for hill climbing. Some of the old people who had lived in these hill villages all their lives would have passed the young PC with ease.
Finally, Cooper reached the high, dark wall at the corner of the graveyard at St Edwin’s Church. The church seemed to have been built on a mound, standing well above the village street at the front and presenting an elevation from the bottom of the valley like the rampart of a castle wall. The square Norman tower stood stark against the sky, tall and strangely out of proportion to the shortened nave, giving the church the appearance of a fallen letter ‘L’.
The surface of the churchyard was so high that Cooper thought the bodies buried there must be almost on his eye level, if only he could see through the stones of the wall and the thick, dark soil to where the oak caskets lay rotting.
The church