Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Page 10

  ‘She’s living with a bloke called Akerman. Johnny Akerman.

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  Not many folks will mess with him. He’s well known around those parts.’

  ‘Which parts?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I need an address.’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, love.’

  ‘Look, don’t waste my time.’

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Can’t, or won’t?’

  She felt him turning towards her in his seat. His knee touched the gear stick. A fold of his coat fell over the handbrake towards her, and she instinctively flicked it away. He was holding out his hands in a gesture of appeal, and his face was a pale smear that she was much too aware of. He was willing her to meet his eyes, but she couldn’t.

  ‘It’s not worth it/ he said. ‘It could get me a hell of a lot of bother. I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything in it for me, is there?’

  ‘Oh yes/ said Fry. ‘You’re going to feel a whole lot better, after you tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think so, darling.’

  Fry pressed the button to close the central locking and reached out to start the ignition.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I think we should go for a little ride.’

  ‘No way. I’m getting out.’

  ‘I suggest you put your seat belt on/ said Fry. ‘It’s not safe without, you know.’

  ‘For God’s sake ‘

  She pulled out from the kerb and drove towards the lights at the end of the road.

  ‘This is the compromise/ she said. ‘And it’s entirely for your benefit. You say you can’t give me the address for this Akerman. OK. I accept that. So what we do instead is, we go for a little drive.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘You decide/ she said. ‘You give me directions.’

  She could practically hear him working it out. He was wondering what the best way was to get out of this madwoman’s car.

  ‘Right, left or straight on at the lights?’ she said.

  He was silent so long that she had almost reached the lights, and she was beginning to think that he wouldn’t go along with

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  it. But he was, alter all, a man who didn’t answer questions too quickly.

  ‘If I were you, I’d go left,’ he said. ‘It’s the scenic route.’

  They drove for a few minutes. Fry’s passenger hardly spoke, but gave her directions by holding up a hand at junctions to indicate left or right. She guessed he was thinking that he would honestly be able to say that he had never told her anything.

  ‘Stop here/ he said.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘I get out here.’

  They were in a street of Victorian terraces, with little flights of steps to their front doors and drawn curtains. Fry pulled up in front of a row of shops, mostly boarded up, but for an Asian greengrocer’s where the lights were still on.

  ‘Is this it?’ she said again.

  ‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘The red door. But if you’re going to try to get in there, you’re crazier than I thought.’

  ‘Thanks for the concern. It’s touching.’

  He got out, slammed the door and in a moment had vanished into the darkness, walking quickly in the shadow of the deserted shop fronts.

  Fry had no intention of going into the house. She was prepared to wait for as long as necessary.

  In the end, it took two hours. When the woman finally appeared, Fry got out of the car and walked towards her along the pavement, pulling up the collar of her black coat and tucking her chin into her red scarf. She stared at the woman openly, trying to see the girl she was looking for in the way that the woman walked, the angle she held her head, or the look in her eyes.

  Fry didn’t stop or speak to the woman. She walked on past her, and continued to the end of the block, where she came to a halt on the kerb and stared blankly at the corner of an empty florist’s shop. For a few seconds, she had been walking along an entirely different street in another city, in a different time. She had been a younger Diane Fry, the one who had looked into every face she passed, expecting to see someone else. But trying to see ghosts never worked. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t work now.

  As Fry listened to the woman’s footsteps fade away behind her, a door opened and closed, a car sounded its horn on the corner

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  and drove away with a screech of lyres, and she realized that she had forgotten where she was.

  But, worst of all, she had forgotten why she had been trying to see someone who wasn’t there.

  Somehow, Ben Cooper had found himself in a room whose walls were covered in white tiles, many of them crazed into patterns of tiny cracks that had absorbed dirt over the years. The only light came from two tiny windows over the doors on to the street, and even the windows were covered in’ steel mesh and spiders’ webs. In front of the doors stood a white Land Rover with its bonnet propped open. There was an overwhelming smell of old sump oil inside the stuffy space.

  Cooper took a step down into the garage, then stopped. He knew he was in the wrong place. The day had been going badly already, and this was getting worse. He must have been too tired or distracted to be concentrating properly, otherwise he would never have ended up here.

  And what a place to be. The tiles made the garage look the way public toilets had done once, before vandalism had made local councils adopt a more cost-effective approach. Bare breeze-block and polished aluminium were the style these days.

  But it was the smell that made Cooper’s hands begin to itch. They immediately felt as though they were covered in grease, and his fingernails were scraped and ragged, and full of black dirt. The pathways in his brain had been stimulated by the oily smell, prompted into recalling the many times he had peered and poked inside the engine compartment of a similar Land Rover, or sometimes a David Brown tractor. He could feel the cold metal under his fingers, which were always numb, because it always seemed to be winter. And he could feel the old blue overalls that he had worn, with the sleeves rolled up over his wrists because they were a couple of sizes too big for him.

  Most often, the young Ben had been completely ignorant of what he was supposed to be doing inside the engine. But he had been enjoying the feeling of a shared moment, whether it had been with his older brother Matt, or his uncle John. Or even, rarely, his father. Joe Cooper had not been quite so tolerant of inexperienced help, and would snatch a spanner from his son’s hand the second he looked likely to turn it the wrong way. There was a curious kind of bonding that took place over a set of dirty spark

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  plugs or a blocked fuel jet. The words alone, as they came into his mind, made Cooper smile with something like nostalgia.

  Following a trace of light, he walked to the back of the garage and found himself in a workshop behind it. Two men were in there, drinking tea from mugs. One of them wore overalls, and the other was in uniform, with a yellow jacket and the peaked cap of a traffic officer on a bench next to him. They both looked up at Cooper in amazement. The traffic officer twitched, and spilled some of his tea on his uniform trousers.

  ‘Can we help?’ said the one in overalls.

  I’ve just come from a meeting upstairs and I think I must have taken a wrong turn,’ said Cooper. ‘Can you show me the way out?’

  ‘CID, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  ‘I’m DC Cooper, from Edendale.’

  The expression on the traffic officer’s face changed, and Cooper knew what he was going to say.

  ‘I’m Dave Ludlam,’ he said. ‘I knew your dad.’

  ‘A lot of people did.’

  ‘I served with him for a while, when I was a young bobby. He was a good sergeant, Joe Cooper. Tough, but fair.’

  Ludlam put his mug down as if preparing for a long conversation. ‘I bet you’re really proud of him,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course. Look ‘

  ‘
It was a tragedy, what happened. A tragedy.’

  Cooper bit his lip. He wanted always to look as though he was proud of his father. But it made it hard to let people know that he really, really didn’t want to talk about what happened. Not any more. There had to be a time when he could get on with his life without someone thrusting the fact of his father’s death in his face all the time and waiting for him to react.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ said the overalled mechanic. The kettle’s not long boiled.’

  ‘No, thanks. I have to get back to Edendale.’

  ‘Can’t you stop and talk for a bit? We’re just taking a few minutes’ break, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a drive from Glossop.’

  ‘Be careful on the roads, then,’ said PC Ludlam. ‘Don’t go speeding or anything daft like that - or I’ll be after you. At least,

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  I will once Metal Mickey here gets the bloody motor fixed. Until then, you can do what the hell you like, of course. And so can every other bugger in E Division.’

  ‘If you could show me the way out,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have some tea?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m in a rush.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the traffic officer. ‘You’re working with Jimmy Boyce’s lot. Rural Crime Team. That was the meeting upstairs, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It had been a long day. Cooper had been up well before dawn to get from Edendale to Glossop and meet the team for the raid at the suspected drugs factory in the isolated Longdendale farmhouse. After his visit to Withens with PC Udall, there had been a series of interviews to do back at Glossop section station, and then a final debriefing meeting with the Rural Crime Team. Now, he was starting to feel dizzy with tiredness. He had eaten at some time during the day, but couldn’t quite work out how many hours ago that was.

  Cooper turned back towards the garage, only to find that PC Udall had followed him out of the meeting and was standing watching him.

  ‘I noticed you’d gone the wrong way,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a rabbit warren, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t tell anybody I couldn’t find my way out of the station.’

  Udall smiled. ‘I’ll show you the way. You wouldn’t want to be in here all night.’

  ‘No, it’s kind of scary.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all the white tiles that do it. We call this the morgue.’

  Later that night, two firefighters found they’d taken the wrong path as they were making their way down the hillside from Withens Moor. They were both tired and smelled strongly of smoke. Their personal water carriers felt heavy, but at least they weren’t full of water now. They had just finished a late shift damping down the hot spots that still flared among hundreds of hectares of scorched peat moor.

  The two men were sweating heavily inside their suits and helmets, and cursing the distance they had to walk to get to the four-wheel-drive Land Rover that would ferry them back to their station. Crews from all over North Derbyshire had been on the moor all day, as well as a dozen Peak Park rangers and a team of

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  gamekeepers employed by the landowners. But because of the location, even Land Rovers had only been able to ferry the men to within a mile and a half of the spreading fire and the clouds of smoke rising high above the hills. From there, they had to walk with their equipment, knowing that there was no possibility of pumping water up to the summit.

  ‘There’s the air shaft, Sub/ said Leading Firefighter Beardsley.

  Sub Officer Whittingham stopped and peered into the darkness. ‘It’s the wrong one/ he said. ‘The next air shaft beyond it is where we meet the track.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Well, if not, where’s the Land Rover?’

  ‘Right.’

  As they approached the nearest air shaft, Beardsley asked if they could stop for a rest.

  ‘I’m knackered/ he said. This gear is killing me.’

  ‘Just for a minute, then.’

  Beardsley eased off his water carrier and flexed his shoulders with a groan.

  ‘You’d think they’d have mobilized the helicopter/ he said.

  ‘We’re cheaper/ said Whittingham. ‘Besides, it’s no good for damping down/

  Though a helicopter had been on standby at Barton Airport, ready to scoop water from the Longdendale reservoirs and bomb the blaze, it had not been called on. Now it was no longer needed. Because moorland fires could burn underground for many months, firefighters had to dig deep into the peat to deal with hot spots.

  ‘Hold on, what’s that?’ said Beardsley.

  Whittingham peered into the darkness. ‘I think you mean “who”.’

  Someone was lying alongside the air shaft, stretched out on the ground with his head turned to the side, as if sleeping.

  ‘It’s some hiker/ said Whittingham. ‘This is access land up here. They camp anywhere.’

  ‘You all right, mate?’ called Beardsley.

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘I doubt it. He hasn’t got a sleeping bag or anything/

  That doesn’t stop ‘em.’

  ‘Hey up, mate. Wake up/

  For some reason, neither of the firefighters wanted to go near the sleeping man. They stood back from him, as if afraid to intrude

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  on his privacy or to make too much noise with their boots and flame-proof overalls.

  ‘You don’t think he was caught in the fire, do you?’ said Beardsley.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t look well to me. We should get the paramedics out.’

  ‘Hang on. Let’s just check.’

  Whittingham laid his equipment on the heather. He bent down to the prone figure and took him by the shoulder to shake him. He got no response.

  ‘Paramedics, Sub?’ said Beardsley.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, I think. He’s dead.’

  ‘No? Oh God, has this buggered up our rest time?’

  ‘Have you got some light there?’

  Beardsley shone a torch on the figure. ‘Hey, that’s blood,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know that, Beardsley. Shine it on his face, will you?’

  The torch beam moved, but failed to pick up a reflection where they would have expected white skin.

  ‘Bloody hell/ said Beardsley. ‘What happened to his eyes? I can’t even see them for the blood. And his face is black. Has he been burned by the fire?’

  Whittingham leaned a bit closer and took off his right glove. Avoiding the pools of blood where the eyes should have been, he touched a finger gently to the face of the dead man.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think he did that to himself.’

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  Sunday

  Sunday mornings had become a battleground for Ben Cooper. It was like going over the top in the trenches every time they opened the doors. In the minutes of waiting, he could see the whites of the eyes of the people alongside him, and feel their tension rising. Five minutes to ten, and there was still no sign of anyone on the other side of the glass.

  The first time he went to do his weekly shop at Somerfield’s supermarket on Sunday morning, he thought he would be the only customer. But he was far from being alone in wanting to shop at that time. There had been a small crowd waiting outside the doors.

  After his first few visits, Cooper realized he was seeing exactly the same faces each week. There was the man with the denim jeans so baggy they surely must never have fit him, and the old woman with a knitted hat pulled tight over an explosion of white curls. And then there was the little man with the walking stick and bent legs, who moved slower than everyone else and needed a shopping trolley to keep him upright and mobile.

  Soon, members of this group had started saying ‘hello’ to him when he arrived, as if he’d been accepted into some sort of club. Each of them had their own little rituals once they got inside the store. Some browsed among the fresh vegetables, or rushed to be first in the queue at the d
elicatessen counter. Some headed straight for the cat food, or did a preliminary circuit to spot the ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ offers. Occasionally, they would pass each other in the aisles and complain that something had been moved again. There was always a small traffic jam by the cabinets where the frozen meals for one were kept.

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  When an assistant manager finally appeared and unlocked the doors, Cooper stood back to let most of the Sunday-morning crowd grab their trolleys and get in before him. The little man with the stick reached the doors last, as always. Cooper was just about to follow him, when his mobile phone rang. He pulled it from his belt and checked the number on the display. It was one he didn’t recognize. Work though, probably.

  For some reason, the idea that the office was calling him on his rest day irritated him more than it ever had before. Previously, it had never seemed to matter. But now, the interruption of his Sunday-morning routine was different. It could upset his entire week. Sunday was for shopping, cleaning the flat or doing some ironing, a quick lunch, then an afternoon with the papers and TV before visiting his mother. Then he would finish off with an evening in the pub, where the usual crowd would be expecting him, and his usual drink would be on the counter almost before he got through the door. Even within three months, the routine had developed a reassuring predictability.

  Cooper let the phone ring a couple more times as he pushed a trolley into the first aisle: fresh fruit and vegetables. In a second, . the answering service would cut in, and he could pretend that he had been unavailable. Then someone else would have to take on whatever job it was they wanted him for. He wouldn’t even know what it had been until Monday morning. He wouldn’t know whether it had been something trivial, or the most exciting case of his life.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he sighed, as he caught the call before the next ring.

  ‘Hello, Ben. It’s Tracy Udall.’

  Cooper had a moment’s difficulty in putting a face to the name. But then a picture of PC Udall in her body armour seemed to materialize in front of him, among the piles of carrots and parsnips.