Blind to the Bones Read online

‘So …?’

  ‘So Wendy’s a Tagg according to the law, but still an Oxley under the skin. Heart and soul, if you ask me. Nobody ever leaves that family. Not until they die.’

  ‘They must be very close, I suppose. Not many families would choose to live so near together.’

  ‘You can say that again. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get away from my lot. My family only came to the wedding because they wanted to see if it was true what everybody kept telling them about the Oxleys.’

  ‘But you fit in all right here, do you, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Melvyn. ‘When I married Wendy, I became an Oxley as far as they’re concerned. One of the family, I am. Don’t make any mistake about that.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Cooper. ‘I wouldn’t want to make two mistakes in the same afternoon.’

  Standing in front of Waterloo Terrace, Ben Cooper looked up towards the road. Melvyn Tagg was right – you couldn’t see much from here. Waterloo Terrace was almost completely cut off from view by the thick covering of sycamores and chestnut trees on three sides. Even in the entrance, the track took a forty-five degree turn to reach the road, so that nothing passing could be seen from the houses. Not from ground level, anyway. And probably not even from the upper floor.

  He turned back to the houses. Number 5 was next. Its brick façade was indistinguishable from the others in the row, except that the door and window frames had been painted blue, and a plastic water butt stood under the end of the downspout to collect the rainwater. Nettles were growing against the wall, and their tops had already reached the window ledge.

  But at 5 Waterloo Terrace, Frances Oxley wasn’t at home. Or she didn’t answer the door, which wasn’t quite the same thing.

  ‘I think Mr Alton mentioned her,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘This must be Fran, Lucas Oxley’s daughter.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said PC Udall.

  They stood on the step and waited for a moment or two. Cooper rang the bell again. There was something about the house that made it feel as though there was someone at home, but lurking behind the curtains or in the shadows of the hallway. He stood a bit closer to the front door, listening for footsteps in the hall. Udall followed his lead, taking a couple of steps to the side, and casually glancing through the curtains of the front window. She shook her head.

  ‘No sign of anyone.’

  ‘Mr Alton suggested there was a man in Fran Oxley’s life, but he seemed a bit vague about his status.’

  ‘Maybe he spends a lot of time away,’ said Udall.

  Cooper walked backwards to the gate and looked up at the house. The curtains were drawn upstairs, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney, as there was from numbers six and seven. Fran Oxley’s house might be heated by gas or electricity, rather than the smokeless solid fuel Mrs Wallwin favoured.

  ‘By “away”, do you mean working away, or away at Her Majesty’s pleasure?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Working, I was thinking. But who knows?’

  ‘Is there mains gas in Withens?’

  ‘I doubt it. The bigger houses have propane gas cylinders.’

  ‘Of course – I’ve seen them. I suppose it’s a bit too remote here. It’s easier for the coal man to get here than the gas company.’

  Cooper tried the door again, but there was still no response. And it still didn’t feel right. People who didn’t answer their door to the police were a challenge. They made him want to know more about them.

  ‘Number 4, then,’ he said. ‘Mr Scott Oxley.’

  Cooper knocked on the next door. They were all looking the same already. And at number 4, Scott wasn’t in, either.

  He shrugged at Udall.

  ‘There are three more houses yet,’ she said.

  They didn’t need to go out of the gate and down the path to the next house, because there was no wall or fence separating numbers 3 and 4. There was nothing to prevent them just walking a few feet along the flags. But they did have to cross the entrance to one of the dark passages that Cooper thought of as a ginnel – though they weren’t anything like the usual narrow alleyways that he was familiar with in White Peak villages. Ginnels could be pleasant little thoroughfares, bordered by hedges and trees, and offering glimpses of other people’s back gardens or flower-covered walls. They usually led somewhere that you wanted to go, too. But the dark, brick passages of Waterloo Terrace held no temptation at all.

  ‘I suppose these passages lead into a kind of communal yard at the back,’ said Udall. ‘I don’t know what they keep back there.’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Lucas Oxley will tell us.’

  But there wasn’t much chance of that. Again, there was no response to his knocking.

  ‘It’s starting to feel as though we’re not wanted,’ said Cooper.

  And then he heard a very low growl, which stopped almost immediately. It died simultaneously with the sound of his own voice, so that he wasn’t entirely sure he’d heard it at first. Logically, he wasn’t sure. But emotionally, he had no doubts.

  ‘Well, you got that about right.’

  Lucas Oxley was standing just within the arch of the passage that ran between numbers 1 and 2. He was wearing the same suit that he’d had on the day before yesterday, and the same hat. The long snout of the shaggy-haired Alsatian protruded from the corner of the brick wall, close to its owner’s leg. Its eyes were fixed on Cooper, and a small string of saliva dripped from the side of its mouth on to the path.

  Oxley had been standing so still that again Cooper wouldn’t have been aware of him, but for the dog. A man who could keep still, and a dog that could keep silent. They made a formidable combination.

  Lucas Oxley looked annoyed. Briefly, Cooper wondered whether he was more irritated by the fact that his dog had let him down and broken its silence, or by his unwelcome visitors. Tracy Udall took a couple of steps to the side to separate herself from Cooper and create two targets instead of one. There was a low brick wall between them and Oxley, but it was no barrier to the dog. Cooper couldn’t see the body of the Alsatian, but he was hoping that Oxley had it on a strong leash, for now. He had to be polite, anyway, until other measures were called for. It was procedure.

  ‘Police, Mr Oxley. Detective Constable Cooper and Police Constable Udall.’

  ‘You were here before,’ said Oxley suspiciously.

  He looked at Udall. Cooper could tell from the corner of his eye that Udall had adopted a non-threatening stance known as the ‘Father Murphy’, with her palms open and facing upwards, her left foot slightly forward and her body half-turned. Her forearms would be in contact with her baton and handcuffs, and her cuffs could be drawn unobtrusively, if necessary. It had been automatic for her, something deeply ingrained from her training. And it was a sensible precaution.

  But Cooper felt a bit more relaxed. He had met this dog before, and he knew it would have attacked by now, if Lucas Oxley intended it to. But this time he couldn’t mistake Udall’s uniform.

  ‘I was here on Saturday,’ said Cooper. ‘What’s the dog called?’

  Oxley shifted his feet a bit. He was a man of so little movement that this was almost a burst of activity. Watching him carefully, Cooper decided to read it as a form of apology. Oxley gazed down at the dog.

  ‘Nelson,’ he said.

  ‘Nelson? That’s a grand name.’ Cooper could see that the dog had two eyes, so maybe the name had some other significance than a reference to Admiral Horatio Nelson. The row of houses was called Waterloo Terrace. But surely the Battle of Waterloo was on land, won by the Duke of Wellington?

  The Alsatian looked pleased to hear its name and get a bit of attention from its owner. Cooper still couldn’t see its body for the brickwork, but the angle of its head changed, and he knew it had sat down. He let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding.

  ‘We’d just like a few words, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, I mind.’

  Cooper took a breath, but pretended he hadn’t heard properly. ‘W
e’re asking a few routine questions. You know about the death of your nephew, Neil Granger?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘It’s a quiet village, isn’t it? We’re hoping that residents like yourself might have seen something. A strange vehicle, or anyone acting suspiciously around the area some time on Friday night or Saturday morning.’

  ‘I saw nothing,’ said Oxley. ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Well, we’d like to have a word with any members of your family –’

  ‘They’re not at home. You know the way out.’

  The Alsatian’s ears went up as it heard the change of tone in Lucas Oxley’s voice, and it let out another rumbling growl. At this point, the procedure was to retreat.

  ‘Don’t you want to help?’ said Cooper in frustration.

  Oxley looked unimpressed. ‘We help ourselves,’ he said.

  16

  In the next lay-by down the valley from where Neil Granger had left his Volkswagen, there was a roadside café in a portakabin, for lorry drivers who wanted to stop on their trans-Pennine runs over the A628. Across the road, black-and-white crash barriers had a strip of red reflectors set into them, warning of the bend as well as the drop.

  The lay-by itself contained the usual debris from passing vehicles – fragments of windscreen glass, cigarette packets, aluminium drinks cans, bits of broken pallet, an entire lorry wheel. And, inexplicably, a pair of green serge trousers lay on the grass, with their legs intertwined. The wall was topped by barbed wire strung between rusted iron posts, intended to discourage people from falling over into the stream below. Further up the hill, water ran down a series of natural steps formed from dark, smooth stones.

  PC Udall pulled up as close as she could to the café. A huge twelve-wheeler Mercedes articulated lorry rumbled into the lay-by behind them. If it had been a small lay-by, like the one where the VW was parked, the truck would almost have filled it on its own. The grill, with its three-pointed star, was right behind their rear bumper, while the driver’s cab was somewhere above them, out of sight. The driver could see down into the car, without being seen himself – until Cooper got out.

  There were two women serving inside the café, surrounded by smells of frying bacon and clouds of steam that the ventilator could hardly cope with. They were busy, and they shook their heads briskly when Cooper and Udall began asking questions. They didn’t remember any customers, except a few of their regular truckers. They didn’t see anything in the lay-by, unless it parked right up by their door.

  Even after a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get out of the stuffy atmosphere. He found he was sweating, and took his jacket off. Then he looked at the sky and saw the clouds dragging more showers towards his end of the valley. Above Torside Reservoir, the rain and sunlight were chasing each other across the face of the hillside so fast that it was as if somebody had just turned up the speed on a film.

  He sighed, and put his jacket back on before leaving Udall in the lay-by and cautiously dodging the traffic to cross the road. He had noticed a rip in the steel crash barriers where a vehicle had gone through and over the edge towards the River Etherow.

  The five Longdendale reservoirs were surrounded by a whole system of channels, weirs and culverts built from square sandstone blocks. They controlled the flow of water to and from the reservoirs, some of them coming into use only for overspill, when the water levels were too high.

  Cooper descended a couple of flights of steps from the side of the A628. He could see that very few people walked here now. The steps were almost overgrown with brambles and ferns in places, and the stone was slippery with moss. Dampness hung in the air, and he had to cling on to the iron railings to keep his footing as he turned a corner halfway down the slope.

  He found he was looking down into a smaller reservoir or holding basin, with water cascading over a weir right beneath his feet. The water ran into a channel and away through a culvert under massive stone buttresses towards the main reservoir. There was a straight drop of about twenty feet into the channel from the steps where he was standing, and the slopes on either side of him were covered in wire mesh to prevent the loose stone from slipping down and blocking the channel. The mesh didn’t hinder the vegetation, which was flourishing in the damp air and the sun on the south-facing slope.

  The mesh had held back the stones, but something else was blocking the channel. The carcass of a dead sheep lay in the water, with white foam bubbling through its ragged fleece, and one of its black ears waving slowly backwards and forwards in the current. The animal had obviously been there for some time. Its body was swollen with gas, and the wool had gradually loosened from its head and shoulders, so that patches of mottled skin were visible through the water.

  Cooper went back to the car and Udall drove round the bend, where they saw Michael Dearden in the next lay-by, arguing with a uniformed officer guarding the tape around Neil Granger’s Volkswagen. They stopped to see what the trouble was.

  ‘Ah, there you are – what’s your name,’ said Dearden when he saw Cooper. ‘How long are you going to keep the track blocked?’

  ‘As long as necessary, sir. We need to preserve any forensic evidence. It can be a long process, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Surely you can leave the track open?’

  ‘No, sir. And I don’t understand what the problem is in using the road through Withens.’

  ‘Oh, forget it.’

  Cooper exchanged looks with the uniformed officer and got back in the car.

  ‘Can we get a look at the old railway tunnel entrances, Tracy?’ he said.

  ‘Of course. At this end, they’re right by where the Woodhead station used to be.’

  She drove a few yards and turned sharply into a narrow roadway that had no signs indicating where it went. At the bottom, some of the station’s platforms were still visible, but the track, sleepers and ballast had all long since been removed.

  It was the tunnels that caught the eye, of course. There were three of them, their entrances driven into a rock face that still bore the marks of the navvies’ pickaxes. The 1950s tunnel was much larger than the other two. It had been made wide enough to take two lines, and it was a lot higher, too. The two smaller tunnels huddled close together, and the three of them made Cooper think of the ewe and its twin lambs, attached to the same hill in their own way.

  To his surprise, he found Gavin Murfin in front of the tunnels talking to one of the maintenance men, who he introduced as Sandy Norton.

  ‘Hey, Ben,’ said Murfin, ‘did you know you can still travel between Woodhead and Dunford Bridge by rail through one of these tunnels?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There’s a little railway line in this tunnel for maintenance work.’

  ‘It’s just a two-foot gauge,’ said Norton. ‘It’s the quickest way for the engineers to get access to the middle of the tunnel. They have a battery electric locomotive shedded here.’

  ‘My brother-in-law would be down here like a shot, if he knew,’ said Murfin. ‘He’s a big railway nut.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that,’ said Norton. ‘They’re always coming here, trying to find some way of getting in.’

  Cooper drew Murfin aside. ‘What are you doing here, Gavin?’

  ‘I’ve been given an hour off jankers.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘For some reason, Miss has gone to the PM.’

  ‘The Neil Granger postmortem?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But I didn’t think she was working on that enquiry. I mean – you are talking about Diane Fry, Gavin?’

  ‘’Course I am. Who else? We’re working on the Emma Renshaw case, but Diane is proper put out that she lost a witness before she could get to him. There’s no way she’s going to accept anybody else’s opinion about whether there’s a connection or not.’

  ‘She wants to prove it one way or the other for herself.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, I can understand that.’

  ‘S
o I’ve been catching up on some other enquiries at the office, and now I’m supposed to meet her at the Renshaws. I noticed the guys working down here and thought I’d take a look at the tunnels.’

  ‘The air shaft where Neil Granger was killed must lead down into here somewhere.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Cooper turned back to the maintenance man.

  ‘I’ve just come down from Withens,’ he said. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Do you ever get the kids from the village hanging around down here?’

  ‘I know the ones you mean. They ride around here on their bikes sometimes. They’re a bit cheeky, but I’ve not had any real bother with them personally.’

  ‘What are the chances of anyone getting into the tunnels?’ said Cooper.

  ‘We never let anyone in,’ said Norton. ‘Safety reasons.’

  Cooper could see the National Grid had been careful with their security. He stood in front of the 1950s tunnel and looked up at the top of the steel-mesh fencing. There wasn’t even enough of a gap for a small child to get through.

  The reason for the security was obvious. The Longdendale Trail was right behind him. It ended at the old station platforms, and would be thronged with walkers and cyclists at the weekends, and in the summer. All kinds of people would get into the tunnels, if they could.

  The surface of the trail had been created by pouring smooth sand over the line of the railway tracks. The sand probably made the going quite difficult when it was wet – in fact, Cooper thought it would be a trail to avoid in bad weather, because it was so open to the elements. A few yards away, in the middle of the trail, lay a dead hare. The skin of its head had been eaten down to the skull, and long, black insects were swarming around its throat, where a wound had been inflicted by a larger animal.

  Norton followed his gaze. ‘Rats are getting a big problem,’ he said. ‘Especially in this middle tunnel.’

  ‘But it isn’t used for anything now, is it?’

  ‘Not at all. Not for a long time.’

  ‘I can see that rats must have thrived in the tunnels when they were being built. With a lot of workmen around, there must have been a plentiful food supply.’