Blind to the Bones Read online

  Cooper wanted to tell her exactly that, but sensed that Angie was right. It fitted in with his own impressions of Diane. He had always thought there was an underlying fear that she barely kept suppressed by hanging on to the stable things in her life – her job, and her promotion ambitions. And her memories of her sister.

  ‘Are you on or off it right now?’ said Cooper.

  Angie Fry smiled that slow, sad smile, but with the instant deviousness in her eyes, the expression that told him she was wondering what lie to use.

  ‘Maybe I’d better not tell you that,’ she said. ‘You being a policeman, and all. I wouldn’t want to compromise your principles.’

  And Cooper knew she was right. If Angie was using heroin now, he would be in difficulties. If she had to get her fix while she was here, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to be forced into that position.

  But he couldn’t help studying her eyes, an automatic reflex from his training. Of course, Angie saw him doing it, and met his stare with undisguised challenge.

  ‘Red eyes, it’s dope,’ she said. ‘Dilated means amphetamines. But “pinny” eyes – then, it’s heroin.’

  Cooper kept on looking. But something must be wrong with his powers of observation. When he looked into Angie’s eyes, he couldn’t see any of the symptoms of drug abuse. All he could see were the pain and the loneliness. And beyond them, that brief flicker that turned his heart for a moment as he looked deep into the eyes of Angie’s younger sister.

  He watched her pick up her rucksack from the floor. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’

  She straightened up, pushed the hair from her forehead, gave him that smile. ‘I don’t know. Can you recommend a good shop doorway somewhere? I’ve got the sleeping bag.’

  ‘You’re living rough?’

  ‘I’m on the streets. What did you think? That I was staying in some smart little hotel with room service and an en-suite bathroom?’

  ‘Haven’t you got any money?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to get any today.’

  ‘How do you usually get money?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  He hoped she meant by begging, but he decided not to press it. ‘You shouldn’t be sleeping on the streets, Angie.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It isn’t safe.’

  ‘So? If you’re so concerned about it, what are you going to do? Are you going to ask me to stay the night here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I thought not. It wouldn’t do, would it? What would people say? What would our Di say?’

  She went out into the hallway and opened the front door. Cooper held it for her while she pulled her rucksack over her thin shoulders, and watched her step out on to the pavement. She looked around, weighing up which way to go, trying to remember where the shops were, or whether there was a park she might find, and a shelter with a vacant bench.

  ‘There are plenty of benches by the river walk, but it’ll be colder down there,’ said Cooper. ‘Water loses heat faster at night.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip,’ she said.

  ‘The market square is quiet, but only after about three o’clock in the morning, when the night-club crowds have gone home. And it’s market day tomorrow, so the market staff will arrive at 5 a.m. to start setting up the stalls. That can be a bit noisy.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘And if you slept on my sofa, you’d have to put up with the cats. They’re a complete pain. Diane hates cats, so I expect you do, too.’

  She looked down the street again. Cooper could hear the sound of the cars on Meadow Road. There was a car stereo playing rap music far too loud, and somebody burning rubber off their tyres as they accelerated from the lights. A traffic patrol would be hanging around later to discourage the boy racers. There was a burst of raucous laughter and the rattle of a can on the pavement.

  ‘I’m not like Diane at all,’ said Angie. ‘I’m quite the opposite, in fact. I thought you would have realized that by now.’

  Cooper looked at her slim hand brushing away the hair, the narrow shoulders, the wiry body, the challenging look in her eyes as she turned towards him. ‘You’re not entirely the opposite,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not. But I’ll tell you something – I don’t mind cats. I quite like them, within reason.’

  ‘Reason has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you’ll have to be out of here by 8 a.m.’

  ‘Do you have to be at work?’

  ‘Out by 8 a.m.,’ said Cooper.

  ‘OK, it’s a deal, then. Cats and all.’

  He took her rucksack off her as she walked past him back into the house.

  ‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s OK, there’s no need to say “you’re welcome”. Because I know I’m not. You just had a sudden vision of me being attacked by some pervert on a bench by the river during the night. And then it might have come out that the friendly local bobby, Constable Cooper, had told me that was the best place to sleep. Not good for your reputation, eh?’

  ‘I’ll get you some blankets,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

  For a moment, Cooper remembered the feeling he’d experienced just before he answered the door to Angie. That premonition of disaster.

  But he pushed the feeling aside. She’d be out of his flat by 8 a.m. tomorrow – he’d make sure of it. And that would be the last he would ever see of Angie Fry. He’d make certain of that, too.

  20

  Tuesday

  For the past three nights, Diane Fry had dreamed that she found Emma Renshaw’s body. Emma had been dead for two years, and the skin had shrunk to pale tatters on her skull, so that it had become a rubber mask that could be twisted and rearranged into any shape you wanted. For Fry, it transformed into the face of a sixteen-year-old girl – a face as familiar to her as her own, and yet alien. A face that left her sweating, and thrashing her limbs in tangled bedclothes.

  Fry knew this fear. This kind of fear was insidious. You could go to bed at night feeling free of it. Yet when you woke in the morning, you found it had descended from the darkest corners of your room and clung to you like cobwebs.

  So the smell, the sound or the movement that she knew ought to be innocent, suggesting safety, now brought with it not a specific fear, nor a memory of the event that had scarred her in the first place. Instead, it created a sort of general dread, a vague, shapeless terror of something she couldn’t picture or name. In everything now she saw something to fear. The blood in the poppies, the mould in the grass. The bones under the skin of the girl.

  That morning, something finally occurred to Fry that she should have known for a long time. She might well be living in a fantasy world of her own making, just as much as the Renshaws were. Angie Fry was no more likely to come home now than Emma Renshaw was. After all, Angie had been gone for fifteen years. A decade and a half. Fry had to repeat it to herself, but it still didn’t mean what it should. Hardly any time at all had passed in her own mind – not in that corner where Angie was still a teenager full of life, setting off for a rave somewhere, leaving the house with a laugh and a brief kiss for her younger sister, vanishing into the night in a whiff of scent and the smell of dope.

  Fry knew she wasn’t immune to the tricks that the mind played. Why should she be free of the need to cling to a desperate, mistaken belief in the face of reality? Was she, too, blind to the bones?

  Angie had already been using heroin by the time she disappeared, and the life of an addict was brutish and short. Fry had seen enough of other people’s brothers and sisters to know what happened to them. Fifteen years was a long time in an addict’s life. And if Angie had still been alive, she would have found her by now.

  Fry found herself facing a decision that had slipped through the gap in her curtains like the dawn replacing the yellow glare of the streetlights outside her window. She had to accept that A
ngie was dead. Otherwise there was nowhere for her to go, except into the dark alleyways of obsession.

  For the first time in months, Fry spent some time doing her exercises, emptying her mind, searching for the energy that she needed to get her through. She positioned herself on the rug in her bedroom and went through the movements, gradually losing sight of the faded wallpaper and the floor as her eyes looked beyond them and into herself. Finally, she began to feel the first whispers of the physical intensity that would provide her with the strength that she had lost.

  It was a start, but not enough. She needed to put all thoughts of Angie out of her mind, and let the knowledge of her sister’s death steal up on her quietly without her noticing. And, perhaps most of all, she needed support in dealing with the Renshaws – the kind of support the presence of Gavin Murfin couldn’t give her.

  The cats had been hunting during the night. One of them had been eating its catch in the back garden of 8 Welbeck Street. There wasn’t much left of the victim now – only the stomach and intestines, and some other internal organs. They lay on the stone flags, still glistening, dark green and red. And there was something else left, as well – two tiny feet, long and pale, and tipped by white claws. One of the feet was curled into a sort of fist, but the other was stretched out on the ground as it would have been in life. They were the remains of a rat.

  Ben Cooper looked around the area for signs of a scaly tail, to get an idea of the size of the dead rodent. Cats didn’t normally eat the tail either. They would consume the head and the front feet, but not the back feet, or the stomach, or the tail. If he could find it, the size and thickness of it would give him an indication of whether Randy or Mrs Macavity had caught an adult rat, or a young one freshly out of its nest. Were rats breeding nearby? If so, there would be more remains to come, now that the cats had located their nest.

  But there was no sign of a tail on the flags. Cooper shrugged. It was possible some bird had flown away with it, thinking it was a worm. There were magpies in this area – they were frequently mobbed by the smaller birds when they landed in the trees. Magpies were carrion eaters. They also took young songbirds, and even the eggs from other birds’ nests. They were ideal for clearing up the leftovers from other predators.

  ‘One of you isn’t going to want any breakfast this morning, then?’ he said, as the cats came fussing around his legs.

  But he put their bowls down anyway, and they ate as eagerly as always.

  Cooper straightened up, and found Angie Fry watching him from the door of the conservatory, with that smile on her face. He felt a surge of unreasonable anger that a private moment was being observed by this unwelcome stranger. Somehow, it seemed to make it worse that this was the first morning he had been able to establish the back yard as his territory. He hadn’t even had time to explore the overgrown garden.

  ‘You have to leave now,’ he said.

  ‘OK, OK. You said by eight o’clock, and I’m on my way. I just wanted to say thanks before I went.’

  Cooper felt himself begin to flush. It was amazing that Angie Fry should have the same casual ability to sway his emotions that her sister did. His annoyance had turned immediately to remorse for being rude.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘I hope you’ll remember, though, what I said last night.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  ‘That’s good, Ben.’

  He accompanied her to the door of the flat, but she paused on the doorstep.

  ‘I may see you again,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Then the door of the other flat opened, and suddenly a dark-haired woman stood in the hallway, swaying forward slightly as if she’d been forced to stop suddenly, to avoid bumping into him. Another complete stranger to Cooper, she looked to be in her late thirties, and was wearing a black jacket and blue jeans.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Cooper could see an expression of alarm cross her face. He could forgive her if she took him to be a mugger.

  ‘Hi, I’m your neighbour,’ he said. ‘Ben Cooper.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  She visibly relaxed, and held out a hand. ‘Peggy Check. So you’re the young man downstairs. That’s what Dorothy Shelley calls you.’

  Cooper shook her hand. He looked around for Angie, but she’d vanished into the street without a word. He found Peggy smiling broadly at him, as if at some huge joke. She had a smile that transformed her face and brought out a depth of humour in her eyes, and Cooper suddenly felt at ease with her. It made him realize how on edge he’d been for the last few hours, ever since Angie Fry had arrived on his doorstep.

  ‘Yes, that’s me,’ he said. ‘The young man downstairs.’

  ‘You’re a policeman, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dorothy says I’ll be perfectly safe with you around. But it isn’t too dangerous around Edendale, is it?’

  Cooper could feel himself relaxing more and more by the second. All the instincts he’d been repressing while talking to Angie were coming to the fore again. He detected a natural warmth that had been uncomfortably missing from his earlier visitor.

  ‘No, you’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Watch out for the cats, though. They’re killers.’

  Peggy looked as though she wanted to close her door and leave, but she couldn’t do it with Cooper blocking the way in the little porch. He stepped back over the threshold into his own flat.

  She smiled again. ‘See you around, I guess, Ben.’

  ‘You must come in and have a coffee some time.’

  ‘Love to. Just let me know. Catch you later.’

  Cooper watched her head off down the street towards the market square, walking with a brisk confidence. She might be a stranger here, but she would be all right in Edendale. There was no doubt about that.

  And he felt sure of one other thing. If she did take up his invitation to come in for a coffee one day, Peggy Check wouldn’t sit in his flat and tell him lies all evening.

  Ben Cooper found Diane Fry standing in front of his desk when he arrived at West Street. She had an armful of files and something that looked like a photo album. She seemed a bit subdued, but that wasn’t what Cooper noticed most when he looked up at her. He found himself automatically looking for the similarities to her sister. The slim shoulders and straight fair hair were recognizable. But there was something else, too – something about the look in the eyes that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Fry brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Another familiar gesture.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ she said. ‘What are you staring at me for?’

  ‘Oh … nothing.’

  ‘If you say so. Ben, I want you to take a look at this. Tell me what you think.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Sarah Renshaw’s cuttings album. She let me borrow it because she’s just started a new one.’

  Mrs Renshaw had collected a thick album of cuttings from newspapers. They were mostly reports of missing children who had been reunited with their families, some of them after several years. There were also stories about young people living rough on the streets of various cities, or in squats, or even in the temporary camps of New Age travellers and environmental protesters.

  There were scores of them, and Cooper was astonished at the range of newspapers represented. All of the nationals were there, both tabloid and broadsheet. There were Scottish papers, and local weeklies from Yorkshire and the Midlands, in fact from all over Britain. Some of the stories, he realized, were printouts of pages from the websites of foreign newspapers, mostly American. Cooper turned to one from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, featuring a girl injured in a car accident on Highway 54 and left unconscious in hospital. The police in a place called Oneida were trying to identify the victim, and were appealing for help from the public. The phone number had been circled in blue ink. He guessed the Oneida cops would have had a call from Sarah Renshaw. He hoped they had dealt with her
sympathetically.

  Cooper checked the dates of the cuttings. The earlier ones began almost immediately after Emma’s disappearance, but were mainly local stories, and they were weeks apart. But as the album filled up, the dates got closer together, their sources more far-flung and international, until the most recent pages were packed with stories culled from the internet day after day.

  It gave Cooper a dizzying glimpse of the world as seen by Sarah Renshaw. In this world, it was as if Emma had started off as just a single missing person in North Derbyshire two years ago, but had steadily multiplied herself over the months. In her various incarnations, she had spread out and scattered all over the globe, invading the world like an army of clones, or a virus proliferating at an unmanageable rate.

  These multiple Emmas had ended up in all kinds of places, some of them lost and anonymous, some hungry or injured, alone or finally reunited. And Sarah Renshaw had spent hours at the computer tracking them down. Perhaps she had become increasingly desperate in her efforts as she realized the numbers involved, and discovered the speed of the virus that she was trying to keep up with. There were more young people going missing every day than anyone could imagine.

  Cooper closed the album with a sigh. They were far from being clones, but the young women featured in these cuttings did have a few things in common, and one big difference from Emma Renshaw. Each of them was someone’s daughter, of course. Many of them would have parents worrying about them at home.

  But most of all, every one of them was still alive.

  ‘It’s sad,’ said Cooper.

  Fry nodded. ‘The most worrying thing is the guilt factor.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sarah Renshaw keeps talking about this “belief” business. I think if Emma turns up dead, she’s going to interpret that to mean she didn’t believe hard enough. She’ll think Emma is dead because she failed her.’

  ‘That isn’t rational at all.’

  ‘There’s nothing rational about guilt. There’s nothing rational about the Renshaws at the moment.’