Blind to the Bones Read online

  ‘You think he has some information on this Senior?’

  ‘It seems likely. I’m scenting a breakthrough. You met Philip Granger, didn’t you, Ben?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let’s go and see what he has to say, then.’

  Philip Granger was looking a bit better than last time Cooper saw him. The initial shock had perhaps worn off now, and some more useful information might well be coming back to him. This was a strange time for relatives, following a suspicious death. Until someone was charged with murder, or twenty-eight days had passed, Neil Granger’s body wouldn’t be released for a funeral, so his brother might have to wait a month or so yet before he could start to put the whole business behind him.

  ‘I heard that you’ve arrested David Senior,’ he said.

  ‘No. At the moment, he’s helping us voluntarily,’ said Hitchens.

  Granger nodded. ‘Right. But I think there might be something you haven’t realized.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Neil was gay.’

  Hitchens shrugged. ‘So?’

  Granger looked surprised at the DI’s reaction and didn’t seem to know what else to say for a moment. Cooper felt surprised, too, but concentrated on not giving it away in his expression.

  ‘Neil didn’t make any big deal of it,’ said Granger. ‘But he did get the piss taken out of him by some of our cousins. That’s one reason he was keen to move out of Withens, you see. I thought it might make a difference – Neil being gay, I mean.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference to us, sir,’ said Hitchens. ‘These days we aim to treat everyone fairly, regardless of ethnic origin, religious belief, gender or sexual orientation.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It might have been the first time that Philip Granger had heard the words, but they were familiar to Cooper. In fact, he was fairly sure they were on a noticeboard somewhere in the station under the heading ‘Statement of Purpose’.

  ‘I mean, the time has long since passed when the fact that your brother was gay would lead to us making any assumptions about his lifestyle or his associates,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘I see.’ Granger looked almost disappointed. ‘I thought I was helping.’

  ‘Unless you’re suggesting this has some direct relevance to the enquiry into your brother’s death?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Granger. ‘It’s just that David Senior … well, I don’t know what connection you think he has to Neil. But they were … they had a relationship.’

  ‘Do you know anything else about David Senior?’

  ‘He used to work at the chemicals factory with Neil. That’s where they met, but that’s all I know about him.’

  ‘Does he ride a motorbike?’

  Granger frowned. ‘Not as far as I know. Why?’

  ‘We were told that some of your brother’s friends were bikers.’

  ‘If it was Neil’s neighbours who told you that, they probably meant me. I ride a motorbike.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Hitchens, as if that had confirmed what he suspected.

  Now Granger looked a bit uncomfortable, perhaps feeling that he hadn’t helped as much as he hoped he would.

  ‘There was something else.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You were asking me about antiques and things …’

  ‘Have you remembered something?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But there was a small box on the mantelpiece in Neil’s house when I went there on Saturday. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I don’t remember ever seeing it there before.’

  Cooper searched his memory. He thought he had done pretty well checking the CD player, but he had never noticed the box.

  ‘What was it made of?’ he said.

  ‘It was metal. Bronze or brass, I couldn’t tell. About this big –’ Granger held his hands a few inches apart.

  Hitchens looked at Cooper, who shook his head. ‘Well, well,’ said Hitchens. ‘Let’s see if anyone else has noticed it.’

  As soon as Philip Granger had left, DI Hitchens’ manner changed. Cooper had to lengthen his stride to follow the DI back to his office.

  ‘Is there a rush, sir?’ he said.

  ‘We have to get on to it straight away,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘This bronze or brass box, you mean?’

  ‘Well, there’s that as well.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘I need to get somebody to work turning over the local arse bandits. They’ll be shitting themselves knowing one of their bum chums has got himself done in.’

  ‘But, sir, didn’t you just say …?’

  ‘Of course I did.’ Hitchens stopped suddenly. ‘You’ve got to be sensitive with bereaved relatives, you know, Cooper. Didn’t they tell you that in training?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, then. Do you want to do bandits or box?’

  ‘Box,’ said Cooper.

  Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin were on the M6 motorway, approaching the junction with the M5 north of Birmingham. They were already well inside the vast urban sprawl at the heart of the Black Country. It couldn’t have looked more different from the empty wastes of peat moor around Withens.

  ‘Is the Black Country the place where black pudding comes from?’ said Murfin.

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘Well, I just wondered, like. I know Bakewell pudding comes from Bakewell, so I thought –’

  ‘No, Gavin, it doesn’t.’

  ‘OK.’

  They were passing through the western edge of Smethwick, having taken the wrong exit from the M5 when Murfin got excited about seeing the West Bromwich Albion football ground. Fry was starting to feel edgy as they came closer to her old stamping grounds. The feeling of tension was like steel springs trying to pull her into the air, so that she hardly seemed to be touching her car seat. But she knew she mustn’t take out her own edginess on Gavin Murfin.

  ‘What about blackberry crumble, then?’ said Murfin.

  ‘No, Gavin! Now, will you shut up about it?’

  ‘All right.’

  Fry remembered all too clearly shopping with her friends in Birmingham or at the Merry Hill shopping centre, touring the Birmingham clubs, drinking lager while she listened to the boys talking about West Brom.

  They drove through Langley and hit traffic at the junction with the A4123 Wolverhampton Road, where the signs all seemed to point to the Merry Hill shopping centre. It had been Fry’s shopping mecca as a teenager, the place where all her friends had gone to meet on a Saturday – not to spend money, because they didn’t have any. Well, not unless somebody had nicked a few quid from their mum. They went just to walk around, to be there and be seen there. It made you part of the crowd, part of the Merry Hill lot.

  With her friends, she had come to know the place so well that it was like a second home. They had learned all the ways of avoiding the security guards and the CCTV cameras. But there had been others attracted to Merry Hill shopping centre, too – men who had money, and had seemed attractive. And perhaps a little dangerous, too.

  ‘Black Forest gateau?’ said Murfin.

  They turned south on Wolverhampton Road and headed towards Warley and Bearwood. And as soon as she saw the big white cross picked out in brickwork on the tower of Warley Baptist Church, she knew she was back home.

  There were starlings roosting on the high ledges, their white droppings streaking brickwork that had always seemed a little ornate for a Baptist church. They stopped to fill up with petrol. On the forecourt of the petrol station, Fry saw the familiar blue-and-cream buses passing, and heard the sound of a genuine West Indian accent.

  Murfin was intrigued by the Caribbean restaurants and Punjabi food stores they passed along the road.

  ‘A Somali takeaway!’ he said. ‘We don’t get those in Edendale.’

  ‘You’re not getting one here, either,’ said Fry. ‘Turn left up ahead.’

  They turned into a housing estate and drove through the
streets to Hilltop. Murfin didn’t question her directions, knowing that she was familiar with the area. They passed Warley High School on Pound Road. It was the middle of the morning, lesson time, so there were no kids hanging around outside. Fry heard a bell ring somewhere and was glad they were already past. She didn’t want to be in sight of the school when the kids appeared.

  Warley Baths were now called a swimming centre. Further up Thimblemill Road was the library, where Fry had spent even more time, sitting among the books, looking for something she could relate to, something that told a story similar to her own. She had never found anything.

  At the infant school someone had planted a yucca in a concrete flower bed, and there were security shutters over some of the windows. But it still looked much the same. Next door was the King’s Community Church. Had it been called that back in the 1980s? She had a feeling that ‘community’ had been an invention of the eighties. Before that, people hadn’t felt the need to use the name. A community was something you just were.

  They negotiated their way through a series of little roundabouts, each with its cluster of shops and a pub. And on George Road she found the Plough still there at one end of the road, with the George Hotel at the other, near the infant school. Familiar places, all of them. Yet alien now, too, like backdrops for a recurrent bad dream.

  From the roundabout near the Hilltop shops, she could see the view across the valley to more houses. There were some masts on the horizon, but she couldn’t remember what they were for.

  ‘Do you want to stop, Gavin?’ she said. ‘You can get a pie in the shop over there.’

  ‘Why, sure,’ said Murfin, surprised.

  While he went into the shop, she walked a few yards back to the roundabout. Yes, the little brick semi was still there, too. It wasn’t a council house any more, by the look of it, but had probably been bought from the council by its occupants. The new owners had put in a Georgian-style front door and leaded windows, removed the crumbling rendering from the walls and covered them with artificial stone. They had painted all the woodwork white, and they had even erected a little wooden fence, which symbolically separated the house from the pavement.

  For many years, Fry hadn’t been able to hear certain songs cropping up on the radio without being transported back to Warley. Anything by Right Said Fred or Salt ’n’ Pepa turned some kind of switch in her mind, and she instantly found herself again in that crumbling council house on the Hilltop estate. She would be lying on her bed in her own room, listening to a cheap stereo and holding the diary she had hidden under her spare sweaters in a bottom drawer, just as Emma Renshaw had done.

  In those days, there had been particular pieces of music that she had used to try to lift her mood, and others she had chosen because they matched her depression, or because their words allowed her to wallow in tearful self-pity. Now, they all meant the same thing. They all recalled the bedroom and the diary, the painful recording of the details of her life, the failure of a miracle to happen.

  Fry stood for few moments longer, looking at the window of the front bedroom. Then, beginning to get embarrassed, she turned away.

  Murfin was waiting for her by the car, smiling contentedly. Food always made him happy. Fry could get envious of him, if she spent too much time in his company.

  ‘We can cut through this next street, Gavin,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  They passed Warley Water Tower, so like a medieval fortress from a distance that it had fuelled her fantasies as a child. And beyond the golf club were Warley Woods. The woods seemed to mark the southern boundary of her territory, with Wolverhampton Road at the western edge, providing the escape route into town. The woods looked neater and more well trained now, less threatening in their orderliness, but also less like a place that might offer a refuge when you needed one.

  In a short time, the place had changed a lot. Yet Fry knew she would have difficulty putting her finger on what exactly it was that had changed, what the subtle differences were that made this place so alien from the world she had known as a teenager.

  She was glad she’d come, though. Warley was the physical link to her past, and seeing it had helped her to put it into perspective. Finding that the house on the Hilltop estate was nothing like it had been fifteen years ago gave her the power to sever the link in her memory. The bedroom and the diary couldn’t exist behind that stone cladding and the leaded windows. The music had faded with the sight of the little white fence.

  And now, maybe, she could put the whole of her past to rest.

  Murfin had stopped the car at a crossroads, where there were long rows of shops running to right and left.

  ‘This is Bearwood,’ said Fry. ‘Where Emma Renshaw went missing, too.’

  24

  It turned out that the search of Neil Granger’s house had recovered the box. It had been logged by the exhibits officer, but its existence was buried in a mass of paperwork. It was even smaller than Neil’s brother had recollected – about four inches long and three inches wide, and it was made of brass, not bronze.

  ‘It looks Indian,’ said Ben Cooper.

  ‘Expert, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You won’t mind if we get a second opinion then?’

  Cooper could see that the DI was irritated to have had to wait for a member of the public to point out the box. It was the only item that resembled an antique in Neil Granger’s house, and now he would have to explain to Mr Kessen why it had only just turned up.

  ‘Fingerprints?’ said Cooper.

  Hitchens sighed. ‘Two recent sets. Neil Granger’s and his brother’s. We took the brother’s prints for elimination when we knew he’d been in the house.’

  ‘He must have touched it when he noticed it on Saturday.’

  ‘Check with him anyway.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything in it, sir?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘It would have been nice, wouldn’t it?’

  He passed the bag containing the box to Cooper. ‘See what you can do with it, then. Origin, value – ownership, if you can.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That’ll take you a while, I expect. What else were you supposed to be working on?’

  ‘Withens,’ said Cooper. ‘The Oxleys.’

  ‘Ah well, you’ll probably get round to them later this afternoon. I don’t suppose they’ll miss you.’

  ‘I think I’m the highlight of their day, sir,’ said Cooper.

  After several fruitless phone calls trying to establish the ownership of a brass box that everyone agreed might or might not be Indian, Ben Cooper finally tracked down a dealer in Crookes who offered to take a closer look at the box. Crookes was on the western outskirts of Sheffield, and could be reached via the A628. It was too tempting to resist. He made an appointment that allowed him plenty of time to take another quick look at Withens on the way.

  It was nearly four o’clock by the time Cooper reached the village. He saw straight away that the postman came late in Withens. It was probably the last place he reached on his delivery round from Sheffield, or wherever the nearest sorting office was. A distinctive red van was parked outside the Quiet Shepherd, and Cooper walked over to wait for the postman to come out. The postie was in his thirties, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and wearing a navy blue Royal Mail body-warmer. He agreed he was nearing the end of his round, and seemed quite happy to spend a couple of minutes talking about his customers in Withens.

  ‘They’re a mixed bunch here,’ he said. ‘Take the folk at Waterloo Terrace, the Oxleys. They don’t seem to want their letters at all. At number 1, they nailed the letter box up once. I had to report it, back at the office, and the manager spoke to them. But you’d be surprised at the attitude some people have. I mean, it’s not my fault if they don’t like the mail they get, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  But there’s the lady at the opposite end. Mrs Wallwin, number 7. She hardly gets anything. Sometimes, I collect together a
few bits of junk mail and stuff that’s been sent to other people, and I put it through her door, just so that she’s got something to open now and then.’

  ‘You do?’

  Cooper remembered the envelopes he had seen on Mrs Wallwin’s table. ‘You’re a winner!’ ‘Open now for some wonderful news!’ He had assumed Mrs Wallwin used them for lighting her fire, like everybody else. But perhaps she kept them as a sign that somebody out there was thinking about her. Did she realize it was only the postman?

  The postman seemed to misread Cooper’s expression as disapproval. ‘Of course, I know I shouldn’t do that, really. I’d probably get the sack if some busybody shopped me for it. But it’s doing no harm. It’s only stuff nobody else wants, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re not kidding. I’d pay you not to deliver my junk mail,’ said Cooper.

  Since he’d moved into his flat three months before, he’d been gathering mail addressed to every previous tenant. Some of them had been dead for years, according to Mrs Shelley. And some of them had strange tastes in mail-order items, too.

  The postman was reassured. ‘The other lot who can be a bit of a nuisance are the Old Rectory folk. Name of Renshaw.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They hang around at the gate waiting for me to get there. I think they must be at the upstairs window watching for me coming down the hill, because by the time I get to them they’re jumping up and down with impatience and snapping at me for being late. Which I never am, I might say. I get up here pretty much on time, no matter what the weather’s like in the winter. They don’t seem to appreciate that.’

  ‘So the Renshaws are eager for their mail?’

  ‘Aye.’ The postman sniffed. ‘Trouble is, by the way they react, I don’t think I’ve ever brought them what they’re hoping for. I suppose that’s my fault, too.’

  ‘The Oxleys,’ said Cooper, ‘do you ever have any problems with a dog there? A long-haired Alsatian?’

  ‘No, I never have a problem,’ said the postman. ‘I know it’s there, all right, but they keep it shut up in the yard. They never let the dog out at the front of the house. Well, not unless they really don’t like the look of you.’