Blind to the Bones Read online

  ‘Professionals, then?’

  ‘No doubt about it.’

  ‘Local? Or the travelling variety?’

  ‘Well, we definitely think they’re using somewhere on our patch to store the stuff they’ve nicked. Another isolated farmhouse, probably.’

  ‘What items are they going for?’

  ‘This lot go for antiques: clocks, porcelain – anything small that looks as though it might be worth a bit of money. There’s a huge market for that kind of thing. It’s likely they’re collecting enough for a vanload, then shipping it off to the States or somewhere in Europe. Easy money, all right.’

  The Shetland pony was deliberately bullying the two Muscovy ducks, nudging them around the paddock until they began to flap their wings and quack angrily.

  ‘Did the architect design the alterations himself?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I believe so. But he seems to have designed them for looks, rather than with security in mind, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You’re right. He really should have known better. Here they come.’

  The task force officers were escorting two men out of the target house. Each man had his hands cuffed behind his back and an officer gripping his elbow. They looked as though they had dressed hastily in whatever had come to hand first. Much as Cooper had done himself, in fact. But these two would have the chance to put their feet up for a while in a warm, dry cell when they reached the section station at Glossop.

  Cooper turned the binoculars westwards, looking for more signs of civilization in the bare Dark Peak landscape of peat moors and heather. His attention was caught by a small, tree-lined valley and the glimpse of a church tower.

  ‘What’s over there?’ he said.

  ‘That? Oh, that’s Withens.’

  Cooper could hardly see the village itself. It seemed to be lying in the bottom of a hollow, slipped casually into a narrow cleft in the moors. There were trees above the village on the lower slopes, through which the roofs of houses were barely visible. But the valley was so narrow that it looked as though the two facing slopes were only waiting for the right moment to slide back together and crush the village completely, and all its inhabitants with it.

  ‘Withens,’ said Cooper, trying the sound of the name in his mouth as he might taste an unfamiliar morsel of food, not sure whether it was going to be bitter or sweet, soft on the teeth or difficult to chew.

  Above the village was a moorland plateau, a gloomy blend of dark khakis and greens, with no sign of the purple flowers of the heather that would bring colour in the summer. Much of the landscape up there would be quagmire – a wet morass of peat bog that shifted underfoot, sucking at the soles of boots and clinging to trousers. Across the valley, Bleaklow Mountain stood right on the watershed of England, and attracted sixty inches of rain a year to its wastes of haggs and groughs.

  ‘I thought we’d go down to the village and take a look when we’ve finished here,’ said Udall. ‘You might be interested to see it. Withens has its own problems. As it happens, the local vicar reported a breakin yesterday.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Cooper noticed a pair of black shapes in the distance, circling over the moor. He turned the binoculars towards them, grateful for any sign of life in the landscape.

  But this wasn’t the sort of life he welcomed. They were carrion crows. Though he couldn’t see what had attracted them, he guessed they probably had their eye on a weak lamb. Sometimes, before shearing, their prey might be an adult sheep that had rolled over and couldn’t get up again because of the weight of the unshorn fleece on its back. But in the spring it was the sickliest lambs that the crows were looking for as they flapped and circled over the moors. Just now, their diet would consist mostly of young grouse and the eggs of other birds. But a weak lamb was a great bonus. Its carcass would last them for days.

  If they’d found a lamb up there, then they would land in a little while and perch on a handy rock as they waited patiently for it to weaken enough to be helpless. Then they would begin to work on its eyes, picking at the white flesh as if they were delicacies that had to be eaten fresh. And once the lamb was blind, the crows could eat the rest of it at their leisure, while it died.

  Cooper lowered the binoculars and looked up at the dark bulk of the hills beyond Withens.

  ‘Tracy, have you noticed the smoke?’ he said.

  Udall followed his gaze. ‘Hell!’

  Black clouds were billowing across a wide stretch of the moor, with an occasional flicker of flame visible behind them. The seat of the fire looked as though it might be just below the horizon. PC Udall went off to her car to use the radio, but was back in a couple of minutes.

  ‘Moorland fire. They think it was started by some kids on a school outing from Manchester. The fire service are turning out all the crews they can muster, but it’s right on the summit above Crowden, so it’s pretty inaccessible. The poor bloody firefighters will have to do the last half-mile on foot with their equipment. They’re also saying they might have to mobilize the helicopter to bomb it with water from the reservoirs.’

  ‘Beyond our remit, anyway,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Thank God.’

  A gust of wind blew along the road and another shower spattered their faces. But there was too little rain to help the firefighters.

  ‘I think they’re ready for us down there,’ said Udall.

  ‘OK.’

  Cooper took one last look at the moors above Withens. The smoke was spreading in the wind rolling low over the heather. But in front of it, blacker even than the smoke, the two carrion crows were still circling.

  Even before the sun had risen on Withens Moor, Neil Granger had known he wasn’t alone. He had been standing with his back to one of the air shafts above the old railway tunnels, facing east towards the approaching dawn. There was nothing but air between his face and the black ridge of Gallows Moss, where the light would soon begin to creep up among the tors.

  Every sound from the surrounding valleys had reached his ears – a bird splashing out of the water on one of the reservoirs in Longdendale, the growl of an engine on the A628. Even the slightest movement of the wind stirred the coarse grass, like fingers groping for his presence in the darkness. The air was so clean that he could taste the first vapour rising from the dew on the heather, like the tang of cold metal in his mouth. But in a few minutes, the dawn would take away the darkness and the dew.

  At first, the sounds he heard nearby could have been the shifting of small pieces of stone on the slope behind him. The scree was loose, and the changing temperature could easily make the stones move against each other. But gradually Neil became aware that someone had walked up to the air shaft behind him. Now, he thought, they were probably resting on the other side of the high, circular wall.

  ‘Well, I’d given up on you,’ said Neil. ‘I was starting to think no one was coming.’

  His voice dropped into the valley, carried away on the wind. There was no response from the darkness, and he smiled.

  ‘It’s a bit of a steep climb, isn’t it? It creased me up completely.’

  He expected to hear someone gasping for breath. But there was nothing – only the darkness and the distant sounds from the valley.

  ‘I’m so unfit after the winter that, by the time I got to the top, I thought I was having a heart attack.’

  He paused, but still there was nothing.

  ‘I thought I was going to die up here, and nobody would know. If I’d died and you hadn’t come, then no one would have found me for days.’

  Neil glanced at Gallows Moss. A pale wash of colour was starting to touch the clouds. He raised his voice a little, as if the appearance of the light had revealed something that he hadn’t suspected until now.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘Do you want a hand?’

  Neil waited in the silence, no longer facing east, but looking back over his shoulder into the west. Away from the light and towards the darkness. Something was different. The wind no longer fel
t refreshingly cool, but was cold enough to make him shiver. The sensations against his face weren’t like gentle fingers, but sharp claws scratching his skin. The air didn’t taste of the dew, but of an unnamed fear. Neil wondered if he would ever hear the first bird calling at the sight of the rising sun. It had been only the darkness that had made him feel safe, after all. And in a moment, the dawn would take away the darkness.

  ‘Yes, I thought I was going to die up here,’ he said.

  The first blow that hit him was so unexpected – like the world falling in, like a ton of stone toppling on to him from the air shaft, or a train bursting out of the ground from the old railway tunnel.

  Neil went down, instantly unconscious, crashing on to the stones with a thud and crunch of bone. Part of his scalp had peeled away, and the bone underneath had shattered, ripping the membrane that covered the brain. Within a few moments, his cerebrospinal fluid was leaking from the tear on to the stones – stones that were already covered in blood that was spreading from his scalp wound. Blood had matted his hair and trickled in small rivulets down his face and neck, forming an interconnecting web like the meandering channels that drained the peat moor on which he lay. But the blood could find nowhere on his skin to settle and dry. So it continued to trickle across the greasy surface until it touched the stones and ran into the ground.

  Where the fluid was leaking from his brain, infection would soon enter. But it would be too late to matter. Part of his brain tissue had been bruised by the impact, and now a small haematoma was forming deep among the tangled pathways and ganglia. The haematoma would be fatal.

  But Neil might still have survived, if he had received urgent attention in a hospital emergency room. A neurosurgeon could have ordered a CT scan, operated to remove the haematoma, then sutured the membrane and carefully picked out the remaining bone fragments. With immediate surgery and a course of antibiotics against the infection, Neil might have lived.

  But Neil Granger was destined never to reach a hospital, or a neurosurgeon. As his life oozed away into the peat, there was one person who waited for him to die. But there was no one to call an ambulance. Neil would never recover from the unconsciousness that followed the first blow to his head, or the coma that the second produced. He would never know what happened after he was left alone, and never feel the fear of what would happen to his body after death.

  Nothing moved around the air shaft except the steam that trickled out of its mouth and drifted down the valley – and, a little while later, the two black shapes that circled over Withens Moor.

  3

  DS Diane Fry knew all about fear. Some people were excited by it, and liked to play with the taste and smell of it, teasing their senses to the limit. But others were destroyed by its poison, eaten away by a senseless, insidious acid that seeped into their brains before they could fight it.

  It wasn’t always possible to know what made you afraid. A therapist had once told her that fear conditioning could be created by a single episode, because that was the way nature had designed the human brain. It was an evolutionary advantage, a mechanism to prevent you from returning to a dangerous situation. Once frightened, forever cautious. And that was why just one sound, a single movement or a smell, could trigger the train of memory that stimulated fear. The sound of a footstep on a creaking floorboard, the sliding pattern of shadows as a door opened in the darkness, the soapy smell of shaving foam that made her nauseous even now.

  The evidence bag that Diane Fry was holding contained none of those things. It contained only a grubby and stained mobile phone. So why did she feel as though the process had begun that would send her sliding down a long, dark tunnel towards the source of her fear?

  ‘Do the parents know about this yet, sir?’ she said.

  Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens was also nothing to be afraid of, as far as Fry was concerned. He was capable enough, but had a disrespectful attitude towards his senior officers that wasn’t going to get him any further in the promotion game. It was a tendency he didn’t seem able to control, any more than Fry could control the dark shadow that had flapped and squirmed somewhere in her mind when she had picked up the bag.

  ‘No, Diane,’ said Hitchens. ‘In fact, we need to be a bit cautious about that. We’ll have to consider how much information we give them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Renshaw are, how shall I put it … a bit difficult to talk to.’

  Fry didn’t feel in the least surprised. Since she had transferred to Derbyshire Constabulary from the West Midlands, she had found most people in the Peak District difficult to talk to – including her colleagues in E Division. Not only did they find her accent strange and exotic, but they also seemed to be living in a different world entirely, a world where the city streets she had known before just didn’t exist.

  ‘I’d like to see exactly where the phone was discovered,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. The contact details are all there. It was found by members of a rambling club doing a spring clean on an overgrown footpath near Chapel-en-le-Frith. The phone was one of hundreds of bits of rubbish they picked up. If it hadn’t been wrapped up tight in a plastic carrier bag, there might not have been anything recognizable left to be found.’

  Despite its condition, the mobile phone had still contained its SIM card when it was found. It had been traced via the network operators, Vodafone, to the ownership of Miss Emma Renshaw, the Old Rectory, Main Street, Withens.

  Fry opened the file that Hitchens had given her. As soon as she saw the first photograph, she thought she knew what had triggered the fear. Emma Renshaw was standing in a garden, wearing a white sweater with leaping dolphins across the chest. Her hair was fair and straight, hanging almost to her shoulders, and she looked happy, but shy, and a little nervous too.

  The second photograph was slightly more recent. A note said it had been taken while Emma was on a study trip in Italy. Not Venice or Florence, or even Rome – the places where everyone was supposed to go to look at art. She was in Milan, visiting contemporary design houses. But the weather had been warm and sunny in Milan. The photo showed her standing in front of a café with another girl, of Asian appearance. Emma’s hair was pulled back, revealing good cheekbones and delicate ears, which made her look more vulnerable, despite the increased confidence in her smile. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and the skin of her arms and neck was bare and pink.

  ‘Emma Renshaw disappeared just over two years ago,’ said Hitchens. ‘She was a student in Birmingham, where she attended the University of Central England’s School of Art and Design. She was last seen by the young people she shared a house with in Bearwood, about three miles from the art school. Bearwood is in the area called the Black Country.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, of course you do.’

  Fry could see the information from her personnel file gradually being dredged up into her DI’s mind. The expression on his face changed as he remembered the awful details, became embarrassed for a moment, then resumed his professional manner.

  ‘You’re from the Black Country yourself, aren’t you, Diane?’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s where I’m from.’

  The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. Old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall were in the Black Country. And many smaller communities, too – like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway. Right next door to Bearwood.

  ‘Anyway, the house the young people shared is in Darlaston Road, Bearwood. Emma’s housemates say they left her in the house getting ready to travel home by train to Derbyshire for the Easter holidays. At least, that’s what Emma told them she was doing, and they had no reason to doubt her.’

  ‘The housemates being Alex Dearden, Debbie Stark and Neil Granger,’ said Fry, consulting the file.

  ‘They were all old friend
s, it seems. The two young men grew up in the same village as Emma, in Withens. Debbie Stark is from Mottram, a few miles away, but she was Emma’s best friend at high school.’

  West Midlands Police had sent copies of all their files to Derbyshire – there were reports of interviews conducted with Dearden, Stark and Granger, and with several others among Emma Renshaw’s friends, neighbours, and classmates and teachers at the art school. Fry noted that the officer assigned to the missing person case had been based at the local Operational Command Unit headquarters in Smethwick – a place she knew well.

  In fact, Fry could picture Darlaston Road, Bearwood, but wasn’t sure at which end of the road she would find 360B, the address Emma Renshaw had shared. Bearwood possessed most of the local shops for the Warley area. She had been there many times.

  ‘I’m not clear on Emma’s last-known movements,’ she said. ‘Who was individually the last to see her? Or did the young people leave the house together?’

  ‘Neil Granger was the last to leave, by a matter of some minutes. He was on his way to work, but had overslept. He said he had been drinking the night before.’

  ‘Did Granger arrive at work on time?’

  ‘A few minutes late,’ said Hitchens. ‘He had a car, which he drove into Birmingham. He claimed the traffic was heavy that morning, and it delayed him even more. The foreman at the site said it was unusual for Granger to be late for work, and he was normally very reliable. So he believed what Granger said, and didn’t think anything of it. He said he had a lot more to worry about with his other employees.’

  Emma had been nineteen when she disappeared, and the guidelines said that immediate enquiries should be made in the case of a missing female under twenty-one. They were considered vulnerable, and, if they went missing, statistically more likely to have been the victim of a crime.