Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Page 30

  ‘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 … ?’

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  ‘Of course I did.’ Kitchens 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

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  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

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  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 serves 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 Warfey. 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 1holding the diary she had hidden under her spare sweaters in a

  tbottom drawer, just as Emma Renshaw had done.

  In those days, there had been particular pieces of music that she t.had used to try to lift her mood, and others she had chosen because

  pthey matched her depression, or because their words allowed her

  Pto wallow in tearful self-pity. Now, they all meant the same thing,

  ttThey all recalled the bedroom and the diary, the painful recording

  h>of the details of her life, the failure of a miracle to happen.

  triFry stood for few moments longer, looking at the window of

  the front bedroom. Then, beginning to get embarrassed, she turned away.

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  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.’

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  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.

  Kitchens 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 Kitchens. ‘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?’

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  ‘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?

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  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.’

  Cooper was surprised to find a Peak Park Ranger in the car park. Of course, the village was within the national park, though it was difficult to remember sometimes. He supposed the area was valued more for its surrounding habitat of peat bogs than for the village itself.

  Cooper introduced himself and asked about the moorland fire that had been burning since Friday night.

  There are still a few patches smouldering under the surface,’ said the Ranger. They might persist for another week or so. Some fires last for months in the peat, you know. We’re lucky it wasn’t

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  a summer one. But that’s another few acres we’ve lost up there. With fires and erosion, we’ll lose the whole bloody landscape in a few years.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’

  ‘Have you seen the erosion recently? The moor is eroding, the sphagnum moss is dying, the peat is disappearing down to the bedrock.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Many thousands of pairs of feet were wearing tracks across the plateaux of the Dark Peak every year, and water running through hundreds of groughs and channels was washing away yet more peat. In places it had been scoured away down to depths of twenty feet, creating deep valleys in the black crust and washing the peat away year by year. It ran down into the water catchment area and into the reservoirs, where the water was brown and tasted peaty.

  ‘Acid rain is the real problem though,’ said the ranger. ‘Long term/

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s been falling on us for decades - for centuries. It’s been falling on us ever since the factories in Manchester began to belch out their pollution over there. The prevailing wind blows all the pollution in this direction, and it falls in the rain when it reaches high ground. It’s the acid rain that’s killed the moss. And it was the moss that bound the surface. Now the m
oss is gone and the peat is exposed, so it gets washed away year by year, inch by inch. Eventually, the hills will be nothing but bare rock. No more banks of purple heather in the summer, no sheep, no grouse, no songbirds. No wildlife of any kind. That’s what acid rain means to us.’

  ‘The moors are a sitting target, I suppose?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s only a matter of time before they’re gone. And fires like this one don’t help. Some fourteen-year-old kid on a school outing from Manchester started it. We don’t know whether he was smoking a fag and dropped it, or whether he lit a fire deliberately, which is just as likely, in my view. But a fire takes days to put out and longer to damp down, and this one has already destroyed thirty acres of moor. Another thirty acres gone. Maybe the acid rain isn’t quick enough. Now Manchester is sending its kids out here to destroy the moors faster.’

  ‘Long-term damage, I suppose?’

  ‘I said “destroyed”, didn’t I? How long do you think it takes peat to form?’

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  Cooper shook his head.

  ‘Two hundred thousand years. Even presuming we’re still around after all that time, would we see new peat? Well, the fact is that peat forms from the undecomposed remains of - guess what? - sphagnum moss. No, when this peat is gone, there won’t be any more.’

  ‘Do you know Withens? There’s a family down there at Waterloo Terrace I’m interested in - the Oxleys.’

  ‘Don’t tell me about the Oxleys. Their kids like to set fires, just so they can hear the sirens and see the flashing lights as the fire appliances arrive. It breaks the boredom a bit. When we turn up, there’s always a little crowd of excited youngsters. The ones that started the fire are probably among the spectators. But we’re never going to be able to prove it.’

  There’s a burnt-out house at the top of the road,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I remember that. It was empty for years and getting derelict. It had got so bad that nobody wanted to spend money on repairing it, I suppose. The local kids broke in and were using it. Then it started getting fires. We were called out there several times. Each time, there was a bit less of the building left. The roof fell in quite early on, and it wasn’t really considered dangerous any more after that. But it still got set on fire regularly. I reckon the kids were dragging bits of wood up there to burn, once all the beams and doors and window frames had gone up in smoke.’