Blind to the Bones Read online

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a line from the play.’

  ‘Right.’

  Fry let it pass her by, as if English Literature classes had been one more interruption in her progress towards whatever goal she’d had her eye on in those days.

  ‘But I’ll tell you what, Ben,’ she said. ‘If it turns out Howard Renshaw killed Emma himself, I’m going to tear him apart with my bare hands.’

  ‘I think he’d have to be a damn good actor,’ said Cooper.

  ‘OK. I’ll present him with an Oscar first – and then I’ll tear him apart with my bare hands.’

  ‘Fair enough. But what about Sarah?’

  Fry leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling of the CID room as she thought about Sarah.

  ‘Sarah Renshaw isn’t acting,’ she said. ‘Sarah Renshaw is gone from the real world.’

  ‘Yes.’

  But Cooper thought he probably had clearer recollections of reading The Duchess of Malfi than Fry had. The lines about covering her face had popped into his mind unbidden, thanks to an enthusiastic English teacher and a memorable reading in his sixth-form literature class.

  ‘But that was her brother,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.” In The Duchess of Malfi it’s not her father who kills the duchess. It’s her brother.’

  But Fry just stared at Cooper as if he, too, were gone from the real world.

  ‘Diane, I think we should take a look at Trafalgar Terrace,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Take a look where?’

  ‘The houses behind where the Oxleys live. There’s another terrace of houses there – the same as Waterloo Terrace, but derelict. No one has lived there for years, and the houses are in quite a state. But they’re not boarded up, and I’m sure the Oxleys must have access to them.’

  ‘A great place to hide something?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘A great place to hide a body? Or what?’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘What about a search warrant?’

  ‘We don’t need one. The property belongs to Peak Water. I’ve already got their permission.’

  ‘We need it in writing, Ben.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll call Mr Venables, and we can visit him on the way there.’

  Cooper folded an Ordnance Survey map over several times until he had a small rectangle showing the area of upper Longdendale he wanted.

  ‘How do you do that?’ said Fry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. I guess I’m just fated to fold creases the wrong way.’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘If you look at the map, you’ll see that we can approach Trafalgar Terrace without going past the Oxleys’ houses. If we park down on this farm road here, there’ll be a couple of fields to cross, and then we might have to climb over a fence or a wall. But we should be out of sight all the way, because there’s a thick screen of trees.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Besides, it’s such an ideal time. All of the Oxley men are still here in Edendale, being interviewed for the affray outside the Wheatsheaf. They won’t be back in Withens for hours yet. We’ll never have a better opportunity to take a look round without being interrupted.’

  ‘Sounds good. But, Ben …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The least sign of anything interesting, and we pull out and organize a proper search by the specialists.’

  ‘Procedure,’ said Cooper.

  ‘It’s not a dirty word, you know.’

  Now it was raining properly. It was bound to, since it was bank holiday weekend and the area was full of tourists. The morris dancers would be getting wet in Edendale. Their hankies would be going limp and their bells would be rusting up. But nothing would stop them dancing.

  In Withens, the dark clouds lay right on top of the village, flattening it into the valley bottom and squeezing the moors closer together, so that the rain ran out of them on to the road and down into the gardens of the brick terraces. For once, it was the black brick that seemed to blend into the landscape, while the stone houses above glinted a little too brightly as they soaked up the moisture.

  ‘Trafalgar Terrace is up the hill there, behind the trees,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘Waterloo Terrace is beyond that.’

  ‘You were right – two fields to cross.’

  ‘Maybe we should walk around this first field, though,’ said Cooper. ‘We should avoid the livestock.’

  ‘They’re only cows,’ said Fry. ‘I do recognize the difference between bulls and cows, Ben. I’m not quite the ignorant city girl you think I am.’

  ‘Diane –’

  ‘Bulls have bollocks and cows have tits. See? I know all the agricultural expressions. If I wanted to, I reckon I could convince people I was a farmer and get subsidies for not growing anything. Besides, I’m not wearing anything red.’

  ‘They’re colour blind,’ said Cooper.

  ‘All the better.’

  ‘May’s a bad time to be near cows, Diane. We had an incident of a woman being savaged by a cow only the other day.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘People get this wrong. They think cows are docile and bulls are aggressive. Young bullocks are just mischievous, and older bulls are usually too lazy even to get up. But cows in May … if they have calves with them, they’ll do anything to protect them. And they’re a herd, so if you fall out with one, you fall out with the whole lot.’

  To his surprise, Fry was actually listening to him. He’d had visions of her getting trampled before she was halfway across the field.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Walk around the outside. Avoid eye contact and walk past naturally. We’ll be fine then.’

  ‘OK.’

  It worked, of course. All the cows wanted was to be left in peace in their field. Leave them alone, and they’d leave you alone. It was one of the laws of nature.

  In the second field, Cooper stopped at the sound of wings fluttering against metal. He walked over to an object partly hidden in the wet grass near a wall.

  ‘What have you found?’ said Fry.

  ‘It’s a Larsen trap.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Some of the old farmers put them out to catch crows in the spring. You don’t see them so much these days. They’re frowned on a bit, on the grounds of cruelty to crows.’

  Fry walked over to see what he’d found. ‘Well, it looks as though this farmer’s caught one,’ she said.

  ‘No, that’s the lure bird.’

  The trap consisted of a cage with two compartments. One side was hinged open, and there were three hen’s eggs inside it. The other compartment contained an unhappy-looking crow, which stood among some bloody scraps of meat, splatters of its own droppings, and pools of water splashed from a small bowl. When it saw them, the bird panicked and flapped at the bars, and Cooper drew back a few steps.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Fry.

  ‘This bird acts as a lure. What the farmer hopes is that a passing crow will be inquisitive and think this one has found a source of food. It comes down and lands on that convenient perch there on the baited side, with its eye on a few tasty-looking eggs. Then the perch collapses under its weight, and the lid slams shut on it.’

  ‘Which means the farmer has a cage with two crows in it.’

  ‘Larsens are supposed to be checked every day. The lure bird has to be given food and water. And any trapped crow has to be destroyed.’

  Fry shuddered. ‘It does look cruel to me. I’m surprised it’s allowed at all.’

  ‘It won’t be allowed for much longer, I suppose,’ said Cooper. ‘But some people would point out that the crows are destroyed a bit more humanely than the way they kill their own victims. They don’t call them carrion crows for nothing, you know.’

  ‘I don’t want to know any more, thanks.’

  They left the crow in the trap and reached a wall, where they could see the black outline o
f Trafalgar Terrace through the screen of chestnuts and sycamores. Water was dripping steadily from the dense canopies of leaves.

  ‘So far, so good,’ said Fry. ‘Give me a hand over the wall.’

  Inside the first house of Trafalgar Terrace, the air smelled fungal and sour, like old cider. These houses were slightly lower down the hill than the other terrace, and the damp had crept into them over the stone steps and risen up through the floors from the black peat, which soaked up water like a sponge. But beyond the dampness and the stale odour of long-abandoned carpets and ancient wallpaper, there was a more acrid smell.

  The broken back door had opened on a loose hinge to let them in easily. Fry stepped over some cardboard boxes that had collapsed and begun to disintegrate in the middle of the floor. She reached the facing doorway.

  ‘There’s been a fire here,’ she said.

  Cooper joined her and shone a torch into the derelict kitchen. There was scorching around the sink and the window frame, and a blackened area on the wall where an electric cooker might once have stood.

  ‘Do you think someone’s been living here?’ said Fry.

  ‘It was probably just kids playing around. By all accounts, one or two of them like setting fires. Jake, for a start.’

  ‘You think so?’ She poked a pile of debris with her foot. ‘Take a look at this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Silver paper. And half a Coke can. It looks as though some of the kids have set up a drugs den down here.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Diane. Want to try upstairs?’

  She hesitated a moment. ‘OK. Where are the stairs?’

  Cooper could remember the layout of the houses from his visit to Fran Oxley’s. Thanks to that night, he could practically find his way round in the dark. Fortunately, he had a torch this time. There would be two torches – if only Fry’s didn’t keep shooting up into the corners of the ceiling, lighting up hanging cobwebs.

  ‘Not frightened of the spiders, are you, Diane?’ said Cooper from the stairs.

  She didn’t answer, but gazed overhead like a surveyor looking for cracks in the plaster.

  ‘Diane?’

  ‘Oh. Carry on. I’m coming.’

  Upstairs, there were some floorboards missing and ancient electric wiring exposed in the gaps. Cooper shone his torch downwards to guide his steps.

  ‘Watch where you’re walking, Diane. And don’t shine your torch at the back windows, in case anybody sees the light.’

  ‘But you said there’d be nobody in.’

  ‘None of the men. But we don’t want to frighten Mrs Wallwin at number 7. And Wendy Tagg is probably at home with the children.’

  Rain was getting through the roof in several places. They could hear it dripping on the ceilings above them, like the sound of tiny footsteps. In the corner of one of the bedrooms, a stream of water glittered against the mouldy wallpaper. A rotten floorboard snapped under Fry’s foot. Cooper put out a hand to steady her. When he touched her shoulder, he was surprised to find that she was trembling.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Cooper pointed the beam of his torch towards the bathroom at the end of a short passage. The porcelain toilet bowl, washbasin and bath were still in there. They gleamed in the light.

  ‘You think we might find a stash of antiques in here, then?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s a stash somewhere, that’s for sure. They can’t be shipping them constantly.’

  Cooper stuck his head inside the door of the bathroom. ‘Heck, I bet there are some big spiders living in that bath.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Only kidding. There’s nothing up here. No attic trap door. I wonder if there’s a cellar.’

  ‘God.’

  He couldn’t quite see Fry’s face, because she was looking back towards the stairs.

  ‘If there is, I’ll go down. You can wait by the back door.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  Cooper trod carefully back down the stairs and into the front hallway.

  ‘If there is a cellar, the door will be under the stairs. Ah, yes.’

  ‘It could just be a cupboard,’ said Fry.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The door stuck a little, but Cooper tugged at it, and a stream of cold air emptied into the hallway.

  ‘It’s probably a small keeping cellar,’ he said. ‘They were very handy, before the days of fridges. On the other hand, it might run under all eight houses in the terrace.’

  ‘If we’re going down, let’s go,’ said Fry. ‘Stop talking about it.’

  ‘All right, all right. Chill out.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  The steps were made of stone, and the little cellar felt terribly claustrophobic. Cooper could sense the hillside behind the walls, the heavy mass of peat and rock that would force its way through one day, if left to itself.

  ‘See, there’s a stone slab this side, and a chute in the top of the wall there. That will be at ground level outside. They must have delivered coal down here. What’s on your side, Diane?’

  ‘Some wooden cupboards built into the wall.’

  Cooper heard the creak of a hinge as she opened one of the cupboard doors. Then there was a sudden scuttling of claws on wood and a scream that almost deafened him.

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  The light of Fry’s torch swung wildly and there was a loud crash, followed by another scream, this one higher pitched and almost ear-splitting in the confined space of the cellar. Fry continued cursing.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘Over here!’

  ‘Diane, keep that torch still. I can’t see a thing.’

  Her beam was flickering everywhere, but illuminating nothing. Mostly, it seemed to be in Cooper’s eyes. The screaming became ragged, but something was scraping repeatedly against a wooden surface.

  Finally, Cooper managed to get his torch pointed in the right direction. Fry had disturbed a female rat from its nest in a pile of mouldering newspapers and shredded wool inside the cupboard. A hole had been chewed through the back corner, and the rat was trying to drag itself towards it. But Fry’s panicked blow with her torch had injured it. Its back legs were trailing uselessly, and its front paws could hardly move its weight along.

  ‘Oh God. What are we going to do with it?’ said Fry.

  ‘Hold on. Let me borrow your torch. It’s heavier than mine.’

  Cooper crouched to the cupboard door and manoeuvred his body between Fry and the rat, which had stopped screaming now. Gingerly, he used the end of the torch to poke the rodent into a clear area and made sure it was lying upright. Then he took aim, swung the torch and crushed the base of its skull with one blow. It lurched over on to its side and its legs kicked for a few seconds before it died.

  He stood up and shut the cupboard door.

  ‘All sorted,’ he said, as he handed the torch back.

  ‘I didn’t even see what you did,’ said Fry.

  ‘No.’

  She pointed her torch at the closed door. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Cooper just hoped Fry hadn’t seen the little heap of blind, hairless shapes squirming at the bottom of the rat’s nest. There was nothing to be done about those.

  Back up the stairs, Fry swept her torch round the sitting room, picking out a pile of empty beer bottles, an old sweater slung over a broken chair, a used paint tin half-full of cigarette ends.

  ‘This is wrong,’ she said. ‘We need to get a proper search organized. We could be contaminating evidence.’

  ‘These houses were empty when Neil Granger lived down here, you know.’

  ‘I do know. That’s why it’s wrong. I lost my witness, and I don’t want to lose any forensic evidence. If there’s anything in here to be found, it should be found properly. We need the task force and some SOCOs in here.’

  ‘Diane, it could be days before we get that type of operation approved and put in
to action. We’re here now. There’s nobody to interrupt us. Besides, these houses may not even be here much longer.’

  Fry began to back towards the door, treading carefully to avoid debris. ‘No, Ben. I should never have let you talk me into it.’

  ‘Talk you into it? Whenever have I been able to talk you into anything?’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Fry. ‘They’ll hear you across at Waterloo Terrace. It’s best they don’t know we’ve been here. Damn it, we could have screwed everything up, doing this.’

  Cooper bit his lip with frustration. ‘OK, Diane. Back to the cows, then. The bigger they are, the easier they are to cope with.’

  37

  Derek Alton could see exactly where Neil Granger had died – right there, on the scrubby grass, among the sheep droppings and the scattered stones, with the wind scraping across the exposed sides of Withens Moor. It was here that his body had grown cold and his blood had soaked into the runnels of dark water that drained from the higher slopes. And perhaps it was on this particular rock here that the crows had waited impatiently for his life to be gone.

  Alton had attended the opening of the inquest, and he remembered the crows being mentioned. The pathologist had explained why some of the injuries on the body were not, in themselves, an indication of unlawful killing. Firstly, the injuries to his face had occurred after death. And secondly, they had not been of human origin.

  There was still blue tape rattling in the breeze, though one of the metal stakes the police had used had fallen over now, the shallow covering of peat failing to provide a secure anchor for it in the ground. But Alton wasn’t looking at the fluttering tape. He was watching the faint white clouds of steam drifting from the air shaft, coiling on the edge of the stones for a moment before being dispersed by the wind.

  He knew he had been stupid to let himself get involved in the Border Rats’ raid on the Hey Bridge well dressing. He had thought he was being accepted at last by the Oxleys – or that was what he had told himself. But it had been a mistake, and the Rural Dean had made that clear. His reputation was already damaged by a misjudgement. But that wasn’t what was worrying Derek Alton most.

  That afternoon, when he had looked again at the picture of St Asaph in the stained glass, he realized that the red representing the burning coals was the wrong colour. It was too pale when the sunlight caught it, too gentle in its tones – almost pink, in fact. There was nothing threatening about it, nothing that suggested a danger of scorching St Asaph’s cloak.