Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Page 49

  ‘Is Scott all right?’ said Cooper.

  ‘He’ll be fine. Daft bugger. I’ve told him to be more careful with that thing.’

  ‘No harm done.’

  Cooper wiped a hand across his face and looked at the streaks of oil on his palm. The spray had hit his face from the spinning blade of the chainsaw just before it fell towards him from the tree. Scott Oxley’s face had stared down at him, shocked and white, as the branch he’d been working on snapped unexpectedly, loosening his grip on the handles. A few feet in front of Cooper, the chainsaw had dug itself into the dirt track in a spurt of mud.

  ‘He’d just oiled it,’ said Lucas. ‘He got oil all over the handles and didn’t bother wiping it off. He’s lucky he didn’t break his silly neck or chop his hand off.’

  ‘Or someone else’s,’ said Cooper.

  The interior of 1 Waterloo Terrace came as a surprise. It was remarkably clean and neat, with two Laura Ashley-patterned sofas crammed into the little sitting room, matching curtains, and even a mock goatskin rug in front of the fireplace. It had a distinctly feminine feel, and suddenly both Lucas and Eric Oxley looked

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  awkward and out of place. Eric was wearing worn brown slippers, while Lucas had removed his hoots on the doorstep to reveal woollen socks bunched uncomfortably at the toes.

  ‘You’ve been all along this terrace asking questions,’ said Lucas. It was a plain statement of fact, a preliminary laying out of the ground.

  ‘Yes, I’ve made no secret of it,’ said Cooper. I’m conducting enquiries in connection with a murder investigation, as I’m sure you know, Mr Oxley. The murder of your own nephew, Neil Granger.’

  ‘He was my wife’s brother’s lad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But nobody here knows anything about that. You’ve been asking your questions in the wrong place, if that’s really what you’re up to.’

  ‘Why should I be up to anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Oxley. ‘That’s for you to tell us.’

  I’ve just explained it.’

  There were no handshakes at Waterloo Terrace. And there were very few rural Derbyshire homes where Cooper would not have been offered at least a cup of tea by now, unless he had actually come to arrest a suspect. But the Oxleys seemed to think that they were automatic suspects, and they were behaving accordingly. Perhaps, Cooper thought, he should be regarding them as automatic suspects. But he’d always had a contrary instinct. If everyone else thought the Oxleys must be guilty of something, he’d find himself looking for their good side. With the Oxleys, though, he might have to look very hard.

  The old man, Eric Oxley, wore striped braces beneath a knitted cardigan, but over his shirt. They weren’t the brightly coloured braces once favoured by city whizzkids of the 1980s. These braces dated from an earlier fashion, and their colours had faded with age. Besides, they weren’t for show at all - their function was to support the baggy trousers.

  Eric’s body was almost swallowed by the worn armchair he sat in. The chair didn’t match the rest of the furniture in the Oxleys’ sitting room. It was much older, and wasn’t at all the right colour to match the Laura Ashley patterns or even the mock goatskin. Eric and his armchair looked like an island surrounded by a sea of encroaching modern frippery.

  Cooper wondered how many battles there had been over the

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  armchair when the new furniture had arrived, and whether the old man had clung to its arms with his thick fingernails as his family tried to prise him loose. There was a space two or three feet further towards the centre of the room where the armchair would have fit more neatly with the arrangement of the furniture. He could picture Marion Oxley moving the armchair into that spot every night after the old man had gone to bed, perhaps pushing it on its casters with the toe of her carpet slipper, rather than touch its grease-darkened upholstery. Equally clearly, he could see Eric sucking his false teeth as he heaved his chair back to its place by the fireside every morning. Territory was important, even if it consisted of an old armchair by a fire.

  ‘You know they want us out?’ said Lucas.

  ‘I understand it’s the empty houses they’re demolishing/ said Cooper. ‘They must be dangerous. A health hazard, at least.’

  Lucas curled his lip. ‘It’s the first step. It’s us they want out, so they can sell this place and make a nice bit of money. They think we’re dirty. Our homes are unsightly. We are unsightly. We don’t fit into this world today.’

  ‘Aye, they want to get shut of us,’ said Eric. ‘I just hope I pop my clogs first.’

  Lucas nodded. ‘They think we’re mucking up the water for folks in Manchester - all the water that comes off these hills and goes through the aqueduct down the valley. It seems funny, doesn’t it, when it was our folk who were killed by the cholera that came from the filthy water they were given to drink? We might as well run over the hill and throw ourselves in the reservoir, like a lot of lemmings. That would solve everybody’s problems.’

  ‘I was assured by Mr Venables at Peak Water that these houses aren’t a problem for the catchment area.’

  Lucas Oxley’s expression said merely that it was Cooper’s own fault if he allowed himself to be fooled by people like J. P. Venables.

  ‘When they come to try to move us out, I suppose it’ll be your lot behind ‘em putting the boot in, making sure us little folk don’t get in the way of progress. I don’t suppose our homes look much to you, do they? Got a nice, modern detached house back in Edendale, have you?’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘If we didn’t have our homes in Withens, where would we go? People like us can’t afford to buy anywhere. And what chance is there of finding somewhere we can all live close together? They’d

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  split us up and put us on council estates. It would be the end of this family.’

  Through a doorway, Cooper watched Marion Oxley fussing around in the kitchen, slamming cupboards, peeping under the lids of saucepans as if some secret lurked inside that she could never share with anyone, and glaring suspiciously at the windows. Her disapproval filled the moments of silence like a bad smell.

  The glimpses of her reminded him of his own mother, as she had been in her best days at Bridge End Farm. Though she seemed to be busy, she was watching. Always watching.

  The picture of family life he was gathering from the Oxleys was completely unlike what he had been used to, yet they were as close as the Cooper family, in their own way. The comparisons he saw all around him made Cooper uneasy. He was trying to concentrate on the job in hand, but his memory kept unpacking old recollections of his childhood at Bridge End Farm. Time and again, he had pushed the remembered images back into their boxes. But as soon as his mind was distracted by a phrase or a gesture, the memories came tumbling out again, unfolding their carefully packed shapes, falling open like the petals of pale flowers, too long untouched by the sun.

  ‘Did they tell you at the water company that somebody wants to buy this land?’ said Lucas.

  ‘Yes, I know there’s a developer interested.’

  ‘But I don’t suppose they told you who’s working for that developer locally.’

  ‘No. Who?’

  ‘Dearden.’

  ‘Michael Dearden?’

  ‘Aye, at Shepley Head Lodge. The people with the money are in London, but they pay him to do the negotiating locally. He’s a surveyor of some kind.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ said Cooper.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve had the odd set-to with Dearden.’

  ‘You had an argument with Mr Dearden?’

  ‘Aye. You might say so. A disagreement.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The road. That road up there. It runs all the way down to their place, Shepley Head. We never could agree on who ought to keep it in order. He’s always chunterin’ about it, silly bugger. He goes

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  on about how the
potholes are damaging that car of his. I wasn’t standing for that. So I gave him what for.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘I thought he was going to burst into tears. What a mard-arse. I’ve never come across anyone so mardy in my life. But I knew what he was on about really. He blamed the road for the time he hit our Jake and smashed his leg. He blamed everything and everybody but himself.’

  Cooper recalled the glimpse of Michael Dearden sitting in his car, terrified at the sight of Jake and the other boys in the road outside Waterloo Terrace.

  ‘Are you sure, Mr Oxley?’ he said quietly.

  Oxley gazed at him for a moment, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘You might not realize this,’ said Cooper, ‘but Michael Dearden has been obsessed with the idea that members of your family are persecuting him, ever since the incident with Jake. He imagines Oxleys in the darkness around his house every night. He even avoids driving through Withens because he has to pass the spot where he ran over Jake. I think Mr Dearden is consumed with guilt, but he won’t ever admit it to you.’

  ‘Happen you’re right, then,’ said Oxley.

  Then Cooper smiled. It had occurred to him that, after the incident in the Oxleys’ yard on Wednesday, he might be imagining Oxleys in the darkness at night for a little while himself.

  Take a look at these -‘ said Lucas, gesturing at a couple of black box files on a table. They go back years. Years and years of getting nowhere. Years of people not listening to us. We don’t fit into their computer systems, so they don’t know what to do about us, apart from getting rid of us. Read some them - they keep repeating a lot of jargon that doesn’t mean anything. Whatever we say, it comes up against a blank wall. The bureaucracy machine just rolls on. One day, it’s going to roll over us.’

  Cooper picked up some of the letters.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that one of these is an eviction notice?’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘It’s not the first.’

  ‘You do realize that if nobody does anything about it, your family is danger of being evicted from Waterloo Terrace?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Have you talked to anyone. Got proper advice?’

  There’s no one we can trust.’

  There must be someone.’

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  I

  ‘Everyone we’ve ever dealt with has let us down, or outright lied. It’s too late now. But we can dig in; we’re ready for a light.’

  ‘That won’t do any good at all, Mr Oxley.’

  ‘It’ll keep our pride.’

  Exasperated, Cooper looked at the old man, Eric Oxley. In a strange way, he was the one member of the Oxley family who made most sense to him. Eric made him think of a Border collie that had lived with the Coopers at Bridge End Farm when he and Matt were children. The collie had been called Sam, and he had first arrived as a puppy, bounding with energy. But he’d lived to be a grey-muzzled old dog who spent his life panting painfully in the heat of the sun, endlessly circling and circling until he could find a comfortable place to sleep. Eric was like that old collie, grey and tired, seeking only a place to settle down and rest. Yet a glimpse of the strong young man that he had once been was still visible now and again, as if it lingered in his shadow.

  In another way, Eric reminded him of his great-uncle, whom he had known as a child, and had been fascinated by. He still clearly remembered the smell of his great-uncle’s clothes and the feel of his trousers as he clutched the fabric tightly between his fingers and pushed his face shyly into his leg. He had loved his great-uncle when he was a small boy. But he had died when Ben was seven or eight years old.

  And then there was Lucas. Surely Lucas Oxley was nothing like his own father. Nothing like him at all.

  ‘We don’t reckon much to you as a policeman/ Lucas was saying. ‘But you’re a sight better than most of the buggers we’re expected to deal with. If that’s what we have to put up with, you’ll have to do.’

  Thanks,’ said Cooper.

  Eric stirred in his chair. Though happen you ought to be looking elsewhere, instead of bothering the likes of us.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Look for the foreigners.’

  ‘Foreigners?’

  ‘You’ve been around here asking about last Friday night, before Neil got himself killed?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, look for the foreigners. There were foreigners in the pub that night.’

  ‘What foreigners?’

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  That’s up to you to find out.’

  Ryan had come into the room, and Cooper could see straight away that he was nervous. But the boy looked from his father to his grandfather, and he seemed to take reassurance from their presence.

  Cooper remembered from the files that Ryan’s date of birth was 26 June, so he had entered the world just after the 1987 General Election, when Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory and became Prime Minister for the third time. In fact, anyone between thirteen and twenty-three had been born in the 1980s, that decade of marginalization and social exclusion, when some parts of society were making more money than they had ever dreamed of. All of the Oxley boys had been born into that time, except Jake.

  And the reason Cooper could remember Ryan’s birthday was that it was almost the same date as his own, though a different year. They were fellow Cancerians. They were known for clinging to their shells.

  Emma Renshaw had been born in the 1980s, too - some time in the spring of 1982, around the time of the Falklands War. Cooper was willing to bet that Howard Renshaw had done well in the 1980s - the companies he carried out work for had no doubt benefited from the boom in the construction business. So was Howard worth a lot of money? Did he have a nice nest egg of capital stashed away that he had managed to protect from the decline in the stock market?

  Money was such an obvious motive for every kind of crime. Cooper made a mental note to ask Fry if she knew where Howard stood financially.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me, Ryan?’ he said.

  Ryan swallowed before he spoke. Cooper was expecting something about minor offences - the damage to the church vestry, perhaps. But what Ryan wanted to say was nothing like that.

  It’s about Barry,’ he said.

  Cooper had to re-focus his thoughts quickly. There was only one person he’d heard of by that name recently.

  ‘Barry? Barry Cully?’

  He noticed Lucas and Eric had suddenly gone very still. Maybe this hadn’t been what they expected, either. There was a silence in the room that allowed the croaking of the rooks to penetrate from outside.

  ‘Fran’s bloke/ said Ryan.

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  ‘I know who you mean. But I’ve never seen him. He’s away, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucas Oxley cleared his throat. It was one of those signals that ought to mean something to his family. A warning perhaps. But Ryan refused to look at his dad now. He was staring fixedly at Cooper as if clinging to something he had finally managed to grasp.

  ‘He knocked Fran about a lot/ said Ryan. ‘She never said anything, but some of us knew about it. We could tell when we went round there. The door is never locked, and sometimes we’d go in when she wasn’t expecting us. We worked it out all right.’

  ‘Did Fran ever make a complaint?’

  ‘No.’

  I’m going to have to talk to her. When is Cully due back?’

  Then Lucas interrupted. ‘We don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Can you give me a phone number where I can contact him? Or tell me what company he’s working for?’

  ‘To be honest, he’s left,’ said Lucas.

  ‘For good?’

  ‘We hope so. We don’t know how to get in touch with him.’

  Cooper looked at Ryan. The boy’s stare was so fixed that his eyes were becoming glassy, and he was pale with some painful internal effort.

  ‘It was Craig who used to get most
upset about it,’ said Ryan. ‘He used to get really, really angry.’

  Lucas took a couple of steps forward and stood over his son. There were veins standing out on his neck, and his fists were clenched.

  ‘We don’t -‘ he began. But whatever he was going to say seemed to stick in his throat when he saw the boy’s expression. It was fear. But not a fear of his father.

  Ryan looked past Lucas at Cooper, like a trapped animal seeking the smallest escape route.

  ‘Craig got really angry,’ he repeated desperately.

  ‘But Craig is dead/ said Cooper. ‘I can’t ask him about it.’

  There was a message here that Cooper knew he wasn’t picking up. His brain felt really slow, as if his thoughts had been blunted by the days of frustration and lack of communication.

  The Oxleys were watching him almost pityingly, in the way they might watch a dumb animal trying to figure out what was happening as it blundered blindly from its pen to be slaughtered.

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  The old man had a particularly disturbing stare. It had begun to feel like something physical, a sensation on Cooper’s skin, as if a spider had landed on him and was crawling across his neck. Cooper wondered what was going on in the old man’s mind that made his thoughts so uncomfortable.

  Then Cooper realized there was an important question he should be asking. But nobody here had been cautioned, and he couldn’t invite them to incriminate themselves.

  Tell me something about Barry Cully/ he said, looking now at Lucas.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  Tor a start/ said Cooper, ‘does he have a finger missing on his left hand?’

  ‘Hold on, what’s happening now?’ said the South Yorkshire inspector, pacing the yard at Shepley Head Lodge.

  ‘He’s coming out, sir.’

  ‘Everybody move back/

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be armed/

  Thank God/

  Michael Dearden walked across the yard with his hands in the air and tears running down his face. His wife appeared in the doorway behind him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the lights.