Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Read online

  Cooper looked at his watch. He was early yet. He had plenty of time to pay them a visit.

  Philip Granger had decided to ignore the advice of the duty solicitor and explain himself. He did it with the same smile, as if he were helping his interviewers to get their ideas straight.

  ‘You have this all wrong/ he said. 1 didn’t intend to kill Neil. Why would I do that? He was my brother.’

  ‘We know that Neil was going to help the Reverend Alton dig up the graveyard. You knew he would find the remains of Barry Cully. All of your family knew that. And somebody had to stop him. We think the obvious person to do that was you, Mr Granger.’

  Philip Granger looked paler than ever. He didn’t seem to have shaved for several days, and his clothes didn’t smell too clean either. He had deteriorated noticeably during the last week, and someone ought to have noticed.

  ‘Yes, yes. But I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said. ‘I meant to break Neil’s arm, that was all - not to kill him.’

  ‘But you did kill him, Mr Granger.’

  He shook his head. ‘It was an accident. He moved at the wrong moment. He hit his head on the stones at the bottom of the air shaft. You know that’s what happened. It was an accident/

  ‘A broken arm wouldn’t have kept him out of action for ever,’ said Kitchens. ‘Besides, you should have known Mr Alton would carry on clearing the graveyard on his own, which is what he did. Did you really hope that the remains of Barry Cully would never be found?’

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  ‘We hoped Alton would leave. We hoped the church would be closed/

  ‘We?’

  ‘The family were behind me/ said Granger.

  ‘But the vicar put a spanner in the works/

  ‘He was a bit obsessed about that graveyard. I don’t know why it was so important to him/

  ‘The damage to the vestry?’ said Kitchens. ‘The theft? The vandalism to his car?’

  ‘We didn’t have anything against him, really. But nothing seemed to take his attention away from that bloody graveyard. He should have left things well alone/

  Fry consulted the notes she had made before starting the interview. One of the first things she’d noted was the record of Neil Granger’s calls from his mobile phone the night he was killed. They were calls to a number in Glossop - his brother’s number.

  ‘Well, there you go, then/ said Philip, when she asked him about the calls. He glanced at his solicitor with a little triumphant smile, but the solicitor didn’t respond. ‘Would Neil have phoned me to arrange to meet, if he thought I would do anything to him?’

  The fact that Neil didn’t expect you to attack him doesn’t cast any light on your intentions,’ said Fry.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, why would I?’

  ‘You tell me/

  ‘Look, he pestered me to go up there. He had an idea about some ceremony at dawn on May Day, and he wanted to rehearse it. I think he’d had a row about it with Uncle Lucas and the others. So he had a point to prove. He was a bit like that, Neil - pigheaded. But it was no good to him doing it on his own, because he needed somebody to prove his point to. That’s why he thought of me. I had my uses, even for my little brother. Hell, do you think I wanted to go up the hill to that air shaft in the middle of the night? He pestered me until I said “yes”. I don’t know why I agreed to it/

  ‘Perhaps you suddenly realized what a convenient opportunity you’d been presented with/

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Philip, shaking his head.

  Kitchens folded his hands together on the table as he took a turn to let Fry prepare her next question.

  ‘How did you actually get up to the air shaft to meet Neil?’ he

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  said, ‘We’ve interviewed lorry drivers on the A628, and no one ;saw any cars parked in the lay-by, except your brother’s.’

  ‘I don’t have a car. I ride a motorbike. I parked it behind Neil’s car, where no one would see it from the road.’

  ‘And you walked up to the air shaft from the lay-by?’

  ‘It isn’t that far. If Neil could walk it, why shouldn’t I?’ Philip grimaced. ‘I was a bit shattered by the time I got there, to be honest. I’m not quite so clean living as good old Neil. That was another way he always made me feel second best.’

  ‘You could have ridden up on the bike,’ said Kitchens.

  ‘I’m not totally stupid. There would be tracks/

  ‘You were worried about leaving tracks, yet you say you didn’t intend to kill your brother?’

  Philip opened his mouth, then stopped and looked at his solicitor, who shook his head sadly.

  That’s a “no comment”.’

  Fry looked at Hitchens, who sat back, content. Time for a change of tack. If Granger thought he could get off lightly, he was going to be mistaken.

  ‘Mr Granger/ said Fry, ‘according to the postmortem report on your brother, some of the cerebrospinal fluid from his head injury was transferred to his hand while he was dying. That could only have been done by you. Do you agree?’

  Granger looked a little sick. If he could have gone any paler, he would have done. His voice was a little quieter when he spoke.

  ‘It was still quite dark, but I remember the sound,’ he said. ‘It was a sort of thud and crunch, like somebody had dropped a packet of biscuits in the street. I could see that Neil wasn’t dead. He was still moving a bit, and making noises like an animal. But I couldn’t hit him again. I couldn’t hit someone who was injured, it’s not the same/ He looked up at Fry for some understanding. She found she couldn’t look away.

  1 was always like that,’ he said. ‘I could never understand how uncle Lucas and some of my cousins could kill injured animals. Lucas always said it was putting them out of their misery, that it was a kindness. But I could never bring myself to do it like he could, not killing an injured thing in cold blood, no matter how badly hurt it was/

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I held Neil’s hand and waited with him, until he died/

  ‘Ho you expect us to believe that?’ said Kitchens.

  Granger dropped his head. ‘He took a long time to die. Bui time always passes, doesn’t it?’

  Fry looked at Kitchens. They both knew that Philip Granger’s account didn’t quite tally with the postmortem report on his brother’s injuries.

  They allowed Granger a moment to recover. But Fry had a lot of important questions she still wanted to ask him.

  ‘And now, Mr Granger, we come to the subject of Emma Renshaw.’

  The maintenance crew at the wind farm turned out to be Danish. They said they were employed by the turbine manufacturers, a specialist wind-power company in Denmark. The wind farm looked quite different at close quarters. The towers were elegantly tapered, but the massive blades of the turbines looked like propellers from an aircraft of unimaginable size. When six of the turbines were lined up, they reminded Cooper of that Hindu goddess with too many arms. Their eighteen blades rotated hypnotically, like white scimitars carving the Pennine air.

  When Cooper drove into the parking area near the substation building, he noticed that the towers were numbered on their sides. At the moment, numbers five and eight were motionless, the ends of their blades turned back like claws. Small doors set into each tower were reminiscent of bulkheads in a submarine. Built on concrete bases, the towers hardly seemed to vibrate, despite the weight and the movement of the blades.

  ‘You should get plenty of wind up here/ said Cooper to the foreman of the maintenance crew. ‘Too much, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. But there are aerodynamic stalls on the blade tips to prevent damage to the gearbox and generator, and hydraulic disc brakes to lock the turbines/

  ‘You know what looks a bit frightening about these things?’

  ‘Frightening? What’s that?’

  ‘These blades are so big. They’re out of proportion. They look too big for the tower to support/

  ‘Yes, the rotors are ove
r 120 feet in diameter/ said the foreman. The towers are 114 feet/

  ‘So they are wider than the tower is high. It seems wrong/

  The foreman smiled at him. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

  The noise of the wind was in Cooper’s ears up here. But it couldn’t disguise the sound of the turbines, that steady whoosh-whoosh,

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  like a giant washing machine on its rinse cycle. No - a whole laundrette full of giant washing machines. Closer to number one tower, Cooper could hear the hum of the motor inside the base and the occasional metallic clunk of a switch. But there was an eerie whistling somewhere, too - a high-pitched keening from the blades as they sliced through the air. It was like a ghostly voice singing on the wind. And since the turbines ran constantly, all day and all night, that uncanny whistling and thudding must never cease.

  It might be a little scary to come upon the wind farm unexpectedly in the dark, and to have your car headlights catch the movement of those vast white arms as they turned against the night sky.

  Cooper turned his back on the towers to look out over Longdendale. Viewed from this height, the valleys were like deep wounds in the moors, and it seemed amazing that there were people living down there. To the west, the sky was so dark and heavy that it seemed more solid than the land.

  Sometimes visitors looked over a vista of peat moors like Withens and Black Hill and admired what they thought was entirely natural scenery. They thought the view had nothing manmade in it - no houses or roads, no walls or telegraph poles, nor even electricity pylons.

  But they were wrong, of course - the entire landscape here was manmade. Longdendale had been primeval forest once. There had been wild boar here, along with deer, wolves, bears and even wild bulls. Now the only signs left of their presence were in the place names - Wildboar Clough, Swineshaw and Deer Knowl. The monks who had been given control of the valley had cleared the woodland for their sheep, and the Industrial Revolution had begun to produce the acid rain that had fallen on the Dark Peak for centuries, destroying the vegetation and eroding the peat. What visitors admired now was the devastation left by thousands of years of destruction by man.

  ‘We offered to help down in the village, you know,’ said the maintenance foreman, coming to stand by him.

  ‘Down in Withens?’

  ‘Yes. It’s our policy to have good relations with the local community. So we offered our services on some projects. But some of the local people there are not very friendly.’

  ‘I think you must be talking about the Oxleys.’

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  ‘You know them?’

  ‘We’ve met.’

  People like the Oxleys knew perfectly well that this wasn’t an unchanging landscape but a dynamic one. They were like the hefted flocks of sheep on the hillsides, who were so crucial to the balance of the ecology. For those flocks, their grazing territories had become inherited knowledge, passed on from one generation to the next. To farm the vast, unfenced areas of moorland, shepherds had to make use of the sheep’s natural behaviour patterns. After centuries of hefting, they became practically wild animals, relying on the strong territorial instinct that went with their feral nature.

  Down on the Withens road, Cooper could see PC UdalFs Vauxhall Astra. He recognized it by the identification number on the roof. In this kind of landscape, those numbers weren’t only for the use of the air support unit’s helicopter crew.

  ‘It’s a shame about Withens.’ The foreman shook his head sadly. ‘We were thinking of offering to clear the graveyard at the church. It’s very badly overgrown, you know.’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Cooper, thinking of the task force officers who had spent the past few days painstakingly removing the tangled vegetation and sifting through sinewy roots looking for clues to the identity of the skeleton and the manner of the victim’s death.

  ‘We even went into the pub a few times, but they didn’t like us being there, we could tell that.’

  ‘Ah. Foreigners in the pub/ said Cooper.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Nothing important.’

  Despite his vantage point, all Cooper could see of Withens was the tower of St Asaph’s church. But he was surprised to find that he could also see the roof of Shepley Head Lodge, out beyond the village to the north, apparently isolated and inaccessible.

  The Reverend Derek Alton had created an involuntary link between the two. Early this morning, the vicar had finally been well enough to talk. Among other things that he had needed to get off his chest, he had revealed that Neil Granger had discovered his brother Philip was involved with the spate of antiques thefts in the area. A stolen bronze bust had been the conclusive evidence, he said. And Neil had gone to Alton to ask for his advice about what he should do.

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  The

  ‘And what did you advise him?’ the vicar had been asked.

  To face him. To tell the truth/t

  Philip Granger laughed then. He seemed to throw off the mantle2

  of guilt too easily now that the subject had moved away from thef

  death of his brother.f

  ‘Emma? Emma was mad about Neil. How stupid was that? SheI

  pursued him for months. I remember she was so thrilled when heI

  moved to Bearwood to stay in the house with her and the other| students. But he was gay. I told you, didn’t I, that he was gay?’

  ‘Yes, sir, you did.’

  ‘But why did nobody tell Emma? Why didn’t Neil tell her? It would have made it so much easier. Things would have turned out differently. But I had to tell her myself, and she didn’t believe me.’

  ‘You wanted Emma for yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I used to e-mail her a lot, because it wasn’t easy to go up to her house to see her. But she always ignored me in favour of Neil. I’m only the brother, you know. Why should he always have got the best? Why did everybody always like him more?’

  ‘Did you pick Emma up from Bearwood that day?’

  ‘I waited outside the house until I saw Neil go.’

  ‘But you only have a motorbike.’

  ‘I can drive, you know,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am? I borrowed a mate’s car, so there was no chance of Neil recognizing it. I pulled up to the kerb when Emma was on the way to the bus stop. She was surprised to see me, but I told her I was in the area looking for work, and she didn’t think anything of it. It was starting to rain then, and the trains would have been packed. I said I was just on the way home, so she got in the car.’

  ‘She would have mentioned it to Neil afterwards, if ‘

  ‘Yeah. But I only wanted to talk to her, you know. It wouldn’t have mattered, except - Well, it went all right for a while. We chatted about all kinds of things, and I thought we were getting on really well, until she started to talk about Neil. Do you know what she wanted? She wanted me to speak to Neil for her, to tell him how much she liked him. How pathetic is that?’

  ‘How far on the way home did you get?’ said Fry coldly, picturing the quiet road where Emma’s mobile phone had been found.

  ‘I don’t really know. We argued a lot. I turned off the A6 somewhere when she started to get really upset. She got her mobile

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  phone out and was going to phone her parents, but I grabbed it off her and threw it out of the window/

  ‘We found that/ said Fry. ‘What I want to know is where you killed her/

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know where it was. She started calling me all kind of things and comparing me to Neil, so I lost my temper and hit her. Then she started screaming and got out of the car, so I went after her and hit her again. I hit her a few times, until she stopped screaming/

  Fry paused. Not for Granger to recover this time, but for herself. Now, finally, she could picture Emma Renshaw - but it was as Emma had been at the moment of her death, not as she had been in life.

  As soon as she was finished here, Fry had to visit the Renshaws. She had made them a promise th
at she would keep them up to date personally on the enquiry. But explaining the facts of the case against Philip Granger to them would not be easy.

  ‘This must have been a very quiet spot, Mr Granger,’ she said.

  ‘I parked on a grass verge somewhere. All I remember were some stone walls and a gate into a field/

  ‘What did you do with Emma?’

  ‘I dragged her into the field and hid her behind the wall. No cars came past all the time we were there. So I was lucky, too, I suppose/

  ‘Yes, you were/

  ‘Mr Granger, we’re going to ask you to look at some maps and show us the area where you think you were at the time/ said Kitchens.

  ‘I was lost/ said Granger. ‘I can’t tell you the exact place/

  ‘Nevertheless, we’ll want to narrow it down as much as possible, so that we can do our best to find Emma. Are you willing to cooperate in that, sir?’

  Granger shrugged. ‘OK. But you have to realize it was all my brother’s fault/

  ‘I don’t think so/ said Fry.

  ‘Oh, yes, it was/ he said. ‘It was his fault. My dear little brother/

  Ben Cooper watched through his rearview mirror as a bus pulled up near the Pepper Pot Inn in the village of Midhopestones. Only three people got off the bus. Two of them looked at the threatening sky and went into the pub. The third one waited until the

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  r

  bus had set off again and began to walk slowly up the road.

  Cooper hadn’t felt the need to tell Angle Fry what sort of car he drove. She probably knew that already, along with its registration number. And maybe his date of birth, his mother’s maiden name and his National Insurance number.

  As Angie got into the Toyota, he continued looking at his mirror, expecting to see a car turning into the road or maneuvering to leave the pub car park. But there was nothing. He started the engine.