Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Page 7

  Now Fry imagined her fear as one of those Breughel visions, all demons and flames. With the therapist’s help, she had learned to cover her mental painting with a pastoral landscape rendered in gentle colours - brown and white cows grazing in a wildflower meadow, a cottage with clematis growing by the door, a cat relaxing in the sun on a window ledge. And always in her picture there was a young girl. She stood right in the middle foreground, clutching a wicker basket in her bare arms, smiling as she scattered grain for the hens around her feet.

  The picture had stayed intact for a while. The cows had never seemed to run out of grass in their pasture, the sun always shone on the cat. And the girl had never aged, so that her skin had remained pink and fresh, and unbroken. Just like the photograph of Emma Renshaw.

  But Fry’s picture didn’t have the advantage of photographic

  52

  permanence. It had been done with cheap paints. After a year or two, the colours had worn thin. They were scoured away by the rubbing of her hands, by her constant touching and stroking to make sure the picture was still intact. When she had handled her picture too often, the Breughel showed through again. That was when she had to go back for help, to prevent the faces of the tormented souls emerging once more from the red petals of the poppies, to convince herself that the hooves in the grass were those of cattle and not goat-footed demons. She needed reassurance to make her see the leaves of the clematis instead of the flames leaping from the pit. She needed help to see the innocence of the girl, not the scaly claws of the birds at her feet.

  Each time she had to lay the paint on thicker, layer upon layer of it, with a bigger and bigger brush and in brighter and brighter colours. Finally, the picture had become so garish that she could no longer see anything but what lay underneath. She saw only blood in the poppies, and mould in the grass. She saw the bones under the skin of the girl.

  53

  Ben Cooper and Tracy Udall found the Reverend Derek Alton in his churchyard. He’d taken a bit of finding, because he was almost invisible among the weeds and overgrown shrubs. Alton was wearing Wellingtons and corduroy trousers, and he was clutching a scythe in gloved hands. Thistle burrs and bramble thorns had stuck to his trousers. Now and then, he took a half-hearted swipe at the weeds, flattening them, but not cutting through them. In between swipes, he paused and stared gloomily at the plants.

  ‘I think your scythe needs sharpening,’ said Cooper.

  Alton looked up and wiped his forehead with the back of one of his gloves. ‘Yes, I know. But the sharpening stone has gone missing.’

  ‘In fact, don’t you think that the job would be a lot easier with a decent brush cutter? You could hire a four-stroke model, so that you wouldn’t have to trail an extension lead all the way out here.’

  Alton looked at the scythe dubiously, then down at his feet. Cooper saw that there was a gaping slash in the rubber across the toes of one of the vicar’s Wellington boots. Perhaps a petrol-driven brush cutter wasn’t such a good idea after all - not if he could nearly take his toes off with a blunt hand scythe.

  The church was small and stone-built. But it was a dark stone, almost black, unlike the golden sandstone or the almost white limestone that had been used in other areas. Maybe it hadn’t always been black, but had been stained by soot from the steam trains that had travelled on the railway lines below ground here.

  PC Udall went to take a look at the vestry, where Mr Alton had reported the breakin.

  55

  ‘Is it your turn on the rota for tidying up the churchyard then, Mr Alton?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Rota?’ Alton laughed. ‘I am the rota.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Other churches have rotas. My other church, All Saints in Hey Bridge - that has a churchyard rota. The graves are tended wonderfully, and the parishioners don’t expect the vicar to lift a finger, let alone wield a scythe. Here in Withens, though … Well, they’re too busy to spare the time, I suppose.’

  ‘Who are your churchwardens here?’

  ‘Michael Dearden and Marion Oxley.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the Oxleys.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘But who’s Mr Dearden?’

  ‘Shepley Head Lodge. It’s out past the village, that way.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They’re both very worthy people, but they have their own concerns, you see.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The trouble is, when we get the first bit of sunshine in the spring, this is what happens.’

  Cooper looked around at the undergrowth. There were gravestones somewhere in there, but it was difficult to be sure. Mats of rough grass had grown over the plots, and brambles and ivy had attached themselves to the stones, so that few of the inscriptions were decipherable. He realized he was standing on what had once been a flagged path, but the grass and dandelions had forced their way through between the flags and covered them. Burgeoning nature was out of control here, and it was spreading nearer and nearer to the church itself.

  ‘So you have no help at all?’ said Cooper.

  ‘A young man called Neil Granger is going to help me. At least, he said he was going to. He said he had one of those things you mentioned, a brush cutter, and some other tools. But he hasn’t turned up. I don’t suppose he could be bothered in the end.’ Alton sighed. ‘He’s always seemed a very genuine young man, but there we are. It’s the way of the world these days. Young people think nothing of letting others down.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Cooper.

  Alton suddenly looked at him again, and smiled. ‘Good heavens, a policeman who doesn’t have a cynical view of humanity. Let

  56

  me tell the curators of the folk museum in Glossop about you they might want to preserve you for posterity.’

  ‘Young people always get a bad press. But I don’t think they’re any worse than they used to be, on the whole. We should put in a bit more effort, take an interest in what they’re doing, instead of writing them off.’

  ‘You make me feel positively ashamed/ said Alton. ‘It should be part of my pastoral duties to draw the best out of the young people in my parish, not denigrate them. I’ll do my best to emulate your attitude.’

  If it had been anyone else he was talking to, Cooper might have thought they were taking the mickey out of him. If it had been Diane Fry speaking the same words, they would have meant something quite different. But, strangely, the Reverend Alton seemed sincere.

  Take an interest in them - that’s what you should do/ said Cooper.

  ‘I will. Thank you/

  Cooper felt sure he was being patronizing. It was ridiculous to find himself lecturing a clergyman on showing an interest in his parishioners. But the vicar genuinely didn’t seem to mind. Probably he had received far blunter advice from his parishioners.

  ‘PC Udall tells me there have been some problems in the village with the children of the Oxley family/

  ‘I’ve had to complain to their father a few times/ said Alton. They do tend to gather in the churchyard in the evenings - particularly at the back here, because it’s completely secluded and no one can see what they’re up to.’

  ‘And what are they up to?’

  ‘I shudder to think sometimes. I regularly pick up beer cans, and that kind of thing. They cause a bit of damage, and there’s some graffiti. It’s just a nuisance, really.’

  ‘But you find their father cooperative?’

  ‘Lucas? He listens. And so does Marion, of course. But I’m not sure how much control they have over some of the children.’

  ‘How many children are there?’

  ‘Oh/ said Alton vaguely. He looked at the fingers of his gloves, as if he needed something to count on, but couldn’t find enough fingers. There are so many of them down at Waterloo Terrace. Lucas has at least three sons - Scott is the eldest, and then there’s Ryan and Jake. And possibly Sean. Then there are a couple of

  57

  married daughters. Well, on
e is married, but 1 don’t think Fran has ever bothered. And Lorraine and Stacey are the younger girls. But there are some cousins around, too, like Neil. He’s a Granger, but 1 think he’s Lucas Oxley’s nephew. It’s hard to keep track, you know - especially if you see them all in a group. Very often, I can’t sort out which is which, except for little Jake, of course.’

  ‘Jake - is he the one they call the Tiny Terror?’

  ‘Yes, poor boy. Now, I think Jake pays more attention to his grandfather than to his parents. That’s old Mr Oxley. It’s quite surprising, really, since Jake is only nine years old, and Eric must be about eighty. But perhaps Jake is going to take after his grandfather one day. We can but hope. Eric was a hard worker in his day, by all accounts.’

  Cooper was having as much difficulty as Alton in counting the number of Oxleys. He had Lucas and Marion placed as the parents, but he’d already lost track of the number of children. Was it seven or eight? There were Scott, Ryan and Jake, but did Sean count? And how many cousins were there? Did the married daughters have children of their own? It was confusing enough, but now there was an older generation to take into account.

  ‘Is old Mr Oxley a member of your congregation here at St Asaph’s?’ he asked.

  ‘Sadly not.’

  Trn surprised. I felt sure he would be. At his age, he would have been raised in the expectation that he would go to church every Sunday. Unless he’s a non-conformist, of course. There are a lot of Methodists in these parts.’

  ‘Wash your mouth out/ said Alton, and smiled down at his scythe.

  75 he a Methodist?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said the vicar. ‘I haven’t had the chance to ask him. Eric Oxley hasn’t spoken a word to me since I arrived in the village. Though I’ve passed him on the road several times and spoken to him, he’s never acknowledged me, never spoken to me at all.’

  ‘Not a word?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Mr Alton, do you think the Oxley youngsters were responsible for breaking into your vestry?’

  Alton sighed. ‘I really don’t know. They’re obvious suspects. But it’s a bit beyond what they normally get up to. They’ve never

  58

  got inside the church before. There’s some quite serious damage to the doors and the furniture. And, of course, there are several items missing. They’ve never stolen things before.’

  ‘Some silver plate, I understand?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, they were nothing much, but they were the only things we have of any value at St Asaph’s. They were a gift from one of the founders, back in the 1850s.’

  ‘It’s quite possible we might be able to get them back.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to give me some hope.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘If it turns out that it was the Oxley youngsters, what I really hope is that someone will find a way of halting their slide into criminality before it’s too late. The boys are getting older. Scott is quite a young man now, and so is one of his cousins. Glen, I think they call him. They’re not a good example for the younger ones. Sooner or later, something more serious is going to happen, and then an innocent person might get hurt. I wouldn’t want that to happen.’

  The understand.’

  Cooper looked at the flourishing undergrowth all around them in the churchyard. There ought to be flower borders under the church walls on either side of the porch, but instead the soil was hidden under elder saplings and clumps of ladies’ bedstraw. Later in the year, there would be a good crop of blackberries from the brambles covering the vestry. And it wasn’t even the beginning of May. At this rate, the church would have vanished completely by July.

  Alton followed his gaze, and sighed again.

  ‘Are the words “losing battle” hovering on your lips?’ he said.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Cooper. ‘Or is it “Fight the good fight with all thy might”?’

  Alton intoned: ‘“Lay hold on life, and it shall be; Thy joy and crown eternally/” He swung the scythe as he sang, and Cooper warily took a pace back. He saw that Alton had unintentionally beheaded a clump of dandelions. Their yellow petals fell at Cooper’s feet, like tiny shards of spring sun.

  The vicar seemed to see the petals, too. Tight the good fight,’ he said. The darkness and the light.’

  While PC Udall went to call in to see if the suspects were ready for interviewing, Ben Cooper tried to identify Waterloo Terrace, where the Oxley family lived.

  59

  There weren’t many places to choose from. Apart from the church, the pub, and the farms, there were a few detached homes and a little crescent of bungalows. But beyond the car park and below the road, Cooper could see a roofline and a series of brick chimney pots, just visible behind a thick screen of sycamores and chestnut trees. He began to wander towards it, intending only to take a look at the place.

  Without the presence of any troublesome youngsters, Withens seemed eerily silent. There was no traffic on the road through the village, and it was protected from the noise of the A628 by the black humps of the peat moors in between. Cooper could hear only two sounds. One was the harsh cacophony of calls from a flock of rooks somewhere in the trees below the road. The other was the equally harsh, but higher-pitched, voice of a petrol-driven chainsaw.

  To get to the houses that he could see, he had to pass the entrance to one of the farms. He paused at the farm gate and looked down through a jumble of buildings. Near the gate was an ancient stone barn with narrow, unglazed windows like arrow slits. Further from the road, the buildings were more recent, and a tractor was parked in the space between them. Cooper found he was looking downhill through a tunnel of buildings to a spectacular view of heather-covered slopes in the distance. The dark mass of Bleaklow lay directly across the valley.

  He moved on a few yards, sticking to the grass verge because there were no pavements and the edges of the road were starting to crumble. There were streams of small stones at the roadside that had been swept down by the water running off the hills. Here and there, scraps of black plastic from torn silage bags lay like tattered oil slicks on the verges.

  In Withens, water seemed to run wherever it chose. At this moment, it was running directly into the entrance to Waterloo Terrace. Because the terrace was on the downhill side of the road, the water was draining towards it in large quantities. And it had been doing so for some time, judging by the holes scoured in the surface of the track leading down to the terrace. Cooper had to step over vast, muddy puddles to reach the safety of drier ground.

  In the wide entrance, there were gate posts, but no gate hung between them. Ceramic drainage pipes had been stacked in neat, geometric shapes nearby, so perhaps someone was thinking of putting proper drainage in one day. Horseshoes had been turned

  60

  upside down and nailed to the gate posts - they were ready to catch luck or trap the Devil, whichever folklore you chose to believe.

  There was nothing about Waterloo Terrace that resembled the romantic idea of a holiday cottage in the Peak District. There were no mullioned windows, no rose-filled front gardens, no honeysuckle growing on the walls. The eight houses were built of black brick that had weathered badly. It had become discoloured and was beginning to crumble at the exposed edges. Between each pair of houses, Cooper could see the arched mouth of a narrow passageway that ran towards the back of the terrace. The passages were completely enclosed and must run underneath the front bedrooms.

  He stood where he could see into one of the passageways, and he could make out no light at the end of the brick tunnel. The passage seemed to turn a sharp corner at the far end, maybe providing access to a back yard, and all he could see was a blank wall. The builders hadn’t thought to install lights in these passages, either.

  There was a sudden crack like a gunshot in the air above the rooftops. But it was only a couple of wood pigeons taking off, their wings clapping loudly as they accelerated and performed a circuit of the houses. />
  Waterloo Terrace puzzled Cooper. It stuck out like a sore thumb in this area, where all the buildings were built in the traditional style, from local stone. Gritstone was so plentiful on the hills all around here that it was difficult to imagine why anyone should have decided to use brick. And black brick at that.

  In front of the row of houses there was a long stretch of garden that had been converted to growing vegetables at some time. But the effort had been abandoned, and weeds had been allowed to take over where the earth had been disturbed. There were a few sickly cabbages gradually being smothered by thistles and couch grass. Cooper wasn’t surprised by that. Withens was surely one of those places where the wind was strong enough to blow cabbages clean out of the ground - and not just during the winter, either.

  Only in one part of the garden had the weeds been held at bay - and that was because black plastic sheeting had been laid over the earth. It was held down by stones and a variety of rusted metal objects that looked as though they had been lying around somewhere waiting for a useful purpose to be found for them.

  61

  The plastic had torn in a few places, and strips of it flapped lazily in the breeze. The soil under there would be warm and weed free, and full of worms and insects. But would anything actually be growing?

  Across the track from the terrace stood a row of brick privies, with bright blue doors and sloping roofs of stone tiles overgrown with grass and inoss. The iron hinges of the doors had been replaced several times, leaving their marks in the paintwork. And now the old privies were padlocked and unused.